Lately, I’ve been feeling a little depressed. Not unbearably so, just a dull ache of unhappiness with myself and my life. Compared to my friends, mine feels bland, muted, as if I’m watching the world in grayscale while their lives are painted in vivid color. Facebook makes it worse—it’s a place of highlights, where you see the engagements, weddings, parties, and milestones, but rarely the monotony or the quiet suffering in between. Every once in a while someone posts about a loss, but even then, it’s softened by sympathy and prayers.
I try to remind myself that everyone’s life follows a different path. If each one were a mural, no two would ever look alike. The brushstrokes flow differently, the colors mix uniquely, and the people in each story take on their own shapes and distances. Still, I can’t help comparing, as though my canvas is empty space where theirs is filled with movement.
When I think about life, I sometimes remember the butterflies from my childhood. In spring, they were enormous, some as big as birds. I once watched one float lazily from flower to flower, lingering on an aloe vera as if time didn’t exist. I crept up and cupped it gently in my hands before slipping it into a terrarium. Its oversized eyes stared back at me as it sat still, unbothered. When I released it, it drifted away, slow and unhurried. Some people live like that butterfly—without urgency, without worry, carried by the breeze from one moment to the next.
But I feel more like the cabbage whites: ordinary, countless, always darting from one task to another. They rush to complete their cycle—mate, lay eggs, leave behind proof of their brief existence. And then, inevitably, they’re seen as pests, swatted away, or crushed under the weight of their reputation. I wonder if that’s what I am—just another cabbage white, too restless to pause, too plain to be remembered.
My own days are predictable. I study, clean, exercise, and play games. I practice driving, waiting for my exam in November. Occasionally, I take a trip to the library or wander around town, usually by myself. It isn’t bad—sometimes it’s even nice—but underneath it all lingers a quiet loneliness.
I talk to my boyfriend on the phone, like we’ve done for the past year of long-distance. We play games together, and I keep in touch with friends scattered across other states. I go shopping with my mother, who is really the only person I see regularly, the closest thing I have to a nearby friend. But sometimes, that doesn’t feel like enough.
The other day at the gas station, I noticed a group of girls crammed in a car, laughing and glowing with the kind of warmth only friendship brings. Maybe they were on a road trip. Later, I dreamed I was one of them—driving my own group of friends before crashing us onto the roof of a grocery store. Somewhere along the way, I lost a toe, and one of my friends retrieved it for me. Oddly enough, I took it as a sign: maybe groups like that aren’t meant for me.
Lately, stress has been playing with my body, even delaying my period. The PMS doesn’t help—it arrives with moodswings, heightened sensitivity, and a shadow of depression I can’t quite shake. People laugh it off, dismiss it, but for me it’s real. It’s as if the world suddenly loses its color and spring shifts overnight into winter. Everything feels muted, joyless. Nostalgia creeps in, making the ache worse.
Nostalgia is a strange kind of grief for me. I’ve realized it feeds my depression. Working with a therapist on my PTSD taught me to live in the present instead of drowning in flashbacks, but I see now that the same rule applies to my memories of childhood. They shine brighter in my mind than they really were, filtered by the brain’s instinct to cling to the good and shred the rest. Still, the fragments I carry—like sitting by the pool after a game of Club Penguin, watching lizards do pushups on a rock—feel almost sacred in their uselessness.
But the darker truth is that so much of my childhood was lost to abuse. For years I lived in a state of constant vigilance, never sure when it would happen again. There was no room to grow, no space to breathe. Life felt like being trapped in a cardboard box, knees pulled to chest, waiting for a door that never opened. Only recently has my PTSD quieted enough for me to really live in the present.
It feels as though my life was on pause until I was nineteen. Suddenly, the pause button released, and I was thrust into the middle of a vast forest, told to build a home with no foundation. While I was frozen in trauma, the world kept moving forward. The sun rose, people grew, lives unfolded. And when I finally looked up, I was behind, holding only fragments.
Maybe that’s why I cling to the past so much—old friends, old memories, even people who are no longer in my life. I’m trying to salvage something from the ruins, trying to piece together a timeline that feels whole. But instead, I feel like a time traveler—waking up from a long nap to find the world transformed, while I remain tethered to yesterday.
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