Over Myself

Do you know what being like me feels like sometimes?

Imagine every movie you’ve ever seen where the antagonist, the Bad Guy, who has been exploiting the evil spirits to forward his nefarious agenda, is slowly being consumed by the same evil spirits who were just given permission by the devil to abandon the nefarious agenda (it was stupid and doomed to fail, anyway). Think of that antagonist maybe hanging on the edge of something, looking upward toward the protagonist, eyes wide, begging, “No, don’t let them take me.” Meanwhile, the evil spirits undulate below, arm-like appendages reaching toward our Bad Guy, overwhelming him, towing him down, down, down.

I am the Bad Guy and those evil spirits are the familiar, painful narratives I tell myself: you are not enough, you are unlovable, you're a failure, you're a burden, why the fuck are you feeling sorry for yourself suck it up other people have it worse than you get back to work, you weak piece of shit.

Except there’s no Bad Guy or Good Guy, there’s just me. The Guy. Rather, the Girl, neither good nor bad, struggling to not be consumed by those painful narratives. There is no nefarious agenda, just the pursuit, like everyone else, of not sucking. Of happiness.

For that matter, there’s no devil even. Just a scared little girl— again, ME— using the monsters of her childhood to protect her from the monsters of her adulthood.

That’s what it sometimes feels like to be me in every eternal moment.

And I'm so fucking over myself.