Even the ache was mine

I worry that I used to have more interesting thoughts.

It is a strange thing to grieve, isn’t it? Not a person, not a place, not even a life I once had, but the quality of my own mind. The way I used to look at the world, the thoughts that kept me awake, taking me places I could never quite explain to anyone else.  I worry that I am becoming stupid, boring, predictable, that somewhere between the things I have to do and the things I consume to forget about them, I have become a little less myself.

I have become nothing more than the contents of my own consumption, a mind full of borrowed thoughts and recycled opinions, mistaken for the familiarity of depth. I wonder how many of my beliefs are truly mine, how much of my personality I have grown into and how much I have merely absorbed. Sometimes I notice a new opinion taking shape in me and cannot tell whether it came from somewhere deep within or from having heard it often enough to make it feel like my own. I wonder if I am discovering new parts of myself or simply collecting them from the world around me.

It frightens me to think that I could spend so much time filling my mind that I might eventually forget how to hear it.

I used to spend nights talking to the moon, making wishes to the stars as though the universe might be listening. I questioned everything. I could turn the smallest detail into an entire universe of thought, spend hours inside my own head searching for answers I wasn’t sure I wanted to find.

Now, so much of my attention seems to belong to what was never really mine. There is always something else to take in.

For so many years, I wished for a quieter mind. I wished for the weight in my chest to become lighter, for the questions to stop following me into every room, for the loneliness to loosen its grip. I wanted to stop feeling everything so intensely. I wanted to be happy without having to earn it through suffering first.

And now, slowly, I am. I have things to look forward to, reasons to get out of bed, people who make life feel a little less frightening. The weight is still here, somewhere beneath my ribs, but it has become lighter, less insistent. Sometimes I go entire days without noticing it.

I should be grateful. I am grateful.

And yet, I miss the girl who used to sit awake with her thoughts until the night became morning.

Maybe I have mistaken my sadness for my substance. Am I confusing my loneliness with companionship? I spent so many years building a home inside my sadness that now, finally, as I begin to leave, I find myself looking back at its windows.

I know I do not want to live there anymore. I remember what it cost me to stay. But there is something unsettling about leaving a place where you spent so long learning the shape of yourself, even when that place was never kind to you. I knew who I was in that house. I knew what to write about, what to do with the hours when nobody seemed to understand me. My sadness gave everything a kind of gravity. I could find meaning in almost anything because I was always searching for something beneath the surface.

Now I wonder whether I have anything interesting left to say when I am no longer sad enough to say it beautifully.

How am I supposed to know which parts of me are truly mine? At what point does something borrowed become something of our own? And how much of a person has ever been entirely theirs to begin with?

I don’t know. I only know that I miss the feeling of being surprised by my own mind.

I keep returning to the idea of my wasted potential, speaking of it as though repeating the words might somehow redeem the time I have spent doing nothing about it. I have so much to do, and somehow, I keep waiting. I wait for the better version of myself to arrive, for the sudden clarity that will make everything feel possible again. In the meantime, the days pass. I make plans, postpone them, consume more, fall asleep, and begin again.

I have become very good at mourning a life I am still perfectly capable of living.

I know how privileged I am to have so much ahead of me, to have opportunities I once wished for, a life that asks something of me because I have finally been given the chance to build one.

I asked for this.

I asked for change, and now it demands things from me. I wanted a life that would take me somewhere, and now I am tired from the journey before I have even figured out where I am going.

“The gift and the weight arrived in the same box, and what a privilege it is to carry both.”

I know that potential means very little if I never give it a place to go. I know I cannot keep waiting to feel like myself before I begin living as though I am.

Still, I am afraid. Afraid that I am losing something I will never get back, afraid that one day I will wake up and realize I have become someone who no longer wonders about anything.

I don’t want to become a stranger to the things that once made me feel alive.

But I don’t want to be miserable just to prove that I still can. 

Tonight, I have no answers. I don’t know how much of me has changed, or how much of the person I am becoming has been shaped by the world I keep letting in.

I only know that I am here, that life is happening even when I am not making the most of it, that I am loved even on the days I struggle to love the person I am becoming.

Maybe I don’t need to turn every feeling into a revelation. I don’t need to find a lesson in every ache or meaning in every ordinary day. Maybe I am allowed to live through some experiences without writing them down, to let a moment exist without immediately trying to preserve it in a sentence. Maybe I am allowed to be happy without wondering what it is costing me, to become someone new without deciding that the person I used to be was better.

For now, the world is quiet. The moon is somewhere outside my window, whether I look for it or not. The stars are there, keeping their distance, asking nothing of me. And beside me, my cat is sleeping, warm and impossibly certain that this little corner of the world is safe.

She knows nothing of wasted potential. She does not wonder whether she has become less interesting, less intelligent, less herself. She does not lie awake wondering whether she has made enough of her life to deserve the peace of a quiet night.

She simply closes her eyes.

And somehow, in the small rise and fall of her breathing, there is a kind of reassurance I have spent years searching for everywhere.

Perhaps I don’t have to figure it all out tonight. I can let the moon be the moon, the stars keep their secrets, and tomorrow come without demanding that I become someone worthy of it.

Even if I have nothing particularly interesting to think about. Even if I am not who I used to be.


I am here.

And tonight, that will have to be enough.