You turn off the screen and within seconds you're reaching for another one. It's not that you can't stand being alone. It's that you can't stand the silence left behind when nothing and no one is talking to you.
You've already forgiven the person who hurt you, or at least you try to every day. But when you think about what you yourself did, the same grace you offer others seems to run out before it reaches you.
You got the position, the recognition, the approval you were after. And instead of calm, what you feel is the fear that any moment now, someone will find out you're not as capable as you seem.
You can be at a party, in an active family group chat, in a full office. And still, on the way home, feel exactly the same loneliness you'd feel in an empty house.
The approval you finally get never quite fills the space that actually needed something else.
Most of the labels you carry were never signed by God. Long before any achievement or any wound, a deeper truth about you already existed.
We're not talking about the kind that shows up on a magazine cover. We're talking about one only you can offer, and one that probably no one has helped you recognize yet.
You learned to answer "fine, all good" even when you're not. That habit has a cost almost no one measures in time.
No one taught you to build that armor overnight. You put it together piece by piece, every time letting your guard down turned out to cost you.
