In the cosmos, when a star is caught in the gravity of a black hole, it gets stretched out. It forms an accretion disk….a glowing, burning ring of light that circles the absolute dark. But what happens if the black hole pulls in something else?

The dying star just has to stay there, trapped in orbit, forced to illuminate the very thing that is taking its place.

If that star could speak, I don’t think it would be poetic. I think it would be a desperate, breathless confession that they can never send:

I am right here. I have been burning in your orbit for so long, tearing myself apart just to keep the cold away from you. But you don’t even see me. You just use my light to look at them.

You tell me how beautiful they are. You tell me about the way they laugh, the texts they send, the future you hope for with them. And because I am utterly trapped in your gravity…..because I would rather be ripped to shreds in your orbit than float alone in the dark……I listen. I smile. I encourage you. I help you translate their signals.

You don’t even know you’re killing me. You think I am just your friend, your confidant, your constant. You don’t realize that every time you say their name with that spark in your voice, another piece of my core collapses.

I am dying right in front of you, and you are too busy watching a passing comet to notice the sky is falling.

We have all been the quiet observer of our own heartbreak.

It’s the feeling of leaning your head against the cold glass on a long commute home, letting a song play on an endless, melancholic loop as the streetlights blur by. It’s the realization that you are giving everything you have to someone who is saving all their empty space for somebody else.

The cruelest part of unrequited love isn’t the rejection. It’s the complicity. It is sitting on a bed, or across a coffee shop table, nodding along and offering relationship advice to the person you would give up the world for. It is swallowing your own feelings so deeply that you forget how to breathe, all because you want them to be happy…..even if it is destroying you.

If you are currently trapped in this orbit, shining your light on someone else’s love story, I see you. It takes a terrifying amount of strength to love someone enough to let them look past you. But eventually, you have to save some of that light for yourself.

How long do you think a person can stay in that orbit, listening to the person they love talk about someone else, before they finally break away?

My college is far from home, which means I’ve spent a massive chunk of my life just... in transit. If you’ve ever had a long daily commute, you know that the journey eventually becomes a blur. To survive the sheer repetition of it, you build a little world inside your head, and music becomes the walls of that world.

During my first year, there was one specific track that held my world together: “100 Words” by Prateek Kuhad.

I didn’t consciously choose it as my anthem. It was just there, looping endlessly while I stood at the dusty bus stop, constantly checking the time, feeling that specific, heavy exhaustion that you only really feel during your first year.

That song was playing when I would finally climb onto the bus, sink into a seat, lean my head against the vibrating glass of the window, and watch the roads blur by. In those moments, it wasn’t just a song anymore. It was the feeling of relief. It was the deep exhale of the day finally being over. It was the sound of going home.

And then, as quietly as that first-year phase ended, the song faded out of my life.

I didn’t intentionally delete it or skip it. I just outgrew that specific routine, found new artists, and moved forward. The song got buried under the digital dust of my playlists.

Until a few days ago.

I was just scrolling, letting my library run on a random shuffle, not paying attention to anything in particular. And then…those opening acoustic notes hit.

Instantly, the ground dropped out from under me. I actually stopped breathing for a second. I wasn’t just remembering my first year…

I was physically pulled back there. I could feel the familiar weight of my backpack on my shoulders. I could feel the specific anxiety, the lingering fatigue, and the quiet comfort of that time in my life. I could feel the rumble of the bus engine.

It’s wild how our brains take an entire era of our existence……with all its messy feelings, struggles, and quiet moments of peace and tie it completely to a simple three-minute melody.

We listen to a track until it becomes the very fabric of our days, and then we leave it behind without a second thought as we step into the next chapter.

But those songs don’t disappear. They just wait. They sit patiently in the archives, holding onto a past version of ourselves.

When that song played again, it felt like running into an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. It was a bittersweet ache. It was a gentle tap on the shoulder, reminding the guy who was just trying to figure things out at a bus stop that he eventually made it home.

It started as a survival tactic. I learned early on that the world rewards you when you fit the narrative it expects. So, I began to draft different versions of myself. I learned to read the room from an almost omniscient viewpoint, calculating exactly what kind of character each person needed me to be, and then stepping perfectly into that role.

For some, I became the ambitious visionary. For others, the quiet, easygoing observer. I curated my words, my reactions, and my energy to match whoever was standing in front of me. If someone needed a shadow, I receded; if they needed a protagonist, I led.

It worked. I became the ultimate chameleon, seamlessly blending into every dynamic, avoiding conflict, and securing my place in their lives.

But there is a fatal flaw in writing a new version of yourself for everyone you meet: eventually, you end up with a thousand different masks, and absolutely no idea what your own face looks like.

Lately, when the room empties and I am finally alone, the silence is deafening. Without an audience to perform for, I don’t know how to act. I look at all these carefully constructed avatars, these fragments of a person, and I feel a terrifying sense of detachment.

Which one of them is me?

Am I the sum of all these different edits? Or is the “real me” the exhausted author hiding behind the scenes, desperate to stop acting? I’ve spent so much time editing my personality to survive the plot that I feel like I’ve lost the original source material.

I am writing this because I am tired of the performance. I am tired of looking in the mirror and wondering whose reflection is looking back.

I don’t have the answers yet. I don’t know how to seamlessly merge all these fractured pieces back into a single, cohesive identity. But maybe the first step to finding the real me is simply admitting that I am lost. Maybe true authenticity starts right here, in the messy, unfiltered admission that I don’t know who I am anymore, but I am finally ready to find out.

I have a fatal flaw. A downfall that I can’t seem to outgrow: I give too much of myself away. When I am on the verge of making a good decision, or when a beautiful idea is blooming in my mind, something precious and close to my heart, I can’t just hold it. I desperately want to share the light.

Sometimes, I meet people and they just have this... vibe. You know the one? That instant warmth that tricks your instincts into whispering, “It’s safe here. You can rest.” They feel believable. They feel trustworthy. So, I let my guard drop. Before I know it, I am opening doors I should have kept locked, handing a practical stranger the entire blueprint of my mind.

But the heaviest heartbreak isn’t just about sharing my plans; it’s about sharing me. The unfiltered, messy, undeniably “cringe” side of who I am. When I show someone that side, I am silently pleading, “Here is the real me. Please hold it gently.” I foolishly expect them to see the vulnerability. I expect them to recognize that showing my raw edges is the highest level of trust I can offer.

Instead, they just look at me and see “weird.”

And then comes the betrayal. The quiet, devastating backstabbing. The things I whispered in confidence, the discomforts I laid bare, suddenly become their entertainment. I am forced to sit there and watch as they take my deepest thoughts and turn them into a punchline. They tease me in front of others, throwing my own private truths in my face while everyone laughs, completely blind to the fact that my heart is breaking right in front of them.

It shatters you. It leaves you breathless, realizing that the knife in your back was placed there by your own hands, because you were the one who gave it to them in the first place.

I am writing this with a heavy, broken heart because I am so deeply tired of bleeding out for people who only wanted a show. I wanted a genuine connection; they just wanted material. My biggest con is looking at the world and believing that everyone has the same heart that I do.

I don’t know how to stop being an oversharer overnight. The urge to connect is wired deep into my bones. But tonight, as I sit alone with these broken pieces, I am making a promise to myself: I have to start building a fortress around my precious things.

Not everyone deserves to see the unfiltered version of me. And a “good vibe” will never again be enough to buy a ticket to my soul.