Dear Diary, I Think I’m Lost
The world tells me I can be anything, yet not how to be myself. It shows me everything I can become, and in doing so I abandon who I already am.
This is an experimental exploration piece, an attempt to give breath to the profound and often inarticulable feeling of being lost. Recently I've encountered countless poems and essays that touch on this essence and inspired me. I wanted to capture these many voices within this piece, and provide the kind of solace I seek when I find that resonance in the words of others. Feeling lost is one of the hardest things to articulate, and I can already feel the stirrings of further attempts. It's akin to that long-awaited yawn finally arriving, allowing the body to sink with a full release.
Dear Diary,
It’s late, and the house is finally quiet, but the noise inside my head is deafening. That hum or maybe it’s a voice — I’m not too sure which — won't stop. It scrambles my thoughts and tightens my chest, a relentless awareness of something bubbling beneath the surface of my perfectly curated life, desperate for peace. What is this feeling? This deep rock in my stomach feels heavy, unmoving, an itch I can’t quite reach no matter how much I strive, how much I do.
It began as a whisper in the quiet moments…sometimes it was even a scream. I tried to drown it out with more work, more distractions, more stuff. It worked for a while, but now, it's just this silent, pervasive ache that follows me everywhere — from the sterile office, like something out of Severance, to the gym, or lingering in the background as I watch TV or cook dinner.
I push it down, I power through, yet my body, always honest, is starting to refuse. Smiles feel foreign, stretched thin. My thoughts scatter like dust, unable to land on anything but this gnawing unease, as I try so hard to figure it out, to put a name to it. Sometimes, when I look inside, there’s just a vast, empty wasteland where purpose and clarity used to bloom. Now I’m just numb. Disconnected.
I feel so profoundly…lost, adrift like a ship without a rudder, tossed about in this vast, indifferent sea of life that I’m realizing no one has a map for navigating. I’m somewhere in the middle of it all, too far from the shore I left behind, too unsure of which horizon I should charter. The waves of daily demands crash against my hull, but I have no sail, no compass, no clear destination. I just drift, watching other vessels cut through the water with apparent purpose, their lights bright, their course set.
There's a persistent, chilling sensation that I'm running on a different software, a unique internal code that makes the world, and most other people, operate on a frequency I can't quite tune into, try as I might. This gnawing sense of being an outsider, forever searching for a resonating frequency, a wavelength of shared understanding that I rarely find, leaves me feeling utterly dislocated. Not always lonely, but always alone.
The youthful optimism that once buoyed me has long since given way to this quiet dread. The sources of joy have been replaced by tasks that offer only a means for paying the bills. When adulthood set in, stark and unyielding, I realized how profoundly unprepared and naive I was. They told me I was lucky, to live in an era of countless opportunities, infinite selves waiting to become. I followed the map, I did everything "right", believing treasure waited at the end. But there's no treasure to be found with this map I’ve been given. Only the crushing weight of disillusionment and the mundane existence of this so-called adulthood. Time seems to pass more quickly, and I can never have enough of it… when not working, all I feel is the imposition of life’s daily chores and tasks. Where is the joy?
I feel so deeply deceived, like a promise broken. My vibrant spark for life now just flickers. The passions that once fueled my days, that made my heart sing, are fading, their muted by this monotony. Where has my motivation gone? It feels like a language I have forgotten. The drive that used to propel me forward has vanished. Creativity, once a flowing stream, has dried up. I reach for thoughts, for ideas, for a sense of me, but often find only nothingness. I've become a hollowed-out version of myself, and my ability to truly connect, to be genuinely present, feels broken.
Somewhere along this path, I learned a brutal truth: happiness and so-called "security" are not in fact the same thing. I've become a stranger to myself, and the scary part is, I don't even know what I genuinely enjoy anymore. I have momentary feelings of failure, not just in what I've done, but who I've become, and for what? I feel like I signed this life contract without reading the fine print — shame on me!
This security I pursued… it arrived disguised as a high-paying, undeniably stable job, yet it proved an unforgiving tether, constantly demanding more than it gave in return. It has been a tireless performance, requiring me to don so many meticulously crafted masks that the prize for being so good at this was the blurring of my own face's true contours beyond recognition. But, like an actor suddenly forgetting their lines mid-scene, there's this persistent, chilling terror I'll be found out — exposed for the raw, unpolished, utterly inadequate self I truly am beneath all these layers.
This isn't simply about concealment. It's alienation, a building dread as I witness my life from behind a distorted window pane, disconnected and watching. This is the very cage woven from masks, meticulously constructed over years, brick by compromising brick, until the authentic self, the one I once knew, has become a stranger, forgotten.
The chilling part? I'm realizing this deep unfeeling, this sense of myself existing outside my own skin, is how I was able to do it all. My body here, but my Self miles away, in a fog. It appears my autopilot got stuck on — and I didn't even realize till now!
I look back at the half-finished canvases, the hobbies I once loved but never quite mastered, the feeling of being the "half-starter", the "quitter". The days I am not myself are swallowed by a deep, vegetative bed rot, my brain a restless pulse within an unresponsive shell. I am a captive consciousness, adrift in this alien vessel, its controls muted beneath my desperate touch.
How do I know what to trust? How do I begin to trust myself, to take that leap of faith, when nothing feels real, and I can't even tell where the dream ends and I begin? It's like my own sad version of inception, where I thought I truly awakened from the dream, but it was just a dream within a dream, and now I'm still not sure if I'm truly awake.
I reflect on how I traded my light, subtly, insidiously. It started with ignoring my own needs, overriding my nervous system’s gentle warnings. Just pushing hard for a little longer, always believing the finish line was just around the bend, that true rest was only one more milestone away. But that finish line is perpetually out of sight, and turns out I was the one gaslighting my own feelings, become lost along the way
Year by year, my life has become a Groundhog Day, distinguished only by the predictable seasons of burnout — a constant flirtation with who I'm falsely trying to be. My nervous system is constantly redlining, running on fumes, so the moment a lull appears, soul-level exhaustion sets in, a profound weariness coffee can barely touch. It's not laziness, I realize, not how society defines it, but a biological reality I must confront: a human can handle only so much. It's a truth I often turned a blind eye towards, until it stared me in the face.
I refuse to follow the well-trodden narrative: buy a home, find a partner, marry, have kids, work ceaselessly, then retire to travel. Recently, I've witnessed that white picket fence of dreams collapsing all around me. Work colleagues are divorcing after their kids leave home, or they battle poor health and injuries — the stark consequence of sacrificing their well-being and relationships for their careers. I won't be the one who reaches the end of their path having traded family, relationships, and friends, only to live alone with career highlights that offer no comfort. The true price, it seems, is finally coming due. Because it does. And it will. Some trade-off costs simply take longer to collect, but the bill always comes due if we're not careful.
They said choice would taste like freedom, but not that it could steal your sense of direction. They didn't mention how this freedom is dressed in fancy marketing and subliminal indoctrination. It promises countless lives I could have, yet makes me lose the one that was already mine. Now, we stay idle, fantasizing about lives we want, never truly recognizing the hunger of our own longing for Self. I don't want more choices. I simply want to lay foundations on what some call imperfect soil and call it home anyway, knowing that I've chosen true to my Self, without a glance over my shoulder at all the other possibilities.
As I write this down, I recognize my lostness stems partly from my desperate need for security battling the desperate ache for joy, with my fear of failure always lurking in the corners. Logic tells me this cage is of my own making and that life isn't about finding a single destination. I will let this knowing seep into my core, hoping to dissolve the invisible bars I've constructed.
Perhaps, what truly demands exorcism isn't the lostness itself, but that entrenched phantom belief that security is the ultimate goal. For what if this lostness isn't merely a feeling, but the ego's final, desperate, cunning attempt to seize yet another life — a confusion it creates to keep us from choosing ourselves and our authentic path?
Diary, I will finish by saying that I know one day this will all make sense to me. The conviction burns within me. My persistence is like a stubborn root that grips the earth, anchoring me against every storm. It's like a relentless flower, pushing its vibrant petals through the hardened ground, determined to bloom from the rich earth of my forgotten Self. This ceaseless quest for truth, this hunger for my deepest Self, this is the only true guiding light, the sole beacon that guides me now. And when the final veil of understanding parts, and this grand awakening consumes me, may it be so utterly permeating, it hums like the silent whisper of my destiny, forever entwined with my untamed soul. May it be a profound cessation of internal dissonance – a boundless peace with a universe finally at rest within my chest.
Countering Complacency is about recognizing the subtle drift in an unlived life, challenging the question “is all there is?” and bravely reclaiming your vibrant self buried beneath expectation. It's an ongoing journey of awakening and authenticity. Follow along for more. If you liked this experimental piece, let me know below. Every bit of your support helps!