Sometimes it feels like my life is on rails and I am just a passenger, watching it all go by.
Work, video games, sleepless nights, repeat. I drag myself from one day to the next like I am half awake, half alive. I keep asking what my future holds, but all I can see in front of me is the same worn-down loop: Alarm, desk, screen, distraction, exhaustion. Then I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, wired and empty at the same time, waiting for sleep that never really comes.
I keep circling this thought of reinvention. Not just a new hobby or a new schedule, but a full reset.
Pack a bag. Grab my passport. Walk away. Leave this version of myself behind like an old skin I finally outgrew.
There is a dark appeal in that idea. To disappear on purpose. To stop explaining myself to anyone and just vanish into a different city, a different life, where nobody knows who I have been.
California shows up in my mind like a ghost. Part of me wonders if I should go back and try again, confront all the unfinished business I left there. Another part of me feels sick at the thought, like going back would only prove I have not changed at all, that I am still orbiting the same failures.
Then I think about the East Coast, somewhere with cold winters and unfamiliar streets, or maybe a place far outside the United States. A country where my name sounds strange and I have to relearn everything from the ground up.
I romanticize it sometimes. A small apartment in a city where I know no one. New coffee shop. New bus routes. New grocery store. My old life reduced to a story I do not have to tell if I do not want to. Just a clean exit.
Whenever I imagine leaving, I hit the same snag: the few people in my life. It is not like I have this huge crowd, but there are names and faces that cling to me. Inside jokes, old memories, those rare moments where I felt like I was not completely alone in the world.
- If I stay for them, am I abandoning myself?
- If I leave for myself, am I abandoning them?
I get stuck in that loop and do nothing, which is its own kind of cruelty. I am halfway gone in my head and still physically here, pretending I am not already pulling away.
Then there is the work question. If I actually left, would I cling to my current job like a life raft? Keep the same tasks, the same responsibilities, just change the backdrop behind my monitor? Or would I try to start over completely?
I think about my resume and it feels like a list of accidents. Places I ended up, not choices I made. Positions I took because they were there, not because I cared. If I did try to reinvent myself, what would I be aiming for? What do I even want? I can list all the things I am tired of, all the things I hate, but when it comes to what I genuinely want, my brain goes quiet.
It is like I skipped that part of myself a long time ago and never went back.
A somber thought creeps in sometimes. What if the problem isn’t the city, the job, or the routine? What if the problem is me?
I could move across the world and still end up on a different couch, staring at a different screen, playing games until the sky turns grey. Perhaps the loop isn’t around me, but within me. That is the part that scares me the most: the fear that I could uproot everything, change the scenery completely, and still feel exactly the same. Same restless brain. Same loneliness. Same emptiness I keep trying to drown in noise and pixels.
You can escape a place. It is harder to escape yourself.
I also keep wondering if I could even do this alone. The fantasy version of this story has me leaving with someone. Two bags instead of one. Shared playlists on long train rides, shared fear, shared excitement. But that someone does not exist right now. There is no person in my life standing next to me with a packed suitcase, ready to go.
So I start asking myself if there is anyone out there who would ever want that with me. Someone who would not tell me to calm down and accept what I have. Right now it feels like I am stuck between two realities:
- In one, I take this risk with another person, and maybe it works.
- In the other, I stay here because I am too afraid to go alone.
And then there is the current reality, where I just keep imagining both and choosing neither.
There is a heavy, quiet part of me that whispers maybe this is it. Maybe this tired, looped existence is my life. Maybe there is no grand reinvention waiting for me, no new city that magically makes sense of everything. Maybe the best I can hope for is tiny adjustments that no one else would even notice. Sleeping a little earlier. Eating slightly better. Pretending that counts as change while I rot in slow motion.
I know how dramatic that sounds, but it is there, that rot feeling. Like I am wasting something I will never get back but I do not know how to stop.
Sometimes I think the bravest thing I could do is pick a direction and commit.
- Buy the ticket.
- Sign the lease.
- Quit the job.
- Or flip it: stay here and actually invest in this life instead of treating it like a temporary waiting room.
But that is the problem. I do not do any of it. I think. I fantasize. I spiral. I pull up listings for apartments in cities I have never been to, then close the tab. I look at job boards, then tell myself later.
It is like I am frozen in this weird halfway position, one foot in the life I hate, one foot in a life that does not exist yet, muscles burning, unable to move forward or backward. I tell myself that I am giving it time, that I am figuring it out, but if I am honest, I am just stuck.
Right now the future feels like a blank screen that I keep staring at, cursor blinking, waiting for me to write something. And I am just sitting here, exhausted, confused, watching the same day replay while the desire to change fights with the fear of doing anything real.
I do not know if I should stay. I do not know if I should go. I keep hoping the answer will hit me one day, sharp and clear, but it has not. It is just me, in this room, in this life, looking at all the possible exits and not taking any of them.
And the worst part is, I genuinely do not know what to do.