At some point in life, you learn a difficult truth:
No one is coming to save you.
Not because no one cares, but because, eventually, you have to become the person who saves yourself.
Lately, I have been tired in a way that sleep cannot fix.
Every morning begins at 8 AM.
Every afternoon ends around 5:30 PM.
And between those hours, I give away pieces of myself my time, my energy, my attention, my thoughts.
Then I come home, exhausted, only to wake up and do it all again.
Monday.
Tuesday.
Wednesday.
Thursday.
Friday.
Saturday.
And finally, Sunday.
The one day that feels like it belongs to me.
But why only Sunday?
Why does an entire week of life have to be reduced to waiting for one day to breathe?
I understand the rules of this world. We work because we need money. We need money because we need to survive. We save because we want a future. We sacrifice today because we believe tomorrow will be better.
I understand all of that.
But sometimes I cannot stop wondering:
When did working to build a life become living only to work?
There is a difference between the two.
A very painful difference.
I used to be a creative person.
I used to believe that if I didn’t know how to do something, I could learn it. Give me enough time, and I would figure it out. I could build things, write things, learn things, create things.
I had ideas.
I had curiosity.
I had a certain light inside me.
And now, sometimes, I wonder where that person went.
Maybe she didn’t disappear.
Maybe she is simply tired.
I don’t hate my job.
That’s the strange part.
I like learning. I like discovering things I didn’t know before. I’m proud of the experience I’ve gained. There are things I can do today that I couldn’t do yesterday because I chose to learn them.
So why am I unhappy?
Because sometimes it isn’t the work that breaks you.
Sometimes it is the life surrounding the work.
I hate the endless routine.
I hate Jakarta.
I hate having to be somewhere at a certain hour when I know that much of what I do could be done from almost anywhere.
I hate the feeling that my time no longer belongs to me.
And sometimes I sit quietly and ask myself:
Why did I choose this life?
I thought this opportunity would give me freedom.
I thought I could work from home.
I thought I could save money and build something meaningful.
I thought I was building a future.
Our future.
I took this opportunity partly because of you.
You told me I needed to work. You told me I needed to collect money so we could build something together. So we could build our NGO. So we could create a future that belonged to both of us.
And I believed you.
Maybe that is what hurts the most.
Because now I don’t know whether I was building a future with you or simply walking farther away from you without realizing it.
Maybe you never wanted that future.
Maybe you just wanted me to go somewhere far enough that leaving me would become easier.
And now here I am.
Far away.
Exactly where you wanted me to be.
Living a life that sometimes feels like it was built from promises that no longer exist.
There are days when I wonder what all those sacrifices were for.
What was the point of working so hard for a future that disappeared before I could reach it?
I don’t have an answer.
I only have this strange heaviness inside me.
I am alone in a city I don’t love, surrounded by people but somehow with no one to talk to.
And the hardest part is that I don’t know how to tell anyone.
My family don’t know.
My friends don’t know.
They don’t know how heavy my thoughts have become.
They don’t know how often I feel like I’m quietly drowning while still showing up to work the next morning.
But what could I tell them?
What could they do?
I don’t want to give them another problem to carry.
So I carry it myself.
And perhaps that is why my phone feels so painfully quiet sometimes.
It doesn’t ring unless I am the one who makes it ring.
No one asks if I’m okay.
No one asks if I’m tired.
No one asks what is happening inside my head.
And after enough silence, a bitter question begins to grow:
Why should I keep caring about everyone else’s problems when nobody seems to care about mine?
I don’t like that question.
Because I know caring shouldn’t be a transaction.
But I’m human
And sometimes I want someone to notice.
Sometimes I want someone to say,
“You seem tired. Are you okay?”
Not because they can fix anything.
Not because I expect them to rescue me.
Just because, for once, I want to feel seen.
Maybe loneliness isn’t always about having no one.
Maybe loneliness is having so much inside you and nowhere for it to go.
Still, I don’t want to give up on myself.
I don’t want to believe that this is all there is.
I don’t want to become someone who spends every day waiting for Sunday, and every Sunday dreading Monday.
There must be more than this.
I want my time back.
I want my curiosity back.
I want to create without feeling guilty for not working.
I want to wake up and feel that my life belongs to me.
I want to work because I choose to build something—not because I am afraid that if I stop, everything will fall apart.
Maybe someday I will leave this city
Maybe someday I will find work that gives me room to breathe.
Maybe someday I will build something of my own.
Maybe someday I will look back at this version of myself and understand why she had to go through all of this.
I don’t know when.
I don’t know how.
But I know I cannot keep living like this forever.
Because life was never supposed to be a long countdown from Monday to Sunday.
We were not born just to wake up, work, come home, sleep, and repeat. We are supposed to have dreams that have nothing to do with our salaries.
We are supposed to have mornings that don’t begin with exhaustion.
We are supposed to have people we can call when the world becomes too heavy.
We are supposed to have time to simply exist.
Maybe I am not lazy.
Maybe I am not ungrateful.
Maybe I am just tired of giving my life to a routine that gives so little of it back.
And maybe the person I thought I had lost the creative, curious, hopeful version of myself is still somewhere inside me.
Waiting.
Not for someone to save her.
But for me to finally come back for her.
I don’t want to spend my whole life working just to survive it.
I want to work for my life.
I want to live for something beyond work.
And maybe, for the first time in a long time, I need to choose myself