Asleep

I need to get myself out of this. I welcome any wise suggestions that anybody might have. Now, what the "this" is. It's how I have felt for some time now. To illustrate with just a few examples: I'm not doing anything that I'm supposed to, the things that I really have to do I hardly manage to complete, I'm wandering aimlessly around the house thinking of ways how to get out of here but I find it difficult even to get dressed earlier than noon, every night I realise how much I haven't done and I panic, I go to bed and cannot sleep. I would love to stop thinking but finding bliss in ignorance has never been my strong side. I have to think, know, be painfully aware... I never let go... I can literally feel time seeping through my fingers like sand, disappearing into an endless sea of the past, never to be recovered. Every wave takes some away from me.
Today I went to the basement to do some organizing and instead looked through my old photo albums I found there. I was looking at these moments and people captured in order to remind us of these "good old times" while they were not good old times yet but a living reality, and couldn't shake off a feeling that it is not me in these pictures, that it is somebody else. With a few exceptions, I cannot remember what I was thinking at the moment the picture was taken. I hardly remember some of the people in the photos. I am left with still images, empty behind. Maybe it's because of that emptiness or maybe because it is actually true, I had a feeling that I knew so little back then. I had no idea about how life works. My life has taken so many unexpected turns along the way, I have learnt so much about people around me and about myself, and there has been so many changes in the way I function mentally and emotionally that my life back in Poland seems now like a kid's dream. Maybe it is not exactly right what I said. Maybe I did know a lot back then. That knowledge simply stopped being relevant at some point. It did not apply to what filled my life later.
I still haven't reached any ultimate state of equilibrium, satisfaction, peace - however you want to call it, so I feel suspended between two worlds, although in reality there are no two separate worlds and no clear cut states of being. It is a continuum, a long journey, and everything that happens is written over the old files repeatedly. Nothing gets deleted. "Starting a new chapter", "turning a new leaf", and other expressions like these are just this - expressions, wishes put in words, banal statements that try to perform a real function. So maybe my old knowledge base from Poland has stayed with me; altered, twisted, adjusted, squished but still influencing everything I do. Keeping me imprisoned within the boundaries of my long-forgotten hurt, love, fear, good and bad experience not to be judged or told apart anymore.
The truth is that if you cannot learn to deal with everything you carry inside, recognize it for what it is and what it does to you, some part of you will always exist in a void - this will be the only safe place in your life otherwise full of control - lack of commitment, a state of extended denial, this little piece of you that you let be drowsy and numb. It is not as safe and as easy to maintain as it appears, though. You may feel motionless, you may feel a part of you is at a standstill, but it's an illusion. You let your guard down for a little while and slowly, you start hearing voices, seeing faces, feeling shivers under your skin - the rest of your life takes hold of the whole you. The world has been revolving all the time and has never stopped dragging you into the whirlwind. You cannot stretch any more. Senses you have tried to ignore surface to haunt you. One by one, gradually, these little sensations, visions, and feelings arouse you from your sleep. You have been changing. You either let the reality in, or become paranoid in your self-inflicted state of hibernation. The question is: have you learnt enough to be able to deal with this reality?