Piece By Piece

By Ruby Staley, April 17, 2019

Read time: 2 Mins

Piece By Piece Image

To be obsessed, to me, is something dirty, untrustworthy. Almost perverted.

To be obsessed is to feel your heart drop to the bottom of your stomach with the weight of a cement brick. To be fixated, completely and wholeheartedly on the thing. To feel like you have no breath left and wouldn’t have the words to say anything, not for a thousand years. To be wholly enticed – almost lustful – after something or someone.

Obsession seems to rear its head at the most curious of times. Taking up the entirety of my consciousness, not allowing me to think about anything but the thing itself. Futile in its true embodiment, obsession often appears when I want what I can’t have. Or want to look a certain way that I don’t. 

To be obsessed with the way I want to look, the way I think I should look, the way I am forever trying to look, can be all consuming. Almost inescapable, overwhelming. At times all I can think about is how much I want to look and be and feel like the way I should. But I don’t look like that and I am not that way. 

Because however I chop and change and paint and stick and brush and flick, I’m still the same pieces, put together in a way I did not at all chose. But I am the sum of those pieces. For that I should love those pieces rather than obsessing over the things I wish I could be. 

If it means taking myself apart, piece by piece, only to put myself back together using shiny, new pieces, why am I obsessed with a looking the way I think I should look? I shouldn’t be so bothered trying to change, let alone be obsessed.

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