I lie awake at night with ideas popping in my head like fireworks. Hundreds of them, up there bursting in the sky of my imagination before fizzling into the black of night, the ashes swept under a pillowcase.
I don’t know why they come at night, but they do. Sometimes I write them down, sometimes I promise I’ll remember, sometimes I follow them off into the dark. But what happens more often then not is that the finale of ideas turns into this sense of anxiety, which then gives way to this sense of fear that I haven’t done enough, and never can.
I wonder if there is something wrong with me. Something seriously, psychologically wrong? Why can’t I turn off my head? Why, if can’t I make all the things I see happen, must I be cursed with them populating my consciousness? And why do I feel the need to tell people I’ve never met about all this…
There it is again… there… right at the tip of that last thought. This thing. This one, sharp, jagged thing that sticks in my being. It’s like the grip of an unseen hand around me, squeezing. An obscene hum in the background of my existence. This need to throw myself out there and be validated by everyone around me.
They say your self identity is formed in part by what you believe, and in part by what comes reverberating back at you once you’ve thrown yourself out to the mercy and judgement of world around you— what parts of you get endorsed, what parts get accepted.
God I hate this.
And yet I’m chained to it…
This is the force shooting off all the fireworks, the hand holding the match that sends flash down fuses.
There was once a time when the ideas were for me you know. Things that a genuinely satisfied; things I wanted to do for me. Just for me. Ideas that didn’t need the world to deem them worthy of pursuit.
I miss those days. I’ve missed them for a long time now. I always wanted to be known, be famous, have the elitist dream granted. But the more time I spend in that world the more I find myself committing this horrible sin of filtering the thoughts of my heart through a lens that makes me ask if what I’m feeling is worth something to someone else. If not, it’s probably not worth feeling.
In a world of likes, and retweets, and reviews, and stars, and friend totals… how much of me is me, and how much is the artificial construct of a Dirk that lives to pander to that force out there? How much is me being jerked along by a social leash for a biscuit of relevance?
I wish I could turn it all off. Desperately I do. Sometimes it adds up on me so heavily I don’t know if I can bear the weight off it. It’s easy to say that no one else’s opinion matters, but it always matters. It always will matter and it always has mattered. We are social beings. In fact, those of us who reject the opinion of all others are often labeled psychotic, insane, mad.
The truth is we all want to be a little mad. We want to be free and confident, because we realize a life lived purely for the approval of others is no life at all. We all want to march to the beat of our own drum, but dammit if we don’t also want others to like the beat we’re making… It’s torture. We’re so close and yet so far.
Lord do I envy those who love their own music, because the song pleases them and no one else.
Lord do I miss the days when the fireworks were just for me.
Good night.