The teachers loved me.
This was not uncomplicated.
Being good at school means something specific.
You learn to detect what’s wanted before it’s spoken.
You learn to deliver it cleanly.
You learn to arrive already adjusted.
It looks like intelligence.
It feels like safety.
It trains something quieter.
By the time I was an adult, I was excellent at this.
So excellent it stopped registering as effort.
Like a low sound that never turns off, until one day you realize you haven’t actually heard it in years.
I was in a career I’d been competent at for a long time when I went looking for the feeling of wanting to be there.
Not obligation.
Not usefulness.
Wanting.
I checked for it the way you check your pockets for your phone.
Certain it’s there.
Then less certain.
Then, something colder than absence.
I tried to approach it indirectly.
Made lists of things I was supposed to care about.
They all had the right shape.
No warmth.
Like recognizing objects in a dark room by memory, not touch.
Like walking through a house where the furniture is still arranged, but no one lives there anymore.
I could remember the reasons I’d given.
The arguments.
The logic.
The wanting itself was harder to find.
It felt… trained.
Like something that had learned to go still when observed.
What unsettled me wasn’t the emptiness.
It was the suspicion that it hadn’t been recent.
That this wasn’t something that had gone missing.
It was something I’d stopped checking for.
A long time ago.
What I’d called my values,
they held up well under explanation.
That should have been the first clue.
What I’d called preferences
felt strangely consistent across different rooms.
That should have been the second.
There was something in me that was mine.
I’m almost sure of it.
But it was buried under layers of accurate responses.
Well-built ones.
Reliable ones.
Structures that worked.
That’s the difficult part.
The cage doesn’t feel like a cage.
It feels like a life that works.
It fits you.
You built it from things that got results.
It’s well-lit.
Predictable.
People approve of it.
There’s no obvious reason to leave.
And that matters more than people admit.
What gets you isn’t the bars.
It’s the stillness.
The absence of pull.
At some point, you realize you haven’t felt the friction of wanting something outside the approved range in so long you’ve started to confuse that quiet with peace.
You haven’t been unhappy.
That would have been easier to notice.
You’ve just been… steady.
Like someone sitting very still in a room they were once told not to leave
and eventually forgetting there was a door.
You notice it when you try to move in a direction no one asked you to go.
How much of you hesitates.
How much of you negotiates.
How quickly the old calculations return.
And beneath all of that,
whether anything in you still knows how to want
without first checking if it’s allowed.