Under pressure.

Fuck expectations.

This has been my mentality for the past few weeks. Now that holidays are upon us lowly humanities students and the minimal levels of stress and agitation have been alleviated for a brief period of time, I finally realise that all this needless anxiety and stress ties simply into expectation. Not necessarily external that is, but more my personal expectations about how I want to live my life, beside how I am living my life. In retrospect, I am not how I would like to be.

In making this conscious realisation, one would assume that I would be able to change and become who I want to be. I should be able to change how and why I act. I should be able to rationally do what I want to do.

This is not the case.

“I feel this great, great pressure coming down on me. It's constantly coming down on me. It's crushing me”

Say hello to the weight of personal expectation and the cage that is the human condition. You see, gentle reader, I feel as though I am at a loss to explain myself to you. Language fails to capture my turmoil. One may attribute it to that special time when a boy becomes a man. I do not. It’s as if I impose certain ideals upon myself in hopes that one day I will finally accept them and become who I want to be. I will become whole in a sense.

I miss the feeling on ignorance. I miss just going on those fantastic night picnics, getting smashed and doing cartwheels across ovals and honestly not caring about what my life becomes or what people think about me. When I had these friends I didn’t feel like I had to work to impress. I’m afraid of the MyKill Doomwater you all have inside your minds. I’m afraid of the representations of myself that you all have. To explain I’ll try and share my view of identity all you lovely readers. Here it is:


1) You all have an idea of me inside your minds at this present moment, one that is how you picture me.
2) This is the guide by which you judge me and evaluate me.
3) This is subconscious.
4) This is a true representation of me, it is as real as my physical manifestation because it is how you perceive me and it is true to you.
5) I am unable to know what this representation of me is – whether it is good or bad, whether you hate me or love me, whether you find my mannerisms frustrating or acceptable.
6) At the same time I have a representation of myself in my head.
7) This is the picture of how I would like to act and who I would life to be.
8) This is a true representation.
9) The only representation I can actively change is my own – the one in my own head.

This thought keeps me awake at night and has culminated in an odd shaking in my right hand that doesn’t seem to stop much anymore. In essence, I can see how I want to act and how I want people to perceive me, yet I cannot help the face that this representation – while being true to me – is not a reality for you. I cannot control how you see me.

One may pose the hypothetical that my actions define who I am, and that these actions give people the basis to which they then create their perceptions of me. This is a fallacy. While actions do provide the necessary basis for public perceptions of myself, they can not effectively translate the unintelligible purity that is my own consciousness. Actions are physical. Identity is not so tangible. While I can choose to act a certain way, odds are that my own human nature will decide to internally contradict this. Years of social conditioning undo personal belief in the way we designate and segregate today. By this I mean that, instinctively, I am afraid when an unknown Muslim man walks towards me in the street. Is this irrational? Yes. Does the thought that I am participating in such social stereotypical perception disgust me beyond belief? Yes. Yet since the global “War on Terror” began we have been subject to such levels of subliminalsocialnormsthatmakeusbelievetheamericandream
dandandandandiwanttoscreambutican’t//can’t//find//////my///voice//
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Remember how I said language fails to appropriately describe this turmoil. Let’s just simplify and say that I expect so much of myself. I expect myself to be likeable, funny, kind, nice, talented and simply able to live a good life. Yet, I don’t live up to my own mental image of how I want to be. And the part that keeps me awake at night and causes an uncontrollable twitch in my hand is the fact that if I don’t have a positive representation of myself, why would you have a positive representation of me? If all these representations are true, then the one I have of myself being a horrid human being and a not really worth knowing is true.

HOWEVER,

If people do still choose to converse and associate with me, I might be wrong. Happiness is subjective and peace is a state of mind I hope to one day partake in. I imagine it would be tasty, kind of like Hokey Pokey – i.e. the tastiest ice cream in existence. But if hope was a food, I think it would be like a cinnamon scroll: a little subtler than Hokey Pokey, but still just as fulfilling.

Peace, love and hope for the future.