Every morning I wake up with the sensation that I am already late to something, but I can never identify what it is. The hours pass, the errands get checked off, the body fulfills its duties, yet there is a hollowness that lingers like background noise. I look around at the people moving through their days with apparent certainty, and I feel as if they all received a script I was never given. It is not that I dislike my life or resent it, but there is a fracture between me and the world that I cannot mend. This fracture is silent, invisible to everyone else, yet it shapes the way I breathe, the way I walk, the way I inhabit even the simplest of moments.
Crossing through streets that carry echoes of a past grandeur, I cannot help but notice how survival itself has been reduced to mathematics. I calculate the money and stretch it like thin fabric, and when it lasts longer than I expected, it feels like the closest thing to triumph. It is humiliating and comforting at once, because that fragile victory is still mine, and in claiming it I carve a small place in a universe that otherwise ignores me. Even my own body has become part of these negotiations, and when it does not betray me, when I can move without pain or exhaustion, I consider that a celebration. These are not the victories anyone dreams of when they are young, yet they are the only victories left standing, and I accept them with a strange kind of pride.
Nothing about this feels like despair, although perhaps to an outsider it might look that way. What unsettles me most is not sadness but the absence of resonance. I do not find myself reflected in the stories around me, nor in the roles I am supposed to embody. Other women speak about love, ambition, or belonging, and I hear their words as if they were coming from another frequency. My silence is not indifference, it is estrangement, and I have learned to carry it quietly. Some days it feels like an exile that no one notices. Other days it feels like the only honest way to exist in a world that keeps demanding performances I cannot deliver without betraying myself.
The strange part is that I am not bitter. I can laugh, I can share, I can carry tenderness in the most ordinary ways, yet behind all of it lies this persistent feeling of being misaligned. I am inside my own life yet not truly living it, as if I were standing one step outside of the frame, watching myself perform a role with no audience. It is not tragic, but it is relentless. I have learned to find a certain stillness in that space, as if by accepting the estrangement I could at least stop pretending that anything will bridge the distance. Perhaps this is what nihilism feels like in daily practice, not a philosophy, but a quiet disconnection that grows too familiar to resist.
There are moments, though, when I allow myself to imagine that this estrangement could become freedom. If I belong nowhere, then perhaps I can belong to myself. If meaning dissolves in the routines of survival, then maybe I can build a smaller, more private version of meaning that is not meant to last, only to be felt for as long as it does. I do not expect to be remembered, I do not expect monuments or stories or recognition. What I expect is only to keep breathing inside this silence, to walk through days that do not mirror me, and to remain here anyway. That is my confession, and perhaps my only form of resistance.
All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.
