These Days: The Panic Years
No one told me my twenties would feel like a long weekend that slowly turns into Monday morning. In the beginning, everything moved fast. Too fast to make sense of. There were always people — in my apartment, in my inbox, in my bed. Laughter echoed in taxis at 2 a.m., and every conversation felt like a doorway to something big. Life was made of noise — loud, loose, a little reckless — and I was right in the middle of it. I didn’t need a plan — I needed a playlist. A bar charger. A half-decent excuse to stay out too late. I believed in momentum. I believed I had time. I let it all blur together because I thought the future could wait. But it didn’t. It shifted — not all at once, but slowly, like dusk bleeding into night. Plans started needing calendars. Some friends stopped answering. The group chat got quieter. The people who once knew everything started to fade into people I scroll past now. And I started to feel it — the silence. Not around me, but inside. The buzzing stopped. The li...
