the tides in my head

hello.

It's late and I'm sitting at my desk with the lights off, just the monitor and the little clock on my journal page glowing back at me. I made a coffee way too late again, which was a bad idea, but here we are. There's a slow, sad song playing on repeat, because apparently I enjoy hurting myself lol. I don't really have a plan for this entry. I just need to get some things off my chest before they eat me alive.

Sometimes I wonder if I've done anything right in my whole life, yknow? I know humans are imperfect by default. We make mistakes, we hurt people, sometimes without even meaning to. But we also have this beautiful ability to change and get better. We're all so unique and at the same time we're nothing at all. Pessoa has that poem that opens with him saying he is nothing and will never be anything, and somehow it's one of the most alive things I've ever read. I think about that a lot. How you can be nothing and still feel everything this loudly.

Before I keep going I want to be clear about something: I'm not dropping names or sharing anyone's personal stuff here. This isn't against anybody. Nobody did this to me. It's just me letting out what's been sitting in my heart for a long time, because I keep waiting for the day I finally calm the tides in my head and this hurts a little less.

I've been dragging guilt around for years. It's weird how guilt works. It doesn't scream at you, it just sits there, quiet, like a heavy coat you forgot you were wearing until you try to move.

I lost a lot of friends these past few years, and my life fell apart in more ways than one. Some of them were best friends, the kind of people you think will be in every chapter, and I probably lost them because of me. And no, I'm not writing this so someone feels sorry for me. I'm not looking for pity, and I don't need anyone to tell me I'm not the bad guy or that I didn't mess up, because trust me... I did. I remember the things I said and didn't say. I replay them at 3am like a bad rerun I can't turn off.

I want to be a good person.
I want to feel like a good human being.
but no matter how much I want it, I can't.

I want to look in the mirror and think "you're a good person, a good sister, a good daughter" and actually believe it. I just can't. I look and all I see is a list of every time I let someone down.

I've failed in so many ways that I don't even know how to make it right anymore. I don't think it's even about fixing it. There's nothing to fix. What happened happened, and I have to live with it, and I'm still figuring out how.

So now I'm scared of connecting with people. Scared I'll mess up, say the wrong thing. I worry way too much about what people will say or do. I isolate myself so much that my life turned into this loop: I wake up, I do my things, I stare at my phone, I don't answer. I don't even want to face the few friends I have left, not because I don't love them, but because what if eventually I fail them too? What if I hurt them or disappoint them? It feels easier to disappear first, even though I know disappearing is its own way of letting people down. I know. I know.

And it's not only the guilt, yknow? Lately it's also this feeling of time slipping through my fingers. Like holding something you love and already missing it while it's still right there in your arms.

I feel that every time I look at my cats.

Midnight is asleep on the corner of my desk right now, breathing slow, completely unbothered by my whole existential crisis. Dawn is somewhere in the room knocking something over probably. And I look at them and my brain goes: how much time do I have left with you? How many more nights like this one? I don't want you to leave. I don't want to count the years. I already know what it feels like to lose one of my girls, and I still don't know how people are supposed to be okay with that. I just want to keep them here, safe and warm and a little annoying, forever. I know that's not how it works. It doesn't stop me from wishing.

Maybe that's part of why the guilt hurts so much. Everything feels so temporary, the people, the friendships, my babies, even me, and I keep thinking about all the time I wasted being scared instead of just loving the things I have while I have them.

And then there's the emptiness. I don't really know what else to call it.

Some nights I'm not even sad. I'm just empty. Hollow in a quiet way, like I'm watching my own life through a window from somewhere very far away. Everything out there is so colorful, and I can see it, I can even think it's beautiful, but it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with me. I'm not losing anything. I'm not winning anything. I'm just here, looking.

Every once in a while I catch this smell of loneliness, like wet dirt after the rain, and it takes me straight back to being small. And I don't say any of this to sound deep or special, because I'm not, and I don't think I'm above anyone. Lots of kids think about this stuff. I was just one of them. But I remember being little and getting stuck on this thought that everything that's born grows, and everything that grows dies, and it scared me more than I knew how to say. Everyone around me seemed okay with it, and I think that's the part that made me feel a little lonely. Sometimes it feels like a lot of my thoughts since then started right there, in that little grief for the way life works. Not because I understood anything better than anyone else, just because I never really stopped feeling it.

Flowers bloom whenever they bloom, early or late, and one day the wind comes and takes the petals anyway. It doesn't matter when. I used to find that terrifying. Now it mostly feels quiet. Maybe that's the empty part talking. Or maybe it's the part of me that wants to understand life so badly, take it apart and look at memory and balance and beauty up close, like if I finally understand how something ends, it won't hurt as much when it does.

I know how that sounds lol. It sounds cold, like some character who looks at the whole world as an experiment and doesn't feel a thing. But I don't think it comes from not caring. I think it comes from caring so much that it's easier to step back and observe than to stand close and feel it. Which, looking at this whole entry, is kind of my whole problem.

I don't understand why I feel like this. It hurts in a way that's painfully huge, too big to fit anywhere. And still, underneath all of it, there's this small stubborn part of me that wonders if I could, I don't know... get better. And better. Until one day I look in the mirror and see a version of me who isn't wearing these chains anymore. Someone who can mess up and apologize and keep going, instead of punishing herself forever for being human.

Will I ever be able to forgive myself?

I don't have an answer tonight. Maybe that's okay. Writing this didn't fix anything, but my chest feels a little lighter than it did an hour ago, and I like knowing these words aren't just floating around in my head with nowhere to go.

Please don't worry too much about me. I'm still here, I'm still trying, and being here counts for something. Sorry for such a heavy entry on such a cute little site lol. One day I want to come back to this page and see how far I've come, even if I can't see it yet.

Now I'm gonna wash my mug, drink some water to cancel out the coffee (that's not how it works), and distract myself for a while. I'm not sleeping anytime soon anyway.

bye for now.