how i stopped existing and started actually living

There is a distinct difference between existing and living. And for the past few years, I have just been existing. The story starts two Fridays ago. Midnight in the Lower East Side with two of my friends. It was the kind of night where you say one more drink four times and you somehow end up at a rave in Brooklyn. Someone's talking to a stranger about Nietzsche or their ex or both and somehow we stayed out until 5am and decided to see the sunrise on the East River. So we walked and sat there on a bench, half drunk, fully running on whatever chemical your body releases when it's given up on sleep and started talking about how bizarre it is that you can live in the most overstimulating city on the planet and still feel like you're on autopilot. Then I just asked, what word do you want to define this summer? One of them said alive. So I'm stealing it. Because honestly, that's exactly it. See, here's the thing that no one warns you about adulthood. Not the taxes, not the weird knee pain that shows up once every three months. Those are pretty well documented. What no one tells you is that time changes texture. In school, life had a built-in plot structure. There was the pilot episode, first week, new people, an innocent excitement. Then there was the midterms, the midterm crisis, and then there was a finale. Every few months, the cast would rotate, the setting would shift, and you would get a soft reset. And then you graduate. And suddenly, a Tuesday in March and a Tuesday in October are the same episode. There are no more semesters, no more syllabi dictating the start of a new season. You're just renewed for infinite seasons with no writer's room. So what do you do? You build a routine because that's what everyone does. You wake up, coffee, work, eat, run, scroll, sleep. And the routine is fine. The routine is responsible. The routine is what your parents describe as having your life together. But somewhere inside the routine, you go numb. You don't notice it at first. It doesn't feel like sadness. It feels like Wednesday. You're not unhappy. That's the tricky part. You're functioning. You're going to the gym. You have a skincare routine down. And yet, you're existing adjacent to your own life. You're watching it through glass. I've been thinking a lot about what alive actually means. Because it's very easy to hear that word and picture something from a tourism ad, skydiving, spontaneous road trip with the windows down, running through an airport, a boy. But I don't think that's it. I think feeling alive is much less cinematic and much more inconvenient than we've been sold. It's the moment right before you say the honest thing, when the real sentence is just sitting in your throat, and you haven't decided if you should let it out. That's alive. It's walking home the long way because the air feels a certain way, and you're just not ready to be inside yet. Even though your feet hurt and you have a perfectly good MetroCard. It's being in a conversation where you lose track of time, not because it's entertaining, but because someone is actually seeing you. I think what alive really means is presence. The moment where the distance between you and your experience just collapses. Where you stop narrating your life, and you're just in it. No internal commentary. No content ideas. You're just there. And the reason those moments feel so real is because most of the time there is a distance. You are one step removed. You're the protagonist and the audience simultaneously. You're living your life and also watching you live it as well. Here's a part that I wasn't really sure how to say, but I think sometimes we don't feel alive because we're quietly, privately afraid to. Because sometimes being fully present means being fully exposed, and exposure is a terrible business model for someone who spent years building a very functional emotional firewall. If you let yourself get swept up in a perfect night, you also have to feel a very specific type of loneliness of getting home at 3am and taking your makeup off alone. If you let yourself fall for someone, you have to sit with the possibility that it might end. So we do the rational thing. We insulate. We build routines that are comfortable and predictable and require very little emotional risk. We get really, really good at being fine. And fine is the most dangerous word in the English language because no one checks on you when you're fine. Including yourself. I have this theory about summer. Specifically, summer in New York. In the city, July is objectively miserable. The subway smells disgusting. It smells like pee. A pigeon is probably gonna ---- on you at some point. Your apartment shrinks. You develop a relationship with your AC unit that's more intimate than most of your friendships. Everything is sticky, stinky, loud. And because everything is too much, people stop hiding. They sit on stoops. They stay out too late on a Tuesday. They talk to the person next to them at the bar because it's too hot to maintain normal social boundaries. People fall in love on fire escapes. The air is heavy and slow and golden. The city smells like sweat and ambition. Which, for the record, is a terrible combination. But somehow the most romantic thing in the world. There's this shared urgency in summer. Even though everyone's tired, even though everyone's overstimulated, there's this unspoken agreement that these months count. That the clock is running. And that urgency strips the insulation away and forces proximity. And proximity, it turns out, is where aliveness lives. That's why the best nights of your life are ones that you never planned. They're the ones that just happen because you said yes when your friend called you at midnight and you were already in bed. Because you stayed one more hour. Because you went to the third location. Because you walked 40 blocks instead of taking the train. And somewhere around block 22, the city did that thing where it feels like it's yours. I want to be clear. I have not figured this out. But what I will say is that I've started to notice the gap. The distance between me and my own life. And noticing it isn't the same as fixing it. But I think it's a prerequisite. I've been saying yes to things that scare me a little. When I want to cancel, I try not to. I try to just say yes more often. But I think these small moments of choosing presence over comfort, they compound. And sometimes in the middle of doing whatever, I get a small flash of that feeling. The feeling of being alive. That morning on the East River, after my friend said, we didn't really talk about it after that. We just sat there. And the sky was doing its whole performance. Pink, then gold, then the shade of blue that makes you briefly religious. The city was waking up behind us. And none of us reached for our phones. And I think that was the most alive I'd felt in months. Not because it was something really different. But because I wasn't trying to be anywhere else. I wasn't optimizing the moment. I was just in it. I don't know if you can chase that feeling. I think the whole cruel joke is the moment you try to hold onto it, it becomes a thing you're performing. And you're watching yourself feel alive, which is a completely different thing than actually feeling alive. But I think you can build a life with more room for it. More gaps. More yeses. Less insulation. More why the **** not. A little less fine. And a little more awake. I'm trying. I don't know if it's 100% working yet, but I think trying is the point. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself. And right now, that's enough.