cutting
                           tight patterns
   into my
                  dissolving body


—I’m loosing shape


           drowning
                                 in an endless sea
     of viscid emptiness


          dark liquid
                suffocating
                     me

        I breathe
                 pain
          into the 
                absolute abstraction
             of light
         of life

—around me
       inside me

           smiling
                struggling
                             to keep the facade

  (behind)

              a perfect construct
      of fake control

            I binge
                          on extreme emotions

       just to feel

          —anything

                  I starve away
           the indecisiveness

               exercise away
                   the numbness

       closing my eyes
             to the desert
                     inside

              swallowing colors

       with a keen edge knife
                    I draw 
        the outlines

           —don’t look into the void

                     I try
                      but
                who will I be

         when the intoxication
                    subsides?

THE CONTROLLED SELF

An essay about order, fear, and the art of not breaking.

Control is often sold as a virtue  as maturity, as strength. A person is considered “stable” when they grit their teeth and no one hears how loud it burns inside.

We grow up in a culture that treats one sentence like a law: “Trust is good, control is better.” But that was never wisdom; it was training in vigilance. A lineage of tension, passed down like old porcelain no one is allowed to drop.

Yet control is rarely strength. Control is conditioning  a quiet inheritance from childhoods where feelings needed more space than anyone was willing to give.

You learn early what is desired: silence, functioning, a smile kept at room volume, a tidy environment so no one sees how chaotic the inside is. We call it discipline, though it is often nothing but survival in power-saving mode.

Society loves controlled bodies  bodies that function without joy and fill their emptiness with screens because silence would reveal too much truth. Souls that think obediently and stay smoothly quiet. Inner worlds that look clean and remain carefully locked.

And when someone breaks, everyone acts surprised, even though the crack has been cultivated for years. Control is not character; it is instruction. People are taught to place their needs under their own feet and are later praised for being “so strong.”

But strength without softness is only an elegant form of freezing. Many controlled lives are nothing more than artfully folded non-feeling. I know people who would rather count calories than desires, who portion relationships like work hours, who preach order because chaos reminds them of something they cannot allow anyone to see.

People who say “boundaries” when they mean fear. “Independence” when closeness moves them too deeply. “Order” when a storm is already raging inside.

I have seen people cling to control so tightly that their entire life looks like a perfectly set table inside a burning house.

Control does not kill quickly; it numbs, it dulls, it narrows  until creativity becomes quiet, intuition dries up, tenderness freezes. Until the body hardens into a shell and the gaze locks like a vault. Eventually stability begins to feel like a cage one guards out of duty.

Perhaps we do not need to release control but expose it  not as virtue but as symptom, not as strength but as an answer to an old pain that never belonged to us.

And perhaps freedom begins not as a leap but as a small, honest trembling — the moment we no longer stand stiff but pause, feel something we have gripped too tightly for too many years: a fear finally allowed to speak, beginning its long walk toward no longer ruling us.

For everyone who learned to be quiet to be loved.

For everyone who mistakes control for safety, even though they already know it burns softly.

“Control is not protection. It is the story that forms when no one hears your pain.”

Samu