Solitary Confinement

This is much more than mere frustration. Here I stand, walled in by something far more difficult to negotiate than a mere impasse. Even though I feel inside me the freedom of casting off the shackles of misinformation and falsehood that once kept me caged, I cannot get past these walls. I'm as free as a bird.. in a bigger cage. Some room to fly, food and water available, but my wings keep clipping those damn walls. Have I merely exchanged one cage for another?

I never doubt how much better it is to be out of the prison I used to be stuck in. Awareness is everything. I went from asleep to waking to fully 'woke' in the space of a couple of decades. Now there is an overwhelming sense of urgency underpinning my every conscious thought. I'm trying to have patience but it's so hard to know when waiting is right, and when to push buttons and pull levers, because if I push and pull at the wrong time I upset the apple cart and it's back to square one. The seething vexation can be seen in white knuckles and gritted teeth..

I hear the word 'overthinking' a lot these days and right now it really annoys me. I'm led to think, how dare anyone say I'm overthinking? How very unthoughtful. There's no virtue and nothing to be gained by thinking any less. I think therefore I am, and I'm trying real hard to put the best and most positive thoughts into action. You know what, fuck you if you think that I think too much. You think too little. You place too little value on thought, then judge that because I don't follow suit that I'm somehow doing myself a disservice. How unimaginative. Those walls I speak of are one thing, but at least I didn't build them myself.

I'm sorry. I got a bit cross. Please forgive me. It's these walls, you see. I didn't build them, but they seem so big and tall and impenetrable. I've tried flying up to see if they can be escaped that way, when on the highest of highs. Wouldn't you just know it, there's chicken wire made out of platinum over the top. From a distance it looks like you can be free, but as you get closer you realise you're just peering through the little gaps in between the wire mesh. There's no way to break through, and it's soul-destroying to glimpse the wonders beyond the walls and know you are that close but cannot actually get out. I tend not to want to fly up there so much any more. It's depressing.

The walls are made from the toughest material that you could hope to try to break through; enslavement to money through debt, disenfranchisement, lack of opportunities, unresolved trauma, bad memories, disappointment and basic human entropy. Even as that sentence flows from my brain I am struck by how selfish it sounds, and how self-absorbed I am to be saying it. For a moment it seems like I'm just on a big downer, but the thing is, the walls are there regardless of how positive I'm feeling, thinking and acting. They're an ever-present, unmoving feature. They are inescapable.

These damn walls. Feels like I'm chipping away with a blunt chisel that could break at any moment. Every time I stretch my wings and think about flying for a bit I'm a little more aware that my bones aren't so elastic any more, my feathers a little more tatty, and it is taking that much more effort to fly. I'm really tired. I shouldn't be so tired. I'm not old yet. It's these walls you see, they're sapping my will to go on, ever so gradually. I still believe in escaping, oh how I believe. I have just enough space to breathe for now but there will come a day when I will have bounced off the walls one too many times. The fear is rising.

It all comes down to one thing, one thought which holds me together when I'm slumped on the ground licking my wounds. It is such a short word, a simple thought perhaps, yet infinitely powerful. It is made of dreams and wishes, dragged out of the sum total of a few decades of ups and downs and highs and lows. Sometimes it feels like the last string on the fraying rope of my sanity, sometimes it fills every conscious thought with waves of ecstasy before settling back down, but it is always present. It sustains me in spite of myself. It is why I can never, ever give up. It is why I'm still alive, it is how I will finally escape these retched walls. It is salvation..

It is hope.

Copyright ©2018 Richard C. Greenlow. All rights reserved.