I am dying.

For most of my life, I thought that I had everything under control.

But it was only an illusion.

Sometimes I wish that I could have believed in that illusion forever—it was so much easier that way.

When I started seeing through the illusion, I felt like I had lost everything—everything that I thought I had, everything that I thought I was, and everything I dreamed of becoming. It is confusing and frightening to not know who you are anymore, to feel your whole identity crumble, to see your dreams evaporate, especially when it happens without warning.

I lost control over my life, and everything fell apart.

But that was part of the illusion, this sense that I had control in the first place.

This is not an illusion only for me, but for all of us. It’s just that for me, it decided to die right in front of me. It just happened. Exactly at the time when I thought my career would skyrocket, when I thought that I had “made it” in life, when I found the love of my life. It happened when I thought my dreams were coming true.

They were only dreams, a fictional idea of how my life should be.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done—admitting that I was full of shit for most of my life, full of lies about myself and how my life should and would be. It overwhelms me, and most of the time I find it hard to get out of bed in the mornings, and I most certainly don’t feel very positive about life.

Well…it’s not like it is my fault, or that I could have known of any other, better way. I mean, no one ever teaches us that we are not who we think we are, and that what we identify ourselves with is not real. That kind of realisation comes only with life, with suffering, with experience and maybe with loss.

Especially when your life starts to fall apart, and you suddenly find yourself in a deep mess, wondering how you ever got this far.

I didn’t ask for it to happen. I see many other people getting away with it, and I can’t understand why. That part of me which always feels like a victim never stops asking “why me?”

But I know why—because honesty and truth were always the most important things to me.

And truth is what life is giving me now.

So I’m dying, slowly and bluntly—to the illusion of myself.

I’m nobody now. And how can you be a nobody, in a world that is full of many “somebodies?” You can’t even meet a friend without telling them the story of “me”—of your past experiences, about your work, or how your “me” is doing. I make up stories in my head before I meet my parents, because they won’t understand that I—their son—who was once incredibly driven and ambitious, now isn’t any of that, because he died, and yet he is still here.

So why am I still here?

Because I was always here—even after I died—and I will still be here even after my body will die. I was never anywhere else, I only imagined that I was and would be.

Realising that I was living a life of illusion has been the most painful dream to wake up from, and yet the intense pain can heal me, make me real again, and bring me back to my true, infinite self.

Because everything I imagined about “me” had been a creation of my mind.

It all seemed so real—so captivating—that I forgot that I was the one who was making it all up.

But when I finally saw through myself, I found what I was looking for. The one which I thought was hiding in my personality, my career, in money, relationships. It was in all of those things, but it wasn’t those things. It was only hiding in those until I noticed it.

Because everything starts from nothing, and if I am somebody, then this too came from nothing.

It is all clearer than ever before, and yet it is still hard to accept.

All I have really lost is my control over my life—it feels like I am dying without that control.

And the more I resist dying, the more I suffer and get stuck.

I still don’t know what will happen, but I have a feeling that when I’m ready to surrender to it fully, I will realise why my dreams had to collapse in order for me to wake up.

 

 

 

Author: Erast Matej

Image:  Youtube screenshot 

Editor: Renée Picard