When Nothing Feels Real

Wish you were here

I eat well. I travel. I work obsessively. I spend nights with people, even share intimacies. On paper, I have a life that should feel full. But when I stop to take stock, there’s nothing there. No pride, no satisfaction. Just a dull echo.

I know I’m fortunate. I know I’ve had successes that others would celebrate. I know my parents look at me with pride. I know the universe has given me opportunities that many will never touch. And still, deep inside, I feel nothing. The knowledge of abundance is there, but it does not translate into feeling. Just receipts of money well spent but forgotten.

Love has always struck me as a kind of delusion. My own experiences have proven that to me. It’s the same cycle over and over again. We bond, on lust, shared interests, hobbies, grandiose illusions we’ve created of each other, and slowly that fades away. Whether it is the sharp reality check that long distance, different backgrounds, life priorities, or even just the feeling of not being ready that feels like a ton of bricks smacking you across the face, or simply realizing that you are young, the chemicals have faded, and you yearn for someone new, no matter what it is that wakes you up that morning, you know that another one has slipped - usually, without you intending it to.

Yet I look at my parents, decades together, and I can’t deny the realness of what they’ve built. How do they sustain it? How do they not see through it? Or maybe they do see through it, and it doesn’t matter. Maybe they’ve just chosen to keep swimming in the delusion, because the alternative is emptiness. But for me, the delusion doesn’t hold. I reach for it, and it slips away. Like a slippery fish.

It’s the same with accomplishments. Each milestone dissolves as soon as I arrive. I can tick the box, but I can’t feel it. It’s like living in a loop: work, achieve, move on, repeat. I have won awards, started multiple companies within a community that I owe my identity to, tried my best to give back in ways that many in my position would have chosen not to do, yet still nothing. I start a project, knowing that it will be a challenge but also knowing that once that challenge is complete I will feel nothing, and so behold, we defeat another challenge and still - nothing. Always moving, never arriving. Where am I going.

What makes it worse is that I see it clearly. I can name the absurdity. I can trace the patterns, expose the mechanics. But knowing doesn’t save me from it, it traps me further. Once you’ve seen the strings behind the curtain, you can’t unsee them. You can’t go back to innocence. I try. I will never let my inner child die. I do my best, I take risks, I listen to my bodily needs, I have really experienced so much of what should bring me pleasure, as an adult and as a teenager, and yet - I don’t know anymore.

And so the days pass: food without taste, love without conviction, work without pride. A life that is lived fully on the outside, but hollow on the inside. The absurdity of it all becomes its own weight: to keep circling, to keep performing, to keep pressing forward with the knowledge that the ground beneath it all is thin, unstable, maybe even empty.

In moments like this, I think of my past. i think of the connections I have made along the way. The hundreds, if not thousands of deep, meaningful conversation that I’ve had with people. On occasion, I feel a sense of fulfillment there. Those moments where we get lose in a spiritual entanglement through our common language, fears, theories, and dreams. I remember a number of people, who I may have had one or two deep conversations with me, who would come back to me years (sometimes months) later thanking me for that moment. Saying that I had shared with them something that helped them see the light, that helped them take the necessary steps to grow. It is a nice feeling. In those moments I understand artists. Really the only time I understand them. Because in those moments I realize that I have no idea what I said to this person that made them feel this way, or even where those words came from, and all I can really say is that they weren’t my words , simply words channeled through me.

Should those connections be enough for me to feel some sense of meaning? Are they enough to accomplish Socrates’ dream of eternal beauty? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just narcissistic for thinking that anything I say has an impact anyway. Fuck all of you. Where is my spiritual guide? Where is my moment where I thank someone for showing me the way? I can have these conversations for hours, spew bullshit for feeble minds to think that they have touched some level of enlightenment but for me it is simply like offering someone their first taste of alcohol. You’re welcome. Fucking idiots.

So then I snap back out of it - and sure I may have smelt some level of pride, fulfillment, or satisfaction in my internal trip down memory lane, reliving some of my favorite memories - but again, all I really felt is my narcissistic tendencies creeping back, some good old angst, and a hint of suicidal thoughts (not that I would do it, where’s the fun in that). Here I am again, asking a god I don’t believe in to show me something, to make me feel something beyond pain and anger, to make me laugh. And all I see is a god who gives me a moment of laughter only to quickly remind me that behind the collective delusions we’ve created for ourselves there is nothing but pain.

There’s no lesson here, no uplifting turn, no promise that meaning will return. Only the circularity. Only the fish bowl. Only the old fears waiting where they always are.