Welcome to my psyche. Please excuse the mess:

Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in a suspense thriller?
Like everyone else is fake, and all circumstances are positioned just to make tomorrow barely tolerable, for you alone?
Except everyone is having this exact same experience in their own tailored hell.
Everyone except content creators with perfect houses and TikTok knowledge.
I keep watching videos of “life hacks” that will never change my life because to use them, I’d have to be in the circumstances that require them. Those people are not like me, they’re alien.

Or maybe I’m the alien.

We doom scroll because at least we can control the horror on our screens.
At least we can keep scrolling by as our lives do the same.
If we’re watching our screens, we don’t have to see the horrors outside OR inside ourselves.

And then I meet up with friends once in a while who remind me how I’m human.
We bitch about the same shit, on replay.
But at least we laugh.
At least we cry.
At least we make art and bask in the sunlight.

I honestly don’t know what’s real anymore.
None of it seems to really matter.
All the pain I feel for myself, for others, for the state of the world.
It feels like it’s wasted on me.
I can only do what I can.
And it’s never enough.
And the world keeps turning and burning.

A psychiatrist finally put me on some nightmare medication.
It drops my blood pressure so my brain can’t freak out.
Vet approved and all.
And though medications help me, I can’t help but wonder if they’re breaking me.
What if they’re making me forget I’m human more than I normally would?
What if the pain of fiery nerves and nightmares are what keep me alive?
OR
What if they’re dulling my human pain to the point where my psychic pain takes hold of me?
Where I wake up to the point of higher consciousness and see what is instead of what I want things to be?
Sometimes I wish I could go back.
Things were simpler then.

Even now my joy feels wasted on me.
It’s important to know that joy will always be some kind of fleeting.
That’s only natural in a world such as this.
This uncanny existence.
Still, I let myself feel it. Even when it overwhelms me to have it leave over and over.

What am I? A ghost?

Time is a trap.
Where do people find the time to work AND make art AND have family AND feed themselves AND have pets AND relax AND?
I’m trapped.

I’m trapped in a time loop.
And each iteration degrades into a worse version of the last.
More kinks and twists and turns.
More struggle and amnesia so the struggle is fresh.

My brain forgets but my body remembers.

My body is stuck in linear time.
My brain is stuck as a time traveler.

Same as it ever was.