I don’t even know why I’m writing this. I just… I can’t sleep. It’s 2 AM and I’m staring at the ceiling, wondering if I’m having some kind of delayed onset emotional breakdown. My kids – both of them, *both* of them – are gone. College. That’s it. My whole… structure. My whole… purpose. Just evaporated. One day they were here, needing lunch money and rides to practice and help with trigonometry, and the next they were waving goodbye from a minivan full of IKEA boxes. And I was supposed to be HAPPY. “You’ve earned this, you deserve this,” everyone said. My mother, my aunts, even my husband. They all kept saying I finally had time for myself. Time for *myself*. What the FUCK does that even mean? Because now there’s nothing. Literally nothing. My days used to be a relentless, chaotic sprint. The school run, groceries, volunteering for the PTA, coordinating tutors, doctor’s appointments, making sure dinner was on the table by 6, checking homework, mediating sibling squabbles, managing their social lives, then getting laundry done after they were asleep. My brain was firing on all cylinders, always solving, always anticipating. Now? Silence. Just… an echo. The house is so quiet it feels like a vacuum. And I’m just… here. I go to the grocery store and I don’t run into anyone I know. The barista at Starbucks just smiles politely. I used to have 15-20 meaningful interactions a day, minimum. Now I’m lucky if I get five that aren’t with the Amazon delivery guy. Is this… agoraphobia? Social atrophy? I feel like I’m losing the ability to talk to people, like my social muscles are just wasting away. I try to explain this to my mom and she just tells me to "find a hobby." A hobby. Like I'm a bored housewife from a 1950s sitcom. She raised six kids back in the village, worked in the fields, never had a minute to herself, and here I am, in my big house with all my “freedoms,” complaining about… what? Loneliness? It feels so ungrateful. So indulgent. But it’s not just loneliness. It’s a profound sense of… dislocation. I don't feel like myself anymore. I feel like a discarded shell. Like the person I was, the person who ran everything, the person who was essential, just… isn’t needed anymore. And the scariest part is, I don't know who this new person is supposed to be. And I have no idea how to even begin figuring it out.