Invincible

My mind is a dizzying place, honestly.

It’s exhausting to be invincible.  You sacrifice all of your own thoughts, feelings, needs—everything—in order for the rest of your life to go smoothly.  Most who know you and/or work closely with you are somewhat taken aback at the slightest smile, the tiniest joke, the most minute display of warmth.  To them, you are a quiet person who lets no one in and does all of the work.  They leave you alone, and you them.  You work very hard to keep up this invincibility.  People are counting on you.  They may not like you, but at the end of the day, you are the person still at your desk, working by lamplight.  You are the only person who will come to work despite a 103^o fever and the flu.  You are the only person who can think clearly enough in crises to organize the funeral of a loved one.  You are the level-headed, the even-tempered, the clear-thinking…  The rest of your world depends on it.  It is not arrogance or narcissism—just truth.  Unfortunately, however, invincibility is an illusion; a convincing illusion, if done properly, but an illusion nonetheless.  The sad irony of this illusion is that, more often than not, the great deal of energy expended on the upkeep of invincibility is its own eventual destruction.  You don’t acknowledge that, undoubtedly, were you to step down from this death-and-ambrosia-nectar-type life that you’ve chosen for yourself, someone else just like you would rise to take the position.  You know, somewhere in your mind, that this is true.  This only scares you.  You don’t know what you would do without your catch-all, save-all role.  Your expendability only makes you cling all the tighter to your sad, destructive illusion of invincibility.

Author's Note

Rate and review, you know the drill. I WANT TO BE BETTER!! It's not precisely a poem, but it's closer to that than anything else. It's just me thinking on paper...