Sometimes I forget how it feels to be outside until I am there.

Suddenly the world is blurry, moving too fast, too many people’s gazes to avoid yet feel burrowing under your skin like maggots

Burrowing until your eyes glance, in the hopes of normal,

glance,

away,

too long!

There is a fine line between the endeavor to provide personhood, but not add to discomfort.

My settings burn so hot,

So cold,

No middle ground as hard as I try it feels so clumsy, like a toddler learning how to grip,

Bruisingly tight sometimes,

Falling open limply at others.

I want nothing more than to feel as if I am not an imposter,

An alien.

Everyone around me seems as if they are okay,

They do not struggle to control their vomiting when they are met with confrontation.

They do things, like get out of the car to pay for gas as if it’s not this looming threat of death.

I twitch,

My mouth smiles falsely,

I wonder if my eyes have blinked too much in the past few seconds.

I wonder if I look as fake to everyone else as I feel.

At home it falls away,

The existential, permeating dread.

Safe.

Warm.

But never for long, it isn’t mine to keep forever.

Soon I will know cold again, I will know the familiar grip of anxiety.

It is inevitable.

I think the cold always finds a way inside..

There is no true home, not a place in existence that my blood entitles me to,

My family,

My talents even.

The only comfort is found inside of a broken body that fails me often.

It is begrudging but I am trying to admit that I am strong,

That I am not failing if I am trying..

And I am trying. I have tried so damn hard.

These words are so disorganized,

but what part of me isn’t.

I have watched the world sprout around me from a barren wasteland.

My own growth stunted, I curled into a ball under a pile of leaves and watched them leave me behind. I was still so small, so scared. But outside circumstances leave no illusion of choice. Live or die.

If I were to lay down and let go, I would understand, yet everything that makes me up wanted to survive.

It’s like a parasite took over my brain,

A parasite that in turn gave everything a dismal hue.

Shadows filled in memories.

Limbs continue to masquerade, hinged on joints and pulled tight by veins.

Me, but not.

Me, except running on the singular notion that I *could* feel a feeling I hadn’t yet felt.

Looking back, I don’t know that I have ever felt it, even to this point.

And yet it is still my motivating factor.

The notion that my brain is not less than others.

Different, yes.

But that isn’t inherently less.

I have to be enough.

I have to step up where everyone else backed down, that is my duty to myself.

I was failed.

I am not a failure.

Not before my life is even over.

In the end, the unknown is scary.

And yet the unknown is the only constant. Change is constant.

We have to grow and shift as people, we were not meant to be held in glass boxes as delicate trinkets.

I am not a china doll.

This world will not break me.