That Funny Feeling

A couple years back, maybe a year into the pandemic, I started disappearing.

Not in a poetic way.
In the actual, terrifying, invisible kind of way.

People stopped seeing me.
Literally.

I’d walk past them on the street and they wouldn’t move.
Didn’t even flinch.
Didn’t clock me.
Didn’t nod, didn’t smile, didn’t give that half-second of human recognition.
Like I was smoke.

I’d go into stores — nothing.
No employees. No eye contact.
No awareness that I was even breathing the same air.

Even the fucking animals.
Squirrels, birds, strays.
Creatures that bolt at the scent of a human —
They’d just stay there.
Look right through me.
Like I was dead already.

I thought I was losing my mind.

But it wasn’t madness.
It was a perfect storm:
untreated depression, self-made pressure, junk sleep, a body fed like a vending machine,
and no movement except the slow curling of my soul inward like a dying leaf.

Everything felt like I was watching it on TV.
Sound down.
No subtitles.

I didn’t know what to call it.
So I didn’t.

Then I rewatched Bo Burnham’s Inside.
That scene hit.

“There it is again… that funny feeling…”

Not funny like ha-ha.
Funny like rot.
Funny like breathing through wet cloth.

A book on healing, dropped off by a drone.
A meditation app with a voice so soothing it makes you want to scream.
Logan Paul.

You stack enough surreal on top of surreal
and eventually you break.

Not with a scream.
With a shrug.
A full-body “fuck this” that sets in deep.

And then someone has the nerve to ask you if you’re okay.
To wonder why you’ve been quiet.
To suggest a supplement.

As if I’m the broken one.

Fuck you.

You eat processed lies for 40 years —
through your mouth, your eyes, your ears, your feed.
All sugar. No nutrition.
And then you wonder why you're spiritually constipated.

You spend your life being marketed to, distracted, scolded, smoothed, optimized —
until one day, you try to be real
and nobody even blinks.

Nobody even moves.
Not the clerk. Not the dog. Not your friend at the dinner table who’s still scrolling while you’re cracking open your ribs to say something that matters.

They’re not ignoring you.
They’re gone too.

Numb.
Pacified.
Zombified.
Flatlined behind the eyes.

This isn’t depression.
This is just what it looks like when a sane man stops pretending.

I’m not broken.

I just haven’t figured out how to fake it as well as the rest of you.

And I’m done trying.
Done nodding along.
Done responding to the ping.

I don’t want to interact with the lie anymore.

So if I’m invisible now —
fine.

Just means I’ve finally stopped performing.
Just means I’ve finally come back to myself.