Lately I’ve become painfully aware of how functional everyone else seems.
People go to work, juggle deadlines, complain about meetings, pick up groceries, meet friends, and scroll through their days with a kind of casual competence I can’t fake anymore.
They move even on the days they don’t want to.
They don’t crumble because the evening felt lonely or because their mind took a detour into old wounds.
Meanwhile, I’m in a private loop that looks suspiciously like a tragicomedy:
cry a little at night, criticize myself in the morning, swear today will be different, and then quietly negotiate my way out of responsibility by noon.
If avoidance burned calories, I would’ve been in phenomenal shape by now.
There’s a moment every day when I become my own unamused narrator:
“Subject displays impressive range of emotions and zero follow-through.”
It’s funny in the way only painful things can be funny.
The Quiet Geography of Pain
What surprised me wasn’t the presence of pain; it was its architecture.
It wasn’t a single sharp ache I could point to. It was an entire landscape — layered, deep, old, and strangely familiar. I hadn’t explored it because I mistook numbness for strength. You only realise how much you’ve buried when it finally rises all at once.
Sitting with it didn’t feel brave.
It felt overdue.
It’s unsettling when your emotions introduce themselves like strangers who’ve lived inside you for years. They don’t knock. They show up with boxes and say, “We’ve been waiting.”
The Slow Erosion of Standards
One of the stealthiest forms of self-loss is how your standards shrink without fanfare. There’s no big announcement. Just a series of tiny compromises disguised as “patience” or “understanding,” until what once seemed like common sense suddenly feels like a luxury.
It starts with lowering the bar.
Then lowering it again.
Then ending up in a mental limbo where the bare minimum feels like generosity.
There’s a bizarre clarity that comes from seeing how far the goalposts have moved — not because you wanted less, but because you got used to receiving less. It’s a small heartbreak to realise you trained yourself to celebrate crumbs.
Isolation and Its Odd Side Effects
Solitude should come with a manual. Preferably one that states:
“Extended periods alone may distort internal truth, amplify irrelevant criticism, and trigger reruns of the ‘Worst Moments’ highlight reel.”
When you go too long without real conversation, your thoughts start sounding like a panel of commentators who were never qualified to judge you in the first place. Their voices blend, echo, and linger until you can’t distinguish your fears from their leftover opinions.
Then, without warning, you talk to someone who listens.
Really listens.
And the contrast is almost disorienting — like stepping out of a dark room into sunlight you didn’t realise you missed. Suddenly you notice how hungry you’ve been for a moment of uncomplicated human presence.
It’s humbling how much clarity one conversation can give you about the noise you’ve been living with.
The Identity Drift
Losing yourself is rarely dramatic. It’s more like misplacing small pieces over time — the confidence here, the decisiveness there, the spark somewhere in between. By the time you notice, you’re functioning, but as a softer, blurrier version of the person you thought you were.
It’s jarring when your reflection still looks like you, but the person inhabiting your internal monologue feels unfamiliar. You start questioning when exactly you wandered off your own path, and the uncomfortable truth is that you didn’t walk away — you drifted.
Micro-abandonments add up.
Living in the In-Between
This phase of my life doesn’t have the dramatic arc of a breakdown or the triumphant tone of a comeback. It’s a quieter space — the kind where days blend, emotions hum beneath the surface, and identity feels under renovation.
I’m functional enough for the world to think I’m fine, but internally it feels like I’m assembling my sense of self with mismatched tools and questionable instructions. Some moments feel raw. Some are unexpectedly funny. Most are a confusing mixture of both.
If anything, I’m learning what it means to exist without pretending — to just sit in the complexity without cleaning it up for public consumption.
It doesn’t make for an inspiring moral.
It doesn’t tie itself into a lesson.
It’s simply a portrait of a person trying to understand their own mind without flinching.
And maybe that’s all an editorial ever really is — a snapshot of someone telling the truth before they know what to do with it.
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