society – Artistic Apathy

Gone but not Lost

I sit in my bed, not knowing what words to type. What lines to scribble on the page. My ink runs dry.

My heart feels heavy. I’m tense. I want to cry but at the same time I’m feeling hopeful and there’s an underlying sense of peace.

This one is different. It’s about the pain and suffering in the world and everything we put ourselves through.

You would never imagine some of the things people have to go through and yet we’re surviving every day.

I’ve never felt like my life was in danger but I fight a battle too. Internally. These people are fighting an external battle.

I wonder if we could all put our weapons down one day. If we could all surrender. Raise that white flag…

Let’s give up on trying to punish each other. Let’s give up on being judge, jury, and executioner to our fellow man.

I’ve been thinking, and that thinking is that if we do anything important in this life it’s that we love one another.

I know it sounds like something on a Hallmark card but it really is the antidote to the poison that has so infected this world we live in every day.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not that I feel so heavily for other people. Maybe it’s a burden and maybe life would be easier if I just didn’t care what happened one way or the other. But I do. I care what happens. Give me the chance to do the right thing and not just for goodness’ sake but because I want to do the right thing.

Allow me to choose between love and hate and I will choose love every time. Allow me to choose the path of animosity or forgiveness and I rather live and let die.

Again, my heart is sore and I don’t quite know where that leaves me. Without love, none of us can keep on living. We may think we’re living but really, we’re dead inside.

A friend of mine told me to write freely tonight so here I am.

I hope my words can carry me farther than my imagination can. I hope that these words are like a song that my trapped cage bird soul sings. This is my gospel and its only mine.

Forever.

Imaginary Monster

Social anxiety for a long time was something I had long suffered with.

It held me back in so many areas: Socializing, working, going outside, etc.

My social anxiety was very mild at first. When I was younger, I moved schools a lot and always found myself in a new environment with no new friends and no familiar faces. In the beginning I always made an effort to make friends but the more I moved the more withdrawn I became. I learned to just keep to myself and not to bother with making friends. After all, who knew when the last time I would see them would be.

The more withdrawn I became, the more I developed my own little world where I was the center of it.

My biggest fear was someone disrupting this world so oftentimes someone “intruding” would trip me up and make me nervous.

First it was being socially withdrawn then after high school it translated into a fear of big crowds. I became overly obsessive about what people might think of me that it made it hard to even function like a normal person. Who knew though, all along I was the only one judging and no one outside of me was pointing a single finger!

For a while I was unemployed just for the reason that the anxiety grew to the point where I didn’t want to even go outside. I didn’t want the world to see me. I had judged myself. Since I went out of my way not to see people, I quickly became depressed out of a need to be seen. It was a conflict between needing to be seen and not feeling worthy enough.

I had few jobs that required customer service skills and the anxiety was so huge for me that I just quit each time. It wasn’t until much later that I found a job that would crack my shell completely.

Living with social anxiety was a nightmare and a hell for me. I tried everything, forums, online videos, medicine, therapy. Anything for me to be normal again but all it took was for me to step outside of my head for a moment. All those things were in my head. If I had just known how powerful your thoughts can be then everything could have changed for me. Now when I sense those thoughts creeping up I just tell myself it’s my irrational self crying for attention.

And I don’t pay attention to it.