Ruminations
1.
The world is grotesque—
and so am I.
Sometimes I feel like I belong to this planet more than anyone,
and then I immediately take it back—
because this place is far too exhausting.
I never wanted to be the kind of person who craved belonging.
But in truth, I always have.
I carry a deep-rooted instability,
and I often find myself needing somewhere to explain me.
Maybe not being whole in myself means constantly searching
for names, for pronouns, for meaning.
And yet, strangely, I’ve never once truly felt that I belonged.
Here, I feel uneasy in one way.
There, I feel uneasy in another.
The pressure of not fitting in anywhere leaves me breathless.
And yet—
my unmoving shadow makes no effort to change.
All I ever do is drift.
Why is my world always so tired?
I’m so fragile, and the world is relentless.
It forces me into extremity, again and again.
It’s exhausting, messy, and cruel.
There are too many grotesque stories in this world.
Too many.
And they keep being born.
Is birth still something to be celebrated?
2.
I met Seung-eun .
She’s my cousin, ten years older.
But we’re like friends.
Not family.
The sentimental weight of blood ties doesn’t suit us.
What binds us isn’t domestic warmth—
but loyalty.
We shared a meal and sat on a bench late at night,
talking about this and that.
Her story at thirty.
My story at twenty.
Rather than becoming twenty.
I feel I’ve just ended up here.
Stumbled into this age.
Clumsily. Unceremoniously.
So “ended up” feels like the only honest way to put it.
She asked me what made me so sad all the time.
I thought for a while and said simply:
“Anxiety.”
I don’t really know why I’ve grown so sensitive to sorrow.
But when I think about it,
every emotion I have somehow leads back to that word:
Anxiety.
She tapped my arm gently,
saying I had nothing to be so anxious about at twenty-two.
And suddenly, I had nothing left to say.
It made me feel like my twenty-year-old anxiety
was somehow not valid.
For the first time,
I told a family member I was receiving treatment.
That I often think about dying.
That last year, I nearly did—drunk and angry.
That a friend saved me that night.
And that I often imagine
what would’ve happened
if she hadn’t.
She said I was the image of the youth
she’d always dreamed of:
Studying abroad.
Pursuing art.
She told me she admired me—
that my life, my youth, looked so dazzling to her.
3.
There was no heartbreak.
Only disappointment in how pitifully I’d acted.
I didn’t want to accept how quickly my world shrank.
I often recall a line I read on the subway—
that the shallowness of one’s life can be unbearable.
That admitting the thinness of one’s existence
feels like suffocating.
I also think about the words of a suicide survivor:
“I’ll try dying well next time.”
Sometimes, I understand that sentiment too well.
In front of K,
I’m a radiant nineteen.
In front of Seung-eun,
I’m an elegant fiction.
In front of H,
I’m an ordinary twenty.
If I meet ten people,
I become ten different versions of myself.
Twenty people, twenty versions.
A hundred, a thousand—
they multiply without me even noticing.
And among those thousand versions of me
I no longer know which one is real.
Even alone, I don’t feel like one person.
It all feels fake.
What does it take to be unwavering?
To be consistent?
How do people become that?
That face—
the one who had what I could never hold—
shone with a light I could never match,
no matter how hard I tried.
I envy them.
And I often wish to become the kind of person
I know I’ll never be.
To speak of dreams
feels too right,
and that hurts.
4.
I keep wanting to live in the past.
And that desire
is starting to break me.
scanned sketchbook, 2024
Feb - between mental illness and kindness
05:48
ⓒ 2025 Moussy
All rights reserved.
All rights reserved.