A Glitch In Existence

 If I look back and trace the timeline of my life, I can say with certainty that something went terribly wrong when I was 14. That’s when I first started noticing the symptoms—not fully formed, not yet consuming, but present. Back then, it wasn’t a storm, just a whisper in the wind, a quiet sense that something was… off.

At first, it was subtle. The way I felt things too deeply, or sometimes not at all. The way I could be laughing one moment and feel hollow the next, as if the world had drained of all color. The way certain words or actions from others stung me in ways I couldn’t explain. I didn’t know what it was, only that my emotions felt like a foreign language no one had taught me how to speak.

But as I interacted with the world, as I endured the things that shaped me, the disorder began to take form. It solidified, like wet cement hardening around my mind, until it became impossible to separate myself from it.

Now, I’m about to turn 30. Sixteen years have passed since the first cracks appeared, and in that time, I have endured more than most people I know. I’ve carried the weight of memories that would crush others. I have seen happiness in fleeting moments, and I have witnessed darkness deeper than I ever thought possible.

Life has its ups and downs. I have no issue with that. What I struggle with is the one thing that has remained unchanged for the past decade—the unshakable desire to stop existing. And not just in the way most people think. It’s not about running from problems or ending suffering. It’s deeper than that.

I don’t just want to leave this life. I want to erase myself entirely. From every timeline, every universe, every strand of reality. If there is reincarnation, I don’t want it. If there’s an afterlife, I reject it. I don’t want to be reborn as something else, to start again in a different form. I want nothingness. Complete, irreversible erasure, as if I was never here in the first place.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I feel this way. It’s not a simple sadness or despair—it’s an instinct, a quiet, ever-present hum in the background of my existence. I feel like a mistake, a glitch in the system, something that slipped through the cracks of creation and now exists as an anomaly. A misplaced variable in the equation of life.

People always say things like, "You matter." "You belong." "You have a purpose." But what if I don’t? What if I was never meant to be here? What if my existence is some kind of cosmic error, an unintended ripple in the fabric of reality?

I look at other people and wonder how they do it. How they accept existence without questioning it. How they wake up every day without feeling like they are trespassing in their own skin. How they move through the world without the constant feeling of not belonging.

Maybe that’s what separates me from them. Maybe that’s what this disorder is. A constant, gnawing awareness that I do not fit into the grand design of things. That my presence is a distortion, a deviation. And maybe the only way to fix a glitch is to remove it.

And yet, I’m still here.

Still breathing.

Still moving through the motions of a life I don’t fully understand.

Maybe I’ll never know why I feel this way. Maybe I’ll never find the answer.

But for now, I exist. Even if I don’t know why.