I don’t know how many time I’ve written variations on this post, then forgotten it’s meaning. My mind quickly wipes away the painful understanding contained. It hides it from me.
I am utterly, hopelessly lost. I can’t ever connect with another person, because I could never bear for someone to really know me. Because who I really am is terrible. So I am alone. I will always be alone. Even when surrounded by people who think they love me. They don’t. They love an idea of me. Perhaps who I once was, before I did all this. I am separated from everyone by the persistent knowledge that anyone who truly understood me would want nothing to do with me. And I did this. But I don’t know how to live with the consequences of my actions.
There are no real guides in our culture for those who have gone too far to be redeemed, except the salves of religion. And I believe those stories are human constructs, rather than external realities. I don’t think there’s anything behind the curtain. It’s not enough to sustain me. It quickly starts to ring hollow.
So I am left alone with the meaninglessness of the life that I’ve made for myself. Every interaction is a pretense, a facsimile of decency. All that remains is the superficial. Sensory addictions and hollow compulsions drag me from one year to the next. Life drains into a numb passage of days. But the heart of everything is gone, leaving only a painful memory of what it was like to be a person. To have real purpose. To experience the world deeply, mind unclouded by the constant awareness of the wrongness of my being.
To put it in religious terms; I murdered my soul many years ago, and yet have continued on trying to live, in defiance of that reality. I am a hollow hungry ghost, desperately clutching at the appearance of a worthwhile life. I am nothing, and given time I will likely fade away. And that will be for the best.
But every now and again I get these echoes of who I used to be. And it feels good, because I briefly remember what it was like to really be part of this world. But it hurts, terribly, because there’s no way now for me to engage with that life. That person can’t survive with what I know about the world now. What I know about myself. He’s dead, but his memories still haunt my present.