“I’m just genuinely wondering why twenty-year-olds, like me, feel so alone in their emotions when it is overwhelmingly evident that so many of our peers feel the same way.”

as am i.

it’s clear to me, certainly, that all of us are in remarkable pain. we suffer in silence, we stalk find my, we seek bursts of dopamine in snaps and chats and messages that mean nothing, really, anyway.

we maintain relationships through mediums, through other people, through screens, and across thousands of miles, and we wonder why we feel so deeply, entirely, and desperately disconnected from one another.

but this is an old way of thinking.

we know there is a problem. we feel it with one another.

after all, knowing that another has a deep-rooted insecurity in our relationship with them soothes our egos. and maybe we keep each other miserable because our egos convince us we don’t really need one another, when connection, when love, is all we ever really crave.

so we worry, we catastrophize, we generate situations in our minds that have never happened, that will never happen, and we stay comfortably within a subtle, imaginative form of suffering that we like to think keeps us whole when it really just keeps us broken.

i try to cry but i can’t, and though i never find any way of ‘releasing’ anything, i’m always feeling empty.

if i’m not living the life i want (i’m not)

and the people around me aren’t either (they’re not)

who is?

who is.