I Don't Know Why I'm Here

I try to live a normal life.

It always comes back to the confusion and depression, anxiety and grief.

I feel trapped here, and I don't even know where "here" is. This is not the world I grew up in.

This world is different and strange. Things change, sometimes from one day to the next.

It leaves me restless, exhausted, confused.

It's like a mildly bad dream. Not horrible, but enough to keep me continuously waiting for the next strange thing to happen, for the next change, the next war or the next crisis in the world.

I could ignore the news, but the changes affect my personal life too. My memories are different from those of the people around me. That is, the few bits of my life that I can remember at all.

Sometimes I think I'm dead, and in a strange afterlife realm. A purgatory where I'm supposed to figure something out about reality or myself, in order to move on.

Sometimes I think I'm in a simulation, or a parallel universe. Time travel is another possibility.

Crazy is a possibility too, I can't rule that out.

There are other possibilities I don't want to think about.

My mind can't shake it off, and just allow me to live a normal life. I can pretend for a few days or weeks that I live in the normal world, but then it always comes back to this.

Maybe I've stepped out of Plato's Cave, and I simply haven't adjusted to the new light yet. Maybe I will in time.

Sometimes I just feel hopelessness and despair.

Cause and effect seem to have no meaning here. The past changes, and my reality shifts. Yet I can remember a past that no longer seems to have existed.

People call it the Mandela Effect. But I think there's a lot more to it than that.

It's something about consciousness, about reality itself. Who I am. What I am.

There are things about my life that point to something strange going on from the very beginning of my existence.

I sometimes follow the breadcrumbs and white rabbits to figure out what might be happening. I keep in mind what happens in stories where people follow breadcrumbs and rabbits.

Some days I have more courage than other days. Some days, I don't want to get out of bed.

I do have good things in my life, that I hold on to.

My family, my loved ones, my pets. I try to create beautiful things, for my own joy, and to add a little bit of beauty to the world. I create out of used, tossed items to make something new and lovely or useful.

Recycling has been a big theme lately that I've been drawn to as a clue. My work is using recycled materials. Life itself is recycled to create new life. The nutrients we take in are recycled as urine and feces, which nourish the plants that then nourish us as they grow and the process repeats.

There is a magnetic going in and going out, in every aspect of the world and of life.

The same stories are recycled, and they are all the Hero's Journey. From Lion King to Star Wars to The Wizard of OZ. I can't help thinking our lives are our personal Hero's Journey too.

I feel I am waking, painfully and slowly, from a dream. Maybe I really am. Maybe that's all my life is.

But even if it is, and nothing is "real", I still love my life, I love my family, I love creating art and growing a garden and baking bread.

I'm not sure I want to wake up.