Being a RIFT.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people who call themselves ‘free thinkers’ are actually slaves to the pantheon of liberal shibboleths. It seems to me that being a free thinker is all about choosing your own norms and axioms – be they liberal, conservative or completely off the bloody wall – without reference to external pressures, trends or the need to be viewed sympathetically.

I now recognise that I probably only became a free thinker this year; it was one of the many sources of the turbulence that 2011 has been employing to throw me about like a ping-pong ball on the edge of a deep barometric depression. And it isn’t an easy thing to be, especially when it’s combined with a couple of other unfortunate characteristics.

The combination of Romantic, idealist and free thinker produces an apposite acronym: RIFT. A tearing apart. Which probably explains why I’ve spent the last two days feeling dissociated from the world around me, consumed by a sense of missing something I’ve never had and desperately longing for the impossible. Oh, and having an imagination running riot to such an extent that I’m no longer sure which version of reality I’m living in.

I’m tired.