i was born inside a card no one explained to me properly. they called it “the world,” as if that word alone should have been enough to comfort me. but every time i looked around, the world felt less like completion and more like a theater built on top of an abyss. everyone moved so naturally through it. they laughed at the correct volume, desired the correct things, wore identities like polished costumes stitched together from trends, fears, and borrowed opinions. meanwhile i stood somewhere outside the invisible choreography, watching it all with the unbearable feeling that i had missed the rehearsal for being human.
in the tarot image, the dancer at the center floats effortlessly within a wreath, surrounded by creatures that seem ancient and knowing. people say the card represents fulfillment, unity, transcendence. but no one talks about the isolation of being the one trapped in the middle of the circle. no one talks about how terrifying it must feel to stand between worlds: no longer asleep enough to participate blindly, yet not enlightened enough to escape the noise completely.
sometimes i think my exhaustion comes from carrying two realities at once. there is the external world: classrooms buzzing with memorized facts that evaporate after exams, conversations built entirely from performance, faces studying each other like mirrors desperate for approval. then there is the hidden world underneath it, the one i feel pressing against my ribs at night like a second heartbeat. the hidden world asks questions no one around me seems interested in answering. what is consciousness? why does the soul ache for something it cannot name? why do i feel ancient and unfinished at the same time?
i try to explain this hunger, but language collapses too quickly. people hear isolation and assume sadness. they hear detachment and assume arrogance. but what i feel is closer to spiritual claustrophobia. i am suffocating inside surfaces. every shallow interaction feels like being forced to eat plastic flowers while starving for real fruit. and because of that, my body has started revolting against ordinary life in quiet ways. exhaustion. apathy. distance. i move through routines like a ghost wearing headphones underwater.
the worst part is that i do not truly hate humanity. hatred would be simpler. hatred is clean. what i feel is more complicated and far more painful. i look at people and see sleepwalkers decorating their cages, convincing themselves the bars are aesthetic. i see fear hidden beneath makeup, irony, ambition, gossip, endless consumption. everyone seems desperate to avoid silence because silence is where the real questions begin leaking through the walls.
and still, despite everything, there is a part of me that longs for transcendence not as power, but as relief. i do not want to become a god. i do not want worship, superiority, or domination. i want clarity. i want to step beyond this suffocating fog of expectations and finally encounter something pure enough to trust. when i say i want to disappear, i mean i want to stop performing existence and start experiencing it directly. i want to become like the figure in the world card: suspended between dimensions, untouched by the machinery below, finally understanding the pattern instead of being crushed beneath it.
maybe that is why the card frightens me as much as it comforts me. “the world” is not just completion. it is the realization that you are both inside the illusion and aware of it simultaneously. it is the unbearable beauty of seeing the entire stage while still being forced to act in the play.
so i continue standing at the center of the wreath, half human and half question mark, waiting for the day the noise finally dissolves into something sacred.
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
pixelskylines
