Tomorrow is my birthday, and for the first time, I’ll be spending it alone. 🙃

It’s strange how the same fact can feel both frightening and comforting at once. Maybe because loneliness is never just about the absence of other people.

I’ll buy myself a vegan double cheeseburger at Burger King, light some candles, and make a wish. I want things to finally start falling into place. I want this new year of my life—my thirty-first—to be lighter than the last one. Freer. I want to travel again. I want to get my residency card. I want to pay off my debts. I want this chapter of my life to finally come to an end.

And as strange as it may sound, I’m grateful even for what’s happening to me now.

For the past week, I’ve barely left the house. Every day, I have conversations with myself. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. Sometimes I try to comfort myself. And sometimes I judge myself more harshly than I would ever allow anyone to speak to another person. Almost every one of those conversations ends in tears.

Maybe this is how people really change. Alone in their room, sitting on the couch, where no one can see the old version of them quietly falling apart.

I want to believe this isn’t just a difficult period, but a transformation. That there’s something meaningful waiting for me on the other side. That one day I’ll look back and understand why I had to go through all of this.

For now, I still feel like shit.

But I’m no longer trying to fight this state of mind. Every attempt to resist it only seems to make it stronger. So instead, I’m letting myself live through it. One day at a time.

I keep making videos and growing my Instagram. A few times, I wanted to quit. It all felt pointless. But yesterday, my very first video unexpectedly got a lot of views. And what I felt wasn’t so much joy as relief. It was as if something inside me quietly whispered, “Wait. It’s not over yet.” 😌

Sometimes, one small glimpse of hope is enough to get you through another day.

Inside, I swing between extremes. One moment I’m convinced I’m not worthy of anything. The next, I believe I’ll survive absolutely everything.

Sometimes I feel like a slug—someone who does nothing but complain about life. Then I remind myself that you can’t expect heroism from someone who’s genuinely struggling. That’s not weakness. That’s simply my reality.

And somehow, whenever I write, it stops consuming me completely.

I’ve started writing on paper too. So these thoughts no longer have to exist only inside my head. So every fear has somewhere to belong besides me.

You know, there’s a particular kind of suffering that comes from becoming too aware.

It’s not about intelligence. It’s about beginning to notice too much. And once you start seeing certain patterns, you can’t unsee them.

Movies become predictable.

Conversations become repetitive.

People begin to look like they’re simply playing roles.

I often find myself thinking about the time when it was possible to simply live without constantly asking why. Without analyzing everything. But little by little, that way of being disappears, and something else takes its place: observation.

And the hardest part of it is the feeling of isolation.

Everyone around you seems to be living their lives, while you feel like you’re standing outside of it, just watching. There are people around you, yet something inside still feels profoundly lonely.

The hardest part is that it’s almost impossible to explain.

So you stay quiet.

You pretend you don’t notice what you’ve already noticed.

That’s the peculiar thing about this kind of awareness.

You can’t switch it off.

Once you’ve seen, there’s no going back to not knowing.