Do you remember who you were
before the world told you who to be?

Before the likes, before the filters,
before your worth depended on
who saw you,
who didn’t,
who cared enough to click twice?
  
I don’t.

Somewhere between
the perfect angles
and curated smiles,
I lost her.
The girl who laughed loud,
cried hard,
spoke her mind without
editing it three times.

Now I take my daily dose—
scroll, compare, refresh, repeat.
A flicker of validation
like a sugar rush to the soul.
Gone in seconds.
And I call it happiness.

But it’s not.

It’s a silence.
A soft forgetting.
Of what it felt like
to just exist
without an audience.

I miss me.
Not the version they love.
The real one.
The messy, too-much,
not-enough one.

The one I buried
beneath all these
happy pills.