Essay No. 1

An essay on fear, self-injury, and the subconscious will to experience life.

I don’t want to fear myself anymore. I want to let all of the air out of my lungs and slip into my subconscious to greet whoever is there. It feels perverse to hide the darkness and embrace the light like it seems insulting to ignore the night while greeting each day. Tip the scales to one extreme and you’re not yourself (take a pill), but attempt to trick yourself into the middle and your stuck in the numbness of twilight.

         I don’t want to be embarrassed of my arms and legs; after all, they’re the most honest parts of me. Scars don’t have the human ability to lie, so perhaps they are in fact superior. That’s not to say that I by any means love them for this- they betray me on a daily basis. I wish this wasn’t so, not because I wish not to have them, but because I wish everyone else’s were visible, too. (Pain is almost always undetectable to the human eye).

         I want to linger in the water until the bubbles clear without dreading what’s beneath. It’s unknown, therefore dangerous. If we know what’s underneath though, will we still be afraid to look beneath the water? I have this thought surfacing from layers of grime and self-denial that tells me, no, there won’t be any more fear once It’s discovered.

         There are people who can’t stand too close to the edge of tall buildings because they worry that they’ll jump. I don’t believe that these are people filled with misery and listlessness; I think they know that if they did it just once, then they wouldn’t fear It anymore.

This is the allure of hurting yourself, isn’t it? If we bleed and recover, does it not reassure us of our sense of life and Being? It’s not a death wish; it’s a yearning to know the miracle of life. Some people cannot resist the desire to know for themselves that this is the truth (and it is the truth). We don’t seek death; it is not in hopelessness that we wish to jump, it is a will deep within our souls to know that be can be like the Phoenix. It is therefore not a weakness in those who cannot resist the temptation to experience this; it is a lust for experience beyond the daily vapors of life that tease us with their fickle sensations of living. Once you’ve felt the raw passion of It all, you lose the ability to be pulled back towards the motions you were once within the orbits of.

         This is the fear- experience It once and you’re forever Its slave. Don’t look into the waters, you may lose your balance, fall in, and drown. To this problem, I see no obvious solution. I hate life for doing this to me, but I love it for allowing me the capacity to feel such depth and despair & beauty and love & passion and pain. No matter how tolling, I wouldn’t give this up. (This is how we learn to sincerely feel).

Author's Note

Form is intentional; Desire for strong voice in writing

Reviews

[The Good Luck Victoriou..]

To me this reads like a combination of autobiography and thinking out loud/blogging. I thought that it showed self-awareness and effectively communicated its point. I really like when a minimal amount of words convey a powerful message e.g. "I don’t want to be embarrassed of my arms and legs; after all, they’re the most honest parts of me." If this were an autobiography, I'd buy it to read more sentences like that because I think that what you're saying is engaging and honest.

The only minor criticism I have (and this may just be because I'm not in your head) is that at some points I got lost between the metaphor and what it was trying to convey and I had to re-read a few parts to understand them e.g. "It feels perverse to hide the darkness and embrace the light like it seems insulting to ignore the night while greeting each day." After re-reading this a few times I am interpreting it to mean that it seems perverse to be dishonest and hide the pain you feel and pretend that you're 100% happy with your life. The second part about night an day I take to mean that you prefer a holistic approach that takes into account both the good and bad in your life.

After thinking about it some more, one could argue that making your audience re-read something is a good thing because it makes them think for themselves in order to interpret your writing.