CHAPTER 4

.♤.

THE RAT

• Monday, January 30 •

I would like to understand my brain.

I would like to understand how it works.

I am so afraid of silence ... This silence which is so familiar to me, so reassuring when words run out.

And yet you know what? We are all living walls colliding with each other, banging against each other with all our solitude.

But I have this compulsive need for analysis.

Analyze, dissect, decipher. Emotions, mechanisms.

The brain is a great machine. It fascinates me.

My obsession with transcribing the inexpressible. You see?

It's madness and no matter how many words, how many lines I could yell, it's already lost in advance. Because no one can save me from myself.

Writing is incapable of healing me. And this incapacity consumes me.

I have trouble with my sensitivity, I have trouble with my words.

It makes me mad. You do not imagine. This impression of having no fucking exit door. Made like a rat. Done but no more to do.

When the cat's away the mice will play.

My heart is accelerating, I feel the anxiety attack slowly creep inside. The anxiety of nothing, of the nonexistent. The anxiety of being me, of not belonging to myself, of never having belonged to myself, of belonging to this nothing.

'Before I die ... Before I die ...'

But what do we care anyway? I have been dead for years.

You know sometimes, I speak to myself alone as if to prove my own existence. I touch myself, touch this body that makes me sick. I'm talking to people who don't exist, damn, it's crazy...

• Tuesday, January 31 •

Like a little girl, I'm afraid to disturb. Fear of rejection, fear of denial.

'I'm afraid'

This sentence seems like nothing, it's so little. Just letters that we assemble.

And suddenly I weigh the whole weight of this sentence. She is so heavy. It is a ball hanging on the ankle of my mind and of which I have carefully lost the key.

'But, dude...what did you expect ?'

Absolute negation. I'm not. I am nothing.

• Wednesday, February 11 •

That feeling of being shit without interest.

While all the signals in my life seem to be green, I am chased by excruciating doubts. As a world of possibilities opens up to me, I suddenly feel trapped in something terrifying. A deep hatred towards all that I am eats away at every moment without my really understanding why. Or maybe it is.

This relentless search for an illusory ideal of perfection. This need to repair the hidden vices of the past. Control. Control everything. Clear, no longer feel dirty. Obsession. It's so obsessive that in reality I no longer control anything. I have no control over these streams of thoughts that assail me. Too difficult to concentrate, too difficult to make efforts, too difficult to fight walls.

My helplessness exasperates me, and inspires me only with disgust. It’s endless.

I feel like I'm living with the wrong credo. Impotence, there is nothing worse.

And I keep smiling to hide the unclosed scars. Out of pride, out of politeness, but it kills me. Inside everything is so ugly ... My politeness will eventually kill me.

And then all this love that keeps me standing, that pulls me inexorably. That same love that terrifies me but that I so desire. Facing the heartbreaking ambivalence, between love of the other and self-hatred, between fear and rejection of the other in the face of shame and self-rejection.

© Birdy'