Listen. You wake up and the first thought is, “Something’s off.” Not with the world, not with the weather-it’s you. Yesterday you decided to be perfect. You looked at your coworker Petya, apostle of clean eating, and thought, “There. I should be like Petya.” And today you overslept, and the grated carrot salad you swore you’d eat for breakfast turned into a dry cookie. Petya is already somewhere up on his immaculate Olympus, and your inner voice, that bastard with the mic, is already yelling, “Slacker! Weakling! Not Petya!”

You spend the whole day, cursed, trying to catch that ideal. And in the evening, when you collapse with nothing left, the same voice finishes you off: “See? Didn’t work. Still not Petya. Still not you (that version of you you sculpted in Petya’s likeness).”

Do you see the circus? You’ve spent your life running a one-person theatre where you’re the director, screenwriter, makeup artist, and meanest critic. And you only ever get one role: “The ideal human according to everyone but you.”

You promise yourself, “Monday I’m starting a new life!” Ha. “Monday” is your personal drug to survive a couple more days. It’s a mental vacation where you pre-forgive every future failure so you don’t break right now. “Fine, today I’ll stay this nobody, but on Monday…” And that lie to yourself, that endless postponement, doesn’t just weaken you. It makes you guilty.

Guilty not before Petya. Before yourself. Before the phantom of the ideal “you” you sculpted so meticulously. You feel like a traitor to your own greatness that never even got born. It’s that gross, sticky feeling when you stand in front of the mirror and realise, “I let myself down again. I couldn’t do it again. I’m still not enough…” And each “not enough” settles on you like dust until you turn into a living statue of disappointment and self-hatred.

***

So you stand there, caked in dust, heavy with guilt, and suddenly your eyes snag on your old sneakers tossed by the door. Not new, not trendy, not the kind “successful people” wear. Just yours.

Those sneakers suddenly feel like the only honest object in your life. They aren’t pretending to be anything. They just are. Old. Comfortable. Yours.

You walk to the kitchen. Open the fridge. Empty. Just a hardened piece of cheese and a lonely yogurt. You take the yogurt. It’s strawberry even though you hate strawberry yogurt. But there’s nothing else. And you eat it. Slowly, spoon after spoon. You taste that cloying, unpleasant flavour. And for the first time in forever you don’t force yourself to enjoy it. You don’t think about how you “should eat healthy.” You just eat lousy yogurt because that’s what you have.

And in that moment, in that lousy strawberry yogurt and those old sneakers, there’s no drama. No breakthroughs. No decisions. There’s only you. Sitting in the kitchen. Eating crummy yogurt. That’s it.

And that inner voice, that bastard with the mic who usually screeches, “Why are you eating this junk? Where’s your healthy lifestyle? You’re not enough again…” suddenly goes quiet. Not because you beat him. Because he just… stops talking. And all you hear is the spoon scraping the bottom of the cup.