You feel like a ghost. You have nothing to show for it. Your 20’s and 30’s have been a twisting crisscross of moving places, a couple of brief trips abroad, jobs in a mediocre role.

You were the poster child for serial one night stands. Your most hopeful and longest lasting relationship was three and a half years.

For these years of quick changes and rash decisions, which you rationalized as adventurous, exploratory, and living an original life, you have nothing to show for it.

You have no wealth, and you are now saddled with enough debt, poor decisions, and lack of career.

This is your lifeline. You have no family, no relationship, no children.

While you make friends easily, you have left most of your friends behind in each city you have moved from while they have grown deep roots: marriages, families, children, career, homeownership.

Most of your nights are spent alone with your cat.

You used to consider yourself creative, passionate, curious. Now, after years of demanding yet uninspiring jobs, multiple heartbreaks, move after move, financial woes, you are quite frankly exhausted.

You do not understand how you landed this far away from yourself.

No one knows who you are or where you have been. You have not kept a friend or lover long enough to give anyone a chance.

On top of that, Society is telling you your value as a woman is fading fast, your wrinkles require Botox and you might plastic surgery soon.

You are drinking too much, and when you do see your friends on occasion, you end up getting drunk and angry or sad or both and pushing them away.

All the while still trying to be the sexpot 25-year-old you thought you were until what seemed like a moment ago.

You used to think you were the one who had it all figured out.

Adventurous life in the city. Traveling the World. Making memories. Now you feel incredibly hollow. And foolish.

How can you make a future for yourself that you can get excited about out of these wasted years.

What reserves or identity can you live from when you feel like you have achieved nothing with your life choices.

You live inside of your shame, everything you see is inadequate and embarrassing.

A lifetime of traveling and having adventures and not being in a long-term relationship looks empty and pathetic and foolish, through the lens of shame.

You have not found a partner. Your face is aging. Your body will only grow weaker. Your mind is less elastic. Your time is running out.

Your life has turned every emotion into the manifestation of some personality flaw, every casual choice into a giant mistake, every small blunder into a moral failure.

You are damned and you have accomplished nothing and it is all downhill from here. You have createed an imaginary World inside your head.

This haunted house you have created has been forged from your shame. No one else can see it.