Alive, For Now

Did you ever wonder where you would go if the place you built in your mind stopped existing?
What if I told you that image you’re holding onto right now never existed at all?
Or worse, never will.

Then what are we, if we really give up on everything?
What happens after that?
Does someone reach out and stop you?

I bet you not.

They’ll assume you wanted this.
That you needed it.
They’ll dress it up nicely, too.
Good for you. Well done. I’m glad you stopped. I’m glad you chose to focus on yourself.

But did you really want this?

Dear artists, of any kind—

Have you ever felt that if you gave up now, you’d finally feel relieved, only to realize the agony of what if starts choking every quiet minute instead?

Because somehow, feeling wasted, pointless, useless becomes easier than feeling half-alive.
You give up the struggle just to stop the madness, and in the process, you stop feeling alive at all.

I thought sharing this journal might be too honest for some authors’ taste.
But sometimes you need a mirror in front of you just to see whether you can still bear your own reflection.

And after reading this, you’ll probably walk away with more questions.
And we both know you’ll do anything except answer them.

Then tonight, when you lie down, that heavy, burning iron will fall back onto your chest right before sleep takes you.

It’s fine.
At least you’re still alive.

For now.

And want to know how I can tell when an author is about to destroy her own path?
Easy. they stop letting the book breathe.

You can feel it when you read the work.
The plot is there. The structure is there. The grammar is polished, the edits are done, everything looks right on the surface.

But underneath it, something is suffocating.

And authors and readers who look for something deeper than distraction will notice it immediately.

The book is drowning.

Just like its author.

It struggles to breathe because the person writing it is already fighting a war inside their own head, like someone pouring dark clouds over the sky of the story. And later, they will say they wanted it. The agony. The tightness in their chest while writing it. The feeling that words were never enough. The way the book started sounding like a broken record, repeating the same wound over and over.

It’s fine, really.

At least now we can blame repeated emotion on AI. Safe for now.

Until someone grabs tweezers and pulls at the roots hard enough to see the truth: the soil underneath is waterlogged, smeared, oversoaked. The plant only looked strong because it was trapped in thick mud.

But look in the mirror.
You’re young, and already feel seventy.
Don’t let that bring you to your knees.

Maybe, for now, this even feels comfortable.
Because what author has ever chosen a healthy mind over melancholy?

Still, keep writing the book.
Keep reading it.
That is what humans were made for: to consume art, to make it, to survive through it.

And I’m glad we do, even when we forget why we started in the first place.

So embrace your failure.
Your pain.
Your darkness.

(For the pictures that I always upload, this month I got none. Maybe next time.)