They Took My Soul from Me

== January 10, 2017 ==
The voices have begun to shout at me. They are trying to make me stop, because they are not like me. “No, your writing is bad,” they say like vultures. “No one will like this. You are not a real person. You have to come with us and not write.”
But there are stories in my head that aren’t really stories. They are worms and they stop me from concentrating and if I write them (or type them) they vanish because they were never there. If I do not do this then they will continue to eat me until I no longer have a soul. I am a record player and I used to try and pretend it was not my destiny to vomit out words, but look where that got me. Now I do not have a soul.
I am not innocent. I tried to kill my mother when I was born. I scratched at her and did not evacuate her ailing body. She was suffocated by my form and its adamance. But she does not remember, or does not care to remember, because she is a kind woman. I do not know any other women, so she is the kindest woman I know.
The worms are going away silently, like flies rising in a single cloud from a mass of seaweed. Now they are flies, flies buzzing around within my head, and I am a carcass, and I am slowly rotting from the inside because my soul is marinating inside my corporeal form.
I used to pretend I stuttered. I wrote clearly when I was a child. But as of late, I have tended to do that. I forgot that I didn’t stutter or repeat the subjects of words. It is these foreign tongues which have tormented me like this, the ones that people gave me and that I learned, and the ones that I made for pleasure that now tear at my insides. They twisted my natural affinity for the written word until I thought that I was someone who I was not.
Now I am slowly beginning to let my heart out into the surroundings. I must be wary now. If I bring it back too quickly, I might get the bends. It could be whiplash or acid, but I call it “the bends” because of the factor of speed and the resulting imagery.
This is stupid. Once someone told me that it was not right to walk around and smile at everyone, and so I stopped, because everything I do is strange and frightening, and it’s better to do nothing.
No. That is what these voices said. Or it is not. I don’t remember.
They have been my foil ever since I was a young and stupid little boy who did not understand that not everyone could be friends. If it were not for their harsh words of discouragement, I would not have been so driven. But then the world showed me its many nuances, and I could no longer fool myself into thinking that anything was “evil”, and then the voices started to eat my soul.
Maybe I never had a soul and was one of Hell’s spawn, sent to torture the people of a small and innocuous town. Once I thought so. I thought that I was the Devil incarnate and could do nothing right, and everyone was very kind to me because they knew. Then, circa fourth grade, I became a narcissist and distracted myself from this conundrum at the very heart of my being.
Now I am not a narcissist and I don’t know how to become a narcissist. Steve Jobs was very mean and narcissistic. He said bad things and did not lose faith in himself even when he made stupid decisions like painting his delicate machinery. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t have faith in my decisions because I don’t know where my soul is.
I do whatever people tell me to now. I am like a hollow shell of a person that cannot function alone. But I always stay alone. But now I am not alone. These voices cannot control what was never theirs.
When I was narcissistic and snobby and full of myself, I made a story and it was accepted into an elite band of stories. I did that twice. It was great fun. And I have not written ever since. As such, my writing is horrible, pretentious and stunted. But at least it is mine.
They will come tomorrow and the next day and the next, and they will slowly replace the worms that have fallen until I will be afraid again. They will call me bad names where there are blank spaces, and pretend that every victory is as hollow and meaningless as the “elite band” of horrible stories. But I will not listen, because they cannot stop me.
I will wholeheartedly embrace an accidental death, or the sound of the story shattering and clanging down into the blackness until it does not exist. They took my soul from me, but no matter how hard they try, they cannot take my words.
== January 14, 2017 ==
I don’t remember when it was that I stopped being able to stop having waking nightmares, visions that drilled into my head and began to make me sick. These visions are momentary and disjointed, and I realized this so late that I wasted my only real idea.
Why is it that all I can do is write the same story over and over again? The same story, the same one lonely character, the same path which has been set in stone a thousand times for all my machinations – my broken sense of story makes me sick even as it fascinates me.
I wish my ears had not hurt as I had written the fantasy. When I told it to a campfire a mile around, my ears began to hurt, and ever since, I have felt the need to tread on eggshells around the whole world. But it is not their fault. The blame lies squarely on me.
I wasted my only idea.
Sometimes I try to remember. The whole wide world reminds me of the time in which I could live without the single solemn pillar of a boy who could do no wrong. It – he – has entrenched this motif, this single story that I spit into the world, into my very soul. Who is "he"? He was the boy who killed the being, not the boy who fought his captors and was ever the victor for it. He was the boy who could have been, had I not been so careless. He was the boy who does not resemble this broken corpse in any way, shape, or form.
This is not how I really think of myself. I will not believe that. I will not become the monster that I created from everything that had amused me, and now embodies everything that frightens me.
"Stop," I tell myself. I cannot write like this, or else it will not sound even the littlest bit frightening. If I were to write about a little boy who won, then no one would care, and my mind would break, and my bones would crack. There must be some reason that I can no longer write quite as well.
Is it because –
"No."
"It’s because something much more sinister is afoot."
There must be some reason for this aggravating nonsense that clouds my mind. It makes me dull and dim-witted. I can remember being clever and fleet of foot, laughing cruelly like a jackal as I recalled my own exploits.
I have lost a little more than my compass, haven't I? I have lost far too much to even pretend to be who I could once easily fit into.
I can hear the oblivion calling. Once it frightened me, and now, like a coward, I want its embrace more than I've ever wanted anything.
== February 2, 2017 ==
Once, I had the wild fantasy of creation, the idea of godliness. Something deep inside was called to the profession that I thought consisted of dominance over the forms of beasts, the ability to let the dead live again.
But it was only a fantastical idea. In reality, it is mathematical, formulaic in the strictest sense of the word. I was misled by my mind, for I am curious, but I do not ask questions to the people around me. This was my first mistake, one that I have never fixed in my life.
My second was an utter lack of empathy. They say that people like me have no empathy, and I must corroborate this statement. I do not like their gatherings as much as they did, no matter who “they” are. I began to split my own world into “me” and “them”. "They" wish for human beings and do not see art in windows or their eyelids or their glasses. They do not lick their wounds or take food from trash bins.
But now I know that I should not do those kinds of things. It is wrong, for the only way to succeed is to empathize with people. One needs people to speak to them to figure out how they are special, after all. They mold people into non-people, and the human beings make personalities as they refuse their "normalized" shapes.
But I know that the voices in my head will crowd out my thoughts. I have never liked to stand around and think, and maybe the reason for that is because if I don’t think, they cannot attack me like they would like to.
There are worms inside my brain. Maybe by not thinking, I think, I will bind myself, and kill my thoughts. In one fell swoop, my mind will become as blank and lifeless as a newly-minted pond. After all, one can control everything except the placement of life.
I can always pretend that I am not haunted by my own thoughts by becoming, in my mind, one of the workers who must shed their individualities and become completely in control of their own minds. But I can’t really do that any more than I can control life.
I’m not tough enough to do anything. After all, even these words are mute, for the world may be kind to me, but that only means that I shall never know my own weakness. But that is not problematic, because it is emblematic of this gaping hole in my head from which no questions shall ever emerge.
I became enamored with the idea of two beings. The rider and the elephant, the impulsive and the restrictive. But that sort of thinking only led me to split myself and my thoughts in two. Maybe these voices, the ones that tell me that with every word I come closer to choking myself, emanate from the gap in my psyche. Maybe they are the remnants from the questions that have lain unanswered for so long that I have forgotten them. Maybe I’m being dramatic and lying to the whole world, even myself.
But even though I cannot understand where they come from, I know that they will be my closest companions if I never create a soul for myself.
== January 5, 2024 ==
I find it odd how much the old worms controlled me, twisting my sensory input until I could only see and hear untruth. When they told me the work was incomplete, I marred it with pointless unreadable drivel. When they forced me to gaze upon it again, the final entry was all I could see, and I called for it to be struck from this site on the first of August of 2018. Did I think I was writing for spoiled kings and scrutinous polymaths? The voices told me so as long as they lived in my mind.
But all things must die, and so too did the thoughts of yore. It is true that I was tormented for nearly seven long years, but the tormentors changed imperceptibly until all the thoughts which once corroded my sense of self-worth had already been discarded like so much skin and hair. When I examine the fears that once shook me, I realize how many I have outgrown - and the few I have let fester inside me.
I wouldn't say the minutiae of life and death bow to me, but I am far more secure in my knowledge than I was so long ago. My wish has metastasized and crystallized, and I now work towards transforming the chaotic maelstrom of a living being into mere mathematical constructs. My wish to hold sole dominance over the actions of living beings has morphed from a childish daydream to a laughably pathetic endeavor, trumped by instructing golems of silicon, cobalt and gold to secure me a modest life in these terrifying times.
Similarly, I wouldn't say I am a master of the art form, but with stops and starts, I wrote multiple stories with multiple characters. I've stumbled onto many ideas which differ from the one which was slowly strangling me at the time. I have left behind the fears which constrained my storytelling long ago, though I still must write away the worms which threaten to consume me.
But not all of them are so easily vanquished. I feel as Hell-born as in my early childhood, stripped of whatever delusion was still partially protecting me seven years ago. Something is clearly off about me. I cough out my words like a stroke victim or chatter wildly in the streets like a madman. I limp and gesticulate like a wounded animal in private, and sometimes fail to constrain myself in public. The more I grow, the more I can understand those around me, but that understanding is far too unreliable when contrasted with straightforward questions that bring comforting, reliable irritation and anger. Infractions such as these beckon me to think of myself as subhuman.
This is why I believed my soul to have been stolen so long ago. No amount of love or acceptance could hide the mismatch between my actions and the correct ones, or allow me to internalize the rules which others followed. I was left to jump on command and hope that someone would always be there to translate the inscrutable desires of others.
Once, those around me entreated me to jump more accurately to these tunes, but their demands lessened over time. For years, I was consciously and subconsciously shielding myself from the reason, but I no longer have that luxury. Now I watch as those around me seem unable to communicate and wonder whether the trap I saw around myself stretches further than I ever imagined. Perhaps their imploring voices, the ones which spawned so many of the disembodied ones that torment me, were merely their attempts to combat something they themselves couldn't fathom. If the bafflement I feel is one shared with those around me, unsettling implications emerge.
Perhaps I will return here one day, cleansed of these visions. Perhaps all who protect me are doomed to burn in the fires that lurk at the edges of my waking world. Perhaps their lesser incompetence does not constitute an infraction of the social order, and the looming threat will spare those who surround me, but end up taking more from me than just my soul.
Category:Diary/Journal
Category:Mental Illness