[776] I feel, therefore I am.

Crit [794]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/dShW7YliWJ

This is my first time writing a piece and publishing it, as I’m fairly new to the experience. I’m not a big-time reader and English isn’t my first language, hence it is a bit raw, unpolished and messy. I only write when I feel heavy emotionally, trying to put my thoughts and ideas down. It’s out of impulse, not a planned intention. I am aware of the sub and its culture, but I’d also like to anything that’s at least decent too, thank you.

Trigger warnings: >!implied gore and suicide.!<

For success, for such a man-made concept, you can’t be human. Detach completely, strip yourself of meat and mind. Let yourself be nothing. Then, the void comes. A calculating, grinding void that works without a heart. Unbreakable. Now you can climb the corporate ladder like rover built for it.

I hated being a human so much that I wanted to rip my skin apart, tear what makes me whole. Yet when it comes to detaching, I couldn’t bear myself to lose that I could love, even when it kills me every time.

When I started seeing bodies as an oozing flesh with full of disgust, I forgot that mind is what differs us from animals. We have feelings. My body can fail and shut down, for that it’s easy to hate my human nature. But when my feelings fail me, I only hated myself for it. It’s too easy to forget that we’re an emotionally driven creatures, and too brainwashed that we think feeling is unnecessary.

If I followed my instincts, the one that this money-driven world forced on me, I would be working and studying, convinced that this is living, as a machine.

Still, my thoughts couldn’t be silent unless I let it overtake my life. “It’s only survival”, she says, “you wouldn’t be writing this if you didn’t have a >!(redacted)!<”. What is it that makes me so heavy?

I flee, I run from it, I fight it, and I lose eventually. I can’t escape the human nature. I can’t escape feeling. I can’t escape to the solitude. I need, I crave, and I yearn. I fall down from the ladder, lying on the cold ground coddled by what brought me down. Such an uneasy comfort.

My body’s wounded from how much I tried to fight my way out of this flesh prison. Sore, bleeding, and red. Only when I stand at the top of roof or when blade is pressing down on my wrist, I feel like an animal, cowardly running back to the pits. I can only scratch out of this prison bit by bit, the bravery needed to break the chains was too much and too pricy.

In the pits, I hold the >!(redacted)!< in my hands, unsure of being tender or being violent. To hold it and feel the warmth that started it, or to destroy and achieve the success. This was not something I could do to myself.

The >!(redacted)!< is too full of love. A love that’s gushing out of it like a ruptured vein, untamed and volatile. The mere idea of it fears the receiver at sight. The warmth of it burns and stabs the giver. Such thing was too much for humans, perhaps, as it felt to forbidden and sinful that the aftermath felt like a punishment.

Feed that love with pain and cruelty, let it burn without acknowledging. And it will destroy everything in sight like a rabid beast. But feed it with crumbs of recognition, and the warmth will feel like home. It settles, and it no longer hurts. Like a sunlight beaming kindly on the grass, like a mother holding your cheeks, it’s warm and gentle. The way it burns is so domestic, like a fireplace warming up the house.

Such an angelic love, I suppose. Don’t fear the intensity and receive a bliss of eternity. Unfortunately, the receivers wasn’t brave so far. Now it lays in my hands, full of ashes from burning too much for nothing, and bleeding for some saw it as a monster.

It weighs my hands down, too heavy to lift. It hurts my eyes, too harrowing to look at. Yet, its faint embers have a lingering warmth, barely, but there. A subtle memories of how good it was, and a brutal grief of how it could’ve been. What a pity that it’s barely burning. What a shame, that I let others extinguish it, because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I, too, am a coward who ran from the pain, after all, no different than the men. Shameful.

I need to rest, from being a human, from doing nothing, from the emotional turmoil I put myself through, for nothing. Let the silence wash me off, let the stillness calm me down. The cold hard floor will strip me from my love this time, not my body.

Then, I can pretend that I’m a machine. Start anew with clarity and a clear goal. Try to ignore that I’m a human, a walking sack of pumping flesh. Even though my heart’s ache is a constant reminder of the >!(redacted)!< that once loved. Perhaps, such intensity cannot be wiped.