Member-only story
Do You Ever Stop Trying to Be What You’re Not?
This isn’t a story — it’s the sound of something breaking.
I have a question for you, but I don’t want your answer — not at first. I want you to feel it, let it sink under your skin like glass splinters. Let it carve into the part of you that winces when someone looks too long, too hard. Don’t flinch. Not yet.
Do you ever stop trying to be what you’re not?
I didn’t. Not for years. Not even when it broke me in ways I couldn’t name. Not even when the act became so seamless I mistook it for living. I didn’t stop because I didn’t even know I was doing it — until I couldn’t anymore.
Realizations like this don’t arrive gently. They’re wrecking balls swinging through glass houses, leaving you barefoot in the rubble. It’s that game you played as a kid, holding your breath underwater, daring yourself to stay down just one second longer — until your lungs ignite, and the water feels less like play and more like a predator, wrapping itself around you, pulling you under.
The moment hit me on a Tuesday. Not a special Tuesday — no thunderstorms, no great personal tragedy, no grand epiphany. Just a day where I woke up already tired, already worn down by a life I couldn’t quite recognize as my own.
