Pain

Life is much more difficult than it appears to be from the eyes of an innocent child whose only preoccupation is what game she is going to get to play when mommy gets home. Fast forward twenty-some odd years and the painful reality of a sinful and cruel world that was discovered at the onset of her teenage years still reverberates to the point of drowning exasperation. The inherent hollowness of her existence and of those around her consumes her daily. Attempting to fill the void with achievements, self-affirmation, and a falsely projected sense of self-esteem, she grows older unable to understand the essence of life and its true value. Nothing seems worth it at times and the frustrated reality of who she is vice who she one day wanted to become attacks her psyche with draconian strength. At a glance, her seemingly cool, nonchalant, and confident attitude invites the admiration and at times envy of many. But her illusion is everyone's delusion. Underneath, exasperation, emotional anguish, and anxiety prey and taunt her. The emotional strength needed to overcome and maintain the illusion exhausts her on a daily basis. Drained of emotional strength, she becomes unavailable and further unable to express her deepest sentiments. Even writing a simple paragraph describing her emotions becomes a difficult self-analytical task driven by the harshest of self-criticism. A mistake unacknowledged by others becomes an obsessive object of self-castigation. Did she say the wrong thing? Was she unable to to formulate an answer to a question quickly enough to assert herself as superior not to others but to her own image of self-perfection? Any error is sufficient to impulse her into an abyss of self-critical perdition. Yet on the surface all will still appear calm. What is the breaking point? What will catalyze her inevitable end? Who if any can stop what undeniably will ensue? If no one can, can she? Will she? And if she does overcome, how will she know that it is not merely a temporary state of survival? She is a survivor; always has and always been, but even the strong perish. Lights fade to black and something always becomes nothing. If nothing else, she staunchly understands these things. She understands the end and to her peril, that self-despair is more likely to consume her before love will. As a rational being, she cogitates on a daily basis with the hope that she may stumble upon the key to unlocking the mysteries that dominate her life. They say life is a journey of self-discovery. The only discoveries of self that she has encountered thus far lead to labyrinths of self doubt and a downward spiral of emptiness. This is pain; not one that can be described in any real terms, but more so the type of pain that persists in ideology. The pain of fading away with no viable recourse to find one self.