I feel less strongly connected to the world around me – my body knows how to move through the space, some part of me knows how to manipulate it.  I communicate, but I feel as if standing on a small rock surrounded by water, separated from the world.

Thoughts of escaping my body, this world, the feelings – flit through my mind.  Step into the street to be violently expelled from here.

She haunts my thoughts right now.  A heavy weight of inadequacy on my shoulders.  The cashier at the market calls me “sir,” innocently – a reminder of my incomplete identity.  I should be strong enough to enjoy the ambiguity but I am not.

Something in my mind is off, like a tilted picture frame or an unbalanced spin cycle.  I know the feelings that feel so dark and heavy come from a sewer of chemicals.  I make digital marks each day to track how they influence me, and when I replenish them.  When the days are particularly strange, rational thought holds little influence.  I chastise myself for being weak.  On this, on rejection, on ambiguity, on aloneness.

I look in the mirror and see an elegant albatross, missing something crucial for survival, like a brutalist tower without concrete waterproofing – slowly coming apart under the unceasing weather of life.  How did I get this far with straws holding up the joists of my mind?  As they sag, bits of hope fall through the cracks, the quantum states of consciousness fall to decoherence – the world recedes.

Therapists are like contractors – expensive, they come to estimate the cost of repair, but leave unfinished.  The wise homeowner learns the craft, understands when the work is done, and what remains to do.  They learn to do for themselves.

The world owes me nothing.