Midnight Retrospection

The fan spins at a speed of 5, not fast enough to cool the room but just enough to keep the air moving, like a constant reminder of the heat. I lie there staring at it, waiting to become tired in the most efficient way possible, as if sleep is something I have to earn after spending the entire day working hard. There’s a quiet anger sitting in my chest because why does rest feel like a reward and not a right? As the blades blur into each other, the day begins to replay. Still, not like a sequence, more like scattered cuts, and it hits me how strange it is that I can look at something so present and still be somewhere else entirely in my head.

“Did I choose any of this, the past 20 years, the person I’ve become, or have I just been moving through a series of decisions that never felt like decisions at all?” As a creative I spend so much time obsessing over control, over the smallest details, colors, textures, timing, frames, making sure everything means something, but what about the choices I don’t notice, like how my hand automatically reaches for that one diary every time, like how I already know what I’m going to wear before I even get out of bed, was that ever a conscious thought or just a pattern that settled into me over time? And if I stop and try to trace every one of these micro-decisions back to a moment of choice, I feel like my mind would just spiral, collapse under the weight of it. Shouldn’t I be thinking about it, because aren’t these exact unnoticed details the ones that slowly shape who we are?

Versions of me - a drawing I made in a state of play.

And now it’s 2 AM, and the room feels like it’s watching me. In the midst of roommates snoring at night and the dogs howling at god knows whom downstairs, I come back to reality. I’m supposed to be sleeping in my slightly mismatched blue and red night suit, which used to be my sister’s years back. With my soft toy placed above my head and the blanket half under me, half slipping away, I continue staring, but this time I choose to stare at the moon. I’m wide awake, having this entire conversation with myself inside my own head, questioning, looping, circling the same thoughts.

A loud clap that cuts through everything, sharp and immediate, and a voice, “Hello?” “What the hell are you thinking about?” I am in my classroom, sitting upright, disoriented, people around me mid-discussion about an assignment I’ve clearly drifted away from. Today I deliberately chose the orange-pink loose shirt to wear because I missed my sister a little too much, and basically everything that I own is hers. I chose the green bag to carry along cuz I felt like styling colourful in the morning and decided to put the most absurd badges on the bag because, well, why not? I look around trying to catch up, a girl with whimsical hair clips is laughing too loudly at something I didn’t hear, another dressed entirely in black with headphones on is carefully pretending she doesn’t care about anything happening here, and I can’t help but wonder if even this, the way they look, the way they exist in this space, was a series of deliberate choices or just something that slowly formed without them realizing, and then the question lands again, do we really choose the tiniest details of who we are every single day, or do those details choose us.