There comes a point in some lives where the noise drops away. Not because you’ve lost people in a dramatic way. Not because you’ve burned bridges. But because you’ve stopped pretending that proximity equals connection. It doesn’t feel like collapse. It feels like standing in a
There have been many nights in my life where I’ve been wide awake at 3am. Not scrolling. Not distracted. Just… awake. The house is silent. The world is paused. And my mind is anything but. Sometimes it’s one thought. Sometimes it’s everything at once. Work. Direction. Money.
For a long time, I thought illusions were lies. Things we told ourselves because we were weak. Or avoidant. Or kidding ourselves. But that’s not what I’ve come to understand at all. Illusions aren’t there to deceive us. They’re there to protect us. We don’t
Most people don’t live as who they are. They live as who they’re wearing. Identity, for a lot of us, isn’t something we’ve discovered. It’s something we’ve put on. Like a jacket. Some jackets are obvious. Some look good from the outside. Some are
This isn’t written from the outside looking in. It’s written from inside the room. I’ve been part of the LGBT community my entire adult life. I’ve used the apps. A lot. I’ve benefited from them, relied on them, escaped into them. I’ve matched, ghosted,
This last week hasn’t been dramatic. No big moments. No fireworks. No sudden revelations. Just space. That in itself has felt strange. Christmas came and went without much noise. No rushing about. No performing. No forcing myself into places or conversations that didn’t really fit. A few walks.
New Year’s Day always feels different to me. Not loud. Not celebratory. More like standing outside early in the morning when everyone else is still asleep, the air cold and clear, and you can finally hear yourself think. As I sit here on New Year’s Day 2026, looking
Most of what we think we see in other people isn’t actually them. It’s us. Our fears. Our wants. Our unmet needs. Our old wounds, staring back at us like they belong to someone else. We look at someone’s life and think they’ve got it cracked.
I like to think that all the shit I’ve had to put up with over the last ten years actually meant something. The depression. The anxiety. The dark moments. The loneliness. The constant feeling of being lost, rejected, and quietly convinced that life was pointless and never really going
The valley isn’t dramatic. That’s why people stay there. When you imagine someone struggling, you picture chaos. Addiction. Crisis. Obvious pain. But the valley doesn’t look like that. It looks like normal life. You get up. You go to work. You see friends. You function. From the
I didn’t plan this. There was no big decision or turning point where I sat down and decided to start writing. It just reached a point where everything in my head needed somewhere to go that wasn’t my own mind. For most of my life I lived in