𝑆𝑦𝑒𝑑𝑎 𝑍𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑏

I was not raised alone.

i have winter inside me. the kind that leaves everything cold and lifeless. it sits in my lungs. it shows up when my hands go cold and my voice starts to shake. at first it was only a small chill, something i thought would pass. but it didn’t. it kept growing. now it lives in my bones. my blood moves slow. my thoughts are fogged glass. and i am so fucking tired of shivering through a life that never seems to thaw.

It’s true mom picks me apart, but I never say the other part: I hand her the knife sometimes. but she knows exactly where to cut. She’s sharp with me, yeah, but I’m the one who keeps giving her reasons, keeps offering up the same bruised pieces. I say she’s the one who hurts me, but I’m the one who keeps walking back into the room, chest bare, saying “look what you did,” when I brought the knife and the wound both.

I’m a burden. I’m a failure. I’m completely invisible. I’m just taking up space. I’m broken. I’m impossible to love. I’m wrong. I’m empty. I’m stuck. I’m always the problem. I’m nothing. I'm always letting people down. I'm too much for anyone to handle. I'm never going to get better. I'm tired of trying. I'm just a disappointment. I'm trapped in my own head. I'm fading away. I'm completely alone. I'm ruining everything. I'm not worth the trouble. I'm just waiting for the day to end. I'm too weak to fix this. I'm losing my grip. I'm a mess. I'm done.

nothing has worked for me for my whole life. not once. i tried everything people told me to try. work harder, be kinder, stay quiet and wait, trust the process, fake it till you make it. i did all of it. i pushed myself through it all. and every time it led me back to the same empty place, like i was running on a track that loops into itself. i watched people fall and still get pulled back up by hands i never had. i watched them mess up worse than me and still land on their feet. i’m not asking for pity. i’m past that. i’m just tired of lying to myself. and i’m too exhausted to believe the next chapter will be different.

I can’t stand myself. I can’t even look in the mirror without feeling sick at what I see, everything I’ve ruined, everything I’ve become, every reason I feel disgusted. I just want to get away from it all, from this face, from this reminder of me. No mirrors, no reflections, nothing that forces me to face it. And yeah, I feel like I should be completely stripped down, broken, erased of anything I could still pretend is fixable. Because then there’d be no more lying to myself about being worth anything.

All they saw was my rude behavior, my laziness, my silence. No one stayed long enough to ask what was behind it, or what it cost me just to get through the day. They didn’t see the war inside my head, quiet but nonstop, draining me before anything even began. Nights spent waiting for my thoughts to shut up so I could sleep. Mornings where opening my eyes felt like lifting something too heavy, when even getting dressed felt like forcing myself into a life I wasn’t ready for. And the silence they judged was just me trying not to fall apart in front of everyone. I wasn’t lazy, I was exhausted in a way sleep can’t fix. I wasn’t rude, I was overwhelmed and had no language for it.

No medicine can erase the memories that swallow me in the evening. Pills can dull the edges, sleep can postpone it, but when it is just me and the dark, the things I wish I could forget sit right beside me. They do not yell. They just remind me. And some nights it feels easier to let it take me than to keep fighting it. To stop bracing and just let the evening carry me where it wants to go. I can drag myself to sleep, but I cannot drug away the nights when my mind becomes the place I die in.

I'm tired of being the person everyone leans on when they're breaking, but falls apart alone. My hands know how to hold other people's pieces together, but mine sit scattered on the floor when the door closes.

i want to do better, but not in a loud or perfect way, just in a way that actually matters. i don’t want to keep repeating the same mistakes and calling it fate, or telling myself i will change later, because later keeps turning into never. some days i feel close to change, and other days i fall back into the same version of myself i was trying to leave behind. i just want to become someone i can live with without that quiet disappointment, someone who keeps trying again even after slipping back, without treating every failure as the end of the effort.

There are moments when I feel like I am only a faint outline that the world almost recognizes and then forgets again, like something briefly lifted into focus before slipping back into blur. It feels like being close to something I cannot name, as if I am always on the edge of being understood but never fully held there.

i look back at the person i used to be and feel embarrassment, something that sits behind my ribs and doesn’t fully leave. it is strange how familiar she feels and still how distant. i don’t hate her, but i don’t know how to defend her either. she tried in her own way, even when she didn’t know what she was doing. sometimes i wish i could tell her what it all leads to, but i know she wouldn’t listen. she had to live it to understand it.

and then i am there again, nowhere physically, but completely consumed, standing in places i cannot return to, speaking words that no longer have anyone to hear them. it feels less like remembering and more like being pulled under, as if the past has hands and it knows exactly how to find me.

grief is sometimes just sitting in a normal day feeling slightly out of place. grief is the instinct to reach for what you cannot return to. grief is waking up and realizing the person, the moment, or the version of life you miss will never return, no matter how badly you wish it could. it is love that refuses to fade even when there is nowhere left for it to land. people think grief fades with time, but it changes shape. it becomes part of you, softer in some places, more fragile in others.

i get quiet around people i really want to talk to. i hate that i never seem to have anything to say, and i worry it makes it look like i don’t want to be there or don’t care. i actually do want to connect, but i just can’t get it out right. it’s like my mind goes empty the moment i need it most, and i’m left standing there hoping nobody notices how stuck i feel. i overthink everything i could say until it doesn’t feel worth saying at all, and then i just stay silent and regret it later.

just because i didn’t show it doesn’t mean i wasn’t hurting. i just learned how to hide it too well. i learned how to smile while something inside me was quietly falling apart, how to sit still while breaking in places no one could see. not every wound makes a sound, and mine learned to stay silent. i told myself it wasn’t that bad, because that was easier than admitting it was. i kept going through the motions so no one would look too closely, so no one would ask what i couldn’t answer without falling apart.

i’m so fucking angry. i’m angry at everything that keeps piling up. i’m angry when i wake up, angry when i try to sleep, angry at people, at situations, at myself for caring so much. i’m angry because nothing feels fair, because nothing feels finished, because the feeling won’t leave. i’m angry at the waiting. always the waiting. i’m angry at being told to “calm down” when nothing inside me is calm. i’m angry because there’s nowhere for all of this to go. i’m angry at myself for feeling it all so sharply, so constantly. it sounds like i’m hurting.