Disclaimer: the following article doesn’t reflect the author’s personal experiences. 

Science teaches us that respiration is the basic process of life. A simple action, sustaining life. Inhale. Exhale. It sounds so easy, you don’t even have to think about it. If your oxygen levels are low, doctors can use an oxygen tank to help you breathe better. If your heart isn’t beating right, the doctors can use a machine to see what’s going on inside. But how do you explain that panic fuelled episode you experience randomly throughout the day? What do you do when you can’t take a full enough breath to exhale properly? How do you explain to a doctor that you can’t breathe when everything inside you is working perfectly fine?

The simple answer is, you can’t. It feels impossible to verbalise these feelings, and even if you did, could you definitely say that it’s real? There’s no way to touch it, see it, or measure it. All you can rely on is a feeling. Reality loses its meaning when you can’t trust your thoughts, the same ones meant to guide you. So when the days inevitably melt together and you find yourself trudging through them as a shell of who you are, the urge to feel real, to make the noise stop, or even to feel anything again, overpowers every sense of who you are.

Forget the internal war brewing inside of you; at some point, everything on the outside feels like a hoax. Like that Botox clinic you pass on your way to school, or those dystopian adverts of the newest bottle of foundation, or those endless hours spent doomscrolling on Pinterest, hitting save on pins with the intent of future manifestations..I mean, how do you resist when there are so many ways to be. It feels addictive to change and transform yourself to a point where you feel like an amalgamation of all the lives you tried out. Life and performance become synonymous. Existence becomes more and more insignificant. The reality is that feeling this way is so profitable…the system is built for you to feel inadequate, and when you do, there’s always a solution. A temporary solution wrapped in false security and distraction. At some point, you can’t help wondering, what do you feel like without all these extra layers? Do you still exist when you’re raw and vulnerable? How do you know if, once you strip away the superficial, you are still enough to be real?

Perhaps that’s when you find yourself desperately trying to stay afloat in the sea of numbness, desperate to know you’re real, maybe scratching the inside of your wrist to feel something might help you stay on the surface a little longer. But let’s be honest, who wants to stay afloat when you can soar through that sea and run onto the warm sand that patiently waits to welcome you home? So what starts as scratches on the inside of your wrist turns into scabs on your inner thighs, and then into long cuts on the inside of your wrist, until you walk around with bloody slashes covered by long-sleeved sweaters and chunky bracelets. So while some people choose to vape or some to gamble, some people choose to look at the inside of their skin until they feel an eerie calm sweep over them.

Can you blame them for finding solace, especially in a system that benefits from our suffering? Choosing to be vulnerable instead can feel uncomfortable, but maybe the most uncomfortable words and visuals are the times when we feel the most authentically human. Feeling or experiencing something so deeply raw and unnerving can feel exhilarating. Perhaps that’s why people get tattoos, the pain of the needle on your skin to create a space for something that is wholly you, to become a permanent part of you.There’s something so refreshing about the idea of being stabbed a million times to decorate the palate we were born with, it almost feels like flipping off the circumstances you were given, to carve a niche for yourself, to know that you control what you are. There is something painfully beautiful about turning those deeply tender and hidden parts of yourself into art.

Beksinski, a Polish artist growing up during world war 2, encapsulated this feeling perfectly as he captured his nightmares through art. Something about looking at this particular piece of his, feels ironically uncomfortable and comforting at the same time. He captures the art of silent suffocation, a slow, painful suffering through the blood flowing freely, especially from somewhere as fragile as sunken eyes. As morbid as this is, it feels like life can feel debilitatingly heavy, and sometimes painting morbid sights is how you can exist.

It all ties back to existing. It’s so easy to forget how lonely life can make you feel, not the kind of loneliness that’s amplified by the lack of people, but the kind stimulated by your brain, like a box of mismatched puzzle pieces. Existence is hard and coping is messy, so when I hide my pain like an embarrassing love letter I wrote a stranger, I feel more suffocated, and when I wear those chunky bracelets, I feel like a fraud, so maybe there is no “right” solution. As kids or even adults, the narrative of “what will other people think?” is branded onto us and it teaches you that your scars and secrets are weights that you have to carry with you. The need to cover up and live like you haven’t felt pain feels like submitting to a system that doesn’t even benefit us.

So what? How do you live in a system that is made against us? Humorist Dorothy Parker once wrote “Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, Acid stains you and drugs cause cramps, Guns aren’t lawful,Gas smells awful ,Might as well live” I once read about this concept of sacrificing willingness, like instead of willing yourself to work or clean or create maybe it’s more beneficial if we sacrifice that will to the things that make us feel human, even if everything in the world makes you feel insignificant, you could sacrifice your will to creating art or taking a walk or sitting with a loved one.

So in a world that’s telling you how to live, maybe the best way to exist is out of spite. When I get told to act a certain way, I will be as messy as I can be and when I’m told to hide the most tender parts of me, I will wear my scars like graffiti on cathedral walls.There is so much strength in choosing to be messily honest. Whether it’s choosing to paint your pain or choosing to find strength in your scars or owning your hard truths.

In a system that aims to remind you of your inadequacy, choosing to simply exist unapologetically and spitefully can be the biggest act of rebellion.

I exist as I am, and that is enough. 

Written by Reona