I don't know if I should be writing this. I don't know if it makes sense. Sometimes I feel like nothing inside me ever really does.

I'm a pretty normal girl, ordinary in ways that make me invisible. No chaos worth mentioning. No tragedy big enough to justify how tired I feel.

My life is simple. Painfully simple.

I wake up. I do things I'm supposed to do. I go to college, come back home, laugh when I'm expected to, talk when silence feels suspicious... and then the day ends.

Routine. Predictable. Safe.

And I repeat it. Every single day.

From the outside, it looks like stability. From the inside, it feels like I'm slowly erasing myself.

And yet… there's this ache. A quiet, persistent ache that refuses to leave, no matter how normal everything looks from the outside.

I know people. A lot of them. Faces I greet. Names I remember. People I call friends.

But the worst part is this, when I actually want to talk, when my chest feels too full, when words line up at the edge of my throat…

That's when I realize, the room is empty.

And I wonder if it's my fault.

Maybe I'm not interesting enough to be listened to. Maybe my pain isn't severe enough to be taken seriously. Maybe I don't know how to ask without sounding like a burden.

It hurts, because it makes me question whether my emotions are even real. Whether sadness needs a visible wound to be believed. Whether pain only matters when it can be explained.

I'm sad, and I don't know why. I'm hurting, and I don't have the words.

So I stay quiet. Because silence feels safer than being misunderstood.

My family is normal. Warm. Present.

And I am the eldest.

Which means I learned early how to disappear politely. How to understand without being understood. How to sacrifice without calling it loss.

I am supposed to be strong. Supposed to be mature. Supposed to hold everything together without letting anything spill.

I'm supposed to have no flaws.

But how cruel is it to expect a human to be flawless, to breathe without breaking, to feel without falling apart?

My emotions don't feel valid because I can't explain them. And when I can't explain them, I punish myself for feeling them at all.

People say we are shaped by those around us. If that's true, then maybe this emptiness was taught to me, this silence, this confusion, this constant self-blame was taught to me.

I'm not quiet. And yet, I am.

A contradiction I live with every day.

I laugh. I talk. I exist loudly enough to convince others I'm fine.

But inside, my mind never stops. Thoughts collide, spiral, replay old moments, invent new regrets.

And still, my lips stay sealed.

Sometimes my wounds scream so loudly I think they'll tear through my skin, but my eyes stay calm, trained, practiced.

Sometimes my eyes burn with unshed tears, but my body stays still, as if nothing is wrong, as if I haven't learned how to collapse.

After a while, I started believing this is normal.

Because it's been months. Years.

And I'm still here, carrying the same weight, pretending it doesn't hurt as much as it does.

I never learned how to stop. Maybe no one ever taught me. Or maybe no one ever noticed I needed to.

So I adapted. I learned how to live with the ache. How to sit with it like an unwanted companion.

But being human means I still have moments.

Moments where I sit alone in my room, staring at my reflection that doesn't recognize me, at my hands that feel empty no matter how tightly I clench them, at nothing at all.

I want to scream. I want to complain. I want someone to ask and actually stay for the answer.

But what's the point of speaking when no one is listening?

I am angry, At people. At the world. At how easy it seemed for everyone else to exist.

But the anger always found its way back to me.

I hated myself, for being too sensitive, for feeling too much, for existing in a way that felt wrong.

Sometimes I wondered what it would be like if I didn't exist at all. No expectations. No noise. No constant effort to be okay.

Just peace.

The thought scared me. Not because I didn't want it but because a part of me did.

Still, I stayed.

Because leaving would hurt the only people who ever loved me. Because I couldn't be the reason my parents broke.

So I sat with it.

I had so many people to blame, but blaming them wouldn't change the silence.

They didn't notice. They didn't ask.

So I blamed myself.

I became both the wound and the hand pressing into it. The hurt and the reason it stayed.

There's a quote that says, "We can't simply stare at our wounds forever."

But sometimes that's all I knew how to do.

I stared at them until they stopped bleeding. Until they healed just enough to stop hurting. Until they faded only to be replaced by new ones.