A moment of rare clarity as I’m walking, as always in daze of non-presentness, down the street. Nothing special about it, a few people around, an old man holding a tiny dog in his arms. I walk and suddenly I see the houses. The trees. I think about the woman walking in fron of me, crossing the street; nothing specific, just noticing her presence, existence in the world as a person separate from me, irrelevant to me, just there. I see another woman with a baby carriage; I think about her existence too.
It hits me like a wrecking ball to the guts and spreads, this feeling of extreme contentment. I see. There is an actual world around me, however small, and my eyes, always looking inwards, suddenly shift and look out.
I’ve described this chronic state of mind to several others as licking sugar through glass; it’s there and you think you can reach it, but the glass is just so endless, unbreakable and unclear. It’s looking at the world through a haze, not connecting, not really feeling like a part of it, physical or mental. Just sort of existing in a separate little bubble.
And it’s not a feeling, although it might be easier if it was - it’s a real, physical inability to focus outwards. At one point I was pretty sure the stress had given me actual brain damage - I do not ever remember feeling this way before, not being able to snap out of it even if I drowned myself in mindfulness and other futile evasion tactics - but I think the multiple reasons are slowly coming together now and this little moment, just a few seconds, give me hope that I will not always be locked in this idiotic, massively frustrating glass cage.
It probably is a feeling after all, or a reaction; as soon as it passed, I noticed my mind returning inwards, as if there’s something in there to be watched and guarded fearfully, at all times. I imagine it as if my eyes are doublesided, the inward pair always darting from one malaise to the next. There’s no time or energy to look out when you have a dark and stony brook looking to grab you by the ankles and drag you through the stones, I guess. So we must watch it, for we have been unattentive before, and look what mess we ended in, do you not see how we’re trying to survive, instead of staring at all manners of silly things out there, men with dogs and random women that do not concern us?, I hear my brain chiding.
As if I don’t know.
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