The Musings of a Self-Loathing Insomniac

By Kriti Arora

I should be asleep, and yet I am not. Isn’t it ironic that I want to be comforted by the people who have hurt me, whether knowingly or not? And when I think too much about how some of them have no way of contacting me now, the guilt crashes over me like the sea at high tide. I have never been by the sea but I have this innate desire to be washed away in its blue waters, to be born anew. For so long I have dreamed of going off to a different continent, where nobody can reach me. I suppose this constant urge to reinvent and runaway stems from a deep and persistent unsatisfaction with my very being. 

For months, long and agonising months, my hands have been bound, bound by the fear that I was not good enough to be a writer. Writing in the dark of my room when everyone is asleep is my stilted, probably futile way of coping with this. Why do I have this urgent, often debilitating urge to explain everything that is wrong with me, as if it is a justification of why everything I produce is not perfect. Why do I feel the need to strive for perfection always? Even when it is detrimental to my health? Is it my belief that I do not deserve to exist if I am anything other than perfect? Or is it simply one of the woes of being a teenage girl in the world? I suppose I will never know. 

Why is it that I despise everything I create? Be it words on a page or a paper craft, the mere sight of any creation of mine is enough to elicit an embarrassed reaction from me. 

I wish I did not have these thoughts waiting for me when I close my eyes, swimming in the waters of my mind like bloodthirsty sharks waiting to devour their meal. Why can’t I just be normal? Is it too much to ask for to not agonisingly worry about whether I am breathing right when I am outside? Is it too much, oh mysterious figure in the sky? I try to talk to you but when I look up, the sky is empty. There is no one who can help me. If I even were willing to accept help. If the mere prospect of it did not crush me with guilt like a rock bludgeoning me to death.

I am tired. I cannot think of the last time I felt truly rested, and I fear that my chronic inability to relax might be the cause why. Anytime I find some new possible problem within my mind, or something wrong with my body, why is my first thought that I must be faking it? For whose attention exactly? The cruel audience in my head that boos at every breath I take and throws the mental equivalent of rotten vegetables at me whenever I so much as open my mouth to speak?

I am scared for my future. Everyone is, I suppose. But I am terribly, terribly so. In a way that I am no longer able to think of anything else but my glaring academic failures. Plath’s fig tree analogy haunts me and I am torn between a path that I do not particularly like that guarantees me financial security, and another that I truly love, but is a potential gamble on my future. Won’t the quality of my art deteriorate if producing it is my primary source of income? Perhaps it will, perhaps it will not and the uncertainty that dwells in the gap between ‘will’ and ‘will not’ terrifies me to my very core. And the worst part is that I am not even certain if I have two figs to choose from. If there is only one choice, could you really call that a choice? 

I suppose all I can do for now is wait. And the wait is the true agony in life. I will drive myself mad with the possibility of failure and I will do it gladly. Or maybe I will drown myself in other endeavours so I cannot let even a singular thought form. I really think a lobotomy would do me quite good, since my father and mother do not seem to believe in the science of antidepressants. And yet when I tell them that the pseudo branch of medicine invented by a German fellow a couple hundred years ago that they follow religiously is not something I agree with, their reaction can best be described as a tantrum. 

I jest, but I am certain that I will be plagued by the guilt of making a mild joke at my parents’ expense because I am a freak of nature, I am a dainty little flower, I am but a teenage girl and I was not made to be a functioning human person, I rather fancy the feline life over this one. Ah maybe, in another universe my wish has come true. 

I long for something otherworldly and mystical, something beyond the shackles of mundanity that this human existence has bound me in. Something that I will always yearn for as long as I am alive in this miserable human body. I suppose the closest thing to that is pursuing a career as a connoisseur of the arts. Or hallucinogens.

I worry that my anxious disposition, and my sullen dislike of all the art I create will deter me from having a successful career in the arts. Memories of people I have loved haunt me in my dreams and I turn them into mediocre art. I lament about missing certain people in my life as if I do not get crippling embarrassment at the thought of reconnecting with them. Though, at the heart of it all is the extreme urge to justify my existence, to anybody willing to listen. Is this not what the gods and goddesses felt, begging to be believed, aching to be heard before they finally gave up on us? 

The truly comical thing is a person who loathes themselves with a burning passion likening their experiences to those of deities. I suppose I am but a contradiction. 

By Kriti Arora