A disguise for every occasion

I’m challenged in the way I can’t stand to say no to a challenge. 

I’m challenged in the way that the thought of someone having a less than superior view of me, encounter with me, decision of me, drives me a little insane.

I’m challenged in the way that this alone is enough to stoke up a new blaze in a handful of charred cinders.

The truth is I’m a bit adrift.

The truth is I’m a bit adrift, which is fine but I recognize I have no real ability to control my direction or even know which way it is that I am going.

I have no real ability to be objective about my status on the planet in regards to fuck-up vs. not-a-fuck-up.

I suppose it depends on who you’d ask, the answer to that one.

The idea that members of my family might view me as a fuck-up (but she had so much potential – she was in gifted for so many years! She read all the time! She could have been a lawyer or a doctor, that one) surficially amuses me. Yet I feel equally, amidst the laughter and the shrugging of my shoulders, these empty caverns resonating that negativity in low rumbles like painfully trapped gas.

Somedays the invisible glue that keeps me in this desk chair weakens, just the slightest bit, and I have a sharp and sudden awareness that I could at any point in time choose to stretch my legs and run from here. It is a restless snap of a second. It is a euphoria of heights like mountainside farms and my figure tending over wooly sheep; it is a sadness like a family that loves but doesn’t like you, forcing you to keep your distance. It is the whole knowledge of what “out there” means and the reaches of risk that I know I can’t fathom. 

The bond restrengthens, a vile nonsentience intent on keeping me, and I begin the cycle of validations once more.