Some days I wander around my house, feeling lost and disconnected, no grip on the texture of the morning or the space around me. I write about having forgotten who I am, but the truth is that I have never really known. My life has been a series of failed attempts at being who I believe others want me to be, failed attempts at being kind, having substance, living with interest and curiosity. I am not curious. I am simply hanging on, waiting for something that never comes because it has no shape, because the edges are dull, because the layers are a fiction, a fantasy, a ruse. I keep hoping that the horizon holds something for me, something that will glue me back together, lift me out of the ground. The horizon lies; it looks close enough to touch but is forever looming, taunting, out of reach.

When I was young, I thought I was supposed to be beautiful, was taught that beauty lives on the skin and the physical impression you leave behind when you have left the room; no-one talked of the beauty on the inside. The inside can’t be seen. I tried to be beautiful, but beauty is the luck of genetics, a luck I didn’t have, so instead, I retreated into shadows and marked up my skin; anything to be unseen. Being unseen is lonely, grows tiresome, has a weight that becomes unbearable. It is also an addiction, a habit, a way to give meaning to your life . It leaves you wandering and lost, looking for shapes in the darkness, coming up empty handed. But still you search.

I came to define myself by what ailed me, by loss and blindness, the afflictions of self loathing and now those that come with the cruel strike of the clock. I will always struggle with the emptiness and the wandering, unable to take shape or give off light, but I also understand that the inside can be seen, through poetry and art and acts of kindness. Perhaps the horizon isn’t a villain after all, but is there to guide the way, to remind us that life is both beautiful and unruly, cruel and abundantly generous.