Rewind

I keep getting sucked back into the past. Unhealthy. But I can’t help it. My mind desperately seeks some reference point for things being different.

I need that reminder that it wasn’t always this way. I wasn’t always this afraid. Or hopeless. Or uninterested in life. I was content to live in the moment, to experience, without all the fears holding me back.

My hopes didn’t even have to consist of anything that specific. It was more a general attitude. Things would work out. I would find my way. I would find out where I needed to be.

I never fully believed in the God that I was taught about – who sees all I think and do, yet still wants to hear my identikit prayers. But I suppose I believed in a kind of providence – or maybe I just believed in my own specialness. I believed that everything would work out for me, because I was so brilliant. Not for me the tragedies of other lives – they befell lesser mortals, too stupid to be as effortlessly amazing as I was.

Even after that started to fade, for a while I believed in a kind of general universal benevolence. I believed that ultimately, love would always win out over hatred. That in some sense, the universe really cared what happened to it’s inhabitants. That there was some degree of intention there. Maybe I wasn’t uniquely special, but surely we, as sentient beings, were special.

Once that belief was lost, for a time I still had hope that it would be recovered. Or replaced by something equally significant. But after searching for a long time and investing a great deal of effort in trying to construct such significance, it started to dawn on me that nothing really fills the space. Nothing outlasts the emotional swings that take place in the mind. Nothing overcomes the anxiety. There is nothing there. When you’re riding high, you may feel benevolently towards your fellow beings and invest their lives with significance. The next moment, you may despise them and see all they do as worthless. Both are true. Neither is true.

So I miss that emotional consistency. I miss having an anchor to hold me while the storm rages in my mind. I can’t see any way to construct a new anchor of belief. But I also can’t stop myself yearning after those of the past. That was happiness. Even when I was upset, or angry, or afraid. There was a consistency to the self, holding it together. Now I’m fractured into irreconcilable opposing factions.