L;FE IN BLACK AND WHITE

I didn’t just wake up one day and saw the world in black and white. It wasn’t like a dramatic switch up of my perspective on life nor a sharp collapse that just suddenly happened to me one day. It was much quieter than that, it was a slow fade; like developed films that were left under the light for too long. The way people talk about happiness in life is like it’s something you could just pay for and eventually have or like a place that is so easy to reach. A place that you would eventually reach when you’ve worked hard enough, believed enough or healed enough. For me, it’s not as easy as it seems. Happiness is something that I could just observe like a color that I could identify but never feel. Most days, I feel like I exist in the middle. Not failing but definitely not excelling. Not broken but never whole. Just..somewhere in between. Somewhere grey. When people ask me if I am okay, I always say “I'm fine” because the word “fine” is the closest word I could think of to explain this numb, neutral space that I keep waking up in. A space where joy doesn’t even exist, it will but only for the shortest time; there will always be something that will ruin that tiniest joy that exists in this space of mine. Pain is muffled in this space and everything feels like it’s muted as if my life has turned down its volume. This book that I'm writing, that you are reading, isn't a memoir of what my life is, not a collection of tragedies, not a record of my struggles or breakdowns. It’s simply the truth. The truth of being alive but somehow not living in full color. These pages are the pieces of me that I quietly carried, the exhaustion of mediocrity, the ache in never being and feeling enough, the secrecy of pretending happiness and the strange comfort of numbness when the sadness gets too loud. This is my life in black and white, finding all the motivations and reasons to keep going even when my mind and body says otherwise. I did not choose my life to be black and white but because along the way, the colors slipped through my fingers and I never got to learn how to hold them again. So if you’re reading this, maybe you felt this way too. Maybe your world dimmed in ways you can’t explain.