The Molting Mind

I sit at the page and suddenly have nothing to say.

Dirty cravings in the back of my mind now play.

Sacrifices swiftly must be made. 

How did we get here?

How did the patients get control of the institution?

All through the land, the arc of power bends to the childrens will.

Not sweet darlings, 

But bastard creatures.

The adult children whose bodies grew, but whose minds were protected from the grit of life. 

Now past coming of age they live chaotic tortured.

They spared themselves the unplesantries and now they enter fully into psychosis;

Suffocating under the dozens of layers of molted skin that the grit was never allowed to take off. 

Growing up is a terrible thing. 

Not diminished in beauty by its terribleness,

But terrible all the same. 

Just as the reptile and crustacean grow through casting off the old layers of themselves;

Layers, mind you, that were necessary and good until just moments ago,

Human growth requires a shedding of the mind. 

Old frameworks, beliefs, identities, and attachments must be burned away

In order that we may make space for more right ones.

For ones that are appropriate for where we are going rather than where we have been. 

Like the hermit crab this casting off of parts of ourselves often leaves us exposed for a time. 

It is often a leap of faith in letting something we know to be dead in ourselves go without knowing what will take it’s place.

There is the chance nothing does and we are left with a hole in us forever.