I think we can safely say we’ve all been there, that strange, hollow space where nothing feels true anymore.
It usually arrives after a disruption.
Something shakes the way you see the world, and suddenly your reality, once familiar or even comfortable, starts to feel foreign.
Like a ship lost at sea, spinning in circles, not even sure what “home” used to feel like.
Sometimes it’s small but jarring. Starting a new job and realizing the people around you are cold, dishonest, or indifferent. It leaves you questioning your place in the world.
Sometimes it’s massive. Losing someone you thought you’d always have. Suddenly, you’re left holding a silence you never asked for.
Or maybe it’s somewhere in between. A slow unraveling. Losing your health, your energy, your social connection. The body doesn’t move like it used to. The world feels distant. The old joys don’t land.
Whatever form it takes, it’s disorienting.
Because the scaffolding you built your life around—your habits, cravings, likes, dislikes, your job, your friends—they’re not truths. They’re constructs. Frameworks.
And when those collapse, what’s left?
That’s the question.
And the answer isn’t always immediate.
But when everything else feels slippery and suspect, I try to return to what is.
Not the beliefs I inherited.
Not the goals I pinned to the wall.
Just the quiet, undeniable things that still hum beneath the noise.
You are alive.
You’re breathing right now. You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t earn it. It just is.
No matter how lost you feel, your body is still saying yes. Over and over again.
You will die.
Not to be dramatic. Just honest.
You won’t always be here. One day, this form, this heartbeat, this name, will be finished.
That truth is hard. The ego will fight it. But it is clarifying. Sobering.
It reminds us that this moment matters.
You have a body.
And that body lets you feel. Taste. Grieve. Love.
It aches and adapts and sometimes betrays you, but it also holds you.
It lets you experience this worldly life.
Your hands are still yours. Your voice still works.
Start there.
You live on a planet spinning in a vast abyss.
You are surrounded by mountains, rain, light, and ridiculous insects in tiny suits of armor.
You are part of a miracle that is too strange to summarise.
And none of it needs your certainty to exist.
You don’t know everything.
You want answers. You want something solid to hold.
But part of what hurts right now is the myth that you should know.
You don’t. And that is not failure. That is reality.
You’ve forgotten before.
Maybe not this exact feeling. But this is not your first unraveling.
It happened before. You recovered. Then you forgot.
Things will get better. And clearer. In time.
So what do you do when nothing feels true anymore?
You stop reaching for conclusions.
You let go of the pressure to figure it out.
You return to what remains.
You breathe.
You cry.
You look at your hands.
You feel your feet on the floor.
You sit in silence long enough to hear the quiet things again.
This is not a breakdown.
It is a recalibration.
And the truths you land on now will not be flashy.
But they will be real.
And resisting reality is futile.