I haven't felt like this in over a year. I've felt many things within that year, but not this. Not this numbness, this complete misunderstanding I hold with myself. I've gotten very good at lying. I've gotten very good at putting on a face that even I can't notice I'm wearing. I have gotten so very good at forgetting myself.

But then, all of a sudden, those masks come off. The walls I had so sturdily built can no longer keep myself out. I creep into my façade. My struggles, like a tidal wave, flood the city I had built. The city of everyday. The city of routine, the city of happy. The fucking city of happy that stands at the border of myself, just like the fake city of North Korea stands at the border of South- a shining face of the world it pretends to be.

That's me. I'm a North Korea in a world of South Koreas. Everyday I trick myself into believing I'm this power. I'm this mecca of okayness. Of prosperity. But I'm not. My people are starving. My people are falling around me. And the rest of the world is against me. And I have neither the resources nor the strength nor the intelligence to stop them from ironing me flat. Some days I know I am a writer. Some days I know that the fucking city is fake. And I realize that only my writing can expose it. Only what I write down in letters that have printed themselves on a page can expose the fakeness of the city, the fakeness of that which I built to show.

And the thing about North Korea is, I think they built that city for themselves as much as they did South Korea. I think they had to prove to themselves that there was a city that could fit in with what they sought to match. That they could build something that would make the rest of the world think they were just fine. And they were fucked up enough to think that that would work. And I'm fucked up enough to think that building a fake fucking city of everyday life to show the rest of the world I'm just as goddamn normal as the rest of you would work.

I sill feel that I'm not a good writer. Because I'm not. My words are sweaty on the page. They feel sweaty in my head. They drip with the exertion it took to form them. They don't feel clean- they don't feel like they were taking a jog through the park- an easy and effortless jog. They feel like a 300 pound man walking 10 feet from his bedroom to his bathroom to take a piss, red and out of breath.

My words feel out of breath. They feel bad. They feel laughable.
My words feel laughable.