There are days I wake up feeling like someone else has already lived half of me.
Like I’ve walked through corridors I don’t remember entering, nodded in rooms I don’t belong to, and spoken words that sound rehearsed even the first time I say them. It’s not that I dislike who I’ve become. It’s just , I don’t remember choosing her. Somewhere along the line, my life became a string of deliverables.
Assignments, opportunities, forms, feedback. A well-oiled system of doing things that look good from the outside.
And inside?
Just a soft humming. Like a fridge running in a quiet kitchen. Always on. Never loud.
But always there.
They call it burnout. But that’s too clean a word.
What I feel is slower. Stranger.
Like being halfway through a novel and realising you’ve been reading the same paragraph for weeks.
There was a version of me once , who did things simply because they moved her.
She wrote for no audience. Spoke without rehearsing. Felt without bracing.
I think she left quietly.
And the worst part is:
no one even noticed.