Part of me want to live in a fantasy, quietly

(Silversun Pickups)

It was never about balance. We are, all of us, constantly shifting and struggling and changing with the tides. You either learn to balance the balls and ride the waves or you decide to live a simpler life.

It's about duality, really.

I both do and don't want to write again. I have so much to say but, I have nothing to say. I am happy, satisfied, content and yet, unbelievably tortured this week for no apparent reason. I love to embrace myself as this walking contradiction, but the ultimate truth is that I am so dark on the inside and I am in a never-ending struggle to drag myself out and into the light.

I stopped writing because I cared way too much about making myself clear and being fair that I self-censored until there was nothing left to say, nothing that really grasped the truth of whatever I was feeling, except conflicted. I make a plan or a theme for this... space... and then I have a hard time coloring within the lines. I start over, and over, and then over again. I'm never really clear on who I'm writing for. Is it me? Is it the three people I know that read this? Or is it to some anonymous someone out there that might connect with what I have to say?

I don't think that what I do end up saying is particularly profound. It's just mine.

I'm here now because I still compose posts in my head. I still wake up in the morning from a dream and lay in bed spinning it into a story. A story that I can control and edit and not a dream that I cannot.

I stopped writing because it became another obligation in a sea of obligation and I was tired of being disappointed in myself when I didn't do it, or it didn't turn out the way I intended, or it sounded like it was coming out of someone else's mouth.

I'm writing this now because I simply can't not. The urge that I've been ignoring or postponing or pushing down for the past six months or year or years has finally gotten the best of me. I write because I hope that I'll get this out of my head or out of system or because I want to memorize something, like the remembering of things is so important (though I'm not really one to forget much of anything) or because my 140 characters on Twitter just aren't cutting it but, like most of my cravings, giving in doesn't necessarily make me feel better.

I stopped because I didn't want to be judged and because everything I wrote began to sound defensive and yet, I constantly worried about offending someone.

Suddenly, I just don't care as much. About a lot of things, actually. I have more faith now that things just end up ok, but also that I can't really control it.

And I'm tired of trying to. It's just wearying being that tightly strung all the time.

I feel both sharper and softer. Not as fragile as I used to be and yet, somehow, more so.

This song is the same way. I was driving home after work one night the first time I actually listened to the lyrics and I felt immediately ill. Overwhelmingly so. And yet I had to listen to it over and over again until that visceral reaction went away. Conditioning. Enough so that I could be objective. I still like it, is the thing, but I'm careful about when I listen to it. How I'm feeling. I've been doing this more and more- being careful about what I expose myself to. Mostly, I'm just afraid of letting myself feel too much and not knowing how to deal with it. Because I feel like I could easily be pushed in either direction and lately I can never tell which way the wind is blowing.