The Stage Called “I Don’t Care“

I said it yesterday like a vow I never meant to keep—
“I no longer care what people think.”
And it felt like freedom,
the way a falling leaf feels like flight
until it hits the ground.

I told myself this was power.
That this was healing.
That this was me,
raw and roaring—
the kind of unfiltered that makes poets weep
and ex-lovers regret walking away.

But the silence after saying it
was a different kind of scream.
Not defiant.
Not brave.
More like someone whispering into an attic box,
“Please don’t look too close.”

Because the truth is—
maybe it’s not that I don’t care.
Maybe it’s that I’ve cared so much
for so long
that caring became a scab
I kept picking
just to prove I could still feel.

Maybe I’ve mistaken dissociation
for self-acceptance.
Like calling a shutdown
an awakening.
Like naming numbness
“empowerment”
because the opposite
feels like drowning in slow motion.

I am me.
With every quirk that once got me bullied
and every misdeed I can’t vacuum out of memory.
With the timeline that doesn’t add up anymore—
The degree that collects more dust than pride,
the dreams that called in sick
and never came back.
I am me—
but only on the days I don’t hear the chant,
“You failed
You failed.
YOU. FAILED.”
pounding like punk rock
in my ribcage.
Like a mosh pit of every unfinished thing
I never became.

I tell people I don’t care,
but I still look at them
out of the corner of my heart.
Still wonder if my too-much-ness
makes them uncomfortable.
Still ask, silently,
“Do you do this?”
Do you ever call not caring
a coping mechanism with good PR?

Because maybe I stopped asking for love
in a voice people could hear
and started screaming it
in a dialect only my body understood—
panic attacks in parking lots,
daydreams that end in apologies,
the heavy sigh of surviving
instead of living.

And maybe
self-acceptance
isn’t a destination,
but a moment we visit
on the way to forgiving ourselves
for not being the version of us
that made everyone clap.

So here I am.
Not uncaring.
Not detached.
Just human—
with bruised belief
and the guts to stay anyway.

If I am a failure,
I am also a poem.
Still rewriting.
Still standing.
Still loud enough
to break silence
like a heart
refusing to
give up.