Apollo Fields | Dear Blank | Dear Self-Consciousness | By Terrence Huie | Writer

“Dear Self-consciousness,

It’s weird to talk to you. You’re like a shadow to my thoughts. A silent heckler in the darkened audience. Yet somehow I can hear you. Feel you. You’ve always been so imposing. It’s not a flattering trait.
[After all] you only exist because I let you. I listen to you like bad gossip out of some base form of desperation. It should be so easy to mute you, but you and self-doubt are some conniving motherfuckers. What are you two playing at anyway?
Why is in in your interest to undermine my progress? You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle? Public shame? Every time I’ve shut you out I’ve only felt elation. Freedom. So what Are you playing at?
You remind me of early Kanye: “we're all self-conscious I’m just the first to admit it.” I’ve always wondered how he reconciles that lyric with, “the prettiest people do the ugliest things, on the road to riches and diamond rings.” Did he stop listening to you? Is he what can happen if I cut you loose?
Because I’m learning to live without you. One letter at a time I’m peeling away all of the bullshit that you’ve piled onto my words. All of the lost lines and abandoned verses, the pages and pages of scribbles. The journals that still have blank pages yet you convince me to buy a new leather one—fuck you.
You make me sick for all of those that you hold back. The struggling artist, confused teenager, hopeless romantic. The effeminate boy and masculine girl. The Boomers who still can’t talk about their feelings. You torpedo rising submarines. You won’t even let us reach the surface.
We just want to breathe without thinking about how we look. We just want to speak without wondering what you’re going to say. So follow the red light to the exit sign or shut the fuck up because, “we don’t wanna hear that weak shit no moooo!””