My Midnight Musings: The Madness of My Existence
My permission to speak plainly and to let my darkness exist without apology.
I’ve decided to crack open a door most people keep locked. And already, I can sense the emotional gravity in what I’m about to write. This is a personal message to myself. A way to gently confront disillusionment without losing the tenderness that runs through my reflections on belonging, grief, and the ache of being human.
Maybe it could even explore how “madness” has shifted tone throughout my life: cosmic irony, creative chaos, hard-earned wisdom… or something else entirely.
Tension, between existence and discontent, endurance and muted hope, feels like the core of what I want to say. I’m not wrapping things in a bow, but I’m also not turning away from the mirror. The honesty will be necessary.
So, let’s see what comes out.
I made it this far, and that must mean something, even if it’s not the something I thought the universe had planned when I was younger and softer and believed in kinder patterns.
I used to picture an existence shaped by meaning, and not merely motion. A story with arcs that resolved, with belonging that didn’t flicker in and out of frame. I imagined the cosmos had something gentle in store, a choreography of encounters and purpose that felt like home.
But I grew older. And the symmetry I sought dissolved into ellipses.
I’ve written about it before: the ache of trying to belong in a world that offers mostly mirrors. The grief that arrived uninvited and overstayed. The ache that wasn’t always pain, but a low and persistent hum, proof I was still here and still feeling.
And yet I am still here.
Not jubilant. Not fulfilled in the ways I once believed I’d need to be in order to call this a life well lived. But I’m no longer demanding that life prove itself to me, either. That’s its own kind of truce.
Maybe the madness of my existence wasn’t a detour from the story. Maybe it is the story. Not marked by grand design, but by quiet endurance. By the grace of remaining open, even when the openings are small. By not turning away.
And in that strange stillness I have found, even in the emptier mornings, something like peace. It has edges. It doesn’t glow. But it holds me.
That’s enough. That’s my quiet endurance of grief.
There is no divine blueprint beneath this ache. Just the echo of my own thoughts, rippling outward into an indifferent cosmos. Sometimes, it feels like I’m treading water in an ocean that forgot it made me. The sky stretches above, empty of answers. Below, the weight gathers, not sudden and not dramatic. Just steady. A slow drowning, not in despair, but in memory. In moments that refuse to pass.
I don’t cry out. Not because i’m strong, but because I no longer expect to be heard. The madness isn’t in losing faith. It’s in realizing there was never anything to lose. And yet, I keep breathing. Somehow. Not for purpose. Not for meaning. Just because breath still comes. That, too, is a kind of resistance.
There is no afterlife I believe in and no damnation waiting at the end. But still, I’ve built a hell, one I carry with me, quiet and well-kept. It doesn’t burn. It presses. It hums. It repeats itself until I confuse the weight with gravity. Until I believe this is how a “soul” is supposed to sit in the body.
It’s not punishment. It’s habit and a collection of unspoken things and of moments that didn’t quite break me. I don’t scream. I don’t try to flee. I just keep walking its familiar corridors. The hell of myself. Lit by memory. Furnished with silence. Owned, but never rented out.
Everything is too loud, too bright, and too much. But none of it reaches me. The colours scream, but I don’t hear them. Taste lingers on my tongue without meaning. Music plays—I know the notes should stir something—but they pass through me, uninvited and unanswered.
This isn’t numbness. It’s something stranger. I see the world in sharp focus, but my body doesn’t echo back. As if grief has rewired me for static, and tuned me to a frequency where nothing resonates. I’m not lost. I’m just no longer found by the things that used to hold me.
I keep moving through the motions, not because they ground me, but because gravity hasn’t let go yet. I breathe in colour and exhale silence. I walk through days like galleries of forgotten meaning, aware and awake, but unable to touch.
So I’ll stay.
Not because the story redeemed itself, or the world softened its edges, or grief became easier to carry. But because I’m still here, and that counts for something, even if that something has no name.
I’ll keep walking. Not toward meaning, but through it. Through this strange, saturated quiet where feeling used to live. Through colour that no longer reaches, and silence that speaks more clearly than sound ever could.
This absurd, aching persistence is the madness of my existence. And somehow, it’s mine.
