Who Are You When You Walk Away?
Reading Time: 2min
How do you mourn someone who is still alive, or worse, yourself?
Growing up, we all carry a vision of how life will unfold. We call it hope. It is the quiet promise that things will make sense, that we will become the people we imagine. But what happens when life, as you know it, begins to feel like oblivion? When it feels like you are watching your own life from the outside, disconnected, observing rather than living?
Many people live with a lingering voice that reduces them to a failure, a voice that insists they will never be enough. Sometimes it is loud. Sometimes it is barely a whisper. Sometimes it is not a voice at all, but an emptiness in your chest. A feeling you cannot name. A feeling that leaves you hollow, alone, even when surrounded by people.
The thing about depression that people do not talk about is how quietly it lives inside routine. How it embeds itself into your day-to-day life until it feels normal. It convinces you that no one will ever truly understand this part of you. It masks itself as overconfidence, as toxic habits, as a craving for validation, as isolation or even as high functionality. You show up. You perform. You survive. And yet, you are sinking.
No matter how deeply you try to bury it, it remains. And the harder you try to climb out of that dark space, the deeper it pulls you in. It becomes familiar. Almost loyal. Like an old friend that depends on you to survive. And then comes the hardest question: what happens when you leave them behind?
What people rarely understand is how much depression grows on you. How it feeds on your energy until it becomes a part of you. Slowly, quietly, it begins to erase the person you once were; the person everyone knew, the person you remember in fragments.
At some point, the lines begin to blur. Between who you were and who it forced you to be. Between survival and living. Between letting go and losing yourself entirely.
If healing means leaving behind the pain that shaped you, who are you when you finally walk away?
