Lost | Teen Ink

Lost

March 25, 2021
By LTODOROVIC1 SILVER, Rochester, Michigan
LTODOROVIC1 SILVER, Rochester, Michigan
7 articles 0 photos 1 comment

I’m lost


I don’t know how else to put it. I’ve been so hyper-focused on life that I must’ve misunderstood it as I just couldn’t put an end to this game that had lost me friends and now it’s a real shame because I don’t even know my own name and to what I claim, and I’m stuck in this labyrinth of burn and bliss of fact and myth and I don’t know which way is which while I try to stitch together some kind of map to help get out of this trap that I have created and that I baited myself and I had waited to stop and smell the flowers or admire the tall city towers, and I just don’t know anything anymore. I feel like I just opened a locked door only to fall through the floor, but as I drop I don’t drop but rather I soar. 

This confusion intrigues me and strokes my curiosity while I pick up velocity as I can’t contain my excitement but all of a sudden I feel frightened as I realize that all there is around me is just empty skies and I feel so paralyzed yet my body has never felt so alive. Yet as I try to cry out for someone all I feel is doubt as I try to create a route to find a way out when I realize what this is all about.

 The truth is I’m clueless. I’ve tried to act like its cool and I know what I’m doin’ but there’s not a way to prove it and now I gotta move and take my shot in the dark hoping that I don’t sin by missing my mark and I know that I’ve got to come up with a better end to this plan so I don’t become a slave for the man but I just don’t know where to begin. I don’t know where or how to begin because of the norms that were set up by my own kin whereas I don’t even feel comfortable in my own skin and to make amends I follow the trends but I wish that could all just come to an end. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the trends, but they keep on leading me to dead ends and I realize that I’m still lost and I don’t know the cost to try and get out of this mess that I’m stuck in because I don’t know how to address my own identity and it’s giving me this feeling of insanity and all this time I keep on falling endlessly.

 But then I remember. I’m not falling, I’m just soaring through the empty skies. All of sudden I can move again, but at the same time my veins lose all of their adrenaline so here I am just lost in every sense of the word not knowing whether or not my cries were heard. However, if I know one thing about being lost, it’s that if you don’t move, you get nowhere. So I quickly teach myself how to fly so that I can continue to soar through this sky of endless blue like a philosopher as they look through a book thinking about false and true. And as I soar through these empty skies, I have this vacant feeling inside as the more I realize that I don’t know about the truths behind my eyes.

 I start to reflect on my life and think about why I’m soaring through these skies, and then it hits me like a linebacker. I realize that I used to just act like myself and not worry about the thoughts of anyone else, I was a kid with no worries about what others thought. But then, something happened at a certain age, where all of a sudden our bodies began to change and our thought processes would rearrange and these judgments of ourselves began to project onto everyone else and that left people like me who had a different time with these insecurities with two options.

 The first was to fall into this swarm of trends and pop culture and new norms, and the other was to be swept away by this storm of rejection and social neglection. So I chose to fit in, without realizing the one big consequence that’s caused me to be here. You see, all this time I’ve been hiding my true self, trying to fit in with everyone else, ended up making me feel less like myself. And when I went to go take my personality off of that closet shelf, I realized that it had disappeared. All that because it didn’t even recognize itself. So now I go searching for myself, and after all of this time, I finally realize the price to pay for hiding yourself. And that cost is getting yourself lost.


The author's comments:

During the lockdowns in the Spring of 2020, I had a lot of time to reflect on my life choices, which threw me into an identity crisis that would last for a few months. I wrote this piece reflecting on the emotions that I felt during that time and how truly (for lack of better words) lost I was. I wound up previously trying to fit in as much as possible so that way I was liked by my peers, but that just wasn't a reliable option as I wasn't letting myself live life the way that I wanted, and this piece exemplifies that. 


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