There’s a darkness moving through me that feels almost sentient — like it watches me from inside my own skin, waiting for moments when I’m weakest. It’s quieter than a scream and louder than silence, a presence that presses against my ribs until it becomes hard to breathe without feeling something tearing inside me. Every thought feels like it’s dissolving before I can hold onto it. Every emotion feels too heavy to carry and too sharp to drop. And every day feels like I’m walking through the ruins of something I can’t remember ever building. It’s strange how emptiness can feel so heavy. I wake up with this hollow ache in my chest — a reminder of everything I’ve lost, everything I never had, and everything I’m still expected to rise above. It’s the kind of loneliness that doesn’t come from being alone in a room… it comes from being alone in your life. Alone in your mind. Alone in the echoes of a childhood that never softened. Alone in the quiet moments when there’s no one left to convince you you’re okay. People talk about family like it’s a given — a safety net, a home, a root system. But I grew up learning that sometimes the world gives you none of that. Sometimes you learn to self-soothe before you ever learn to trust. Sometimes you learn to stay quiet before you dare to hope someone will listen. There are nights when the silence feels like it’s swallowing me whole. When the walls feel too close. When my own heartbeat sounds like something pacing beside me instead of inside me. When my brain shifts between chaos and nothingness so fast it feels like reality glitches. My emotions come in violent storms — sudden, electric, devastating — then leave me empty, staring at nothing, unsure how I went from fire to ash in minutes. My body holds tension I never earned. My mind remembers pain I didn’t choose. My thoughts run too fast, collide too hard, or fall lifeless before I can organize them. And the loneliness… it doesn’t just sit beside me. It lives inside me. It moved in a long time ago and never left. It’s a strange kind of despair — the kind that doesn’t scream for help, because help has never arrived before. The kind that doesn’t ask for comfort, because comfort never stayed long enough to trust. The kind that feels less like sadness and more like a slow erasing — little pieces of me fading in the places where love should’ve been. People say I’m strong, but strength feels like a myth right now. What I feel is survival — raw, primitive, exhausting. What I feel is the weight of all the battles I’ve fought alone. What I feel is the ache of being my own protector, my own healer, my own witness. Sometimes it feels like the world keeps spinning just to remind me how far behind I am. How forgotten. How invisible my pain becomes when everyone else’s lives keep moving forward. There’s a version of me buried somewhere deep — steady, whole, untouched by the cracks. But she feels distant, unreachable, like a ghost I remember more than a person I ever was. So here I am — caught between too much and not enough, between the chaos in my mind and the silence in my life, trying to hold myself together with hands that shake more than they should. This isn’t a cry. This isn’t a scream. This is just the truth of what it feels like when darkness becomes a language you never meant to learn. I’m still here. Even if it feels like I’m fading at the edges.
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