Exorcise.

What do I feel right now?

I feel like I’m going to lose my mind. I haven’t felt this way for a long time. I can’t hold my attention to a thought. I am always starting again. Like I keep waking up, and these responsibilities and goals are sitting there, unmoved and undisturbed. This is when the anxiety begins to creep into mind. I stress about…

Where is my life going? I’ve been having dark thoughts recently. Terminal thoughts. Its not healthy. Its stress induced. Like there is a wall of challenges that I keep walking up to, and I begin climbing, only to realize it was a dream, and the wall still lies before me.

I am behind on work.

I am making poor decisions. Decisions that I have decided were ‘not poor’, but were ‘reasonable’. These delusions are leaving me worse off. I am feeling defeated. I am unhappy. I have trouble enjoying myself and others without alcohol, so it seems.

I went to panama city beach this weekend. As I was told, it proved to be an exhilarating experience. With my fellow frat mates and their dates, we drowned ourselves in alcohol from the early hours of the morn into the wee hours of the night. When fatigue struck, due to overexposure or sheer inebriation, we popped uppers and chugged caffeine to restore our energy levels. And as often as possible, we had drunken sex with total strangers. These were, of course, our frat brothers dates. Date swapping is encouraged. I clocked in a few hours of sleep in the midst of it all. ‘How?’ is well beyond me.

I used to be a behaved boy. These tendencies to ‘rage’ like an animal, to indulge in these fantastic sensations of the body, were instinctual in my pubescent years. They came all too naturally, like a tsunami hitting the shoreline, decimating every inhibition in its path until the hunger subsided. As I grew older reason became a more trustworthy judge that shielded my inhibitions from destruction. Now I find myself rationalizing these behaviors. My moral compass has become a relative game of spin the bottle. My powers of manipulation have refocused themselves on my ethical operations, and its taking a toll.

Who are these people that encourage my demise? No. These voices? In my head. I am losing my mind.

I have work to do. Instead, I lie in bed. I hide my head from the faces around me. The shame in myself. My lack of attention in school, in the classroom, has caused my self confidence to erode. I cannot simply ‘rage’ like a mad man and maintain a composer that produces. I am not that person. I have never been that person. My attention span is that of a fly. This is why goals, concise and succinct, have been my beacon in dark hours. They provide a flickering blaze on the horizon that orients and alleviates the tension of being lost. But where have my goals gone? I can barely remember my motive for college.

Perhaps this weekend temporarily jostled my brain fluids. Perhaps the sleep deprivation has simply caused stress to double its intensity. Perhaps all these dark thoughts that weigh so severely on my conscience are merely short lived delusions that will burn off with time.

I don’t think thats the case. I am wrestling with something inside me. Something that needs to come out. I know better. While I have not eradicated the demons, I have managed their trouble. My escapades have led me astray. I have failed to keep them at bay and they are wreaking havoc on me.

So I sleep. I escape with dreams. Dreams of the world I seek to escape. It is a horrible nightmare.

Where does this inadequacy stem? Why do I feel so out dated, so expired. In my delusions, my efforts are monitored by harsh critics. My job is to increase the criticism so that I am prepared for the worst. What happens is that I destroy the only confidence I have so that I flounder when it counts. My lack of ease is alarming. Is my only refuge sleeping? Reading! Time wasters. Anything to preoccupy my mind. I steal away into these altered realities. Only here is my attention suspended completely, for a moment. The nagging anxiety melts away as I absorb into the narrative. There is no judgement. There are no peers and professors and red ink and critical counter claims. There is nothing but a suspension. A weightless wonderful suspension.

Until, of course, my habits of routine kick in and I am forced to attend maintenance responsibilities: go to class, show up to frat parties, submit work at an immovable deadline.

These deadlines are the only ones that seem to have any effect on this world that is perpetually postpone. I am not making myself into anything. I am beginning anew with every moment. This is torture. This is hell on earth. Culminated efforts with no direction. I focus and take aim, flexing and commanding my mind to hit the mark, but the direction is lost upon release and I am left wondering where my energy is being invested.

I am a wayward ship tormented by shape shifting skies.

These feelings need to get out. I need to exorcise them.

Smoking cigarettes makes me ill. But I do it anyway. Where are my values?

Why do I hate myself? Why do I hate the contradiction?

And I wake. And I am lost. This world is foreign, these faces are new. They seem to move to and fro as if I were a familiar fixture in their landscape. But who is it that they know? I am unknown to myself. I would give them that person. I would jest for their satisfaction just to give myself I place, just to restore that place in myself.

I am disconnected. Uprooted, I am artificially nourished with lies and delusions.