Liberation

I know I’m on the right path when it feels lonelier.

The transparent walls around me shatter and I step out into a clearer reality, a sharpness of sceneries when I put on my glasses, only this time I’m taking them off.

The air is fresh, and I am unbound to the things and people that I used to tie myself to. No Twitter, no kneeling before someone else’s expectations, no hesitation from feeling forced to do something. My energy is my own to give, and I decide whether I’ll give it to someone or something else.

Liberation.

That’s what it is, bit by bit through little transformations each year. As my friends do, I feel uneasy about turning thirty in the next two years, but these moments of gradual liberation make me think that there ought to be a small gift each year unfolds. Maybe narcissism is like an onion; you keep peeling it until all the layers are gone and you’re left with nothing, because even the innermost part is, well, a layer.

However, I don’t have to be a narcissist forever, even when its remnants stay with me to the end of my life.

All the destructive defenses my childhood heart learned will subside, and days will morph into things I’ve never imagined before as I train to embrace my freedom, my authority. I’m silently excited to see what will come into shape, and suddenly my future does not feel as murky as it was before.

The distance between me and other people is also clearer.

I can see the floor bricks that measure how far I am to them, and perpendicular to it, the outlines that frame their figure: their hair, their shoulders, their bodies.

Their faces are blurred, though. Distorted. Pixelated.

I realize that maybe I've never known them for all these years, the shapes and colors of their will, their hopes, their despair. This time, instead of jumping outside my body and pretending to wear their skin, I am an outsider studying the curves of their noses, their necks, their lips, like a visitor in a museum observing sculptures.

There has never been a more vivid distinction that I am me and they are them, a sense of otherness that, instead of alienating, is refreshing.

This is the reversed process of unlearning when you’re a narcissist, and I wonder whether it’ll still feel refreshing to die a baby like Benjamin Button. I wish there will be time left for me to bounce back, that when I reach the stage of a baby, I won’t die. Instead, I can have another reversal so that I can experience all those youthful years I’ve lost growing up, regaining what I was supposed to experience back then.

All of these are uncharted territories for me, waiting to be explored.