#and it’s exacerbating all the other issues i’ve been pushing aside for my whole life

[starshapedsupernova]

oversharing in the tags pls scroll unless you’re nosy <33

[mishallaneously]

only semi-autobiographical

I think the last time I saw the floor of my room was three years ago. I don’t miss it.

I used to be embarrassed whenever anyone would come in my room.

“So sorry,” I’d apologize profusely before pushing the door open. It was genuine, cross my heart.

“It’s no big deal,” they’d assure me, their lips pursed as they tried not to step on any dirty underwear.

“I’ve seen worse,” they lied easily.

Back then I drank up their reassurances. Their consolations quenched my insecurity while I kicked clothes and papers aside, clearing them a path into the inner sanctum of squalor.

I don’t bother apologizing, anymore.

One time someone told me that how you keep your room reflects your inner state. That made me upset at the time. I’d always been messy. Which was probably a product of laziness. Which was probably exacerbated by privilege. But just because I never figured out how to put my clothes away didn’t mean I had a screw loose. Just because there were no clear exits to my room (fire hazard) didn’t mean the inner workings of my mind were an M.C. Escher painting. Psychoanalyze that, bitch.

Then I got Sad. You know, with an uppercase ‘S’ so you know it’s serious. Not like, “the next person who enters this room will trip over my lunch from last week AND my dead body” kind of Sad. But a Sad where you feel like your whole body might be made out of tears and dust which seems paradoxical but at that stage of Sad you don’t really care about your analogies making sense. I suppose you could psychoanalyze that.

During that time I sat on my bed like a throne, the duvet gathered around me like glorious robes, and watched my kingdom deteriorate even further. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe if I thought hard enough it would fix itself. Thinking never did get me very far, come to think of it. What was I thinking? No, no, that was the whole issue. The thinking.

The Over-Thinking as they call it. The Dwelling. The ruminating. I did that bit in my room but it usually wasn’t about my room. That whole thing was a byproduct. Maybe of buying too many products. But really it was all about the —

Bygones, why couldn’t I let them be?

So I sat in the destitution of my own making thinking, constantly thinking, endlessly pondering what it was that was so gosh darn wrong. With me? Perhaps. I had a few answers: I was lazy! I was scared. I was Unmotivated. I never learned to cope. I had it easy all my life and the second it got hard I wanted out, put me on the bench, coach.

You know, in soccer the other dads on the team used to pat me on the back at half-time. “I like how you lean into plays,” they’d say. “You’re not afraid of a tackle.”

Ruthless, they’d called me.

The steamroller, it said on a placard one of my coaches gave me.

Sports were easy. There was no time to think in sports. You saw a ball, you just ran. Maybe life is really that simple but I’m now one of the slower kids, one of the ones afraid of getting hit.

What is I was afraid life would hit me with? If I had to guess — and I definitely don’t have to which is a whole other thing I’ve discovered recently— it’s rejection.

If I do something, put myself out there, someone’s bound to say no. They’ll say quit it kid, you’re no good, you’ve got no talent. That was me butchering a quote from Marty McFly in Back to the Future. But really, Marty was right. What if they told me that?

What if they even said they loved me? Told me I was their whole world, they’d never felt that way about another person. That every hope I’d had about myself inside was reflected back at me in their eyes. What if someone told me that to them I hung the stars? And then what if they left.

What then?

Well, I guess I’d be here in my amassed mass of material belongings. Waiting in the ether. Waiting for someone to validate the qualities I thought I had but were consumed by cowardice long ago. If I don’t move maybe life won’t find me. If I don’t lift a finger maybe I’ll be okay.

Look upon ye works, I mutter to the now visible layer of dust coating my floor, and tremble.