How It Is

I know how it is. I really do. Trust me.
I know that a lot of the time life makes no sense, and the people you love and the people you trust let you down. Over and over. It hurts, and it’s confusing, and it seems to have no rhyme or reason, and maybe it doesn’t. You think maybe you deserve it, or maybe you can fix it, or that maybe you are keeping the world spinning round by sheer force of will. I also know that when it happens, or even sometimes when life is just going along fine, that you can feel like you’re about to be overwhelmed and lose it all. Like there’s only a thin line between an anxiety attack or even a complete mental breakdown. It’s like that collapse is just there waiting for you, sitting over there in the corner, and you have to go about your life so carefully, ensuring that you don’t accidently make eye contact with it. Because if you do, and you lock eyes with all the things you fear, all the worries your mind has been whispering to you all these years, it will all fall apart. This whole house of cards you have been propping up all these years, stitched back together time and time again. You are always one wayward glance away from being knocked off the tightrope.
Thing is, there is no tightrope. You’re firmly on the ground. The tightrope is in your mind, the feeling that you are holding the world together is an illusion, created in your subconscious so you have some feeling of control over things that cannot be controlled. Almost none of the worry and effort you put into the puppeteering and the balancing act matters in the least. In the end people will do what they want, and time and gravity will take care of the rest. I realize all of this and I play the same game you do, wasting my energy, my time, my love, my own sanity to try to keep walking the rope and avoiding the fall. Anything, so I don’t have to look it in the eye and have it tear me and my whole world apart. We are safe, if we only allow ourselves to accept that fact, but we can’t. To accept it would mean we would have to look it in the eye, and that is too much to ask. We have nothing to fear but fear, yet we are all terrified.
I know how it is. I really do.