You're reading this from your phone in a rare moment. Maybe lost, definitely searching. And you feel…

When you strip everything away, you feel like you’re suffocating in slow motion. Like you’re watching yourself live this perfectly acceptable life while the real you is pressed against glass, screaming to get out. The world is burning and you're supposed to just keep going, and scrolling, and pretending?

It feels fake. Every morning when you get dressed, or grab your bag. Every time you laugh at the right moment in conversations. Every time you say “I’m good!" when someone asks how you are, or feel alone with the friends, the person, the group. You’ve gotten so good at it that sometimes you forget you’re pretending. Sometimes, you convince yourself this is real.

But in the quiet moments—usually at some moonlit hour when you can't sleep, or when you’re walking home and the city feels especially hollow—you feel this devastating homesickness for a life you’ve never lived. A grief, a longing, a wild hope for a life and reality and world that are so much more than this.

And beneath it all? Terror that this is it. That you’ll keep making the "smart" choices until you wake up one day and realize you did everything right except the only thing that matters - true, full, life.

You know something deeper is wrong. Maybe you've tried fixing it. Maybe you know it can’t be fixed. But knowing hasn't changed the hollow feeling that you're acting out your own life. That the people who should get it don’t. And that something needs to change.

This. This on its own isn't depression. It's not something to fix. You're not broken. You're between worlds. The world itself is, too. The old one is dying - maybe slowly, maybe all at once - and it's taking you with it. Most people numb out here. Some of us use it.

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