"Who are you?" is a question oft asked by others to me; I never really know how to answer. Currently, it is usually a question I ask myself. There was this time when even in my dreams I was haunted by this question. Even when writing this, the answer to this sphinx's riddle is unknown to me.
I suppose part of the reason I love space and aliens is due to the fact that I feel as if I am from space; that I am not of this world. I struggle internalising certain behaviours which are common for most humans, and the looks I get from others when I fail to grasp such simple subjects seem to affirm my feelings of being an alien; that the next morning my skin will tear off, revealing my green skin beneath. This deep alienation has caused me to exist in this sort of dreamscape of life, as if life were this odd dream, where things just happen and I automatically react. In video-game terms, I am in a constant unskippable cutscene, where control is taken away from me.
Resulting from this deep derealisation, I can sometimes become accidentally sociopathic. As in, I do not intend on being so, but my emotional functionalities simply...cease to be. Sometimes I can be empathetic, but other times I short-circuit. These circuts cannot simply be fixed. I've tried many a time to "just be normal", as my parents would say. It always ended with severe consequences.
For most of my life I contended with identity death. For much of my childhood, I went years without breaking from my dreamlike spell. In fact, it has only been recently in my life that I can truly say I consistently experience lucidity. This is most likely due to the fact that I am now away from people who sought to mould me into something they wanted, rather than what I wanted. However, it is clear the damage has been done; I struggle to explain myself to people, and an identity I should have been forging for myself during my childhood was never born.
In many ways, my digital persona is significantly more developed than my real life one. In the digital world, I am significantly more me. In some senses, the digital worlds I inhabit (Neocities, small Discord communities) feel more real than the real world. It was in this digital world, I didn't have to follow the "rules of masculinity" pushed onto me by parents and elders; I could be myself. It was through that experience that I broke out of a genuinely hostile mindspace I had put myself in, and finally acknowledged who I was to myself. Yet despite all this, the feeling of being an alien never leaves. It feels as if I do not deserve a name, as I do not deserve to be acknowledged. My suicidal ideation takes this particular angle. I seek not just to die, but to cease to exist; to be wiped from the record.
I have fantasised about disappearing one day, and watching the world continue on without me, likely improving without my presence to ruin everything. I usually feel lesser than others; not necessarily through any actual fault of my own, but just for the simple fact that I don't feel like I have a soul. It feels as if I were born without one, as I simply do not know what it feels like to exist with one. I cannot really grieve over it, as I do not know what I have really lost. Instead, I am stuck in this phantasmal state, feeling like a ghost inhabiting a corpse, puppeting it around, merely pretending to be human.
There is a sort of philisophical war being waged within my mind. On one side is the part of me that genuinely wants to vanish; one that seeks erase every piece of evidence that I existed, toss it into the fire, and either waste away or just kill myself. On the other is the part of me that is screaming to be known. This part of me shouts to the heavens "I EXIST!" This part of me desires and craves meaning; this part of me has been carefully cultivated to eventually break myself out of the illusory prison I am in now. This part of me is someone different to the person I am now; she is meaningful, understanding, kind. Most importantly, she has a soul. I started this Neocities to help this person; to cultivate.
Perhaps I will never get a soul, though. Maybe I am getting my hopes up for nothing. Where do I go from there, reader? Do I surrender myself to the void, accepting that my eyes will forever remain devoid of humanity? Perhaps, one day, I will slowly begin to vanish from sight, until I am nothing but a ghost. Perhaps that is what I deserve; a righteous punishment for the soulless.
I will get a soul or die trying.