on drowning

i thought your 20s were supposed to feel electric.

city lights, bad decisions, laughing too loud in bathrooms with girls who don't know you but love you anyway for five minutes. cheap thrills. bodies in motion. becoming.

instead, mine feels like a window i keep mistaking for a doorway.

agoraphobia is such an ugly word. it sounds clinical, detached. it doesn’t capture the humiliation of standing in your own driveway and feeling your own heart try to exit your body. it doesn’t explain why being in a grocery store can feel like standing in front of a firing squad. it doesn’t explain why the horizon can stretch so wide it feels hostile, leaving you small and raw in the middle of it.

it doesn’t explain how the world itself starts to look predatory.

i am 24 and my radius is shrinking.

i watch the sun move across my bedroom wall like it’s the only clock that matters. outside, people are living. they are networking. they are falling in love. they are getting promotions. they are collecting passport stamps and stories and inside jokes. meanwhile i am collecting... dust.

there is something uniquely humiliating about being young and afraid of daylight.

i look fine. that’s the worst part. i can do my hair. i can put on eyeliner with surgical precision. i can look like someone who belongs in a loud room. no one sees the mathematics happening behind my eyes. exit routes, time estimates, how long until i can leave without seeming insane.

every invitation feels like a test i am destined to fail.

“just come out for an hour.”

an hour is geological time when your body thinks it’s dying.

people think agoraphobia means you’re scared of the outside. i’m not scared of the outside. i’m scared of the way my body threatens to betray me once i’m out there. the dizziness. the dissociation. the sudden certainty that i am going to faint, vomit, implode. the way sound sharpens. the way faces blur. the way i become hyperaware of my own heartbeat, like it’s a ticking timebomb strapped to my ribs.

and the shame.

your 20s are supposed to be expansive.

mine feel claustrophobic. everyone says this is the decade you build your life. i feel like i’m watching mine through glass. i have degrees. plans. ambition that flickers like a pilot light. but opportunity requires presence, and presence requires leaving the house.

some days i am able to find the strength. some days i push past the doorway, no matter how heavy it feels. sometimes i even make it somewhere and smile like nothing is wrong. but the cost is high. i come home wrung out, nervous system scorched, and i need hours, sometimes even days, to recalibrate.

other days, i cancel.

i watch my phone light up with stories i am not in.

there is grief in this that no one talks about. a quiet and erosive grief. the kind that sands you down over time. i grieve the version of me who would have said yes without calculating survival odds. i grieve the casualness of movement. i grieve spontaneity.

i grieve the girl who could just exist in public without negotiating with her own pulse.

and there’s a darker layer underneath it. the fear that this is permanent. that i will blink and be 30 and still measuring my life in safe zones. that my 20s, the decade everyone mythologizes, will be remembered as the years i merely survived in rooms instead of living in them.

people say “you’re so young.” like youth is elastic, as if time waits politely while you heal. but time is not sentimental. time moves whether you participate or not.

that’s the part that keeps me up at night.

i don’t want to waste my life in a bedroom. i don’t want my world to shrink to the size of my house. i want to travel. i want to fall in love in loud, inconvenient places. i want to build something bigger than my fear. i want my nervous system to stop treating existence like a threat.

but wanting and being able are two different things.

so here i am. 24. technically alive. technically young. watching the world from a window more often than i’d like to admit.

and i don’t know if this is a season or a sentence.

i only know that there is something brutal about losing your twenties to something invisible.

something that leaves no visible wreckage. something that gets mistaken for apathy when you’re actually trying to outrun a body that thinks it’s under attack.