stranger to my own self

what is it when desire is not quite a want or longing but it is mixed with nostalgia even before you have possessed the thing you so desire?
a thought that feels deeper than fancying something new - it is as though it is a return to something long forgotten, absent, missing. . .
this is a strange feeling - and to face it each day makes it stranger. i do not know myself. it reinforces the lack of connection and meaning that I think we all experience in our lives. so many things depend on an existence that is cantilevered - disconnected from reality - attached to some long removed and imagined thing.
i can't say that i am comfortable with this. i don't know who i am. i don't know where i am going or why i do any of the things i do. it makes me insane to consider it and so i just keep doing. it is the only way i can make it through the day - creating meaning so i can exist.
gnawing. ever present, occupying me.
i sit and gaze at nothing, wondering why, what am i missing?
suddenly i wonder if it is the brain getting in the way - by nature of our human brain we perceive everything through the veil of linear time and three dimensional space. perhaps the confusion comes when slivers pierce the veil and give me a shadow and a shimmer of some other reality that might exist somewhere, sometime.
this universe is full of mystery and i am reminded of it now as i reflect on a few of the many things we will never know. i walk through life with truth obscured and i am both frustrated and thankful for it.
i do not think any of us could manage the complete truth of reality. wisdom, insanity - i think it is beyond us. the truth is full of life and death, lovely and terrifying. the small pieces i encounter each day are enough to bring me to tears, i could not bear it to know the things i sometimes wish i could know. i would regret knowing for it is the mystery and the experience we call life that makes being here something worth doing. what would there be if there was nothing to know or experience? i think it would be empty, isolating. already i lose myself to wondering about the things i know and imagining the things that i can imagine.
it is such a struggle to find joy in the doing - in the simple things of life - when my thoughts are not what i do and i am a stranger to myself.