The day I was handed the diagnosis of “Adjustment Disorder,” I was forcibly removed from the battlefield (the construction site).
What came first wasn’t despair or sadness; it was just an overwhelming sense of “nothingness.”
The Silent Phone, The Stopped World
Until yesterday, my smartphone was a mass of never-ending notifications. Shouting, requests, adjustments, and confirmations. Then, it suddenly snapped shut.
A daily life began where it was so quiet I could almost hear a metallic ringing in the depths of my ears. In a room with the curtains tightly drawn, I did nothing but count the wood grain on the ceiling.
I was terrified of the morning. I couldn’t stand the sound of the world starting to move. The sound of people turning the gears of “productivity” leaking through the walls was unbearable.
Getting out of bed—an action I once did unconsciously—now felt like a labor-intensive task on the scale of lifting myself with a massive crane.
The Terror of Being “Nobody”
Unemployed. Those characters were engraved deeply and coldly into my chest. When I opened SNS, my former comrades were proudly talking about their achievements. I felt as if I alone had been left behind by the flow of time, sinking to the bottom of stagnant water.
“Tomorrow will be better.” Words like that were no salvation. I didn’t have a single drop of the foundational strength left to “get better.” It felt as if the “blueprints” for being myself had been torn up somewhere beyond repair.
Finding My Outline in the Mud
But in that pitch-black silence, I heard my own voice for the first time. Not the “me” designed to meet someone else’s expectations, but the battered, unsightly “me” that was just… breathing.
“Is it okay for me to be alive?”
There was no answer to that question. There was only the fact that, while shivering in the mud, my heart was still beating.
The Xer’s Monologue
During my period of unemployment, I thought I was “as good as dead.” I believed that a version of myself not connected to society had no value.
But I understand now. That silence was a “maintenance period” to repair a broken system. If you don’t shut down the entire power supply once in a while, the circuits will burn out.
Even when I seemed to be doing nothing, my heart was desperately re-driving the stakes in the darkness to hold onto “tomorrow.”
Don’t blame yourself for being unable to move. That is the most grueling and important job for your survival.
Got it done.
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