The following is an essay that I wrote as apart of my Emerson Application. The prompt was to write about a metaphor that I find powerful and explore its potential to be helpful and/or harmful in my thinking.
Chaos is a friend of mine.
As a child I hated silence. It left me alone with my thoughts and they scared me. Every time I was exposed to utter quiet, I spiraled into a pit of darkness filled with fear. This immense anxiety left me petrified and hopeless. To combat it, I decided to never allow myself to sit in silence. I refused to be in peace because despite the connotation of it, peace was my personal hell. Soon enough, excess sound became futile against my mind. Thoughts crept their way between verses of songs I used as a distraction and I was crushed beneath the weight of my worries. In hindsight, I should have faced myself head on and accepted the darkness that lingered in my mind, but in the moment, I could only see one way out of that black hole: chaos.
I began to fill my days with activity and deprive myself of rest, because even one second to spare was a key to collapse. As I ran from the clutches of my own insecurities, I grew exhausted and fatigued. That's the problem with running from yourself, you are incapable of escape. I remember there was one day when I was at the dinner table with my parents and all of a sudden I started to cry. I stared at my plate, attempting to conceal the tears as they trickled down my face, but the emotion exploded as I started to explain that I felt overwhelmed. The irony is that I wasn't tired by what I was running from, but by what I was running to. The chaotic frenzy I had turned my life into was suffocating me and I was fully convinced that it was my solution to all my problems. I told everyone that I thrived in constant activity, that I didn't need to take a break, but I was just ignoring the fact that I had replaced one crippling avalanche with another. Despite the fact that I was clearly breaking under my self-imposed pressure, I couldn't seem to let go of it all. I couldn't stop myself from diving into the sea of mayhem.
This pattern of distraction is one that I have noticed quite frequently, not only in my life, but in everyone's around me. Denial is comfortable because we believe that avoidance is the secret to eradicating the problem. The truth is that you can create as much chaos as you want, but none of it will take away the problem at hand. Chaos was my crutch for so long and I have realized how to genuinely turn it into my friend. Chaos is always the enemy when you create it yourself, but by transforming the chaos of the world, you can create harmony in spaces that are void of it.
Chaos is a friend of mine when I take the incontrollable things and learn to accept them and to work with them. It is a friend when I transform obstacles into art and use them as tools to save people from their own chaotic creations. This metaphor is powerful to me because it can either lead you straight into demise or guide you into greatness.