Mozart

Photo by Tetiana SHYSHKINA on Unsplash

Trust me to come up with the most absurd article titles. Today is no less.

See, the topic today is to deliberately hide what I am talking about. The accurate and sensible title would be:-

“If my life right now was a playlist”

But, as we all know, it has been said that if you want to hide anything from humans, hide it in the middle of a book. This is my attempt at hiding a desperate present reality in the “middle of a book”. In the middle of a book on the internet. A perpetual book.

To be honest, I have thought about this over and over and over again, Risper, do you really need to publish this? Is this for a public platform or for God’s ears?

Well, here I am, an hour to midnight, a few days to my 26th birthday, sitting on my bed due to restlessness, a thousand ideas and thoughts racing in my mind; wishing I could just write forever; wishing I knew what’s going to happen each day of my remaining life until death; desperate to control everything, with my life presently feeling very out of control and uncertain.

If I were to make a playlist describing my life right now, here it is. A playlist that is both a prayer and benediction(whatever that means, it just sounds too good to leave out); A playlist that is both a cry for help and a reality check. No one is coming. No one is coming to save me. No one can save me. No one can save us. At least not until we can first look at ourselves with honesty and admit what we can see.

Disclaimer:

Kindly note that the list below does not indicate that I am self-harming, and neither am I considering it.

That said, here goes nothing:

1. Misfit. That I know I am.
2. Luckily for me. I can create a world where I fit. Hehe, truly speaking, I was so tempted to joke like Kanye, that Luckily for me I see ghosts. Thank God I don’t. I have enough demons to deal with without adding ghosts and things into the mix.
3. Mentally unstable. What else is new?
4. Afraid. Afraid of the future
5. TMI. This is probably too much information.
6. Addicted. Addicted to chaos.
7. Living in my worst fear. My greatest fear has always been that I will fail, that I will fail so publicly, and then get humiliated. Well, I have been failing a lot lately, and it’s not even things I should be failing at.
8. Have I become my father? Since I can remember, my father has been cyclical. He is good, focused, and optimistic. The next minute he is uncontrollably drunk, verbally and physically abusive, and dissociated from reality. Then the next day, he is ashamed, regretful, and in denial; then h needs to drink some more to hide or numb.
9. Well, I don’t drink.
10. I self-sabotage
11. Way too much
12. I worry
13. Could I be irredeemable?
14. Not feeling very hopeful right now
15. Feelings. I feel way too many feelings. Exposed, unworthy, ashamed, afraid, humiliated, imposter, angry, stuck, confused, hopeless, failure, too inconsistent, despair, conflicted…
16. Four in one. At the very least, I am aware that I have a minimum of four conflicting self-concepts all fighting to be on the surface. My ideal self. My core, uninterrupted original self. My wounded inner child. The reality of who I am now, as shaped by choices passive and active. And so many more.
17. My evil twin. I once listened to a Sermon by Bishop Jakes that everyone has a twin inside them. Lately, my evil twin has been winning a lot.
18. Could I be bipolar?
19. I like being alone
20. I hate Maths. (Actually not really, once you get it, it’s the sweetest thing)
21. Calculus. Human relationships are like Maths to me, calculus in particular, it’s the one thing I could never figure out in school.
22. Jump in front of a bus. Yes, I have entertained this thought quite a number of times. It just feels like it would solve a lot
23. Death is a luxury. I cannot afford this luxury. I am not in denial of how often I have considered it lately; I just can’t die because it makes no sense. What if I die only to find out I continue being alive and miserable, only eternally and without a body?
24. Thank God for family. My family, my brother, my sister, and my mom. Thinking about them is what has kept me away from suicide these many years.
25. Haha, who am I kidding? I have too much shame to die by suicide. I worry too much about what people will think.
26. Imagine the shame. What would people say about me dying by suicide? Shame is indeed the master emotion, perhaps too powerful, perhaps even more powerful than death.
27. The pride. The sheer arrogance to think that I am alive because I decided to live.
28. Except for God. Unless the Lord builds a house, those that attempt building do so in vain. I am only alive because God loves me, and is so far from done with me. If it were by Might, I would have died a long time ago. After all, for whatever reason, I had never been able to envision life beyond 23.
29. Get your shit together girl.
30. At least you’re afraid. At the very least, it indicates that you haven’t completely given up on yourself. It indicates a sense of hope in yourself. It indicates there is an awareness in you that your current state is not all there ever will be to you. Your current state of feeling irredeemable and exposed is not all there is to you.
31. No one reads this. Honestly, I just needed to write this. It is my reality. I have thought long and hard about whether I needed to publish this. I have come to the conclusion that this is who I am. I overshare. This is where I feel heard. It’s not even because anyone will read it, I just feel like I have finally screamed loud enough once I write about something. Screaming is good for me. I think more clearly once I scream.
32. Bonus. A bonus point is that honestly, I am just not that logical. I do not think anyone else in the world would publish this. I don’t really care though. I am at a point where I feel I have lost all the “dignity” I would ever try to protect. I have tormented myself enough with shame in secret. Honestly speaking, from where I stand, I have nothing to lose.
33. Cracks in my Façade. I have lived my whole life trying to convey an image of someone who is perfect:- Put together, focused, driven, goal-oriented, determined, visionary, hardworking, sure of myself, responsible… I have desperately wanted to be so amazing that by default people call me things like, “world changer, a trailblazer, a ground shaker, a mover, a leader in her generation…” And so much more. I have wanted to effortlessly come across as these things. I have yearned for the praise of men. All while trying to portray me as just a humble girl going about her ordinary life.
34. Oh, the irony. There is no humility in my oh-so-humble desires.
35. I’m just a perfectionist and not the good kind. I am more focused on looking like I have made it. I haven’t. I have carefully curated this image of who I want to appear like in the world, and the more I have pursued the appearance of it, the less I have been it.
36. Reality check. In truth, I am not anything I have tried to be. I haven’t made it. I do not feel confident that I have what it takes to get out of this cyclical rut I have been in. I over-explain myself to solve any inconsistencies. I try to have answers for everything so that it doesn’t look like I didn’t do my job. I have over-exaggerated good things just to make them look even better. I have lied to avoid conflict. I am a people pleaser, I desperately want to be accepted. I avoid people, perhaps so that they only interact with me when I am at “my best”. I am in some international spaces to hopefully finally feel worthy and enough because in truth, 75% of the time I feel inadequate. A part of me has this sense of grandiosity, that I feel I need to protect, by whatever means. I am low-key threatened by everyone around me- friends, foes, and strangers. I compare myself too much against others, the confidence I have is just because I was born that way. Otherwise, in the present, I feel like everyone I have ever “inspired” or despised has succeeded and surpassed me. And that makes me feel a lot of shame. I feel humiliated internally, all by myself. I have tried to impress people, seniors, peers, and juniors, all while keeping a safe distance so that they do not see the imposter that I am.
37. In short, I got issues. Plenty.
38. Facts,
39. I may change the world still, it’ll just not be the acted version of me that will do it.
40. Reality Check II, I will not attempt to clean this up by concluding with some hopeful, positive, attempt at inspiring anyone. This is just the list as is right now;- if I were Mozart and made a playlist to describe my life in the present.
41. In conclusion,
42. It’s not over yet, I know that. Logically. I just need to catch up to that in belief and practice.

I’ll attempt to close this “playlist” here, for now. There is so much more I could write.

I have tried to be extraordinary. But I am not. I am just a normal, messed-up, extraordinarily ordinary ’97 gen-z babe with great potential and a heap of many limiting beliefs and habits that I must overcome if I am to make anything of myself.

What’s your reality? If you composed a playlist of three pieces describing your life right now, what would it be?

Best,

Your fav-TMI-gen-z-millennial?-misfit,

Risper.