A Collective Trauma

Grasping in the dark for something you can't quite put into words.

Guided only by the faint fear of falling into the dark vacuum – a gaping deficiency that lingers within that carefully manicured psyche. You don't dare tread near the vacuum. You'll do anything to avoid even thinking about it. Quick, find a distraction.

Always cycling through mind-numbing social activities that promise to provide you with fulfillment. Debate clubs, affinity groups, political parties, historical reenactment societies, rainbow gatherings, punk gigs, fan conventions. You decide to go to a protest downtown.

With every new social engagement, you imagine you'll find the meaning you so desperately crave by converging with yet another group of like-minded busy little bees.

You'll soon start to wonder if your shared fixations are superficial, ill-considered, ultimately a waste of life. But you'll shake yourself out of it and continue to go through the motions of social ceremony, because anything is better than falling into that dreaded vacuum lurking deep in the crevasses of your mind.

Peace never comes from other people. It has to come from an understanding and an acceptance of the self. You know this but you pretend to have forgotten.

Only by connecting with your base elements; the self free from decades of social manipulation and subjugation can you find the meaning you've lost touch with.

Reaching into the vacuum to retrieve your innate uniqueness. This is the only way you can hope to catch a glimpse of whatever lies beneath the dense layers of deception you've amassed. You know this beyond any doubt when you lay asleep at night, but allowing such dangerous ideas to enter your waking thoughts is too frightful a proposition. The vacuum is just too dark a place.

You possess the ability to break through the thick haze of bullshit enveloping everything you are. But the warm embrace of the group is so much easier to cultivate.

Using shiny new people to distract yourself from all that existential dread is so very easy. It's what you know. It's comforting. It's intoxicating. It's what everyone else is doing.

Hungrily consuming anyone that happens to fall into your orbit, the same way you use up any other throwaway product.

Absorbing them into the banal tedium that is your existence, dragging them down to your meek and docile level.

Breaking your near-lifelong tango with convention and uniformity would be too distasteful. What if people stare? What if they're scornful?

You want so much to feel at peace with your place in the universe. But all your life, you've steadily been indoctrinated into the cult of leviathan. A senseless, punishing death march that dilutes and depletes everything it touches. It inflicts on you an onerous unease.

Leviathan's programming constrains your ability to connect with yourself, your environment, other people. You've been taught to live in fear of all that makes you brilliant and unique. To replace connection with consumption. Desire with duty, obligation, constraint.

You so crave the perceived permeance of community, of a shared understanding, shared values, shared goals.

The truth is dreadfully hard to accept. Community is nothing more than a shared delusion. A callous fraud that promises to make you whole, but instead leaves you tapped out, broken and thoroughly compromised.

You know this, don't you? When you're in a deep sleep and the vacuum starts to open itself up, spewing out its secrets.

Community is when people get together to collectively and violently repress their uniqueness and adopt a bland inoffensive homogeneity. An army of traumatized and traumatizing soldiers, always marching in unison, boots stamping deafeningly on the tarmac. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.

It's tragic watching your decay.

You so hope to be told you're something greater than your dreary day to day existence suggests.

You're not.

You are the sum of the parts you've chosen for yourself and those parts are bland, vapid, frivolous.

A follower of followers of followers of followers. An old joke told so many times in so many places by so many people, it can only hope to engender a strained smirk.

In trying to soothe your disconnect by centering your place in the group or the subculture; by putting the needs of a manufactured, forced community above your own desires, you adopt an almost-religious fervor for both conformity and sacrifice.

"I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter."

"I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter."

"I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter."

You lie so confidently to your own face. It's almost become a reflex now.

You're an echo of a television Christmas special broadcast a hundred times to millions of people, year after year. Scripted, choreographed and predictable. Something familiar and thoughtless to fall asleep to before the next workday starts.

You expertly avoid ever acknowledging your true desires, instead dedicating your brief remaining moments on this planet to sacrificing yourself to the cause, the community, the nation, the faith, the struggle, or whatever other wholly artificial spectre you decide to build up and glue yourself to.

You are forever on auto-drive. A constant loop of weary self-regulating insipidity.

It's detestable what you've become. Really it is. Willfully squandering every speck of potential the cosmos seeded you with. Every original thought. Every creative impulse. Every inclination to be you.

And for what? To be accepted? To fit in? To be assigned a role? One more cog in Leviathan's machine as it churns away at everything beneath its feet.

You don't get it. This isn't the way it was supposed to be. You were going to be so much more before you let them all beat you into the bland, flavorless pulp that puddles before me.

They took everything from you. Everything fierce, radiant, defiant. Everything that sparkled, moved and inspired. All that made existence in this world a tolerable and worthwhile pursuit.

All that's left for you now in this world is a sunken hole in the desert, and it's rapidly filling with sand. Dry coarse sand, funneling into every orifice, stripping away at your flesh and bones.

It doesn't have to end this way. You can reclaim your unique. Unleash your fire and fury to claw back everything that was coerced from you. You can crawl out of that sinkhole before the sand completely breaks you down.

Abandon your need to placate the spiteful, erratic hive that has forced itself on you for so long. You have the power to burn to an ember everything that has cruelly choked the unique out of you for all these years.

Conquer your fear of being alone. Rediscover what it means to be you. Disconnect from everything that drains your will and leap into the only place no tie-wearing tyrant can follow. The dark vacuum within you. The place you most fear, the place where you stuff all your truths.

Submerge yourself in the vacuum. Let it become you.

Bask in the solitude of the self, hear your thoughts and yours alone. Take a series of deep breaths and gather every morsel of strength you have left. You're going to need it.

Wait.

Absorb it all. Every deep-seeded secret the vacuum holds. Every insight you've forced yourself to bury. The totality of your lost enlightenment.

Wait.

Wait...

Now. It's time.

You are become the full manifestation of the unsealed dark vacuum, the unrepentant force of nature that absorbs all lies and spits out cold hard truths.

Burst out in righteous fury. Take your apt revenge for all that's been done to deprive you of you.

You have reclaimed your unique, embraced every desire you long suppressed. You will not be sacrificed to the will of others. Never again.

Fully embody the self and no force on Earth will stop you from living and dying as you are. Ungovernable, ferocious, piercing, glimmering, sublime. You.

Everything that subjugated you in your former life will be eviscerated in a fiery blast of indignation.

Every little piece of the world you raze quickly adds up in the quest to destroy the universe.

You are a bellwether for the discontented. Go forth and dismantle the instruments of your oppression. Never let them chisel away pieces of you again. Be whole. Completely and fully you.