It always felt like eggshells walking around in my seemingly passive existence.

Steps I’d take seemed to consist mostly directed between an overwhelming amount of cracks, making it incredibly hard to navigate these ever-changing eggshells constantly moving, changing, blowing in the wind. You could say, from how carelessly I would notice people obliviously strolling through them.

Only my perceptions would create this narrative, forming a pattern of opinions within this abstract clutter. It would shape to form certain structures of thought, ideas, opinions of value onto someone else’s perceptive beliefs of subjectivity, seemingly objective within its own logic of truth somewhere between those lines.

It would manifest reasonable questions towards answers that would either motivate or discourage myself as an individual walking through my own life, consciously aware of how walking on or around these eggshells would echo my existence outward onto something or someone else.

How dare I place my steps anywhere else than what I thought was expected of myself? Where those limits on where I could walk be a path taken for myself that I could get to without feeling guilty, doubtful, and lacking, while trying to break this mold would reflect back echoes of eggshells cracking underneath my feet through my deepest insecure fears I’ve spoken to myself internally, only to get my self-confirming doubts spoken back to myself around me.

It becomes an uncomfortable dance of moving stillness, what’s expected by the unexpected thoughts and feelings surrounding this sense of a lack of self. A lacking of existing only to exist in a state of waiting for what’s going to happen next when nothing at all is really happening.

Once I did start moving, I was basically faced with, how dare I?

How dare I?
Gain confidence over and over again.

How dare I?
Continue doing what I enjoy and love while being questioned about almost everything I say and do.

How dare I?
Finish and complete everything I said I would and have done, without talking too much about it before it’s even started.

How dare I?
Speak up, being honest with the truth or my truths on what I think, feel, and believe while being faced with crippling narcissistic scapegoating directed towards this outdated awareness of my old “passive eggshell nature.”

How dare I?
Not let myself or anyone else get away with it anymore.

How dare I?
Be at fault for burning those bridges a final time that I stood on while they were set on fire anytime someone else felt like it or just wanted to burn it for fun.

How dare I?
Clean up most all those eggshells in my life only to at times keep stomping others into dust when they still can’t let go of thinking or speaking their problems with…

How dare I… Change.

In this context I lay out, I've come to realize this is a big part of the problems I face and what I hear people have faced. Besides the obvious problems themselves, I've come to realize it gets lost in our translations of intentions and motivations.

If I can't speak freely depending, given the context within my creative thinking to add my perspectives within an allegorical context of philosophical thought without being dismissed as someone would think it to be more so somewhat crazy to do so, then why do I get this projection that for some reason I "have to" take in someone else's perspective as pure fact?

The only reason I've come to understand it as a type of "fact" is that someone is usually always "right." It usually never fails, but there usually isn't going to be recognition given to the other person who seems just as accurate within an understanding of what's happening or going on as well.

For some reason, this sense of "feeling right" blinds understanding that someone else exists beyond certain limits of this comforting comprehension of control set up to create these realities of "feeling right."

Obviously, when other people with different thoughts, feelings, and opinions try to relate within a context as well outside a person's set-up limits, it creates resistance if the other person is not willing to accept it "beyond" themselves.

The only thing left to do is belittle, bash you for it, or patronize because it's now outside someone's comfort of reason and confidence within themselves. So, it seems to become very unreasonable, looking for any excuses to gain back their sense of superiority and self-confidence.

The cycle continues.

I don't "have to," but I really do (want to). That's my difference, but I think it gets lost in the narratives of a nihilistic, neurotic, narcissistic set of self-importance.

I'm sure many people can come to a consensus about what that last part means to gain an understanding, and obviously, I'm one of those people who have gained an understanding of what that means for myself to have placed those words together.

But how dare I say that. How dare I direct certain attention and effort towards something or someone while in many ways it’s expected most times as the utmost for myself.

How dare I stop having an experience or conversation with something or someone else because there may be something or someone else who can't handle themselves to handle it while I would be expected to do the same thing, and god forbid I'd interrupt if it was them like they're doing to myself.

How dare I kept playing these silly games people have created to gain a sense of control over their lives without being aware or educated enough to understand to know…

How dare I… Exist here too.

How dare anyone else exist outside this contextual narrative-driven "theme" of nihilistic, neurotic, narcissistic self-importance.

How dare anyone clean up those eggshells life and people place around us, only for us to step around or on them to get by, so life or those same people who placed them there for us to walk on can look to us and say...

Shh.

Writing by:
© Travis Dob