I CLEARED THE SEARCH HISTORY ON MY PHONE BECAUSE I WAS ASHAMED OF MY OWN LONELINESS

Dear Delyara, I did something tonight that made me feel so small I could barely look at my own hands. It was 2:30 AM, and the silence in this room was so heavy I could feel it pressing against my temples like a physical weight. I opened my phone and found myself typing questions into the search bar that a grown man should never have to ask. “How do you know if you are completely broken inside?” “What does it feel like to go crazy from isolation?” I scrolled through the pages of cold, clinical answers, looking for a single sentence that felt like it was written by a real human being who understood what it meant to sit in the dark and feel your soul slowly turn to stone. Afterwards, a sudden, burning wave of absolute shame hit me. I deleted the entire history, scrubbing the data until the screen was blank, terrified that if anyone ever saw those words, they’d realize that the disciplined, capable man they see during the day is just a hollow shell waiting for the wind to blow him away.