Teetering

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Ronan Furuta

This post has been a long time coming. The idea for it has been sitting in the back of my mind for months as I’ve been attempting to deal with my own mental health in the wake of the pervasive shock to my system that has occurred since I’ve been in this stateless place. Though through the process of thinking through this post, the contents and contexts have changed, I think the feelings generally still apply.

When I was young, I hated the rides and roller coasters at theme parks and fairs as the idea of being taken around a metal contraption you had no control over seemed like a silly notion to a kid who never felt in control of his own life. So any time any of my family or friends wanted to ride a ride, I would walk through the lines with them until it came time to take your place in the wagon, cart, or wheel. At that point, I would simply walk out the exit. Everyone in line would try and convince me to stay, telling me how not scary it really was and if I were to just try and ride, I would like the experience. However, I knew this to be untrue as every ride up to this point felt like an excruciating experience, and making the ride taller and faster did not make relate to making the experience any better for me. So I would leave, and in those few moments of freedom, I would watch and wonder what the other people must have been experiencing being taken around by these giant machines.
At these parks, I become fascinated with one ride in particular, round up. This ride consisted of a spinning disk surrounded by metal fences, usually with beautiful blinking lights on the outside. Every time the ride stopped, new people would file in and find a spot, and then slowly, the disk would spin like a top. Up and down, left and right, round and round again, as people felt themselves pushed back into the fence without so much as a strap or buckle. I would watch people go around, unable to move as this large machine tilted and teetered back and forth. Until sometime later, the ride would slow and come to a stop before starting all over again. I wasn’t so much fascinated with the experience of the ride but the motion of the machine as it would bring people up and down with so much ease creating the illusion of excitement with every lift but never actually changing the experience of those who are riding it. It is in these times when I would stand there watching the blinking lights go round and round, what it would be like wondering what it would be like to just spin forever.

I never really put much thought into the ups and downs of my life other than the occasional consideration as to whether the inconsistent but frequent tumults stem from avoidable circumstances or actions. It wasn’t until the stacking of traumas and tragedies that it felt thought that my own world began to teeter uncontrollably. These high highs would be followed by low lows, each success followed promptly by a disappointment. This moving back and forth became heavy, and I began to become scared of spikes that would throw my world into chaos.

Truthfully it felt like someone had their hand on my head and would push it under the water, only to bring me up to catch my breath. I was swaying, spinning, and losing my footing. Each day became a chore, and each night a relief. Life became like walking through water, getting up on instinct rather than motivation.

I can tell you that I didn’t realize how much my mind was spinning round and round until I finally got some medicine that let it stand still. I didn’t know how pressure accumulated and built upon me, crushing my body and my hopes and dreams. It was then that it felt like I had lost myself, and it made me wonder why I tried so hard in the first place. I lost my way; the spinning made me lose sight of the ground and the sky, for it all to become a blur that some invisible force kept me down. Each teeter gave me hope but then promptly dashed it. Things I could normally handle began to stack higher, and the impossibility of banal tasks made me sink lower. When these dark thoughts began to pervade my mind and my feelings, all my actions that I felt out of control and I wanted to disappear. To hopefully be thrown for the ride and survive or at least to stop this misery.

I don’t know how to escape the ride or if the medicine will let me off. These pills I take scare me because of how well they work. Knowing some external force is making my body feel normal again. It makes me worried that I will be stuck with them, forever unable to be me on my own. Dependent on something else to stop the spinning. I feel like I’m on that round-up machine that is beginning to slow, hoping now that I have the power to make it to the end. I don’t know what else I may experience, but I know I’m not cured. I feel my body still be heavy but at least I feel strong enough at the moment to lift it. Through it all it still feels like I’m still going round and round, watching the world teeter and twirl, and wishing I was still that kid watching from the fence, wondering what it would be like to spin forever.

Cold War Kids

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Water’s Edge – まぬが

People say that the cold war ended in 1991, but for me, it started in 1992.
The day I was born, the battlefield began, not with fighting and disruption but rather through a dissolution of what other kids find as a firm foundation to live life upon.

I do not remember this union, though I am told that it existed through pictures and memories of all those who had the opportunity to experience it’s ephemeral existence. No, for my sister and I, what we knew was shouting over the phone and proxy wars between two people who had said until death to us part but would like nothing more than to be apart at death.

I can almost perfectly recollect the wars that were fought using children as a weapon, swinging us back and forth, with each strike damaging and dulling our delicate mental health. To this day, I look around and wonder what little eccentricities may have bloomed from the battlefield of my mind. How many unexpected scars and traumas are waiting to be awakened in the myriad of moments I have yet to experience. With no way to determine or avoid distress used to brace myself constantly for the cataclysmic collision of conflicts that would crawl it’s way into my cranium.

I had been reflecting on this recently, about the way I never truly understood a sense of normalcy because my normal was made so askew that I believed mountains were valleys and valleys were mountains. Though I have since learned this lesson, I am left with this sense the “normal” life will never be within my grasp. Like a fish living in water, I will never fully understand the nature of the bird that was given a chance to fly.

I remember the days in and days out when I lost who I was, I lost choice, I lost breath, and most of all I lost all that was left. I became the puppet who you could pull the string and carry out a messy pantomime of what I believe to be a functioning human being. I remember the voice of those friends who told me that I would no longer be able to play with them because it was too hard to keep track of my schedule. I recollect all the opportunities that faded away because arranging a meeting became too much of a hassle. I still have engraved the moments I missed because I was not allowed to exist in a way that made sense. I lost so much I became obsessed with perserving all I could keep, but like sand on the beach, all that I could hold would ultimately wash away when the water comes in.

I wasn’t until after I returned home from college that I sought to find some solace and peace in the chaotic sprawl that had become my life. Even now, there are wounds all around from the damage done by everyone involved. Patterns of behaving that have no hope of a resolution. I find, though, that recognition of humanity in those superpowers that lead the fight as a way to cope with the travesties I experience growing up.

Though I recognize our faulty lives and acknowledge the inadequacies that pervade those who had a hand in shaping this situation, I can tell you that I still feel the sting of disappointment, even when the expectation is failure. Perhaps this is the last semblance of childish hope that stokes the light of a small candle within me.

I found acceptance in my unordinary life, though sometimes I wish things were easier. I may never know what it will be like to not have family drama or conflict, though I can be one to champion peace and understanding.

I can’t say every moment I lived was terrible, and I have nothing to look back to fondly, but like a flashing bulb, my dark memories still light up the ceiling as I lay in bed at night. I know that though the war may be over, its effects are long-lasting, even when I am thousands of miles away.

A Last Song For Duo

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I’m going to try and put into words, this experience made too ephemeral, this moment crafted premature, this time intended for never and not yet but arrived just the same. Oh Duo, for how I miss you. How dearly I cannot say for language falls short in constructions of eternity and the infinite. These memories and moments with you seer beneath my skin, for forgetting, is a sin and I intend to be a saint. Though I’m sure this prose is more for me than for you, these words stand as a small testament to you and our time together. Though I can’t hold you any longer, I hope that this passage will preserve a piece of you everlasting.

What can I truly say other than I miss your large bright green eyes. Oh, now they used to look at me like I was home. A place I feel for me I hardly know but for you was within me. This peace I had because I was able to provide for you something that I had long forgotten myself. This yearning, I feel and wish I would see them truly looking at me one more time. That love I felt when you would do was almost comedic in character because how could it have been? I had always felt so undeserved, but you paid no mind to my insecurities and faults.

It’s in that memory of laying with you, and how you revised the way I slept that I found peace. The way you insisted on laying between my legs felt so warm and weighty that in my absence, I cannot sleep. I burn for the way you used to keep me in bed long beyond my morning alarms. The way I would play tardy with you, and the world would pass us. I savor the moments for I was with you because for those moments, I felt whole with you in reach.

It’s in your soft fur that my fingers can still touch. The way you would acquiesce to my whims, begrudgingly but trusting. The peaceful confidence you displaced traversing the world. The way your brother relied upon you to make sure the sky was not falling, and that there was always a warm place to lay his head. The way I knew you would always come back around so I would never need to chase.

I wish I could wake to you. Those visions of it all being a terrible dream and that it was only a manifestation of a worry gone too far. For my days have gone to grey waiting for you to return through that front door that you left through. For that night I can’t escape, that stain on the concrete and grass; that deep red turned to various shades of rust and grey. Something broke inside for me that night, and I don’t know if it will ever be made right. I pray for you every night that you come home and pray that if you cannot that you at least are happy someplace else. Oh, how I miss you so much.

It then a tragedy of that night that these flashes of the pain of memory keep these bittersweet memories sufficiently somber. Through their experience, I become darkened further because how can a light like yours be put out. Like others in this situation, I blame myself, wishing I hadn’t let you out that night because I didn’t; you might still be here. I can’t escape you but nor do I want to. I just want the pain to finally subside so I can enjoy memories of you without this inexplicable dark from arising. A pain that is both a curse on my heart but also a blessing of your existence. I know with time, I will heal, but that will not make me yearn for your soft fur and heavy frame any less. It’s my arms I wish you would still be, wasting and watching days go by, making life a little easier and more worthwhile.

I remember when you first came home that I used to lay awake at night, making sure you were still breathing. I would sit there watching your tiny frame anxiously until I could see that hearty breath in and be relieved that you were still there. I would worry you would be gone from me any moment, but when that worry stopped you were gone, and I didn’t know how to pick up the pieces. That night I carried you and had hoped you were warm. I saw end the end of your breathing, and I felt you and your soft fur grow colder. I wish I knew to do more, but I was helpless in front of this fate.

It’s unfair, and I know life is never that way, but why did it have to be you. The blood on my clothes and the towel I wrapped you in, markers of a life that could not be spared. I suffer the trials and tribulations of the world knowing the punishment should fall on me but in a split moment, the world collapsed around you for no more reason than it feels to prolong a certain sense of wretchedness. I would take the world on my back to protect you from harm and yet I could not protect you from danger and chance. What purpose could lie in this, a lesson that could not learn some other way. That is to say I miss you, so dearly that don’t have words to describe. I would trade it all for you and I wish you were still here. I wish above all else that could see those bright green eyes look at me again and have those mornings with you. Oh for how much I love you Duo, I always have.

At the end of this, what I wish I could tell you is
until the stars burn out.
and the sky goes dark
I will always love you

Goodbye Duo, I didn’t deserve you, but you came to me anyways. I will take care of Hero and everything else. And I hope, deep in the purest place in my heart, to see you again.

Hoping for Wishes and Wishing for Hope

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Snow by Pascal Campion

I don’t know how to speak to hope, with the words I put to the page never seeming enough. The only reason I want to speak to hope in the first place is that I’ve been thinking about hope, or the lack thereof, in both myself and the world around me. It’s like gravity pulling dreams and aspirations down to the ground and burying them beneath the soil. It’s like a force is speaking little messages to people, telling them not to hope or pray for wishes because wishes are for the lucky and hope is for the foolish.

But what is hope except for a wish not yet to come, a part of our heart speaks out so loudly that ask us to take a chance on the world and its wonders and believe that more is possible? Hope is what the architect sees before the building, the engineer sees before the machine. Hope is an extension of the dreams but… dangerous thinking that is, because to aspire to leave your neck out to get cleaved and those who forsake hope, survivors of the dream guillotine, don’t want to get hurt again.

I can understand this apprehension and this desire to abandon hope. As you get older the world continues to test the willingness to hope and more of your life feels as if it were to be a graveyard for dreams. Those who are lucky, seem to be blessed in some way by the universe to continue forward unimpeded, but the for the rest of us, it feels as if every day we spend climbing mountains.

I’ve lost hope in people and institutions while I’ve been living in this stateless place. Maybe I’ve been an idealist all this time because I’ve been fortunate enough to guard my heart and hope enough not to get ravaged by the hands of time. Now my heart lays exposed and bloodied by the experiences of the past few years, marred and marked about the failings of hope and effort. I’m sure there are some that will believe that the death of ideals and dreams will give way to a clearer view of reality. Those who believe that setting the bar low only provides a more accurate view of the universe. The people who call themselves realists have been beaten and broken by the cost of dreams, see the world as one broken place and that if they dare to dream that dreams would be dashed and only pain would persist.

Maybe this is why I can’t stop myself from caring because I stop caring about this world and others that I give way to the death of my dreaming. That if I lose all hope and persist entirely without the expectations of others or the future, all that would be left is a shell of myself who goes through the motions without an end in sight. That it’s this foolish hope about the change in the world, that someday we find can find a better way and my efforts mean something that keeps me looking forward and coming back to the table.

It’s hard though, to hope in a place that has done nothing but balks at my dreaming and my aspirations. To call only for persistence through extraordinary circumstances as a solution. To feel isolated, alone, and not to be taken seriously. I can understand why I have so much hurt with hope because hope is the knife that continues to make me bleed. It’s the belief that things will get better here and that all my experiences have been a string of bad luck and not the result of my failings. Hope has me believe that the future is calling, and as long as I work towards it, things may go my way. It’s hard to continue to be as I feel hope as I experience the cleave of dream guillotine regularly. At times it feels as if these people and places are avatars of the universe acting like an executioner of my dreams.

I know the power of hope, though small at times, keeps me persisting ever longer with the belief that my continued progress will get me to eventually meet my dreams. I haven’t given up but man… it’s been hard, and at times I find myself hoping for wishes and wishing for hope.

More Morose than Most

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Moon Sea – Sun Kai

It’s difficult, this wandering mind that speaks of despair and death followed by feelings that prance and plague the heart and soul with solemn thoughts and wicked words. It is the invasive conceptions of a traumatized mind that form an inescapable umbra casting shadows in the light and swallowing hope whole. It is cruel premonitions of a life steeped in inadequacy that encroach like a predator starved for prey, slowly and with great care, only to strike right at my throat, choking me with metaphor and simile until I feel myself grasping for breath. I fear these moments because it leads me to believe the floodgates on my feelings have been loosed, and that I will forever feel that dreams of death will always taste a little sweet.

It scares me late at night or worse, during the day when I feel this crippling sense of lowness. This feeling that through all my toil, I am unequivocally bound for a life of ephemeral mediocrity followed but the subsequent oblivion of being forgotten. It paralyzes me, drowning me in this waking nightmare about a time that has never come and still yet never may be. The visions appear to me in the visage of a well-worn memory, as if to be assured premonitions warning me about the future that is to come. It sours my mood and makes me believe fate is a foe insurmountable.

It speaks to these insecurities of mine that those around me never put me in their mind. That conversations are short, and feelings are even shorter. That I am minuscule and momentary to the experience of those who are meant to serve as compatriots for a time on spaceship earth. It makes me read between the lines and question all statements. To take every action, movement, song, and verse as evidence of my accusatory paranoia. Though I override these thoughts and beliefs, I grow weary of fighting with myself to come home exhausted and unable to sleep.

It’s a menagerie of experiences that culminate to inexorable episode of multitudes of meloncoly. I try to see with eyes unclouded, but wounds in my heart remind me that this place I exist may never be as I want to see it. I have become attuned to my world, and I find it darker than the halls path I walk at night. This cold place makes this feeling echo loud and makes the noose tighten slightly around my dream.

These feelings come in ways and waves that I don’t know how to fend. I may have let too much in to be free of these feelings for the rest of my life. For now, I try and rest and write my way through it in hopes that by the time the morning comes that I can once again start again.

The Hate In Healing

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Failed Work – Dino

I hate this.

This continued conversation I come back to. Taking this meta-focused approach of writing about how painful the writing process become and to wearily replete the page with a sincere apology for the indiscretion of not arriving sooner.

I hate this is the only way I know how to return to this process though my brain fills to the brim with words left unsaid. My hands freeze now every time I return to writing, be it personal or professional, this feeling of impending emotion begins to overtake the reminiscent pleasure I used to receive from putting my hands to the keys. It feels strange as if I am faced with an invisible wall that I am scared to touch because it will hurt me, or that when looking at the page that some invisible hands begin to squeeze my heart.

I hate them for all this pain and strife I’ve encountered as a result the trauma they have inflicted upon me. This inability to escape from this shadow they have placed me under, no matter how illogical this may be.

And I hate myself for letting these wounds seep in deep and scar because of my fear, doubt, and pain. I speak to healing but never allow myself the space to return.

It’s been difficult because every time I don’t quite make it to putting my thoughts on the page as it adds one more to my list of failures. The wall of returning becomes greater and greater until I stand before mountains made of the mind. To speak of being able to do and then looking to the mountain I need to climb and I am disheartened.

Though I return to the space of needing to be compassionate to myself. Just like the act of physical therapy or attempting to get strong, the expectation that I should return from a prolonged break or hurt without the need to build back this muscle slowly is problematic. Though this may seem simple and obvious to some, the practice of it is harder than it seems.

What I need to do this slow again, and find myself in the words that used to call for me. Spend time but be okay with retreating a few paces to give me the space to grow again. I need to heal and more fully acknowledge the effect of the wound on my heart. “Start slow”, I have to tell myself, “but be consistent”. It’s okay to write a little as much as it’s okay to write a lot. Just be consistent, and remember your audience, me.

I hope then I can find that solace in these words and upset the upset in my heart. For now, it’s just a step, and one small step, one after another, and I will find myself in having traveled to where I want to be in no time. Just keep walking.

To Think of Knights and Dragons

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My Equal – Rasmus Berggreen

I’ve been thinking about knights and dragons lately. Wondering what a knight would believe once they started their journey and after it was over. Did they feel compelled by the dragon to act, to fight against all odds, to try and win when winning seemed like a far-flung fantasy? Did they go on this journey knowing the risks, the pain, the anguish they may experience? When a knight comes home, with scars and marks, do they let everyone know about the journey, the tribulation, the hurt and the pain? Would they tell a story of victory and triumph or costs and measured losses? I wonder if the knights would heal, from the pain inside and out, or let the scars of the fight die with them, that way the dragon does not claim another victim. What does the knight lose along the way to the dragon? Do they return a little less of themselves having done something so great? Does a knight need a dragon to be the hero they are meant to be? Can a knight be a knight with a dragon?

I’ve never asked for an easy life, an easy one sounded boring and banal, what I wanted was an adventure, to help others, to make the world a little bit better by leaving my mark on it. So I’ve set out on my own journey, like many others in kind, to find and learn to be better than anything I could imagine ever being. And sometimes, to be honest, this journey has kind of sucked. It’s never really been easy, and I don’t know why. I’ve had to fight my through everything, and I’m starting to believe that I’m pushing too hard for a thing I’m not meant to be.

It hurts so much, these dreams I carry on my back, which drive me from the nothingness to the light have also shackled me to my own form of hell. I do not regret having these dreams, but I fight and I fight against the coming current to feel like the stream doesn’t even want me there to begin with. That who I am is beginning to erode, and this path I was sure I was taking has started to crumble beneath my feet.

Can I run? Escape from this world for a second to catch my breath and become reinvigorated? If I were to take that much-needed reprieve would my dreams still be there when I return?

All I’m left with are questions, ones that I don’t know how to answer because I didn’t know the questions needed to be asked in the first place. I’ve tired and strained, my brain feels like it’s running on overdrive all the time. The only moment I seem to find reprieve from these burdens is I close my eyes to sleep, a dreamless sleep until I am forced to wake again.

I wonder about these knights because I have my face my own dragon and I’m wondering what will be left after I am through. Will I still be able to look in the mirror and see myself, or will I have lost so much from the fight that I become someone unrecognizable? I worry that I will lose parts of myself that I can never get back and that slaying the dragon, at the end of the day, won’t be worth it, that I will have lost too much.

I’m scared and tired, and I don’t know what to do. How did those knights, in those stories find their way?

I wish I had the answer, but I’ve been making it up as I go, maybe when this is all over I will have my own tale of knights and dragons, but for today I just have to fight and hope I don’t lose too much of myself along the way.

Don’t Avert Your Eyes

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Symbiosis – Mark Maggiori

I used to get in trouble a lot when I was younger, not for anything malicious, just my own flavor of rule-breaking like talking too much or being generally disorganized with school work. Whether it was at home or at school I could always count on being in some sort of trouble. I realize now that a lot was going on emotionally but that is a story for another time. When the pain and punishment came around I learned to acquiesce. To keep my head down and push forward because people couldn’t be mad forever, and pain, though uncomfortable, would eventually go away. At least that’s what I believed as a kid. Head down and push through.

I didn’t realize for a long time that this strategy only works in the short term. That each time you keep your head down and push you lose a bit more of yourself along the way. Before long you don’t know what you are pushing towards or away from. It’s becomes so natural that even the slightest hint of trouble you are attempting to push it away because you’re not standing for anything, especially not yourself. It an easier way to live, I know, I’ve lived that way, but its certainly not better.

I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, and experienced many different triumphs and tragedies but what this experience has taught me is not to avert my eyes. That when turmoil strikes it’s better to be looking up at what’s happening than ducking away into the darkness and hoping that things turn out okay in the end.

When I started looking up in these moments of pain, I wouldn’t say that it go rid of the pain but it allowed me to work through it. To not lose myself along the way. That I felt a strength well up inside, strength of character and conviction, that began to suffused itself into my every day life.

It’s hard not to close your eyes and look away when bad things happen. It takes courage to realize you may have gotten things wrong and could do better. The only way we progress is to face our fears and work through them. It’s the harder route but the right one. You may not even know if you are doing the right thing in the moment but 9 times out of 10 by having that courage things will work out better for you.

I can tell you from experience that even though life still happens and that difficult thing still occur, because I learned to look up and see my problems instead of just keeping my head down things would get better. Life is a lot of work, anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something. This is one of those things I don’t have much to speak to, it’s simple to say but hard in practice, and you NEED practice.

Don’t avert your eyes, look up and face your problems. I promise if you do, you will begin to feel like you are living again.

A Dream of Pandora

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Alone –

I woke up from a dream today, a dream which showed me a vision from the heart and spoke to me of my eternal strife asking me to listen, think, and then do.

This dream consisted of a subject that I am comfortable speaking about but uncomfortable dwelling upon. It feels at times when broaching the subject as if I were to be given pandora’s box with the last bit of evil trapped inside, the antithesis of hope. That opening the box somehow unravels more me and my motivations that I’m scared of whats inside. It scares me because I used this demon trapped to push myself forward and what would happen if I were to cleanse myself of it like all of the other demons of my past. Would I lose that vital piece of trauma that pushed me forward? I don’t know if I was created by this traumatic need or I should prevail all the stronger having faced it. So like Pandora, I will open the box and peer inside, hoping instead that what is left is better than when it was locked away.

In this dream, I was at a reunion of sorts. People who were there were all among the people I when to elementary and middle school with. A strange set of people from a strange time that at this point I have more than double amount of memory and experiences than I did when I knew them.

In this reunion nothing strange or dreamlike occurred, just people talking to each other, catching up about old times, and recounting new ones. But when I began to speak it was this feeling deep down that these people couldn’t see me, they saw this sad and broken version of me from back then. Made to feel so small and insignificant. Made me feel like the person that the teachers and the students paid no mind to and created no lasting impressions of. The one that was seen to not be going anywhere in particular, living a banal and unimpressive life just fading into the background.

This is why its so crazy to me, it still made me feel like I was the same person as I was back then. All it took was a look, and a couple of comments which weren’t even mean and it felt like I had gone through a time machine and that person they believed me to be was still there deep down inside of me. Through a look I had to relive all these feelings and inadequacies that I endured for many years.

In the face of the intolerable cruelty of my past, I realized that trepidations shake across time to create a resonance felt today. I have this feeling and fear that I’m going to disappear. That back then in these early and formative years were a reflection of my ultimate destiny of fading from view. To never be taken seriously or thought to hold value.

I know that these feelings may be in some ways irrational but its the dissection of these feelings which may allow me to understand more fully subsequent motivations. I feel as though I need to be good at everything but can never be the best at any one thing. I have this feeling that I can’t leave anything behind and that by saying “No” an opportunity that may be forgoing the one last piece of the puzzle that would make me whole. It’s this paranoia of not being enough for anyone that makes me fluctuate from feeling like I shouldn’t try at all to throwing myself through hell for work.

It’s this feeling of unease that I have constantly compared to everyone around me and by doing so that I always come up lacking. That as me I can’t ever be enough.
It is as though around me sense this, this desire to be seen and appreciated. I’m sure in some way off-putting. Even when recognized don’t feel that usual happiness of accomplishment but the inescapable and unsatiable hole in myself.

Can I ever really be truly happy bearing on my back this kind of curse. I am irrevocably broken that I have no hope to fill these gaps. I need another solution to fill this hole inside of me because eats away at me and doesn’t direct me where I need to go. Coming to terms with this though is harder said than done.

Perhaps with this dream, I can start on this journey of reformation, to become the person I hope to be without the fear of slipping back into the person I used to be. To run forward not because I am scared of what is behind me but because I am looking forward to something in front of me. It is a journey that won’t be resolved in one night but by opening the box we can then only know where this journey may lead.

Asura Instinct

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You have to forgive me, for I’m using words and phrases for which I only have a tentative understanding of the complexity, history, and significance to describe, most likely poorly, my own experience. To be fully transparent, it’s because of this naive understanding that I can, in any way, describe my feelings sensibly. I’m to co-opting these words and phrases, not to describe these borrowed concepts in any negative light but to illuminate these emotions which I can’t readily discern otherwise.

Begin

You can’t hold a flame in your hands. – Auroradiation

It’s a fury in my chest, a fury that arises from the seething fire of the accumulated stress and pressure of my everyday life. A fury without direction, coursing through my body like boiling water, scorching my veins and arteries and wanting me to turn everything back to black. It strains my muscles, my mind, my flesh with an untempered ferocity that asks to destroy, to upend, to dismantle, and to reduce everything back down to its component parts. It’s a frustration with my circumstances that calls for me to rip and tear apart everything, but most of all destroy some foundation of myself.

These destructive impulses call so loudly for destruction, like being opposed to creation in its purest form. The desire or instinct to bring it all down to nothing – that in my mind have named the Asura instinct. This idea of being opposed to heaven, to creation, to everything that sentient existence convenes upon us. To raze towers and seas. To bring mountains low and us even lower.

This Asura Instinct on the surface appears to be this overwhelming negative impulse, because how could these feelings of wanton destruction bring about anything good? But it’s because of this desire to destroy that I understand the true need, the need for change and control. That my life in some ways is not working. That this pressure begins to build and build until the whole system feels like it’s going to come down. This directionless fire and fury in my veins serve then as the power to change, to dismantle systems and build them anew for myself and my future.

It reminds of the three principal gods of Hinduism and the cycle they foretell through their role and existence, the creator, the preserver, and the destroyer. All three serve an important purpose and each role is seen as essential for the process of life and reincarnation. Destruction and death are all part of this cycle because without destruction we have nothing to create, and without destruction, we have nothing to preserve. It is true then without destruction we cannot fully be.

It’s this fury in my veins that tells me that something has to change, that sadness and frustration are, too, the part of this journey. That all things must end no matter how much I fear the end and how much this fear paralyzes me. I’m scared of the destruction because of what will happen when I can no longer hold onto something in my arms so tightly. That I have to let go and say my goodbyes wholeheartedly. That it’s okay for it to disappate and no longer return. That it’s okay that the permanent state of a thing could be in both its ephemeralness and its finality.

It’s this Asura instinct, the fire within my veins that I know that I need to complete the cycle of change and growth. That the wave has to return to the shore. That projects and problems must see an end, and in their end, they may not be perfect but they may be perfect because they end.

It’s acknowledging this Asura Instinct, my need for destruction, that I know change needs to happen and that I must let it. I must let things end so they can begin anew. I must let go so I have the opportunity to hold. It’s through this destruction that I know that I can truly live at all. It’s through this destruction that I can finally be me.