linger - tiny desk concert - the cranberries

i am a better person than i was a year ago. at least i like to believe i am.

i am a better person than i have been in the past few years. i am more myself.

i was a shell of myself for a very long time. i couldn’t realize it at the time. i can understand it now.

i spent years doing things i enjoyed with everything in my heart. i met so many people, so many places. i am not saying that i wasn’t myself during those times. but i wasn’t really anyone specific. for a long time, i had the priviledge of waking up and meeting new people again and again to the point that i started lying. i started lying a lot. i had the opportunity to choose who i want to be every day. and if i didn’t like that anymore the next day, i could pick something else.

my worst times during those years, those experiences, were the ones when i couldn’t hide who i was. the times i was slipping, the times when people could actually see me. i hated myself for letting people percieve me. and then i hated those persons. some part of me did. but i hated myself more for giving them the chance to grasp me. so i pushed them away. i started pushing people away and running away from everything solid, everything true or meaningful. the ones that were older than me would just blame it on the craziness and the recklessness of my age. i guess that is kind of true to an extent. i mean that’s exactly why everything was so intense, why i was intense.

for years i thought that this is all i’ll ever be. i believed that my auto - destructive tendencies and craziness would consume me. i didn’t feel worthy of real care and love because of all my flaws. i learned to love people around me, through their flaws, their faults. but i resented my mind for the way it was fucntioning, for every little slip up, for every sign of weakness.

someone i knew at the time told me i could never be casual because i am a yearner. to me, at the time, this felt like the worst thing to ever happen to me. i cried over it. i tried to convince myself and that person that they are wrong. that i was casual. that i didn’t care. that i was more than just emotions and feelings and love. i did somewhat achieve it. i managed to finally not care. i stopped caring about a lot of things. i stopped caring about them in the way i used to as well. that was the smart thing. the efficient and non-crazy option. that would lead me to being desirable again. i blew it too many times by caring, so i knew that i had to just keep up with my nothingness. of course and i wasn’t actually honest with myself. of course and i still cared. after all i only changed everything about my emotional world, because i cared. because that’s who i am. but fake it till you make it right?

i shut off my emotions. almost all of them. that was obviously at the same period of my life as abusing alcohol and other things. because when i was drunk, when i was wasted drunk to be blunt, i could feel. alcohol has this effect on people. whatever you do in your normal life, alcohol does the opposite. when you cannot forget, alcohol makes you forget. when you shut off your emotions, alcohol turns them on again. i spent 2 months being drunk or hangover. day by day parts of me started drifting away. i was going to the park, reading, drawing, going to art galleries, journaling a lot. i was trying everything to fix it. i was trying everything to hold on to my pieces running away, but it was too late.

i don’t believe the concept of it’s never too late. sometimes it is. at that time it was too late for me. that doesn’t mean that i would never be able to fix it, to go back to myself, and all that. but it was too late to do it in that way. journaling, for the first time, wasn’t enough. seeing my friends wasn’t enough. calling my mom either. making art was almost impossible.