They say, “Go out and live your life,” like life is hiding behind a tree or buried under rocks. But life is nowhere.

The kind of life I want to live doesn’t exist out there. And the kind of life everyone else is living? That’s theirs—it has nothing to do with me. My life is within me. I created it, and now I’m living it. It’s in everything I do, everywhere I go. It exists in the thoughts I produce, in the emotions that rise in me. My life is not separate from me—it is me.

This world creates an illusion by telling me to “go out and live” (which really means do what they are doing). But this time, I won’t fall for it. Because now, I know an entire world exists inside me. I’m happy in it. I live in it. I create in it. My world is richer, more meaningful, more adventurous than this one. It holds more depth than the world outside. And honestly, I have no idea what to do with this big world of yours. It feels distant, like it doesn’t belong to me. Somewhere along the way, I lost my interest in it.

But still, sometimes, I step out of my world and into this one—not to live in it, but to observe, to entertain myself. Because in the end, this world is just a stage, and I am merely the audience.

TheSparklingWords | Anushree Vaishnav