In response to Citizen by Claudia Rankine, pg. 139-
Some years there exists a wanting to escape–
You, floating above your certain ache–
Still the ache coexists.
Call that the immanent you
You are you even before you
grow into understanding you
are not anyone, worthless,
not worth you.
When you close your eyes at night, you wish you could believe that just a breath can cure the thousands of aches that you feel in a given moment. But instead, you lie awake, dwelling on what occurred throughout the day and rehearsing what you expect from tomorrow. Every word you wished you didn’t say, every mistake you wished you didn’t make, every opportunity you wished you had all converge into a cloud of chaos–a spiral of regret. Somewhere between your reflections on the past and your subconscious dreams lie your expectations for tomorrow. When you dream awake, you have complete control over the ending. You can live freely above your chaotic spiral, pulling at each memory like an infinite thread of your past. You correct each tiny memory that you considered to be a failure because for once in your life, you know what comes next, and you can plan accordingly. No opportunities to disappoint yourself. No surprises.
Every night, you are caught in a moment between the past and the future, but you never stop and just think about the now. When it’s not about the past, it’s certainly about the future, but what happened to now? You never let yourself accept that the now is the best that it will be, so you continue to think about yesterday and tomorrow.
Some nights, you wish that you could just fall asleep and leave your day behind you, but the past lingers on, and you can never truly be free from it. It grows inside of you and pounds on your chest, waiting to be released. You try to shove it to the side and escape into a dark space of nothingness. You wish that you could float above it all and fly away from the constant reminder of your goals, of your mistakes, of yourself. But again, you continue to toss and turn between your silky sheets, trying not to look at the faint blue light of your clock because you know that with each new thought, you are drawn further away from the good night of sleep that you promised yourself.
One night is particularly worse than the rest. You knew this day would come, but you never thought it could be this bad. The minutes turn into hours, and you just stare at the ceiling because you know that getting sleep is no longer an option. But you don’t give up that easily. You fight and kick as you now violently toss and turn, and you scream without making a sound because it’s 3:00 in the morning. You can’t make a sound. You try music; you try podcasts; you try suffocating yourself with multiple layers of thick, cozy blankets, and yet you can’t sleep. Whenever you doze off, your mind protests and reminds you that you made too many mistakes for you to succeed tomorrow. You thought that all the practice and the countless hours you spent scribbling furiously at your desk for the past months would convince you that you were enough. But in reality, nothing you do would ever be enough. You have never been enough for yourself.
When you are always looking for answers, you rarely stop to ask yourself the questions. Your chaotic spiral grows and grows until one day you shatter. It’s only then that you begin to question why you’ve never been enough, why you can’t ever let yourself be enough. Each time you justify your world, it diverts further from reality and closer to insanity, perfection, whatever you choose to call it. You are so obsessed with reaching this ideal form of yourself, but if your standards are always changing, when does it stop? When do you stop? Why can’t you stop?
When you wake up in the morning, you don’t remember what you thought about the night before, but you know what you felt. When you talk about how you felt, the world tells you to breathe. Every therapist, every doctor, everyone just tells you that all you can do is breathe. They say take a breath as if it will all magically go away with the air expelled from your chest. The air may leave you, but the stinging ache persists. You’ve lived like this for so long that you forget that releasing your pain is even possible. So instead, you sigh. You move on. You repeat the same steps over and over again, but you’ll never forget how you felt that one night when you felt it all.