Escape

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to escape reality. At first it was just brief instances, after upsetting events. But over the years it became an increasingly all-encompassing habit, to the extent that now I find myself desperate for a way out every single night.

I reach a point where I’m so tired that all my regret, sadness, longing, loneliness, and frustrated desires just overwhelm me, and I can’t distance myself from them any longer. I just find myself thinking ‘how the fuck is this my life?’ And I don’t know how to handle that, when I’m in that state. I’m too tired to think rationally, or constructively. To put my feelings in context, or find any perspective. It just drowns out everything, and I don’t know how to tolerate it.

So I look for an escape. Anything that will absorb or numb my brain until it’s so exhausted that it just gives up. So I don’t have to face this stuff in my head, all these things that I don’t know how to live with. But spending each night desperately trying to wear out my brain leaves me with no energy the next day. Which leaves me without the resources I need to really improve my life.

It’s a vicious cycle. I don’t know how to live with my feelings, so I drain my energy exhausting my mind until they go away. But this leaves me without the strength I need to improve the situation, or change the way I think about things. So the way I feel about myself and my life just gets worse and worse, as the years go by.

And I don’t know how to break that cycle. How to live with my feelings to the extent that I can resist numbing them, and develop the resources I need to change myself.