A Long Way Back

"I can see it now."

I couldn't believe it. All my life I had been living a lie. I didn't want to believe the fact that all this time, all these years, I refused to understand it, I refused to process the words of my parents, the words of everyone around me. Yet, I still felt somewhat right; somewhat sure that I wasn't completely wrong after all. My imagination had tricked me. I was mad at myself. Mad at the fact that I was so ignorant and arrogant. Too lost in my own thoughts and too busy to distinguish the real from the fake. Why didn't I listen once? The one time when everyone told me the same thing.

Sighing, I glanced around myself. It was such a prepossessing place, yet a strange darkness was still visible to my upset eyes. This darkness followed me everywhere, it was attached to me as if it was a magnet. I spent years trying to get over it, trying to get away from it, yet it always found a way to find me again, no matter what I did, where I went and who I was with. I didn't even know it was a negative thing until recently. For a long time, I just saw it as a discomfort which I could ignore or forget about - even though eventually, it would always return - and just keep going forward without paying attention to it. It was only recently that I found out how much it could affect me, yet I didn't know how. I had no idea that I everyone around me was giving clues about that it would eventually impact all my life. Everything around me, everyone and everywhere I went would be damaged because of my ignorance. My perception of life depended on it heavily, but I was too young to realize it.

I paced around, trying to understand all that I chose to ignore in my past. I always tried to hide from my mistakes and my pains, my whole life. I always ran away from everything that brought me gloominess. Trying to avoid every negative feeling, I destroyed myself, I destroyed my perception of life. I suppressed all my emotions and avoided to feel them, with the goal of not having to suffer. This brought more problems than the ones I solved, leaving me heavily unbalanced. I didn't know how to solved these difficulties. I didn't know how to feel. I didn't know how to experience emotions. Something so basic yet so complicated. All for the sake of not suffering, even if it was only for a little while. I hated feeling unhappy, so I decided to simply not feel at all.

"Aren't you upset about this?" "Why don't you give me a minute grin?" "I thought you cared!" "How come you've never cried?"

All words that followed me since my early days. All things that I've heard thousands of times, yet I chose to just ignore them all instead of analyzing why I was being told these phrases over and over again.

Not only I refused to validate my own emotions, I never tried to express them in any way. I didn't know how to. Every time I had tried to do so, I failed horribly. Failure was another thing I strongly disliked, and I tried to avoid this feeling as well. I always had a serious expression stuck to my face, and I didn't dare to smirk or expose any visible emotion on my face. I was too afraid to do it wrong, so I never even tried it.

My whole life, I had searched for happiness. I sought it in objects and places. I sought it in my imagination. I cared very little for the outside world, and always considered my own small world a better place than the one I actually lived in. I looked for friends, always trying to find the right person. Little I knew that there wasn't a right person. There wasn't a perfect person, someone who never made mistakes and always did the things the way I would. That person only existed inside my head, in my thoughts. That's why I spent nights thinking about situations and conversations with people, without even talking to them. I thought that if I visualized it enough, I would someday find someone like the characters that participated in my dreams and thoughts. That day never came, even if I waited for it for years. I had waited for happiness for so long that I forgot what it felt like.

Not long after I turned eighteen years old, I decided to move to a place far away. Away from all the people and things that had surrounded me for long. I wanted to run away from all my problems and worries. I was sure that living in a good place would solve them. The place that I had dreamt about for so long, for so much time. I spent days and days, trying to think of how my life would significantly change if I lived there. I didn't know that all of this would be nothing more than another one of the tricks my imagination pulled on me.

I hadn't spent much time there when that miserable feeling of emptiness had reached me once again. All my problems started to reappear and follow me everywhere I went. The darkness that had pursued me for so long had caught me once again. There were so many things that all brought me to understanding why this darkness followed me everywhere I didn't even know which ones were actually the responsible ones. I disliked thinking for this long that I was so right, I ended up being wrong. That's when I finally understood the wise words of a man I had talked to long ago. I was never interested in knowing the meaning behind them, yet those words followed me like my problems did, never leaving me alone. I thought about them often, yet never understood them until that moment.

"Happiness comes to the price of pain. Life would be illusory if suffering didn't exist, why, it makes us really enjoy happiness when it finally comes."