Life is short; it is like a dream. Some days, I lose myself in that dream, that perfect, rolling illusion. My dreams have become my reality. I am living in a perfect world, but there is something inherently ugly in perfection. Something stale, artificial, wrong.
When I was young - maybe 12 or 13 - I watched The Truman Show, and I was disturbed. For days, weeks, maybe, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my life was a carefully constructed lie. That I was being watched - through mirrors, in my room. But you can’t live like that, so the feeling passed... or maybe it didn’t. Maybe I internalised it and the paranoia has lingered, infecting me with the sense of subtle unreality that I have always struggled with. That sense that only I exist, that things are too good, too cohesive, too easy. Unnatural. Supernatural.
I am not an open person. Not really. I am just open enough for people to trust me. I bare my soul as if to say this is all of me, all the while knowing that my humanness is too controlled, too precise to be real. People love what I give them; they are beguiled by what I represent. Through me, they see themselves more clearly and I, magic mirror, show them exactly what they need. That’s what I am - the human equivalent of a one-way mirror: a smooth, still surface for others to project onto. I see everyone, but nobody sees me.
I have been ‘open’ with mental illness. I have talked about it - seriously, jokingly, in depth, in passing. But what I haven’t talked about is the guilt. I am out now, I say to people, even though I’m not sure if it is ever possible to fully ‘out’. I feel out - all still and smooth. In balance. Good. I feel fucking good. And pristine. Powerful and present. Being out hasn’t fixed me. The things that were wrong with me are still wrong. I am still the same fucked up person at my core. It just doesn’t bother me anymore. I’m high.
So, where does the guilt come from? You would think that having spent all that time lost in the dark would make me more sympathetic to people still caught in it, but it doesn’t. In fact, it does the opposite. Instead of leaning in, I want to lean out. I recognise the signs and experience a sense of revulsion in my gut. I recoil. As though it’s contagious. As though the ‘out’ is just a fleeting illusion. As though I’ll wake up, sober. Captive, again, in that gruesome, mutating reality, cursed to wander the warping fields. I am saving myself, like a rat, fleeing. Clinging to my solitude, married to my opium haze.
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