21:47.
I disguised the work that had fallen short as a weightless little joke:
“Messed up at work again today lol.”
The sentence spent three minutes and seventeen seconds airing in the text box before I pushed it into the group chat’s digital ocean. The moment the send button swallowed the words, fifteen stickers burst to the surface. My cry for help was already sinking toward the deep end of read-without-reply.
“Weekend grilled fish! Same place—come through!”
Last week’s group notice was still pinned above the chat:
“No spreading negative energy.”
My phone was running a high fever in my palm.
Someone dropped the restaurant location. Someone complained about a ridiculous coworker. Someone else ranted about a weirdo on the subway. My text box felt like a can jammed inside a vending machine.
Actually, I…
In the flood of stickers, those words became a plastic bottle adrift. A fresh Read label clung to its side. Its mouth was plugged with another:
I’m fine.
Twenty-six seconds later, I broke myself apart and typed myself back together:
“I was just kidding! Count me in~”
Three roses immediately sprang up to embrace the pale new lie, as if this were the version of me I was supposed to be.
A specimen that always smiles and never disturbs.
My heartbeat gradually fell into rhythm with the vibration of my phone. And this perfect show was only the opening act.
The Rule Pinned Above the Chat
22:40.
“My boss yelled at me for no reason again today, even though it was literally my coworker’s fault!”
As Little Fish’s voice bubble rippled through the group chat, I was wiping the fog from my phone screen.
Seven seconds. Just enough time for a drop of ink to seep through three sheets of xuan paper, and already a flood of hug stickers had broken the surface.
Seven seconds. Only seven, and her pain had somewhere to stay.
“You’re so cute—who could ever be mean to you?”
“Look! My taro boba is on the way~”
“Ten minutes. I want a bald-boss Photoshop contest by then!”
Meanwhile, my own sunken trouble was being carried by the current of the chat toward colder, deeper water.
Why did some tears evaporate into rainbows while others hardened into shards of glass, when the crying was the same?
I looked at the photo of the chinchilla I had grown up with, then at the manuscript pages scattered across the table. The wings of inspiration had long since broken.
23:17.
For the ninth time, the cursor gnawed at the text box:
Actually, my moods have been all over the place lately…
Delete.
Anyone know what to do about insomnia?
Delete.
Anyone else still awake…
Delete again.
Sweat bled half a fingerprint across the screen. In the end, the send button spat out:
“Don’t forget—no scallions with the grilled fish~”
Every tilde had been ironed flat and neat, avoiding any wrinkle that might give the truth away.
Moonlight crawled across the scratches on the wall from the days I was depressed. Years of dust had settled into the groove that read:
You do not deserve to be loved.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m perfectly fine on my own, trust me!”
That sentence had looped on the tip of my tongue millions of times. I just couldn’t remember when this protective spell had stopped convincing even me.
When the Disguise Stopped Working
00:12.
The bay window reflected half of my false smiling mask.
Ten seconds earlier, I had just reached the tail end of sheep number twenty-seven. Now it shattered inside a group chat notification that suddenly lit up.
The name branded into my bone marrow surfaced from the dark river of messages. A late-night @ glowed a gentle blue:
“Just saw what you said about things going wrong at work. Want me to come curse out the night wind with you?”
The hour hand suddenly became a pair of scissors, cutting off every silent way out.
Why him? Why, in this hour when everything else had gone quiet, was he the one holding out an olive branch of hope in such a gentle voice?
The fault line in my memory gave way.
That summer when I was sixteen, glass suddenly refracted sunlight into blades. The word monster was planted permanently in my throat.
Those seeds of ridicule took root on my eardrums and sprouted, growing into the cold current of seventeen desks turning toward me.
My throat had long since become a specimen gallery, housing every cry for help my vocal cords had filtered into silence.
After that, an irreversible program was engraved into my body:
Do not trouble anyone. Do not show any weakness.
I stared at the sunken sentence he had hauled back to shore. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know how to put the disguise back on.
Countless replies lined up across the keyboard, every one of them a perfect technique for lying:
“It’s nothing. Don’t worry!”
“I’m just being too sensitive.”
“I’d already forgotten about it. How do you still remember?”
I began to wonder whether the pain midnight had handed me this time was a fall or a flight.
Was I finally facing the weight of my own soul honestly, or running once more into the shelter of “I’m fine”?
The Courage to Run Toward the Night Wind
00:35.
Midnight was peeling the mask from my face. For the seventh time, my fingertip hovered above the Backspace key, my nails pressing half-moons into my palm. From the locker came the sobbing of my sixteen-year-old self:
Don’t hand over your heart.
On the eighth attempt at the keyboard, I let the fissure show in the moonlight:
“Okay. Work hasn’t been going well lately. My pen keeps punching through the paper, but I still can’t write a whole self…”
A ding exploded from the notification. Tears had already wrapped themselves around my fragility. I wiped them away, and my cuff came back stained with this salty sea.
“Five minutes! I’m bringing beer and a megaphone. Tonight we’ll make the night wind kneel and listen while you curse.”
The frost flowers on the window melted into tears I had never shed as a girl. In the reflection, the girl who always kept her head down was wiping her glasses until they shone.
When my fingernail dug again into the groove in the wall that read You do not deserve to be loved, chips of plaster fell into the pothos’s fresh new shoot.
As I turned the key in the lock, sweat from my palm dampened it. The moment the hallway motion-sensor light came on, the sixteen-year-old self that ridicule had nailed to the threshold suddenly fell away from my back.
The night wind lifted the strands of hair pasted down by sweat. In the distance, he was running toward me, clutching two iced milk teas.
The wind billowed his basketball jersey into a parachute. Drops of sweat fell from the brim of his baseball cap and shattered into little stars beneath the streetlight, catching the footprints that had been burning for ten years.
The sticker on the milk-tea cup had already blurred, like the night itself, and like the sentence neither of us had said aloud:
“Actually, I want to be loved well, too.”
🌙 Why can’t I ask for help even when I’m struggling?
The hardest part may not be finding the words. It may be letting them stay honest long enough to send. When needing someone is tangled with shame, rejection, or the fear of becoming a burden, distress can shrink into jokes, vague hints, or “I’m fine” before anyone can respond to what you actually need. Silence isn’t proof that help is unwanted; it can be an old way of making vulnerability feel safer.
I turned every cry for help into something easier to laugh at.
I made my pain easier to receive by making it smaller than it was.
Have you ever turned “I need help” into a joke because the joke felt safer to send?
A need that comes out as a joke is still a need.
You don’t have to make your pain harmless here.
You can leave it here quietly.
I read every comment.
Xiaobian..🫶🏻🥰 The crushing isolation of feeling like you have to disguise your true distress as a joke just to stay palatable to your friends is such a deeply painful emotion to sit with..🥹
Lovely, post.