“Picture Perfect” – Said The Liar To The Mime

I’ve always felt wrong, like a 1000 word puzzle smashed together by a careless three year old. Pieces jammed in out of place and out of shape, the picture a mutated attempt at what’s on the box, with all the symmetry of Picasso.

The image on my metaphorical box is pretty and well ordered, my pieces are not. I’ve always felt like the small child responsible for my creation got angry and tired halfway through and tossed everything up in the air to let the pieces fall where they may.

Leaving me unfinished and full of holes.

I’ve spent two decades trying to fill those holes, with love and with objects, with career and friends and a family (or 5)of my own making. I had others try to patch them over with diagnoses and treatment plans.

I tried to fill them with pills and powders, with shining needles that just left more holes. I was a voodoo doll, stabbing needles into my soft places in the hopes of suffering and vengeance, of anything really as long as it took up space, flooded the cracks and glued me together.

The strongest glues are toxic, everyone knows that.

My darker days still catch me with a mind like Hiroshima in that final second before, just waiting for the boom, the smoke, the uninhibited destruction of disaster.

So here I sit, a personal menace in a painstakingly synthesised environment of regimented control. A home full of places for everything with everything in it’s place, except perhaps me.

I force myself to live by schedules and charts, cleaning calendars and preplanned wardrobe choices. I create this image of calm, of effortless organisation in the hopes that maybe one day I will have almost balanced out the private chaos I wont let them see.

I’d rather be branded a liar than inspire pity, better to suffer in silence than seek sympathy.

It’s all about image and I am the Bree Vandercamp of mental instability. Turning my agoraphobia into dinner parties, ever the house proud hostess, never letting on that I’m afraid to leave. My anxious incapacity for stillness becomes projects, DIY obsessions and the quest to bake the perfect cupcake. The harrowing highs and desperate lows of my moods and energies are passed off as a writer’s eccentricity.

Little white lies.

They tell me that this is what it means to be better, in some ways they’re right. I am better.

I am a better liar, a better chameleon, a better display of the expected progress.

I’m not healed, I haven’t changed, I can’t be fixed. My holes aren’t filled and I still trip over the cracks.

I’m still put together wrong but I look okay and that’s what matters, right?

 

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