Scared

2003-12-07 at 12:24 a.m.

People are looking at me funny in the street. Can they see my thoughts? Or am I saying them out loud without realising it?

Why won't the words stop? They're my thoughts, but I'm not controlling them anymore. I don't know who is. I wish I could get them to stop. Maybe then I wouldn't be so tired.

Everything is wrong. I'm wrong. Right-angled to the world. Nothing is natural. The laws don't apply. Have I wandered into some other life, some other world by mistake? I don't feel like me. Who am I anyway? I don't recognise the face in the mirror, I don't recognise my hands, I don't recognise what I write. I don't know who I am anymore but I don't think I am who I think I am. Maybe I'm not "Emma", maybe I never was. Maybe I've been dreaming, thinking its 23 years, maybe its never been real. Maybe nothing is. Perhaps I'll wake up someday and all this will seem some strange nightmare. But what will I be? Who will I be? What if I don't exist at all, what if someone is dreaming me? How would I know? How can I tell?

I'm lost. And I'm confused.

My life is vanity, nothing more. I'm the supreme egotist with nothing to brag about. I have no achievements, just some feeling of importance which comes from nothing. Why am I trying to go do a Phd? I struggled just doing an undergraduate degree, how can I think I could be an academic? How can I think I can write anything, how dare I publish it online, when its sentimental, specious crap?

Why am I even bothering to post my thoughts? No one wants to hear them. Maybe they read out of pity. People only ever pretend they like me out of pity. When they get to know me better they say I'm horrible, weird, bizarre. That they feel sorry for me because I'm a weirdo - at once arrogant and self-hating, "mentally unstable" as my Principal told me. Not good enough to run with the best nor bad enough to be at bottom, I'm just nothing in particular. People always hate me. They don't look at me properly and then when they do they hate me. I've turned into Elizabeth. Now she was a weirdo. Girl walked around school wearing a sword and telling tales about a horse named Midnight at 18. Said she had depression, thats all. My arse. You could see something wrong in her face (is that what people see in mine?). Don't know what was wrong with her but I suspect bipolar with a touch of something genetic - as I say, there was something wrong about her face.

But what if I made up Elizabeth? What if I really am Elizabeth but pretending to be someone else?

I can't touch anything, the world is out of reach. Its all blunt-edged and bleary like seeing without glasses on. People talk too loudly, walk too loudly, are too big and bright. They scare me. They're real, I'm not. "Earth, fire, water, air, meet together in a garden fair...if you answer this riddle you'll never begin" I read that somewhere. Nothing is real, I've become a ghost who periodically thinks IT is human.

Maybe I'm just dreaming. But who am I? Do I even exist? What if I'm a figment who pops into people's heads every so often?

Why can't I touch anything, feel anything? Why aren't things real? Why won't the words stop? Why do people laugh at me in the night? Am I in a play somewhere? Stuck in a TV? Why are the laughing? Why won't they stop? I don't see the joke.

My head is swimming. I can't breathe. I'm scared, I don't know who I am. I don't KNOW. Just a piece of flotsam in some incomprehensible tide.

WHO AM I?

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