The Desire to Not Exist
There’s that moment. The one where the breath catches in the throat, and everything contracts—skin, mind, time itself—and for a second, nothing else exists but the overwhelming urge to not be. It’s not death that calls, not really. More like a desire to sink into the ground, to dissolve, to vanish from the weight of your own existence. Because existence, in moments like these, feels unbearable.
It begins simply enough. Maybe a misplaced word. A sentence, spoken with confidence, until it unravels halfway through, and you realize the eyes watching you see through the cracks you couldn’t cover up. The heat rises, the awkward pause grows pregnant, and you smile too wide, say something stupid to fill the space. There’s a familiar burning in the gut, as if you’re being hollowed out from the inside. The silence in the room presses in, tangible, heavy, each second a reminder of how deeply you’ve just failed. That is when the urge comes, quietly at first, then louder: What if I could disappear?
It’s the email—the one sent late at night, when the lines between brilliance and foolishness blur, and you press send before sanity catches up. Morning light, harsh as truth, reveals the mess. The wrong tone. The overshare. The clumsy sentence, the typo, the painting submission you didn’t even remember to attach. And worst of all, the sickening realization that this piece of you, this poorly crafted self, now exists forever in someone else’s inbox. How quickly does that fantasy return, the one where you never pressed send, where you don’t exist in this moment of regret? But the truth is more brutal: You do. You did press send. You can’t take it back.
Worse are the times when there’s nothing specific at all, just the slow, creeping dread. Maybe a project’s fallen apart—a painting that looked better before posting, or a business with friends that fizzled into nothing. Days blend into each other, punctuated by unfinished drafts and unanswered messages. People outside your window live their lives, each one oblivious to the quiet collapse happening inside your studio, your mind. You scroll through timelines, consume fragments of other people's lives, and for a while, it’s enough to distract from the voice inside that asks: Why does any of this matter? The numbness creeps in, the dull weight of insignificance settling like dust on your skin. Maybe if you were gone, nothing would change.
And then there’s the lie—the one you told, small at first. You’ve made it, you belong here. Harmless. You had to attend your Grandma’s funeral, third Grandma you lost this year. Harmless. You’ve never traced, overpainted, or used A.I in company work, you tell the judge. The lie grows, entangles itself in more lies, and soon you’re caught, held in place by the strings of your own making. You wonder, in that split second before you’re exposed, if you could escape it all by simply not existing, as if you could be erased from the equation, as if you were never part of this. But of course, the lie catches up, and with it, the weight of being caught. Eyes on you again, waiting for your excuse, and there’s no room for dignity in that space. Just the gnawing desire to vanish, to be nothing, to not be.
But the truth of it—the hardest truth—is that you are. You are and you are seen. You exist in the eyes of others, in the marks you’ve made, in the moments you’ve created, even the ones you wish you hadn’t. There’s no running from it, no disappearing into the void. And maybe, somewhere in that truth, there’s a sliver of strength. The pain, the embarrassment, the fear—they rush toward you, faster than you can flee. So you meet them head-on because you must. And in meeting them, in enduring, in breathing through the desire to vanish, you learn that this is what it means to exist: to feel it all, to survive it, and to keep going, even when the urge to not be is louder than anything else.
