The Curse of the Mad Woman

I have lived in a long, bitter resentment of my own reflection. A deep sense of disgust arises whenever I look at my self. I am hyper-aware of every gaze that lands on me, feeling the weight of judgment in every pair of eyes I meet. My acquaintances often dismiss my pain, claiming I think of it too much, but they do not see the towering mirror that manifests before me. It looms large, a silent judge declaring that my body is an embarrassment to the soul housed within it. I lack the strength to argue with the glass, and so, I simply surrender. In that surrender, I lose my spark.

When midnight arrives, the world grows quiet, but my mind becomes a loud, chaotic workshop. My eyes refuse to shut, fixed on the ceiling as I process the trajectory of my life—the good, and the bad one, that ever happened. This relentless cycle of overthinking has slowly pushed me toward a quiet kind of madness.

My mother, in her simple faith, tells me that prayer is the only thing I need. Yet, I’m still struggling to live normally. When I try to voice the complexity of these thoughts, she dismisses them as "silly" and our conversations often dissolve into an endless argument about what is really going on in my mind, as if I’m no longer the one who owns my own head.

Some moment the madness comes like invisible hands that choke, hit, and drown me. Not until I got my way of escapism from pills in the form of my friends. They are the "pills" I take to numb the madness, a temporary anesthesia of laughter and chatter. But the dosage never lasts. The moment silence hits the group, the madness crawls back from the shadows.

It is a curse I do not deserve, I don’t even know what I committed in my past life. I was reborn with no memories of the past, so why must I endure such pain? I was hurt as a child, and as I grow, that child still lingers within me. So please, have mercy on me...