As the Thread Disappears, Would I Keep Reading?

I don’t know when I stopped feeling like time was something I had.

I keep thinking about this— a kind of neutral awareness, like recognizing you’ve been walking in the wrong direction for longer than you realized. I haven’t been asleep. I haven’t been miserable. I’ve been here. I’ve shown up. I’ve done the things. But when I try to trace the line back to where I chose it, really chose it, the thread disappears. Not because it was cut, but because it was never pulled taut to begin with.

I’ve always been good at things. I learned early how to move through systems without resistance. I learned to answer questions I hadn’t asked. To win games I didn’t remember choosing to play. And when something came easily, I took that to mean it was right. That I was made for it. That there was no need to doubt the shape I was growing into. I confused fluency with purpose. I mistook praise for direction.

I wonder how much of my life I’ve mistaken for decision when it was actually just compliance. How often I’ve moved forward because stopping would require too much articulation. I don’t believe most people are passive because they want to be. I think it happens because the alternative—confronting the sheer absurdity of choice—is unbearable. We talk about agency as if it’s obvious, as if waking up with a body and a calendar is enough to constitute authorship. But most days, I don’t feel like a protagonist. I feel like an accumulation of defaults. Things I said yes to because I didn’t know how to say no without explanation.

And then there’s the question: would I even recognize authorship if I had it? Or would I dismiss it because it didn’t feel like I expected it to—because it didn’t come with applause or clarity or the sense that I was finally on the right path? I don’t trust the right path. I think it’s a euphemism for confirmation bias. I think most people only know they were on the right path in retrospect, and even then, they’re just grateful they survived it.

There’s a version of me that still thinks I’m waiting for something. A disruption. A rupture. The page-turning moment that splits the story in two. But the longer I wait, the more I realize that nothing’s coming. No one is coming. I am not a page waiting to be turned. I am the one holding the book, and I’ve just been sitting here. Eyes open. Spine stiff. Pretending it’s not my hand on the cover.

I don't want a breakthrough. I want to understand why I believed I needed one. Why I thought a life required permission to begin. Why I kept looking for some external sign that I was allowed to start writing. As if reality were a workshop and someone needed to call my name before I spoke.

Most days don’t require much from me. Most days just want me to maintain the shape I’ve already formed, and I’ve gotten so used to confusing that for meaning.

Still, the question stays: if someone read my life, would they keep turning the pages?

And the harder question: would I?

I think about that more than I admit. Not in the sense of chasing some imagined version of myself—I don’t believe in that anymore. I’ve seen too many people exhaust themselves sculpting futures they don’t even want, simply because they committed to them before they had language for doubt. But I do think about who I am becoming in the quiet, continuous way that growth actually happens—when no one is watching, when no one is asking for an update, when there’s no milestone to report.

There are things I’m doing now that look, from a distance, like progress. I could name them. I could frame them as signs that I am, in fact, writing, that I am moving forward. But that feels dishonest, or at least premature. I don’t want to reduce movement to evidence. I don’t want to perform momentum just to prove I’m not stuck. What matters to me lately is not what I’m doing, but why I’m doing it—and whether I’m still asking that question, or whether I’ve grown comfortable enough to stop.

I wonder, often, if I am capable of building something before I fully understand it. If I can move toward something without needing it to resolve my uncertainty first. If I can tolerate the mess of not knowing, and still keep shaping. That feels like the task now. Not mastery. Not certainty. Just presence with intention. Choosing the same life again and again, not because it feels impressive or affirming, but because it feels mine, even in its unfinished state.

I used to think clarity would arrive like a conclusion. A sense of arrival. A tightening of narrative threads. But I no longer expect that. I think clarity is something you notice only in retrospect, and even then, it changes when you look at it too long. What I want now is something smaller, something quieter. I want to be able to say, at the end of a day, that I was awake for it. That I didn’t defer to the version of myself I’ve already outgrown. That I didn’t hand the pen to the script that’s always been waiting to reclaim me. That I paused, even briefly, to ask: is this still true?

Not every day. That’s not sustainable. But enough days. Enough to tip the scale.

And maybe that’s all a life is. Not a sweeping arc. Not a clean throughline. Just the quiet, continuous accumulation of days you were awake for.

The kind of life you’d still keep reading, even if you already knew how it ends.