Blink

Now: Flicker of a Candle

Now

Looking back, I see the irony that so evaded me then. I was the world's first and only introverted extrovert. Adventure was not a desire of mine, yet my brain wheeled with dreams and ideas that were both terrifying and exciting at the same time. And, bizarrely, I hated conversation, yet all I craved was company. 

The contradictions controlled my life (a bitter torture chamber of ironies). They were the masters, I was the puppet dangling from a thread. Hell, they were stringent dictators that ruled my communist mind. They made me difficult to befriend, so I began to craft costumes and masks that made my companionship more desirable to whoever I wished to be with. Between each change, a little piece of me fell like the leaves of an autumn oak, until I was nothing but a skeleton. Nothing more than a pile of bones, completely without muscle, let alone will. 

I know now that I was inadvertently proving my mother right. I never really tried hard enough, because I was too busy cowering in fear of change. I reacted so vehemently to her words because they rang truer than I would have cared to admit. Walls had formed around me, and I seemed incapable of breaking them down, I was powerless in comparison to their strength. Until - reverent pause -  the end of that day. It sounds like worship, and funnily enough, that's not too far from the truth. I finally saw the 'light' then, and it was far brighter than I could have supposed. My walls were particularly good at only filtering through what I thought I was capable of seeing. 

It was shocking, enlightening and terrifying at the same time. The walls had been blinders made of industrial strength steel, that not only killed any possiblily of new experiences, but boxed everything that I needed to release in.

I was the jailer and the prisoner, forever at the mercy of my pityless thoughts and fears. 

Could you be wondering what my so-called "little problem" was? Well Dave the ever-helpful therapist classified it as a mixture of insecurity and sedatephobia, the fear of silence. My mother classified it as the one thing keeping her from a normal, happy life in her perfect new marriage. I classified it as something that caused me to differ from everyone else, which only furthered my obsessive anxieties.

Then, like the flicker of a candle, it dawned on me. I was the creator of my own limits. And, when I orchestrated their destruction, there was far more beyond them than I ever could have imagined.