Most people die before they realise someone else has been living their life.

Same hands.

Same face.

Same name on the paperwork.

But someone else chose almost everything.

What they should want.

Who they should fuck.

What success should look like.

Which god was listening.

Which behaviour made them respectable.

Which parts of themselves needed to be hidden before somebody noticed.

And somehow we call this a personality.

That's generous.

I think it's closer to a hostage situation.

Look closely enough at yourself and you'll start finding fingerprints.

Your mother's voice inside your guilt.

Your father's absence inside the people you chase.

An ex inside the way you apologise.

Some kid from school inside the part of your body you still hate twenty years later.

People leave.

Their programming doesn't.

That's the clever part.

Eventually you don't need anyone controlling you.

You do it for them.

You censor the thought.

Swallow the anger.

Stay agreeable.

Stay attractive.

Stay useful.

Stay employable.

Stay lovable.

Stay inside the fucking lines.

And every morning the machine boots successfully.

YOU.

Password accepted.

Identity loaded.

Nobody asks whether you chose it.

Why would they?

The system works better when you don't.

Then something goes wrong.

Maybe grief.

Maybe betrayal.

Maybe one ordinary Tuesday when you're brushing your teeth and catch your own eyes in the mirror and experience the deeply unpleasant sensation

that someone is looking back who knows you've been lying.

That's where it starts.

People like to call it awakening.

Of course they do.

Humans have a remarkable talent for giving pretty names to psychological violence.

Awakening.

Transformation.

Finding yourself.

Sounds better than:

Everything you thought you were has begun decomposing while you're still inside it.

Because that's what happens.

You start noticing things.

Dangerous things.

You don't actually want half the shit you're chasing.

You don't even like some of the people you're terrified of losing.

Some of your strongest beliefs collapse the second you ask where they came from.

And the personality you're so protective of?

Parts of it were built by a frightened child trying to predict which version of you would get hurt the least.

Let that sink in.

A child wrote the emergency protocol.

You just forgot to update it.

So thirty years later you're still running.

Still pleasing.

Still proving.

Still mistaking anxiety for intuition and familiarity for love.

Then comes the really ugly discovery.

You helped.

Of course you did.

That's the part nobody wants in the enlightenment books.

Eventually the prison didn't need guards.

You decorated the cell yourself.

Put plants by the window.

Called your fear "standards".

Called avoidance "independence".

Called emotional numbness "peace".

Called being needed "love".

Very tasteful.

Five stars.

Would dissociate here again.

And once you see it,

you're fucked.

Because you can't unknow yourself.

You can pretend.

People are excellent at that.

Go back to work.

Answer emails.

Buy groceries.

Post something about gratitude.

Ask strangers on the internet which attachment style explains why someone didn't text back.

Anything to avoid the question now breathing behind your skull:

If all of that was learned...

what the hell is actually me?

Careful.

That's where people start disappearing.

Not physically.

Something stranger.

The version of you everyone knows begins dying while you're still wearing its face.

People notice.

They'll say you've changed.

There's accusation hidden inside that sentence.

You've changed.

Translation:

You are no longer behaving in the way that made you predictable to me.

And they'll want the old you back.

The forgiving one.

The quiet one.

The endlessly understanding one.

The one who could be wounded and still ask whether the knife was comfortable.

That version was easier to love.

Mostly because it required so little from anyone else.

You might miss them too.

That's the sick joke.

You'll grieve identities that were killing you because at least they knew how to survive.

The new you knows nothing.

No map.

No commandments.

No convenient little cosmic voice saying:

Congratulations.

You have reached consciousness

Just silence.

And silence gets fucking loud when you've spent your whole life being told who you are.

This is where enlightenment becomes less romantic.

You don't float above humanity.

You see more of it.

The bargaining.

The performance.

The desperate little economies of affection.

People exchanging pieces of themselves for belonging.

Everyone terrified of being alone,

so they become whatever keeps the door unlocked.

You see it everywhere.

Then you see it in yourself.

That's worse.

Because the deepest illusion was never society.

Or religion.

Or capitalism.

Or your parents.

Or the people who hurt you.

It was believing that because the voice was inside your head,

it belonged to you.

So now you begin the unpleasant work of killing things that have your face.

One identity.

One belief.

One fear.

One borrowed voice at a time.

Until eventually there is almost nothing left.

And you wait.

Surely this is where you find yourself.

Surely something pure emerges.

Some final, authentic version.

Something untouched.

Something true.

...

Nothing.

That's the secret nobody can sell you.

There may be no buried self.

No finished version.

No person waiting at the bottom.

Maybe consciousness is simply the thing watching all these versions of you

arrive,

perform,

panic,

love,

destroy themselves,

and disappear.

Maybe finding yourself was never about finding anything.

Maybe it was about becoming conscious enough to notice

who has been speaking through you.

And brave enough to answer the question that comes after the last voice goes quiet.

Now that nobody is telling you who to be...

who the fuck are you?

The world has gone mad.

But hey, at least the Wi-Fi's fast.

The planet's splitting at the seams,

yet somehow ads still load so fast.

Children practice hiding drills

between arithmetic and art,

learning how to shield their heads

before they learn what taxes are.

The oceans drown in plastic waste,

the forests burn for cash,

while billionaires preach "eco-change"

from private jets that guzzle gas.

A man works sixty hours weekly

and still can't pay his rent,

while wealthy heirs sell "hustle culture"

from yachts worth nations' GDP percent.

Healthcare costs a king's ransom now,

so sickness comes with debt,

but luckily a podcast bro

says "drink more water" on the net.

Wars are streamed in portrait mode

with music soft and sad,

while someone in the comments asks

where soldiers bought their bags.

A city falls. A mother screams.

A child is pulled from stone.

Then influencers add sepia tones

and call the footage "raw" on phones.

How tasteful.

How chic.

How profitable this week.

They say that "mental health comes first",

then grind staff to the bone,

rewarding mass dissociation

with pizza parties over Zoom.

Corporations change their logos

to rainbow shades each June,

while children stitch those very shirts

in overheated rooms.

People can't afford their food,

their medicine, heat, or rent,

but thank God billionaires reached Mars,

what progress that event.

The rich sell luxury bunkers now,

the poor buy scratchcards drunk,

while politicians promise hope

from podiums built on junk.

"Change is coming".

"Trust the plan".

They've said that since the dawn of man.

And through it all the clocks tick on,

precise, uncaring, clear,

while humanity keeps doomscrolling

through collapse year after year.

The world has gone mad.

Still, smile for the camera, dear.

The algorithm loves despair

this time of year.

I arrived without a mask.

Nobody warned me

that was considered obscene.

Apparently, there are parts of yourself

you are supposed to bury

before entering polite society.

So everyone came dressed appropriately.

The miserable wore smiles.

The cruel wore charm.

The empty wore expensive things

and called it a personality.

Predators arrived dressed as protectors.

Liars came wearing sincerity

so convincingly

they eventually began believing themselves.

And the wounded,

God, the wounded were beautiful.

They learned to bleed inward

so nobody had to look at the mess.

They called it strength.

I watched people shake hands

with those they despised,

kiss mouths they had already betrayed,

say I love you

with the same tongue

they used to dismantle someone

in another room.

And somehow

I was the strange one.

Standing there

with every ugly, inconvenient truth

still attached to me.

No costume.

No rehearsed smile.

No carefully manufactured version

of myself designed

to be easier to swallow.

It took me years to understand

why people kept trying to change me.

A real face is dangerous

in a room full of masks.

It reminds everyone

that theirs can be removed.

So they will call you difficult.

Too intense.

Too dark.

Too honest.

They will tell you to soften

until you become something

they can comfortably lie beside.

And if you refuse,

they will make you believe

your face is the problem.

That is how the party survives.

Not because everyone is pretending,

but because everyone agrees

never to point at the masks.

I used to wonder

why I never belonged.

Now I know.

Life was a costume party,

and I walked through the door

wearing the one thing

this world has never known

what to do with,

a human being

who had stopped pretending

there wasn't a monster

somewhere inside us all.

Some truths do not set you free.

They wait.

Quietly.

Behind familiar faces, inside promises spoken too easily, beneath the warm architecture of everything you trusted.

Then one day, something shifts,

and you see the machinery underneath.

How affection can imitate hunger.

How loyalty disappears when it becomes inconvenient.

How virtue survives beautifully until nobody is watching.

You begin noticing how much of the world depends upon everyone agreeing not to look too closely.

So they call you cynical.

Difficult.

Dark.

Anything but awake.

Because people forgive blindness far more easily than they forgive the person who points toward the body.

And there is no innocence after seeing.

You can close your eyes.

You can pray for ignorance.

You can crawl back toward

the comforting lie,

but there are doors

the mind only opens once.

And the cruelest thing about truth

is not what it shows you.

It is knowing

you might have been happier

if you had never looked.

I wonder how many walk the world starved,

not for food, not for sex,

but for the violent permission to feel

without shame.

We are love-malnourished,

touch-deprived,

emotionally exiled

by a world that confuses silence with strength

and teaches us to swallow grief

and call it survival.

We flinch at softness.

We fear kindness.

We wear independence like armor

and mistake the weight of it for healing.

Vulnerability became a wound

before it ever had the chance to be a bridge.

But we don’t want fixing.

We want safety,

to fall apart and not be left,

to feel without punishment,

to be held without becoming a burden.

We are not broken,

only starving,

for love that doesn’t make us bleed,

for tenderness that doesn’t keep score,

for arms that carry without cages.

And maybe salvation

is nothing more than this:

to be allowed to be as we are,

beside someone

who lets themselves be the same.

Pull the lever.

(Or did they pull it for you?)

The reels spin, symbols blur,

Cherry. Cherry. Skull.

Almost.

Always almost.

You call it voting, shopping, freedom.

But the machine was here before you,

and the symbols were painted on your eyes

before you even opened them.

Pull the lever.

Three cherries. Jackpot. Right?

No! The payout was promised in another life.

This life only gives you noise and flashing lights,

a simulation of winning.

Every coin you drop is your own time,

sliced into hours, stripped for data,

sold back to you as entertainment.

Pull the lever.

Even rebellion’s been given a reel,

Cherry. Skull. Raised fist.

Slogans pre-approved,

your outrage packaged in the same font

as last season’s soft drink campaign.

They hand you the script for your resistance,

and you recite it,

thinking it’s your own voice.

Pull the lever.

Sometimes I think the machine watches me.

Knows when my pulse spikes.

Knows when my eyes linger too long on the skulls.

Maybe it’s not even a machine anymore,

maybe it’s alive.

Maybe it’s mapping my mind in real time.

And maybe I’m not playing it at all.

Maybe it’s playing me.

Pull the lever.

I tell myself I could walk away,

but I don’t remember the door I came through.

I’m not even sure there was a door.

What if the lever isn’t in my hand at all?

What if my hand is the lever?

What if I’ve been the machine this whole time?

What if silence isn’t empty at all?

What if it’s the eye of the storm, the breath between the crash of waves, the pause before the world rushes forward again?

In that stillness, everything is waiting: voices unspoken, dreams gathering shape, a thousand lives unfolding behind closed eyes. A single moment of silence can hold more than noise ever could: grief, love, memory, hope, whole stories written in the spaces between sound.

Silence is the soil where new worlds are conceived. Inside it, galaxies stretch their arms before they are born, stars hum quietly before they ignite. Whole universes are rehearsed in the dark, preparing to spill into light. A person can live an entire lifetime there: healing, breaking, falling in love, saying goodbye, beginning again. The silence carries it all, like a womb cradling what the world has not yet seen.

And silence doesn’t have to be lonely. It can be a place where two souls find each other when the storm outside rages. Inside the eye, they twirl together, a slow dance where time bends, where every heartbeat is amplified, where the world cannot touch them. In that hush, they can laugh without sound, ache without words, love without limit. In their quiet, there is safety. In their stillness, there is eternity.

So when silence comes, I don’t see absence. I see possibility. I see storms gathering their power, I see worlds being written, I see dances that belong only to those brave enough to step inside the hush. Silence is not the end. Silence is the beginning

They don’t call it murder.

They call it procedure.

Call it compliance.

Call it enforcement.

Call it "just doing our jobs".

Like jobs don’t kill.

Like pens don’t stab.

Like a signature can’t be a blade.

They come at dawn

when the light is weakest.

Boots cracking pavement.

Radios coughing static.

Vans lined up like hearses.

Windows blacked out.

No witnesses.

No reflections.

No proof you ever stood there breathing.

Paperwork first.

Always paperwork.

Forms.

Clips.

Stacks of lives pinned together like receipts.

A paperclip biting through ten names at once.

Red stamp.

Denied.

Red stamp.

Removed.

Red stamp.

Gone.

Tell me how that isn’t execution.

Tell me how a desk isn’t a killing floor

when whole bloodlines vanish across it.

They don’t shoot you.

They unperson you.

Erase you softer than chalk.

Quieter than a grave.

A mother screaming in the street

while a man with gloves checks boxes.

Checkbox.

Checkbox.

Checkbox.

Like he’s ordering lunch.

Kids in socks on concrete.

Grandfathers shaking like loose change.

Hands zip-tied so tight the skin blooms purple.

Faces pressed into asphalt

like the earth is already rehearsing burial.

The air tastes like rust.

Like pennies.

Like blood you didn’t spill but still swallow.

And the street watches.

Curtains twitch.

Doors lock.

Nobody wants to be next.

Because genocide doesn’t start with fire.

It starts with neighbors learning

to look away.

Street by street.

House by house.

Name by name.

Not war.

Not accident.

Design.

Cold.

Deliberate.

Administrative slaughter.

We’ve seen this before

Don’t tell us this is new.

We’ve seen the footage.

The grainy black-and-white ghosts.

The piles of shoes.

The mass graves.

The paperwork signed by men who said

we were just following orders.

Every genocide starts tidy.

Starts legal.

Starts stamped and filed.

The killing only gets loud

after the world pretends not to hear the quiet part.

So we break glass.

Yeah, we break it.

Because what else do you do

when your life is being erased

with a clipboard?

What else do you do

when "justice" wears riot gear

and smiles like it’s mercy?

We throw our grief through windows.

We light our rage like flares.

We turn the night red enough

that they finally have to look.

This isn’t disorder.

This is survival with its teeth out.

This is a throat raw from chanting

NO MORE.

NO MORE.

NO MORE.

This is what happens

when you cage people long enough,

they stop knocking.

They start kicking doors.

Call it protest.

Call it riot.

Call it criminal.

We call it breathing.

Because every time that van door slams

another name disappears

like it never existed.

And if that isn’t killing,

what the hell is?

They say we’re violent for screaming.

But what do you call

a system that eats families whole

and wipes its mouth with policy?

What do you call a country

that files bodies alphabetically?

What do you call paper

that weighs more than a life?

Because silence looks too much like death.

Because calm sounds like a coffin lid.

Because if we don’t make noise loud enough to shake the sky,

they’ll finish the list.

And one day

there won’t be anyone left

to scream.