How I Avoided Life

 
    Breathing came easy to me. It was my only natural instinct that I could perform without feeling like a failure. With that said, I failed at everything else. Life, I mean. Though many argue that life is never easy and that we learn from our mistakes, there was a crucial memo that I missed while developing into the person I am today. That being, how to live life. Yes, it all sounds very cliché and depressing. The rebellious student who only complained about the glass being half empty. Though I can't say that my life has always been bad, somewhere throughout the process of being alive I realized something. I had cheated the system. I didn't live life, others lived it for me. And I lived off the wounds of others and the struggles of those I chose to call my friends and family and essentially avoided life altogether.  
    I realized this not so long ago, as I tried to make my way past the other entrance of the kitchen in order to avoid an otherwise antagonizing comment and tormenting presence from the step. And yes, his presence was like a never healing festering wound on the side of my toe. It was the stink that ran up my nose and open the cavity through its foul and horrid smells. The kind of things that sting when touched and sometimes, if ignored long enough would settle on its own side and only haunt you occasionally. But this disgusting piece of rotting flesh that dangled from my toe would remind me everyday about the pain and hurt I had felt as a little child. His words would haunt me, and though I never really liked to admit; it hurt. It hurt a lot, just life in general.
    So while fighting my own external demon I realized something very peculiar about myself. I was someone who nobody knew. As I developed a fear of confrontation, I developed a device to keep people believing I functioned the same way as them. I spoke in almost what seemed to be quotes, speaking in others spoken words that I somehow had others believing were mine. I often found myself playing the innocent victim card to get others to do my work for me. To showcase me as a person I wanted everyone to think I was, but I wasn't. I was everything but real to pretty much anyone. I was a good friend when I wanted to be, when I needed something, when something was in my benefit. A good daughter to parents who, more or less cared about what really happened in my head. A sister to a girl, who in my attempt to stray from the path already left by her, became my main victim.
    I avoided life to make things easy for me. It was a habit that I had conceived to feel like I had taken control of the untamable life that had unfolded before me. I was no hero for having my work done on time. Because in others' eyes, I had been a thief. A thief of words, a thief of the unspeakable plagiarism. People believed that I needed the help, so the hand was always free when I held on to it. I avoided doing things for myself for a very long time, I had always seemed to have things on a golden platter. A full paid scholarship, a "marvelous" opportunity for early college, people who wanted to be around me despite my malicious acts, guys taming at my feet only to strip me of my stained clothes. I had parents who'd give me anything I wanted for what used to be tears but then later developed into words. I did have it all. But it wasn't mine. I don't think it ever really was. Because it my mind I was a patchworks of pieces of different people. Taught to think a certain way because that's how others thought, I looked the part and I spoke the role, and people believed who I was because of it.
    I used to think I was an evil person, a person who only wanted to see other kneel before me, who didn't care whether their knees were scraped and bleeding, I'd still have them eating off the ground made of needles. But it took me a while to realize that, that's not who I was. I wasn't evil, a predator, I didn't feed off other's despair, in fact, I was just selfish. I needed things and people gave them to me. However I had rather see the people serving me in conditions just as good as mine or I had just been given dirty opportunities. Which I was given, but I deserved.
    The revelation happened last year. Almost around the time where I blossomed and became the target for sexual harassment, which by just being in my shoes was a common theme in my life. Through those buried and suppressed emotion I rose and slowly became who I am today. I hadn't realized it beforehand and though it had happened multiple times before, it never occurred to me that I rarely finished what I started. This was no surprise to me though. I hadn't been used to doing things for myself so obviously when the going got tough, I would coward out. I chickened out many times last year. It began with my first short story that I had spend days writing and towards the end I depressed myself and thus made a quick shameful ending to. It moved on to my obsession with learning the guitar and about a month in and 4 messy lessons, I made my instrumental focus to the piano. It's funny because I thought this would've been something I would have stuck to, but after two or three months or so of Wednesday evening sessions in New Jersey, I called it quits. And the voices told me it was the right thing to do. I may have quit my lessons, but I had been saving up the money that I spent while taking them. As summer zoomed on by, I had the opportunity for an internship which at first sounded like a great idea, but resulted in me lying to the workers saying that I had gotten another job and could not attend the internship program. This action in itself came with its own rewards. A care-free summer to spend with the guy I had initially thought was amazing for even approaching me in the streets one late April.
    When school came around I committed myself to taking a psychology class on Saturdays. It was a very exciting moment for me, to tell others that I had put an extra foot forward and had been working towards earning more credits with an extra class. This experience became tiring very quickly and stole my Saturdays right away. And when the opportunity door opened to withdraw from the class, I grabbed it at the first chance I had. This of course, came with praise from others who had told me it was the right choice because I had been overwhelmed with work, and I had been making a very adult decision by looking past my current problems. Bullshit. I was just lazy.
    Oh but it doesn't end there. Early November or so, teachers drove us to participate in revolutionizing the world, one child at a time. Because as we all know, anyone can make a difference. I didn't bother going down that road. Committing to another after-school activity which would leave me with little or no self satisfaction. Of course not, which reminds me of how I never really joined any after school curricular activities. Only the ones that were offered that excused me from attending class regularly. I'm a joke.
    I struggled during this time. I now knew, that I had indeed avoided life in itself. In its more complex essence, I hadn't done anything healthy for the planet, healthy for myself, or for others. I was as good as nonexistent. On simple terms, I had breathed carbon dioxide to flowers who then provided me with oxygen. I had filled the Earth with more toxic gases. I had cared for one other being more than life itself, my dog. But in the life that I was living, things like this didn't matter. It only mattered when I accomplished something, when things went right, when people would see the day I succeed in college. Therefore I didn't live life for the right reasons.
    When I did do things alone, the pain only came from a scratch on the surface. I never bled on to a paper until it was good, I never gave sweat and tears to anything I did. I didn't even know what my full potential really was because I never really gave it a shot. But one day I was confronted with this dilemma and doing the one other thing that I believed came easy to me, writing, became my biggest burden. When writing by force, I concluded, I was unable to finish a thought, I was at a never ending stop light in my life. And it took me six unfinished stories to produce one mediocre complete story. It was hell, when I was put to the test and when other could not help me, I slowly sunk into a dark hole in my chest and swallowed myself whole. I never really found a way to change, and I doubt I'll ever really do so, because for 17 years I cheated life, I was handed the golden tickets and I produced millions of passageways to avoid facing it. It took me almost a decade to come to the conclusion that I ran before I could stand yet I never truly learned how to walk. I am a leech of life. Not an evil conniving beast that should be murdered for murderous acts, because if I ever did murder anyone; it would've been myself.
    Because, as I crossed the kitchen only to be met with the person I loathe the most in the entirety of the world, and I heard the words that screeched into my ear drums reverberated down my spine, giving me cold feet and awful shivers, "you don't say hi anymore?" I am overcome with a sense of reality. No, I have been avoiding you for as long as I can remember, and I will never confront you because then I'd have to kill you or myself for falling into the trap. And as I've learned in my brief years as an angst filled teenager with a rather twisted and misshapen perception of the people who have helped me and the people who truly did me wrong is that, I never finish what I start and I can’t kill myself because I haven’t begun living life.