Self-consciousness is generally loathsome, though it doesn’t stop me from trepidating on its doorstep, flirting with it constantly behind my eyelids.  In one sense, the whole of my existence is a barbaric wrestle with regret.  Skipping from one medication to the next in the endless psychopharmicological pursuit of a cure to this rotating polarity in my brain, I feel at all times nervous about the state of my emotions.  I am, after all, a creature more emotional than rational; though I do with my best intentions try to reason my way through the emotional cloud.

Quick to anger and sadness and despair and slow to peace and quiet.  The world within my head only distantly mirrors the world through which I walk, yet the two are so separate, so real, and so indistinguishable to me that I find myself in constant worried tension over the viability of my beliefs.  In the end, I must always believe something; and it seems necessary to believe that which feels most true.  After the excesses of over rationalization have begun to spoil by the curb, there remains only one faint handle by which to pull myself up: a gut instinct, a hunch, an irrational feeling.

Just as the warmth of a cup of coffee will influence my emotional state, my emotional state is always in bitter siege of my reason.  That I say, with frequency too embarrassing to confess, things which are wrong (logically, ethically or practically) is true; but that I always very nearly believe myself in these moments to be the most reasoned, the most disciplined, the most sane is the great sadness.  To exist in a constant state of waking from a falsehood, a falsehood which seemed too compelling to be anything but absolute and true.

In the absence of  strong emotions, my mind is clear; and I, at least, feel that I appear to be normal.  The overpowering fear persistent within these moments is that my illusions persist.

Feelings are like tides, and the tides have me lost at sea.