worldsaway

What a gift it is to be alive.
People say that so easily, as if the sentence lands softly in everyone’s chest. As if being alive always feels like sunlight instead of survival. As if existence itself is enough to make someone grateful.

And maybe it is a gift.
But gifts can be heavy too.

Because lately, I don’t want to be alive anymore. Not in some dramatic, cinematic way. More like exhaustion settling into my bones so deeply that even imagining the future feels impossible. People talk about five-year plans and growing old and retirement and all the beautiful little lives they picture for themselves decades from now. And I sit there quietly wondering how they can see so far ahead when I can barely picture myself surviving another year.

What is my purpose?
Why am I here?
What am I supposed to be reaching toward?

I search for some image of my future and find only fog. Blank space. Static. Everyone else seems to carry this invisible certainty that life will continue unfolding for them, but I keep waiting for mine to abruptly end, as though my soul already knows something my mind does not.

And that thought terrifies me.

Because if I cannot imagine myself old, does that mean I never will be? If I cannot picture happiness years from now, does that mean it isn’t waiting for me? I keep trying to force myself to see a future version of me—older, softer, healed somehow—but the image slips away every time I reach for it.

Maybe that’s what depression does.
It steals the ability to imagine yourself existing beyond the pain. It narrows time until all you can see is the next hour, the next day, the next breath. The future stops feeling like a promise and starts feeling like a rumor other people believe in more than you do.

Still, there is a strange ache inside me that keeps asking these questions. And maybe that ache means something too. Maybe the part of me wondering about purpose is also the part that hasn’t fully given up. Because people who feel nothing do not search this desperately for meaning. They do not stare at the horizon hoping to finally see themselves standing somewhere in it.

I think part of me is mourning a future I cannot yet imagine.
A life I cannot currently believe belongs to me.

And maybe that is the cruelest thing about hopelessness: not that it convinces you life is painful, but that it convinces you pain is all your life will ever be.

But the truth is, human beings are terrible at predicting their own futures. Entire lives can change in a single year. A single person. A single moment. There are versions of ourselves waiting ahead that we cannot comprehend yet because we have not met them. And sometimes surviving is not about seeing fifty beautiful years stretched clearly before you. Sometimes it is just about staying long enough to let the picture slowly come into focus.

Right now, I cannot see the future either.
But maybe darkness is not proof that nothing exists ahead.
Maybe it simply means I have not reached the light far enough down the road to see it yet.