Self-Made Hypocrite

A level of awareness that allows your emotions to take form of physical pain fills the void of emptiness. It’s an excruciating feeling. Suppressing reality with illusions only welcomes the pain to multiply; linearly, then exponentially. Like a wave building up to its peak, you anticipate the moment it curbs to crash down with the inevitable sound of destruction. You aspire to be the free bird passing over it, traveling at a straight, steady pace, with control of its wings to take it anywhere it wishes. But you’re stuck on the loop of the waves. They are magnetic to the frequencies of your soul, entangled into vibrations of sorrow. A hidden endless melancholy. You appear shallow because you’re afraid to acknowledge the very depth you are made of; it is too dark. Why would you expose such a cruel thing? The lack of understanding that others already withhold for you will only increase. Sometimes you wish the wave trapped you forever. You think you must accept it as your destiny, as you come up with absurd possibilities for its potential. What if it takes me to another world, a portal unknown? Will I then finally feel something meaningful? Will I experience the thrill and excitement I crave? I’ll find out eventually.

No Longer Human - one of my favorite books. I never expected to relate so much to a character from a book.

“I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violence enough to make me dizzy. I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. It was hardly to be expected that someone like myself could ever develop any close friendships.” - Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

I learned that this story is based on Dazai’s personal life, him being the troubled, suicide obsessed protagonist. It inspired me to expose that hidden side of myself, and reflect upon such mind patterns in order to understand them better.

“Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric. I thought, “As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. I must avoid being offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.” - Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

It is truly incredible how, by putting on a facade of the clown and attempting to showcase the shallow excitement of the optimist, you become a magnet for human beings. To entertain based on playful shame and tricks of unpredictable embarrassment, arousing the laughter of those surrounding you, deceives them to believe you are a massive ball of joy and carelessness. When wearing that clownish mask becomes unbearable to your own tiresome soul, you no longer possess the magnetism for shallow laughter to distract you from quiet suffering. You are no longer needed, no longer sought for, unless you return to your eccentric behaviors set to entertain with no end in sight. If not that, you are to be avoided without excuse due to your depressive aura, one that appauls fragile human souls as far away as possible, for as long as possible. If you're asked about your condition, you allow yourself to suffer even a few moments of putting on that false mask of self once more and present a deceiving smile to allow a false sense of relief for the ones who wonder.

The more you feel, the further you retreat. By no means does your inner critic allow even a trace of emotion exposed to the world. The play must go on! The humorous, eccentric genius is naught but a silly fool, an ambitious aspiring physicist who plays chess for hours after scribbling equations and then proceeds to read Camus while lying on the floor. That is the pathetic image I project to the world. When in reality, I am a self deluded, melancholic who buries himself to work tirelessly in order to achieve grandiose visions, for the sake of proving that facade of self I have created to wear carelessly.

To live in isolation is to give oneself a pair of skates to drift down the slithery land of self sabotage and destruction. The unidentified fears that hold me back from following a meaningful path to success seem to constantly creep up to shoot me down and drag me into the slums of failure. Is that it, the fear of failure?

I am a self-made hypocrite. The arrogant inner critic that lives within my consciousness is, without a doubt, one of my greatest enemies. I critique every imperfection around me and yet find myself portraying that same imperfection. What I criticize I become, it is inevitable. Whenever I judged the power hungry, money chasing shallow beings, I ended up morphing into that same image myself. When I internally criticized those suffering from feelings of emptiness and depression, I ended up feeling insufferable amounts of pain. Whenever I assumed I’d found a purpose, a passion worth following, I'd indulge into it with all my might and assume that it has value, that it is worthwhile. In reality it is nothing but a short lived play, dressed in comical frustration.

It is worse to be stuck within a narrow area of despair, not being able to move forward onto a new path and not being able to end the suffering called living. Being present in this physical reality, my soul is unable to fully reach out to the entirety of my consciousness. It is confined in a trance, terrified to stop dreaming and be forced to live in this inevitable existence. I can’t identify whether I feel completely hollow or repressing enormous amounts of pain. I suppose pain is something I cannot fool myself about; I am definitely in pain.