I don’t know if I’m suicidal.

Maybe that’s the wrong word for it.

I think about death a lot, but I don’t think I would ever actually do it. There are still things tying me here. A handful of people who care about me. My boyfriend. My family. My cat. Tiny unfinished dreams I still carry around like receipts at the bottom of my bag.

I still want things.

I want a home someday. I want children. I want to travel and wake up somewhere beautiful and unfamiliar and feel something other than exhausted. I want work that doesn’t drain the life out of me. I want to believe I matter to the world in some small permanent way.

But sometimes those dreams feel imaginary. Like they belong to a future version of me that may never exist.

I talked about it with my therapist during our first session. We talked about dying. About living. About how sometimes it feels like there isn’t enough here to make staying feel meaningful outside of the people I would hurt by leaving.

And that’s the strange thing.

The thing keeping me alive isn’t necessarily my love for life. Sometimes it’s just guilt. Obligation. The image of my parents getting a phone call. The idea of my boyfriend sitting alone afterward. My cat waiting by the door for someone who isn’t coming home.

I can’t imagine doing that to them.

So I stay.

But staying and wanting to be alive are not always the same thing.

I’ve thought this way for years now. Quietly. Secretly. In the background of everything.

Whenever people ask what superpower I would want, I always say the same thing: stopping time.

Not flying. Not invisibility. Not mind reading.

Just stopping everything.

So I could disappear for a while without consequences. So the world could pause long enough for me to breathe without falling behind. Without disappointing people. Without having to keep performing being okay every single day.

Sometimes I fantasize about getting sick or ending up in the hospital, which sounds horrible to admit out loud. Not because I want pain, but because I want permission to stop controlling everything. I want life to happen to me for once instead of constantly feeling like I’m barely holding it together with both hands.

I think there’s something deeply wrong with the way exhaustion settles into people.

Eventually you stop fantasizing about happiness and start fantasizing about escape.

And loneliness makes it worse.

Loneliness turns your thoughts inward until they rot there.

You start questioning your purpose. Your identity. Whether anyone would truly know you if you disappeared. Whether you deserve the future you keep imagining for yourself.

Sometimes I think I hate myself too much to believe good things are meant for me.

And maybe that’s where a lot of these thoughts come from.

Fear.

Fear that I’ll fail.

Fear that I’ll succeed and still feel empty afterward.

Fear that one day I’ll finally become the person I always wanted to be and realize I’m still lonely inside my own head.

That possibility terrifies me more than failure does.

Because then what?

If I accomplish everything and still don’t love myself, what happens after that?

Those are the thoughts people don’t talk about.

The ugly ones.

The ones that sit quietly in your chest at three in the morning while everyone else is asleep and somehow the world feels unbearably far away.