Hollow

There’s a certain kind of silence that eats at you. Not the silence of peace, but the silence of being stuck. You wake up, and somehow the days blur into each other. Weeks pass, and you wonder what exactly you did with them. Meanwhile, the world moves. People around you are getting promoted, getting married, moving cities, chasing dreams, building something. And you? You feel like you’re watching life from behind a glass wall. Present, but not participating.

At first, you tell yourself it’s just bad timing. Everyone has their season. But deep down, a sharper thought cuts through: Maybe I’m not just behind. Maybe I’m wasting my life. And that thought burns, because it isn’t about comparison anymore, it’s about the emptiness you can’t escape.

The truth is, comparison doesn’t hurt because of what other people are doing. It hurts because it points a finger at the places you’ve abandoned yourself. It shines a light on the hours you’ve numbed away, the ideas you never started, the promises you’ve made to yourself and broken so many times they barely mean anything anymore. And that’s the part no one wants to admit out loud, sometimes it isn’t the world that failed us, it’s us. Sometimes the reason we feel behind is because we’ve been hiding.

It’s easier to keep scrolling than to sit with your own hollowness. It’s easier to stay distracted than to face the fear of trying and falling short. And so you put things off. You wait for the perfect moment, the perfect energy, the perfect plan. But in the waiting, life slips by. And each day you don’t show up for yourself, the silence grows heavier.

That’s why the pain doesn’t go away. Because it isn’t about being late to the milestones like marriage, career, success, whatever. It’s about the growing distance between who you are and who you know you could be. That distance feels like failure. That distance is what you call “falling behind.”

But the truth that you rarely hear is that you don’t have to close that distance overnight. You don’t have to run, to catch up, to compete with anyone else’s pace. The healing doesn’t come from chasing. It comes from stopping the cycle of abandonment. From deciding, in the smallest ways possible, to show up for yourself again. Not dramatically, not perfectly. Just honestly.

Because what if you’re not hollow? What if the emptiness is only space, space waiting for you to finally step into it? To create, to stumble, to try, to fail, to try again. What if all this time, you weren’t late… you were just paused?

And maybe it isn’t about racing forward. Maybe it’s about walking back to yourself. Listening to that voice you’ve ignored for years. The one that whispers, “I want more. I deserve more. I am more.”

Falling behind isn’t real. What’s real is the choice in front of you, right now, in this exact moment: to keep betraying yourself, or to finally come home.

And when you do, when you decide that you will no longer abandon yourself, the glass wall doesn’t shatter all at once. But it starts to crack. And light seeps through.

At first, it’s faint. Just a flicker of clarity on an otherwise heavy day. But that flicker grows each time you choose to stand with yourself instead of against yourself. Each time you stop apologizing for being “behind” and start honoring where you are. Each time you replace shame with presence, and fear with a small, imperfect act of courage.

And one morning, not in a dramatic moment, not with fireworks or applause, you will wake up and realize you don’t feel behind anymore. You feel here. Fully, painfully, beautifully here. And from here, you can finally move forward, not because you’re racing anyone, but because you’ve stopped running from yourself.

You were never late. You were never less. You were simply waiting for the day you’d decide to be yours again.

And maybe, just maybe, that day is today