Where do I begin… I guess anywhere is a start.

Who am I? My identity, I've struggled with this for quite some time. You think when you're younger, looking onward that by the time you hit a certain age (i.e. 25, such as myself) the pieces will just fall into place. Little did my younger naive self know that the 20's would not be the time when everything falls together, but actually falls apart? This is the decade where struggles would ensue in order to find out what I was really made of.

Particularly this is not an easy process, even now that I have the answers lying in front of me, my career goals hanging over my head, the vague vision of a life I yearn for on the horizon, and the knowledge of ideals and habits that must be formed to get to these destinations. Yet I flounder. I know what hinders me, I have walked through the pain and I have been deterred many times by the same mistakes. Yet I continue to make them. I realize berating my body through calorie deprivation, obsessing over exercise, and falling into a drunken stupor every weekend inhibits the progress I wish to make in life. Self-loathing after adrunken binge episode of gooey Domino's pizza, purging what I can over a porcelain bowl, waking to an intense regret and the unease of disheveled actions from the previous night. The waste of a perfectly beautiful day to the nausea and sickening embarrassment of my own self. Then the week starts again, new motives, same actions, no progress.

I hate myself. Often, I cringe inside my own skin. I'm confused, why do I feel so unsatisfied? Why does inflicting punishment on myself bring me satisfaction? Why do I continue to drink so much, to escape reality? When the reality I am trying to escape is caused by the method to escape it!? I live in a wheel, it continues, it repeats, it never ends. But what will it take, how does it end. I dream of falling in love, I dream of a Master's Degree, I dream of livinginto the future with a smile and sense of regard for the gift of life that has been bestowed upon me. I see the abilities I have been granted with, the offerings I can present to others, yet I find them locked away and buried through the piles of baggage I have cast atop of them. Baggage I wish to disparage, but continue to wallow in as if I had no other choice.

So I ask… why do I feel trapped? When theoretically I am trapping myself? And why am I condoning my own entrapment?

Irony.