Sometimes, it’s an ache.
A sort of longing for a life you’ve never lived. A dance of emotions when you walk through the world. A quiet pleading in the morning. A detachment, a disconnect from the things others are stressed about, wondering about, rushing around with.
A nagging feeling: “what if none of this matters the way we pretend it does?”
It’s living in two realities at once:
- the surface reality, where you need to pay rent and show up to things and please people you’re used to pleasing,
- And the deeper current where you know you need something more real. More true.
Other times, it’s a numbness. That frustration of needing something messier, rawer, more real—and being stuck with performance. Especially in how you relate to others:
To friends who use the same scripts you see online. Conversations about dating apps and career moves and you’re thinking about your deeper life, and this ancient sadness, and other things you know you can’t really say out loud.
Often, it’s grief. For a version of yourself that hasn’t been. And it can feel like there’s something deeper trying to emerge, but you stuff it away because it doesn’t fit into your current life.
And sometimes, in little moments, you know exactly what you need to do.
You know you need to quit. You know you need to move out. You know you need to change.
But then morning comes and you’re back to being practical. It’s like a paralysis—there is no safety on the other side of what you need to do. But there is only misery if you keep doing what you’re doing. And so, you betray yourself every single day, by choosing what’s safely broken over what’s dangerously true.
It’s something deeper than just mental health or quarter-life crisis.
This is what it feels like to wake up.
It’s that first step down the beach.
Lonely, achey, numb.
Because to wake up in a broken reality—to become lucid in a world trapped in a recurring nightmare—is lonely. It’s jarring. It’s cold. And it means you’re already different.
There is more on the other side of that. There is more in the next step.
For now, having woken up, take note. Keep a record of how you feel. What you notice. Who and what’s all wrong. Who and what feels right.
And keep going. Stay awake, but keep going. More soon.
