alone in my mind

Egon Schiele, Wally in Red Blouse With Raised Knees, 1913

Hey: I think that you have a lot of issues expressing your emotions and I don’t think I can help you.

Hey: I keep imagining all the different lives I could be in and I don’t know if any of them suit me better than this one.

Hey: I’m worried my life has been weird for so long that I’ve lost all ability to evaluate normalcy, not just when it comes to material circumstances or personality traits but what it feels like to love and be loved by another person. This is terrifying. But I’m so pathologically calm I can’t even access my own terror.

You said there’s nothing I can do to make you stop loving me. The worst part is that I believe you. You never constrain my behavior, you’ve taught me that I can get away with whatever I want, and I’m scared that all this optionality is not good for me. I feel like I’m rattling around in my own mind with no guardrails.

I used to use drugs and physicality and falling in love as a way of cordoning off my thoughts. None of those things work for me anymore. Now it’s just me and my brain all the time.

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Sometimes I hate my own competence and what it enables me to get away with. When my flight is delayed, when I have a deadline, when someone’s panicked and I’m soothing them—I probe myself and most of the time I just feel calm. Flat.