...No Hell Below Us

I always thought that when you became an adult, that that was when you were grown up. Once you got there you didn’t keep going, didn’t keep learning things that should’ve already been learned. Lately I’ve been finding that it isn’t remotely close to the truth. For as long as I can remember I’ve had preconceived notions of how my life is going to go. I was the one who played house and just knew I was going to grow up and have a husband that loved me, and kids and everything was going to be perfect. I grew up enough to get married and then I realized that things weren’t perfect but definitely not boring. People I know are getting married and having babies, ones who I always thought I’d be ahead of when it came to certain things. Shows you how much I know, now doesn’t it? Learning more than I thought I would at this stage of the game, might be more, or maybe less, jarring if I could just figure out how I want my life to move on from this point. So many things seem to be half-finished and discarded that I don’t even know what some of them are any more. Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind, I long to be on medication, but don’t want to be handicapped by some synthetic drug that’ll tell me that I’m happy now. I don’t want to have panic attacks that make me feel like I’m preparing to go on an epic roller coaster ride. I don’t want to disappoint anyone and I need to get help but I’m scared that I won’t know what to do, I won’t know how to be, without my fake self wrapped around my real self. I’ve been this way for so long that I’m not sure what I’m really like. I’m scared that I’m not like anything, that I’m really a blank canvas, that all I am is a reflection of everyone around me, secretly I am nothing at all. Nothing worth anything at all. I worry that I am secretly a shadow, that if everyone I know were to stand in a room together and say things about me, on the same subject; that everyone would be different and none of them would be true. I worry that the real me was the child in high school, the one who was alone for the most part, living life through books and music and collages. What if that was the real me? I don’t even remember what that person was like. Just that they were lonely, and possibly creative. How does one find their real self after it’s been lost? Is it lost forever and instead one has to be picked out like a secondhand dress? If you lose the self you had when you were born, does it mean that you’re just out of luck now? Maybe I never had a self at all and was just lucky enough to fake my way all the way here. But what now? What now. Maybe nothing now, maybe I’m doomed to be a secret shadow, a blank canvas, stuck waiting.