Tiny Shards of my Fractured Reality

This is a very old post from my blog; so old that it was originally hosted on LiveJournal. The page has been preserved in case its content is of any interest, but formatting errors are likely and the page's original comments have been lost. Please go back to the homepage to see the current contents of this site.

“Forever has gone, today is infinity…
and yesterday’s dreams, today a faint memory…

forever has gone, today is infinity…
it’s time to move on, forever has gone…
Two eyes in the face of billions of voices,
I saw the flashing lights move further in the distance…

(the) Dream was not meant to be.
…And outside these walls I have created,
the sound of stars colliding echoes in the distance,

and dreams - they shatter…
Let it break into a thousand pieces, let the wind blow it all away
Dreams are fragile but our hearts grow stronger from the memories…“

— Lia - Disintegration

I’m sitting here, as I have been most of the afternoon, refreshing the LiveJournal friends page of a ficticious character in the hope that other ficticious characters will write interesting things. And this is something that really matters to me - I’ve chosen to spend my free time today being bored as a ficticious character rather than being productive as myself.

This is pretty symptomatic of my whole attitude to life recently. I have discovered myself to be totally lazy - I should have written a few e-mails to people at work at the beginning of October, and it’s now nearly reached December without me having written them. Likewise, I should have set about finding a new housemate back in October, or September even. But no, it’s nearly December and I’ve done nothing. And the start of December used to be a time of year I really looked forward to - advent calendars and Christmas decorations and all the rest. But now, it just seems like it’s nothing special.

I have a lot of Uni work to be doing, but somehow I just end up sitting here, quietly, with a blank mind. Listening to music isn’t enjoyable anymore, reading isn’t enjoyable anymore, cooking isn’t enjoyable anymore, the internet isn’t enjoyable anymore, games aren’t enjoyable anymore, anime is barely enjoyable anymore. Just about thhe only things that seem to be able to focus my mind on something other than blankness are my friends, or pointless immersion in self-psychoanalysis. In fact, “friends” may even be too broad a category. As time goes on, living here, I think I’m slowly drifting away from my friends back home…

It’s getting towards the point where I’m not even sure if I have a core personality or not. So much of my time is spent pretending to be someone else, with different emotions and a different personality and i

n some cases in a different world, that I might be losing my grip on the nebulous concept of “me”. I think Richard said it best over MSN this afternoon - I have no problem getting in-character, but I’ve yet to master the ability to get out-of-character again.

Then again, I’m not sure if it matters or not. I suppose it’s the eventual result of having the kind of philosophy that I have - the realisation that a desire for self-identity is meaningless. There’s an extent to which it doesn’t matter whether or not “Ian” exists, because there’s no real reason why Ian should be any more important than any of the other personalities that I have buzzing around my mind. Perhaps, after all, it means that the philosophy that I believed to be so useful was ultimately self-destructive. But if I give that up now - even if it was possible to, which I’m unsure of - I’d lose so much. The story which I hope will be a lasting memory of my life will suddenly become a mere unimportant dream, and I will lose so many of the fictional people I’ve grown to love - I’ll lose Malachai, I’ll lose Kotori, and most importantly of all I’ll lose Tsuki.

If I were to lose that much, I don’t know what I’d be left with. No dreams, and no emotions… Maybe I’d become hard-working, or reliable, but I’d have lost the most important thing of all - love. Love, both for other people and for my dreams

, has always caused pain and always will. But it’s something that can’t be given up, no matter what. It’s the one single important thing that makes life worth living.

So, in the end, even though it means I have days when I feel like this, I can’t give up the part of myself that loves and dreams. I have to take the bad times when they come, along with the good times. Just like everyone else, when I think about it. It’d be foolish for me to think that I could have a life where only good things exist.

I’m back where I started, and yet at the end of this little outpouring of my mind. I apologise to anyone who’s sat and read their way though all of this - in a way I don’t want people to read it, don’t want people to know… But I learnt once before - the hard way - the results of hiding emotions that are so powerful they dominate my mind. It feels good to have written something like this… Now I just have to hope that I can get away with having written it, and not have things change around me in unwelcome ways because of it…