This is your inner, pocket tyrant. A tiny mad director you yourself handed an unlimited budget and complete creative freedom. He sits in your head, legs crossed, sketching the storyboards of the future. Right here everyone else will say exactly this. And you will answer like that. Perfect lighting, measured pauses. He even picks poses for a conversation that hasn’t happened yet. It’s his arthouse film, his masterpiece, with the whole world as an obedient cast.

And there’s an intoxicating sweetness in that, isn’t there? The moment you’ve “engineered” everything, you’re the god of this cardboard universe. You feel the strands of control converging in your hands. It’s a heady sense of dominion over chaos. You build a crystal palace on a cloud and believe for a second it will stand forever.

Then the curtain opens.

And it turns out your actors have their own opinions. The sets wobble in the draft of reality. Someone forgets a line; someone never even shows up on set. Your brilliant script goes to hell.

That’s where the funniest and most tragic part begins. It isn’t reason or logic that gets angry. It’s that little director. He stomps his feet, tears at his imaginary hair, and yells, “These hacks! They ruined everything! My genius plan!”

But who is he really mad at? At the world that refused to bend to his fantasy. At the people who dared to be alive instead of puppets. And, in the end, at himself, because deep down he knows it was just a performance in a theater with a single spectator.

The whole storm is phantom pain for something nonexistent. You grieve for what never was, except in the rough draft of your imagination. You rage at ghosts you drew yourself.

And there you stand amid the ruins of your airy castle, covered in the dust of failed expectations, and you understand the most paradoxical thing: the only one who locked you in that tower is you. You designed it, built it, and became its first and last prisoner. All on your own. What a talented self-destroyer.