i sometimes fantasize about becoming a geographical impossibility, living somewhere so inconsequential that even the world would forget to look for me. an old cottage surrounded by overgrown grass, a room above a secondhand bookshop, perhaps a little house in some nameless village where the days pass without incident. nothing particularly extraordinary. just a life with fewer witnesses. i imagine the small, almost ridiculous pleasures of it. making tea and forgetting to drink it. reading the same page until my thoughts wander elsewhere. keeping a notebook of observations nobody will ever read. remembering people i no longer speak to, wondering what became of strangers i saw once on a train, assigning entire biographies to faces i'll never encounter again. my mind could spend hours in these useless little excursions, and for once, there would be nowhere else i needed to be. the modern world has an almost vulgar insistence on being present. every thought must be expressed, every absence explained, every passing moment filled with something. even solitude has become something people photograph and announce. i find myself longing for the opposite, a sort of inconspicuous existence, unrecorded and undisturbed. no audience, no correspondence, no obligation to translate the contents of my head into something another person might understand. perhaps i romanticize these imaginary hideaways because i've never quite understood the appetite for constant company. there are afternoons when my own thoughts provide more than enough entertainment, though admittedly, they also make terrible company. they drag up ancient embarrassments, invent improbable catastrophes, and insist on examining things that would have been better left alone. still, i'd take that peculiar interior chaos over the world's noise sometimes. at least my thoughts are familiar nuisances. the world, on the other hand, keeps finding new ways to be exhausting.

I don't know if I would have gotten as far as I did without hating myself. I just didn't realize how much of myself I was destroying in the process. Self-hatred was all I had. When you grow up without any real foundation of self-love, self-hatred becomes the engine. You hate yourself enough to keep trying to outrun the person you believe you are. And yes, it's a terrible engine. It runs on the worst fuel imaginable, and it poisons everything it produces. But when it's the only voice that's ever pushed you forward, you start believing that without it, you'd have no reason to move at all. I spent years believing that punishing myself was the path to redemption. That if I just suffered long enough, eventually I'd come out on the other side as someone I could finally accept. But every time I got close to the person I thought I needed to become, my brain moved the finish line further back. And then I realized the race was designed to never end. Because if your ability to love yourself depends entirely on becoming the person you imagine you should be, you'll spend your entire life withholding that love from the person who actually exists. Whenever something good came close enough to actually make me happy, my brain would just say, "No, go fuck yourself. Happiness was something you had to purchase with enough pain, and I never had enough." Would you look at someone you love and tell them they don't deserve to be happy because they haven't suffered enough? You won't. I mean, you'd never say that to them, but you'll say it to yourself every day and not even notice you're doing it, because the cruelty became so normal it started sounding like common sense. And when someone tells you to, "Oh, just love yourself," if you spent your whole life being punished for your mistakes, where exactly are you supposed to learn how to forgive yourself? If nobody ever taught you that you could be hurting and still deserve kindness, why would you suddenly know how to give it to yourself? You can't love yourself your way out of self-hatred when self-hatred is the only relationship with yourself you've ever known. That capacity was never built. Most of my life looked like that war, and I was never suddenly healed or anything. I just started noticing when my own mind crossed from holding me accountable into tearing me apart. And over time, the days that used to be most days started to become some days. I still have self-hatred, and some days it still wins. But I stopped waiting to become someone worth caring about before I allowed myself to stop suffering. I spent years withholding acceptance from the person I was because I believed it belonged to the person I would become. And I never understood that the person I would become had to be built by the person I refused to accept.

guys, i need your help please help me out