Better Things Ahead?

I realise I only ever come here when I am sad and to dish out my sorrows in the form of cryptic poems and prose, but tonight I have nicer things to write about. Well, I just got an email telling me that I've been invited for an interview at Oxford University. It's quite another feeling when one of the best schools in the world tells you "hey, we think you're good enough to get a fighting chance at being here." I am still in quite a detached state, this feels surreal, it is great news, I know.

I can't quite get the part of my mind that panicks about everything to slow down and stop telling me "GO READ THE BOOKS ON THE READING LIST"
"GO SET UP PRACTISE INTERVIEWS"
"GO REVIEW THE THINGS YOU LEARNT ABOUT ON YOUR INTERNSHIP"
and let me enjoy the moment a little bit more before I start having my anxiety attacks.

I hope it goes well, I hope I enjoy my first time in Europe. I also hope I can walk without crutches by then, it would be a great inconvenience if I had to take them on a flight across the world with me.

Things might just be looking up, because I've found a new island to swim to in the ocean and it's closer than the other one.

A Dream Like Many Others

I close my eyes and see

I'm on the beach by the bay

The waves are cool and strong

I walk into them without a second thought

The water reaches my waist

The water reaches my chest

The water reaches my neck

Now my head too, all underwater

I keep walking, the sand is all soft

I don't bother breathing 

I know I cannot

The walking continues on 

I choke and I stop, short

But I don't try to get up, not even a little 

I fight it, I stay, I swallow water.

I know when it all goes dark 

and I'm done

My body will make its way up.

When I write a poem or anything like that I just write it, and then I read it over again and think: wow that was really fucking dramatic. What is wrong with me? I need to stop being so fucking dramatic.

I can't even validate my own feelings and that is fucking sad. I feel sorry for myself, and sorry for how much I hate myself and how I never give myself enough.

I get lonely a lot but  I think about how I should stay lonely. Because no one needs to deal with the fucked up bullshit I drag along with me, that seems to come from nothing. I don't think anyone would understand, and I don't want to have to make someone understand because it's dark and I don't need to turn off the lights in someone else's life just because mine are turned off. Even if someone else did understand, it would mean that they have all of their own shit to deal with and I couldn't possibly want to give them all my shit too; it wouldn't be good for anymore. I think about how I should keep to myself because I think about leaving too much, and if I leave I want to leave as clean as possible. I mean I shouldn't try to tell anyone about the things that are hard to say, the things that latch on in my trachea and can't make their way out, there are reasons they're hard to say.

Do you notice how when you say you feel bad some people ask you where or what it is, while some others just assume?

There are questions that are easy to ask and difficult to answer, and still we ask them so readily even when we know what it's like to be on the other side.

feel

Why do we have to know what we're doing all the time? Or at least look like we do. I don't know what I'm doing and I never have. I think I can say I love the way I am but I am only lying -I want to rip off my skin and start fresh without these scars with new flesh. I don't want to feel this stubble or be clumsy and stumble (all the time, all the time). I don't want to choke on my words or have what others' say feel like swords. I don't want to be weak or feel like I've sprung a leak (all the time, all the time). I don't want to be who I am, I don't want to give a fucking damn (all the time, all the time).

Running away from people and things, falling into the seduction of vapid darkness and the comfort of nothingness. This is how I pace fourth.

It's so hard for me to talk about my feelings to anyone, and it's even worse when they seem indefinite. I can't tell anyone any speculations I have about my personal feelings and I can never bring someone in to help me unravel the tangles; I sometimes just lie to make it more concretely categorised when I myself am entirely unsure...it fucking sucks sometimes how I can't bring myself to tell people about things that are emotionally important to me.

Recently, I've been thinking about how lonely it is and how the chances of me remaining lonely are extremely high, and just more things have happened that just make me think about this consistently and constantly.

I think about 'why' and I realised I'm an entirely emotionally inaccessible person, I cannot bring myself to show deep emotionally connections in public because I fear being vulnerable, so much so that I think I appear to be less than interested in many things I love entirely, or hate with passion. I realise that this makes me so much less of a person that one can comprehend, and really it's so hard to love someone you don't know... I find it so hard to be truthful about everything and open about anything because all I think about is how I am horrible at keeping my friends and that someday they are going to drift away and there's going be this person out there that knows things about me that I can't bring myself to tell anyone else, and I don't know why this bothers me so much... maybe I'm just terrible at speaking about my feelings because my family has never really been one to deal with our emotions, or maybe its just me. I am rude a lot of the time too and I never know what to say face to face. Also, most of the time I never give in to my feelings (other than for food because I am a sucker to short term satisfaction in that respect). Plus, if I'm going to be honest about it, I am not attractive enough for anyone to overlook all my shit.

Well, this sort of makes sense I guess...

Well the thing about life is that sometimes you're going to fall apart, some swooping wave of shit is going to come along and knock over the castle in the sand you've spent ages on. Sometimes there will be people there to help you rebuild your castle and everything will go a lot easier - it won't necessarily be easy, but it sure beats doing it alone. Other times there's going to be no one there to help, or simply no one noticing your castle getting swept away, and if you cannot bring yourself to reach for someone else, or if there is no one to reach for, you just have to suck it up and get your hands right back in the sand and start building again, because if you don't put in something, no one is going to do it all for you.

swim

It isn't simply because this system is bad and flawed or that it's only excuse for being so overwhelming is that other people have done it before so everyone else should be able to as well; it is because I have been in the deep dark end since long before with several hands holding me down and now this is yet another hand forcing my head underwater and I don't know how long I can keep treading water.

What a terrible alliance I have formed with the silence; I cannot breach the void and the hard cement only ever closes in and I remain within the crawl space searching for comfort in darkness, afraid of anything foreign, afraid of sound and light.

Silence of the mind 
Could be the best thing of all
A silence that eliminates
All the chaos and flaws
Silence that brings peace
Like a cool ocean breeze
but silence in itself cannot
Thaw the freeze
Silence with no whisper
To encompass it all
Silence that unraveling of
Thoughts into a void
The silence that I hope for
Cannot be achieved
without the exchange of
Something tremendous

                                       A silence of the mind
Could be the worst thing of all.

[written 3rd June 2013]

I am a dark cloud of a person, 
but I'll try not to rain until you get inside

[written 16th March 2014]

adulthood

The only part of being treated like an adult I want is the part where no one tells me where I can and cannot go or how much time I spend in or out of the house. Other than that I don't want it, I don't want to think about money more than I already do, I don't want to plan for a future with a salary and taxes and housing, I don't want to think about being responsible for other people. I want none of that, but life doesn't come with bargains does it?

School

I don't even understand who plans this shit. Who goes "well we're going to put you through the toughest pre-uni course! It's okay if you don't know what they want to do with their lives yet, we will leave them absolutely no time to think about that. Lets make them do 6 subjects, it's going to appear flexible but actually we're just trying to get them to work in 6 different categories even if they are terrible at some. Let's throw in a 4000 word essay that they're required to pass, lets also make up a whole new subject to make them think about thinking because I don't think the kids are having enough existential crises. LETS TRY TO CATEGORISE THE EQUIVOCAL NATURE OF KNOWING YEAH THAT WILL REALLY RILE THEM UP. Oh you know what? We should also make them do university research, let's not forget that halfway through this tidal wave of work they will also have to fill out all their application forms that decide their eventual fate. Lets make sure they have at least one test a week. Lets do IAs on top of that pretty often too. Wait we can't forget to make them holistic individuals, lets introduce a need for consistent participation in a wide range of after school activities. I'm sure they'll have time to just be teenagers and have fun with that, if they don't then it's really THEIR FAULT. They should learn how to handle this. Lets make it normal for everyone in the course to have anxiety or panic attacks every couple of weeks, it's no big deal, they can handle it! Yeah and they can't really be absent on any day without receiving certified medical leave from doctors (that are really fucking expensive here), forget taking days off because you don't have to strength to get out of bed and you want to drown yourself in the bathtub, get your ass to school! Oh and this is just the expectation, if they really want to succeed, if they want to get into universities and have a future in our flawed society, they have to excel in all those things and they have to participate in more activities and they can't sure as hell need have no inclination of having a limit. THEY HAVE TO BE TECHNICALLY EXPERIENCED TOO, but they should find a time and way to do that on their own, we've helped them enough. We're sure everyone is just going to be tip-top we'll have the most knowledgeable students yet, well they may or may not emotionally worn out and mentally unstable, but you know what, that's just the cost of succeeding in our society!

The A levels don't sound any better either, like how flawed does a school system have to be that so many students choose to skip school to STUDY for their exams? What more do people need to see before they go "Hey something's not right here, maybe we shouldn't keep making kids go through this."

locked in

A lot of the time I think about how limited everyone's perception of the world is; we can only experience our single life through our eyes, our skin, our nose, our ears. Everything only belongs to one person, and we can only truly feel this one person's emotions. How are we as individuals to know what it is like to be anyone else, how do we know it isn't completely different to be another person, in every sense of the word 'different'? I feel like just being me in this single life isn't enough experience of anything at all, and well it's more of a jail isn't it? We're just stuck in our own bodies, and if they get fucked up, we're fucked. It's like we're born shackled in and we can know nothing else that what it is like to be ourselves. Why do we even try to be other people, it never is going to work anyway....