There was a time when I carried the weight of the world like it had nowhere else to go. I was angry, cynical, and convinced that life was just a series of disappointments. I felt misunderstood, like no one saw things the way I did. But what I didn’t realize then was that the only thing I truly had control over was my own perspective.
Once I stopped resisting the way my mind worked and instead started guiding it—training myself to see things differently—life didn’t feel so suffocating anymore. That’s not to say the weight disappeared, but I learned how to carry it without letting it crush me.
Now, let’s take a step back to when the weight of everything still hit me too hard each day:
May 12th, 2017
I don’t know if it’s a curse or a gift, the way my mind works. The way I pick apart reality like it’s a puzzle missing its most important pieces. I see too much. I feel too much. And yet, I can’t do anything with any of it.
I’m sitting in the shed in my backyard, curled up on an old lawn chair with my notebook in my lap. The light from the single, flickering bulb above me casts long shadows along the wooden walls, the scent of damp earth and rusted metal thick in the air. It’s quiet here. I like the quiet. It’s one of the only places where I can hear myself think.
And God, do I think.
There’s this quote by Nietzsche:
“When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.”
I think I understand it now. I’ve spent so much time staring into the void, trying to find meaning in all this, and now it feels like the void is looking at me, laughing, whispering, “There is no meaning. Stop trying.”
But I can’t. I can’t just accept this world for what it is. It doesn’t make sense to me.
Everywhere I go, I see people chasing things that don’t matter. Money. Status. Validation from people they don’t even like. I walk past groups of girls at school who plaster on fake smiles and giggle at things they don’t find funny just to fit in. I watch teachers feed us information without ever questioning it themselves. I see adults who gave up on their dreams just so they could afford a house that feels like a prison.
It’s like everyone is sleepwalking through their lives, and I’m the only one awake.
I look up to people who saw through it all. The thinkers, the questioners. Socrates, who said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” And he was right. The more I learn, the less I feel like I understand.
Bill Gates. Warren Buffet. Barack Obama. Eleanor Roosevelt. Rosa Parks. Einstein. Chopin. Dr. Seuss. People who shaped the world, who thought differently. People who saw the cracks in reality and tried to do something with it.
But then I think about people like Van Gogh, who saw the world too vividly, too painfully, and it destroyed him. David Foster Wallace, who understood the emptiness of modern life so well he couldn’t bear to live in it. Sylvia Plath, who bled her thoughts onto paper but still couldn’t find a reason to stay.
And I wonder—where do I fit?
Am I meant to do something with all these thoughts, or am I just another broken person who thinks too much for their own good?
I flip through my notebook, running my fingers over the words I’ve scrawled in the margins over the years. Quotes from books, lines from poems, half-finished thoughts that I couldn’t quite put into words.
“Language has no stable reference,” I wrote once. “It’s all subjective. There is no real meaning except the one we assign to it.”
I don’t even know where I read that, but it stuck with me. Because it’s true. Words feel empty sometimes, like they’ll never be enough to express the things I feel deep inside my bones. How do you explain a feeling that doesn’t fit into language? How do you articulate something that can only be felt?
That’s what messes me up the most. Knowing that no matter how much I learn, how many books I read, how many times I try to explain myself—no one will ever fully get it.
People like me aren’t meant to exist in a world like this.
I take out my lighter and flick it on, watching the tiny flame dance in the dim shed. I press it to the skin just behind my hairline, where no one will see, just for a second. Just long enough to feel something.
There’s a sharp sting, and then a dull ache. I exhale slowly, watching the red mark form.
I’ve been doing this more lately—burning, scratching, hitting my fist against the walls shower, my bedroom or the cement floor of the shed when I come out here. Not because I want to die, but because I want to feel alive. Because the numbness is getting worse, creeping into me like a fog I can’t shake.
Maybe I need to read something new. Something that reminds me that I’m not alone in this kind of thinking.
I flip open my bookbag and pull out No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Jim Morrison biography I picked up last week. He was another one who saw too much, felt too much, tried to drown it in everything he could—drugs, alcohol, music, sex.
He once said, “There are things known, and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors.”
I think that’s where I’m stuck. Between the known and the unknown. Staring at the doors but unable to open them.
Russell Brand wrote something in one of his books that I copied down once:
“What gravity is this that holds us down, who installed this low, suffocating sky? I get that feeling a lot, like I want to peer round the corner of reality, to scratch the record off, to say I know there’s something else, I know it.”
I know it too. I feel it.
There’s something else beyond this world. Beyond this reality, this routine, this fucking shallow existence. I just don’t know how to get to it.
I wish I could talk to someone about this. But every time I try, people just stare at me like I’m speaking another language.
So I keep it all in. I write it down.
And I sit here, in this cold, dark shed, hoping that one day I’ll wake up and finally understand what I’ve been searching for all along.
