Singularity-Five

Fuck narrative structure - let's just write.

So I did the thing that I realized I needed to do. I let go of the dream I was bludgeoning myself with. I let go of the unrealistic expectations, and the impossible standards, and I accepted that my premise was flawed: no amount of personal success would erase the gaping wound in my heart.

And then I told myself that I needed to sit with my grief, so I did. I'm sitting with it now, in fact. I'm doing my best to accept it, to compute this notion that acceptance must come before change, and that's the thing that I'm hung up on now.

How can I possibly accept this? What does it mean to accept this? 'What are the 1s and 0s of this program?' I ask myself, despite knowing full well this isn't a program and that humans don't operate in binary.

So I crashed and I burned, as I knew I had to, and now I have these familiar broken pieces with which to try and rebuild again. Blah blah Sisyphean nightmares, etc.

Here's what's different: I'm sundering the foundation, too.

See, when I enter the 'rebuild' portion of the cycle, I keep starting from the same place. I have my core mental processes, my emotional and intellectual perception, and I just tweak how they work together a bit and hope that this time the thing they build will be more permanent.

I'm still in this mental bunker. I'm still in this emotional hole.

What I've learned in this most recent crash is that these things need fixing, too. It's not enough to simply let the colossus fall apart - I have to dismantle to ground it's built upon as well.

I know a lot of this is in broken metaphor, and I apologize, but this is the shit I have to work with. This is the way I learned to effectively interpret my shit, and it's how I observe and manipulate my thoughts. This, too, is a broken device, but I'll try to explain more clearly.

One of my big problems is my perception of time. I don't really perceive myself as having a past, present, and future - it's all one giant knot in my brain. The past is not past for me; the past is now. The future isn't really a thing; what is now will always be.

This is how PTSD works for me. This is why trying to live 'in the moment' doesn't work for me: 'the moment' is still mid-abuse.

That's why I'm so scared every time I leave my apartment. It's why I'm constantly on the lookout for people who might want to hit me for no reason. It's why I'm so scared to even be looked at, which doesn't even include the same I have regarding my physical appearance. In my head, with its 'past-is-now' vision, being seen means I'm more likely to be yelled at and hit.

When I think about the future, whether it's my creative ambitions or just interacting with people socially, I feel immense dread because all I can see in my future is my past.

This is the broken machine I keep using to try and fix itself, and I think what I'm realizing in these doldrums is that this machine must be rebuilt as well. I don't know how to do that, and I don't know what it'll look like, but that's what therapy's for.

I hope, anyway.