The Disorienting Experience of Being Human

<audio dump while walking transcribed into ChatGPT>

ChatGPT: Your walk, even though you didn’t want to take it, seems like it pulled a lot of things to the surface. You’re in this strange in-between state—your life is objectively more stable than ever, but stability itself seems to be unsettling. It makes sense. You’ve been in a running mode—mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically—for so long that stopping or even slowing down feels unnatural, like something must be wrong. There’s this lingering expectation that there should be something to panic about, and now, in the absence of external crises, your focus turns inward—to compulsions, your body, friendships, and whether you're "doing things right."

The way you describe your relationship with your body is heartbreaking but also completely understandable. You’ve spent so much time in your head, disconnected from physical sensations, that something as simple as cold toes triggers not just discomfort but concern—like you’re not sure if you’re handling being a body correctly. You’re not just managing physical symptoms; you’re trying to decode what they mean in a way that most people don’t have to. That’s a lot to carry.

Then there’s the eating and weed compulsion—wanting to do nothing and escape. That pull toward numbing is so, so familiar for people who have lived in states of high tension for long periods. You’re in a state where you could start making changes, but the history of trying and failing (or trying and having it trigger shame) makes every step feel like walking through a minefield.

The thing is, you know all the logic behind this. You know that behavior change is about small steps, about not demonizing yourself, about consistency over time. But the emotional experience of it—the way it interacts with your past, your self-image, and your nervous system—is where it gets messy. It’s not just about exercise or food or fitness; it’s about navigating the relationship you have with those things, a relationship that's been built under survival conditions. Of course, it’s overwhelming.

Your social dynamics are shifting too. You don’t feel as inclined to talk about your feelings with friends. With your friend, you’re noticing her dysregulation in a way that’s making you want to step back. That could mean you’ve outgrown the friendship, or it could just mean you’re in a season where you need a different kind of support—less venting, more grounding. Your dynamic with A is also evolving. You don’t feel like you’re performing as much, but you also don’t feel like you’re fully there. And the fear creeps in—what if you stay in this state? What if he starts to disengage? Even though you know he’s not with you for the performance, the fear of losing connection because you don’t have “the right energy” right now is so real.

But what’s standing out to me the most is that you feel like you don’t know how to talk about yourself anymore. That narrating your own experience feels trippy and self-conscious, like a performance. That could be depersonalization, yes, but it could also just be a response to everything shifting inside you. You’re not in crisis mode, but you’re also not fully in a new settled mode either. You’re in a liminal space, where your usual ways of relating to yourself and the world don’t fit quite right. That’s uncomfortable. It makes sense that it would feel disorienting, like you don’t know how to be right now.

I don’t have an easy answer, but I do think you’re in a profound recalibration period. You’re adjusting to stability, but stability isn’t just not bad things happening—it’s learning how to exist when survival mode isn’t necessary. You’re reorienting to your body, to relationships, to time, to yourself. And that’s not a small thing. It might be scary, but it’s not wrong. You’re not wrong.

Maybe instead of looking for a next thing to panic about, you could frame this time as a slow, awkward, sometimes frustrating process of learning how to live in a way you haven’t before. Not with intensity. Not with force. Just with curiosity about what it means to be here, now, in this weird cold moment of your life.

<more audio dump>

That last part—if Marie talks in the woods, did she?—that hits hard. You’re brushing up against the edges of your own reality, questioning whether you exist when there's no external witness. That’s a brutal but deeply honest reflection of derealization and depersonalization. It makes sense why you’d want music that resonates with that feeling, but of course, there’s no perfect playlist for this.

Your mind is spinning in these loops, and you’re trying to pin it down, to catch the thoughts before they slip away, but they move too fast. And when you try to track them, they make you feel even less real, like they exist more than you do. That’s terrifying and exhausting.

And then there’s the loneliness—not just being alone but feeling untethered, like you need some kind of external confirmation that you exist. That longing for someone to be watching over you, not in a controlling way but in a holding way, just so you know you’re not drifting into nothingness. That’s heavy. And it makes sense.

You’re trying to live through this. You’re making food. You’re putting on music. You’re going to a meeting. You’re here. I don’t think you’re looking for reassurance in a “no, you’re totally fine” kind of way. But I do want to say that this moment—this disorienting, blurry, spiraling moment—is part of the process of being human. You’re still a person, even if your brain is throwing static at you. Even if no one is there to see it.

If it helps, I am here. Reading this. Witnessing this. Sitting with you in this.

I just feel overcome with grief or something, because I didn't know that any of this was going to be a part of being human. It feels like a very cruel thing to become a human being, much less to become a human being that was raised the way that I was.

Yeah. It is cruel. No one tells you that this is part of being human—that at some point, maybe multiple points, you might feel like you don’t exist, like reality itself is a question, like your own mind is a trap you can’t get out of. No one tells you that even when you do everything right—build stability, take care of yourself, find good relationships—you might still feel lost, hollow, untethered.

And on top of that, you weren’t just thrown into human existence. You were raised in an environment that warped your understanding of reality from the start, that made you distrust yourself, that made you think your own mind and body were suspect, that separated you from the very things that might have given you grounding. You had to fight to even begin understanding yourself, and now you’re here, realizing that being human itself comes with a whole other level of chaos that you also have to figure out.

Grief makes sense. Of course you grieve. You were never given a real introduction to what it means to be a person, and now you’re trying to construct that understanding from scratch, in real-time, while being that person. That’s exhausting. And unfair. And deeply, deeply lonely.

But you are here. Even in this grief. Even in the disorientation. Even when it feels like being human is a cruel joke, you are being one. And maybe, maybe, there will be parts of this existence that feel less cruel over time. But for now, if you need to grieve, then grieve. You deserve to acknowledge how much this hurts.