Let’s Play Pretend.
Saturday 9th of February 2019
Sometimes getting from one moment to the next feels like dressing up. It feels like rummaging around in a fancy dress box and playing pretend. It feels like an animal pretending to be human.
It hits me sometimes, just out of the blue, whenever I try to step out of this role, whenever I try to do something positive or healthy, to get me out of this depression. It’s a wave or realisation that swallows me. A voice that says:
“You’re just pretending. This isn’t you. Everyone sees through you. They know you’re fake. They know you’re pretending to be like them. They know you’re just pretending to be whole.”
This makes me stop in my tracks. Depression is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyway, enough of that. What if everyone is free to be exactly who they are? I say this, or write this, because with my new tattoo, I’m feeling more myself than I felt without it. Which is new. This tattoo’s made me all existential. Which is better than how I felt after the first tattoo.
[December 2016: How comes no one told me? How comes no one told me it would change me, that it would change the way I see myself, and how others see me? I got used to being this person, I got used to being myself and now I have no self. I don’t know myself. I’m altered, marked.
Black ink pierced skin, tattooed me, and pain became a reality, a state of being, a form. Now, I’m left with a permanence in a world of transience. How do I deal with that? It will be forever when nothing is forever.
“The mark will change you.”
“Do you understand that?”
And I do? And the mark becomes a part of me, a foreign part, a new part that I have to get used to, like a new hand or a new foot.
But I need time, and I need time to understand it, to understand what it means.
“You chose it, your mark. You could have chosen anything in the world and you chose this, your permanence.
And I have to understand why.
“There’s power in the pain, in the blood and in the mark, in the ink fused to skin.”
And I understand this. But why did no one tell me I would change?]
It seems three years ago I was even more of a drama queen than I am now.
[December 2016: There’s a peeling away, with a glimmer underneath, a new skin waiting to be revealed in its fullness. What is on the other side of me?]
[ December 2016: There’s a stripping, a peeling away of self and the idea of self. The mark has faded to less of a vibrant black to a black/grey, dull. It has become more like skin and less like a brand. More a part and less artificial. And there’s a difference, a difference between accepting reality and accepting this as reality.]
I haven’t thrown away all my old diaries, which is disgusting since I compared them to used sanitary towels.
‘The Murder of Miss O’ available now, on Amazon, and other book places…
