A letter from Oct 10, 2025

Every once in a while, I get these bouts of mental unwellness. I feel as though I’m waking up to something that my life isn’t - like for months I’ve been living in an out-of-control haze and I’m shooting up in bed in a cold sweat, eyes wide and fists clenched. Or maybe it feels like I’m my own parent in my head, coming home after an irresponsibly long vacation to a kid that didn’t quite trash the place, but everything is different and it doesn’t feel like home anymore. Or maybe it feels like coming home from college and your little sister started going to a new daycare where the kids eat worms and say ****. Anyway, it gets this way often when I settle into a routine, after a long time of running around doing whatever the hell I want to do. I live months in this kiddie fantasy of relationships and parties and smiles and then it all sets in that I’ve actually not been happy in years and everything is fake and meaningless. It’s very sobering. Things just seem so suddenly different. They seem more bleak and devastatingly poignant. I told dad my ricecooker broke months ago and I haven’t cared enough to get a new one. He said “you used to eat a lot of rice”. I used to eat a lot of rice. ****. I used to eat a lot of everything, and then a lot of nothing. I used to run around wearing holes in my shoes in a burning rage. Now it hurts to fill up my gas twice a week from driving 45 minutes to work. I’ve been spending a lot of time at Valerie’s. I like it there. She’s there and we eat whatever we want and we sing and cry and listen to music and it makes me so happy. When I’m there it makes me feel like I’m okay. I’m scared to find out why it feels unokay when I’m by myself. Sometimes life gets so still it feels like I’m in high school again and then I start to cry like I’m in high school again. Back when I couldn’t drive and I didn’t like my friends and mom and dad lived in the same house but nobody would talk to each other. Yesterday I just cried and cried for hours because I felt so sad and lonely. I don’t know what happened to me. It didn’t feel like anything would ever be okay again. It wasn’t like me at all. I started to worry if people would still like me if I wasn’t like me at all anymore.