On the Brink

I feel today - as I so frequently feel - that I am perched on a ridge. I balance precariously on the ridge that seperates sanity from insanity - and I feel that I can look down and see either option available to me. From my standpoint, the world of the insane seems so peaceful, so much less exhausting than the manic, impossibly fast pace of the world that the sane inhabit. I dare not enter one, and I cannot enter the other. It is a perpetual purgatory: unknowing, inescapable, and isolating. Solace comes in finding others who know what it is to be perched on this ridge - I have spent my time in pursuit of such a person 'in the flesh', as it were, rather than hidden behind the words on the pages of my books. In all of his books, Thomas Hardy shows that he knew; in, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', Oscar Wilde shows that he knew. Sartre knew; Rimbaud knew; Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Coleridge - they all knew.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wildflower:
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
There - William Blake knew as well. But what is the use of all these dead people knowing and understanding? Of having shared my agonies? And no - that isn't too strong a word. Unless you know what it is like to be terrified of living in this world of other peoples' making, you aren't in a position to judge my terminology. Right now, I want so badly to give in to my version of sanity - the world's version of insanity. Why, for the sake of those around me, don't I? Living has become a constant battle, a submission, a suppression of myself.
Why am I writing this? Because I am at the point where I desperately need to find someone who understands. Not somebody who brushes this aside with the view that, 'everyone feels like that sometimes, yeah, you just, like, DEAL'. If just one person could say to me - okay, you view the world differently to me, and I cannot wholly understand your view, but neither will I invalidate it. That they accept this isn't some drawn-out teenage anxst; some cynical idealism; some image being created.
What is the purpose of my blog? I was asked that earlier today - pertinent question indeed. Frequently, to mock the world, to laugh at it, something that you find amusing cannot surely be as terrifying or inhospitable. Occasionally, through a poem I've chosen or an entry I've written, I've attempted to convey - perhaps unsuccessfully - that it is not cynicism that dictates my ideas. And today, I've tried to show you something else, another aspect. I know what any reader's reaction will be, with phrases such as 'attention-seeker', 'dramatist' and 'ego-trip' springing into minds globally as you have read this. Frankly, if you want to think that, you go for it. You're wrong. I've given you the option to understand and if you choose not to take it, then that says more about your relationship with the 'real world' than it does mine. In a few days, I'll produce another Rant about something - food packaging, game-playing, my perpetual computer-related torments - and everything, for you at least, will be Back To Normal. Consider yourselves lucky you can walk away from the brink this post directed you towards - because I don't have that option.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. (Erich Fromm).