when you're inside the house for the entirety of the day, several days a week, each day ends up blending and mashing together, and the special outlook needed to look forward to the future narrows the more you spend your time inside. i say this as someone who hasn't left the house much (i believe since 2022?) when the realization that the city and neighborhood i reside in is not as friendly and inviting as it may have seemed before. its the paranoia of interacting with less than ideal, unsafe people that are in worse corners of life than i have ever gone to that keep me inside the house.

its the fear for your children's well-being that makes you keep them locked up inside, with small shimmers of freedom shining through whenever you muster up the courage and the energy to go to a nice park in the nicer city nearby. truthfully its hard to look forward to anything when you're poor and the only means of entertainment you have that does not involve technology is drinking a coffee in a nice (often expensive) cafe, or the same old park you always go to. i know personally that i do not go out enough, because in recent years, i have acquired this habit of staring off at the green leaves of trees and the large fields of grass at the nearby park, whenever i have the chance of going outside i mean. my eyes feel exhausted by the monotony of being in the inside of four walls, and my eyesight is taxed by the heavy use of screens throughout my day to day life.

its the feeling of layered sadness you get when you realize the people around you are more or less living the same life, to the point where you're happy when they leave the house, even if you didn't get to go with them.

i cannot go more than one day on some type of screen, when all i have really wanted in life was (funnily enough) to be a farmer. (an impossible task with the price of land these days and the desire to stay close to family) kind of humorous in a way, since i'm now studying to be a computer scientist. my life with screens will not end soon, but hopefully the perpetual, repetitive life indoors will.

i sound like a Luddite, but i do appreciate technology. i just want the ability to get away from it from time to time. to get out of the house for once, to look at the sky and feel the slight breeze outside. this stagnant house removes any happiness i have, and it and the neighborhood it resides in gives me a layer of anxiety that feels never-ending and faint, always in the background.

on top of all of this, the anxiety of passing my classes puts me in such a low state of mind. i don't have the mental capacity to deal with the knowledge of possibly failing a class, of what it may mean for the near future. it's like i'm perpetually stuck in some way, life is blazing past, but nothing is really happening, and at the same time, everything is.

-aneri