The Enemy Inside

Many people have enemies. Their enemies are vicious, spiteful, and fierce.

My enemy is all of those, and more. My enemy is my mind.

Every day, it would stretch and pulse for information, seeking to figure things out.

The plainest of things can drive my mind crazy. Sometimes I can’t control what I’m thinking, struggling for words to say. The worst part is that I seem ordinary enough to people, yet my mind is experiencing a hysterical outburst.

So, I have no friends. I’m a loner. Sometimes I envy normal human beings. They have perfect minds that work like a milling of knowledge with just enough stupidity in the right places.

With my mind, I couldn’t be normal. I’m lucky enough to act natural and get away with it. Many like me are in mental hospitals

Every day I would sit down and have vivid fantasies about being normal. The thoughts of being normal are so alluring. But I know they will never come true.

How can you be normal when you have multiple “voices,” suggesting and fighting in your head? Imagine losing time and not being able to explain it. You find articles or drawings which you must have done, but do not remember working on. Sometimes you can never predict your emotions and your energy level because they seem to change without warning or for no clear reason.

You cannot understand why you feel what you feel, and, if someone asks you to outline them, you cannot explore those feelings precisely. Your life feels confused and often disconcerting. It is a daunting experience. It feels out of control.

Every day is a perpetual strife.

I wake up in the morning, staring at the empty ceiling above me, sprawling there, anticipating the fate that the new horizon would bring with it as it spreads its golden fingertips through the sky like the grains of sand through the hands of those satiated with yearning

Sometimes I go to bed feeling the same way.

Sometimes I just can’t sleep at all. 

At night I always seem to come awake with thoughts. Yet they never are good thoughts.

It should be a soothing time for someone like me- the silence of the night.

But the night betrays me. It always does.

This is the time I take to evaluate things to death. I turn every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind struggling to establish what it meant. I try to figure out whether there was a subtext or an implicit critique. I try to think of the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the show on their faces matched. I try to figure out whether they were genuine or a mockery. Whether irony or sarcasm touched the kind word, or whether the smile meant pity. 

Sometimes I think when people look at me enough, they could see the little girl in my head being abused violent images projected behind my eyes? That is what I would often think and such thoughts eat away at the facade of my self-confidence. I am constantly raising and repairing. 

It is hard to explain to those that need me to explain it. But imagine the world revolving upon its axis, one that feels brief glimpses of warmth from the dawn of the sun, but one that degenerates into a blackness that veils the dreams and aspirations in the shine of the stars.

Sometimes it feels like the night is never ending. The black is here and there, just unfolding its fingertips to all the corners within my head. Sometimes it feels like something turned the lights out. Other times it feels like it had never turned them on at all.

Yes, yes, I know. You think my mind is my own. Pure, and untouched. Maybe yours is, mine isn’t. But I smile more than you do as it is fundamental to look ordinary. Appearances are important to normal human beings, and I for one resolve to look extra normal. Although deep inside it will always be what it’s always felt like- always chasing shadows in the dark as the shadows constantly trailing me.

I exhale as I stepped on to the pavement and stroll towards the waiting bus. A wave of the smoky breath trapped within my lungs gushed out from my mouth to intertwine with a moving breeze of cold air. Some of it crystallized on my bare and broke lips. ‘Freedom’, it must have innocently thought as it blasted away into the sky. But it would learn soon enough. This world is an unforgiving place.