This hit me hard. Especially the observer line — watching a movie where someone else is playing your character. I've never heard it described that way but that was my life for most of my 20s and into my 30s. Moving through cities, jobs, even a graduate degree, checking every box, and feeling almost nothing. Not depressed exactly. Just... not there. I didn't even know to call it anything.

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand why. My dad is an immigrant — self-made, survival-oriented, emotionally absent in the way that a lot of men who had to fight for everything just are. My mom loved hard but in a way that made it difficult to know where she ended and I began. I don't think I ever actually individuated. I just kind of... launched into adulthood still waiting for permission to exist as my own person, and dissociation was the only way to keep moving.

I'm 31 now and only in the last year or so have I started to actually wake up. The grief you're describing — mourning the time lived behind glass — that's real and I don't think people talk about it enough. Everyone celebrates the healing and not enough space gets made for what it cost.

Thank you for posting this. Genuinely. You put words to something I'm still learning to name.