It is amazingly excruciating to have a mental disease.  My life is lived not for me, but for the antics of my brain.  There are days that I am happy, sad, angry, tense, nervous, and sometimes plain lost.  None of it is truly justifiable because none of my emotions are dictated by fact.  The world that I live each and every day is determined solely on the chemical balance in my brain; and there is simply no reasoning, no prediction, no reality included.

It is tiring to feel emotions; to continually find myself moving from one dimension to the next.  There is a sadness in knowing even in my happiness I am destined for something much different tomorrow.  There is a price that you pay for the good, the bright, the soulful beauty; and there is a danger in acknowledging the rest.  There is no single moment of relaxation or ease, as the sheer climb to get to that ease is not worth the destruction to your soul. There is no break, no moment of silence or simple joy.  There is instead a constant barrage of push and pull, until the word real becomes dirty.

There is no true real, and no real truth.  That which you believe with your whole soul turns out to be nothing more than the daily bread the world gave you.  That which you could have sworn was true is nothing more than a symptom of a lesser dream.  The world turns and flashes colored lights at you until the only rest you can feel is the shutting down of your whole soul.  The turning off of everything until you are nothing but a limp corpse barely breathing, and hoping for eternal sleep.

There are days when the sound of a child’s laughter is distant and far away.  While it creates in me a beautiful light. But that light is so quickly dimmed by the pain of loneliness as to not even be existent.  And the sound of my child’s laughter is the only true and pure expression of joy that I know.  It is the only sure thing in my life.  It is the only reason for me to breathe another breath, and the only reason for me to rest to get stronger.

Strength is an illusion as much as this life can be.  Illusions abound in the world as easily as stories, myths and those fairy tales someone gives us to dream.  Illusions risk nothing and find their home in the mundane madness that is life.  They comfort, they destroy and they take the place of our reality when we need it most.

It comforts me, those illusions that I embrace.  The illusion that tomorrow will be different; the illusion that I won’t again seek numbness in the place of pain.  The illusion that what comes next will be worth the loneliness that I feel in a crowded room, and the illusion that the fear I feel is nothing but a climb without the nets.  There are illusions I elate in, there are illusions I despair in; but they are not real and therefore not the pain of listening to a child’s laughter far away from my own existence.  The existence I feel not in life, but in the darkness of the truth.

For truth is as dark as the night without the moon. Truth gives nothing to us but the understanding that the fallibilty we did not know in our innocence is instead directly shining on our everyday.  The darkness that is as much apart of my existence as the breath that I am forced to surrender is nothing easily missed.  It is there, in the forefront, welcoming me as only Cerberus himself can greet the citizens of hell.

I cannot find blame; the truth of my darkness is my own responsibility.  I often like to believe that there is a God, a righteous being that will comfort me when I need it most.  I need to believe that his truth, that his arms, that his very presence gives me the strength to find a way through my madness.  There are days when the slippery slope of sanity is so drenched in my tears that I worry about the most innocent around me.  There are days when the falling spheres of my very being descend into the madness of perpetual darkness and I wonder about the freedom just beyond my reach.

The line between sanity and insanity is held together by my own willingness to fight.  There are nights when I must conserve all my strength to fight the demons, and there are days when the sun itself can not light my way.  I fight demons, I fight battles, and I fight my own insecurities. I feel unworthy, I feel unable, and I feel defeated.  The fight for one more day seems pointless and extreme.

I wish there was a point to my fighting. I wish there was a reason that I should fight the madness that is waiting so seductively for me.  I imagine my world in madness and find there is freedom in the release of the monsters that hold me so tight.  Maybe if I exhale one more time the fight will take me; maybe if I rest for one more moment I won’t have to fight again.  The fear, the tiredness, the reality of a disease that I literally suffer will be raised to an echelon that is worthy of my notice.  I will become that which is right beyond my conscience, and find freedom in a journey unparalleled to life.

I wait daily for the next fight, the next battle that will test all that I am, and all that they ask me to be.  For as many voices are asking me to finally rest, there are as many asking me to fight one more day, one more battle and for one more life.  There are voices whispering in the voices of sirens to simply allow the madness to consume me, and there are small, silent voices asking me to be the blood and tears of my triumph.  I want to live in the middle, the sacred normality that finds itself in everyday life.

I don’t want the knowledge that the darkness is all-consuming. I don’t want the pain of reality or the seduction of madness. I don’t know want to know what the world never sees, and I don’t want to hear the choirs of those who have fallen before me.  I want to live in the normalcy; I want to exist in the mundane.  I want to find the strength not to live happiness, but to live in a world that is as gray as God intended.  I want the unbelievable ordinary existence given to the creatures most worthy.  I want the natural, the typical, the standard that is given to those who can not see, can not hear, and can not feel the life that exists just beyond.

There is a life beyond our own minds, our own conscience.  There is an existence that is only felt in the darkness of misery and the fight for freedom.  There is a world that is so different as to be terrifying; there is a world that is so painful as to be unreal.  There is a darkness so complete, that the simple act of breathing becomes more than a chore, it becomes a question of necessity.  I live there.  I will die there.  And there is no true rest or true fight that will ever let me escape it.