Beyond the surface

It’s not about what’s happening to you all the time. Sometimes, this crippling mental illness, known as Derealization, can be the result of what’s happening around you — from the external world. It’s a rare case of having external circumstances truly effect your internal sanity. I’m a firm believer of thoughts over circumstances and that circumstances do not define a person.

Before we begin, let’s take a look at a couple of textbook definitions of Derealization:

1. a feeling that one’s surroundings are not real, especially as a symptom of mental disturbance.
2. Derealization is a subjective experience of unreality of the outside world.

I am currently experiencing a different form of DR, one that I am not quite familiar with. It doesn’t give me panic attacks and it’s almost as if I accepted this altered reality. I’m watching the external harm surface as I internally build a sheltered fortress. With a blink of an eye or altered motion in a situation, derealization can take you from a dream-like state to a nightmare — I believe this is where panic flourishes.

Trolling or not, for Kanye to say that he loved SmokePurrp’s flow on the remake of “Life Yourself” is disheartening. I love SmokePurrp and “Do Not Disturb” with Yachty on Offset is fire, but come on Ye — why even promote that? To each his own, of course. Mental strings get pulled when you see artists actually putting forth an effort with their art. Why entertain it Kanye? My vision is blurry at times to think this is the guy who made “Never Let Me Down” with JAY Z in the early 2000s. The state of the industry and the state of our world as we know it, is quite exhausting.

And yes, I’m giving it my time of day and energy. Sometimes you have to give energy in order to get rid of energy. And yes, while my thoughts on this matter is subjective, derealization is a subjective experience of one’s unreal feeling of the external world. So no, nothing on Kanye’s agenda feels real to me.

The bothersome feeling comes from seeing Kanye like a father figure. Many will say “think on your own,” “what he does has nothing to do with you,” etc. However, that’s easier said than done when you have no real role models around you during your adolescent stages. Now being “of age,” I’d say it’s easier to deviate from holding celebrities and anyone I don’t personally know on a pedestal that they can’t reach for me. Yet in still, their words carry significant weight and leave tons of people to fall by the waist side.

In 2018, Questlove was spotted wearing a shirt that says “Kanye doesn’t care about black people.” You couldn’t tell me this would be true a decade ago. What kind of warped reality are we in?

More than anything, I don’t hold Kanye West responsible for my derealization feelings. DR, like other mental health illnesses, are fragile and it’s difficult to know what to avoid. I thought Kanye coming back to Twitter was the greatest shit to ever happen, until he got further into his pondering thoughts — tweeting his opinions — sending me into an abyss that rattled sensations of simulation. Another day in the part of life that is hard to manage.

It’s always a “lituation” when Ye’s involved. There’s gonna be some complications when Ye’s involved. I be going through derealization that I cannot solve.

Words and actions make the world jog. Presence matters and that pedestal mattered all too much, in terms of how I looked up to Ye. But the pedestal is for another chapter, that’s for another story. To be continued.

Original Story: BLUNTIQ