I’m At The Mercy Of My Own Mind, But I’m Terrified Of Losing Myself

I fear that I am addicted to sadness.

I fear I am addicted to the biting pain of these feelings that I experience with such blinding intensity.

I taught myself, too long ago, how to draw a deep breath and dive into the whirlpool that is my heart, scraping fingernails along the sides of the wells of emotion that exist there, finding every last vestige of desolation, loneliness, and agony and turning them into the letters that make up the words in my writing.

It is in those moments of vulnerability and weakness, where I bleed words rather than carefully construct them, that I am truly satisfied with what I create.

It is, too, the only method of coping that I learned. It is my outlet. It is my escape when the world’s colours become too painful to look upon any longer.

Writing is as natural, and as critical, to me as breathing.

As I have grown older, my experiences have become exceedingly more difficult to dissect. Emotions become unnamable. Sensations are so far out of my realm of comprehension that every adjective I can find in a thesaurus is inadequate. The world is no longer black and white. It is dazzling shades of blue, fiery, burning reds, delicate, soft pinks, fierce oranges, and despondent grays; so many grays.

Everything becomes so much harder to write, because the complexity is so much harder for me to understand, and I don’t know how to move past something when I do not understand it, myself, and how the two clash or interact.

How do I write when I have no words to describe what needs to be written?

Where do all of my emotions go when my outlet is not available, because I don’t know how to make use of it? It is in these moments, when everything becomes agonizingly overwhelming and I don’t know how to cope with it, that I despise my nature, despise myself for a weakness that ordinarily I don’t view as one.

It hurts. This feeling of being too full of thought, too full of feeling with no discernable way of expelling it hurts.

This feeling of being lost within the depths of my own mind hurts.

I am adrift in an ocean, with nothing but the sound of wind and waves, and I want something to hold onto. The water just slides through my fingers, though, and sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost my ability to swim.