“I am not my solitude”

Don’t leave me alone with my thoughts. Don’t leave me in the dark closet I fought to get out of, the shaded woods where each and every little voice in my head shouts and yells about my flaws, insecurities.

Anxiety and depression are nothing to encapsulate and package into nice, neat, and pretty boxes with curly bows on top.
I’m scared to face the idea of myself, the idea of what I might be thinking, and what it actually means. I absorb the lives of literary characters, of my friends, into my very being until I forget what it means to think. I’m scared to be alone, insecure on the thought of being in an empty room with nothing but the constant stream of thoughts running through my head.

Worries, ideas, poems, analyzing each and every misstep I have taken; the list is never-ending.

My mind works on overdrive. I lay awake at 2:23 a.m. or later on a nightly basis staring at the ceiling, knowing the words I type on the page will be an enigma, an incomprehensible representation of what my thoughts actually mean.

I have lived, and I have thought, yet it is all remaining in my head. I isolate myself time after time. I have sat, stone-cold silent, through four therapists, letting their words run through one ear and out the other. My thoughts and my head trapped me in high school, and they, albeit less rarely, trap me now.

The only thing that frees me is the utter silence that I am left with. I feel everything and I feel nothing. Raymond Carver wrote it first, and best:
“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”

My heart keeps on beating, and my mind continues to churn.
There are an infinite number of letters and words I can describe this, this insecurity; I could fill pages upon words, beloved words.

Yet I leave the page blank, for my thoughts to fill. I am left with an abstract of the concrete. And so it goes.