The edges of the red paint are curling down, twirling their own petals of latex into shards of whimsy and rebellion. The rubbery flakes of thrice-coated Bold Cherry veer away from the straight edges of the crown molding but can't quite detach from their substrata. They're terrified. They're flawed. They're ugly. But they're my imperfections, I guess.

My overactive imagination has made trying to live outside of my head and its machinations nearly impossible this week. In reveling in my dreams, pretending that a life exists outside of my own and everything goes just how it should, I've unknowingly let go of some of that control I'm constantly grasping with white knuckles to prevent swirling into an abyss of emptyness. And I'm finding a fresh feeling of freedom to experience the kind of genuine happiness I haven't found in a while -- the kind of happiness that comes from honest external validation that tells you you're worth something.

That also means that when I'm not happy, it's hard to just be neutral. Once this door cracks open even a smidge, past resentments crest in crescendo against the hollowed out wooden panels, splintering the door to allow anger and tears and frustration and sorrow to fight the joy for the best seat.

I just want you to know me. To tell me that I'm going to be ok. To tell me that it's ok to cry until you're too tired to cry anymore. That I'm still normal. To tell me why I never quite feel complete even when everything around me is just so, when anyone could look in the front window and see just so evident all around. Tech seems so easy now. I keep telling myself it'll get easier here, it has to, but it's hard to live in the present when the only thing running through my mind is to look towards the future because it'll be better.

I just want to be ok with this.

People shouldn't be this complicated. Or capable of causing this much hurt. And so frustratingly single-minded: I can list on my hand all the things that rack me with sobs and cause me to hide in my own mind. But, identity-less Internet World, I don't think you're ready for that list yet.

Part of this whole experience was supposed to be about "finding me" and "knowing who I am as an individual." But what happens when I realize I don't necessarily like what I've found? And when I recognixe that there's not really a solution to be pointed out in a table, to be calculated and applied?

I really want to feel home again, wherever it's moved to. What to do when my usual tokens of home fail to comfort? Where to go when there's no longer a physical location to be home, there's no longer a specific person to hug to be home? I don't want to have to escape to the numbness of my mind everytime I wonder who I am because I don't have a marker anymore to point me in the right direction ro remind me where I'm going from where I've come from.