Losing you

It is okay to lose yourself because sometimes when you are lost you make ways to find yourself. You never stop chasing until you discover that you are not really lost but just scared of something, and thus decided to make an escape. You tried to hide from the truth, the reality, the pain of living, the pain of being yourself, the fear of being alone and left behind, and many more. You are not lost. You—yes, you—are just within the layers of your body, just waiting to unveil yourself and to be free of all the blunders in life.

But being free seems an impossible thing. You are tied up by pain, rejection, failure, a little bit of happiness and amusement, sorrow, and all the other feelings because you are only human and capable of anything. After you feel all the emotions, then there comes the feeling of being lost.

It starts in the days when you feel numb. You feel like there is some kind of anesthetic injected into your core, so that you wouldn’t be able to feel anything. You ask yourself why. But you really have no idea. Because of this nonresponse you keep searching. You find your own adventure, you do your explorations. And sometimes there is a severe desire to rebel against the world, for not giving you the answer.

Then you engage in rebellion against your life. You think it is the easy way out. You demand an acceptable reason why you are lost, why life seems not to care even if your life sucks, even if you are falling hard, getting bruised, and in fact crumbling from intense pain inside yourself. Life doesn’t pick you up, and is not even trying to help you. You curse at life because of this. You think you’re an idiot for not getting the answer to why you are lost.

Why am I not getting an answer, or perhaps even a hint? you shout to the sky. As though some entity up there would provide you an answer, like what you have heard from the stories of others who have gone through such an ordeal. Expectedly, you do not get a response. And you curse at life again. You embrace the blame game. You even defy the higher entity up there. You feel that you’re the victim, and pity yourself thoroughly.

As the haunting goes on, you drag yourself up and do what needs to be done. You wake up. You dress up. You show up. You mingle with others. But at the end of it, amid all the seemingly scripted dramas in life, you feel lost again. So the cycle goes on and on, because you get tired of chasing after an answer. You are giving up, you do not care anymore.

You ignore that feeling although it keeps hammering itself into your system. That feeling demands your complete attention. It wants you to become its slave again. No matter how high the barricade you build against it, the feeling wins—again.

This time it is stronger, more intense. Silently, you beg for someone to help you. But no one seems to care — maybe because they don’t know what you’re going through, or maybe like you they are lost and hoping that someone will spoon – feed them the answer why. At the end of every day you cry out, because this is the only thing you can do. You isolate yourself even more. You feel that misery is the best companion.

But one day, the light comes. The light wakes you up. After days of feeling lost, you find the answer to everything — the

answer to why many people are getting lost, and why they are lost stars trying to light up even if their bulb is flickering nonstop. You come to know that the answer is within yourself, and it just takes time to discover it.

You feel the new you. The new you, who are feeling sorry for what you have done, for the wrongs you have made. For the ruthless words you have thrown up at the sky. But what is done is done. To give back, you try to bring light to other people. But the truth is, it is only they who can find the answer. You may extend a helping hand, but they are the only ones who can find the switch and light up their own bulb.

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Robinson B. Valenzona, 24, is a senior high school teacher at Muñoz National High School in Nueva Ecija.