The Aesthetics of Empathy

–Rachayita

People say, “It’s okay to not be okay.”

But do they really mean it?

Because the moment your “not okay” becomes inconvenient — when your words slip out of rhythm, when your eyes drift somewhere else, when you start losing the thread of their sentences — the world looks away.

They love awareness, not reality. They adore the aesthetic of empathy, not the discomfort of truth. They can post a quote about mental health at 11:11, but they flinch when you tell them the voices you hear aren’t metaphors. As a schizophrenic, I live between two mirrors that never reflect the same face twice. There are days when I can’t trust my own perception — when a whisper sounds like a warning, when time slows down, rearranging itself like broken glass.

The world becomes a theatre of moving walls and breathing shadows, and I am left questioning which parts of me are real and which are residue. To be misunderstood — that’s the daily ache. It’s not the grand tragedy of being unloved; it’s the quiet erosion of being mistranslated. When you try to explain the texture of your mind, they nod politely, like you’re confessing a dream instead of a disorder. When they say, “It’s all in your head,” you wish they understood how vast that head can be — how it becomes both a battlefield and a home you cannot leave.

Expression becomes a risk.

Every sentence has to pass through the filters of “normalcy” to be digestible. I edit my emotions, trim my tremors, and disguise my disorientation with humor — because truth, unfiltered, scares people. But silence — silence eats you from the inside. The truth of being not okay is neither romantic nor noble. It’s messy, repetitive, exhausting. It’s the daily negotiation between reality and illusion, hope and fatigue. It’s learning to live with what you cannot cure, to breathe through the static, to exist even when the world insists you are only surviving.

Mental health isn’t a trend. It’s not an accessory for sympathy. It’s the quiet revolution of staying alive — even when your mind rebels against you. So… no! I don’t need the world to tell me “It’s okay.” It’s not. I just need it to stop pretending that brokenness looks poetic in candlelight. Healing isn’t a montage — it’s the slow, silent act of waking up again, even when your mind feels like a stranger’s room. Some days, survival itself is art — not the kind that hangs in galleries, but the kind that breathes, trembles, and keeps going. Because at the end of it all, I am not a tragedy to be pitied or a story to be sanitized.

I am a person — flawed, flickering, and still here.

And maybe that’s enough.