A Thing to Strive For

I am sick with anxiety and striving — that outwardly manifests itself as over-reaching. A form of compensation that is trying to hide, to overcome, to make up for what I feel is lacking within myself.

What others see as accomplishment, I see as a disease.

To merely exist feels like a waste of time, and therefore is associated with feelings of guilt. But what am I feeling guilty about, really? What do I feel is being “wasted”?

People don’t understand this sickness. Of never being good enough. Where the standards of others matter naught relative to the ideal in your head, the Thing To Strive For. Yet this Thing lacks an operational definition and is therefore elusive and incomprehensible. There is the reality of what is there, and then there is what should be in its place. But how do you get an ought from an is?

There is no contentment in this House. I walk through empty corridors, listless and agitated. No sooner do I arrive at a place than I feel the need to be somewhere else. Always clamouring for more time and not having the slightest clue what to do with it. The waveforms making up (1) my body and (2) the Being that is me, are out of sync. I feel like I am always trailing slightly behind, dissonant and unsettled — just never quite there.