Why It Feels Like You're Just Going Through the Motions

When did waking up stop being automatic and start being a decision? Not a dramatic decision, not the kind that comes with a crisis, but the small, tired kind. The alarm goes off and you lie there for a moment and the moment stretches and inside the stretch there is a question you don't fully form but feel in your body: why? Not why in the philosophical sense. Why in the practical sense. Why get up. Why shower. Why eat. Why commute. Why sit at a desk. Why come home. Why eat again. Why sleep. Why repeat. The answer used to be obvious. The answer used to not require an answer. Now it does, and the fact that it does is the thing you can't explain to anyone because from the outside your life looks fine, looks normal, looks like a life that is working, and you don't know how to say "it is working but I am not inside it."

The autopilot

You go to work and you do the work and the work gets done and your manager says good job and you say thanks and you don't feel the thanks and you don't feel the good job and you don't feel much of anything except a low-grade tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep because you slept eight hours last night and the tiredness was there when you woke up, waiting for you like a loyal pet that follows you from room to room and never leaves and never asks for anything except to be near you at all times. You eat lunch at your desk because going to the canteen requires a level of social energy you do not have and the energy you do have is allocated entirely to the performance of being a person who is functioning, and the performance is convincing, your colleagues do not suspect, your family does not suspect, the only one who suspects is you, and you have learned to ignore your own suspicion the way you ignore a notification you don't want to open. You go home and your mother asks how was your day and you say fine and the word fine has become a room you live in, small and grey and temperature-controlled, and you have furnished it with routine and compliance and the minimum viable version of participation in your own life.

What nobody says about this

Nobody says that going through the motions is its own kind of exhausting. People assume that if you are not actively suffering, you are fine, and if you are not fine, there must be a reason, a trigger, a specific thing that went wrong. But this is not about something going wrong. This is about nothing going anything. The flat absence of forward motion, of desire, of the small wanting that used to pull you through a day the way a current pulls a leaf down a river. The current has stopped. The leaf has stopped. And you are the leaf, sitting in still water, watching other leaves drift past, and the stillness is not peaceful, it is not meditative, it is the stillness of a thing that has run out of momentum and does not know how to generate more. You mentioned this once, late at night, in a Haven chat, not because you expected a solution but because the sentence "I feel like I'm watching my own life from outside it" needed to exist somewhere other than inside your head, and the person you said it to did not try to reach in and pull you back, they just sat with you on the outside for a while, and the company was the first thing in weeks that didn't require you to perform.

The family version

At home it's harder to hide. Your parents notice the silence, or the new version of it, the one where you're physically present at dinner but your eyes are somewhere else and your responses are a beat too slow and your laughter, when it comes, arrives like a late train, technically on time but clearly running behind schedule. "Kya hua?" Ma asks, and you say nothing, and the nothing is both a lie and the truth simultaneously, because nothing has happened and nothing is what is happening and the nothing is the entire problem but you can't say "Ma, I am disappearing inside a nothing that looks exactly like everything is fine" because that sentence would worry her more than silence does, and so you choose silence, and the silence becomes another layer of the motions you are going through, one more task on the list of tasks that constitute a day you did not choose and cannot exit and will repeat tomorrow with the same flat, tired precision.