Down the Rabbit Hole

I have always felt like I was different from everyone. I know everyone has that feeling from time to time, but for me I feel like I am entirely out-of-place here where I am. I feel like I don’t belong – not in this space, not in this time, I just don’t feel like I fit in at all.

I never really have.

I mean I can assimilate reasonably well, I make a passable attempt at getting along with those around me. But in my heart I feel out-of-place, like I am on a completely different plane of existence. It might sound somewhat elitist or egotistical but I really do feel like I think and feel things so differently to people around me.

I thoroughly filter everything I say, so that I never reveal much of what goes on inside my head. I have so many thoughts and feelings but I only let people see maybe 5% of who I am – and that’s as much as even family and friends would see. I have always done it, ever since I was little.

In fact it’s gotten worse as I have become older – I put more distance between myself and others. It is so exhausting always putting my defences up, but I have been terribly hurt in the past so now I go to extremes to protect my real self.

I think a part of my problem is that I think and feel things so deeply. I have always had a habit of getting stuck inside my thoughts. I have a stellar imagination, and sometimes my thoughts get so loud and I get lost inside my head. I forget to vocalise things – doesn’t matter whether those things please me or bother me. So often someone wants to know what I truly think or feel, but I can’t seem to find the words to say. I know what I think, I know what I feel but I don’t know how to share.

And then there is that part of me that doesn’t want to share. I’m so convinced that I’ll never truly be understood, I just want to keep it all locked away. They are my thoughts and feelings. I don’t want to share them – I don’t want to risk letting them get trampled all over and destroyed. Because if someone destroys what’s in my mind then they destroy me.

When it comes to “who I am” – I value my mind above all else. Ego cogito, ergo sum: I am thinking, therefore I exist. Without my mind, and all of my thoughts, and all of my knowledge, and all of my wisdom – I don’t exist. I cease to be. I know it sounds paranoid and delusional, but I fear that if I share those parts of me, let someone actually see those things – then they will have the power to take them away from me and I will no longer be me.

My mind is my own secret garden – a secret garden I long to share with the one who would understand me entirely. But I’m so afraid he doesn’t really exist, that there is no one who would ever truly get me, and that I am completely and utterly alone. Even though I long for the one who would understand me – I won’t even let anyone close enough to try. Maybe I’m writing my own destiny of loneliness.

Sometimes I would like to just stop. Stop the noise in my head. Stop the constant stream of thought that leads me deeper down the rabbit hole and further into oblivion. But sometimes, just sometimes, I welcome oblivion.