When Darkness Falls

I am a prisoner of my own pessimistic thoughts.  No light can penetrate, no optimism can affect my views.  No amount of logic can alter what I feel or know to be true.  Words of encouragement are interpreted as white noise falling on deaf ears  My views are felt by many, understood by few.  Why try to change that which you cannot possibly begin to understand?  Do you honestly believe you hold some sort of wisdom that I do not?  I am a pessimist, this I know, of this, I am aware.  I exist this way for a reason and it is my experiences that have molded me into the person you see standing before you.  Dark, distant, wary and always analyzing.  In my life, I have found that naivety feeds optimism.  What is there to be pessimistic about when all you've known is success?  How can the world hold doom when all you see is the light?

I do not hate optimism, quite the contrary.  I am intrigued by it.  Intrigued because it is something that I seem to lack and be incapable of doing despite how hard I may try.  I am fully aware of positive outcomes and the likelihood of it occurring, however, it's just easier to see and accept the negative for it is the negative that usually occurs for me.  This way, should a positive outcome result, it comes as a pleasant surprise, uplifting in a way, whilst when expecting the doom, it arrives much like an anticipated and unwelcome enemy at your door; you saw it coming all along.

"Esperanza"... a word I have tattooed on my left wrist and I sometimes wonder why.  Its purpose was to serve as a reminder to have "hope" in a world that seems void of it.  To not give up even when things are looking down.  At my worst, I'll look at it and try to hold on to that faint promise of optimism it seems to imply it will give me.  Never lasts long.  In fact, more often than not, when I look at it, I want to scratch it off my wrist, feeling this word, now permanently inked into my flesh. has failed its intended purpose.  So what hope is there then, for a gloom and doom thinker like myself?  Perhaps that is my burden to carry; I am forever destined to live a life in darkness, isolated from the smiles and laughs that come so naturally to most.