when you live inside dissonance, it also lives inside you

I am a world of opposites coinciding and colliding. 

Swirling inside of me are a million conflicting sentiments. Inside my mind, a million distinct realities flash before my eyes and vanish instantaneously. The fact that I can actualize only one shakes me to my core. I am a maelstrom of thoughts and emotions that I can't begin to understand.

What the hell are emotions, even? Strange halfway things between thoughts and chemistry. Halfway between mind and body. A script running through your head coupled with the roiling of your guts. Irrational, inexplicable, and inevitable. 

How can so many conflicting thoughts and feelings reside within one person at one time? Yet this is normal. It's normal to feel X and Y at the same time, to feel happiness and sadness intermingled, to sense the kaleidoscope constantly refracting inside of you, creating shapes and patterns that are as senseless as they are beautiful. I keep reminding myself, it's normal, it's normal. 

I feel the opposing aspects of myself swirling around each other like snakes. 

It's my 26th birthday. If my 20s are a hill, I've crested and am rolling down the other side. Due to the nature of aging, the years seem shorter, and will always seem so. I'm grateful to be older, because it means I've survived this far. Also the wisdom that age and experience affords is immeasurable and I know it will only increase exponentially. I am much more secure than I ever have been, in many ways. But in other ways, I am more terrified than I have ever been. The future gapes like a treacherous and breathtaking valley. I don't know if I can weather the terrain but I have to try because there is no other way to get to the other side.

I've been living in Trinidad for the past six weeks. God it's beautiful here. Everything is so vibrant, even the colours are brighter here. I've been working here, getting to know people who I've come to love, soaking myself in movement and music, enjoying the sun and the ocean, the mountains lush with green, everything all at once, everywhere. And I miss my family. I miss my friends. I miss home, terribly and profoundly. I miss home, and I don't want to go home. I want to stay here in this strange new universe, and I want to go back to what I know and love. 

I am terrified, and I am excited. I am optimistic, and I feel doomed. I am calm, and I am exploding. I am healthy, and I am pathological. I crave the cradle of ocean, and I am unnerved by its vastness.

And I just keep reminding myself, this is normal, this is normal.