Seeing the Laughter Inside the Pain
Life is not about knowing who you are or whether everything will be okay.
The voice you hear in the audio is entirely mine.
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When every version of yourself feels distant, do you ever ask if they were ever you?
I used to belong to the roles people needed me to be. My positivity would spill into other realms, feeding others while emptying me. Beneath it all, I knew those borrowed personalities were never really mine to carry.
I never wanted to break free while realising that being somebody was killing me.
Life is a paradox.
By not betraying my nature I was betraying my nature.
I loved who I was way too much that I didn’t realise, slowly, it was turning into a performance.
Up until now, I thought I was performing for others.
In truth, I was performing for the gaze that met me in every mirror.
There was a certain version of me that I held very dear and kept calling it my essence. The one that kept jumping around, singing, swirling, being chatty for no reason.
When something is deemed renewable, we grow reckless, mistaking endurance for infinity.
Yet the truth is quieter, more merciless: what is squandered does not return untouched, and what is lost does not fully replenish.
I wasted and abused myself as though the well of my energy could never run dry. I rose each morning under the illusion of being restored to 100%.
Maybe none of us ever paused to ask what that exhaustion costs.
What if, one day, our energy simply refused to serve us?
For years I threw myself into activities without estimating how much they drained me, without pausing to take stock. I managed to make it to 27 without ever thinking that this lifestyle might cost something.
I was wrong in a way that I didn’t foresee.
The life I had, the self I kept demanding out of it, wasn’t costing me something.
It was costing me everything.
Not the lack of effort but the opposite, the act of overeffort.
The act of forcefulness.
I held death and potential in the same hand. I did not see life repeatedly offering me an invitation to see that what I thought was peace was, in truth, a comfortable prison. Because the path I chose appeared seemingly safe.
But it constrained.
What I once called triumph turned into loss.
I became utterly lost, just in a more visible way.
For a while now, I have been trying to live through my older versions. Yet, I keep arriving at these destinations that feel worse than being on the road.
Perhaps my inner struggle today lies exactly here, none of my past versions will be close, and I will belong to none of them.
Yet, I cannot help but feed the fear that lives in me.
The fear of becoming,
a nobody.
Instead, I clung to meaning through the war within, only to be left beneath the empty skies of unfinished outcomes, where every confident step leads to incongruence. My self-confidence started to show up as an inflated balloon in disguise, leaving me with the feeling as if I was an imposter.
When you lose your performance, is it truly a loss or a win?
Life functions in its own weird way. That’s why searching for purpose and meaning can be deceitful.
I kept imprisoning myself in cages of my own making, expecting life to appear in a certain way. In return, my life didn’t remotely turn out the way I pictured when I was little girl.
There was a time when I searched my mother’s gaze for reassurance. Instead, she stood there, wordless and frozen.
I did not know whether I’d be ever be okay when my health worsened.
That was when I found my healing in hopelessness.
Hopelessness strips away illusions, the false promise of ‘later’ or the fantasy that suffering will one day vanish forever, leaving us face-to-face with the moral and emotional weight of now.
I now refuse to say to myself, it’s all going to be okay.
Because with no hope came no expectations. I went to hell and back, and when it lifted, I promised myself that when bad things came again, I would not project hope onto them before I knew what they meant.
Only then, life became urgent in a way it never was before.
It is this bareness, the absence of guaranteed outcomes, that makes love and struggle sacred.
They are unrepeatable and finite.
When we make peace with the idea that it may not be okay, we start noticing that what isn’t okay is beautiful in its own way.
I still remember those days where shame wrapped me in every corner, in every gaze, and I stayed within those four walls watching sitcom series with my mother, my sister, and my grandmother. Despite the pain of not being able to take two steps forward, I still cherish those days where I heard my grandmother’s laughter.
When something cannot be renewed, when it is finite, its ending makes it priceless.
I have been living with the growing fear of losing my grandmother.
That’s what reverses the pain that I carried those days into joy, blissful and gentle. My cries are silenced by my grandmother’s laughter when that doorman dropped the tray and spilled everything on it onto the silk dress of the landlord’s wife in her favourite show.
Maybe that’s what remains in the end.
Not a polished identity. A secure job. Or a false promise of later.
Perhaps the strange relief of not having answers does not make life smaller, but invites the wonder.
Not the knowing of who you are or whether everything will be okay.
But seeing the laughter inside the pain.
Authors note: What I realised as I wrote this piece carried as much of a revelation as its message.
I hadn’t cried while writing something for a long time. Until I wrote these words.
I don’t practice my ideas before putting them on the page. More often than not, I start writing without knowing where it will lead me. And I try to stay as honest with you here as I am with myself.
So I ask you to take a moment to consider upgrading to paid. I try to share as much of my work freely as I can because I believe in healing through each other’s stories.
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I had to read this twice Imi. The second time all the emotions jumped out at me. That act of forcefulness, death and potential in the same hand, the sacredness of love and struggle. A whole life in one post, one sacred writing. You said you don't always know what you're going to write when you sit down and then it flows. You write with an authority whatever comes. You write with heart, compassion and soul. I see the works, the truth, the heartfelt honesty that comes through you. Life is a paradox. I know you'll keep your eyes wide open miss Imi. That's the best way to go through life.
The strongest idea here is that exhaustion did not come from failure, but from overidentifying with a self that had quietly become performative.
“By not betraying my nature I was betraying my nature” captures that paradox beautifully...