My sadness

My sadness looks like me being all alone in a huge building and I can't find my way out. Everyone has left me, no one cares that I'm lost in the ugly building, I can't connect with the fresh air, the sun, the stars, the greenness of it all. It is cold. All I can think about is how damn cold it is and how no one is even looking for me. I've been wandering around trying to find the door that goes outside for hours, days, months and I'm feeling like this is what my life is going to be for the rest of my days. Opening doors, solving puzzles, only to find myself more stuck in the cold, dingy labyrinth. I call people, email them, seek them out for conversations and then find that I can't speak to them about it. It is as if the me that is stuck is shouting out for someone to hear, but the me in RL is incapable of voicing that need. I want them to notice something is wrong, something is different, so I can deny it, so I can throw up more walls to trap myself in. What would they do if they knew? Ignore it? Use it against me? Hate me for my weakness?

How did I get here? I'm here because I let someone lead me in here. I trusted them and they let me down. I called for help and they just said "oh", or didn't even respond at all. I put out my flowers for them to enjoy and be blessed and they ripped everyone from me and didn't even say thank you. I am here because I have failed. It might be a big failure, it might be a small one. I didn’t meet that goal that I set, I'm not doing what I thought I would be doing, I want so much more out of life, but here I am slaving away for what? I'm wasting myself, my education, my passions on stupid stuff and... I DON'T KNOW HOW TO STOP. Or don't want to go to the effort of trying it. I might fail, I might not be able to be the best, I MIGHT... and I run into another room, without any windows and only more doors to things I don't want to think about. LET ME OUT! I DIDN'T SIGN UP FOR THIS, I DIDN'T...

I feel it in my chest. It feels like huge rocks are dragging me down, keeping me from being able to draw a full breath. I feel trapped, held back, jailed. It feels like I am on the train tracks and I can hear the train rushing at me. "That is the sound of inevitability, Mr. Anderson." And there is not a damn thing I can do about it. I feel like I've been here over and over and over again, but this time, I've gotten myself so stuck, so deep into the matrix, I can't find my way out. Why should I even try to get out? I'll only find that more rocks have piled themselves onto my chest, more ropes are keeping me from running, the room is getting smaller.

And yet, somehow, I find myself in the sunshine. How did I get here? What happened to my loneliness, my failures? They have dissolved around me, one fragment at a time. When I find myself in the smallest, most confined space, I begin picking away at the filaments that make up the walls around me. I find a chip in the wall and start prying away. I find a string, in the tangled mass that enslaves me that I can pull completely out of the mess and set it aside. I examine that thing that has wounded me, enslaved me, and I can see that it serves a purpose. It makes up who I am. I am the one who has used it in the wrong way, this can be used for a blanket not a web. And I can see a little bit of light, I can feel a warm breeze on my finger, I can breathe a little bit easier. And now I can pull another string out of the mess, take a bigger chunk out of that wall, examine it for what it is... sharp and ugly, but useful, in some weird way, and I add it to the growing pile of useful bits of my life. I start to realize that I can take all these raw materials here and start building a dream, my life. This is BEAUTIFUL, not cold, ugly, and restraining. I can start to see patterns in the wreck around me, and the chaos that has been drowning me suddenly becomes ordered and useful. My prison has dissolved into nothing around me. I never even had to move to get out.

My pile of useful bits doesn't always make it into my new blanket, my new arbor. If I leave them too long, wasting away in a corner of my life, they start to form walls around me. It happens so subtly, I don't even notice that I can only see three sides around me, then two, then one, then none. And the cycle begins again. Will I have the strength to stop panicking and start to look for the one crack, the loose string? Will I be able to pull it out? Can I bring myself to look at that lonely ugly piece and examine it closely to find that beauty in it? Will I be able to find a way to integrate it into the blanket of my life? Or will I sit, curled up into a ball on the floor of my cold, cell beating against the cement walls of my prison, hoping, praying that someone will come along to give me a pickaxe to help me demolish this beast?