MANTRA

Thank you, universe, for the shattering ache,

for the nights where silence became a tomb,

for the weight of dread pressing against my ribs,

teaching me the depth of my own darkness.


Thank you for riddling me with questions,

for filling me with trembling and despair,

for tearing away the comfort of certainty,

so I might learn the language of the void.


Thank you for the nearness of death,

for the shadow that stalks each step,

for the reminder that every breath is borrowed,

and every heartbeat is both fragile and sacred.


Thank you for making me small,

for reminding me I am dust and star both,

for showing me the futility of clinging,

so my hands could finally open to the infinite.


For in this breaking, I am made whole again,

in this dying, I am reborn into fire,

in this annihilation, I discover divinity.

I rise from the ashes as my truest self.


Prose - Essay

I am full of insecurities. I am riddled with existential anxiety. I am bleeding with loneliness. I look ahead and the horizon swallows me whole, reminding me how impossibly small I feel in the presence of my own dreams. Yet tonight, I see the paradox: I feel small because my dreams are vast. I walk among artists I once idolized, once placed on impossible pedestals, and now I see them as equals. And yet, their years, their experience, their mastery, mostly two decades beyond my own, mock me silently. I want what they have, and in that wanting, I forget that the very essence of what I once chased, I now hold. I am living it. And still, the anxiety gnaws. I have arrived nowhere. My accomplishments feel minute against the cosmic scale of what I envision. Yes, this is good, but I am reaching for the stars beyond the veil, beyond the constructs of society, for a truth unbound by measure.


Cognitively, I know this is the nature of comparison, the human brain wired to see gaps rather than abundance. Psychologically, I am tethered to anticipatory longing, restless in pursuit of what is next while disregarding what is present. Neurologically, my reward system craves novelty and magnitude, dopamine igniting at expansion, leaving what I have achieved feeling insufficient. Philosophically, it is desire’s nature never to rest, to pull us into tension between now and infinite possibility.


Sometimes the nights stretch so long I wonder if I exist at all, or if I am only a ghost wandering the corridors of my own ambition. Some days, the hunger for what I dream feels like a blade turned inward, carving at my sense of worth until I am only fragments, shadows of what I thought I would be. The emptiness becomes a room I cannot leave, its walls closing in with every comparison, every unmet metric. It is not only sadness but a kind of slow erasure, as if the world is folding me back into silence.


Yet in those moments, when my breath feels thin and my body heavy with invisibility, a flicker of truth appears: this ache is proof I am alive, still reaching. The weight is potential, not failure. My longing to dissolve is also my longing to transform. Even in my darkest hours, when I imagine myself breaking apart, a stubborn pulse whispers that I am still building, planting, mentoring, loving, that these small acts are seeds of galaxies. I mentor a photographer. I teach twenty-six students. I am curating an exhibition with six friends who have never shown before. That is me, creating, nurturing, igniting sparks. The scale may seem insufficient, yes, but the universe does not measure in numbers, only in resonance. My anxiety is misdirected; it is inspiration in exile, drive seeking a vessel. It is not despair, it is passion, potent and alive. One day, it will unfold. One day, the world will feel the weight of all I pour into it. For now, I breathe, and I trust that these small manifestations are seeds of cosmic harvests to come.


Invocation

There was once a wanderer who carried within them a stone of great heaviness, a stone carved from the raw ore of anxiety. It pressed upon their chest, it bent their back, it whispered that they were small and unworthy of the path they dreamed to walk. For a long time, they believed this stone was their curse. But one night, under the silence of the stars, the wanderer heard the universe speak: “This stone is not your prison, it is your material. This heaviness is the ore from which your light will be shaped.” So the wanderer built a fire, and into its furnace they placed the stone. The flames were breath, the heat was patience, and slowly the ore began to change. The jagged edges softened, the weight grew radiant, and what was once only fear revealed itself as gold. The wanderer understood then that every tremor of doubt, every wave of panic, every restless hunger for more was not a sign of failure but the raw, unformed power of becoming. And so they no longer cursed their burden, but carried it as prophecy. For anxiety had become their alchemy, transmuted into a cosmic drive, a passion divine in its fire. The stone had not been an anchor, but a seed, waiting for the courage to burn.



That wanderer is me. And, I carry within my hands gold forged through an existential crisis.