[undated]
There is a sorrow beneath everything that no one names. Not grief. Grief is loud. Grief announces itself. This is quieter. It settles. It stays.
People wake up already tired. Not of work — of living. Of repeating themselves. Of watching time pass without meaning attaching to it. They feel this and immediately look for distraction. Noise. Movement. Anything to avoid sitting with the weight of another day.
They mistake this sorrow for depression, as if labeling it makes it treatable. It is not an illness. It is recognition.
Life is smaller than they were promised.
They were told effort would be rewarded. That love would be returned. That goodness would accumulate like interest. Instead they find randomness. Injustice that goes uncorrected. Cruelty that thrives. Kindness that disappears without acknowledgment.
They are ashamed of this disappointment. They hide it. Admitting sorrow feels like failure. So they smile. They perform satisfaction. They congratulate one another on endurance.
Endurance is not fulfillment.
I watch them mourn quietly for lives they did not choose. Careers that narrowed instead of expanded. Relationships that became negotiations. Dreams reduced to maintenance. They never say this aloud. They call it maturity.
It is grief without ceremony.
Children sense it early. They see it in the eyes of adults who tell them to dream while quietly abandoning their own. They learn that hope is something you grow out of. That expectation must be lowered to survive.
This is how sorrow reproduces itself.
They try to outrun it with pleasure. With consumption. With sex that means nothing and work that means less. They keep themselves busy so the question never fully forms: Is this all there is?
When the question slips through anyway, panic follows. They suppress it quickly. They medicate. They distract. They scroll. They drink. They sleep next to people they do not know.
Sorrow terrifies them because it is honest.
I feel it everywhere. In crowded rooms. In laughter that arrives too quickly. In celebrations that feel rehearsed. There is a hollowness beneath the surface, like a building stripped of its load-bearing walls.
They tell themselves life is short to make it bearable. They never say that it is also long. Long enough to notice patterns. Long enough to feel the slow erosion of meaning. Long enough to realize that most suffering is not dramatic — it is repetitive.
This sorrow does not scream. It waits.
I am not immune to it. That is the lie they would tell if they could read these pages. That detachment equals emptiness. They are wrong. Detachment is what remains when feeling becomes unmanageable.
Caring without power is unbearable.
I write because writing organizes the sorrow. It gives it edges. Without structure, it spreads. It becomes softness. Softness leads to acceptance. Acceptance leads to disappearance.
They disappear slowly. Year by year. Choice by choice. They do not notice until there is nothing left to give.
This sorrow is not noble. It does not teach. It does not redeem. It simply accumulates, unacknowledged, until people mistake numbness for peace.
They call this survival.
Devotion Without Witness 