no good deed goes unpunished

December 7th, 2025—

If emotional exhaustion had its own week, I have just lived it. And today I’m feeling the brunt force of its aftermath, now that my brain is no longer glazed over with its own instinct to survive. Tired doesn’t begin to cover what I woke up feeling, yet it’s the only word that comes to my worn mind as to why I cannot muster a more accurate depiction.

An actively suicidal client, an awkward reunion with a friend I have outgrown, adjacent to a fair-weather friend who would choose neutrality above all else, and a hopeful introduction turned sour, leaving me insecure and jealous— just to offer some brief insight into how the week merely met its end. A disastrous, tight bow tied atop an already fragile box.

And I have missed you. You. The metaphorical you. And maybe, in that, something that symbolizes me. As I sit here staring at my screen without the energy to judge my own writing, sipping on orange juice with far too much pulp, I realize the thing I have been so frustrated at is how much I’ve been lacking in myself. My morals, my values, my joy, my peace. It’s a lesson I have to relearn every so often. A lesson I resent and I loathe and I wish I could banish from this earth however pretentious it may sound. A lesson that I cannot make people good, in the way I know good, in the way I see good. And each time I exert myself in trying to make good where it doesn’t belong, a part of me goes with it.