Well, it wasn't necessarily a nightmare. There were no monsters chasing me, I didn't wake up screaming or in a cold sweat or anything. It was more just... unsettling. And not even when I first woke up, either. I woke up normally. It was only when I was telling my sister about it that I realised just how unsettling it was.
In the dream, I had been kidnapped by a very conservative Christian couple and forced to live in their house. I couldn't leave the house, I had to dress in long dresses and skirts and follow their rules. I think they even re-named me. That wasn't the scary part. The scary part was that their regime brainwashed me. The kidnapping wasn't the dangerous part - the letting me live in their home and feeding me and using some sick form of "love" to twist me into their perfect daughter was the dangerous part. They made me feel like I belonged there, made me forget who I was, how I am the very antithesis of everything they stood for.
To the point where when the police rescued me, I refused to go. I felt safe and secure with my kidnappers, they convinced me I had everything I'd ever need. I did not remember who I was before they had "saved" me.
Even writing it out now, I'm sickened at how easily I gave in to that. I'm horrified that the promise of security allowed me to settle for that and forget who I am.
That's not what I want. I don't want to stagnate just because it's the "safer" option.
I've been trying all day to make sense of this dream because it has nothing to do with anything I've been thinking about lately. In fact, I feel just the opposite lately. With the end of my final semester rapidly approaching, it actually feels more like time is going too fast. Like the world is speeding all around me and I'm fighting just to keep up. Like I'm on a train racing up a hill and I know the train is going to drop but I can't yet see what I'm dropping into on the other side of the hill - will it be a smooth ramp down or a steep drop off a cliff?
Granted I'd actually like some measure of security. But if there's no risk in something whatsoever, then what makes it worth doing, you know?
And though I tell myself this, do I really believe it? Sometimes part of me still feels like maybe I should just stagnate, fall into a monotonous routine for the rest of my life, never ever take a risk again. My anxiety is terrible, the idea of taking a risk and having it fall through terrifies me. That part of me keeps dragging me down, telling me not to move, not to even graduate. "You've been in school for twenty years straight," it coos at me, "it's all you've ever known. How on earth will you function without the structure school gives your life? You won't. You'll fail."
(This is the same part of me that sometimes tells me it'd be best to drop out of school so I don't fail.)
Obviously I'm afraid of failure. I know that. I'm afraid of risk.
But that damn dream is showing me I'm also afraid of a no risk lifestyle robbing me of who I am. Because underneath all my anxiety, I do feel I really am a ~*~free spirit~*~
The question thus becomes, how on earth do I find a balance before I move? Or do I just have to ride out the train ride to the top and accept the drop?
-Nym-
No comments:
Post a Comment