When You Feel Small in Your Own Eyes

There are days when you feel small in your own eyes.

Everyone else seems to be moving forward while you alone are standing still; days when you only have to take a single step—

—and even that you can't do, and you look pathetic to yourself.

What hurts isn't that this wretchedness is mistaken.

It's that it's right—because it's true—and that's what makes it hurt all the more.

Your head knows it perfectly well.

That you have to get out of this room.

That you can't go on like this.

That a life like this is a waste—that, honestly, you know best of all.

You really do know it, but your body won't follow.

Your back won't lift off the blanket, and the distance to your shoes weighs a thousand pounds.

From the outside it's one step; from the inside it's a thousand miles.

It's unremarkable people who make both peace and war.

People like that build the world with things like AI,

and raise up glittering castles.

Such beings—nothing more than mere humans—

live in an age that changes even the earth's great nature, even its climate.

That you can't come out isn't because you're lazy.

Your body not moving isn't a malfunction.

It's a signal that you held on too long, that you lost too much on your own.

And that is no fault at all.

This isn't writing meant to push you out the door.

Because if that worked, you'd have come out long ago.

I'm not telling you to come out.

But more people than you'd think have passed through a cramped little room like that, and one of them is writing this right now.

We were all there.

And from there, somehow, we got out.

Not by gloriously kicking the door down—

but because one day someone sat down beside us,

or simply, on a day when the body felt a little lighter, we slipped out quietly.

So until that day comes, all you have to do is stay alive.

Going out comes after that.

And—if the days your body won't move stretch on,

this is as far as words can reach.

After that, you have to lean on the people around you.

A doctor, a counselor,

anyone who knows you.

That isn't taking on a debt—

it's a public good that you're meant to seek out and receive.

You don't have to lift the thousand pounds alone.

Even the people who changed those enormous things—at first, every one of them was just one person.

And they did it from a cramped little room.

No matter how overwhelmingly, how threateningly the world grows,

what moves it begins, in the end, with a single person.

So it's okay to cherish it. Your own life.

Even if you can't move right now, this world isn't over yet.