This is not a metaphor.
Life will not be handing you lemons,
it will hand you silence.
A silence so thick you’ll choke on it
in the middle of crowded rooms
and wonder if your name was ever yours.
The truth is,
life isn’t a river,
it’s a pit.
And most people were born halfway in
with a smile trained like a guard dog
to keep others from looking too close.
You will bleed for things
you never asked for.
You’ll lose sleep over people
who sleep soundly without you.
You’ll carry wounds no one will see
because you were taught
that vulnerability was shame
in prettier clothes.
The world teaches you to survive
on compliments like air—
but it’s poison in the lungs.
“You’re strong”
becomes code for
“we won’t help you.”
You’ll be told to smile through the storm,
to keep your chin up
while the weight of your own ribs
crushes you inward.
You’ll learn to nod in meetings
where your soul is not invited.
You’ll drink coffee to replace sleep,
scroll to replace thought,
work to replace meaning,
and call it adulthood.
The truth is,
you are not lazy.
You are tired.
Bone-tired.
Soul-tired.
The kind of tired that doesn’t go away
with a nap or a vacation,
but the kind that comes from
being on alert your whole life.
From holding your breath
so no one sees you fall apart.
And still—
the world wants you productive.
It wants your labor,
not your living.
It wants your mask,
not your mess.
It wants you digestible—
palatable grief,
a sanitized struggle,
a filtered face that says,
“I’m fine,”
even when you’re shattering
from the inside out.
But here’s what they won’t tell you:
You are not a machine.
You are not your output.
You are not your degree
or your salary
or the likes on a post
that disappears in twenty-four hours.
You are a breathing contradiction,
a half-lit room full of bruised prayers,
a heart that beats
even when it doesn’t want to.
There’s no map for this.
No clear path.
No gold star for surviving another Tuesday
when everything in you said,
don’t get up.
But you got up.
And that counts.
Even if you did nothing else.
Even if you cried in the shower
and called that cleansing.
Even if you held your own hand
because no one else offered theirs.
You are not broken.
You are breaking open.
There’s a difference.
One is an ending.
The other, a beginning
you didn’t ask for—
but maybe needed.
Because when the silence gets too loud,
and the compliments turn to static,
and you finally scream,
not into your pillow
but into the world—
that is not weakness.
That is resurrection.
And none of that
was ever
a metaphor.