Dan Daiquiri

Every second I’m alive, I’m feeling something- whether I want to or not. Thoughts circle the drain. Emotions spill over, pulling me under. Some loud, some whispering from corners I forgot existed. I can’t mute them. They’re hardwired into the system. And in the mess of it all, I forget to look. Properly look.

I catch my own reflection in passing. That moment in the mirror when my eyes lock with themselves- I flinch. Don’t want to hold the stare too long. Don’t want to know what it’s saying. The version I see isn’t me. It’s a compromise. A highlight reel stitched together by necessity. A filtered survival. It’s the closest I get to self-awareness in real time- and even that feels secondhand.

I tried to go inward. The mindful shit. Meditation. Breathing techniques. Journals with lines half-finished because finishing them would’ve meant confronting what came next. I thought peace was in the silence. Turns out the silence was full of everything I’d buried. That quiet place people sell you as healing? It’s not a sanctuary. It’s a trapdoor to everything you’ve avoided.

I looked in my own eyes, and I didn’t find some higher version of myself waiting. No strength. No answers. Just wreckage. Versions of me I thought I’d abandoned, still alive, still pulsing under the surface. The moments I cut myself off. The selves I killed off in order to cope. All still here. Waiting. Watching.

I’ve spent years running from myself. Burned every bridge and then built new ones just to jump off them. Easier to implode than to sit still. Easier to sabotage than to take responsibility for what lives underneath the skin. And I got good at it. Mastered the art of self-erasure. Smiled through it. Numbed through it. Drank through it. Told myself it was freedom. But it was just escape with better branding.

And now, I’m not running.

That doesn’t mean I’ve arrived anywhere. I’ve just stopped. I’m sitting in the aftermath. Breathing in the smoke. Feeling the sharp edges of everything I tried to keep buried. And it hurts. But it’s mine. And I’m not trying to make it pretty.

The same instinct I used to survive is now turning on me. And I can’t keep pretending that survival is the same as living.

I used to romanticise bartending. Thought it was all edge and elegance. Free drink, free chaos, beautiful broken people confessing their lives in whispers and gin. I thought I’d made it. But what I’d really done was build a cage that served alcohol. And I drank. And drank. And watched myself disappear into the thing I thought I wanted. Careful what you wish for. Some dreams rot from the inside out.

I started therapy in 2023. Thought it would be a clean fix. Tighten a few bolts, get back to business. But healing isn’t surgery. It’s an unearthing. You don’t patch up- you dig. And what came up was a lot. Not just sadness, but a sense that none of it had mattered. The cocktails. The curated persona. The fragile ego that stood in for a self I hadn’t met yet. None of it held. None of it healed.

I’m still sad. Still trying to find a version of life that fits. I pour energy into making other people feel something good — maybe because I still don’t know how to give that to myself. Maybe because helping someone else feel okay is the closest I get to feeling okay.

But I’m not running anymore.

And in a world obsessed with perfection, with the illusion of progress, with performance- standing still feels like protest. Like truth. Like the first honest move I’ve made in years.