I was filing corporate taxes tonight, reconciling some ledger when I found it. My old art portfolio. It’s been maybe fifteen years since I looked at it. My mum kept everything, of course. She’s like that. I sat there, just staring at the cover, and then I opened it. Charcoal sketches, watercolors I did for A-levels. Some design ideas for a graphic novel that never happened. I remember the smell of the art room, the linseed oil. How my hands would ache from holding a brush all day but it was a good ache. A productive ache. Not like the dull ache of carpal tunnel from typing spreadsheets all day. It wasn't even a choice, really. My parents, they came here so I could have stability. A future. Not a starving artist life. My younger cousins, they’re still back home, struggling. I have a good job, a good apartment, a good future. Accountant. Predictable. It’s what I *should* want. It’s what anyone in my position *would* want. I just sat there, looking at those old drawings, and this... feeling... washed over me. Not sadness, exactly. More like a profound displacement. A fundamental incongruity between my perceived trajectory and some deeply suppressed, almost subconscious, ideal. It's disorienting. I don’t know what I'm looking for by posting this. I just feel this heavy weight. This... anhedonia. Like, everything is fine. Objectively. But internally... it’s just blank. Empty. I keep thinking, what if I’d just chosen the difficult path? The one that felt right, not the one that was logical. What then? Would I be happier? Or just poorer. I don't even know if I still *can* draw. It’s been so long. I just closed the portfolio and put it back in the box. And now I’m here. At 2 AM. Typing this out. Wondering what’s wrong with me.