“Did we ever meet before”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem so familiar to me”

“I’m sorry. Don’t think we ever met before.”

“Okay”

I don’t quite feel at home anymore. Well, I do (I’m literally in bed as I write this). I just mean in a cosmic sense. Something I’ve had to constantly contend with in my life is feeling outside everything. Outside my body, outside my head, outside the world. I am by no means unique in this feeling. Plenty of people have felt on the fringes. And for me, nothing about me particularly stands out. But it’s this feeling. It inhabits me when I gain some sort of sentience in a conversation. Like I, all of a sudden, lost my ability to navigate through this and I need to desperately need to escape. I make it out because I’ve trained myself to. But when I leave the conversation, it creeps back in. Just staring at me in the corner, like my sleep paralysis demon. I tend to distract myself, telling myself constantly that it’s just me overthinking. And it often is. The feeling comes back though. Especially when I get flustered and lost in conversation.

I guess something this has spurned on me is thinking about my relationship to people. I can’t shake this image out of my head. One of my friends (who I probably had more feelings for than I am truly willing to admit to myself) was trying hard to hook up with this guy at a party, and she got really close to him. Like really close to him. They was up in each other’s grill, fam. I stared at them… for longer than I should have. It had me thinking. Has anyone ever showed that much physical wanting to me? I’ve never really been physically attractive. The proof is in the pudding. And I think there’s a huge sense that is something I’ve always wanted to experience. The experience of having someone physically finding me attractive. That they cannot even hide it. They are unashamed. That’s something I’ve missed in my life. It has been noodling around in my head a bit.

Recently, I went to a bar with some co-workers. I met this guy and his beautiful girlfriend. We got one moment alone and I guess I asked him about dating. He disclosed to me that he was divorced. I asked him how he was able to “bag a baddie” (these were my words, ashamedly). He advised me that I present too “feminine” and that girls don’t really like that… Now, I’ve been one to think about potentially changing myself to please others. But after that comment, it really exposed how out of place I must be. I don’t believe I do present too “feminine”, I am me. And surprisingly, I was being the most me I had been for a long while in that moment.

It’s these things that add up and give me some sort of sense that I don’t know who I am. My identity is being explored less and less. Work is draining me, and I am trying to lose weight. People say in times of struggle, that’s when you learn the most about yourself. But if I was being truly honest with myself, I’ve learned the most about myself in the moments where I’ve thrived. When I wasn’t floating by. Because in those moments, I truly feel like I can process what is coming at me. Those moments, when I felt outside of myself, always come at times where I disliked myself the most. When I was at my most self-conscious.

I am kind of over criticizing myself. It’s not good enough to make change. It’s not good enough to finding myself. An elusive goal, finding yourself. But a worthy one. At least, I think so.