Night Musings

Trigger warning: A reference to self harm, spouse beating and drug use is included

It’s been a long time since I wrote. I guess I feel like my opinions don’t fit with the world today. I don’t know anymore.

I’ve taken to avoiding news stories and political sites because I’m not sure if I’m even seeing them right. It seems so strange to think that I even thought I might understand.

How can I comprehend? How can I know a world which doesn’t belong to me?

I had, and still have, a dream: A fantastic image where we stop thinking in terms of friend and foe, instead reaching for the commonalities in each of us. An existence built together rather than segregated.

I don’t know if our world can work like that yet. I say ours because the way I see it this world is just built over the natural world with it’s ‘survival of the fittest’ rules. Can you imagine that – we built this world from the ground up to cover a patch of nature and did it so well that we forgot that we made it. We who squabble amongst ourselves made this tapestry; we made these chains and barriers and they’re as real as our collective opinions make them.

Of course there’s power and money and weapons too; I know nothing’s as easy as it can be on paper. Yet the fact remains that this is how it all began – one rule or edict building on top of another with just a group agreement or force of rule making it so.

Anyway, I digress.

I find myself watching children’s/teen movies more and more, because it’s where a lot of the feel good, lets come together, there’s no baddies/goodies movies seem to end up. It reminds me of a work by Tolkien where he argued why fairy tales shouldn’t be relegated to children’s stories and have the power at their heart ripped out.

I don’t know for certain why we relegate things in this way. We take the best dreams and call them fairy stories and pipe dreams. We diminish them until we stop believing they could ever be real. It makes me sad because we made this world yet, somehow, we’ve made it impossible to make it magical.

Yet even this is digression.

I began my concept for this post because I’ve had to stop working due to flu.

It’s odd that I used to love my job but now I feel trapped by it, yet every day I push myself to not fail and berate myself for every moment not pushing my limit. I actually made myself ill’er because I couldn’t be certain anymore if I was ill enough to let myself stop working.

I don’t want to fail or let those around me down.

It’s all weight I’ve put upon myself and sometimes it gets so much I can’t see what I love and why I began being me in the first place. Tonight I actually tried looking inside and felt like something is hidden in there, like there’s this huge block hidden behind a hologram.

It’s something I’ll have to work on over time.

It got me thinking though; It reminded me of how much we don’t see…

Look along a perfect terrace with perfect lawns and perfect cars. White privilege, maybe. 1950s facade, perhaps. Total lack of understanding of any other world, quite possibly.

Look closer and ask what’s hidden underneath. Is there a violent spouse? Someone hiding their gender or sexual nature? Someone covering up razor cuts or needle marks? How many hold their heads high and pretend they’re better so no-one ( including them ) realises they hurt? How many hide from conflict so they can’t be hurt more?

Look deeper and the questions come thicker and faster. A thousand whys. A thousand what ifs. A thousand questions about what broke so many of us. Most of all one big question, why did all of these people have to bury so much until it became a dark guilt, a deep fear or a nasty secret? When did we write this into our world and how do we change it?

How many of us, from all walks and ways, are hiding such deep wounds? How much of our world was made from the scars, blisters and scabs left behind from all these wounds?