Being

There have been times when I have been overcome by a terrifying
awareness of being. It would usually come on me as I lay in bed
waiting to sleep.

It was becoming conscious that I am myself. That I exist. And am
living a life. And that I am aware of this. That I am both the thing
I am aware of and the thing that is aware.

It overwhelms me. I get up and turn the lights on and the tv and
get something to eat. I have to numb this consciousness, to
escape from it. Return to the dullness of normality. That intensity
of awareness of self and of the strangeness of being, is
unbearable.

I think this may be what T.S.Eliot meant when he wrote, "mankind
cannot bear too much reality."