It starts as a quiet hum beneath the surface, a feeling that you can’t name yet can’t quite ignore. It’s not sadness, not anger, not fear— just something. Something that stretches across your chest like a rubber band pulled too tight but never breaking. You sit there, staring at the wall or clock or the ceiling trying to convince yourself that it’s nothing. Nothing is wrong. You know that, logically. You have food, water, a roof over your head. No one is yelling. No one is leaving. No one is crying.
But still it’s there, that something. And it shouldn’t be, not when everything is fine. Not when your life is this clean, smooth sheet of glass with no visible cracks. You tell yourself to stop overthinking. You’re fine, you’re just tired. Maybe you didn’t sleep well, or you forgot to drink enough water. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s— what?
You don’t know. That’s the problem. You don’t know, and when there’s nothing to fix, you’re stuck. Chasing the feeling, trying to find its edges so you can cut it out and be done with it. But it doesn’t have edges. It doesn’t have a source, it’s just there, filling your lungs like heavy air, slowing your steps until trying to breathe feels like an effort.
It makes you wonder if this is what drowning feels like— not the thrashing, not the desperate fight to get to the surface, but the part right before the end. The part where you just stop fighting and just let the water pull you under. Except there’s no water here. No storm. Just this endless, silent nothingness that wraps itself around you like a weighted blanket you didn’t ask for.
You try to explain it to yourself. This is stupid. You’re being dramatic. You repeat it over and over, like a mantra, like maybe you can shame the feeling away. But do you argue with something that doesn’t make sense? How do you fight a ghost you can’t see?
You start chasing answers instead. Maybe, you’re not eating right. Maybe you’re not working hard enough, or maybe you’re working too hard. You run in circles, looking for the cause like a dog chasing its tail. But the more you run, the more exhausted you feel, and the farther you get from understanding why you started running in the first place.
And eventually, it just gets tiring. Not the kind of tired you can sleep off, but the kind that seeps into your bones and makes everything heavy. You sit there, and you think, Maybe this is just how it is. Maybe this is just what okay feels like now.
And that thought? It scares you more than anything else ever could.
Author’s Note:
Feeling can sometimes be bigger than you are, and that’s okay. When your body holds on to a feeling with no source that you fight to rid but can’t figure out “Why”, it can feel like pouring from an empty cup.
Dorabell Doll | 14 | Sunrise, FL | @officialdorabelldoll on Instagram
