what a sentence from a dead man did on a saturday morning
originally posted on my substack page here on JUL 25, 2026
i used to say that i only get to have one week in a month to feel good. about myself, about my life, about my body. i was thinking if it’s the default that women has. and then i thought maybe it’s just me and some undiagnosed conditions in my body. on a better days, i can think of it as something that i can set. like the body clock thing that people talked about. or like the concept of reframing thought. and all that well-being advice you can get for free on the internet.
i’ve been sleep deprived for at least the past month. it’s not that i’m looking for a reason to deny my feeling. because i’m not. but maybe the lack of sleep and the recalibrating that clock in my body have a cost that i need to pay; being emotional. in the sense of simple stuff can heat up my eyes and make me cry. in the shape of huge dark cloud over my head hiding storm inside it.
this morning i woke up at 10am. not by myself. not by the alarm. but by repeated holler of my name. i had my eyes a little swollen and the bright tone of the room pinched my eyeballs. i made my coffee and enjoy a slow-late-morning. in between the gradually clean the house and doing my favorite thing on the weekend, i pick up the book a really good friend gave me as a present. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. here’s where the roller coaster of that one week in a month thing, the sleep deprived brain, and the clock adjusting self gets her moment.
there was a line on the early pages that talked about childhood.
why didn’t i stay child forever? why didn’t i die there, in one of those moments, caught by my classmates’ mischief and the as-if-unexpected arrival of my teachers? today i can’t do this. today i only have reality that i can’t play with. (the book of disquiet, fernando pessoa)
i instantly got my eyes wet. the way he described the …sharp, useless longing gnawing at me like regret. something in me burnt. my chest felt full of something that i can’t quite name. and i decided to call my mother.
we only talked for less than ten minutes. but what i so urgently feel the need to tell her was that i learned a lot about myself lately. i unlearned a bunch too. i discovered and unfold different things about me. she smiled and said, “now that’s another part of growing up, you’re almost 34 and it’s getting better.”
when the call disconnected, i stared at the ceiling for a bit. i felt the sense of relief but i can still feel this brume—a warm kind—growing thicker inside my chest. i can feel that my heart throb differently. the flow of oxygen is not so smooth from my lungs to the sleep deprived brain. i’m happy. i’m sad. i’m fulfilled. but i believe something is still missing. too.
but it’s true. i learned a lot of new things about myself. for instance, i thought i was afraid of heights. but when i was up the trees in the middle of a forest, Pedra Amarela Campo Base in Alcabideche, Portugal, i was so light-footed and frisky. putting my one foot in front of the other, swinging on the wired logs and stairs. i walked briskly. like a little monkey whose life was always on the trees. i looked down to the ground, i was high up, and i wasn’t afraid. in fact, the sight of the distance between my head to the ground poured me with the sense of comfort.
what was that? finding out that you are something else when you always thought the other way around. it did something to me. the same way i found out that apparently, i love cleaning the house while i thought i was having foreboding reaction to the idea of doing chores.
is it the same with realizing that all this time you weren’t that depressed after all.
all you need is a genuine connection, the sense of community, the feeling of being welcomed and accepted where you can be yourself and not afraid of showing parts of yourself that you’ve been hiding for more than half your life?
so “one week in a month is all i can get to feel good” was a myth. i can narrate my life better in my head. i can take something dreamy that is not a part of my daily reality as part of my life too. now that i write it, organizing all of this thought, this very second, the brume inside my chest started calming down. the cloud over my head is fading away.
i hope this stays. like the memories i keep from childhood. like the warmth that i keep with me from my short time in the place i never thought i would ever step my foot at. like the grit i have engraved on my soul.
i hope you can get what i’m trying to say with this long stream of consciousness. i hope you feel what it feels like to be 34 and have a lot to learn still but genuinely being appreciative of everything.