31/05/22 - Faking my Death
I've been dealing with some very strange thoughts recently. I would say intrusive thoughts, but recently everything has just been really... weird? Is the only way I can describe it. I recently recieved a message from someone on my old uni course. I didn't really have any friends back on my course, that was something that I really struggled with, but I did manage to get on speaking terms with about one person. The other day she messaged me after not hearing from me for months, asking if I was still on the course. My immediate thought, without any prompting was "pretend to be dead". Why? Why was that my first thought to being asked what had happend to me? I suppose I realised that no one knew what had happened to me, and I guess my lecturer hadn't said anything. I didn't want to reply to the message, because I had no idea what to say. This happens a lot, even with people that I am close to, but pretending to be dead as a means of escaping responding?? In no scenario would that work out well for me. I was going back to Uni and the likelyhood was that I would end up seeing someone from the course again where they would inevitably ask why I had never been back in contact. But then I really did not want to reply to that message. I still haven't, so we'll see if they end up thinking I'm dead or not.
I think the desire to fake your own death is something that a lot of people can relate to. It's less what it is and more the idea of wiping away your old life without any baggage and starting completely fresh. I used to think about this a lot before I went to university. I've lived in my hometown my entire life and it really did feel like everybody knew absolutely everybody. Going to college for my alevels, I met people from the next city over and somehow we still all knew each other in one way or another. I felt trapped with my childhood and teenage self, like nothing I could do could stop me from being known and every growing pain and embarrassing adolescent experience was out there for everyone I had ever interacted with to see. I wanted nothing more than to go somewhere where nobody knew anything about me, somewhere where I could start fresh. I think it's interesting then, that after moving to a different country even- I live in the Uk, I moved from England to Wales- I'm getting this feeling again. There is no one here who knows me from before, there are no connections between these two versions of myself, but already I'm feeling the desire to start fresh again. I feel like I messed up my chance for a first impression, and now everyone has formed an opinion of me that I'm unhappy with, thus I now want to try again.
Whilst I wanted a fresh start, it had always terrified me. I knew how hard I found it to begin anew, how hard I found it to make friends, and talk to strangers, how long it took me to form bonds with people, yet I was still surprised when things didn't go so smoothly. I found myself craving the familiarity of my hometown and the people in it, despite my past desire to get as far away as possible. I guess it's really hard to find that balance, between the embarrassment of having people know too much about you, and the isolation of having people not know you at all. I'm not likely to be faking my own death any time soon, but I wonder how many chances to restart a person can have before they all catch up and become one?