What if I told you I know you? Not the one who shows up polished, the one who edits their words before hitting “send,” who straightens their hair in the mirror before stepping outside. Not the profile picture, not the résumé, not the curated version that lives on other people’s screens.

I’m talking about the other you. The one you bury. The one you hope no one ever meets. The one I’ll call the you-you. Others have a you-you-you. And some have so many layers it sounds like a stutter just to describe them. It depends how deep you’ve buried the real self.

The one you buried under routines and noise. The one that doesn’t get invited to interviews. Doesn’t post, doesn’t always smile at the right time, or sometimes doesn’t smile at all. The one that knows silence better than applause and is still gasping for air, hooked on life-support, while you pretend he’s long gone. Or maybe you tell yourself one day he’ll come back.

We hide our true selves behind the masks we were taught to wear — like Instagram photos carefully staged while our bedroom is a chaos of half-eaten cereal and laundry piles we pretend don’t exist.

The you-you doesn’t smile on command. It doesn’t clap when everyone claps. It doesn’t nod politely at things it secretly despises. Your you-you is naked—raw, twitching, shameless in its hunger and cruel in its honesty. It whispers truths you strangle as soon as they surface.

You-you doesn’t care about office small talk. It doesn’t care about career paths or five-year plans. You-you stares at the ceiling at night, wondering how much of your life has already been traded away for nothing.

You’re scared of the you-you, aren’t you? That’s why you built walls of masks and routines, why you dress it up, why you tuck it deep into the corners of your life like some unwanted guest. Because if it showed up in public, people would recoil. They’d see what you really feel when you sit at family dinners, when you scroll through social media, when you wake up on Mondays.

The you-you doesn’t play along. And you can’t allow that. So you smother it.

But here’s the catch—it never dies. It leaks through in flashes. In the moment you curse under your breath when no one hears. In the quiet sigh when someone leaves the room. In the way your eyes linger on the exit sign during a meeting. The you-you is alive, clawing, breathing, waiting for you to stop pretending.

And yet you keep pretending. Every day, you put on the armor. The polite, manufactured smile. The “I’m fine.” The mask of competence. You-you is gagged, shoved in the backseat, while the mask drives your body through the day.

I know it because I’ve met it in myself. I wore the varnished version so well that even I believed it some days. But it was a costume—and I knew it. I knew it in the quiet, when the mask slipped.

I’ve seen it. And you’ve felt it. That’s why you’re here. Reading this. Because a voice inside you whispered: Maybe someone knows. Maybe someone else has heard the same scream.

Don’t tell me you don’t recognize this. You’ve walked into a room full of friends and felt alone. You’ve laughed at jokes that scraped your bones because silence would’ve exposed too much. You’ve posted the photo with the right angle, the right filter, and then felt emptier than before.

That emptiness? That’s your you-you pressing its face against the glass.

You know exactly what I’m talking about. That uncomfortable recognition that the thing walking around under your name isn’t quite you. That the face in photos looks alive, but behind it, something quieter, rawer, is waiting.

And you’ve tried to silence it with noise. Music blasting, Netflix rolling, scrolling through endless feeds, anything to drown the gnawing ache that says: This isn’t me. But no matter how many distractions you throw at it, the you-you waits. Patient. Relentlessly restless.

It watches you lie to yourself. “I’m happy.” “This is enough.” “This is normal.” It smirks, because it knows you’re bluffing. Inside, we feel the tension like a phone battery at 1% — warning buzzing, screen flickering, yet we keep scrolling anyway.

You try to bury it deeper—maybe a vacation will help, maybe another drink, maybe a new gadget. But when you’re lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, all of it comes back. The masks dissolve, the excuses rot, and there it is. The raw thing. The you-you.

Do you even remember him? Or did you unplug him already without noticing?

And here’s what terrifies you most: the you-you is stronger than you think. It’s the part that refuses to leave because that’s who you were born as; everything else is illusions you’ve fed yourself so far. Even when you’re exhausted, even when you’re ready to give up. It’s the one thing in you that doesn’t bend to trends, rules, or appearances. That’s why it scares you. Because it’s real—the real you.

Don’t look away. Answer me. What happened to you? What happened to the real you?

But how foolish of me. Asking the great pretender about the real one. You wouldn’t admit it even if you tried. It takes guts just to say he exists. Fine then. Let’s grow some guts.

I’ll start with me.

I caught my own eyes in the mirror once, couldn’t recognize the man looking back—a complete stranger I had built. A stranger that looked like me, moved like me, spoke like me—but wasn’t me.

It wasn’t the stress. It wasn’t the sleepless nights. It was the weight of the lies. Lies I fed myself for years.

“This is who you are,” I told myself. But a quiet voice inside kept whispering: “No. This is who you’ve become”.

Maybe you’ve heard that voice too. The suspicion that you never really chose this life. That the river just carried you here, while you pretended you were steering.

And the truth hit me: I built him. Brick by brick. Lie by lie. Until the real me was buried underneath. And now I stand there pretending not to know him—just like you’re pretending right now.

And if I’m being honest, it terrified me at first. Because if that version was the real one, then who the hell has been living my life this long?

You’ve felt it too. The discomfort. The slip. The moment you realize you’re not quite at home inside your own skin. You patch it with distractions, stitch it with routines, but it never fully disappears. The you-you doesn’t leave. It waits.

My me-me is still on life support. Thankfully, I haven’t pulled the plug yet. Worse, I still carry that secret hope: that one day he’ll rise again. The comeback story. The return of the prodigal son. The return of the king.

Don’t you carry that same hope? Be honest.

That maybe one day you’ll hit the jackpot. Maybe one day the sky will split open for you, and your story is going to be rewritten.

Dumb hopes. I nurtured them through every black hair on my head. Now grey and white have started to take their place, and the hope still whispers.

But if you want to know where such hopes go—visit a cemetery. You’ll find mountains of them buried there.

This book isn’t a flex. It isn’t a highlight reel.

It’s a confession. A mirror I’m holding up to you, because I’m tired of the pretending.

I’ll tell you about my brokenness, my failures, my hunger for meaning in the middle of chaos. Not to entertain you. Not to shock you. But to remind you: you’re not alone in your madness.

And maybe—just maybe—your you-you still deserves another chance to breathe.

So, tell me. Deep in your bones—don’t you feel it? That something’s wrong? That the life you’re living isn’t the one you were meant for? That this game we’re playing has gone too far to still call it healthy? I call it the universal trap!

And when you look at your children—do you really see a future for them? Or for their children?

If you’ve got pictures of when you were a kid or a teenager, or if you have that old diary you used to write stuff in.

Please, my friend, do yourself a favor: cling that one picture of yours to your mirror and look at the picture and at yourself… and tell me, what do you see? Who do you see? 

No, no… tell yourself, who do you see?

So let me ask you directly: Who are you right now? The mask, or the you-you?

Because here’s the thing. The mask can survive a lifetime. But the you-you? It doesn’t want survival. It wants truth.

And if you ignore it, it will turn on you. It will rot your bones from the inside out. It will make your success taste like ash. It will make your laughter sound hollow to your own ears. It will turn every victory into another layer of chains.

But if you face it—if you dare to stare it down—you might just begin to live for the first time.

So no, I don’t know your job title, your age, your family tree. But I know you. The you-you. The thing you keep chained but can’t escape. The thing that’s whispering right now as you read these words: He’s talking about me.

Yes. I am.