I am simultaneously locked inside and outside my own body. Some days my hands do not feel like they are my own, even if I order them to pick up the customer’s check. Sounds of doors slamming and coworkers asking me to refill water pitchers muffle in my ears, and I cannot recognize the noises as anything more than alien chatter. Truffle fries and gourmet burgers might as well be plastic toys for kindergarteners—lacking any real taste or smell. My vision blurs with fuzzy floaters and disorienting light-spots circling the barely formed map of my environment.
I want to scream and beg my coworkers to pull me out of my dissociative daze. Why do they not ask what’s wrong? Can they not see that I do not understand what they are saying to me, that everything I touch is moments away from slipping through my invisible fingertips? Or have I gotten that good at pretending that I am not actively questioning my sanity when I force my tongue to ask the table, do you want another soda refill?
I am disconnected from my environment because I am disconnected from myself, caged in a world of thoughts that paradoxically will not let me think clearly. I am stuck in the unsettling interstice between the reality created by society and the reality in my head. My spiraling, anxious mind often fails to remind me that I am safe and present, while the outer world rushes past my eyes—like a poorly-paced movie one wants to pause but cannot find the remote. I want to cry as I watch this reality slip past my consciousness—through the part of me that is locked within the membranes of my mind, trying to process the inception of an experience within an experience within an experience.
I often wonder if this empty vessel of headspace, strapped to my various states of consciousness, is the closest I will ever get to silence. I crave silence most of the time, amidst the overstimulating sounds of this city, but I did not know that it would feel this unnerving. How chaotic must my world be? How chaotic must I be, if the only way my nervous system can search for silence is by mentally removing myself from society and physically removing my body from my sentience? My dissociative self is sadly not a witness to my world but a captive to my mind, chained to the fear that the minute I return to the restaurant floor, my body will cave into a carcass and dissipate into dust. In its own twisted way, my dissociation is trying to keep me alive, creating some silence in my life even if it is an eerie, desensitized state of silence.
The energetic space of dissociation and distance between where my mind is ambushed by anxiety and where customers yell at me to grab the check is the only place I can secure silence. I have to morph this purgatory into a palace. Is there a way to quiet my world without wondering if I am actually inside my body? The closest I have found is in my writing, but even my writing at times feels too loud. Is there a way to write without words, thoughts, or hands? Is there a way to be still and silently present—enjoying this reality instead of escaping it.
if this is reality after all?