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.

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. It's like you’re method acting in your own life, and 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 perfectly curated everything except the only thing that matters - true, full, life.

The therapy helps but doesn't reach it. The meditation app worked for three weeks. You've read every book about trauma, purpose, finding yourself. You know all the words - boundaries, nervous system, attachment style - but knowing hasn't changed the hollow feeling that you're acting out your own life.

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 the new one hasn't been born. Most people numb out here. Some of us use it.

If this found you at the right moment, enter your email. For the next three weeks, you'll get pieces like this one. Welcome to Lifepunk.