This is our inner, pocket tyrant. A tiny mad director we ourselves granted an unlimited budget and total creative freedom.

He sits in your head, legs crossed, sketching storyboards of the future. Here’s where they will say exactly this. And I will answer just like that. Perfect lighting, calibrated pauses. He even chooses poses for a conversation that hasn’t yet happened. It’s his arthouse film, his masterpiece, with the whole world cast as obedient actors.

And there’s a heady sweetness in that, isn’t there? In the moment you’ve “designed” everything, you become the god of this cardboard universe. You feel the strings of every marionette gathered in your fingertips. It’s an intoxicating sense of control over chaos. You build a crystal palace on a cloud and, for a second, believe it will stand forever.

Then the curtain rises.

And it turns out your actors have minds of their own. The scenery shudders in the draft of reality. Someone forgets their line; someone else never shows up on set. Your brilliant script goes straight to hell.

Here’s where the funniest and saddest part starts. It isn’t reason or logic that rages. It’s that little director. He stamps his feet, tears at his imaginary hair, and screams, “These amateurs! They ruined everything! My genius vision!”

But who is he really angry at? At the world that refused to bow to his fantasy. At the people who dared to be alive instead of puppets. And, ultimately, at himself, because deep down he knows it was nothing more than a one-man show in a theater for a single audience.

The entire storm is phantom pain for something unreal. We grieve over what never existed outside the pages of our imagination. We rage at ghosts we ourselves sketched.

So there you stand, amid the ruins of your air castle, dusted with unsent expectations, and you realize the most paradoxical thing: the only one who locked you in that tower is you. You drafted it, built it, and became its first and last prisoner. All by yourself. What a talented self-saboteur.