Spending time awake while the world sleeps brings a profound sense of disconnection that’s difficult to fully grasp, but also one that’s utterly useless to try to find a meaning to.

It doesn’t really matter whether I’m awake or asleep, if it’s in the middle of the day or way past 3 am. It’s just a socialized necessity or a custom that makes it easier or more acceptable to be awake during regular working hours.

If I spend time doom scrolling at 3 am I’m a degenerate and lazy dipshit of a loser, if I do the same at 4 pm I’m just relaxing. One day bleeds into the next, but nothing actually changes, there’s no discernable difference between one day and the next, no mark or sign of a change, at all.

In 11 days it’ll be Christmas, and yet it’s as if we’re in February and Christmas won’t come for almost a year. I’m unable to find anything meaningful because it all feels the same, it all feels so utterly hopeless. I’m grasping for some connection to something else, but it’s not there. It was never there. I’ve always been disconnected.

Going back to messages sent in 2013 wondering what could’ve been had I joined a best friend on her trip to France. Would things have been different had I been more persistent and texted someone back in 2015? I’m left with questions that can never be answered. Why didn’t I record more of my moments in 2017?

The questions leads to more questions. Why, given my endless reservoir for empathy, did I stop answering people? Why did I leave them out in the cold? I never intended to answer, I didn’t put it off for a few months, I just never replied. What went through my mind? How did my connection splinter so much I just couldn’t be bothered with anything?

I wanted to be a stylist when I was a teenager, but suddenly at one point I just couldn’t care about anything regarding myself. I went from spending hours in front of a mirror to detesting the person who stared back at me. The person who could no longer express their gender identity due to faulty genetics, instead forced into a hypermasculine appearance. And I just couldn’t cope.

I stopped shaving, I stopped brushing my teeth, I stopped showering. I ate awful food, drank pure carbonated sugars. Nothing gave me pleasure besides playing a game which I developed a clinical addiction to. And so when people reached out I didn’t reply, not because I disliked them, or didn’t want anything to do with them. But because I disliked myself. I hated myself, so why would I reply and break their illusion at all? Shatter their expectations of me built up over the years based on someone I once was, but not who I am anymore.

Instead I ditched it all, I ghosted it all. And now it’s been such a long time that there’s not a shred of evidence of my existence anywhere. I’m nobody, with nothing to my name. No friends, no one who knows who I am. And worst of all I am content. Safe in this illusion of resilience that’s become my inescapable prison.