Grief is widely considered to be something we pass through once and then leave behind, but for me it keeps coming back.

I spent most of September grieving. I grieved the things I keep failing to make progress on: my capital gains, my undone dreams, my incapacity to live in my altruism. This grief has been messy, but I have come to believe that grief, the recurring theme of my year, is not a detour from my life but the very thing that keeps me grounded and human.

I had an epiphany that it was simply meant to be my season of grieving, a way to compensate for the pleasures I had earned in the second quarter of this year. At least, during that happy phase, it dawned on me that I had managed to capture a single memory: a beach I saw and felt on the northern shore of Central Java, while staying at a modest mini-hostel. I have clearly stored the sensation of the morning breeze touching my arms and my face, the anonymity of the birds’ singing, and the dance of the waves trying to catch up with my footsteps. I didn’t even shed a single tear that time.

Because of this, I made a bargain. I think I told God I was thankful for this chapter of pleasing exploration in nature and culture during my travels (yes, it was because I was heavily, excitedly doing micro-travel to small cities), and that I would gladly take the bad days as the trade-off for the good ones.

So here it is, the other side of that bargain: the messiness of my unregulated phase of grieving. It felt completely miserable. I gave up on myself (it wasn’t even surrender), and my inner world kept trying to make war with me. In this phase, I have zero empathized analysis to define whether I am trying my best or not.

Along the same lines, not even my boyfriend’s words can reach me. Every garden of words he gives me to shift my inward thoughts toward something hopeful often overlooks how my body responds, as though my life and every micro element in my body were a graveyard that deserves to be mourned.

Even beauty was not enough to move me. Take one morning as an illustration: the yellowish-green, shiny kitchen of mine, with the shadows of fake plants dancing across the wall, was the first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes, slightly and warmly, from my early sleep. It was 6:45 a.m. when I turned my eyes toward the TV screen and saw the clock. I thought, wow, this is beautiful. But that scene wasn’t strong or convincing enough to make me truly get up and leave my bed. I therefore went back to sleep until the alarm in my body woke me up at exactly 9 a.m.

The night before, I had cried out loud in the middle of a call with my boyfriend. It was supposed to be our usual call, our so-called endeavor to maintain a well-connected relationship. We usually call at 7, 8, or 9 p.m. to have our a-day-in-our-life listening sessions. But I, as someone who is still adjusting to a healthy dynamic, find the predictable, repetitive questions a bit dull because… they don’t spark any real excitement. How are you? What did you have for dinner? What’s the highlight of today?- Those are just my default scripts when I don’t want to think too deeply, or when I’m not feeling particularly excited about him.

He is one of the most articulate people I have known in my entire life, and he explained things so clearly that his day was no secret to me.

Then it was my turn: he asked me how I had been doing all day. This happens often. I freeze at that simple, mundane question, because most of the time I don’t know if I know how I am feeling. So, to rationalize those breaking moments, I simply told him, let me think about what I did. In truth, I didn’t intend to think about what I did. I used that phrase to let myself get inside my memories and internal life (past moments, sensations from the wound, pain, random statements). This is how my brain responds when people ask how I am or how my day was. It is not small talk to me. I take every word literally: how-are-you and HOW-was-YOUR-DAY.

My day is mostly spent being confused, so I don’t know how to respond with a rational storyline; I am a narrator who doesn’t know the plot of her own day. After a few minutes of spending time with my internal self, I started to talk. I began by saying, my day has been productive, especially in the morning. But I also felt some loneliness.

Without a doubt, he is used to hearing this despairing element in my words: I acknowledge the positive, then shift my tone and add a grieving nuance in the middle. What a paradox I love to live in.

Then came the question that undid me from him: had I reached out to any of my friends? Yes, I said. I remembered texting my girls. One of them had just given birth to a big baby through a C-section. Another friend from our group had texted that she was going to Italy for work.

I think that was when the grief started to surface, followed by the idea of loneliness, and despair, and missing out, and being left out. My brain easily captured it this way: things were moving forward for them, even if only insignificantly, while I watched my friend take little steps toward success in her career. And it stinks that I feel jealous of them.

That call shows me why I will never stop talking about grieving: it is a powerful way of staying grounded, connected to your soul, and feeling human, for better and for worse.

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

― Jamie Anderson, “As the Lights Wink Out…” (2014)

Stories about grieving are overrated, yes. Everyone has their own journey to define, familiarize themselves with, and feel their grief. I even think grief is simply what is held inside our bodies. We are walking collections of our own wounds and of sensations from past memories. Having the time to sit with your grief is a privilege; it shows you have the emotional capacity and the actual time to process your loss.

Grief is a source of our creative work. Every poem, song, and novel born from loss shows us that pain can turn into something meaningfully powerful and authentic.

You have a lot of options to step away from your grief. You can have lots of short gratifications, escaping it the way nicotine works in your body. But grief is a resource, a gate to somewhere beyond your realities. It is where you can let your imagination paint, and be as abstract as you can.

I cried because I opened a hole, a pipe, almost -to let my grief, sadness, and worries flow out of me instead of keeping them trapped inwardly. I let the past open itself up again. it ‘s not because I wanted to live in it, but perhaps some parts of it were still waiting to be felt.

Grief is still there for you even when the world has given you the tenderness you had long asked for. In my case, I found someone who holds me with life and its meaning. He stated that I am in my transformative phase. According to him, I am like he was three or four years ago, and he promised that I could become the person he is now if I am willing to work on it and surrender to this phase of life.

In the end, my September of grief was not lost time; it was the most honest part of my year.

_{This writing is made from honesty, rawness, discomfort; sometimes healing, sometimes uneasy. If you’ve found value or comfort in these words, supporting this space means a lot. It helps me feel supported by people who choose to be here with intention.}

_{And if you feel like leaving a little tip (even if it’s $1!!), it would honestly feel like so much love to me. 🤍}

_{No pressure at all. Reading me is ALWAYS free, sharing, or simply being here already still means something to me.}

Leave a little love <3

I think I have started confusing caring with proving that I care

The world is fucked up. And everyone is being pushed to show their side.

I understand why.

People are dying. People are losing their homes. There are wars, racism, discrimination, political violence, disasters, corruption, all of it happening at once.

Most people already know they have no power to change anything on their own. They are living inside systems they did not build and cannot move, from the price of things, the policy, the war, the company that will not answer. The only thing that has ever shifted any of it is a crowd big enough to disturb the view from far away. Enough voices at once that it becomes visible globally, and someone with actual power has to respond to it.

So calling on each other to speak up is not vanity. It is people trying to assemble the only pressure available to them, out of the only material they have, which is attention.

Once you show your side, it immediately becomes some kind of existential competition of values and principles, instead of simply staying true to the nature of your own intention.

Caring used to be something you feel

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because I feel like we are living in a time where caring is no longer something you are allowed to simply feel or practice quietly.

People can no longer just do good in silence.

You cannot just help someone without showing that you helped them. You cannot simply care about something without making your care visible. You cannot call yourself neutral. You cannot call yourself apolitical.

That is what makes this so hard to argue with. The demand comes from somewhere real. It comes from powerlessness, not from cruelty.

And because that demand never stops, your kindness stops being something you simply have and starts being something curated. Not felt, but selected and sorted by whether it happens to attach to an issue the world currently considers relevant. Which is how your kindness becomes less relevant if you don’t showcase your support for whatever is happening around you, like the discrimination, racism, war, political sides, all of it.

People with any kind of platform are almost expected to prove that they care. Doing good and being empathetic has slowly started to feel like a competition rather than something sincere.

You feed your family. You build your own community. You help the people around you. You do things that nobody sees.

But if you are not helping the right people, talking about the “right” issue, or showcasing what you are doing to the world, somehow it becomes evidence that you are a bad person.

And “right” is not something you get to decide.

The right issue is whichever national or global tragedy is on the feed that week: the fires, the floods, the war, the human rights case, the politics, the verdict everyone is reacting to. The right people are the ones that issue has made visible.

Your own street does not qualify enough to be called a disaster. Nobody is posting about it, so helping there earns you nothing, and the ledger stays empty no matter how much you actually spend.

And I think that is what scares me about where we are right now.

Then I started wondering what we actually mean by “caring”

In August, an Indonesian public figure known as an Oxford and Stanford graduate, Maudy Ayunda, uploaded a video called “mindfulness in the age of bad news”. She talked about feeling emotionally overwhelmed and suggested limiting how much news you take in every day.

Within weeks she was being called tone deaf. Parts of that criticism were fair, and she said the fairest part herself when she apologised: being able to step away from the news is a privilege that not everyone has. Some of it went further than timing. People pointed at the class position the video was made from, and at a beauty brand of hers that sources from Kalimantan while the advice was to look away from the news. That is a real argument and I am not going to pretend it isn’t.

But something else happened underneath it, and that is the part I cannot stop thinking about. The argument slid, very quickly, from this content is badly timed to this woman does not have empathy. Those are not the same claim. One is about a video. The other is about a person’s interior life, decided by strangers, from the outside, in a week.

It is almost as if there is now one correct way to prove that you have empathy:

You have to speak. You have to post. You have to react. You have to follow the conversation. You have to show that you are aware.

And if you choose to stay quiet, pray, take care of yourself, make something completely unrelated, or simply continue living your ordinary life, people can read that silence as indifference.

And this is not only our internet

Two weeks ago, Ed Sheeran’s opening act Macklemore performed “Hind’s Hall” at MetLife Stadium and said free Palestine from the stage. Macklemore was off the tour shortly after. Sheeran’s position was that he has personal views on the war but does not want his concerts turned into political forums. Within a week, Finneas, Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe and Beoga had all walked off the tour.

I want to be clear that the ones who walked chose something, and it cost them money and dates they will not get back. I am not putting a refusal on the same level as that.

But notice what Ed was punished for. Not for a position. For declining to hold one in public. And the reason people would not accept the refusal is that he had already proved he was capable, because he played a Ukraine benefit in 2022. So once you have shown you can speak, silence stops reading as absence and starts reading as choice.

That is the rule. It is not written down anywhere, but everyone knows it: neutrality is only available to people nobody is watching.

This was already the logic of Blockout 2024, the campaign that followed the Met Gala and asked people to unfollow celebrities who had said nothing about Gaza. One organiser called it a digital guillotine. Taylor Swift lost over 200,000 followers. Zendaya, Drake, Lizzo and Kim Kardashian were on the list. The argument a fan made about Swift is the cleanest statement of the whole doctrine I have read: if she can rally all of us to vote, she has the power to speak up about injustice.

So now you see that capacity becomes obligation, reach becomes treasures.

And it works, sometimes. Lizzo and Chris Olsen both posted appeals for Gaza donations after being blocked out, so the pressure does sometimes do the thing it was designed to do.

But somewhere along the way, a tactic for moving powerful institutions became a test we now apply to individual human beings. And the test has no “pass mark”. It only has a running tally of everything you have not yet mentioned.

I guess suffering has become easier to recognise when it has a headline

And underneath all of it there is a ranking that a society running on resilience introduced and then agreed never to say out loud.

A war has a death toll. A fire has hectares. A flood has a number of people displaced. That pain is legible. It is collective, it is systemic, and it is obviously nobody’s personal failure — which is exactly what makes it safe to feel in public. We have learned to take it in as shared pain, because it is shared, and because saying it out loud together is the only pressure any of us has.

Private pain has none of that. Nobody is standing next to you in it, unless they are people who already care about you.

So it reads as smaller. Less dangerous, less serious, and even almost embarrassing to bring up while the world is burning, as though not being able to pay your family’s bills is a personal failure and a famine is a structural one, when they are the same kind of problem at different scales.

That is the part I keep getting stuck on. Not that people are wrong to care about the war. They are not. It is that we have built a hierarchy where one kind of suffering counts as a crisis and the other counts as an excuse.

So when someone goes silent, we assume nothing is happening to them.

Usually something is. It just doesn’t have a name big enough to say, especially in social media.

And perhaps that is why I have become so careful about what I say

Because I have also started questioning myself. I keep asking whether I am doing enough, whether I am caring enough, whether I am present enough, whether I am contributing enough. I look at everything happening around me, and sometimes I feel guilty for not being louder. But I cannot afford to be loud when my own internal voice is already so tired.

That is the part I find difficult to explain, because people only see what you allow them to see. They see that you are smart. They see that you have a platform. They see that you can communicate. They see that you have access to certain people, certain spaces, certain opportunities.

They see the power that you appear to have, and then they assume that you must also have the capacity to constantly use that power in the way they expect you to.

But they do not see what happens when you close your phone. They do not see the things you are carrying privately. They do not see the financial problems. They do not see the anxiety. They do not see how much energy it sometimes takes just to get yourself through an ordinary day.

They do not see the conversations you have with yourself before you even have enough space to think about what is happening in the world.

Meanwhile, my own life is already taking so much out of me

These past few weeks — or maybe more than a month now — I have been questioning myself so much. But my life lately has been a lot of trying to stabilise my internal world before I can even deal with the external one.

I wake up and I try to figure myself out. I try to work. I try to follow my list, because that list is probably one of the only things that gives my day some kind of structure.

If I don’t have that daily list, I don’t even know how to live. But even with the list, I still don’t feel like I am doing enough.

Sometimes I realise that two-thirds of my day is spent trying to align things inside my brain, my mind and my body so that I can actually function and do the work I am supposed to be doing.

And then I feel guilty about that too.

So when I look at the world, I don’t know what more I am supposed to give

Because I am already trying so hard to keep myself together. Sometimes I open my eyes and I don’t feel present. My eyes don’t feel like they are seeing.

They don’t feel like I am alive.

And I keep trying so fucking hard to be present. Even trying to be present feels like a problem. So, when I look at everything happening in the world, I sometimes think: how am I supposed to carry all of this too?

Natural disasters. Politics. Social issues. War. Discrimination. Racism.

And social media is a place where bad news just keeps coming and coming and coming.

I am not ready for all of it.

Perhaps I don’t need to prove that I care about everything?

I care about what is happening in the world. I don’t want to become someone who is indifferent to other people’s suffering.

But I also cannot pretend that I have an unlimited capacity to absorb every tragedy, every political situation, every social issue, every demand for attention, and every expectation to respond.

Sometimes I just want to pray for them. Sometimes I donate my little money but I don’t show this off. Sometimes I talk to relevant people to share our empathy. Sometimes I want to take care of myself. Sometimes I want to call someone at seven in the evening and talk about absolutely nothing related to what is happening in the world.

Sometimes I want to write about what is happening inside me. Sometimes I just want to be quiet.

And I am starting to wonder why those things need to be justified. Why does care have to be visible before it becomes real?

Why does empathy have to be showcased before people believe that you have it? Why does everything have to become content before it is considered meaningful?

But I don’t want any of this to read as permission to do nothing

Because I do think we are living in a moment where your voice is worth more than you probably imagine, and going silent costs more than you think it does.

If everyone who felt something decided to keep it entirely to themselves, nothing would move at all. And the people who benefit from nothing moving would be very comfortable.

I am arguing about what counts as showing up. Whatever power you have, you do have some. It is just rarely the kind you see other people using.

If you have a name that people listen to, that is your power. That is exactly why the internet asks you to speak, and it is not unreasonable of them to ask. Speak.

If you have money and you barely open social media, that is your power. Send it. Nobody needs your post.

If you have neither, you still have something. You can have the conversation at dinner that shifts one person’s understanding, which is how most understanding has ever shifted. Empathy that stays between two people is still empathy that landed somewhere.

That is what I mean by collective responsibility. Not that all of us do the same thing. That all of us do something, out of what we actually hold.

My capacity is not the benchmark for yours. And yours is not the benchmark for mine.

I know how this argument can be used. Capacity is something only you can report, which means anyone can claim to be at the end of theirs, and the people quickest to claim it are often the ones carrying the least. I am making it anyway, because the alternative is a rule that only works for people with nothing else going on.

When we demand that everyone respond in the same way, with the same volume, on the same day, we are not building pressure. We are just exhausting a smaller and smaller group of people, and leaving everyone else quietly ashamed of whatever they were already doing.

So take your role. Whatever size it is. Play it with what you actually have, not with what someone else has.

And when you cannot see what someone else is doing, try not to assume they are doing nothing.

This writing is made from honesty, rawness, discomfort; sometimes healing, sometimes uneasy. If you’ve found value or comfort in these words, supporting this space means a lot. It helps me feel supported by people who choose to be here with intention.

And if you feel like leaving a little tip (even if it’s $1!!), it would honestly feel like so much love to me. 🤍

No pressure at all. Reading me is ALWAYS free, sharing, or simply being here already still means something to me.

leave a little love here <3

Healthy love is not always pretty. Sometimes it ruins your favourite coping mechanisms.

I used to think I would recognise healthy love the moment it turned up, that my body would know it the way you know your own street in the dark, and that if I ever met someone kind and consistent and emotionally available, my nervous system would throw a little parade for him. Instead, my nervous system took one look at the man and decided he was suspicious, which I think is quite rude of it.

Everything could be going perfectly well, an ordinary Tuesday with nothing wrong and no evidence of anything, and I would still catch myself reading a message twice and then reading a silence three times, preparing for a disaster that had not happened and had no plans to happen and did not exist anywhere outside my own chest. Nothing was burning; I was just standing near the smoke alarm, waiting.

It took me longer than I would like to admit to work out that most of that discomfort had nothing to do with him at all, and that it was coming instead from the fact that this relationship wasn’t handing me any of the familiar things I had spent years mistaking for love. There was no rollercoaster to keep me hooked, no guessing, no campaign to seduce someone into staying, and no performance of being the woman who needs nothing and asks for even less. There were none of those small, elegant tests I used to design in order to find out the only thing I actually wanted to know, which was whether he wanted me as much as I wanted him.

So I was left sitting with a question that is much less flattering than the ones I was used to asking, which is what happens if love can be good and I still don’t know how to receive it. That question has been following me around the flat for months now, and I don’t think it’s finished with me yet.

The first dirty sign is… that I wasn’t obsessed

This one almost felt like an insult when I noticed it, because I wasn’t checking my phone every three minutes, I wasn’t conducting forensic analysis on a full stop, and I wasn’t counting heart emojis and drawing conclusions from the data. I hadn’t cancelled my entire personality just because a man had walked into the room, which was new.

I still had a life going on around him. I worked and ate actual meals and went to the gym and wrote and thought about things that had nothing to do with him for hours at a time, and then I would remember him fondly, the way you remember something nice that is waiting for you at the end of the day. And then it landed on me properly: I wasn’t anxious.

At first that felt like the chemistry had left the building without saying goodbye, but it hadn’t, and what had actually gone was the chaos. Nobody tells you that those are two entirely different things, or that you can lose one and keep the other.

I used to believe that intensity was proof something mattered, and now I think intensity is often just what happens when desire and uncertainty are sleeping in the same bed. When you take the uncertainty out of it, what’s left is much quieter and doesn’t announce itself and doesn’t keep you awake, and that quiet takes some getting used to when you have spent years reading turbulence as passion.

Then we got annoyingly human with each other

This is the part where romance stops being cinematic, because he is, unfortunately, a person. He gets tired and says things badly, and he once made a face at something I said that I thought about for two full days before I finally asked him about it, at which point it turned out he had been thinking about his emails. I am also a person, which is worse, because I know exactly how I get.

We misunderstand each other, and somebody forgets something and somebody has a bad day and is not the most emotionally elegant creature alive, and the difference now is that I don’t immediately assume this is the end of us. We talk about it, sometimes badly and sometimes beautifully, and occasionally only after one of us has stood in the kitchen for ten minutes pretending to look for something, but we do come back to each other.

That might honestly be the sexiest part of the whole thing, not that we never hurt each other, but that conflict stopped meaning the door was closing. I don’t have to be perfectly calm and perfectly soft and perfectly understanding and perfectly desirable at all times in order to remain lovable, which means I am allowed to be irritated or needy or tired and unreasonable about it, and I am allowed to say that something hurt me out loud in my normal voice, and nothing ends when I do.

Then comes the embarrassing part, where I met myself

When someone isn’t constantly setting you off, you finally get enough silence to hear what you have been thinking all this time, and some of what I heard was not cute. I found out how quickly my mind can turn uncertainty into catastrophe, how easily a feeling becomes a fact, and how fast my body will say danger when the real situation is only unfamiliar.

So I have been practising a question, and I would like to tell you it’s a beautiful question, but really it’s just deeply annoying: what actually happened? Not what I imagined happened, not what it reminds me of, and not what it could conceivably mean if you squint at it sideways at eleven o’clock at night, but what actually happened.

I’m learning that my feelings deserve tenderness, because they kept me safe for years and they have earned that much, but they don’t automatically get the final word on reality. I can feel afraid without concluding that I am unsafe, I can feel insecure without concluding that I am unwanted, and I can ask for reassurance without turning it into a test he doesn’t know he’s sitting.

Distinction has changed something in me, and the strange part is that while it makes love less dramatic, it also makes it far more intimate than it was before.

I stopped pretending I don’t need anything

This is the one that has humbled me most, because I spent a long time admiring women who seemed impossible to hurt, the ones who could leave without looking back and who never double-texted and never admitted to missing anyone, the ones who could say they didn’t need a man in a way that sounded like an entire personality. I wanted that personality so badly that I built a fairly convincing version of it.

I still believe in having your own life and I always will, but I no longer think that needing nothing is the highest available form of strength. Some days strength looks a lot more like telling him that I missed him, or that I want him close tonight, or that I need reassurance and don’t have a good reason for it, or that I don’t know why something made me emotional but it did.

There is nothing weak about wanting to be held, and there is something almost embarrassingly sensual about letting yourself actually receive it without flinching or deflecting or making a joke halfway through.

Independence doesn’t have to be a fortress, and it turns out you can be a woman with a full life who still goes soft in someone’s arms at the end of it, because those two things were never enemies. I just happened to meet them separately and assumed they’d never get along.

Sex became less about being sexy

This surprised me too, because when you feel genuinely safe with someone your body slowly stops performing and you stop running that background programme about how you look from this angle, in this light, at this particular moment. Instead you start noticing how you feel, what softens you, what makes you tense without meaning to, and what kind of touch makes you feel adored rather than merely wanted, which I only recently learned are not the same thing at all.

I got more honest in bed once I stopped being afraid that honesty would make me less desirable, and now I can say yes or no or slower or more, or that I don’t want anything tonight except for him to stay, and I can admit what I want without feeling vulgar for wanting it. The whole thing has changed shape as a result, because it stopped being about proving that I’m sexy and started being about actually living inside my own body while it’s happening, which is a completely different kind of sexy. It isn’t the woman who knows how to make herself desirable; it’s the woman who knows she is allowed to desire.

Then, oddly, I started grieving

Nobody warned me about this one, because sometimes being loved well makes you sad on account of finally being able to see clearly what you used to put up with.

I remember how much energy I spent trying to be chosen, and I remember the versions of me who accepted not knowing where they stood because at least not knowing meant there was still something left to hope for, and I remember confusing longing with love and being absolutely certain about it.

There is real grief in discovering that you don’t want any of that anymore, partly because chaos can become familiar enough to miss, which is another thing nobody tells you.

You can miss the adrenaline without wanting the relationship back, and you can miss who you were inside all that intensity without ever wanting to become her again. That grief doesn’t mean I’m unhappy where I am now; it means something in me is dying, and what’s dying is an old way of loving and an old way of protecting myself and an old definition of passion that served me faithfully for years before it quietly stopped working. Some things deserve a funeral, and I think that deserved one.

I stopped asking, “Does he choose me?”

This is where everything starts changing. The question slowly moves from:

Does he love me?

to:

Do I like the way we love each other? Do I respect him? Do I like who I become around him? Can we talk about difficult things? Can I be soft without becoming smaller? Can I be ambitious without becoming emotionally unavailable? Can I want him without losing myself? Can I disagree with him and still feel close? Can we build something that makes sense outside the chemistry?

Those questions feel different. They put me back inside my own life. Because being desired is lovely. Being adored is intoxicating. Being chosen can make your heart do stupid little cartwheels.

But choosing someone consciously is different. It requires your whole mind, not just your heart.

And I find that incredibly romantic.

The dirtiest sign of all

Eventually, you realise your partner is not your therapist. They are not your parent, your nervous-system regulator, or the person responsible for proving, every single day, that you are worthy of love.

They can hold you. They can reassure you. They can love you beautifully.

But they cannot do your inner work for you.

At some point, you have to learn how to tell the difference between intuition and fear.

Between a fact and a story, something happening now and something your body remembers from then.

You have to learn how to stay present when your instinct is to run. And that might be the most vulnerable thing love has asked of me.

Not “Can you let someone love you?”

But more like:

“Can you let yourself be loved without making them pay for what someone else did?”

Ouch.

That one lands differently, because healthy love doesn’t mean you stop having wounds. It means you finally have enough safety to see them clearly. And then you get a choice. You can keep making the present prove the past right.

Or you can slowly, awkwardly, imperfectly learn something new.

Love can be erotic without being chaotic, vulnerability can be sexy, and softness is not submission. Boundaries do not kill intimacy. Desire does not have to come with fear. Peace does not mean the spark is gone. Being deeply loved does not mean becoming less yourself.

It means becoming more honest about who you are.

The ugly parts. The needy parts. The sensual parts. The ambitious parts. The scared little girl. The divine woman. The woman who wants to be held.

The woman who still wants her own life.

Just skin, heart, desire, fear, faith, and two imperfect people trying to love each other without turning love into a battlefield.

Perhaps that’s the kind of romance I was actually looking for, that doesn’t make me lose myself and make it safe enough for me to finally come home to myself.

This writing is made from honesty, rawness, discomfort; sometimes healing, sometimes uneasy. If you’ve found value or comfort in these words, supporting this space means a lot. It helps me feel supported by people who choose to be here with intention.

And if you feel like leaving a little tip (even if it’s $1!!), it would honestly feel like so much love to me. 🤍

No pressure at all. Reading me is ALWAYS free, sharing, or simply being here already still means something to me.

Leave a little love🤍

No one warns you that a good man can make you sick, and I mean sick in the body, in the stomach, in the part of you that has never once been asked to hold something gentle without dropping it.

A bad one hollows you out slowly and you call it chemistry, you call it intensity, you call it he’s just complicated, and you let it happen because being emptied is a sensation you already know how to survive. A good one walks in, puts both hands flat on the table, tells you the truth in a completely normal voice, and your whole body runs a fever it cannot explain to anyone, least of all to him.

I have been running that fever for months.

There is a Polaroid in front of me right now, next to a cup of coffee I have let go cold twice. A small Japanese bar in Jakarta, eight seats, no sign on the door, a man behind the counter who never once looked up at us the entire night. What the picture does not show you is that ten minutes before it was taken he told me something he was afraid of. Not a story he had polished for company. The real one, the one that cost him to say, offered up before I had given him anything at all, while I sat there with my hands around a glass and understood that no man had ever gone first before. Then somebody took our photo, and in it my mouth is open in the middle of a laugh I don’t remember making, and his hand is on the back of my neck, not gripping, not steering, just resting there the way a thing rests somewhere it lives.

I keep looking at that photograph the way you look at a receipt for something too expensive, scanning it slowly, waiting to find the error that will explain why I was allowed to have it.

A few weeks ago a message came into my iMessage from a man I used to orbit, and I need you to understand the specific gravity of him before you decide anything about what happened next. He is older. He is married. He has the family that photographs beautifully, the one you scroll past and feel briefly worse about your own life. Years ago he told me I would never be happy with someone simple, and I have carried that sentence around ever since like a diagnosis somebody qualified had handed me. He said he was flying into Jakarta. He said he wanted to see me.

I read it standing in my kitchen, and my body answered before my mind had any chance to get involved, which is the part I still cannot forgive. Heat climbing the throat. That old, familiar, disgusting thrill of being chosen by a man who is not free to choose me, a thrill I have been chasing since before I had language for it.

Ask me what I did. I did not reply, and not because I am good, and not because I am strong, but because I did not trust my own hands on the screen.

Then I did something worse than not replying, which is that I went silent on the man who actually has me. For days I told him I needed time with myself, time to sit with my own life, and it sounded spiritual, it sounded like growth, it was cowardice with better branding. I was not meditating in that silence. I was standing in a room with two doors, negotiating with a girl who has been waiting twenty years to be wanted by somebody who was never going to stay.

Almost a week later I answered him. I told him I had just come back from vacation, which was true, and which was also a lie, because the truth is that I let his message sit there for six days like a lit cigarette in a dry field and watched myself not put it out.

Understand that answering is not what I do anymore. There is a small graveyard in my phone this year of men who were absolutely certain that I would write back, and I don’t, and I have learned that the wanting passes in about four days if you refuse to feed it. I used to keep them warm. I liked being liked, and I would let a man believe he had a chance with me because his believing it made me feel real for an entire afternoon. So I know exactly how to leave a message unanswered. I chose not to, for him, and there is no version of that sentence that lets me off.

He wrote back easily, the way men like him always write back easily. He had come and gone. He will be in Jakarta again in September. He wants to see me then.

And seconds after I read that, my boyfriend texted me.

Seconds. Not minutes.

He said he was sorry. He said he was sorry that something in him had made me pull away, that he would keep working on becoming a better version of himself so that he could love me properly and protect me properly, and he wrote it plainly, with no performance in it, the way he writes everything. Then he called me and he cried, and he told me he had already taken it to his therapist, this fear that I was disappearing in front of him and he could not find the reason why.

I sat down on my floor holding a phone with two men inside it. Do you understand what he was apologizing for. He was apologizing for my hiding. He took responsibility for a wound that I made, and I let him, because I could not open my mouth.

So no, this was never a story about two men, and if you came here for one you will be disappointed, because the only person in this story who did anything is me.

I grew up in a house where love is traded like an investment, where nothing was free and every soft thing was a deposit somebody was already waiting to collect on, so I learned to read affection as debt and to earn my seat at the table before I was allowed to sit down in it. Which means that when a man looks at me and asks for nothing in return, my nervous system does not read safety, it reads trap. I wait for the bill. I keep waiting. And when the bill never comes I panic and try to pay him anyway, in whatever currency I have on me, which is usually my own disappearance.

An unavailable man has never made me feel this, and you already know why. An unavailable man never actually meets me. He meets the woman I built for strangers, and she is very good, I made her carefully. She is mysterious. She is agreeable. She is beautiful at three in the morning and gone before anyone has to see her at breakfast. She is easy to love because there is nothing inside her that requires loving.

I built her when I was young, out of all the parts of myself that nobody in my family ever asked a single question about. I thought that was what being a woman meant. Softness as currency, beauty as apology, be lovely and be a little unreachable and someone will decide to keep you.

Being wanted is a spotlight, hot and narrow and thrilling, and it goes out. Being seen is daylight, and daylight shows the stretch marks and the sulking and the mornings when I am unbearable to be near, and daylight does not leave the room when I do. My body still prefers the spotlight, because my body is an idiot with excellent taste in tragedy.

If you were raised on conditional love then I already know what free love does to you, because it does the same thing to me. It feels like a scam. You check his hands for the knife. You test him in small, unforgivable ways and you tell yourself it is self protection, when what it actually is, is sabotage in a silk robe. You lie awake next to a man who has never hurt you, grieving a man who did nothing else, and you hate yourself for the arithmetic of it, and then you get up in the morning and make him coffee and say nothing at all.

I don’t think I am a bad woman for wanting to be wanted. I think I am a woman who went years without being looked at, and who now flinches when someone holds the gaze too long.

I don’t have a cure for this. What I have is two more things keeping me honest, and I’ll give you both.

The first is that I stopped treating the urge as an instruction. Wanting to be desired by a man who cannot have me is information about my childhood and not information about my relationship, and I can feel that want move through my entire body and still not move my thumbs.

The second is harder, and it happens in my own kitchen, where nobody is watching. Last week he got up in the middle of a sentence and brought me a glass of water I had not asked for, set it down, sat back down, kept talking. Nothing. A glass of water. And I felt the ledger open in my chest, that immediate scramble for what I owed him now and how fast I could pay it, and I made myself sit there and drink it and give him nothing back. It feels like standing in cold water. I stay in a little longer every time.

I have not told him about any of this yet. He carries his own fear of being betrayed by somebody he loves, and I am not going to hand him mine while it is still on fire. That conversation is coming, and I am building the language for it slowly, the way you build a bridge you already know you will have to walk across.

September is still coming too. I know what I am going to do about September, and I also know that knowing has never once been the hard part.

Here is what I finally saw in that Polaroid, after months of holding it like a receipt. I am laughing in it, which means I am not looking at the camera. Which means he isn’t either. He is looking at me. He was not posing for a photograph he did not know was coming, he was just watching me laugh at something he said, ten minutes after telling me the thing that scared him, and it is all right there on his face and has been the entire time.

I have been checking that picture for the error. The proof was in it from the beginning. I was reading the wrong side of the paper.

In December, I wrote about feeling too much. About three men who appeared like scenes from films I’d watched alone in the dark, and the specific electricity of wanting people I could never fully have. I ended that essay wondering if the real practice was learning to be a container large enough to hold my own desire without needing someone else to complete it.

Five months later, I think I finally understand what that means. And it is harder than I made it sound.

This month forced me to confront something I never wanted to admit about myself.

Even good people are not enough for me.

This is not because they are lacking or they do not love sincerely. This is because somewhere along the way, I became more emotionally attached to longing itself than to fulfillment.

This year, I met a kind-hearted man who, on paper, feels almost unreal. He’s gentle, sincere, emotionally present, intentional. He is exactly the kind of man many women would pray for after surviving emotionally unavailable men. And yet, even while being treated softly, some part of me still searched elsewhere emotionally.

While being with him, it’s crazy for me to realize that I still wanted that older man who was never really built for relationships. He’s almost twenty years older than me. He could be emotionally manipulative in text sometimes, yet still made me feel desired, chosen, seen. I know this type of connection is built more on tension than safety. And that’s why it keeps my nervous system awake at night.

And at the same time, I also still wanted another man. A married man with a beautiful life already built. A wife who used to model while raising three beautiful sons. A family business. That particular combination of stability and wisdom still caught up in his eyes. We had conversations that barely look romantic from the outside but emotionally stay inside you for weeks. We mostly spoke through glances, pauses, small smiles, fragments of vulnerability. He is my Lost in Translation man, because something within depth and borders challenged us as human beings.

And these specific desires, from these different men, terrified me.

Because suddenly I realized this was never only about men.

It was about the fact that no matter what appeared in front of me (love, sincerity, beauty, emotional connection, future opportunities, dream universities, healing, attention) something inside me still struggled to feel settled.

I could already see the pattern forming before my own eyes: I crave what is unavailable, romanticize what is emotionally difficult, and become restless the moment something feels emotionally safe.

That realization made me cry harder than heartbreak itself.

Because what do you do when your loneliness survives even inside beautiful moments?

And for the first time, I stopped asking, “Why are these people not enough for me?” and started asking a much more frightening question: What if no one was ever supposed to carry the responsibility of completing me emotionally?

I think some people become emotionally dependent on longing because longing creates movement. Desire creates fantasy. Fantasy creates emotional stimulation. And for people who spent years emotionally surviving instead of fully living, yearning can start feeling more familiar than peace.

Peace is quiet, but longing is loud.

Longing gives you something to chase. But peace asks you to be with yourself.

And I figured that is why emotionally unavailable people feel so intoxicating sometimes. They keep the emotional machinery running. They allow us to continue projecting meaning, depth, hope, imagination, and fantasy onto someone instead of fully returning to our own lives.

I realized that I have spent years emotionally investing outward. I listen deeply to people. I understand people. I make space for people. I admire people. I emotionally nourish people. Meanwhile, my own needs often become secondary to the emotional worlds I create around others.

I kept emotionally orbiting people while slowly abandoning myself.

And perhaps that is why nothing ever fully feels enough.

Because no human being can realistically carry the heaviness of becoming another person’s emotional home.

People can awaken parts of us. They can reflect things back to us. They can make us feel alive in rare ways. But eventually we still have to return home to ourselves.

I think that is the grief I was really crying over.

It was not the heartbreak. It was the realization that I kept searching for emotional transcendence through people while neglecting the actual life waiting for me here: my body, my future, my healing, my ambitions, my exhaustion, my financial stability, my writing, my ordinary mornings.

I kept believing fulfillment would arrive dramatically, through a person or a feeling, when perhaps healing is much less cinematic than that.

Perhaps healing is learning how to stop abandoning yourself while searching for emotional intensity elsewhere.

Healing is allowing peace to feel enough without needing chaos to accompany it.

Healing is understanding that depth is beautiful, but drowning inside your own depth is not.

And adulthood is slowly realizing that nobody, no matter how beautiful or emotionally significant they are - can ever complete the emotional universe inside you.

These days, I think I want something simpler.

I want a life that still feels meaningful when nothing extraordinary is happening. I want love that feels grounding instead of addictive. I want to stop mistaking longing for destiny.

And more than anything, I want to finally return to my own life before it passes me by while I am busy romanticizing everyone else’s.

In December I asked: when was the last time you felt something so intensely you couldn’t find language big enough to hold it?

Now I want to ask something different and I’m asking myself as much as I’m asking you:

I don’t have the answer yet. But I think that’s the question this year is asking me to sit with. Not to resolve. Just to hold honestly, without immediately reaching for someone else to fill it.

This essay is a continuation of On Being Too Full to Write, December 2025.

I want to ask you something before we start: how many times in Q1 did you work your hardest and feel absolutely nothing back?

I did both things they tell you to do: Worked hard. Worked smart. Simultaneously, which is supposed to be the formula.

I stayed late not out of fear but because I take seriously the things I commit to. I prepared more than was asked. I showed up with everything I had, every time, and poured it into “containers” that were never built to hold what I was bringing.

Then one day I found out that a colleague doing equal work, maybe less, was being paid double what I make.

The anger didn’t come hot. It came in silence, settling into the body like something finally confirmed.

I had been operating as if quality was the currency. It was not the currency. And what made it worse was where the anger went first: It went inward as I was mad at myself for letting it happen and for being a woman who works hard enough to earn double and accepts less without demanding the difference.

I got mad at myself for being too devoted, too serious, too careful about the wrong things for people who were never keeping score the way I thought they were.

My CEO made this terrible judgment on me in March.

I had prepared the way I prepare for everything I take seriously, thoroughly, with more than was asked, because that is simply who I am. Mid-meeting, he turned to me with that specific slowness. That patience which is not patience. And assumed I hadn’t understood what someone else had just said.

I had understood before the sentence finished.

I sat with that for the rest of the meeting, feeling the particular shame of being misread by someone whose reading of you doesn’t even matter. I felt that shame and humiliation in the way I held my pen too tight for the next twenty minutes and didn’t notice until the meeting ended.

This is what misalignment actually feels like from the inside: just the slow accumulation of giving your best and watching it land like it was nothing. Like you handed someone something precious and they set it down without looking at it.

Q1 was a semester of that; Part-time applications that returned silence. Volunteer work where I held a C-level position and still wasn’t heard in the way that would have made the work feel real; A manager who keeps delaying her works became my “performance review” as I couldn’t finish the task on time because of her; My financial tightening while people with softer lives complained in my presence about theirs.

I kept showing up with everything. I kept leaving with most of it still on me, unclaimed.

On top of these series of me being fucked-up, none of it felt like failure at a spiritual level.

Deep down, under the exhaustion and the anger and the salary number I couldn’t stop thinking about, I knew I had done the work correctly. I took the hard assignments. I stayed. I cared in a way that most people in those spaces simply didn’t. And still nothing moved. Nothing returned proportional to what I put in.

So if the effort was right and the intention was right, what was wrong?

Is the variability supposed to be the people and the specific world I was pouring myself into? I guess so.

I was planting in ground that was never going to grow what I was trying to grow, and I kept watering it anyway, kept checking on it, kept believing that enough care would eventually force something to bloom.

Some things don’t bloom because you didn’t try hard enough. Some things don’t bloom because they were never meant to grow there.

There is a version of failing that is instructive. It tells you to adjust, to try differently, to look at the gap between what you did and what was needed.

And then there is a version of failing that is just a sign, but not a lesson. This could be formed in a series of closed doors that are not asking you to knock better but to find a different building entirely.

I am beginning to believe Q1 was the second kind.

The exhaustion I’m carrying isn’t from the failing. It’s from the trying-so-that-they’ll-see. That specific, intimate erosion of calibrating yourself toward a perception that keeps moving. I have been doing this longer than I want to admit. I arranged myself so that the right people would finally read me correctly.

What keeps pulling me back anyway is the belief that if I get it precise enough, something will finally shift. That there is a version of my effort exact enough to make a room like this one actually see what it is looking at.

But I am thinking about something harder now. Some rooms are not for me. And being understood is not something you earn through precision. It is something extended by people who come with curiosity instead of verdicts already written. Some people decided what I was before I opened my mouth, and no quality of preparation was going to crack that open. I was pressing against a wall that had no door on its side.

I wonder where all of this is taking me. I can feel that this is not punishment. The invisibility and betrayal and neglect are not evidence of my inadequacy. They are evidence of a woman who has not yet found the ground that was made for her.

I am still in the part of the story where nothing fits because the right place hasn’t been reached yet.

My prime is somewhere. I can feel it the way you feel heat before you see the fire.

I just haven’t gotten there yet.

Before you go, let my Q1 be the reason your Q2 lands differently. a few things I’ve learned to recognise. Because alignment starts with understanding why.

How to Know You’re in Misalignment

1. Your anger goes inward first. You won’t be mad at them but yourself for allowing things happen. That direction is the first sign.

2. The tiredness doesn’t lift. Not after sleep or after weekends. Because it isn’t exhaustion from work. It’s exhaustion from constantly arranging yourself to be correctly read by people who have already decided.

3. Failing stops teaching you anything. Real failure gives you information. Misaligned failing just repeats. When the lesson stops coming, you’re not the problem. The soil is.

4. It doesn’t feel like failure at a spiritual level. That knowing underneath the exhaustion is not denial. It is discernment. Trust it.

5. You keep believing one more attempt will make them see you. It won’t, because some people decided what you were worth before you walked in.

Let your misalignment guide you into Q2.

No matter how much you try and it keeps failing you, remember: it is not failure speaking. It is your misalignment. And it is trying to tell you something you are almost ready to hear.

Now tell me: what misalignment have you recently realise?

The most underrated erotic experience is a Friday you designed entirely for yourself.

It started with a flat white at four on a Friday afternoon.

I was dressed like I had somewhere creative to be; semi-casual, chic, an outfit that says “I take my work seriously but I also know how to wear it lightly.”

I had a writing meeting that energy, except there was no meeting. Just me, my laptop, my own company, and the low-grade restlessness that had been sitting in my chest since noon.

At some point staying home stopped feeling like working and started feeling like hiding. So I went to the coffee shop. I ordered the flat white. I opened whatever I was working on and let the room hold me for a while.

By the time I moved to the restaurant, the city had that particular Friday-evening looseness to it, like, people spilling out of offices, the week finally releasing its grip.

I went to the place I always go when I need to be reminded that the world is still interesting. It is vibrant in the specific way that matters to me: locals and foreigners at the same tables, people who are somewhere between important and fun, service that doesn’t make you feel strange for being alone. I have eaten there enough times to know that no one will look at my single place setting and feel sorry for me. That is rarer than it sounds. I ordered what I always order. I settled in.

And then I started flirting.

The man at the next table was there with a woman who had been on her phone since before I arrived. I don’t know when it started exactly. But at some point I looked up and he was looking, and instead of looking away I stayed. And then he stayed. And it went on like that, back and forth, longer than a glance, longer than accidental, long enough that it had a shape to it. Long enough that something in me started laughing at myself.

I laughed because I knew exactly what I was doing and it was absurd: sitting alone at my favorite table in my writing-meeting-that-wasn’t outfit, conducting a full flirtation with a man whose name I would never know, narrating the whole thing to the only audience available, which was me. I was the protagonist and the spectator simultaneously. I almost had to set my wine glass down just to contain it - this private hilarity of being so deliberate, so aware, so completely in on the joke of myself.

And somewhere inside that laughter, something landed. Quiet and certain, the way realisations do when you’re not trying to have them: this was enough.

I wasn’t enough because I flirted with a cute guy sitting with his lady, not even because I thought about what he might be if I talked to him, learned him, let him become a study.

It was enough simply because it is just the sustained look, the almost-smile, the small electric current of being seen and choosing to hold it.

My body felt warm in a way that had nothing to do with the wine. And I thought: “I have made myself so miserable learning people. I have gone past the glance into the conversation, past the conversation into the pattern-reading, past the pattern into anticipating the hurt before it came — and it always arrived anyway.”

All that extra knowing, and the warmth was never more real for it. The warmth was already there. It was there in the first look, before there was anything yet to lose.

Flirting asks for none of the rest. It is just the surface. And the surface means I understood, still half-laughing at myself, the man’s eyes finding mine one more time before he finally looked away. It is sometimes exactly the right depth.

We have been told the surface is where things are false. That real intimacy requires going further, giving more, staying until it costs something. And sometimes that is true. But sometimes we confuse depth with damage.

Sometimes we keep excavating not because there is more love buried there but, rather, because we don’t trust ourselves to stop at warmth. We study people until we know too much. We learn the specific silence that means something is wrong. We see the ending coming and we stay anyway, because leaving feels like admitting we went too far for nothing.

I finished my meal. The woman across from him was still on her phone.

Later I ordered chamomile to tell my body the night was done, that it had been enough, that it was allowed to soften now. I held the mug in both hands and watched the room thin out. The couple not speaking. The man with his laptop still open. The woman at the bar who’d needed the wine before she could decide anything. All of us in the same lit room, all of us reaching for confirmation, company, the feeling that a Friday night meant something.

I think mine did, not just because of the flirting, exactly, but also because it was present enough to find myself absurd, which means I was present enough to be actually in the outfit, in the restaurant, in the long ridiculous beautiful moment of a glance that went on too long with a stranger I’d never speak to.

That’s the whole evening. That’s what I came home with.

Some nights, it’s enough to be your own best audience.

My point is: Be erotic with your own time, not just romantic.

We talk about self-love like it’s bubble baths and early bedtimes. But there is another version where you dress with intention, eat what you love, let yourself be briefly electric in a stranger’s attention and feel no guilt about any of it, not just romance.

Romance is indeed soft and waiting. But erotism is beyond that - it is more about being turned inward: deliberate, present, fully alive in your own body.

Everyone who moved to a big city did it with some version of the same fantasy - that the density of people would mean the density of connection. Somewhere in the crowd, there would be a person, or several people, built at exactly the frequency you needed. The big city, with all its noise and motion and possibility, would finally give you what smaller places couldn’t: the feeling of being fully met.

Nobody tells you that the big city is not interested in that project.

It will give you stimulation. It will give you options, and enough-almost connections to keep you reaching for years. What it will not give you, at least not easily and never without cost, is depth - the kind where someone knows the 2am version of you and stays anyway.

I’ve been living here long enough to stop being surprised by that.

I’m writing this for anyone who hasn’t yet realised that moving to a big big city isn’t as magical as movies make it look. No soft-focus montages, no perfectly timed meet-cutes at coffee shops, no sudden sense that life has finally “started.” Instead, it often feels more like a quiet catastrophe.

Especially in your twenties.

Consider this a letter I wish someone had slipped under my door on the first night.

PS: The idea of “big city” mentioned is a metaphor. It doesn’t belong to New York or London or anywhere specific. It belongs to the particular kind of place that promises everything and teaches you something else entirely.

Lesson one: Everyone here is performing. Including you.

The big city runs on a specific social currency: appearing to be fine, busy, thriving. You learn this quickly. You learn to say I’ve been so busy when what you actually mean is I’ve been so lonely. You learn to show up to things you didn’t want to attend and leave feeling more hollow than before you arrived.

The clubs are the most honest version of this. You go with the girlfriends, you get dressed with intention, you walk in and the attention finds you. At some point one of them leans over and says, “wow, you’re getting so much attention tonight,” and you both smile like that’s the point - like you came here to be looked at and now you’ve succeeded.

Nobody says out loud in the Uber home that being looked at by everyone and chosen by no one is its own specific loneliness.

The attention lands on the surface and slides off. You come home and the apartment is quiet, and somehow you feel more hollow than before you left, because for three hours you were the most visible person in the room and still nobody saw you.

You use your body to be seen because you’re afraid of disappearing. And every time you are seen only as a body, you feel more invisible than before.

That isn’t a personal failure. It’s the big city’s economy.

At its core the big city functions like a capitalist machine: it needs you visible, consuming, circulating, performing productivity and desirability and wellness on a loop. A woman who steps off that loop reads as a problem to be solved.

Once you see that machinery clearly, the performance stops feeling personal. It begins to look like a system you were handed and are now, slowly, learning how to put down.

Lesson two: [on dating] The men will see you completely, and still not stay.

The big city has a specific type of man I was not prepared for: smart, intentional, built from experience.

He asks the question after the question. He reads you the way someone reads a book they’ve been looking for, and you start to think that maybe this is it - maybe this is the person who can hold the whole thing.

He can, which is precisely the painful part.

He is completely capable of seeing you - the depth, the mind, the parts you’ve kept folded away for the right person - and still not choosing you. His life was optimised long before you arrived, often at an altitude that doesn’t leave obvious room for someone who wants something real.

The thing about men who have built impressive lives is that they have often built them at the direct expense of availability.

They will show you what it feels like to be known, and then they will leave, and you will spend the next month trying to understand how both those things happened in the same story.

I keep falling for the ones who speak beautifully and reflect none of it in what they do. They have the vocabulary of depth and the behaviour of someone passing through, and I have confused articulate for trustworthy more times than I want to admit.

I have sat across from someone saying exactly the right things and felt held, only to realise later that I was the one doing all the holding.

For a moment they make it feel like the big city kept its promise. Then the moment ends, you’re back in the apartment, and the ceiling has nothing new to offer.

Lesson three: Your friends have shallower water than you need.

I have a friend here. She’s married. Sometimes we get coffee.

She judges debt as if it’s a moral failure she would never touch under any circumstances. She complains about capitalism and how it traps people. Then she goes home to a twentyyear mortgage.

The things she debates as ideas are the things she is already living as reality.

I’ve learned - the hard way, in the big big city and through getting it wrong - that handing something real to someone who doesn’t have the range for it doesn’t make the problem lighter. It just changes the weight of it, leaving you feeling more exposed and more alone than before you reached out.

And I keep thinking about the class reality nobody wants to say out loud: depth costs time, and time in a big big city is distributed by income.

The people who can sit with their feelings, tend their friendships slowly, and show up for each other at odd hours without consequence are usually people whose survival isn’t precarious.

When the money is wrong, the job is uncertain, and you are carrying three contingency plans in your head at once, the bandwidth for slow intimacy disappears. The same is true for the people around you.

Everyone is hustling. Everyone is managing.

The big big city rewards speed and quietly punishes stillness, while deep connection - annoyingly - is a slow thing.

So you learn to curate. You bring the version of yourself that the room can hold and store the real feelings for later: the notes app, the drive home, the blank page, the 2am journal.

The loneliness of big big city friendships isn’t the absence of people. It’s the presence of people who know the performance and mistake it for you.

Eventually you stop expecting depth from others and start looking for it in solitude, which is where the big city, unexpectedly, finally gives you something real.

Lesson four: Isolation is not what they told you it was.

Last month I pulled back. I stopped going out. I stopped asking friends to meet. It wasn’t dramatic - just a gradual reduction of noise until the apartment stopped feeling like a waiting room and started feeling like a place I actually lived.

What I found in the quiet surprised me.

I found that I was comfortable thinking too much, feeling everything physically, crying on random Wednesdays without a clean reason and still, despite everything, finding life overwhelmingly interesting.

Isolation is not the same thing as loneliness.

Loneliness is the pain of needing connection and not having it. Isolation is the deliberate act of stepping back long enough to hear your own thoughts.

One is a wound. The other is a practice.

The big city tends to pathologise solitude. It reads withdrawal as failure, as antisocial behaviour, as something that needs fixing. A woman who has gone quiet and returned to herself is no longer consuming, and the big city depends on you consuming.

Go quiet anyway. The clarity that arrives there is worth the discomfort of finding it.

Lesson five: Your inner life is the only thing that is actually yours.

Work will not love you back.

I stay late not out of ambition but out of armour, because accountability has become the only language that keeps the quiet warnings away in a room where someone else’s mistakes get absorbed downward and mine would not.

I do the job. Someone else receives the warmth.

That is also part of a big big city education: learning that competence and recognition run on entirely different systems, and that the second one has far more to do with politics than with you.

Money doesn’t come cleanly either. Every direction I look shifts by the week - writing, applications, scholarships, projects, selling something professional when what I actually want is something personal.

Most weeks I end up standing in a hallway full of doors, unsure which one was meant for me and having opened none.

The big city has a way of making you feel as though everyone else received a map you somehow missed.

My parents are far away and would not understand the language of this life even if I tried to explain it. My only prayer is that my struggling never reaches them as shame, that the cost of this season remains mine.

Everything I tried to hold onto here has moved, left, or turned out to be less than it appeared.

Everything except the writing.

The slow accumulation of honest thought placed somewhere permanent. The version of myself I am building in the quiet - not for anyone yet, maybe not ever for anyone - simply because she deserves to exist somewhere outside my own head.

That may be the real lesson the big big city teaches.

You arrive expecting the world to meet you, and when it doesn’t - when the men leave, the friendships remain surfacelevel, the nights end hollow and the 2am tightness in your chest becomes its own kind of company - you eventually turn back toward yourself.

Not as consolation, rather, a discovery.

Your inner life isn’t what remains when the big city fails you.

It is what the big city was quietly pushing you toward all along.

I’m still in it. Still figuring it out in real time, in the silence of an apartment that has become the most honest room I’ve ever lived in.

It’s named as: Rules. Timings. The correct angle of the body. The correct words in the correct order.

I memorised it all without understanding any of it, like the way we memorise a name in a language we don’t speak yet: fun enough to pronounce, hard enough to comprehend. A form without feeling.

Nobody told me God could be known.

That knowing was even the point and that the whole terrifying, beautiful invitation was: “Come and find out for yourself.”

I was only ever taught how to obey. And obedience, I’ve learned, is not the same thing as love. Not even close.

I think a lot of us are waking up to some version of this right now.

Something is progressively shifting in the culture: people are slowly stepping back from the noise and the exhausting loop of being perceived online, especially on social media.

And in that transitioning space, something else is filling up: real depth through community, real conversation, anything that inherently means something deeply human.

Manifestation culture exploded because people needed to believe they could call something real into their lives. But underneath all the vision boards and the affirmations is a deeper pain - people are reaching for “depth”. Precisely, spiritual depth. They just haven’t called it that yet.

I have been exploring what that depth actually means for a while now. In varied, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes unexpectedly beautiful ways.

This is part of that exploration.

I want to say something plainly before I get into it:

I don’t call myself religious in the conventional sense. I didn’t learn spirituality through a tradition that handed me something to hold. I came through exhaustion while being tired of my own reactions.

I came from wanting to understand why I feared what I feared, why I resented what I resented, why I kept spiralling every time something left my control.

I wanted structure for my inward soul.

What I found was less mystical than I expected, and more confronting.

🌒 I have watched people manipulating God my whole life.

My social culture gets me surrounded by those who come to gatherings wearing their religion the way you wear something you want noticed.

And I am not saying this with judgment, I am saying it with grief, because I think they were never given anything else. They received something hollow and called it sacred, because nobody had ever loved them enough to show them the difference between knowing God and using him.

What does God want with a performance? Because if God can be impressed by posture, we’ve built ourselves a very small God.

What I think God wants (what I am slowly learning to offer) is an unscripted, unwitnessed encounter. It’s just you and whatever is waiting on the other side of dropping your guard.

🌓 Witnessed, diminished

A friend saw me pray once.

They said something small. I don’t remember the exact words but it was something light, almost teasing me as a “saint girl”.

I didn’t let anyone see me pray for a long time after that.

I used to think this was about shame. I’ve stopped thinking that.

What I understand now is that my spiritual practices are too divine to be watched by humanity, too unformed, too chaotic, and too mine.

The moment someone else’s interpretation lands on them, they change shape. Because people tend to box you into something legible, something that fits inside what they already understand, something they can file away and reference later.

Spirituality wrapped with religious practices is inherently easy to judge because that’s basically what people do with what they see about religion. It’s the only free will that seems truly universal: the will to perceive, and in perceiving, to reduce.

I don’t want to be reduced.

My spirituality is the one territory I refuse to hand over to anyone’s interpretation since it is the only part of me that belongs entirely to something larger than human judgment, and I want to keep it that way.

So I do this in silence now, radical silence, like someone protecting a flame.

As a result, every day, I cry.

I mean actually, on the floor of myself, in the place below language, below reason, below anything I can explain to another person.

It comes without warning and it doesn’t ask if I’m ready. I used to call this breaking. Now I call it returning.

I follow it all the way down: past the grief, past the questions I’ve stopped expecting answers to, past the distance between who I am and who I can feel pulling at me from the future, and I stay there until something in me exhales. Until I come back quieter and cleaner. Like the first hour after a storm when everything is still dripping but the air has never smelled so alive.

This has always been the most typical, most honest prayer I have ever offered.

I want to know God the way I know a scar, not from being told how I got it. I need to know God from the night i remember my grief and gratitude at the same time, from what I was willing to survive to still be here.

I don’t want handed belief. I want earned belief that has my fingerprints all over it and has been dropped and retrieved so many times it fits exactly in my hand.

That’s the only God I’ll ever fully trust when I found myself, in the dark, when nobody was watching, it was just me and whatever is true.

🌓 Nothing becomes truth until you own it.

Park Hyatt, 36th floor. There was I and this man on a night that feels sacred and complicated in equal measure, because I know I’ll return to it in my mind long after I’ve left it.

He looked at me and asked about my perception of God. Not casually. There was something searching in his eyes, like curious, open, a little unguarded in the way people only get when they’ve stopped performing for the evening.

The question came out softly, like it had been waiting. The city below us, the quiet between us, the heaviness of what we weren’t saying, it all made the question feel larger than both of us. I looked back at him and said, “It doesn’t matter what religion you are. What matters is the truth you’re actually holding on to. And nothing becomes truth just because it’s inherited. It becomes truth when you confront it, question it, and still choose it. Not in the showing-it-off way. In the living-it way.”

He went silent and I remember the smirk before the silence.

The way his eyes changed, that slight shift when a thought moves from the mind into something deeper. He was listening the way people rarely listen, with his whole self, like he’d forgotten for a moment to be careful.

What I understood later is that what I was really saying was this: belief without internal alignment is just… a concept?

Truth requires ownership. I was saying it to him. I was also saying it to myself - to the part of me sitting on the 36th floor with a married man, talking about God, wondering what it means to live by the things you claim to believe.

🌘 Your spirituality is proven in how safe people feel around you

You can feel it, I think, when someone’s spiritual life is real.

You don’t have to say anything. It comes through anyway in the steadiness of a person, in the quality of their presence, in something you can’t figure out but recognise immediately.

Spirituality is energy. It just makes people feel less alone in your presence. That’s the whole benchmark. The most spiritual people I’ve ever met never told me they were. I just noticed I could breathe differently around them. Something so settled in them it made space for everything unsettled in me. That’s what I want to become. I want to become safe to be around.

And if I’m lucky (mostly I am), people won’t just feel comfortable around me. They’ll feel found.

Thank you for being here with me. For reading this. For letting me process out loud instead of pretending everything is simple. I’m really glad you’re still here too.

This writing is made from honesty, rawness, discomfort; sometimes healing, sometimes uneasy. If you’ve found value or comfort in these words, supporting this space means a lot. It helps me feel supported by people who choose to be here with intention.

I want to support Sabella

While the world celebrates love this month, I need to confess something: I’m still learning what love means.

Because the first woman who loved me taught me that love looks like sacrifice, and where love gets confused with duty and duty gets weaponized into obedience.

It’s about me learning love from women whose lives were dictated by their dependency on men, while treating beauty as currency - and then they teach their daughters to do the same thing, and call it love.

This is about me and my mom on the idea of love.

I am a daughter raised on filial piety as religion, taught that good daughters are obedient daughters who make mothers’ sacrifices worthwhile by repeating them.

And it’s about how much I need you to fail at making me like you.

PS:

Before I go into this, a heads up. This is going to hurt to read.

These are the uncomfortable things being as for motherhood.

This is also going to be long, raw, and perhaps uncomfortable. I’m not going to rush through them just to keep this digestible.

You can stop reading if that’s too much. But if you stay and if you’re a daughter who’s teaching herself things her mother never knew, please read slowly.

Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t.

And if you can’t call your mother your best friend either, this one’s for you.

Mom, I think I might be your enemy. And I don’t know how to fix that.

Mom, I need to ask you something I’ve never had the courage to say: How do you feel about me being different and somehow powerful than you?

And I don’t mean that in some arrogant way. I mean, when I do things you never got to do, when I speak up in rooms where you would have stayed quiet, when I choose my degree over marriage, when I build a life that doesn’t look like yours - does it make you proud? Or does it hurt? I think it might hurt, no?

It’s not because you’re cruel, I think it’s because my freedom might remind you of your own constraints that every choice I make to be bigger might feel like a mirror showing you everywhere you made yourself small.

And I’m so sorry if that’s true. I never wanted my life to be a judgment of yours. I just wanted to be me. And somewhere along the way, being me started to feel like betraying you. I see you looking at me sometimes with something in your eyes I can’t label. Is it pride? Is it fear? Is it sadness? I want so badly for it to be pride.

But I’m afraid it might be grief for the life you didn’t get to live, reflected back at you through the life I’m trying to build. I’m not trying to prove you wrong. I’m just trying to find out who I am.

But it feels like I can’t become myself without it looking like I’m rejecting everything you are. I don’t know how to fix this. I just needed you to know: I see the tension. And it breaks my heart.

On the Husband You Keep Hoping For (And What I’m Hoping For Instead)

“You’re almost 30. I hope you get a husband soon, who is rich and loves you so he can also support me.”

You said this laughing, mom. But we both know you weren’t joking.

You keep inventing him in every call, every conversation. But I heard what was underneath the laugh has always been about the worry, your fear that I’m getting too old, too educated, too independent.

You’re afraid that I’m becoming the kind of woman men don’t choose.

Perhaps it’s because you learned that women are commodities, and the best thing you can do for your daughter is teach her to fetch a good price.

You see power in marriage and a man’s income.
But mom, I see it in sharpening my mind emotionally, scientifically, to build a life that doesn’t need a proposal to feel legitimate.

Every time you mention a rich husband, you’re basically saying I’m not whole, as if everything I’m building is just temporary, it’s just marking time until a man gives my life its true meaning.

When you say you want me to be happy, what you mean is you want me to do what you did: surrender myself to a man who will provide for both of us.

I’m not saying your way was wrong. You did what you had to do. You survived. And I’m here because you survived.

I’m just saying… I want to try a different way. And I need you to trust that I’m not being naive. I’m being intentional. I’m looking for love that doesn’t ask me to disappear. And yes, it’s taking longer. Yes, it’s lonely sometimes. Yes, I might fail. But I’d rather try and fail than never try at all.

We speak different languages of survival. You learned women are saved. I’m learning that women save themselves.

I’m learning to protect myself in ways you never taught me

But hey mom, I understand why you worry. In your world, in your time, being chosen by a good man meant safety. It meant you mattered. It meant you wouldn’t struggle alone. You want that security for me. You’re trying to save me the way you wish you’d been saved.

But mom, that security you’re praying for terrifies me because I’ve watched what it costs when you need someone else to make you whole and when you trade parts of yourself for safety.

Anyways - I’ve been in situations with men, with manipulators, with people who had power over women, where being a “good girl” the way you taught me made me vulnerable and when being polite and sweet and accommodating got mistaken for being available.

You taught me how to be chosen. You never taught me how to protect myself from the men who would hurt me while I was trying to be chosen. Does that make sense?

You armed me for the marriage, not for the war. And out here? It’s mostly war.

You taught me that men are rescuers. You never taught me that men are predators.

You survived by making yourself small enough to fit inside male protection. But that protection is a cage. And you know it’s a cage. You’ve lived in the cage your whole life. You just think the cage is better than being outside it alone.

So now I’m learning to trust the feeling in my gut when something’s wrong, even if I can’t explain it logically. I’m learning that softness doesn’t mean I have to accept everything or being being feminine doesn’t mean being available. I can be gentle with myself while being firm with others.

This is hard, mom. Because every time I set a boundary, I hear your voice telling me I’m being rude. Every time I walk away from someone, I feel guilty for not giving them another chance.

But I’m learning. I’m learning to protect the tender parts of me that you taught me to offer to everyone.

I wish you could have taught me this. I wish someone had taught you this. But I’m learning it now.

Finding love that doesn’t require my surrender is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do

You ask when I’ll find love. What you mean is: when I will “give up”.

But mom, finding love that doesn’t require surrender is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried. Harder than the degree and even harder than building a career in rooms full of men who don’t want me there.

I hope you’re not ashamed I haven’t gotten there yet. Because that’s double pain: being alone and disappointing you for me nothaving it, and knowing that hurts you.

But I can’t marry the man you’re praying for.

I need a different, rare kinda love where I don’t shrink to make someone bigger and where my ambition is celebrated, not tamed.

I’m also learning that I don’t have to wait for someone to choose me to start living a life I love. This is so different from what you taught me that everything starts when someone chooses you.

I’m learning that love is the foundation, and everything starts when I choose myself.

I’m not rejecting love, mom. I’m just trying to find a kind of love where I get to stay whole, where love is a supporting system, not subtraction.

And I’m scared I won’t find it. I’m scared you’re right, that I’m asking for too much, that I should just settle while I still can. But I’m more scared of the alternative of waking up one day and realizing I gave up myself for someone else and called it “love”.

On Surrender, Wounds, and Prayers

I’m not mad at you anymore, mom.

Understanding you without agreeing is grace. I spent years angry at your limitations, expectations, and your inability to see me.

I did get the angst that you prepared me for dependency, not danger.

But anger exhausts, and it’s always incomplete.

I’ve traced your wounds, and I’ve seen how you were taught that being chosen was the highest safety. The world gave you impossible choices, and you simply called it love.

The problem is, I’m in a different world now. Or I’m probably trying to build a different world. And the tools you gave me don’t always fit the life I’m trying to create.

So your idea of me being a good daughter is now irrelevant and it’s been wrong. I’ve protected you from this truth for years.

Every “I’m fine.” has shown you performances of the daughter you want to see. Because I do everything, everything, alone. My life’s been tougher than you know.

But you what magical? Your prayers reach me anyway. Even when we speak different languages. Even when you can’t understand my choices or when my dreams look like rejection - your prayers reach me in moments I want to give up.

Your prayers are the invisible thread between who you needed to be and who I need to become. And I can’t thank you enough for that.

An mom? I’m now learning to be my own mother who says: you’re enough. You’re safe. You can trust yourself. Your feelings are valid. Your dreams matter.

In the other words, I’m learning to give myself the things I wished I’d gotten from you because you couldn’t give what you never received yourself.

I’m mothering the little girl in me who needed to hear she was perfect as she was, who needed permission to want things and to know her softness was strength, not weakness.

This doesn’t mean you don’t do enough as a mother, you did it with your own capacity. It simply means I’m learning to love myself the way I needed to be loved.

Final Notes (If you want somthing tender to end this reading)

To every daughter reading this who can’t call her mother her best friend: I see you, I hear you.

The loneliness of being misunderstood by the person who gave you life. The grief of loving someone whose survival strategies you must reject. The guilt of choosing freedom when it looks like betrayal - all of these are things we’re learning together.

And if we’re lucky, if we do this work well enough, we’ll become the mothers who can teach our daughters what ours couldn’t teach us.

We’ll break the cycle not with anger, but with softness and expansion.

We’ll say: “Here’s another way. Here’s what wholeness feels like. Here’s how to be powerful and tender. Here’s how to love yourself first so you can love others freely.”

We’ll become the mothers we needed.

Thank you for being here with me. For reading this. For letting me process out loud instead of pretending everything is simple. I’m really glad you’re still here too.

This writing is made from honesty, rawness, discomfort; sometimes healing, sometimes uneasy. If you’ve found value or comfort in these words, supporting this space means a lot. It helps me feel supported by people who choose to be here with intention.

I want to support Sabella’s writing

I hope February is being kind to you. Or at least, not cruel. :)

Quick thing before I get into it: I have some snacking hacks for you below, inspired by my situation when I’m living alone and it’s 9pm and I’m hungry but not hungry hungry, you know?

This is how I’m opening February with you: messy, mid-process, still figuring it out.

Let’s continue co-sharing our self-transcendence journey, starting from here:

I’ve been living in what I’m calling the “aftermath” of not the moment of transcendence itself (that was back in November), but everything that came after. The hidden part where you have to keep living in a body that remembers dissolving but still needs to do laundry and show up and pretend normal is still an option.

This aftermath is strange and nobody tells you about it. They tell you about the breakthrough, the revelation, the peak, but not the valley after or even the slow, unglamorous work of integrating what you learned when you were briefly someone else.

I live alone, so I’ve had to do this without witnesses. Which has been… I don’t know. Painful? Necessary? Both.

That steadiness is what’s been carrying me through this aftermath I mentioned. And out of it, some things have crystallized. Things I’ve been calling my hot takes, though they don’t feel clever.

Before I go into these, a heads up.

This is going to be long. Six things that have been living in my body lately, and I’m not going to rush through them just to keep this short.

You can skip ahead if you want. Skim it. Come back to whichever one catches you.

But if you have the time, I’d appreciate it if you read slowly.

Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t.

This is how they actually live in me:

1. Loneliness came first.

And here’s the fucked up thing I keep noticing: it doesn’t matter what I choose. It’s there either way.

You know that feeling? When you give your energy away, when you let people consume you without feeding you back, when you sit and listen and hold and witness for hours while no one asks you a single thing that matters? You’re surrounded but you’re starving.

I’ve been doing this for so long I didn’t even realize it was happening that it was always full of their need but often empty of my own. So it somehow led to the loneliness in your chest and it makes your throat tight. You’re there, present, performing connection, but you’re also disappearing.

Since last year, something cracked open and I couldn’t stop seeing it. How often I was abandoning myself and calling it “love”. Giving everything, asking for nothing, pretending that was generosity instead of what it actually was - lastself-erasure.

The aftermath? Of course it’s the loneliness that tastes like resentment.

But then when I have nothing left (when I’m scraped clean), I pull back. Stay home and simply withdraw into myself like a body curling around a wound.

And that’s… lonely too.

Do you feel this? The impossible choice between two kinds of alone?

One kind of loneliness where you’re emptied by others, and the other one where you’re just... with yourself. Both hurt. But I’m learning that only one lets me keep my bones.

Some nights I still give freely. I let people take what they need. I feel that specific pain of not being met, not being seen, not being fed while everyone else eats.

Other nights I close the door and don’t answer anyone and anything. I just sit in my apartment with the lights low and just... exist in my own company.

Both nights, are lonely.

The difference now is I’m choosing the loneliness that doesn’t hollow me from the inside out, which means that I’m alone but not betraying myself, that I’m quiet but not erasedm, that I’m still instead of shrinking.

Perhaps you’re doing this too? Like, you’ve also noticed there’s no way out of the loneliness. It’s just a choice about which version you can live with.

After transcendence, I can’t unknow this. I can’t go back to trading my fullness for the illusion of connection.

So loneliness became the thing I’m learning to hold, or even not solve. And it might not mean I’ve given up, it’s just because it’s real and it’s what it costs to stay awake to what I actually need instead of numbing out in rooms where I’m just furniture with a heartbeat.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

2. Awareness has always been easy for me. Embodiment? Not so much.

I think we all got really good at self-awareness, didn’t we? It’s everywhere now: the language of healing, the vocabulary of boundaries, the ability to name what’s happening while it’s happening.

If there’s one thing I’m genuinely proud of building in myself, it’s that I can see clearly: I’m highly self-aware. I’m sure you are too. And perhaps that’s your survival skill now.

But here’s what no one tells you about awareness: you can know something is destroying you and still not be able to walk away.

I understand healing. I can articulate my boundaries so clearly it sounds like I have my shit together. I see endings coming from miles away and I can feel them in my body before anyone says a word.

And still.

My body locks up and it reaches for the old patterns like muscle memory. It stays in situations it should leave and it wants people who can’t meet me.

There were so many moments where I knew exactly what was happening (could narrate it in real time) and let myself hurt anyway.

My winning awareness just stood there, watching and yet doing nothing.

You ever experience that? Where your mind is screaming the truth but your body won’t listen? Where you can see the trap but you walk into it anyway because some part of you is still wired for it?

That taught me something brutal: a) knowing isn’t the same as changing. b) insight isn’t safety. c) understanding the pattern doesn’t mean you’ve broken it.

The body rewires slowly, glacially. And when you try to force it, when you shame yourself for not changing fast enough, for still wanting what hurts you, for freezing when you should fight - you just create another kind of violence but a different kind of damage.

So now I’m learning to wait for myself.

Not in some spiritual, “trust the process” way. Just honestly, like “okay, I see you’re still doing this thing. I see you’re not ready yet. I’m not going to punish you for it.”

It’s humbling to watching yourself repeat something you’ve already understood while feeling your nervous system choose the familiar nightmare over the unknown safety. You are knowing better and still not doing better.

But perhaps, that’s where real change actually happens: in the slow, unglamorous practice of letting your body catch up to what your mind already knows.

3. Growth doesn’t follow timelines; it works in layers.

I used to think growth would happen all at once. Like one day I’d level up across the board (career, money, love, creativity) - everything syncing into this new upgraded version of me.

That’s not what happened.

What happened was: one thing got better. Another thing fell apart. Something else stayed exactly the same for months. A few things moved forward in parallel without ever touching each other.

Growth doesn’t give a shit about my timeline. And, it doesn’t respect urgency.

I noticed it moves in layers, sometimes in weird overlaps and sequences that only make sense in hindsight. Once I stopped demanding it happen faster, I could actually feel where I was.

4. Intention dies without consistency.

I’ve learned this the hard way: you can want something deeply, name it clearly, feel it in your body, and still watch it fade if you don’t actually do the work.

Intention without action is just a nice idea that slowly rots.

I notice this in myself. The things I say I care about but don’t show up for. The boundaries I set but don’t enforce. The changes I want but don’t practice.

Every time I skip the follow-through, the intention weakens and it starts to feel like something I’m lying to myself about.

You feel this too? Where you meant it when you said it, but then days pass and you didn’t do the thing, and suddenly the want itself feels less real? Like the intention is asking: do you actually mean this, or are you just faking it?

Consistency isn’t about being perfect, it’s about proving to yourself over and over that you meant what you said until it turns out as a commitment and accountability.

When I don’t follow through, I’m not just breaking a habit. I’m eroding my own trust and it’s immediately teaching my brain that my wants don’t actually matter so I don’t have to take myself seriously. And that? That weakens everything.

So now I’m trying to be honest about what I can actually sustain. What I’m willing to show up for even when it’s hard, even when no one’s watching, even when the initial spark has faded.

Because intention needs consistency to stay alive.

Otherwise it’s just words I said once that meant nothing.

5. I’ve also stopped being ashamed of my hyper-vigilance.

For years I thought it was something broken. Something embarrassing about how closely I watch people, how fast I read rooms, how ready I am for exits.

But hyper-vigilance isn’t a personality flaw. It’s survival mode that never got to turn off. It kept me safe once and it kept me alert. It also taught me to stay one step ahead of pain.

I don’t hate that part of me anymore. I just don’t let it run everything.

Safety now looks like trust, not in outcomes, but in my ability to handle whatever comes. In knowing I don’t need to guard every door to survive the next thing.

6. You can’t curate real connections.

Real connection stripped me of strategy.

And I tried. God, I tried. There were so many moments I wanted to manage: control the timing, curate the outcome, make it all legible and safe. I thought if I could just be careful enough, strategic enough, I could secure what I wanted without the mess.

But the things that actually stayed? The connections that felt real?

They were never the ones I handled carefully. They were the ones I felt.

The ones that happened when I stopped “curating”. When I let conversations run too long, spill into territory I didn’t plan for, and when I let myself want without a safety net. When intimacy existed without me trying to own it or control where it went.

You know this feeling, right? When you stop trying to manage someone and just… let yourself be affected by them? When you risk being obvious, being too much, being wrong?

That’s where connection actually lives - in the rawness.

Love doesn’t want to be managed. It wants presence that is messy, undefended, without an agenda.

I learned this through every moment I tried to play it cool and felt the distance it created, through every time I calculated my response instead of just responding, and also realizing that chemistry can’t be optimized. You can’t curate (again) someone into choosing you.

Connection comes from risk of letting your emotion show without trying to protect yourself from what might happen next. Connection comes from being willing to be seen wanting something you might not get.

It’s, indeed, terrifying to let go of “strategy” and it’s scary to just show up without knowing if it’ll be met.

But it’s the only way anything real has ever found me.

Well, these aren’t lessons I’ve mastered - they’re just places I keep coming back to. Especially now, in February, when everything’s slower and there’s less noise and I can’t hide as easily.

If any of this lands for you, you don’t need to say anything. I just wanted to put it somewhere outside my head.

Thank you for being here with me. For reading this. For letting me process out loud.

And I’m really glad you’re still here too.

So here’s to February.

To living deliberately.

To all of us learning how to stay soft without breaking.

Support this space if you wish

I don’t know where you’re reading this from (your bed, a café, the train, somewhere in between things) but I’m glad you’re here, really. Let’s take this slowly.

I want to tell you what I’m holding as this year begins, and then I want to invite you to sit with me in it, if it feels right.

For a long time now, I’ve been actually orbiting one question:

How do we live beyond constant self-protection, without losing ourselves in the process?

I didn’t always have language for it. I only knew the feeling and the exhaustion of gripping too tightly, the desperation of wanting to love without fear, the desire to stay open even when life gives you plenty of reasons not to be.

This year, I want to walk that question more intentionally. And I don’t want to walk it alone.

If you’ve been around Cups of Thoughts for a while, you’ll know I tend to return to a few familiar places in my writing. I’ve been thinking about how they actually fit together, and I want to share that with you in a simple way.

🌒 Self-transcendence is the path; the thread that runs underneath everything. It’s the question of how we move beyond constant self-protection, fear, and grasping.

🌓 Love is where that question gets tested. In romance, friendship, family, desire, attachment, endings. Love is where all our good intentions get messy and real.

🌘 Divine femininity is the way I walk it. Not as an aesthetic or an identity, but as a sensibility — learning how to hold softness and strength in the same body, without apologising for either.

They’re not separate themes here. They’re just different ways the same question keeps finding me, and perhaps, finding you too.

I want to be honest with you about what self-transcendence looks like in my actual life, because I know how easily it can start to sound abstract.

Sometimes it’s resisting the urge to lean toward people who have already shown you they won’t choose you, for the sake of seeking the potential love.

Sometimes it’s letting a conversation end without adding one more explanation.

Sometimes it’s letting to go with loneliness instead of reaching for the person I already know can’t meet me where I am.

It’s rarely glamorous, it’s oftenirritating and even always it’s quiet.

What helps me is remembering that this isn’t about becoming “better”. It’s about becoming less defended.

A close friend of mine, Ve, a psychologist whose work centres on self-compassion and self-transcendence has been a steady companion in this terrain. Through our conversations, and through watching how she lives her values in the world, I realised that what I’d been circling intuitively finally had a name.

This year, I want Cups of Thoughts to feel less like something you consume and more like a place you can come back to when your inner world feels noisy.

So alongside essays and stories, I’ll be sharing things that have genuinely kept me company and things you can hold lightly, or return to when you need them.

To start, here are a few things that have been sitting with me lately:

• A book I keep reaching for when I need kindness:
  How to Give by Seneca

  

• A film that understands becoming without forcing resolution:
  Poor Things

• A small practice that steadies me: writing one page a day without trying to make it meaningful

• A question I come back to often:
  Where am I tightening and what would it feel like to soften, just a little?

• A meditative podcast that has been mothering me for years

  Sarah Blondin

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I’ll keep sharing books, films, essays, music, and small practices as the year unfolds. It's not really as recommendations you should follow, but just as things you might want to check out, or not. Take what feels nourishing. Leave the rest without guilt.

No pressure, you don’t have to show up loudly here. You don’t have to say anything clever. Reading in your silence even without reacting to this is already a way of being in this space - and I’m always grateful for you being here :)

But if you ever feel like speaking (in the comments, or by sharing a moment from your own life) know that it’s welcome!! I read everything. I really do.

I’m not here as a guide or an expert. I’m just a friend who writes, walking through the same uncertainties and longings, trying to stay open rather than certain.

If you’re drawn to exploring what it means to live with a little less armour, a little more presence, and more honesty in how you love and want, please note that you’re already very welcome here.

Let’s take this year slowly.

We’ll figure out the rest together.

PS:

I’ll still be writing about love, divine femininity, and desire, sometimes through essays, sometimes through short stories, sometimes through pieces that are a little raw and a little sensual. They all belong to the same inquiry, even when they don’t name it directly.

If something here kept you company, I’m really glad.

That’s more than enough.

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You can feel it in the way social media keeps pulling 2016 back into your timelines softly, in how those ‘16s playlists suddenly sound familiar again, in how people speak about that year with a tenderness they do not offer the present.

Starting 2026 halfway through January, I caught myself falling into it too. I was not searching for anything in particular. I was just scrolling, absent-minded, slightly bored, and then I was there again, inside a year that still knows how to touch a nerve.

I stayed longer than I meant to. I let it take time from me. And I realised how easy it was to want to live there again.

You know that feeling. I know you know about the small pause when a song from ten years ago plays and your shoulders drop before your mind catches up. I‘m sure it is not about missing an era because it was perfect. It is about recognising how different it felt to exist before life became so heavily documented, so insistently observed.

Back then, we did not wake up thinking about how things would look. We woke up thinking about how things would feel.

In 2016, I was seventeen, about to turn eighteen, and my world was mostly internal. I spent hours inside my own head, not in the way people describe overthinking now, but in a way that felt expansive and generous. I was fascinated by my own thoughts. I wrote constantly and I threw myself into college projects with the certainty that they mattered, not because they would be seen, but because they helped me understand who I was becoming.

I had a strong sense of direction then. Not a detailed plan, but a trust that I was moving towards something real.

I’m not sure if you feel the same thing, but exploration for me at that age was intimate and contained. It stayed close to home. It did not ask much of me beyond curiosity. I could follow an idea until it bored me. I could change my mind without explaining myself.

In 2016, responsibility existed indeed, but it had not yet wrapped itself around every decision. I could want things freely. Desire did not feel like a risk calculation. It felt like a pulse.

I think this is where many of us recognise ourselves in that year. I’m not talking about the recognition of the trendy OOTDs or the music, but in the relationship we had with our own “wanting”.

We were not yet trained to flatten it, to make it acceptable, to package it in language that sounded reasonable. We were still allowed to be hungry for experience without immediately turning that hunger into identity.

What people remember as the wildness of 2016 was not chaos. It was absence of constant self-surveillance.

Only a small number of people lived their lives for social approval back then. Most of us were not performing. We were simply present. Concerts felt electric because no one was worried about capturing the perfect angle. Summer felt endless because it was not constantly interrupted by the need to show it to someone else. Fun did not require evidence.

Now, ten years later, the contrast is impossible to ignore. We live in a world where even our most private moments feel like they are happening in public.

Growth is measured. Healing is narrated. Even confusion comes with an expectation that it will eventually be resolved into a lesson. It is no surprise that people look back at 2016 with feeling of missing themselves.

That year represents a time when life did not demand explanation at every turn.

The people who were much younger and open then are carrying much more now.

We hold jobs that stretch them thin. We hold families, partners, financial pressure, and emotional responsibility.

Right now, in this “economy of life”, we know what disappointment feels like when it refuses to fade, so we stop being naïve and become hyper-vigilant, trading (or being trapped?) openness for control.

We have then learned how easily things can unravel. The nostalgia is not childish, but rather informed. It is the recognition of how much we have learned, and how much that knowledge has cost us.

I find myself living a strange echo of that earlier exploration now. Being in our late twenties feels like standing in a narrow passage between who you were allowed to be and who you are now expected to become.

It’s like, we are old enough to know that desire shapes your life, and young enough to still want to listen to it. We understand how intimacy can undo us, yet we continue to reach for it.

We are no longer interested in being impressive, but you are deeply interested in being alive.

This is where the conversation about 2016 becomes something else entirely. It is not about returning to the past.

There is also something particular about this moment that makes 2016 feel close again. 2026 does not feel open or optimistic, but it feels corrective.

After years of living under constant acceleration, economic pressure, and the demand to monetise every part of ourselves, people are instinctively reaching for a way of being that feels less extractive, less strategic, less owned.

The world is still expensive and uncertain, but the appetite has shifted. There is less desire to win and more desire to remain intact.

What made 2016 feel alive was not ease, but the absence of relentless calculation.

Capitalism and social judgment had not yet fully entered our inner lives.

Pleasure did not need to be productive. Fun did not need a future. In contrast, the years since have trained us to live defensively, to anticipate loss, to measure joy against cost.

The return to 2016 is not a wish to go backwards, but a refusal to keep hardening. It is indeed an insistence that intimacy, play, and interiority still matter, even now.

If this moment feels heavy to you internally, if the return of 2016 nostalgia has stirred something you probably cannot name, you are not alone! :)

We are not regressing, we are responding honestly to a life that has become louder, faster, and more demanding.

Wanting softness again is not weakness, but is intelligence, I believe.

We are not meant to live entirely without witnesses, but we are not meant to live entirely for them either. Somewhere between those two extremes is a way of being that feels both grounded and free. That is what I am looking for now.

That is what I suspect many of us are circling around, whether we call it nostalgia, longing, or growth.

So I will end this the way I would end a conversation, not with a conclusion, but with an invitation:

PS:

Before you go, I left something for you.

Three essays from my book (don’t worry, it’s free!!)

Take them. Read them slowly. No need to give anything back.

Think of it as a small thank-you for reading.

If they keep you company, I’m glad :)

I'll take this gift

I slept for ten hours and woke up unfinished, which is how I know this has nothing to do with rest and everything to do with desire I keep denying.

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Rest, however, did not restore me. It only softened the edges. I stayed in bed longer than necessary, not because I was tired, but because getting up meant agreeing to the day, and I wasn’t ready to decide what version of myself I wanted to offer.

The apartment met me immensely. I cleaned it slowly, deliberately, aligning objects, wiping surfaces, letting my hands linger as if order itself could flirt me back into clarity. Cleaning has always been my secret seduction. It’s a proof that effort still works and control can be rehearsed even when life refuses to cooperate.

I showered and washed only my bangs, leaving the rest of my hair untouched, damp and heavy against my back. It seems like partial reset and a small refusal. I wanted to look composed without being fully revealed. The mirror watched me like it knew exactly what I was doing.

Work waited until late afternoon, patient and unimpressed. I let it. When I finally opened my laptop, I moved with professional ease, updating my team, answering emails, offering competence without intimacy.

Then I returned to my Substack draft, where four likes blinked back at me like a restrained judgment. I stayed with it anyway. I refined sentences the way one might trace skin, adjusting pressure, pulling back, leaning in, believing that if the words were precise enough, the day might forgive me.

Outside, the rain fell hard and steady, the kind that presses the city into submission. I let it set the tone. I watched videos about insulin resistance, drawn to the promise of systems that could be understood, regulated, mastered, while my own life remained beautifully disobedient.

I cooked vegetable soup and ate it slowly, heat settling into my body in a way I trusted more than motivation. I also called my family and tried to be present, my voice affectionate, familiar, practiced. I listened and I responded. I loved them without fully arriving. I wasn’t unhappy. I just wasn’t anywhere.

A man texted and asked me to come over. The invitation was simple, confident, bodily. He wanted my presence and my body without my process. I said no, and the no felt clean, almost elegant, like closing a door without needing to explain why.

Not long after, an email arrived from London at one in the morning, and my chest tightened before I could stop it. I saw the report instantly, the messy data, the rushed assumptions, the fear that my mistakes might ripple outward and land on someone else’s shoulders. I imagined my VP taking the blame. I imagined the consequences. I sat with it instead of running. I meditated while doing something else, which felt like an honest reflection of where I am now. Presence, fragmented. Focus, negotiated.

I posted four photos on Instagram, just a proof of life. I replied to a story from a man I used to see and told him he looked hot, fully aware that his girlfriend was standing beside him in the frame. I knew what I was doing. I knew why the moment lingered. Desire does not disappear just because it should. It simply learns how to wait.

I ordered a venti iced latte and pretended it would not follow me into the night. Now it is late, well past the hour I tell myself I should be asleep, and my body feels alert in the wrong places, my mind pacing as if waiting for a verdict that has yet to arrive.

Tomorrow keeps knocking, persistent and unsentimental. I tell myself I will read something beautiful, then remember that beauty does not pay. I think about money, about focus, about the three pillars I keep promising to honor. I tell myself I should be urgent, productive, strategic. I consider seeing two men I have been circling, or maybe choosing neither. I want urgency to arrive the way desire does, sudden and undeniable, knowing exactly where to touch. I want momentum without desperation. I want ambition without self-betrayal.

I keep calling today wasted, then replay it more carefully and see the truth hiding in plain sight. I spent the day choosing. Choosing boundaries when it would have been easier to be wanted. Choosing restraint when attention was available. Choosing to sit with fear instead of seducing myself out of it. Choosing myself without witnesses.

This is the part no one romanticizes. The hours where nothing dramatic happens and everything shifts anyway. The late twenties are not loud or cinematic. They are precise. They teach you how to hold desire without spilling it everywhere. How to sit with fear without disguising it as ambition. How to want deeply without begging. I am learning how to be sensual without being available. How to be divine without being distant. How to stay soft without dissolving.

I am not lost. I am processing. Love speaks first. Ambition interrupts. Fear negotiates. My body listens to all of it. This is what it looks like to become someone on purpose. Not polished. Not finished. Just awake enough to notice what is changing. If you are here too, moving through ordinary days that feel heavier than they should, tell me. What is your life teaching you when nothing spectacular happens?

I took a ten-hour bus ride to a city I used to think was too small for me. And I went alone. That's the point.

The first days of a new year are supposed to feel like beginnings, like clean slates and fresh starts and all the things we tell ourselves when we’re trying to believe in change, but I wanted something different this time, something softer, something that didn’t announce itself as transformation but simply existed as itself, which is why I found myself traveling solo to a small city named Solo right at the turning point between one year and the next. Not my first trip alone ever, but my first this year, and something about the timing felt deliberate, like I was closing one door while opening another, standing in the threshold between who I was and who I might become.

I used to think this city was too small for me, too accessible, too cheap, like a place you pass through on your way to somewhere more important, but smallness, I’m learning, has a way of holding you that bigness never can, of forcing you to sit with yourself when there’s nowhere else to look and no one else to be. Have you ever felt that? The way a small place can make you feel bigger and smaller at the same time, like you’re finally seeing yourself clearly because there’s nothing else demanding your attention?

The bus ride took almost ten hours, though I could have taken a one-hour flight, could have been there before lunch and started my trip in daylight, but I chose the bus because I wanted to see who else was traveling, what their faces looked like in the early morning dark, how they moved through the world when they thought no one was watching.

I sat with people who paid fifteen dollars for the whole journey, which included lunch wrapped in banana leaves, thin rubber slippers that would fall apart in a month, snacks in plastic bags that crinkled every time someone opened them. For me, fifteen dollars is what I spend without thinking, what disappears from my account on a fancy brunch I had too fast or premium rides across livelihood I forget the moment I arrive, but for them, fifteen dollars had to mean something, had to be worth something, had to include everything they were promised and maybe a little bit more.

I watched a woman count her change twice before buying a bottle of water at a rest stop, her fingers moving carefully, deliberately, like she was holding something precious, like every penny had been earned through hours of standing or sitting or working in ways I’ll never have to understand. I thought about how I’ve never counted change in my life, how money for me is abstract, numbers on a screen that replenish themselves, how I’ve wasted more than her monthly wage on things I didn’t need and didn’t even want, things I bought just to fill space or time or some emptiness I couldn’t name.

Being poor is more honest than being rich and careless, more deliberate, more intentional, more awake to the value of things. That’s what I learned on that bus.

Ten-hours bus passed, so let me walk you through how I framed, saw, and observed things whenever I stopped in this city.

Day One: Arrival

I arrive in the midnight with a backpack and my camera and no real plan except to be here, to exist in this space without explanation or justification or the need to make it mean something it doesn’t. The hotel room is the size of a closet. Two and a half meters by one. Barely big enough to turn around in. I drop my bag and sit on the edge of the bed and suddenly the smallness feels like a metaphor I don’t want to examine too closely, like the room is reflecting something back to me about the life I’ve built, about all the ways I’ve tried to make myself smaller to fit into spaces that were never meant for me.

The day unfolded perfectly at first, the way days sometimes do when you’re traveling alone and accountable to no one, when you can wake early or sleep late and no one cares either way. I woke early anyway, pulled by some internal clock that refuses to let me rest even when rest is what I came here for. Had brunch at a place I found by wandering, eggs cooked the way I like them without having to explain. Worked in a beautiful coffee shop where the light came through the windows just right, hitting my laptop screen at an angle that made everything feel cinematic, like I was in a movie about a woman finding herself in a foreign city even though this isn’t foreign and I’m not sure I’m finding anything except more questions. Felt productive, which is its own sort of high of validation that I’m doing something right even when everything else feels uncertain. Then I went back to the hotel to work more, to keep pushing to work because I got the internal energizer in doing so.

The loneliness.

Not slow, not gradual, not the one that builds over hours or days until you can’t ignore it anymore. Just there, all at once, sudden and heavy, sitting on my chest like a weight with no name, like something that had been following me and finally caught up.

I got triggered because I eventually realized that no one to talk to. No one who knows where I am. No one who would notice if I disappeared. The people here are kind, they smile when they see me, they ask if I need anything, but they’re strangers who will forget my face by tomorrow, who won’t remember that I was here at all.

So I let myself feel it, the loneliness, which is something I’m trying to get better at, this thing of not running from feelings I don’t want, not reaching for my phone or a distraction or another task to complete. I don’t try to outrun it or distract myself or text someone just to hear another voice confirm that I exist. I just sit there on the edge of the bed in this tiny room and let it move through me like water, like something that needs to pass, like a storm that has to run its course before the sky can clear. Have you ever done that? Just sat with a feeling you didn’t want and let it be there without trying to fix it or explain it away or convince yourself it means something it doesn’t?

My mom called, her voice crackling through the bad connection, asking if I was eating enough, if I was being careful, if I was alone. My sisters too, their voices overlapping in the background, everyone talking at once the way my family always does, filling every silence with noise. I could hear my niece laughing in the background, high and bright like wind chimes, like pure joy sounds before you learn to be self-conscious about it.

My sister sounded tired in that way mothers sound tired, like she’d been awake for years, like she’s forgotten what rest feels like. She’s stuck at home even though it’s the holidays, even though everyone else gets to rest, because holidays don’t mean anything when you have kids, when you have responsibilities that don’t pause just because the calendar says they should. She has kids who need her, who don’t care if she’s tired or needs a break or wants five minutes to herself. She can’t just pack a bag and leave like I can, can’t board a bus to nowhere and disappear for a few days without explanation or apology.

And for a second, I felt it, the guilt pressing against my ribs like something physical, something I could touch if I reached inside myself far enough. The awareness that my freedom is someone else’s cage, that the choices available to me aren’t available to everyone, that being able to leave is a privilege I didn’t earn and she didn’t lose, we just ended up on different paths and now we’re living different lives. But I didn’t let myself go there, didn’t let myself spiral into the guilt that would ruin this trip, that would make me feel like I don’t deserve the freedom I have. I didn’t let myself feel bad for having what I have, for making choices that prioritized my own desires over stability or family or the things women are supposed to want.

I wanted to feel my own pleasure without apologizing for it, without diminishing it to make someone else feel better. I wanted to be selfish. So I was. Do you ever feel that tension?

After the call, I worked on my book, which sounds more impressive than it is, which is really just me trying to make sense of everything I’ve felt this year by organizing it into something someone else might want to read. The book I’ve been writing all year without realizing I was writing a book, without understanding that all these fragments were adding up to something whole. I collected twenty five essays from my Substack, pieces I’d written late at night or early in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, when I was trying to figure out what I felt about love or loneliness or the way men come and go from my life like seasons, and I turned them into something whole, something I could hold in my hands, something that proved I’d been here, that I’d felt things deeply enough to write them down and share them with strangers.

The last step was the cover, which took longer than writing the whole book because I kept changing my mind, kept second-guessing every choice. I wanted red because red has been my color all year, the color of wanting, of recklessness, of reaching for things I knew would burn me but couldn’t resist anyway, of all the desire I couldn’t contain or control or direct toward anything useful.

But I chose blue instead, which surprised me, which felt like a different kind of choice. Deep, bright blue like the palace I would visit later, like the evening sky before dark, like water you could drown in if you weren’t careful. One flower. The title in white letters that looked clean and stark against all that blue. Lovelessness: Essays on Desire, Distance, and the Body Between. I finished it today, hit publish on the first day of the new year like it was some sort of symbolic gesture, like starting 2026 with a book about loneliness was exactly a contradiction I’ve built my life around.

And I should have felt more, should have felt everything, should have felt the way you’re supposed to feel when you accomplish something you’ve been working toward for months. But the day had already given me too much, had already asked me to feel too many things, too much solitude and realization and work, and I didn’t have any feeling left for this moment. So the book just became another thing, another checkbox on a list of achievements that don’t actually change anything about who I am or what I want. I’m proud, but I can’t access the pride yet, can’t feel it the way I thought I would. It’s there, somewhere beneath the surface, waiting for me to have space to feel it, waiting for some future version of me who has distance enough to understand what this meant.

In the evening, I climb to the rooftop.

The mountain and the stillness

The mountain sits behind everything like a held breath, like it’s been waiting there forever and will keep waiting long after I’m gone, blue fading into gray fading into sky. The mosque dome catches the last light, green against shadow, and I stood on the rooftop feeling the air cool against my skin, the heat of the day finally releasing its grip, taking pictures of things I couldn’t name, things that felt important even though I couldn’t say why.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find yourself looking, until you realize that the act of looking itself is what you needed all along, that bearing witness is its own kind of purpose.

The palace

I wake early by some internal clock that refuses to let me rest even when rest is what I came here for. The palace opens at eight and I’m there at eight-fifteen, one of the first people through the gates, walking into a courtyard so quiet I can hear my own footsteps.

1. The palace is blue, every carved detail, every corner, every shadow painted in shades of blue I didn’t know existed until I stood there trying to name them, and I stood there for ten minutes just breathing it in, trying to memorize the feeling of being somewhere so beautiful it makes you ache. The air smelled like rain that hadn’t come yet and something ancient I couldn’t place, something that’s been there longer than me and will be there long after. No one else was around. It was just me and the palace and the silence between us, and for a moment that felt like enough.

2. He leans against the statue like they’re old friends, like he’s been standing there for a hundred years and will stand there for a hundred more. I take the picture before he notices me, before he can change his expression or posture or become conscious of being seen. His face is weathered, tired in a way that comes from living, not just from being awake. He doesn’t smile but he doesn’t look away either. We hold the moment between us like something fragile.

3. They stand in formation like soldiers, like dancers, like they’ve done this a thousand times before and will do it a thousand times again. Red everywhere, burning against the white tiles, against the pale sky, so bright it hurts to look at directly. The sun is hot on my shoulders, pressing down like a hand. I don’t know what the ceremony is, what they’re celebrating or commemorating, but I stay to watch anyway, feeling like I’ve stumbled into someone else’s memory, someone else’s sacred moment.

4. Orange flowers hang from the trellis like small fires, bright against all the green. I stand underneath looking up, feeling the burden of beauty pressing down. The garden doesn’t need me to witness it. It exists whether I’m here or not.

5. I looked up and saw gold everywhere, dripping from the ceiling like honey, like something too beautiful to be real, too ornate to be practical, too much and yet somehow exactly enough, and the chandelier caught the light and threw it back in pieces, scattering brightness across the walls. The ceiling didn’t care that I was the only one looking, that I was the only witness to all this beauty. It was magnificent anyway, whether anyone saw it or not.

6. I ordered something sweet I didn’t need, some pastry I couldn’t pronounce that the server recommended with such enthusiasm I couldn’t say no, and the window framed the garden like a painting I wanted to walk into, like I could step through the glass and disappear into all that green. I sat there alone, the plate between my hands, and everything felt suspended, like time had stopped or slowed or expanded in some way I couldn’t measure, like I was inside a moment that would never come back, that existed only for me, that no one else would ever see or know about.

7. Someone carved the bed by hand, spent days or weeks or months bent over wood, shaping every single curve, every flower, every impossible detail that most people will glance at for two seconds before moving on, and I ran my fingers over it, feeling the grooves, the places where someone’s hands had been. I thought about how much time that takes, how much patience, how much love for something most people will never notice or appreciate or even see. The chair sits there waiting for someone who isn’t coming back, someone who sat there once and didn’t know it would be the last time, and the photos on the wall are people I’ll never know, frozen mid-laugh, mid-gesture, caught in a moment they didn’t know would be their last, their faces preserved while their names disappear. The green paint is chipped but still bright, still holding on to color when everything else has faded.

8. He stood there forever in his frame, trapped in a moment someone thought was important enough to preserve, watching over an empty room with eyes that followed me no matter where I moved, no matter how I tried to escape his gaze, and I wondered who he was and if anyone still remembers his name, if anyone still tells his story, or if he’s just a face now, beautiful and forgotten, someone who mattered once and doesn’t anymore.

The street food

1. The smoke rises thick and gray, curling into shapes that disappear before I can name them. People reach for their food with hands that know exactly what they want, no hesitation, no second-guessing. I watch the vendor’s hands, fast and certain, turning meat over fire with the kind of precision that comes from doing something the same way for years, maybe decades. He doesn’t look at anyone’s face, doesn’t make eye contact or small talk. Just keeps working, just keeps doing what he knows how to do.

2. The fire underneath is red, almost alive, breathing and pulsing like something with a heartbeat. The oil in the pan shimmers and popped. I can feel the heat from where I stand, can smell the garlic and spice and smoke mixing into something that makes my mouth water. Someone is cooking dinner for people who are hungry, people for whom this meal isn’t a tourist experience but just Tuesday night, just what they eat when they’re tired and want something familiar.

3. Someone is feeding strangers without knowing their names or stories. There’s something beautiful about that, isn’t there? About making food for people you’ll never know, people who will forget you the moment they walk away?

4. She wasn’t looking at me, wasn’t looking at anything I could see, her gaze fixed on something beyond the frame. The bananas behind her were perfectly yellow. I bought nothing. I just stood there watching her watch something I’ll never understand.

5. I watched from inside later, the glass between me and the world. The cart outside looked small, forgotten. The word on it promised something sweet I didn’t need.

6. Every color in plastic bowls. Sweet things I couldn’t name, toppings I didn’t recognize. I wanted to try them all but I kept walking, kept moving, kept being the person who watches instead of the person who stays.

The Traditional Market

The aisle is narrow like the walls are closing in, my shoulders brushing against baskets and fabric and things I can’t name. Everything is stacked to the ceiling, overflowing, spilling out into the walkways where people squeeze past each other without speaking, without looking up, just moving through the space with the efficiency of people who’ve walked these same paths a thousand times. The air smells like spices and dried fish and something sweet I can’t place, and the vendors sit behind their piles of goods, some talking to customers, some just waiting, watching the day pass. I think about how they do this every day, how the sun rises and they’re already here, setting up, arranging, waiting, how this is their world and I’m just passing through it, how I get to leave and they get to stay.

End game : (Another) Coffee Shop and What Matters

I go to a coffee shop, but not for coffee, never for coffee even though that’s what they’re called. For lemonade instead, hot lemonade, which sounds wrong but isn’t, which is exactly what I needed without knowing I needed it. The place is full of young people bent over laptops, pretending to work, pretending to be busy, performing productivity for each other and for themselves. The building is old, crumbling in places, held together by paint and hope. Bikes hanging on the walls like art, like someone’s idea of what young and cool looks like.

I sit at the end of a long table. My book open in front of me. The book I just published. My own words staring back at me in a way that feels both validating and embarrassing.

And then I see him.

Exactly my type, which is both predictable and annoying, this pattern I keep falling into. Tall, broad-shouldered, moving through the space like he owns it without trying, like confidence is something he’s never had to think about. I watch him look for a seat, watch him scan the room with that casual ease of someone who’s never been told he doesn’t belong anywhere.

And then I see her. Following behind him, slightly uncertain, slightly deferential in a way that makes my stomach turn. The girl he’s with. Decent but unremarkable, plain in a way that feels safe and unthreatening. Talking about nothing that matters, about traffic or weather or some friend’s drama, filling the silence with words that mean nothing.

I sit there reading my own book, my own words about loneliness and desire and the way we destroy ourselves wanting things we can’t have, and I think the thought I always think. The thought I hate myself for thinking.

“Why her? Why not me?”

And before I can stop myself, my mind starts making the list, the comparison, the inventory of ways I’m better. I’m smarter, more interesting, more beautiful, more accomplished, more everything that should matter and apparently doesn’t. I know I am because I’ve spent my whole life being told I am, being rewarded for being those things. And I hate that I think this way, hate that I’m the kind of woman who sees another woman with a man and immediately starts competing with her, ranking myself against her, needing to win even though there’s no prize. But I do it anyway because I can’t stop, because it’s automatic, because every time I see a couple, I measure myself against the woman and I always win in my head. But I’m always alone, which means either the categories I’m measuring don’t actually matter or I’m measuring the wrong things or there’s something about me that makes men choose women like her over women like me.

Do you do that too? Compare yourself to strangers and come out on top in every way except the one that matters?

I want to text him. The guy I’ve been seeing. The one in Bali right now, probably on a beach, probably with someone else. The one in an open relationship, which I said I was fine with, which I am fine with except when I’m not. I want to ask him to come here, to be with me, to fill the space that keeps opening up inside my chest like a wound that won’t close. But I don’t, keep my phone in my bag, keep my hands wrapped around my lemonade. Because if he wanted to be here, he would be, and asking him to come would only prove what I already know, which is that he doesn’t want me the way I want him, that I’m convenient but not essential. And because if he were here, I wouldn’t be having this moment, this solitude, this reckoning with myself.

But here’s what I know now, sitting here with my lemonade going cold and my book still open in front of me: I’m happy I came. Happy I took the ten-hour bus instead of the one-hour flight. Happy I chose this small city that I used to think was too small. Happy I spent these days alone, even when the loneliness felt unbearable, even when I wanted to fill the space with someone else, anyone else. Because I did something I’ve been threatening to do all year, and I did it alone, in a room the size of a closet, with no one watching, with no one to validate or celebrate or tell me it mattered.

This is how I started 2026. How are you starting yours?

This year, I dated a series of good men.

Not chaotic ones or emotionally reckless ones. But men who were kind, attentive, well-mannered, emotionally literate enough to name their feelings without being prompted. Men who noticed me first in the ordinary way, through the visual grammar of attraction, and then stayed longer than they expected once conversation began.

Each of them came with a different background, a different temperament, a different way of carrying masculinity. And yet, over time, they all arrived at the same place with me, often without realizing they were doing it.

They softened.

Not in a way that diminished them. Not in a way that made them smaller or less certain of themselves. But in a way that allowed something internal to loosen, something usually held tightly behind posture and performance and control.

It was never immediate. Attraction came first, as it usually does. Glances, flirtation, curiousity. But somewhere between talking and listening, between silence and response, something shifted. Their voices lowered. Their sentences lengthened. Their bodies relaxed into the space between us.

Then, inevitably, one of them would say it.

“I don’t usually talk about this.”

“I don’t feel like I have to be guarded with you.”

“I feel… safe. Like I can be honest.”

They said it with surprise, as if they had stumbled into a room inside themselves they hadn’t planned to enter.

What struck me was not that they became vulnerable, but how they did. Their masculinity didn’t dissolve. It didn’t collapse into something passive or uncertain. It remained intact, steady, self-possessed. What changed was the tension around it. The constant effort to perform strength relaxed into something quieter, more grounded.

They were still men. They’re no longer armoured.

I began to notice that what they were responding to wasn’t my appearance, though that was often the doorway. It was what happened once they were inside the conversation. The way I stayed with what they were saying. The way I didn’t rush to interpret or fix or reassure. The way I let silences exist without trying to decorate them.

I like people. I like listening to them. I like noticing how they speak when they feel unobserved, how their stories change when they are not being evaluated. And again and again, men told me that being with me made it easier to be themselves emotionally, without feeling like they had stepped outside their masculinity to do so.

That mattered to them.

They weren’t looking to be mothered or corrected or softened into something else. They weren’t trying to escape who they were. They simply wanted permission to exist fully within it, without the constant pressure to hold everything alone.

I didn’t think of this as a love language at first. I thought of it as a temperament. A way of being. Something intuitive, unremarkable. But the repetition made it impossible to ignore. Different men, same outcome. Different contexts, same response.

They felt emotionally held without being diminished.

And that is when I began to understand that what I was offering had very little to do with romance as it is usually described, and everything to do with presence.

We talk about love languages as if they are interchangeable currencies. Words of affirmation. Quality time. Acts of service. Physical touch. Gifts. Each one measurable, performable, easy to demonstrate once you know the rules.

But none of them speak directly to how attention is given.

Mental presence is not about how long you spend with someone, but how fully you inhabit the time you share. It is not about saying the right things, but about not leaving while the other person is speaking. It is not about touch, but about what the body feels when it realises it is not being watched, judged, or rushed.

Mental presence is the difference between someone hearing you and someone staying with you.

It is what allows vulnerability to emerge without force. What allows masculinity to remain intact while becoming more breathable. What allows intimacy to feel erotic without being performative.

In a world that teaches us to optimise connection, to multitask our attention, to perform interest while thinking ahead, this kind of presence feels almost transgressive. It slows things down. It removes escape routes. It makes people feel seen in ways they are not always prepared for.

Perhaps that is why many of these men stayed for a while, rested inside the space we created, and then left. Not because the connection was false, but because sustaining that level of presence requires a kind of internal availability that not everyone is ready to live inside.

Mental presence asks you to stay when there is nothing to hide behind.

I am still learning what it means to carry this quality of attention without offering it endlessly, without confusing openness with depletion. I am learning that just because something comes naturally does not mean it should be given without discernment.

But I am no longer confused about what it is.

It is not softness that erases strength. It is presence that steadies it.

And perhaps this is the kind of intimacy that matters most now. Not the one that is advertised or named or categorised, but just happens naturally, when someone realises they are allowed to be fully themselves in front of you, and nothing about them has to disappear for that to happen.

So I wonder:

I’ve been carrying these last two months in my body like a secret I don’t know how to tell. Not because nothing happened, but because too much did. Because I felt everything so acutely that my skin couldn’t contain it.

Every glance lasted too long. Every accidental touch rewired something. Every silence between words felt louder than the words themselves.

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Three men appeared in my life like scenes from films I’d watched alone in the dark. Each one offering a specific kind of attention my body had been starving for without knowing it was hungry. And the intensity of feeling them (really feeling them) - the way their presence altered the air in a room, the way my pulse changed when they leaned close - terrified me into silence.

This is why I haven’t written. Not because I had nothing to say, but because the experiences felt too tender to touch. Like pressing on a bruise to feel it the pain. I was afraid that naming what I felt would make it smaller, would reduce the enormity of sensation to the inadequacy of language.

But the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. And mine has been insisting persistently, that I pay attention to what happened. That I write it down before it blurs into the comfortable distance of memory.

November was my month of architecture. I sat with my journal for hours, designing the scaffolding of who I wanted to become in 2026. I wrote until my hand cramped. I felt focused, intentional, like I’d finally figured out what I wanted from my life.

Then December arrived and my body started speaking louder than my plans.

The first man came back in January after a year of absence. We spent one of those nights that feels like it’s happening in a film you’re watching rather than living: something like Lost in Translation without the ending or Before Sunrise without the promise of Sunset. Everything suspended in the realm of could-be, might-happen, not-yet.

When he touched my lower back to guide me through a doorway, my entire nervous system lit up like a city at night. Not from the touch itself but from what the touch implied. From the electricity of restraint. From knowing he wanted to pull me closer but wouldn’t, and that the space between wanting and having was where all the voltage lived.

I remembered him for weeks after. Not the content of our conversation, but the texture of his attention. The way he leaned in when I spoke, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his skin. The almost-ness of it. The way desire feels most potent when it has nowhere to go.

My body became obsessed with the sensation of his fingers brushing my wrist while he gestured telling some story I can’t even remember now. Such a small thing. But my nervous system cataloged it like evidence of something larger. I found myself reaching for the memory at odd hours - 2am, in the shower, walking to work - replaying that single moment of contact like it held the answer to a question I didn’t know how to ask.

This is what I mean about feeling too much. Most people would call that night pleasant and move on. My body treated it like a religion.

The second man I met at a bar. He had the sort of presence that makes a room feel quieter, more focused. When he looked at me while I talked, I could feel the quality of his attention, like, not polite listening - but actual interest, that makes you aware of your own mouth moving, your hands gesturing, the way you inhabit space when someone is truly watching.

Two weeks later we met at a bar I chose - a small victory I didn’t announce but savoured. We sat close enough that our knees touched under the table, and neither of us moved away. For three hours we sat like that, having a conversation about art or work or something I barely remember, while our bodies conducted an entirely separate dialogue through that single point of contact.

The pressure of his knee against mine felt more erotic than most sex I’ve imagined. Not because it was sexual but because it was charged with the possibility of becoming sexual. Because we both knew we were touching and chose not to acknowledge it. Because the restraint made every word we said vibrate with subtext.

When he left the city (he won’t be back until January) I understood something about myself I’d been avoiding. I keep choosing men who offer intensity in limited doses. Men who give me just enough to feel alive but never enough to have to sustain it. The hit without the relationship. The voltage without the follow-through.

Maybe you’ve done this too. Chosen unavailable people because availability feels too heavy, too possible, too much like something you’d have to keep showing up for. With the unavailable ones, you get to feel everything: the longing, the pain, the exquisite torture of wanting - without ever having to do the duller work of being known.

The third man appeared because I didn’t want to go to a bar alone. He said yes. We walked through the city talking to tourists who stopped us for directions, and the night had that quality of accidental magic where everything flows and nothing sticks.

He didn’t kiss me but his hands in my hair, his body pressing mine against the rough texture of the building, and I felt my consciousness split - half of me observing from a distance, noting the sound of footsteps, the smell of rain on pavement, the fact that I was performing a scene my body knew how to execute but my heart wasn’t participating in.

He wanted to see me every day after that. The attention I thought I craved suddenly felt suffocating. I realised the thing I was chasing wasn’t connection but the specific frequency of desire when it hasn’t yet been answered. The moment before touching. The question before the answer. The wanting before the having.

When I left for travel, he stopped texting. And I felt relieved. Not hurt, but more like, relieved. Because I could return to the purity of my own longing without having to meet anyone else’s.

I got on a plane at midnight. Hadn’t slept, but my body was wired with the residue of too much attention and not enough real contact. I wanted to disappear. To stop being looked at. To stop performing presence for people who couldn’t hold the weight of what I was actually feeling.

My lovely friend met me at 6am in a city that was still dark. I hadn’t slept on the flight. My body was running on nothing. But she took my hand and we walked.

For seven hours we moved through her city, my legs were in pain, my eyes were burning, my mind was drifting in and out of presence, and it was the most intimate day I’d had in months. Because she didn’t need me to be awake or interesting or charming. She just needed me to be there. And being there without having to be anyone felt like the closest thing to prayer I’ve experienced.

Real intimacy, I realised, doesn’t perform. It doesn’t curate or optimise or edit. It just shows up in its exhausted, half-broken state and trusts that’s enough.

Her hand in mine pulling me toward another street felt more exciting than any of the men who’d touched me that month. Not because it was sexual but because it was complete. There was no subtext, no seduction, no performance of desire. It was just presence meeting presence without asking for anything in return.

This is what the body knows that the mind keeps forgetting: that intimacy isn’t in the voltage but in the steadiness. Not in the almost but in the staying.

I didn’t write any of this while it was happening because I was too inside it. Because writing requires a distance I didn’t have. Because the feelings were too large and too tender and too alive, and I was afraid that translating them into language would kill something essential about them.

But now it’s December 11th and the motion has stopped and my body is finally quiet enough to speak.

I’ve spent two months feeling everything so intensely that I couldn’t metabolise it. The dopamine kept me moving, not away from feeling but toward more of it, sharper, brighter, until I was so overstimulated I couldn’t tell the difference between connection and performance, between desire and hunger, between being seen and being watched.

What I’m learning is that feeling too much is its own kind of loneliness. That carrying sensation this acute makes you incompatible with people who move through the world at normal volume. That when you feel a hand on your back and your entire nervous system lights up, you’re both blessed and cursed; blessed with the capacity for ecstasy, cursed with the knowledge that most people will never match that frequency.

The men gave me the voltage I crave. My best friend gave me the ground I need. And I’m still learning how to want both without having to choose.

Perhaps stillness isn’t about feeling less. Perhaps it’s about finally having the courage to feel everything I’ve been avoiding by staying in motion. To sit with the intensity without needing it to be answered by someone else. To let my body carry all this sensation without requiring validation that it’s real.

Perhaps this is the spiritual practice I’ve been running from: learning to be a container large enough to hold my own desire without needing someone else to complete it.

So I want to ask you, without urgency, without pressure:

When was the last time you felt something so intensely that you couldn’t find language big enough to hold it?

And what did you do with all that feeling when it had nowhere to go?

A “touch” that says: I know your body better than I know your thoughts, and I prefer it that way.

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I was the best student in my program, top of my university class that year. I was that student whose professors remembered, whose arguments in seminars made other students take notes. But that’s not what people remembered about me.

What they remembered was how I looked in the hallways between lectures. The comments weren’t about my thesis on constitutional interpretation. They were about my legs, my smile, the way I carried myself through the library.

Even when I won the academic award, someone made a joke about how good I’d look giving the acceptance speech. Everyone laughed. I laughed too, because that’s what you do when you’re young and brilliant and learning that brilliance doesn’t protect you from being reduced.

I was born innocent. I grew up abandoned, not physically but emotionally.

I was alone in a house full of people who couldn’t see me. Who looked at me and saw a daughter-shaped space they needed to fill with expectations. Good grades. Good behavior. A good girl who didn’t ask for too much.

When you grow up like that, you develop a specific sort of hunger. Not for food or safety, but for proof. Proof that you exist beyond the roles people need you to play. Proof that someone, somewhere, might choose to stay.

I went looking for that proof at 16. Then 18. Then 22. I went looking in boys who became men who all taught me the same lesson in different handwriting: they’d stay if I was easy to want. If I was sensual but not demanding. Present but not complicated. There but not entirely there.

None of them forced anything. That’s important. They didn’t have to. I came to them hungry, and they simply fed me what they had. Desire dressed up as devotion. Attention packaged as love. And I ate it because I didn’t know there was supposed to be a difference.

One of them told me he was sapiosexual.

He said it early on, like he was offering me something precious. “I’m attracted to intelligence,” he said, and I felt something unlock in my chest.

I thought, “Finally, someone who wants all of me?!”

We were together for 8 months. In the beginning, he’d ask about my classes, my research, the cases I was studying. He’d listen the way you listen to a language you don’t speak, attentively, but without understanding.

After a while, he stopped asking. But he never stopped reaching for me. Never stopped tracing the lines of my body like he was reading braille. Never stopped pulling me close in the dark.

I remember one evening in his apartment. I was building an argument about judicial interpretation, the words coming fast and precise, the way they did when I was excited about an idea. He was nodding, but his hand was on my waist, fingers slipping beneath fabric, and I understood: he was waiting for me to stop talking. Waiting for the part of me that didn’t require him to think.

I let the sentence trail off. He kissed me. We moved to his bedroom, and afterward I stared at the ceiling, feeling something close to grief. Not for what had happened, but for what hadn’t. For the conversation that died mid-breath. For the part of me that never made it into the room.

The pattern repeated itself with different faces, different rooms, different ways of saying the same thing:

“You’re so smart, but…”, “I love your mind, but…”, “You intimidate me, but...”

It’s always a suggestion that my intelligence was something to manage rather than celebrate.

In seminar rooms, I learned to soften my arguments. To phrase my insights as questions rather than statements. To let male classmates build on my ideas without crediting me, because being right mattered less than being liked. I watched professors light up when men spoke and nod politely when I said the same thing five minutes earlier in different words.

At family dinners, I learned to be a good daughter who wasn’t allowed to mention that I was lonely or to ask why love felt so conditional. I was instead being asked to “perform” gratitude for the bare minimum because asking for more made me difficult, and difficult daughters don’t get the easy kind of love.

And in romance, I became an expert at calibration. I learned exactly how much intelligence to reveal before it became a problem. How to be interesting enough to hold attention but not so complex that I became work.

I often make men feel brilliant by asking questions I already knew the answers to. How to be sensual in a way that eclipsed everything else, because that was the part they actually wanted.

My body became a language I spoke more fluently than words.

This is not because I chose it, but because it was the only language that seemed to work. The only part of me that made people stay.

I turned 25. Then 27. Then suddenly I was approaching 30 like a horizon line I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross.

Because somewhere in all those years, I’d lost track of which parts of me were real and which parts were survival.

“Was I naturally soft-spoken, or had I just learned that loud women get called aggressive?”

“Was I genuinely accommodating, or had I been trained to prioritize everyone’s comfort over my own?”

“Did I even know what I wanted anymore, or had I spent so long shapeshifting that I’d forgotten my original form?”

I started thinking about all the times I’d made myself smaller. All the brilliance I’d dimmed. All the opinions I’d swallowed. All the times I’d chosen being desired over being known because being desired was easier, simpler, less likely to end in abandonment.

And I wondered: who would I be if I’d been loved differently? If someone had stayed for my mind instead of staying despite it? If my sensuality had been one aspect of me instead of the only aspect anyone seemed to see?

There’s a particular loneliness to being wanted but not known.

To be called unforgettable by people who can’t remember what you said, only how you made them feel. To have men describe you as the most seductive soul they’ve ever met while being unable to name a single book that changed your life or an idea that keeps you awake at night.

I’ve been desired by men who never brought me home and bought me flowers. Who called late but not early. Who wanted me in the dark but not in the daylight of their actual lives.

And the worst part wasn’t their failure to see me. The worst part was that I’d taught them not to. I’d led with my body because leading with my mind had never worked. I’d performed ease because complexity made me unlovable.

I don’t know how to untangle this yet. I’m writing from the middle of it, not the other side.

But I’m starting to understand something. My sensuality isn’t the problem. The problem is that I learned to use it as currency. To trade it for attention, affection, the temporary relief of feeling chosen. I learned to lead with it because everything else about me seemed like too much.

Now I’m almost thirty, and I’m trying to imagine a different way. Trying to imagine showing up whole. Not performing softness or hiding my edges or splitting myself into digestible pieces. Just existing as all of it at once. Sensual and intelligent. Feminine and formidable.

I don’t know if anyone will stay for that version. The unedited one. The one who doesn’t make things easy.

But I’m starting to think I’d rather be alone as myself than accompanied as someone else’s fantasy.

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I was working at my usual coffee shop when my neighbour appeared beside my table. She’s in her sixties, lives three doors down, a woman who waters her plants on the balcony every morning at seven. I had my laptop open, headphones half-on, the universal signal for don’t disturb. She stood there anyway.

I could’ve stayed hidden behind my screen. Could’ve given her a tight smile and kept typing. But something in her face stopped me. A softness, or even a heaviness. Her expression says: “I need to tell someone this, and you’re here.”

I closed my laptop.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” she said.

“You’re not.”

She sat down across from me, and for a moment we just existed in that strange intimacy of two women in a coffee shop, steam rising from our cups, the afternoon light slanting through the windows.

“My husband died three years ago,” she said, no preamble. “We were together for forty-two years.”

I watched her twist the ring on her finger. Gold. Thin. Worn smooth.

“People ask me if I miss him,” she continued. “And I do. But what I miss most is the surrender. Does that sound strange?”

I shook my head.

“Marriage isn’t romance. It’s not passion. It’s waking up next to someone on the days you can’t stand them and choosing them anyway. It’s seeing them at their ugliest and staying. It’s letting them see you at yours.”

She leaned forward, and I could smell her perfume. Something floral and faded.

“I fought with him. Resented him. There were years I fantasised about leaving, about what my life would look like if I’d chosen differently. But I stayed. And he stayed. And that staying became its own kind of love. Deeper than the beginning. Truer.”

She looked at me then, really looked at me, and I felt exposed. Like she could see every man I’d never let close enough. Every time I’d run before, someone could see past the performance.

“You’re so beautiful,” she said. “But you’re alone. I can tell. Don’t wait too long to let someone in.”

After she left, I sat there feeling something I couldn’t name. Not sadness or longing but something closer to recognition.

We’d met at the beginning of the year. Both of us at the Hyatt, too early, the gym was empty except for us. He’s been married for twenty-five years. Three kids. We don’t talk about what exists between us, but it’s always there. This current. This almost.

The next morning, we ended up at the juice bar after our workout. He is in his wedding ring. I am in my carefully chosen activewear. Both of us were pretending this was casual.

“You seem different today,” he said.

“Do I?”

“Quieter.”

I stirred my green juice. “I had this conversation yesterday. About marriage. About staying.”

He smiled, but there was something sad in it. “What do you want to know?”

“How do you do it? Twenty-five years with the same person.”

He was quiet for a moment, and I watched his hands around his cup. Strong hands. Hands that touched his wife. Hands that would never touch me.

“Zero expectations,” he said finally. “That’s the only way. The moment you expect something from someone, you’ve already set yourself up for disappointment.”

“That sounds lonely.”

“It’s the opposite. When you stop expecting, you start seeing. You stop keeping score. You stop waiting for them to fail you.”

I thought about the way he looked at me sometimes. The way I looked back. This thing we’d never name.

“Do you ever think about leaving?” I asked.

“All the time.” He said it so easily.

He looked at me when he said that last part, and I felt it everywhere.

“But you don’t leave.”

“No. Because I made a promise. And because the grass isn’t greener. It’s just different grass. And eventually, you’d want to leave that too.”

When we parted, he touched my lower back, just briefly, guiding me through the door. His hand burned there for hours.

I went home and took a shower and stood under the water, thinking about his hand on my back. About my neighbor’s ring. About all the ways I’ve kept myself safe by keeping myself unavailable.

That night, I found a podcast. Philosophy. Love. Loneliness. Alain de Botton was talking about why some people can’t find partnership even when they desperately want it.

And then: “Sometimes lovelessness is a form of protection. It keeps you safe from a love you’re not ready to receive.”

I pressed pause. Played it back. Let those words settle into my body.

A love you’re not ready to receive.

From that, I thought about my parents. How I’ve watched them my entire life, this strange choreography of need and distance. My mother, vibrant and overwhelming. My father, quiet and withdrawn. They take turns eclipsing each other. Some days she’s the sun and he’s the shadow. Other days, the reverse.

I’ve always wondered if they’d be happier apart. If they’d be lighter without each other. More themselves. But they stay, and there’s something in that staying that I’ve never understood. Something that terrifies me.

Because I learned love wrong. I learned it as a transaction. Be good, get warmth. Fail, get distance. Not cruelty. Just a coolness. A withdrawal of presence.

So I became good. I became beautiful and intelligent and self-aware. I became the woman everyone wants at their dinner party. Interesting. Sensual. Just unavailable enough to stay interesting.

I’ve perfected the art of being desired without being known.

Men look at me and see potential. They see beauty. They see this promising shimmer of something. But the moment I show them anything real, anything that doesn’t fit their fantasy, they disappear.

And I’ve learned to disappear first.

I think about the man from the gym. How he looks at me like I’m water and he’s been walking through a desert. How I look back. How we circle each other in this careful dance, never touching, never naming what this is.

It would be so easy to cross that line. To let him kiss me in the parking garage. To go to a hotel room and let this current finally break. To feel wanted in that animal way that makes you forget everything else.

But I don’t. Not because I’m moral. Not because I respect his marriage more than he does. But because I know what would happen after. I’d want more. I’d want him to leave her. I’d want him to choose me. And he wouldn’t. And I’d be devastated. And I’d tell myself it was about him, about his cowardice, when really it would be about me. About the fact that I keep choosing unavailable men because available ones terrify me.

Because available means visible. It means letting someone see me on the days I’m not glowing. The days I’m anxious or insecure or boring. The days I’m just a person, not a fantasy.

So I chose the impossible situation. I chose heartbreak I could predict and control. Because at least that way, when it ended, I could tell myself it was about him. About his cowardice. About circumstances.

When really, it was always about me.

And I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know if I can let someone love me without performing for them. Without earning it.

I want the kind of love my neighbour had. The committed, surrendered kind. But I don’t know if I can survive it. I don’t know if I can show someone my mess and not spend every second waiting for them to leave.

So perhaps lovelessness is the kindest option right now. Maybe it’s giving me space to stop auditioning for a role I’ve been playing since childhood. Perhaps it’s protecting me from repeating the pattern. From giving everything to someone who only wants the pretty parts.

Or probably, I’m just scared. I’m so good at being alone that I’ve romanticised it into something spiritual. Maybe I’m hiding and calling it healing.

I don’t have the answer yet. I’m still here, in my apartment, watching the city lights through my window, wondering if I’m brave enough to be ordinary with someone. To be seen without the soft lighting and the perfect angle.

All I know is this: I’d rather be alone than loved for someone I’m pretending to be. I’d rather wait than settle. I’d rather be untouched than touched wrong.

And if that means I’m not ready, then I’m not ready.

Act I: The Search

People say I’m interesting. They love how I think, how I speak, how I move through rooms like I know where I’m going. But what they really mean is: “You’re easy to admire, hard to approach.”

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I’ve built a life that looks composed - eucalyptus candles, soft light, a calm apartment that smells of quiet success. From the outside, it looks like I’ve mastered peace.

But peace can be a costume, too.

A few months ago, I started upgrading my life: better bars, finer restaurants, hotels that remember my name. I thought if I surrounded myself with people who valued quality, I’d meet people who valued connection.

That night in Jakarta, I went to three bars.
The first was too quiet: couples whispering, no room for strangers.
The second was too loud: music so heavy it drowned thought.
The third had promise: warm light, polite laughter, the pulse of possibility.

Five men approached within an hour. One forgettable. One distracted. One funny. One invasive. And one with kind eyes, expensive watch, a voice that filled the pauses. He bought me a drink I didn’t ask for.
“You look like you’re waiting for someone,” he said.
“I’m not,” I replied. But I let him believe I was.

He spoke about his startup, funding, disruption, growth. I smiled where politeness demanded. When he asked for my number, I gave him a fake one. Not because he was unkind, but because he wasn’t mine.

When he left, I realised I’d been searching for proof more than connection. Proof I still existed in the eyes of others. Proof that I could still be chosen.
But being seen isn’t the same as being known.

Act II: The Stillness

Three weeks later, I was in Bali. Alone again, at a restaurant so curated it felt unreal with a golden light at 8 p.m., handwritten menus, music that pretended to feel spontaneous.

At the next table, two women laughed over cheap wine and fried rice. Their joy wasn’t rehearsed; it just happened. Watching them, I felt something shift my emotions into envy, tenderness, longing. Not for their lives, but for their ease.

The waiter asked if I was waiting for someone.
“No,” I said. Again.

The fish was perfect. The silence wasn’t.

I realised I’d been chasing stillness by running from noise and curating calm instead of living freely. I’ve confused solitude with power. And distance with dignity. I told myself I was protecting my energy, but I was only protecting my fear.

On the other hand, there’s a man I’ve been seeing, more or less for seven dates in six months.
He calls me independent, as though it absolves him from trying harder.
He says he doesn’t want to crowd me.
I wonder if that’s his way of keeping a safe distance.

Independence looks beautiful from the outside, but sometimes it’s just exhaustion with lipstick on.

Act III: The Return

My friends live scattered across continents. London, Melbourne, Jakarta. We like each other, but we live inside different calendars now. Messages start with “miss you” and end with “let’s catch up soon.” Weeks pass. Nobody does.

I scroll through names I could reach, but my finger never taps send. Connection has become something I plan instead of feel. Every text needs a reason. Every conversation, a purpose. I want to stop calculating my sincerity.

One night, I typed: “Hey, been thinking of you.”
Then I erased it. Not because it was false - because it was vulnerable.

And that’s when I understood: I’ve spent years polishing my strength and neglecting my softness.

When thinking of nurturing connection, I used to think divine femininity was poise - the art of knowing when to walk away. Now I think it’s the courage to stay when your instinct is to run. To let life move through you - unguarded, unfiltered, alive. The sacred isn’t in control. It’s in surrender.

It could means choosing to reach out first, letting love in even when it makes you tremble, or even simly being seen, fully, without armor.

Last week, I called my mother. We talked about nothing like her plants, the weather, groceries. But it anchored me. Connection doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it just sits quietly on the line, breathing with you.

I’m learning that transcendence isn’t about rising above loneliness; it’s about letting love meet you inside it.

You know what? I’ve built a beautiful life, but forgot to leave the door open. I’ve mastered composure, but miss the mess that makes things real. I’ve created peace so still it stopped breathing.

Now, I want something living again.

I will try to understand that I don’t need perfect timing or perfect people because I just want to stop guarding my heart like it’s an artifact. To offer it anyway with imperfection, trembling, sincere. Because visibility without intimacy isn’t peace. It’s silence in a prettier dress.

I’m curious about your journey in finding your connection. Tell me
Have you ever built such a careful life that you forgot to let anyone in?