There is so much happening within me. Endless thoughts bathe my mind and soul, although they’ve lost their refining refreshment and have become lukewarm over time. These thoughts seem to throw me into a convoluted world of my own confusion, but in actuality they serve to make it clear to me that I am indeed alive. They fill me with a certainty that I must exist, even as I flow mindlessly with masses of students from class to class. When I am at school, my abstract thoughts, my doodles, and my scribbled lists of ideas and dreams, remind me that this life is not a dream and that I am indeed an individual. Unfortunately, I will never wake up to find out that these years, made up of monotonous days that I can hardly distinguish from each other, were an imaginary product of a deep sleep. Even as I feel a barely familiar childhood life being sucked out of me with every mechanical day of lessons and homework loads, I know that only my heart–not the one pounding in my chest, but rather the one that feels more real–is dying.

But why am I decaying inside? Why do I feel as though I must hide within the crowds with my head down, when every cell in my body is praying for release from my loneliness? Why do I embrace my textbooks when I yearn to hug friends, and tell them all that flows through me? Is it because nobody cares to look beneath my bleak appearance? Or is it because I rarely let anyone do so? Have I changed? Or has everyone else?

My mind grasps and releases these questions, trying to find the innate key to success that everyone but me seems to have. As I incessantly wonder, my distress reminds me that I am indeed alive and painfully unique inside.

High school has been the worst possible setting for these years of my life, during which I have felt my heart become an aching void, as vacant as a plastic disposable cup. High school has robbed me of my ability to communicate my thoughts to the world with confidence and clarity. Teachers and counselors work to benefit their students, but I feel that they have unintentionally driven my spirited desire to learn deep down through an abyss leading to the very core of my being. Only my convoluted thoughts bring this desire back to the surface, over and over.

Even as I write these words as honestly as I know how, I do not feel that I make any sense. My emotions are lost in translation to tangible forms.

Dear reader, if you have gotten this far I applaud your tenacity. This is only a mush of ideas regarding the certainty of my confusion, the awareness of my unawareness, and the emptiness of my depth. This is only a glimpse into a vain search for myself, when I am already here.