Nobody warns you that identity is mostly just survival. You figure out what makes people comfortable around you, what version of yourself gets the least pushback, and you repeat it until it starts to feel like a personality. And then one day someone asks you who you are and you open your mouth and what comes out is a list of preferences. Music taste. Aesthetic. The shows you watch. As if consumption is the same thing as a self.
Adolescence is strange because everyone treats it like a chrysalis. Like you go in one thing and come out another, cleaner, more defined. But some people just stay in there. Turning and turning and not arriving anywhere. And the turning itself starts to feel like the point.
Somewhere in the middle of all that becoming, you develop this quiet distaste. Not for anything specific. Just for the texture of your days. You can't explain it without sounding ungrateful because the facts of your life are fine, you know that. You're not naive. You understand privilege, you understand that most of the world would trade problems with you without thinking twice. Knowing that doesn't dissolve the feeling. It just adds guilt on top of it.
You love to write. You've always loved it, held onto it like it meant something about you, like it was proof of some inner life worth having. But every time you actually sit down, what comes out is this. Circular. Inward. The same four feelings rotating. You wonder if you're a writer or just someone who has mistaken self-absorption for depth. The line is embarrassingly thin. You've read enough to know that real writers write outward eventually — toward other people, toward the world — and you keep waiting for that to happen and it doesn't. Everything still leads back to the same room.
There are people whose lives have a quality of readability. You notice it without being able to fully name it. Something about the way they move that produces meaning automatically, strangers can look at them and find a story worth following. You don't resent them for it. It's not that simple. It's more that you understand intuitively that some selves are easier to romanticize than others, and romanticizing your life feels necessary somehow, feels like the difference between living it and just getting through it. Without that you're just a person things happen to. And you can't locate what it is exactly that makes a life readable. You suspect it's not about anything as simple as beauty or luck. It's more like some people arrive in the world already legible, already pointing somewhere, and others spend their whole lives being the thing that doesn't quite resolve into a clear image no matter how long you look.
People would be surprised, if they knew. It's the consistent thing. You're not who anyone would think to worry about. You show up. You're present. You say the correct things in the correct order. You're actually funny sometimes. You have a self and it's pleasant, warm and inviting. It's just that the self has this other room in it that nobody gets taken to.
The wish has been there long enough that it doesn't frighten you anymore. That's probably the most honest thing you can say about it. It's not violent or urgent. It's more like a door you know is unlocked.
You don't need to open it, you just need to know it's there, that the option exists, that you are not completely without agency in the story of your own life. On good days too. The good days don't make it go away. You've stopped waiting for a version of yourself that doesn't have it. You think maybe this is just part of the architecture.
And then there's the question you keep circling back to, the single variable. The one thing, if different, that might have changed the entire trajectory. You don't know what it is exactly but you feel its absence. You think about the version of yourself that got that thing, whatever it was. A different year. A different person who said something that landed right. Some small mercy at the right moment. You don't think about her with envy really, more with this useless and genuine curiosity. Like watching a film about someone else's life and thinking that's what it could've looked like.
You told yourself once that you were strong. You were younger, something hard came and you looked at it and decided it wouldn't touch you. And it didn't, or you stopped letting yourself feel it, which at the time felt identical to strength. You built something around that. Made it part of how you understood yourself — the one who doesn't break, the one who handles it, the one who is fine.
And now what. You have this self loathing that doesn't even have the decency to be about something. No singular wound you can press on. Just a general uselessness. A flatness where feeling used to be. You're not sad exactly, sadness would at least be something to work with. This is more like the absence of investment. In yourself, in the version of yourself you're supposed to want to become.
So you try to locate a desire that exists independent of witness. Something you would build even if no one turned their head. The search feels almost clinical. You lay your interests out on a table like objects found in a pocket. Writing. Reading. The small private satisfactions. But even those have been shaped by response. Praise. Comparison. The quiet competition of who is more perceptive, more articulate, more wounded in an interesting way.
Is it that you are in love with the feeling of being a shell of a person. Not the pain of it but the identity of it. The emptiness as something you've held onto long enough that losing it would mean having nothing recognizable left. It's a cleaner story than wanting things. It's a more interesting thing to be than someone who tried and came up ordinary. A shell at least has shape. A shell at least is something you can show people and they'll understand immediately, without you having to explain.
Wanting, real wanting, is embarrassing. It's exposed. It requires believing you deserve the thing before you have any proof.