There is a peculiar violence in waking up before the others.

Not from slumber in the conventional sense, but from the sleep that drapes itself across entire lives — the kind born not of exhaustion, but of unexamined acceptance. To awaken from this is not to feel a rush of triumph or illumination. It is to find oneself stranded on a distant shore, peering back at a world still comfortably asleep.

Clarity is not a blessing. It is a severance.

The first casualty of awakening is belonging. To see the structures for what they are — fragile scaffolds built on old fears and convenient myths — is to stand apart, irreparably and without hope of return. Society hums along with its rituals and credos, while you, newly awake, observe from the margins, invisible and misunderstood. They will call you cold, detached, even arrogant. They will not see that clarity has cost you everything they still cling to: the solace of consensus, the warmth of unquestioned belief.

Perhaps we mistake loneliness as a failing, a flaw in our wiring. But what if it is merely the inevitable consequence of clarity? What if lucidity isolates before it liberates? Most cannot bear the solitude that enlightenment demands; they return to sleep, grateful for the comfort of shared illusions.

We are taught to believe that knowledge enlightens, that freedom liberates. But what of the heavy solitude that follows? When you see through the charade — the empty chatter, the performative ambitions, the hollow victories — you no longer belong to their world. You drift among them, a ghost tethered not by affection or allegiance but by observation alone.

And in that vast chasm between you and the world, doubt whispers: Was it worth it?

Was the price of clarity — the surrender of belonging, the forfeiture of community — too high a toll? Or is this exile the only true freedom, the only honest existence?

In the end, one must ask: is it better to sleep among many or awaken alone?

Perhaps the loneliest truths are also the most profound.