What do you do when you are stuck in reverse?

You know that feeling when you can sense your life falling apart but you think the best course of action is to pretend it isn’t? You can see that you’re becoming a shell of the person you once worked so hard to become but you keep telling yourself that everything is okay. You feel the pain and the anger festering inside of you but you convince yourself that if you pretend it is not there then it will go away. You keep acting as if everything is okay until one today, you realize that you neglected to see the signs for they were; a warning.

Why would you, anyway? What is the point in working so hard to become the person you want to be when every few months you find yourself falling apart again? What is a point in all the self-help when ever-so often you need to take yet another existential journey to put your broken pieces back together again? What is the point in putting yourself back together over and over again when eventually you will just fall apart in the end, like you always do?  It’s like, you work so hard to build yourself up until you get to a point where you are finally happy only to turn around and one day to see that everything you worked so hard for is just reversed. Have you ever felt the exhaustion, the loneliness and the fear of knowing that you built it all up just to destroy it again? As if your journeys have always been a sandcastle on the shore, waiting for the inevitability of the waves to set in.

I have always had this need to control every aspect of my life even if I have no idea where I am going. I like certainty, I like plans and I am not one for surprises. Yet, I always find myself plagued with that which bothers me the most; Uncertainty. I feel like I have never had control over my life and every struggle, every hardship has been in vain because no matter how hard I try, I have no power over what happens. And that, that to me is the scariest thing of all. There is this fear that comes with realizing that all the efforts to become the coveted “better person” were useless because in the end maybe it was all just a show, rigged for some cruel purpose.  

That is when the defeat comes. There comes this time when you stop believing in yourself and surrender all your faith thinking what point is there in fighting battle after battle when you will always come back to this crossroad. There comes a time when you give up on trying to fix yourself and wait for your mind to set itself right but it never does, does it?

Today, I realized that nothing works itself out and giving up only adds fuel to the fire. Especially when you are giving up on yourself. That is the moment when you begin unraveling from the inside and no one can see how shattered you are except for you. There is no savior that will come and there is no remedy you can go out looking for. When you give up on yourself, there is this emptiness that you can’t shake off. It starts with little things like losing interest in friendships that once meant the world to you or throwing yourself into work thinking it will help keep your mind busy and the pain away. You know what happens next? You become that person you have spent so long warning other people about, that “toxic” person that destroys everything in their path. That one person that is always filled with bouts of negativity that just radiates off of them and knocks you out. There comes that time when not being able to figure out your life becomes the least of your problems because your lack of action starts hurting everyone around you. That is the point where “now or never” comes in. You either step up and you start fighting back against yourself for everything you gave up or you sit there and you let your life pan out the way it is until one day you are left with nothing.

One way or another, there are always ultimatums in life. There is always a fork in the road and the only way to ever move on is to make a choice. You either choose or you go back to everything that you tried moving on from. You either make a difficult decision or you let yourself be stuck in reverse.

In the end, it’s your move; either keep trying even if it’s temporary or give up and lose any chances you ever had at feeling complete.