You ever just have one of those moments where something completely innocuous happens, something totally mundane, and it just… CRACKS you open? Like, really splinters that thin veneer you’ve got going on, the one you painstakingly applied every single morning before the daycare drop-off, before the ten thousand emails, before the dinner demands, before the bedtime routine that takes an hour and a half even though she’s FIVE. Because that’s what happened to me, around 2:17 PM today. I was typing up a quarterly report—seriously, a report about printer ink usage, riveting stuff—and I saw it. On my left hand, just under the knuckle of my ring finger. A new age spot. A tiny, faint, almost imperceptible brown dot. And it just… hit me. Like a physical blow. Not even that it was a *new* spot, that’s just biological reality, right? But the sudden, visceral understanding that it’s just going to KEEP happening. More spots. More wrinkles. More… fading. And then the rage started. Just this cold, quiet fury that’s still humming under my skin right now, keeping me awake at 2 AM while everyone else is sound asleep. Because you spend your entire twenties and most of your thirties pouring everything you have into someone else—first her, then him, then sometimes even him again because he forgets his own fucking doctor’s appointments—and you look up and suddenly you’re… this. This person who notices age spots while typing reports about toner. This person whose primary identity markers are "Mom" and "Office Manager" and "The one who remembers to buy toothpaste." What is left of… *me*? Where did she go? Was she ever even here? Or was she just a placeholder, a temporary vessel for everyone else’s needs, a human resource dispenser, waiting to be depleted? The thought of that felt like a kind of depersonalization, like I was observing myself from above, some kind of detached entity just performing the functions required to keep the little ecosystem alive. It’s like you’re constantly running on this hamster wheel, right? But it’s not even your wheel. It’s everyone else’s wheel, and you’re just the one who has to keep it spinning so they don’t all fall off. And sometimes you just want to stop, just for a second, just to catch your breath, but if you do, the whole thing grinds to a halt. And then everyone looks at you, confused, like you’re the one who broke the machine. They don’t even see the blur of your legs, the sweat, the sheer effort it takes to keep it moving. They just see that you’re not *running*. And then the guilt washes over you, because what kind of monster wants to stop running when everyone else is depending on her? What kind of monster just wants to stare at a tiny brown spot on her hand and wonder where her life went, instead of getting up and checking if the baby monitor is still on, or if she remembered to set the coffee timer for 6:15 AM so he can actually get to work on time… Jesus. I just want to scream. Or maybe cry. I don't even know which one anymore.