This is about a struggle with reality and a fight to control subjective perception of the world.
I'm very happy and not suffering from depression - at least I don't think I am - but I do find it hard to look on the bright side sometimes and I wonder what the world is all about. I mean, what's it for?
It's a beautiful sunny day and I can look out of the window and see it all but I can't really appreciate it. It feels like a long time since I've been able to get from behind some sort of glass wall that's grown around me in. I've become trapped in a box (my head) and I don't know how I got here.
I'm doing this because I've got no one to talk to. I suffered some losses and moved to a new area and I find myself unable to be open and honest here because no one else is. The place is stunningly beautiful but full of gossip and malice. My ideas that all people are fundamentally good and doing their best have gone right out of the window. I always thought that bitchy people were insecure and putting others down to build themselves up but here they seem to get genuine pleasure out of other people's pain and suffering.
Everyone is defensive. Everyone is careful. Everyone is cold.
However, I do know that my experience of the world is tainted by my losses and my past and I'm filtering so that my thoughts become my reality. So I know that the only way I can change this situation is to change my perception of it.
Task Number 1. Work out how to change the way I'm seeing people.
That's a hard one, isn't it. I've built up walls and I find it very difficult to talk to anyone about anything real. I'm afraid to. All I need to do is look in their eyes and I can see that they're not really with me.
I want to see people the way I saw them before.
Take my brother for example. He's so sure about everything. He KNOWS he's right about stuff. He has definite ideas and opinions and he won't sway because he is right.
How can he be so sure? He's older than me so how can he have lived for so long and not had the carpet swept out from underneath him? How can his set beliefs not have been smashed to pieces time and time again until he is left unsure of even whether anything is as he thinks it is?
I envy him.
My world is very different to his. And it's all about other people. I'm happy to believe that the physical world itself is not what it seems. I don't mind that at all. It gives no end of entertaining trains of thought. But when I found it extended to people as well and that all of the closeness and intimacy and love that I'd ever felt, that was so real to me, was just illusion and all in my own head, I didn't deal with it anywhere near as well. The thought trains that come from this are dark and sinister and frightening.
I don't want to live like this - looking at the world this way. I feel that it is something I've learned from my bad experiences of people and that I can learn more and go deeper and maybe find another, better way of seeing things. God, I hope so. So I'll be a good girl and research my first task and try to haul myself up over the top of the glass walls that surround me. I hope they don't have sharp edges. I hope that what I learn doesn't take me further into the dark.
I wish I could go backwards and unlearn.