i am sitting here on the floor of the kitchen at 2am and the only light is the blue glow from my phone and the little green eye of the microwave watching me while the rest of the world sleeps in their king sized beds in their custom built houses with their crown molding and their perfect 2.5 children and i feel like a ghost haunting my own life... i am thirty years old and i spent four hours today trying to draw a hand but my toddler kept screaming because the grapes weren't the right kind of purple and i ended up just staring at the wall wondering when humans decided that we were meant to live like this in these little isolated boxes pretending that we are satisfied with just being witnesses to everyone else's highlight reels i see sarah from high school posted photos of her new place in the suburbs it has a wraparound porch and she looks so soft and settled like she was born to hold a mortgage and a baby carrier while i am here with charcoal under my fingernails and a sink full of crusty dishes that feel like a physical weight on my soul... we are told that this is the apex of human existence to build a nest and stay in it but nobody tells you about the atrophy of the self that happens when you stop being an individual and start being a utility a resource for someone else to consume until there is nothing left but the rind the weirdest part is how we use these screens to scream into the void hoping for an echo but all we get is a little red heart icon that means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of our biological imperatives... we are primordial creatures trapped in a digital architecture that rewards the performance of happiness while the actual lizard brain is just screaming for more than this more than the smell of stale cheerios and the crushing silence of a house that is too small for my ambitions... i think about the paintings i used to make the ones that felt like they were vibrating with some kind of cosmic energy and now i just draw cartoon dinosaurs for a three year old who doesn't even like the way i do the eyes tonight the baby finally fell asleep after three hours of fighting and instead of sleeping like a rational animal i am scrolling through the lives of people i haven't spoken to in a decade wondering where i took the wrong turn or if there even was a right one to begin with... maybe humans aren't supposed to be happy maybe we are just supposed to survive long enough to replicate and everything else is just a cruel trick of the consciousness... my husband came out earlier to get water and looked at me like i was a stranger or a piece of furniture he forgot he bought and he asked if i was coming to bed and i said i just needed a minute but it has been two hours and i am still here on the linoleum i feel this URGENCY like my skin is too tight for my bones and i want to throw my phone against the wall but also it is the only thing tethering me to a reality where people still care about art and philosophy and things that aren't diapers or interest rates... i saw a post from a guy i went to art school with he is in berlin now doing a residency and his studio has these massive windows and he looks so unburdened so light while i feel like i am being buried under the sediment of domesticity... we pretend that we are okay with the trade-offs but the truth is that some of us are just better at lying to ourselves than others and i am losing my ability to maintain the facade there is this terrifying entropy in a house with a child where everything you do is immediately undone and you spend your entire existence just fighting back the chaos only to wake up and do it again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... i used to think that being an artist meant seeing the world more clearly than everyone else but now i think it just means i have more words to describe the specific shape of my own misery... i look at these women on my feed with their perfectly curated lives and i wonder if they are also sitting on their kitchen floors at 2am crying over a screen or if they really are as simple and satisfied as they look in their filtered photos it is a strange kind of grief to mourn the person you are still supposed to be while you are still alive and occupying her space... i want to be more than a vessel or a caregiver or a failed creative but the gravity of this life is so heavy and i don't know if i have the kinetic energy to break orbit anymore... we are all just trying to prove we exist by showing the receipts of our lives—the houses the kids the careers—but none of it actually fills the gap between the internal self and the external world... i am just a collection of unfinished sketches and unmet expectations staring at a picture of a woman i used to know who just bought a lawnmower and i want to scream until the windows crack i keep thinking about how we are just carbon and stardust and all that poetic garbage but mostly we are just hungry and tired and desperate for someone to look at us and see the version of ourselves that we haven't even met yet... the sun will be up in a few hours and i will have to be a mother again and i will have to pretend that i am not crumbling into dust while i make oatmeal and fold the laundry...