I’m a nosy bitch.

Yes. I am that person.

I need to know everything.

Not in a “fun facts” kind of way.

In a pathological way.

If there’s a conversation happening in the other room, I need to know what it’s about.

If two friends have an argument, I need both sides, the screenshots, the historical context, and preferably a short statement from any witnesses present.

If someone says, “I’ll tell you later,” I physically feel my nervous system file a complaint.

Later?

Why later?

What changes between now and later?

Why introduce the existence of information if you’re not prepared to immediately hand it over?

Someone says, “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” but I don’t hear “tomorrow.”

I hear:

There’s currently information in the world that exists everywhere except inside your head.

And suddenly tomorrow feels offensively far away.

There’s something deeply unsettling about existing beside information I don’t have access to.

It’s like walking around with an itch inside my skull.

I become restless. Distracted. Slightly less capable of being a functioning member of society.

I’m not proud of it.

But I also refuse to pretend I’m above it.

I am a nosy bitch.

I want the names.

I want the dates.

I want the motive.

I want to know what happened before, what happened after, and what everyone involved privately believes happened in between.

All information must be provided.

Every piece of data must be taken into account.

Everything has to pass through me before I can let it go.

Every story.

Every opinion.

Every contradiction.

Every tiny, seemingly irrelevant detail.

I need to digest it.

Metabolize it.

Only then does my brain allow me to move on.

Until then, the information exists like undigested food.

Just sitting there.

The thing is, I’ve started to think “nosy” might just be the cute way of describing something slightly more deranged.

Because nosy is wanting to know who went home with who after a party.

I want to know why.

Did they plan it? Was this brewing for months? Who made the first move? Did anyone else see it coming? Was alcohol involved? Have they spoken since? Are we calling this a mistake or are they getting married in Tuscany next summer?

I don’t just want the information.

I want the fucking case file.

This applies to less entertaining things too.

If someone tells me they don’t like me, I can deal with that.

But why?

When did it start?

Was there one specific incident?

Did you always secretly find me annoying?

Did you tell anyone else before you told me?

Did they agree?

Actually, who exactly have you spoken to? Let’s get everyone on a call.

I’ve realized I don’t necessarily crave certainty.

I crave completion.

Bad information doesn’t scare me nearly as much as incomplete information does.

Tell me the horrible thing.

Just tell me the whole horrible thing.

Because somewhere in my brain, I seem to have decided that knowing everything about something gives me some degree of control over it.

Which makes absolutely no sense when I say it out loud.

But unfortunately, a lot of my internal operating system doesn’t survive being said out loud.

I think I’ve always been a control freak, just not in any of the ways that would make me successful.

I don’t have a five-year plan.

I’m not particularly organized.

I have no sense of urgency.

I regularly remember something I was supposed to do three days after it would’ve been useful to remember it.

I’d actually love to have the productive version of control issues.

Mine are about people.

I like understanding them.

I notice patterns. Changes in behavior. Tone. Things people repeatedly say. Things they suddenly stop saying.

I like knowing how the people around me work.

And I think somewhere along the way I started believing that understanding people meant they couldn’t surprise me.

If I know you, really know you, then I’ll notice when something changes.

And if I notice something changing, I can figure out why.

And if I figure out why, then…

Then what?

I don’t know.

I guess nothing bad ever happens to me again.

Excellent plan.

No notes.

Except there’s one very unfortunate flaw in my little information-based security system.

Sometimes you get a feeling you can’t explain.

Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody confessed to anything. There’s no smoking gun sitting conveniently on the kitchen table.

You just notice something.

A shift.

Something small enough that saying it out loud would make you sound slightly insane.

So you tell yourself you’re imagining it.

You tell yourself you’re doing that thing women are constantly accused of doing, finding meaning where there isn’t any, connecting dots that were never supposed to form a picture.

And sometimes you almost convince yourself.

Until curiosity wins.

Until you go looking for information.

And you fucking find it.

That’s the part nobody really prepares you for.

Not the finding something part.

The being right part.

That tiny, deeply irritating voice somewhere inside you going:

I fucking knew it.

I hate that voice.

I hate her because now she has credibility.

I’d actually like to resign from the “trust your intuition” community.

Effective immediately.

People love intuition.

Especially female intuition.

The internet talks about it like women have a small FBI agent living somewhere between the uterus and the lower intestine.

Trust your gut.

Your body knows.

If something feels off, it probably is.

Okay.

Very empowering.

Personally, I’d occasionally like my body to know absolutely fucking nothing.

I’d like my intuition to take PTO.

I’d like to get a weird feeling, investigate it, and discover that I’m dramatic, irrational and deeply in need of a hobby.

Do you know how peaceful it’d be to be wrong?

I want to gather my evidence. Present my case. Call my witnesses.

And then I want the judge to look through the entire file and say:

“Ma’am, none of this means anything.”

Oh my God.

Thank you, Your Honor.

Case dismissed.

I’ll go home.

But every once in a while, intuition does the most irritating thing imaginable.

It turns out to be right.

And nothing radicalizes a nosy bitch quite like finding something.

Because now what am I supposed to do with that?

The next time my brain tells me something feels weird, I’m supposed to tell it to relax?

It has evidence now.

It has precedent.

It has a previous case it won.

My source?

Female intuition.

I can already hear it.

Remember last time?

Shut up.

No, seriously. Remember last time?

YES.

And I think that’s the part I’m struggling with.

Finding something painful is one thing.

Having to find it is another.

Because there’s the information itself, and then there’s the realization that the information existed before you knew it did.

Someone else knew.

Maybe multiple people knew.

You didn’t.

And there’s something about someone deciding for you what information you’re better off not having that makes the whole thing worse.

Especially when that information belongs to your life too.

I don’t want someone else making the executive decision that ignorance would be kinder to me.

Maybe it would be.

That’s still not your call.

I think I can handle almost anything if you tell me yourself.

And maybe that’s an insane amount of confidence to have in my own emotional stability, but let me worry about that.

Hurt my feelings.

Make me uncomfortable.

Tell me something I’m going to hate.

Tell me something that’ll make me ask seventeen follow-up questions and then stare at the ceiling for three business days.

Just don’t make me discover it.

How I react to the truth is my problem.

Telling me the truth is yours.

I don’t want to find things.

I want to be told things.

Don’t tell me everything so I can control you.

Tell me everything so I don’t have to investigate you.

Those are very different things.

My ideal scenario isn’t becoming incredibly good at finding out what people are hiding.

That sounds fucking miserable.

My ideal scenario is having relationships where I don’t have to.

I don’t want access to become a substitute for transparency.

I want the opposite.

I want enough transparency that access becomes irrelevant.

I want to know that I don’t have to look because if there were something I needed to know, you’d tell me.

Even if it hurts me.

Even if you know I’ll hate it.

Even if it would be infinitely easier for you if I never knew.

Tell me anyway.

I need partnership.

I need transparency.

I need to know that the people closest to me aren’t privately deciding which truths I can and can’t handle.

I’d rather you sit me down and ruin my fucking Tuesday.

At least then we’re ruining it together.

Because once I have to find something, the problem isn’t only what I know.

It’s what knowing has done to the way I don’t know.

Before, a weird feeling could just be a weird feeling.

I could dismiss it.

I could call myself dramatic and go to sleep.

Now my brain has Exhibit A sitting somewhere in storage.

And being right is terrible reinforcement for someone like me.

Because now I have to distinguish between intuition and paranoia, and I’m not entirely convinced either of them comes with a name tag.

Is this my gut?

Is this my anxiety?

Did something actually change?

Am I noticing a pattern?

Am I inventing a pattern because one time I noticed one correctly?

Am I perceptive or have I simply lost the plot?

There should be a test for this.

Unfortunately, the only test I know is finding out.

And that’s exactly what I don’t want.

There’s a difference between wanting to know everything and wanting to check everything.

I’ve always been the first one.

I never want to become the second.

Because checking sounds exhausting.

Imagine having to verify everything people tell you just to enjoy your own life.

I don’t want a second unpaid job.

I want to believe people.

I want someone to tell me something and for my brain to simply go, “Okay.”

What a luxury.

No follow-up investigation.

No internal corkboard.

No red string connecting completely unrelated events.

Just okay.

And finding out was supposed to be the part that made me feel better.

That was always the deal.

I get the information.

I process it.

I understand it.

I metabolize it.

Then I move on.

Except I’ve recently discovered that some information apparently can’t be metabolized on command.

Rude.

You can understand something and still be bothered by it.

I know this sounds painfully obvious.

It was apparently not obvious to me.

I’ve always treated understanding like the final stage of feeling something.

Once I understand why, the mystery is gone. Once the mystery is gone, my brain can put the whole thing in a little folder marked SOLVED and we can all get on with our lives.

Except sometimes you get the explanation and think:

Okay.

That makes complete sense.

I still fucking hate it.

Which has really ruined understanding for me.

Because now I know that context isn’t necessarily going to save me.

Sometimes context just gives the thing more detail.

And detail, as established, is unfortunately my favorite drug.

You find out one thing and immediately there are six new things to know.

Why?

Since when?

Was this the first time?

What happened before that?

What happened after?

Did you mean it?

Who else knows?

And my personal favorite:

Is there anything else?

That question alone could keep me employed full-time.

Because how do you ever know you know everything?

You don’t.

I hate that answer, by the way.

There’s always going to be information that exists outside of me.

People have thoughts they don’t say.

Conversations happen when I’m not there.

Things happen before I find out about them.

People understand their own motivations incorrectly all the time, so apparently even interrogating the source isn’t foolproof.

Completely unacceptable system.

Wouldn’t recommend.

And then there’s the other problem with information.

It doesn’t know how to stay where you put it.

You learn something today and suddenly it has opinions about six months ago.

Something you didn’t think twice about at the time walks back into your brain wearing a fake moustache like:

Well, now that we know this…

No.

Absolutely not.

That memory has already been processed.

The office is closed.

But your brain starts reopening things anyway.

A conversation feels different.

Something someone said suddenly seems relevant.

A tiny detail you barely registered gets promoted to Evidence.

And before you know it, you’re fact-checking your own memories.

This is the part nobody mentions when they tell you the truth will set you free.

Sometimes the truth gives you homework.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that maybe I got the relationship between knowledge and control completely backwards.

I thought I wanted information because information gave me control.

But it doesn’t.

It just gives me information.

Which is an embarrassingly obvious revelation to have at my big age.

I can know why something happened and still not be able to change it.

I can understand the explanation perfectly and still wish there’d never been anything to explain.

I can have every single detail I begged for and still sit there thinking:

Great.

Now what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?

Maybe that’s what I actually hate about not knowing.

It forces me to admit how little control I have over anything that happens outside of me.

I can’t know every conversation.

I can’t predict every person.

I can’t investigate my way into never being surprised again.

And, more importantly, I don’t want to.

I don’t want being right once to turn me into someone who’s suspicious forever.

I don’t want to become someone who treats every strange feeling like the beginning of an investigation.

I don’t want to be good at finding things.

I want to feel safe enough that I don’t have to look.

Which is probably the lesson here.

Or at least it would be if I were the kind of person who learned lessons.

Because after all of this, after discovering that knowing doesn’t necessarily make me feel better, that intuition being right can be its own little curse, that information creates more information and that sometimes understanding something changes absolutely nothing…

Would I rather not know?

No.

Not even a little bit.

This is embarrassing.

I’d love to end this essay by announcing that ignorance is bliss and I’m finally choosing peace.

I’m not.

If you put two doors in front of me and told me one had a beautiful lie behind it and the other had an ugly truth, I’d ask why you’re being so dramatic and then open the ugly one.

Obviously.

I may hate the information.

I may wish it were different.

I may spend an unreasonable amount of time metabolizing it.

I may even miss the version of myself who existed five minutes before I knew it.

But I’d still rather know.

I just don’t want to have to find out alone.

Maybe that’s control.

Maybe it’s curiosity.

Maybe it’s self-preservation.

Maybe it’s ego.

Maybe it’s just what I think closeness is supposed to look like.

It’s probably some deeply inconvenient cocktail of all five.

I don’t know.

And as you can imagine, that’s already bothering me.

I’m a nosy bitch.

And unfortunately, now I have one more thing to figure out.

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I have a very high tolerance for disrespect from people I’ve wronged.

Not everyone. Just the people I’ve hurt.

If a stranger calls me out of my name, we’re done.

If a friend disrespects me for no reason, I’ll probably never speak to them again.

But if it’s someone I’ve betrayed?

It’s different.

Because every insult feels like interest on a debt I created.

Every cruel comment.

Every public jab.

Every moment they make me uncomfortable.

Some part of me just thinks,

Fair enough.

I’ve been sitting with this thought for a while because lately I’ve been expecting someone I’ve wronged to start saying some… less than flattering things about me.

It hasn’t happened. Yet.

At least, not that I know of.

But I’ve been waiting for it.

Not anxiously.

More like you’d wait for a bill you know is coming.

You don’t want it to arrive.

You just know it probably will.

And honestly?

I don’t even think I’d defend myself.

I’d probably just nod.

Maybe even throw in a,

“Yeah… that’s valid.”

Which made me realize something.

I think the people we hurt deserve free passes.

Not unlimited ones.

I’m not saying you get to burn my house down because I forgot to water your plants in 2018.

(Although if I cheated on you… honestly, I’d probably help you find the lighter.)

But if I shattered your world?

Yeah.

I think you’ve earned the right to be a little unreasonable.

Pain has never made anyone eloquent.

People don’t discover they’ve been betrayed and immediately start speaking like they’re delivering a conflict resolution TedTalk.

Sometimes they scream.

Sometimes they insult you.

Sometimes they say things they don’t even mean.

And maybe…

Maybe they’re entitled to that.

At least for a while.

I’ve never understood guilty people who immediately start drawing boundaries.

Tell me you’ve never watched someone get caught cheating and, halfway through the argument, suddenly become deeply invested in respectful communication.

“Okay, but don’t call me names.”

“I know I lied, but don’t bring my family into this.”

“I know I hurt you, but don’t yell.”

Really?

That’s where we’re drawing the line?

You had a whole secret relationship but your bald headed momma is where we collectively decided to protect people’s feelings?

Be serious.

People will burn your house down and then ask you to lower your voice because yelling is triggering.

I’m sorry…

but watch your tone?

I get it.

Nobody wants to be the villain forever.

Even guilty people want dignity.

Especially guilty people.

But I wonder if we rush to reclaim it.

If we’re so eager to stop feeling guilty that we accidentally start policing the emotions of the person we hurt.

As if heartbreak has HR guidelines.

As if betrayal comes with a customer satisfaction survey.

I think the immediate aftermath belongs to the person who got hurt.

Not me.

But here’s where I lose people.

Because I also think there’s a line.

I just have absolutely no idea where it is.

When does the debt end?

Consequences make sense. Punishment makes sense. Anger makes sense.

But at what point does accountability quietly become vengeance?

And who gets to decide?

The guilty person?

The person who was hurt?

Time?

Or, to put it in other terms…

When do we stop collecting the debt…

and start charging interest for fun?

The hardest part isn’t being insulted.

It’s not knowing when I’m allowed to feel insulted.

And how long I’m supposed to shut the fuck up.

Because if someone I hurt humiliates me…

Can I be upset? Or does being upset somehow erase what I did?

Am I asking for grace I never gave them?

The moment you’re the guilty one, your moral compass changes.

You stop asking whether someone’s being fair.

You start asking whether you’ve earned it.

Every mean thing you say?

Fair enough.

Every passive-aggressive TikTok repost?

Fair enough.

Every subtweet?

Sure.

Every insult becomes another installment.

Every curse word feels like interest on a debt that’s still collecting.

But I wish guilt came with a receipt.

Imagine how much easier life would be.

Outstanding Balance

• 3 insults

• 1 public humiliation

• ½ a podcast episode

• 2 TikTok reposts

Balance Remaining: ???

Great.

See you next Tuesday.

Because after a while, I genuinely want an itemized receipt.

Seriously. How much do I still owe?

Because I have a sneaking suspicion we’re charging late fees now.

Every time I think,

“Okay… this one felt a little unnecessary.”

I remember I don’t really get to object.

My lawyer has advised me to shut the fuck up.

So I do.

I swallow it.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Until eventually another thought creeps in.

Your Honor…

they’re dragging it.

Not because I didn’t do it.

I did.

But surely we’ve moved past accountability and entered the era of recreational humiliation.

When do I get to match your disrespect?

When do I get to come down from my heels?

When am I entitled to throwing salt back into your wound?

Because I, too, can be a bitch.

Truthfully, that’s probably what got us into this mess in the first place.

The difference is that guilt has made me remarkably well-behaved.

Every time I think,

“That was unnecessary.”

Another voice reminds me,

“So was what you did.”

And just like that…

I swallow it.

Again.

I stretch that boundary line much farther than most people would.

I stomach a lot.

Probably more than I should.

Because every time I think I’ve reached my limit…

I remember theirs was much smaller.

But it has to end somewhere.

Right?

At what point do we stop balancing the scales…

and start tipping them in the opposite direction?

Somewhere along the way, justice quietly became character assassination.

Parents do this.

Children do this.

Friends do this.

Exes do this.

We all have different expiration dates for punishment.

Some people think one sincere apology resets everything.

Others think once you’ve crossed a line, you’re permanently indebted.

Neither side ever agrees.

Maybe this is where I’m different.

I think if I’ve shattered your world, you get a grace period.

I think you get to hate me.

I think you get to drag me to your friends.

I think you get to say things that aren’t entirely fair.

I think you get to embarrass me.

I think you get to be messy.

Because pain is messy.

What I don’t think…

is that the grace period lasts forever.

At some point, I become a person again.

Not an innocent person.

Not a victim.

Just… a person.

Someone who’s still guilty.

But still worthy of basic respect.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to say this whole time.

Hate me.

But watch your mouth.

God.

Listen to me.

That’s exactly the kind of sentence a guilty person would say.

Maybe that’s why this question is so difficult.

Every answer I come up with sounds suspiciously convenient for me.

There has to be a point where someone sends me an email.

A certificate.

Something.

Congratulations. Your emotional debt has officially been paid in full. You may now defend yourself without looking like an asshole.

Until then…

How am I supposed to know?

If I’ve wronged you, I lose the right to dictate how you react.

But you don’t lose the responsibility for who you become because of what I did.

Maybe that’s the line.

Or maybe it isn’t.

I don’t know.

I just wish that somewhere between justice and revenge…

between accountability and hostage-taking…

someone would tell me when the debt has finally been paid.

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This week I watched Obsession.

And before anyone says anything, yes, I know I’m late.

The movie came out last year. So the think pieces have been written. The tweets have been tweeted. The Letterboxd reviews have been Letterboxd-ed.

But it only came out in Lisbon this month. So now it’s my turn. Bear with me.

Ok so what I expected was a horror movie.

But what I got was a nearly two-hour cautionary tale about what happens when an average man develops a crush and starts treating it like a religious experience.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know I already have some thoughts about “good men.”

Obsession did not improve them.

But not because the movie is about a bad man.

That’s the thing. Bear isn’t particularly evil.

He’s not a criminal mastermind. He’s not a manipulative billionaire. He doesn’t have a secret family in another state. He doesn’t even have enough charisma to qualify as a red flag.

He’s just a guy.

A lonely guy.

And maybe that’s what unsettled me so much.

Because women are constantly warned about dangerous men.

We’re taught to look out for the obvious villains. The aggressive ones. The controlling ones. The men who punch walls and make your friends nervous.

Nobody really prepares you for the guy who just likes you a little too much.

The guy who remembers every detail you’ve ever mentioned.

The guy who looks at you like you’ve personally invented happiness.

The guy who has known you for six weeks but somehow speaks about you with the confidence of a man who helped raise you.

The guy who isn’t dangerous.

Until he is.

And I think that’s why Obsession got under my skin.

The movie understands something women learn embarrassingly early in life: being desired and being known are not the same thing.

In fact, sometimes they’re opposites.

Some of the men who want you most have absolutely no interest in who you actually are.

They’re in love with a version of you they’ve assembled from scraps.

A smile. A shared joke. An Instagram story.

Three conversations and a frightening amount of imagination.

By the time they tell you they love you, they’ve spent so much time with the fictional version of you that the real one barely matters.

And that’s exactly what makes Bear scary.

Not the supernatural stuff. Not the horror. The projection.

Because every woman watching this movie has met a Bear.

Maybe not one willing to make a wish at a magical tree.

But definitely one who decided she was his soulmate before learning her last name.

You know the type.

The man who mistakes compatibility for destiny.

The man who mistakes kindness for chemistry.

The man who mistakes his feelings for your responsibility.

Women know this archetype so well that we have entire group chats dedicated to identifying him.

Sometimes the warning signs are subtle.

Sometimes they’re not.

Sometimes it’s excessive eye contact.

Sometimes it’s “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

Sometimes it’s a playlist.

God help us all when it’s a playlist.

Nothing good has ever followed the sentence, “I made this and thought of you.”

Especially if we’ve only known each other for twelve business days.

There’s something uniquely unsettling about realizing someone has built an entire emotional infrastructure around your existence and forgot to ask whether you’d like to live there.

And what Obsession gets right, maybe better than any horror movie I’ve seen in a while, is that obsession rarely feels dangerous in the beginning.

It feels flattering. That’s the trap.

Nobody gets stalked by someone they immediately identify as a threat.

Nobody gets consumed by someone they instantly fear.

It starts with attention. Then admiration. Then investment.

Then one day you realize this person isn’t responding to who you are.

They’re responding to a character they’ve written and cast you in.

At which point you’re no longer a person.

You’re a solution. A fantasy. A cure.

And there is nothing more terrifying than being treated like the answer to a question you never asked.

The older I get, the less impressed I am by intensity.

I used to think the highest form of love was being chosen above everyone else.

Now I think the highest form of love is being seen accurately.

Not worshipped. Not obsessed over. Not turned into someone’s personal religion.

Just known.

Which is why Bear terrified me.

Because he’s familiar.

And if horror movies are supposed to reveal our deepest fears, then Obsession succeeded.

There’s one scene I haven’t stopped thinking about.

Not the jump scares. Not the violence. Not even Nikki smashing through the window.

The scene where Bear is sitting outside talking to Sarah.

The whole time, you know Nikki is coming.

You know something awful is about to happen.

And yet somehow it’s one of the warmest scenes in the entire movie.

For a brief moment, Bear is having the exact thing he claims to want.

Connection.

Sarah sees him. She talks to him. Challenges him. Treats him like a real person.

And what struck me most is that Sarah seems to know more about Nikki than Bear ever did.

She knows about her family. Her life. Her history.

Bear knows almost nothing.

In fact, one of the most frustrating things about Bear is how little curiosity he has about Nikki, the girl he claims to love soooo much.

He wants proximity to her.

He wants access to her.

He wants to be chosen by her.

But he rarely seems interested in the boring, unglamorous work of actually knowing her.

Which is a difficult thing to admit about a man who’s supposedly in love.

The movie keeps giving Bear opportunities to connect with actual people.

And every single time, he chooses the fantasy instead.

That’s what makes the final jump scare so effective.

It’s not interrupting a romance.

It’s interrupting the closest thing the movie has to genuine intimacy.

Because I don’t think my worst nightmare is a dangerous man.

I think it’s a perfectly ordinary one deciding I’m the meaning of his life.

Unfortunately, my thoughts on Obsession quickly turned into thoughts about my own dating history, which is how most things end around here.

Because the truth is, Bear didn’t scare me because he was unrealistic.

He scared me because I’ve met versions of him before.

And if you’ve ever wondered why I approach self-proclaimed “nice guys” with the caution of a Victorian woman encountering a wolf in the woods, this is probably a good place to start…

Read more

I’ve been thinking a lot about how there are at least three versions of me walking around at all times.

There’s the one I see in the mirror.
The one people interact with in real life.
And then… whatever the hell shows up in photos.

And I don’t think those three people have ever met each other.

Because I don’t know when we all collectively agreed to pretend that cameras are an accurate representation of reality, but they’re not. And I think we all know that. We joke about angles and lighting and “this side is my good side,” but at the same time we’ll let one bad picture ruin our entire mood like it’s official documentation.

Like that’s it. That’s the evidence. That’s who you are now. Case closed.

Which is insane.

And I’m not even joking, this feels like a case for the FBI.

Because explain to me why I can look in the mirror and think, okay… this is manageable. This is a face I recognize. This is someone I’ve been living as for years.

And then the back camera opens and suddenly I’m looking at a woman who has never known peace?????

Like who is she?

Why does she look like she just got caught doing something illegal?

Why is one eye doing its own thing?

Why is my face shaped like that from this angle?

And why does it change every single time?

That’s the part that really gets me.

Because if I looked bad consistently, I could work with that. That’s data. That’s something I can study, adapt to, grow from.

But no.

Sometimes I look like myself.
Sometimes I look better than I expected.
And sometimes I look like a distant cousin who wasn’t invited to the main storyline.

There is no system. No logic. Just vibes and betrayal.

This betrayal has led me to FaceApp.

And I say this as someone who used to be deeply, morally against editing photos.

Like I was an editing hater.
But an ethical one, of course.

I used to think if you don’t look good the moment the camera shutters, then… that’s between you and God. Accept it. Grow from it. Build character. Maybe stick to being kind or funny.

No retakes. No adjustments. No “let me fix the lighting.”
Just raw, unfiltered truth.

Very noble of me.

Very stupid, in hindsight.

Because the truth is, cameras are not neutral. They are not honest. They take someone who is alive, moving, layered, constantly adjusting… and flatten them into a single frame taken at the worst possible moment with lighting that feels personal.

And suddenly that’s supposed to represent you.

That’s what I have an issue with.

Because I don’t hate how I look.
I hate how I look on camera.

I can leave the house feeling completely fine, like okay… this is working. This is a version of myself I recognize.

And then someone takes a picture of me and I’m introduced to a completely new person. Someone I’ve never met. Someone who looks like she’s been caught mid-thought, mid-blink, mid-life crisis.

And the worst part is how inconsistent it is.

And sometimes I look like I was accidentally cast in someone else’s life.

Group pictures make it worse, because now it’s not just you. It’s you next to other people who somehow look exactly like themselves. Like their camera understands them on a personal level.

Meanwhile mine feels… malicious.

And don’t even get me started on other people taking your photos.

There’s something about not being in control of the camera that immediately ruins everything. The angle is wrong, the timing is off, the lighting becomes aggressive, and suddenly you’re seeing yourself from a perspective you never asked for.

And they’ll show you the picture like “this is so cute” and you just have to sit there and process it in silence.

Because what do you even say?

“Thank you, but I don’t identify with her”?

So yes, I used to be an editing hater.

But now I think I was just misunderstanding the problem.

Because I don’t actually want to look different.

I’m not trying to become a new version of myself or edit myself into someone unrecognizable. I just want the photo to reflect what I actually look like in real life. I want it to match the version of me that I recognize.

And those are not the same thing.

So lately, instead of immediately accepting whatever the camera decides to do to me, I’ve been… experimenting.

Nothing dramatic. Just small things to understand how I translate on camera.

I started playing around with FaceApp, mostly out of curiosity, and realized it’s less about “editing” and more about understanding how different details actually show up in photos.

I didn’t go crazy with it, just used the remover tool to get a man out of my background (sorry to him), kept Smooth Skin on level 1, eyelashes on level 2, and the Hollywood preset on level 1 to subtly brighten things, even out the lighting, and make everything look a little more put together without it feeling like too much.

It still feels like me and not a completely different person.

Not to change myself. Just to understand how I’m being captured.

I tried it again on a closer photo of my friend Cassy (shoutout to my girl for letting me use her image for the sake of science), mostly because I needed proof that it’s not just me vs my camera beef, and kept it pretty light.

I used Volume on level 3, eyelashes on level 4, andSmooth Skin on level 2, just enough to make everything look a little more put together without crossing into “who is that?” territory.

Because the issue was never “I don’t look good enough.”

The issue was that I was letting one bad photo decide that for me.

And I’m not doing that anymore.

Not because I suddenly believe in perfection, but because I’ve realized there’s a difference between changing how you look and correcting how you’re being represented.

And I think I deserve at least a fair representation. At the very least.

Because I don’t need to look better.

I just need the camera to stop lying on my name.

If you’ve ever been personally victimized by your phone camera or if you’ve ever looked at a photo and thought “that’s not me,” you’ll get it.

You can try it here:
https://faceapp.com/get/5pn5f

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I’ve been sitting on a thought that makes me sound like a terrible person, but unfortunately, it’s also true… and rooted in lived experience.

Sometimes… when I hate my friend’s significant other, I start to hate my friend a little bit too.

Not instantly. I’m not evil. It’s a slow burn. A quiet shift. Subtle. At first, it’s just confusion.

Like… him?

That’s who you picked?

Out of everyone?

Interesting.

And I try to be normal about it. I really do. I listen to the audios. I nod at the stories. I act like I don’t see the red flags waving. And I pretend I don’t hear the subtle insanity laced into every “but he didn’t mean it like that.”

I tell myself love is blind. I tell myself it’s not my relationship. I tell myself people act different when they’re in love. And who am I to judge? Maybe I just don’t get him.

But then time passes. And patterns emerge.

And it keeps happening.

And suddenly it’s not about him anymore.

It’s about you.

Because now I’ve seen you act in ways that don’t make sense to me.

I’ve seen you rearrange your personality like furniture to make space for someone who, in my humble opinion, should not even be in the building.

And that’s when something in my brain snaps a little.

Because it stops being “ugh, I don’t like her boyfriend” and starts becoming:

how can you love… him?

Like gurl cmon I’m watching you do things that don’t align with the version of you I know.

I’m watching you defend things that would’ve made you gag six months ago.

I’m watching you shrink, accommodate, explain.

And I’m sitting there like… oh.

So this is who you are when you like him.

And I don’t know if I like her.

There’s a very specific frustration that comes from watching a smart, funny, self-aware woman act absolutely stupid in a relationship.

And I don’t even mean stupid in a mean way. I mean stupid in a “I know you’re better than this” way.

Like I’ve seen you do critical thinking in real time. I’ve watched you read people for filth. I’ve watched you clock situations with surgical precision.

So why is your brain suddenly buffering?

Why are we lagging?

And I know that sounds harsh. It is harsh. But stay with me.

There’s this one friend I have, someone I genuinely love, who got into a relationship and just… lost all sense.

Like I’m watching her say things and I’m thinking, this cannot be the same girl I used to debrief life with at 3am.

She’s moving like someone who has never been embarrassed before.

And it’s not even about the guy being objectively awful. It’s the way she becomes around him. The way she explains things. The way she tolerates things. The way she prioritizes him.

It makes me look at her differently.

Not in a “I’m better than you” way. More in a “wait… who are you?” way.

And then there’s the other kind. The worse category.

The boyfriend that is so aggressively mediocre it feels like a social experiment.

Not evil. Not toxic. Just… nothing.

A placeholder man.

A “he’s just there” man.

And somehow, my friend is in love. Deeply. Passionately. Building a life around him.

Defending him like he’s a misunderstood genius when he has the emotional range of a fucking teacup.

I don’t even hate him as a person. I hate what he represents.

You know that feeling when someone’s personality is just… filler?

Like if he disappeared, nothing in the ecosystem would change?

And I’m sitting there like… there has to be something about you that I’m missing.

I’m trying so hard not to be that friend, but internally I’m doing full equations.

Because math is math. PEMDAS and shit. Combining like terms. Something is not adding up.

Because what do you mean you see something in him?

What do you mean I just “don’t get it”?

You’re right. I don’t. And I don’t think I want to.

The worst part is… it doesn’t stay contained.

It starts leaking.

Because your partner is not just some random person in your life. They’re a reflection of you. Not entirely, but enough.

Enough that I start questioning things.

Your standards. Your self-worth. Your taste.

And that feels dramatic, but be honest.

How can I watch you love a disposable character and not start wondering what part of you connects with that?

Like there has to be something there.

Something I’m not seeing.

And now I’m side-eyeing you.

Which is so unfair. I know it is.

And crazy, because we’ve been friends for years.

YEARS.

We are cut from the same cloth.

You and I have done life together.

We have shared opinions. Shared experiences. Shared levels of discernment.

So when you pick someone that feels so… off-brand, I’m not just confused.

I’m personally offended.

Because what do you mean THIS is your type?

Where was I when this was decided?

Was there a meeting?

Minutes?

A group chat I missed?

I start wanting to hang out with her less, because I know he’ll come up in conversation.

Or worse, he’ll come in person.

And now I have to sit across from someone I fundamentally do not respect and act like I don’t think he’s a placeholder in her life.

And just when I think it can’t get worse, it does.

Because it’s not just about me not liking him.

Sometimes… he doesn’t like me.

And ok. Let’s not make everything about me. Let’s generalize.

It’s even worse when your friend’s boyfriend doesn’t like you.

Or doesn’t like her friends in general.

Because now we’ve entered a whole new layer of insanity.

More times than not, I’m on the receiving end of this.

And I’m not saying I’m perfect. I’m not saying every man should automatically love me. I get it. Personalities clash.

But what confuses me is the logic.

Why do you hate your girlfriend’s friends? HOW?

Why are you beefing with the people she chose?

Why are you acting like we’re randoms?

We’re not randoms. We are curated. We are vetted.

We are long-term investments.

We are YEARS of inside jokes, emotional support, questionable decisions, and character development.

You just got here.

So the hostility is… interesting.

And this might lead you to think I’m talking about, like, relationship-adjacent behavior.

You know, partying too much, single girl habits, idk, things that might realistically clash with a relationship.

But nope. I’m talking about the normal things.

Existing. Having opinions. Being close to your friend.

Suddenly everything is a problem.

We hang out too much. We talk too much. We’re “influencing” her.

Influencing her to do what? Be herself?

And let me be clear. I am an ethical hater.

I don’t hate for sport. I don’t hate blindly. I don’t hate people for being imperfect.

I hate with reason. With structure. With evidence. My hate is peer-reviewed.

If I don’t like your boyfriend, it’s not because he’s awkward or quiet or not my vibe.

It’s because something is off.

Something in the way he speaks to you. Or about you.

Something in the way you move around him.

Something in the way your light dims just a little bit when he enters or leaves the room.

I’m not saying I’m always right. But I’m rarely confused.

And the craziest part is how this shows up in real life.

It’s the group dinner where he barely acknowledges anyone and you laugh it off like it’s a personality trait.

It’s the night out where you leave early because “he doesn’t like those environments” and suddenly neither do you.

It’s the voice note where you spend 10 minutes explaining his behavior and 2 seconds admitting it hurt you.

It’s the soft launch where we all have to pretend we don’t see him so we don’t say anything negative.

It’s the way your phone is always face down now.

The way you check it mid-conversation.

The way you’re physically present but mentally somewhere else.

And I clock it all.

Quietly. Respectfully. Judgmentally.

And this is where my feminist rant starts loading in the background.

Because there’s something very convenient about a dynamic where a woman slowly distances herself from her friends because her boyfriend “doesn’t like them.”

It’s never loud. It’s never explicit. But suddenly she’s less available.

Less present. Less… herself. And now I’m not just annoyed.

I’m watching something happen in real time that I don’t like.

And it makes me resent both of them.

Him, for obvious reasons.

And her, because… why are you allowing this?

Why are you co-signing this quiet isolation?

And I’ve tried to be the good friend. The supportive one. The one who says “as long as you’re happy.”

But what if I don’t believe you are?

Or worse… what if you are?

What if you’re genuinely happy with someone I find deeply unimpressive?

What does that say about you?

And now we’re in dangerous territory, because I start questioning your taste. Your standards. Your self-perception.

And I hate that.

I hate that I’m doing character analysis on my own friends like this is a case study.

But it’s hard not to.

Because relationships reveal things.

They expose your blind spots. Your insecurities. The things you’re willing to tolerate. The version of yourself you’re willing to become to be loved.

And sometimes… I don’t like what I see.

And here’s the part where I check myself.

Because if I’m being honest, I’ve been that friend too. I am her.

The girl making excuses. The girl saying “you just don’t get him.”

The girl choosing someone in a way that probably made my friends look at me like I’d lost the plot.

So maybe this isn’t about superiority.

Maybe it’s about recognition. Or fear.

Because I know what it looks like from the inside.

And now I’m seeing it from the outside.

Because watching your friends accept less than what you think they deserve forces you to confront what you’ve accepted.

Or what you might accept in the future.

And that’s uncomfortable.

So I don’t cut my friends off. I don’t start fights. I don’t stage interventions.

Still… I can’t lie.

Sometimes I do pull away. I just… pull back. Slightly. Quietly.

Not dramatically. Not in a friendship-ending way.

Just… slightly.

A little less available. A little less invested.

Enough to protect how I see them.

Because it’s hard to feel close to someone when you feel like you’re watching them live in a reality you don’t respect.

And maybe that’s the real problem.

Not the boyfriend. Not even her choices.

But the quiet shift in perception.

The moment you realize you don’t see your friend the same way anymore.

And you don’t know if that’s a temporary phase…

Or if this is just who she is when she’s in love.

And if it is… you’re not sure how much you like her.

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I think it’s a bit crazy how much I value respect in theory.

Like if you asked me, I’d say it’s non-negotiable. Essential. The bare minimum. I’d probably even get a little passionate about it, like I’ve personally been appointed spokesperson for self-worth.

I’d say things like “know your worth” and actually mean it. I’d nod when other people say it. I’d even repost it, which is arguably the highest level of commitment.

And then in practice… I get a lot more flexible.

Not in a dramatic way. I’m not out here making obviously terrible decisions, ruining my life, embarrassing myself publicly. It’s much quieter than that, which somehow makes it worse.

It’s more like I slowly adjust.

I bend a little. Then a little more. Nothing that feels serious enough to stop over. Nothing that makes me go, oh this is unacceptable, I need to leave immediately. It’s all very reasonable in the moment.

I understand. I’m chill. I don’t make things a big deal.

Which sounds like a personality trait until you realize it’s also a strategy.

Because if nothing is a big deal, then nothing has to change.

And for a while, I’m fine with that. More than fine, actually. I settle into it.

I can take something that would normally bother me and just… reframe it. Downplay it. Give it context. Add nuance. Suddenly it’s not that bad, it makes sense, it’s complicated, it’s situational, it’s fine.

I make it make sense. I convince myself that I’m just being easygoing, adaptable, mature even.

And I’m really good at that. Like, impressively good. Everything is fine.

God I hate how convincing I can be.

I deserve an award for how well I can make things fine.

The problem is, at some point, I still expect… something.

Not even anything crazy. Not a grand gesture. Not consistency, necessarily. Just a certain level of care. Consideration. Respect.

And that’s when it gets a bit embarrassing.

Because I have to sit there and ask myself, very seriously, where exactly I thought that was going to come from.

Like genuinely. From where?

It’s not like I was promised anything. It’s not like I set a clear standard and watched it get ignored. That would almost be easier to deal with. At least then I could be mad. At least then I could blame someone.

But no. It’s worse than that.

I adjusted first.

I made things comfortable. I made things easy. I made things… flexible.

And now I’m surprised that everything around me is just as flexible.

There’s something very humbling about realizing you’re not being disrespected in some grand, cinematic way. No one is going out of their way to mistreat you. There’s no villain, no betrayal, no shocking reveal.

You’re just… operating in a space where respect was never required to begin with.

And you agreed to that.

Willingly. Casually. Repeatedly. Almost impressively.

I think that’s the part that bothers me. Not what happens but how well I adapted to it.

How quickly I can take something that doesn’t fully align with me and just… make it fit.

I don’t even fight it that much. I notice it, sure. I have moments where I step outside of it and go, this is a bit insane. Funny even.

And then I go right back

Like awareness alone should be enough to fix it.

It’s not.

If anything, awareness just makes it more annoying. Because now I can’t even pretend I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll literally catch myself in the middle of justifying something and think, wow… this is a wild thing to be okay with.

And then continue being okay with it.

Which feels like a personality flaw, but in a very low-maintenance way.

I think that’s why it’s so easy to stay in situations like this. Nothing feels bad enough. There’s no breaking point. No dramatic moment where everything collapses and forces you to leave.

It’s just a slow accumulation of things that don’t sit right, but also don’t sit wrong enough.

So you stay.

And you adapt.

And you tell yourself you’re just being understanding, or easygoing, or emotionally intelligent. Which sounds a lot better than saying you’re slowly lowering your standards in real time.

But then you still expect to be treated like you didn’t.

That’s the part I can’t wrap my head around.

How can I expect something I’ve been quietly negotiating down?

Not demanding, not enforcing. Just… lowering, little by little, until it fits the space I’m in.

It’s like I want the outcome of having strong boundaries without actually having to enforce them.

But I’m starting to think it doesn’t work like that.

I think it’s a lot more literal. A lot less philosophical.

I think it shows up where it’s enforced. And disappears where it’s not.

I keep saying I want respect like it’s something that appears once you’ve decided you deserve it. Like it’s a reward for having standards somewhere in your personality, even if you’re not actively using them.

Like it’s based on intention.

It’s not.

It’s based on what you allow.

Which is slightly unfortunate for me, because I seem to have a habit of making it optional and then being surprised when people treat it that way.

I seem to allow a lot. Not everything. I do have limits. They’re just… further than I thought they were.

Or maybe they move. LOL

That’s actually worse.

Because it means my standards aren’t fixed, they’re responsive. They depend on how much I want something. How comfortable I’ve gotten. How inconvenient it would be to walk away.

And that makes everything feel a bit unstable.

Because if my standards can move, then what exactly are they anchored to?

I don’t think I’m confused.

I think I just have a very high tolerance for things that don’t fully sit right with me, as long as they don’t feel bad enough to leave.

And maybe that’s worse.

Because it’s not chaos. It’s not a mistake I can dramatically exit and learn from. It’s not even a story I can tell in a clean, satisfying way.

It’s just me, consistently, choosing something that requires less from other people… and then quietly wishing they’d give more anyway.

I say I want respect.

And I do.

I just might want it in theory a lot more than I require it in practice.

And I don’t know which version of that is actually me.

Or worse—

I don’t know if they’re both me, and I just switch between them depending on what’s more convenient.

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Long time no see.

I miss this. I miss you guys. I miss oversharing in peace.

Unfortunately, the opps discovered my little corner of the internet and now I have to think before I speak, which is honestly against my brand.

Writing anything that isn’t fully real feels dishonest, and if I can’t be real, what are we even doing here?

I’m figuring it out though. Slowly. Dramatically.

I also have a uni test in 30 minutes and instead of studying I’m here… spiraling and publishing this.

So that should tell you everything you need to know about where I’m at mentally.

Pray for me.

Bear with me.

Ly

There’s something uniquely cruel about a guy who does everything right.

He’s good. In the unremarkable, steady, makes-you-feel-safe way. He texts back. He listens. He remembers things I mention once and never repeat. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t disappear. He doesn’t make me guess.

He loves me plainly. Earnestly. Without theatrics.
And I wish I loved him the way he loves me.

That sentence alone makes me feel horrible.

If he were careless, this would be easy. If he were inconsistent, emotionally unavailable, vaguely allergic to commitment, I’d already be gone.
I’m very good at leaving when guys give me reasons. I have a well rehearsed exit strategy for bad behavior. I know exactly how to pack my dignity and go.

But what do you do with someone whose only crime is not being what you want?

There’s no socially acceptable breakup script for “you’re wonderful and it still isn’t enough.” No applause for walking away from kindness. No communal nod of understanding. Just the quiet implication that you’re broken, ungrateful, afraid of love, or secretly addicted to chaos.

Maybe all of the above.

So sometimes, in my darker and more selfish moments, I wish he would cheat on me.

Not because I want to be hurt. But because I want clarity. I want a clean reason. I want a story that makes sense to other people and to myself. I want to be able to say “of course I left” instead of “I left because the love didn’t land where it was supposed to.”

If he cheated, I could be righteously angry instead of unbearably sad. I could be betrayed instead of confused. I could be the girl who was wronged instead of the girl who simply didn’t feel it.

There’s a strange comfort in being disappointed.

Because disappointment implies expectation. It implies that you wanted the thing badly enough for its failure to matter. Right now, I’m stuck in a worse place. I’m not disappointed. I’m unmoved. And that feels far more damning.

He’s the kind of person people say you should marry. The kind your friends would defend in your absence. The kind your mother would love. The kind who makes you question your own instincts because surely, if this isn’t love, then what is?

But desire isn’t democratic. It doesn’t care about résumés. It doesn’t respond to effort alone. You can’t negotiate your way into wanting someone more. You can’t gratitude yourself into passion.

I’ve tried.

I’ve waited for the switch to flip. For the affection to deepen into hunger. For the certainty to arrive late like a delayed train. I’ve been patient with myself and unfair to him at the same time.

And the cruelest part is that he would never cheat on me. He’s not that person. He’s too decent, too consistent, too emotionally intact. Which means when I leave, I’ll have to do it without a villain. Without a scandal. Without a single screenshot to justify myself.

I’ll have to leave knowing that love, when offered freely, isn’t always received the same way.

I wanted him to be like every other guy. I wanted him to disappoint me in a familiar way. I wanted him to give me the kind of pain that feels legible, narratable, almost comforting.

But instead, he’s good. And I’m the one breaking the story.

Not all endings are caused by wrongdoings. Some things end because the love is real but asymmetrical. Because wanting someone to be enough doesn’t automatically make them enough. Because staying out of guilt is its own kind of betrayal.

There’s no villain here. Just two people loving at different volumes.

And maybe that’s harder to explain than cheating ever would be.

This can’t just be me. Right…? If everything is a universal experience, I need to know if at least a few of you have been here, staring at a perfectly good person like they’re a beautifully wrapped gift you don’t actually want but feel insane returning.

Have you ever tried to explain this out loud and immediately sounded ungrateful? Like the words themselves were betraying you? You start sentences with “they’re amazing, but…” and everyone braces. You lower your voice when you talk about them. You soften your complaints. You pre-defend them before anyone can misunderstand you.

You don’t want to make them the bad guy because that’s not what they are. And somehow that makes it worse.

It’s so easy to leave when someone hurts you. When they embarrass you. When they mess up publicly. There’s a guide for that. There’s language for that. There’s a group chat consensus and a clean emotional arc. You’re sad, then you’re angry, then you’re free.

But what do we do with the men who don’t, and we still don’t want them?

That’s where the silence is.

This is murkier.

This is leaving someone you still like. Someone you still respect. Someone you still hope does well in life. Someone you’d defend in a hypothetical argument you’ll never have again.

No one prepares you for how much guilt lives there.

So you start negotiating with yourself instead. You tell yourself that wanting more chemistry is shallow. That stability should be enough. That attraction grows. That love is a choice. That maybe this is what healthy feels like and you’re just too dramatic to recognize it.

You stay a little longer. Then a little longer than that.

And late at night, when you’re being honest in a way you’d never be out loud, you wish he’d just do something wrong. Not because you want him to suffer. But because you want permission.

Permission to leave without having to explain yourself fifteen different ways. Permission to be sad without being the villain. Permission to choose yourself without it being framed as self-sabotage.

We don’t talk enough about how many women are trapped by decency. How often we confuse being treated well with being right for each other. How kindness can turn into a cage when you stay out of guilt instead of desire.

And no, this isn’t about chasing chaos. It’s not about wanting toxic men. It’s about admitting that goodness alone isn’t compatibility. That safety isn’t the same thing as wanting. That peace without pull can still feel like absence.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can say is “this doesn’t feel right” without waiting for proof.

So if you’ve ever loved someone gently but not fully, stayed longer than you should have because leaving felt cruel, or secretly wished for a reason that would make the ending easier to explain, I see you.

You’re just honest in a world that only understands women when they’ve been wronged, not when they’ve been clear.

And maybe that’s the part we only admit to each other. Quietly. Casually. Late at night.

The kind of truth that lives in the group chat and never quite makes it into the official story.

And before anyone starts drafting think pieces in the comments, yes, I know how this sounds.

I know how bad it looks to say you wanted a good man to cheat on you. I know how ugly that sentence is when you strip it of context.
Screenshot it without the nuance and I look like a cartoon villain. Fine.

But let’s be real.

Have you ever been so bored by peace that you started resenting the person giving it to you?

Have you ever looked at someone who treated you beautifully and thought, why doesn’t this feel like anything? And then immediately hated yourself for thinking that?

Because no one tells you that being loved properly can feel suffocating when you’re not in it the same way. That being chosen gently can still feel like being chosen incorrectly.

So yes, sometimes I wanted him to mess up. Sometimes I wanted him to give me an out that didn’t require a PowerPoint presentation of my feelings. I wanted him to ruin the fantasy so I could stop pretending.

And that’s when people start diagnosing you. You must have daddy issues. You must be avoidant. You must be traumatized. You must be addicted to drama. You must be scared of healthy love.

Or maybe you just don’t want him. Which isn’t always the case. And even when it is, no one likes that answer.

So you stay. You perform gratitude. You over-explain. You convince yourself that desire is optional and that chemistry is a luxury. You start shrinking your wants until they fit inside what you’re being offered.

And the resentment creeps in quietly.

You don’t hate him. You hate yourself around him.

You hate that you feel ungrateful. You hate that you can’t reciprocate at the same volume. You hate that he’s doing everything right and you’re still mentally checking out. You hate that leaving will make you the story’s antagonist.

So yes, in those moments, cheating feels like mercy.

It feels like someone else making the decision for you. It feels like being released instead of choosing to go. It feels like being allowed to want more without being morally prosecuted for it.

And if that makes you uncomfortable, good. It should.

Because I think a lot of women are walking around in relationships they don’t actually want, held together by decency, optics, and fear of being seen as ungrateful. I think a lot of us have mistaken being treated well for being right together. I think we’ve been taught that leaving requires justification, not just truth.

Sometimes there is no lesson. No villain. No betrayal.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can admit is: nothing was wrong. I just wanted more.

And we don’t have enough stories for that. So we fantasize about worse ones.

That’s the part we don’t post. That’s the thought we swallow. That’s the sentence we only say half-joking, half-serious, to our closest friends and immediately follow with “I know that sounds insane.”

It’s not insane. It’s just impolite.

And maybe that’s why it feels so dangerous to say out loud.

And here’s the part I’m not supposed to say.

If he had cheated, leaving would’ve been easier than staying ever was.

Because staying required me to keep pretending that love is something you can grow into if you just behave correctly. That wanting someone is optional. That being chosen should be enough even when you’re not choosing back.

Cheating would’ve made him smaller. Staying made me smaller.

I didn’t want him to hurt me. I wanted him to free me from having to admit that I wasn’t moved.

I wanted a reason that would absolve me. Instead, I got the truth, which is less forgivable.

The truth is that some people can love you perfectly and still not be the person you want. And no amount of kindness makes that cruelty disappear.

The truth is that I didn’t leave because he failed me. I left because I didn’t want him enough. And that sentence is harder to live with than any betrayal.

This even had me thinking about cheating in a whole different light. What if this is why some women cheat in relationships they should’ve left?

Not because they don’t care. Not because they’re reckless or cruel. But because cheating turns an existential truth into a contained mistake?

Because “I cheated” is a confession people recognize. It’s ugly, but it’s legible. It has consequences, remorse, a beginning and an end. You can point to it and say that’s what went wrong.

“I just didn’t want him anymore” doesn’t have that luxury.

That truth doesn’t feel like a mistake. It feels like a character flaw.

The guilt of cheating is heavy, but it’s finite.

The guilt of staying with someone you don’t want is slow, shapeless, and corrosive. Infinite.

One can be apologized for.

The other just sits in your chest and eats at you.

I’m just saying I understand the math.

Because we live in a world that forgives women for doing something wrong more easily than it forgives them for wanting something different.

We talk so much about being chosen. About being loved well. About not settling.

But no one tells you how devastating it is to realize you are the one who would’ve been settling.

Jeez this one ran long. Your girl had a lot to say.
If you’re still here, thank you for listening and for letting me be honest on the internet. I love you for it.

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Envy has this strange way of pretending to be admiration. It shows up disguised as inspiration, as ambition, as that little spark that whispers why not me? But if you look closer, envy isn’t a feeling that tells you who you are. It’s a feeling that tells you who you’re not. And what you don’t know.

We tell ourselves envy is ugly. Small. Petty. A sign of a weak character or a fragile ego. We pretend we’re above it. We call it insecurity and move on.

But envy is huge. It’s curiosity with sharper teeth. It’s a confession of desire. It says “I want what you have”. Or at least what I think you have.

What makes envy dangerous is not the wanting. It’s the certainty. The confidence with which we believe we understand someone else’s life from the outside.

This thought really landed with me while I was watching the new Diddy documentary on Netflix. I grew up, like a lot of people, in awe of the machine called Hollywood. The glamour. The beauty. The money. The doors that seem to open with a whisper.
Even now part of me still looks at that world with a craving. The access. The influence. The fantasy of limitlessness.

But watching it from this angle changed everything.

Because look at the pieces people sell of themselves to live that life. Look at what is traded away quietly in exchange for proximity to power. Look at how many people arrive shining and leave hollow. Look at the silence that becomes the price of survival.

We envy outcomes and imagine they came at a discount. We see girls living the “dream”. The trips. The men. The wardrobe. The access. And forget to ask what those things demanded from them. Some of them sacrificed everything to stand in those rooms. Some of them stay alive out of habit, not desire.

We envy lifestyles without ever calculating the full cost of entry.

And then you see the other side. The part no one posts. The part that people have been forced to swallow for decades because the price of speaking is higher than the price of suffering.

It made me realize something uncomfortable: envy thrives in ignorance. It needs distance. It needs silence. It needs the illusion of a whole, beautiful life that looks effortless from the outside.

Because the closer you get, the more the fantasy disintegrates.

Some of the girls out here living the life we swear we want have lost everything to get close to it. Family. Safety. Voice. Selfhood.
And the scariest part is that from the outside it still looks like winning. It still looks aspirational. It still looks like the dream.

It’s unsettling how often we idolize people who are barely holding themselves together, but envy makes monsters look like destinations.

Envy flattens people into symbols. It removes the cost. It erases the complexity. It tells a story that feels good to believe because it’s clean and cinematic. But real life? Real life is messy, negotiated, compromised. And the things we envy are often built on decisions we would never actually want to make.

Social media made this so much worse. We’re now professionally exposed to people’s highlight reels. Their best lighting. Their best angles. Their curated chaos. Their monetized personality. Their soft life branding. Their million dollar boyfriend. Their pilates at dawn and private chefs at dusk.

We envy the setup. The aesthetic.

We never envy the insomnia. The therapists. The lawyers. The isolation. The contracts that decide your face before you wake up. The fear of becoming irrelevant the second you slow down. The exhaustion of being desired as a product before being loved as a person.

We envy the crown but not the weight of the neck beneath it.

Watching that documentary clarified for me that we’re not really envying people. We’re envying symbols. We envy what their lives represent to us. Escape. Validation. Wealth. Safety. Choice. Softness. Power. Being chosen.

We project our unmet needs onto strangers and call it admiration.

And then we punish ourselves for not being them.

The cruel irony is that many of the people we envy are also trapped inside a version of themselves they no longer recognize. They become brands before they become safe. Product before person. Fantasy before flesh. And once you’re useful as an image, your pain becomes inconvenient.

Your breakdown ruins the rollout.

No one teaches us how to envy responsibly. No one teaches us how to look at someone’s life without flattening it into a mood board. No one teaches us how to hold complexity when the internet trains us to compress everything into a like.

We’re encouraged to want without wondering. To crave without context. To compare without consent.

And now, in the era of social media, the scope of envy has collapsed. We don’t just envy Hollywood anymore. We don’t just envy the women on yachts or the people whose houses look like they were decorated by god on a slow afternoon. (That was at least understandable, they lived on a different planet.)

Now we envy ✨mere mortals✨. People who were born in the same hospitals as us, who go to the same grocery stores, breathe the same polluted air, take the same overcrowded metro. Envy has gotten embarrassingly domestic. A girl your age posts a photo in Capri with a spritz and suddenly your entire existence feels like a poorly edited draft. Someone buys a new couch and you question your career choices. Someone gets engaged at 23 and you wonder whether you should start freezing your eggs.

We envy people who are just as confused as we are.

The internet knocked down the hierarchy of desire. You no longer need fame or wealth to be enviable, you just need good editing and a well timed upload.

It’s tragic how the people we envy now are often struggling just as much, if not more, than we are. But the aesthetics trick us. They make their lives look intentional, curated, almost cinematic.

Meanwhile half of them cry in bathrooms between posts.

Envy has gotten closer. More personal. And because of that, more poisonous. It’s much harder to remember that you’re envying a projection when the person looks like someone who could sit next to you in class.

So maybe we should envy people more. Not less.

Not in the sense of longing for their lives. But in the sense of truly seeing how little we know about them. Envy should humble us. It should slow us down. It should whisper you’re looking at a surface, not a story.

Because the truth is simple and unbearable. You never know what someone had to survive to look that good. You never know what they tolerate to stay relevant. You never know what they traded to stay chosen. You never know who they’re not allowed to be anymore.

And the idea that someone can look like your dream and still want to disappear should haunt all of us a little.

Not to make us cynical, but to make us gentler with ourselves and with each other.

Maybe the lesson isn’t to stop wanting. It’s to stop assuming.

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I’ve been watching something ugly grow in my generation for a while. It started small. A video forwarded here, a screenshot there, a joke made a little too close to real pain.
At first it feels isolated. Then it becomes a pattern. And at some point you realize it isn’t random anymore. It’s culture.

I want to talk about that culture. About how casual cruelty has become. About how numb we are to real people and real events. I want to talk about how we’ve turned other people’s worst moments into something we pass around on our phones.

To talk about that honestly, I need to mention something that happened in my demographic yesterday. Even mentioning it makes me uncomfortable. It feels like I’m in danger of doing the exact thing I’m criticizing, like I’m turning that tragedy into a writing prompt. But I’m not trying to. I’m not looking for a grief aesthetic or a moment of moral clarity. This isn’t about my feelings or my epiphany. It’s just that pretending it didn’t happen would feel dishonest, because it’s exactly the kind of event that exposes who we’ve become.

There was a heaviness in the air yesterday. Six kids died in my town. A car crash. A fire. The kind of tragedy that makes your stomach clench before your mind even catches up. None of them were my friends, but I’d crossed their paths in that loose, small-town way. A party. A mutual friend. A moment of recognition at a mall.
Until yesterday they were people with lives, habits, inside jokes, group chats, futures. Now they’re gone.

As the news spread, there was that silent panic math. Checking group chats. Calling friends. Refreshing Instagram stories. Praying that the name of loved ones wasn’t one of the six. There’s something brutally communal about those minutes before confirmation, a whole community holding its breath at once.

And then, just as the shock was settling, photos began circulating. Real photos. Not just of the wreckage. Not of the aftermath. But of their bodies. Burned beyond recognition. Carbonized in their seats.
Something no stranger should ever see. Something that the families should never have to know exists, let alone stumble upon in groupchats. Yet there they were, flying across town at the speed of gossip.

I saw a few. I didn’t want to. I didn’t ask to. Now it lives somewhere in the back of my skull like a splinter.

I keep thinking about their parents. About the moment someone might have opened their phone and been confronted with the worst possible image of their child. How their last memory is now contaminated by an image that should have been protected, held back, shielded. I think about how terrified I would be to see someone I love in that state, reduced to something unhuman. There are no words for that. It’s a violence that goes beyond the physical. It’s a violence of memory. And the fact that this image was passed around like gossip? That part feels like a wound of its own.

It made me think about how far we’ve drifted from the old instinct to cover the body, to shield the eyes, to protect the dignity of the dead. Once, communities knew there were things the living shouldn’t witness. Now we live inside a camera roll with no guardrails.

Somewhere along the way, boundaries dissolved. The margins of empathy blurred until everything became content. Privacy stopped being a right and became a courtesy. Moments that should be protected are now converted instantly into something shareable, something shocking enough to earn a reaction. Not necessarily out of evil, but out of that modern reflex: if I saw it, you should see it too.

And what unsettles me the most is how casual it is and the strange pride some people seem to feel while doing it. As if being the first to send the photo, the first to “confirm”, the first to drop the most gruesome detail somehow grants them a weird victory. The digital equivalent of standing on a rooftop and screaming, I knew before you did.

There’s something deeply human about wanting to feel connected during tragedy, but something deeply warped about wanting to feel important because of it.

We’ve gotten too comfortable collapsing real lives into content. We turn people — breathing, laughing, annoying, complicated people — into posts. Into engagement. Into a momentary spike in impressions. And once you start seeing lives as headlines, it becomes easy to forget that behind every headline is a mother whose ears are ringing, a friend who can’t swallow, a sibling answering the same question for the fiftieth time.

We’ve seen the trendification of tragedy happen in real time. People making TikToks about tragedies that aren’t theirs. People performing a kind of sloppy, public mourning for audiences of strangers. Not out of real connection, but out of the instinct to insert themselves into the narrative. To be seen being affected. To mark themselves as relevant to the moment.

Everyone wants to add their two cents, even when the jar is already overflowing. People who had no connection to what happened suddenly feel compelled to react publicly. Not to offer actual comfort, not to help, but to stay visible. To stay part of the conversation. It’s like silence has become suspicious. If you don’t post, you don’t care. If you don’t perform concern, you must not have any.

It’s wild, and not in the poetic sense. Wild in the unhinged sense.

It’s crazy how desensitised we’ve become. How easily we balance devastation in one tab and self presentation in the next. How someone can post a death notice in the morning, share their brunch in the afternoon and squeeze in the classic “dear friends, please drive safe” message before uploading a video of themselves popping champagne. All of it stitched together with their outfit of the day. The seamless shift from loss to aesthetic. The way sorrow becomes a brief detour before the regularly scheduled content returns.

It feels like we’ve collectively forgotten that some moments deserve a pause. A little respect. Not performative grief threaded through curated highlights.

Tributes make sense when they come from the center of someone’s life, from the people who held their secrets or their hand or their dreams. But when someone who spoke to the victim once at a party suddenly posts a photo carousel with a paragraph about “how fragile life is”… it becomes less about grief and more about proximity Olympics.

There’s a name for that phenomenon. Grief Olympics. The race to claim the closest seat to tragedy. The sudden rush to scroll through thousands of pictures to post a blurry group photo from 2022 at a house party because you drank with the victim once and now want the world to know that you’re devastated too. So you can caption the post: I can’t believe this. Life is so short. Hashtag broken heart. Hashtag rest in peace.

It’s emotional opportunism dressed up as compassion.

And the worst part? It muddies the waters for the people who are actually grieving. It drowns out the voices that matter. It turns someone’s life, and someone’s death, into a momentary spectacle.

And then there’s the part that annoys me in a different way. The collective morality parade that always appears after tragedy. The “hug your loved ones tonight” captions. The “don’t drink and drive” recycled advice. The inspirational quotes about life being short. I understand awareness. I understand safety. I understand good intentions. But the timing is awful and the energy is self serving.

It’s like clockwork. A tragedy happens, and people start performing moral clarity as if grief were a stage and they’re auditioning for the role of Most Responsible Citizen. The way people slide seamlessly from someone’s death into their own anecdote about a time they “almost crashed with the deceased driver last summer”? It’s tone-deaf at best, self centered at worst.

For fuck’s sake Jessica, I do not want to watch you turn someone else’s death into your personal cautionary tale. Take that performance elsewhere. Write it in your diary. Tell your group chat. Anything but another black and white Instagram story under the guise of public service.

What I’m sick of, truly, viscerally, is the performance. The immediate rush to package tragedy into something sharable and meaningful. Something that makes you look thoughtful and concerned and wise. Something that makes you feel involved. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is shut up. Sit with the discomfort. Sit with the fact that something awful has happened and nothing you post will redeem it.

Grief doesn’t need your commentary. Loss doesn’t need a hashtag. And respect sure as hell doesn’t need to be aesthetic.

There has to be a way back to tenderness. To silence. To choosing not to post. Real grief doesn’t need an audience, and respect doesn’t require proof.

Underneath all of this, the gore-sharing, the grief Olympics, the moral theater, is something real and ugly. A generation that mistakes visibility for virtue. A generation that thinks feeling something is only real once it’s posted. A generation that has forgotten the sacredness of restraint.

There are things we never need to say. There are moments we’re never supposed to see. There are tragedies that deserve privacy. There are families who deserve gentleness. And there are boundaries that should never be crossed in the name of curiosity or clout.

If anything, losing touch with our own capacity for care is the real tragedy of my generation. We’ve become so used to witnessing pain through screens that we’ve started adopting the logic of the screen: fast, numb, reaction-based, and forgettable.

Maybe the real mourning will start when we learn how to look away again.

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The internet loves telling me to touch grass. They say it like it’s a prescription. Like I’ve never opened a window in my life. The funniest part is that most people delivering this advice are probably commenting from beds they haven’t left in over 12 hours, surrounded by empty takeout bags and a ring light. It’s the pot telling the kettle to log off.

I understand the spirit behind it. It’s a longing disguised as an insult. What people actually mean is: I’m overwhelmed, everything feels fake and I miss feeling grounded in something real. It’s not judgement, it’s projection. (1) But instead of admitting that, they launch “touch grass” at strangers like it’s a spell that will suddenly fix the world’s collective burnout. It’s community, but weaponized. It’s yearning, but poorly translated.

**quick footnote for the unbothered: after my last two posts, a small but enthusiastic club of internet detectives decided that my writing was “AI slop” because I used this pattern a few times, so now I’m adding a counter to help them build their case without hyperventilating. you’re welcome ;)**

We’re living through a curious moment, everyone is hyperconnected yet starving for the kind of spaces where you exist without performance. Third places used to be automatic. The shopping mall where you wandered with no money and too much lip gloss. The condo courtyard that doubled as a playground and a debate stage. The public park where kids practiced TikTok dances long before TikTok existed.

But now everything is a transaction, a brand, a reservation, a line. You can’t even sit at a café longer than ninety minutes without ordering another drink and accidentally contributing to inflation. So we flee online, hunting for the ease we once had offline. Then people shame us for being… where else were we supposed to go? It’s not addiction, it’s migration. (2)

This is where the irony becomes almost poetic. I get told to go outside by people who don’t understand that the internet is my outside. Not the whole thing, I’m not out here finding community in comment wars, but the little corners. My Substack, my silly TikToks, the people who read, respond, debate, laugh. There’s a version of me here that is not performing for a grade, a paycheck, a social obligation. It’s still curated, of course. Everything is curated. But it feels like home, or at least like a bridge on the way to one.

Touching grass is lovely. I enjoy the outdoors, it’s not a moral achievement. But the idea that digital spaces are inherently inferior is outdated. It’s digital nostalgia wearing analog cosplay. The world has expanded. So have the ways we gather. Community didn’t die, it migrated. It’s not worse, it’s different. (3)

Maybe the issue isn’t that people are too online. Maybe it’s that third spaces became luxury goods, and the internet stepped in as the world’s unofficial living room. Not perfect, not always peaceful, but accessible in a way the physical world increasingly isn’t. And when your physical city is expensive, alienating, or dangerous, a well-tuned timeline can feel like a park bench that never kicks you out.

Growing up in a generation that is so online didn’t make me detached from reality, it just meant reality had multiple tabs open. We moved between physical and digital spaces the way older generations moved between rooms in a house. To us, the internet was never an escape. It was an extension. A second living room. A hallway we shared. A place where things happened even when nothing was happening.

And because of that, digital community never felt fake. It felt accessible. Offline, belonging usually depends on timing, confidence, and whether you look like someone people want to talk to. Online, belonging happens sideways, through punctuation, timing, chaotic emojis, a long text at 1am, a comment that says “I felt this.” People show their insides first. It’s backwards, but in a way that makes sense for us.

People love pretending that being “too online” ruined us, but the truth is for some of us it did the opposite, the internet gave us rooms the physical world wouldn’t. You can walk into a comment section the way people in the 90s wandered into each other’s living rooms. No appointment, no dress code, no need to present your most palatable self.

It’s not perfect, communal spaces never are, but it’s honest. Online, belonging is often accidental. And accidental belonging is sometimes the most real kind.

That’s why “touch grass” in the non-meme way feels so outdated to me. I do touch grass. I love the outdoors. I’m not a vampire. But online is where I’ve touched understanding, humor, debate, softness, chaos, curiosity, recognition, all the textures that make a life feel lived. That counts, even if a few people in my comments are having a personal crisis over it.

Growing online didn’t shrink my world. It widened the map.

So no, random @user42917, I will not be touching grass on your command. I touch it when I want to and not as a punishment for being visible online. What I am doing is building something, tiny digital rooms where people can linger and breathe. Rooms where community doesn’t need proof of purchase.

My last post proved it in real time. The comments turned into a village square where every archetype showed up at once: the philosophers, the doomsday prophets, the soft-launch scholars, the secret romantics, the AI detectives, the bitter uncles, the grass evangelists.

People kept writing “touch grass” like they were prescribing antibiotics. Others insisted I had been replaced by a robot because apparently using parallel sentences is now a sign of being silicon-coded. It’s not style, it’s evidence, right? (4) Meanwhile someone else was quoting Basil Hallward like the whole thing had been assigned reading.

It was chaos in the purest, most internet way. And honestly, it cracked me up. Because all of them, the praise, the hate, the well-meaning lectures, the random victorian literature references, were gathering in the same place for the same reason. They wanted to be part of a conversation. Even when they were yelling, they were participating. Even when they were calling it slop, they were coming back to check if I replied.

If anything, that comment section proved my point about third spaces, the internet is one of the last places where strangers gather without needing to buy anything or be invited. Is it messy? Absolutely. But so were cafés in the 1800s. So were town plazas. So is any place where humans wander in with feelings they haven’t sorted out.

People don’t say “touch grass” because they think I’ve never been outside. They say it because they’re overwhelmed by a world that swapped community for performance and doesn’t know where to put the discomfort. They tell me to get offline because they’re online enough to see me. It’s not concern, it’s displacement. (5) The irony is delicious. The logic is none. The humanity is obvious.

And if someone thinks a robot writes my posts, that’s between them and whatever WiFi demon haunts their house. I know the truth, I wrote my little essay with my little brain, in my little bed, half-horizontal. There’s nothing artificial about that. It’s not AI, it’s girlhood. (6)

In a way, all those comments were proof that people are still looking for a place to exist, to yell, to overthink, to confess, to argue about relationships like it’s a group project. If that’s not a third space, then what is?

Digital soil counts too. And sometimes it grows better things than grass. It’s not nature, it’s nurture. (7) **Counter updated. Mystery solved. Case closed. Detectives, you may breathe now.**

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If you’re anywhere online, you’ve probably seen the question: is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? I saw it on TikTok, naturally, the birthplace of all modern existential crises. It stuck with me because, yeah, being in a relationship does feel a little cringey these days. Like wearing matching hoodies in public or using baby talk at a restaurant. It’s not even that we hate love, it’s that being visibly in it feels like social suicide.

So I did what any reasonable person does when faced with a cultural dilemma. I took it to the besties group chat and then to my finsta stories for peer review. After multiple rounds of qualitative data collection and post-analysis voice notes, I finally read the Vogue article everyone kept referencing, the Chanté Joseph one. It didn’t really hit for me. It was smart, it was good, but it didn’t quite explain the pit in my stomach that forms whenever I see a hard launch.

So I decided to write my own. You’re welcome.

Having a boyfriend really does seem embarrassing when you look at the rise in soft launches and the trend of keeping it “lowkey”. No one’s flaunting boyfriends like accessories anymore. Maybe it’s because we’ve finally learned that men are not something to boast about.

Where I’m from, we have this saying: “o que ninguém sabe, ninguém estraga,” which translates to “what no one knows, no one ruins.” Maybe that’s the root of it. Maybe women are keeping things private because visibility has become a liability. Maybe it’s because public love has started to feel like a setup.

But if having a boyfriend is so embarrassing, how come everyone has one? All my friends are in relationships. Every influencer I follow is either in love, moving in with a man, or getting engaged. We claim it’s cringe, but we’re all posting male hands on steering wheels and shadows behind plates at restaurants. We’re not rejecting romance, we’re just rebranding it.

The only thing I’m currently sure of is that somewhere between the soft launch era and the rise of situationships, the value of having a boyfriend has plummeted.

Somewhere along the way, public love became a liability. It’s not that we’re ashamed of romance, we’re just painfully aware that men are statistically likely to humiliate you. And who wants to go from “it girl” to “poor girl” in a single news cycle?

We’ve seen it happen too many times. The girl who posts her boyfriend like he’s a soft launch rebrand, only for him to cheat, comment something weird, or reveal a questionable opinion. Suddenly she’s the fool, the meme, the “couldn’t be me” quote tweet. We don’t even mock the man anymore, we mock the woman who trusted him.

You post him once and suddenly everyone’s a market analyst for your romantic stock. One bad outfit, one questionable like, and you’re publicly reevaluating your judgment. The internet has made the girlfriend experience feel like brand alignment and some of us aren’t sure our partners are PR-safe.

That’s the horror of modern romance. You can curate your entire life, but one bad boyfriend can ruin your public image faster than a viral thread. It’s not even about heartbreak anymore, it’s about damage control. Women are hyper-aware of the optics, of the way love can instantly become content. So we’ve learned to minimize risk. Keep it on the low. Encrypt our affection.

It’s not shame, it’s survival. The soft launch isn’t mystery, it’s insurance.

And then there’s the quieter fear, not of being embarrassed, but of being absorbed. You spend years building a sense of self, becoming the main character of your own feed, and suddenly you’re someone’s girlfriend. The camera pans out. You’re no longer the story, you’re part of one.

It’s not vanity, it’s self-preservation. The moment you go public, you stop being a person and start being a plus-one. Your selfies turn into “relationship goals.” Your jokes become “his muse.” The algorithm stops reading you as an individual and starts tagging you as part of a set.

There’s a reason so many women soft launch with a plate across the table or a blurry arm in the frame, it’s intimacy without identity. Proof of love without surrendering authorship. It’s not secrecy, it’s strategy, a quiet refusal to let romance flatten your character arc. To dim your light. Neutralize your spice.

We’ve all seen it happen, a woman gets a man and suddenly her entire feed, her conversations, her existence start orbiting him. He’s not an accessory, he’s the centerpiece. And because of that, there’s a collective disdain for that girl, the one who disappears into her relationship like it’s quicksand. We mock her devotion, her naivety, her inability to post anything solo.

And maybe that’s why so many of us are now allergic to saying “I have a boyfriend” out loud. We want to distance ourselves from that archetype as much as possible. The one who made a man her personality. The one who lost her plot. So we hide our relationships not just from others, but from the fear of becoming her.

But there’s also something deeper at play, a kind of emotional risk management that goes beyond pride. Privacy has become the last luxury. Keeping a relationship off the grid isn’t about being mysterious anymore, it’s about keeping what’s real away from what’s hungry.

Put a hand up if you’ve never seen a girl comment “is your boyfriend single?” (I see no hands). Exactly. It’s funny, I get the gag, but there really are monitoring spirits out there, people who want what you have simply because it’s you who has it. I’m not saying men are some sacred prize to be protected, or that they even get “taken” (God knows they willfully go), but envy is a quiet motivator. The easiest way to guard what’s yours is to keep it unseen.

And then there’s the obvious: men as a whole are embarrassing. Times are hard. The bar is subterranean. The probability of a man humiliating you publicly, digitally, or spiritually is dangerously high. They will cheat, fumble, like a thirst trap, or worse, start a podcast. And when that happens, you go from “iconic” to “unfortunate” in record time.

So women learned to prevent the PR crisis. Keep it quiet, manage the narrative. If it implodes, it implodes privately. No tagged photos to scrub, no captions to delete, no comments to disable. Just heartbreak, unarchived.

It sounds clinical, but that’s the reality of modern romance: love is tender, but it’s also a risk assessment.

So yes, having a boyfriend is embarrassing. That’s why we’re keeping it private.

But don’t let them fool you. Everyone and their mother is cuffed up. No one’s bed is empty, no one’s DMs are dry, and no late night FaceTimes go unanswered. We’re still very much in the trenches, boo’d up, negotiating weekend plans and sharing playlists like it’s 2016 again.

We haven’t given up on love, we’ve just gotten better at PR. We’re protecting our public image from secondhand humiliation, preserving the illusion of composure. Because love might still be beautiful, but being publicly clowned? Never again.

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Someone walked into the Louvre — in broad daylight — spent roughly the length of a rushed matcha run in a jewellery case, and walked out moments later with the French Crown Jewels. A few tiaras and a couple of diamond earrings, enough sparkle to blind a small city. They arrived in a lift, left on scooters, and — according to one witness — stopped at a red light on their way home. That’s not just audacity, that’s etiquette.

The news arrived like a plot point from Lupin, except with fewer cameras and more audacity, and for about twenty delicious seconds the world got to watch prestige get its ankles shown.

I know it’s illegal. I know technically, this is a crime. But if you can break into the world’s most famous museum at 9am, bypass security, slice open the display case, and glide off into the Parisian morning without hurting anyone, you deserve at least one tiara, a standing ovation, and the right to list “detail-oriented” and “meticulous planner” on your resume.

A museum heist is so deliciously whimsical. It’s the cardigan of crimes, dashing, polite, borderline literary. Nobody’s grandma loses her pension, no innocent bystander is traumatized, and nothing explodes except the collective imagination. This is the sort of news story that reads like a short film: four shadowy figures, a perfect plan, and a little red-light courtesy on the getaway. Considerate, if you ask me.

And honestly? It’s a breath of fresh air. The news cycle is a conveyor belt of existential dread, and suddenly, here’s a group of anonymous art nerds performing a live critique of property and power, complete with scooters. It’s not right, but it’s somehow refreshing. Like the universe briefly remembered it used to have a sense of humor.

Think about it. The Louvre is not a jewellery shop. It’s a cathedral of curated ownership, a palace turned archive where value is as much about story as it is about carats. Everything inside is a public artifact and also an assertion of power: crowns gifted, ornaments accumulated, empires represented in polished metal. To breach that temple and walk out with its ornaments is to stage a tiny, chaotic critique. Someone took a centuries-old performance of status, interrupted the choreography, and in doing so revealed something obvious, the things we call untouchable are usually just unguarded.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the craft. Because this wasn’t chaotic smashing, this was project management. Someone scoped the gallery, analyzed the weak spots, sourced a lift, and organized timing down to the minute. This was attention to detail. Precision under pressure. Team coordination. These people have work ethic. They didn’t panic, didn’t harm anyone, didn’t even jaywalk. If you put that kind of efficiency into an office, they’d be promoted before lunch.

That level of planning, timing, and sheer nerve deserves at least a little admiration, not because crime is cool, but because skill is. Skill is glamorous, even when misused.

And if we’re being real, there’s a kind of je ne sais quoi to it, old-school, noir-movie chic. The kind of crime that wears gloves and listens to jazz. A little dangerous, a little stylish, fundamentally victimless. The museum will get insurance money, the jewels will either reappear or become myth. Nobody dies, nobody cries, and for a brief moment, the world’s largest museum looks human, fragile, breakable.

Which is part of the appeal, isn’t it? The Louvre is meant to be the pinnacle of human achievement, a temple of beauty, empire, and theft (the classy kind, institutionalized and written about in French). Everything inside it was already stolen once, repackaged under glass and called culture. So when someone strolls in and liberates a few ornaments, it feels — and forgive me for this — like karmic symmetry. A tiny cosmic refund.

We call it “heritage preservation” when museums hoard art from colonized nations, but “theft” when someone does it back. Same verb, different PR team. There’s an irony there that deserves a slow clap.

Of course, this is satire, I’m not advocating for crime. But the romanticism of it, the elegance, the precision, that’s undeniably seductive. It’s proof that imagination still exists in a world allergic to surprise. In an era of scams and data leaks and faceless corruption, a good old-fashioned jewel heist feels almost wholesome. You can’t launder diamonds through a crypto exchange. You have to show up. You have to plan. You have to care.

And I do admire that care. The thieves didn’t just steal, they curated. They saw a gap between myth and maintenance, and they exploited it with taste. That’s what the Louvre heist really is, a performance piece about how nothing sacred is as safe as it pretends to be.

If I were them, hypothetically, artistically, I’d post a haul on social media. Not to gloat, but to document. A tiara on a marble countertop. A diamond hairpin beside a croissant. Caption: “Six minutes, no casualties, 10/10 team communication.” Hashtag: #VintageHaul. The comments would be pure chaos, moral outrage and aesthetic envy in equal measure. Half the internet would demand justice, the other half would ask for a tutorial.

It’s absurd, yes, but also kind of poetic. For one dazzling morning, history wasn’t trapped behind glass, it was sprinting through the streets of Paris, obeying traffic laws. The heist reminded us that value isn’t inherent, it’s a performance. These jewels were worth millions not because of their materials, but because of what they meant. And now, stripped of context, they’ve gained a new one: proof that even the untouchable can be touched.

Which brings us to the notion of value. The jewels are “priceless” in headlines, which is a diplomatic way of saying “we cannot meaningfully price the narrative around these objects.” The real currency of a crown isn’t the diamonds; it’s the story: who wore it, which coronation it witnessed, what empire smiled behind it. Remove the story and you have gemstones in a box. Turn the story into absence, a missing case, a headline, a moment of collective breath, and suddenly the object’s worth balloons. This is the same trick that turns obscure songs into hits when someone samples them, or mediocre tweets into cultural touchstones once a celebrity shares them. Fame attends to absence.

So if whoever pulled this off uploads a tasteful grid of tiaras like they’re unboxing vintage couture, I will do my part and enjoy the absurdity. Repost and watch the internet do what it does: mythologize, monetize, and moralize in equal measure. People will debate ethics while simultaneously screenshotting the sparkliest brooch. That’s the human condition, we can both be outraged and envious at the same time. Multitasking emotions is our superpower.

Hear me out on the social media part. The internet loves the heist narrative, it’s modern myth-making. A carefully photographed tiara next to artisanal coffee will act to half the world as performance art and to the other half as evidence of a finely executed plan. You could frame the caption like a job interview: “Project managed: cultural asset relocation. Skills demonstrated: logistics, risk mitigation, team coordination, attention to detail.” Recruiters value those keywords. It’s borderline unethical to ask yourself if HR would be impressed. I am asking on behalf of society.

So here’s my humble proposal, whoever stole the jewels from the Louvre should keep them. Not forever, just long enough to try them on at home, pour some champagne, and admire the craftsmanship in the bathroom mirror. Then maybe return them anonymously, wrapped in tissue paper with a handwritten note: thanks for the inspiration.

No hostages. No blood. Just a six-minute masterclass in planning, civility, and style.

In an increasingly bleak world, a little mischief feels almost restorative. So, to the considerate criminals with good posture, impeccable logistics, and moral ambiguity polished to a shine, cheers. May your crimes remain whimsical, your spreadsheets color coded, and your traffic stops considerate.

Because honestly I love a victimless crime.

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Thank you so much for reading! If this resonated and you want to help me keep writing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I’ll be posting more soon, some of it free, some of it behind the velvet rope.

And if you’re not ready to commit to a subscription, you can buy me a matcha at the overpriced café where I pretend to be extremely mysterious while staring at my screen. No pressure. Just eternal gratitude :)

buy me a matcha :)

You know those TikToks your friends send that you open half-asleep, expecting another brain-rot audio or a chronically online debate about something stupid like “why penne is the best pasta”? I thought that’s what this was. I was ready to chuckle, double-tap, and move on.

Instead, I ended up having a full-blown existential crisis before 11 am.

The video — you can watch it here — was about how people who always “figure it out” receive less empathy. The girl said, if you’re the person no one has to worry about, you’re never going to get the same softness as the people who fall apart. And I felt that in my bones.

If my very close friend saw this and thought of me, that says a lot about how I move through the world, capable enough to be admired, but not enough to be worried about. And that’s very telling.

There’s this unspoken penalty for composure. The world looks at you holding everything together and assumes you’re fine because you look fine. You navigate disaster with grace, so they mistake that grace for ease. You can handle it, right? You always do.

I think that’s what happens when you’re known for being “strong.” People stop checking if you actually are. They forget that being good at surviving doesn’t mean you’re not exhausted by it. That competence isn’t comfort. That “figuring it out” isn’t the same thing as being okay.

What’s worse is that strength becomes part of your identity. You start performing it even when you don’t want to. You start anticipating everyone else’s needs before they say a word, because that’s what’s expected of you. And when someone finally asks if you’re okay, you almost don’t know how to answer. You say I’m fine out of muscle memory, because vulnerability feels like a language you’ve forgotten how to speak.

And that’s the quiet cruelty of it, when people see you as dependable, they stop imagining you as breakable. You become the designated caretaker, the friend who always knows what to say, the one people call when they’re falling apart. It’s not that they don’t love you. It’s that they love you for your stability, not in spite of it.

It’s funny, isn’t it? The better you are at handling life, the less help you get. The more stable you seem, the more invisible your pain becomes. It’s almost like empathy is rationed, handed out only to those who cry the loudest, shake the most, or collapse in public. Meanwhile, some of us are quietly breaking in well-decorated rooms.

And it gets even trickier when you look the part, when you’re attractive, articulate, smart, or even just okay at pretending to be okay. There’s this strange resentment that builds around people who appear to have it together, as if being composed disqualifies you from being cared for. You end up punished for your balance.

But here’s the other side of it: people won’t celebrate you the same way either.
When you succeed, it’s expected. When you accomplish something, it’s “of course you did.” Your wins are treated like footnotes because you made them look easy. People save their loudest applause for the ones who come from chaos, who make their pain part of the redemption arc. You, on the other hand, are just doing what everyone already decided you would. There’s no surprise, no relief, no story to tell.

It’s a strange kind of isolation, being too put-together to deserve sympathy and too consistent to inspire celebration. You end up existing in this emotional middle ground where everything you do, whether it’s surviving or thriving, gets met with silence.

And there’s another truth no one warns you about: if you do your job really well, you get to do everyone else’s too. The reward for being competent is more work. The reward for being emotionally stable is carrying everyone’s instability. You become the group’s infrastructure, the invisible scaffolding that holds things up but never gets noticed unless it collapses.

I’ve noticed that people want to feel useful more than they want to feel connected. They want to fix you. So when you don’t look like you need fixing, they drift. They save their tenderness for messier people, the ones who make their empathy feel earned. It’s like struggle has to be visible to be valid.

And here’s where my floating rock mentality usually kicks in. It’s my go-to coping mechanism, that comforting thought that none of this really matters because we’re all just tiny creatures spinning on a floating rock in space. When things get too heavy, I tell myself to zoom out. To remember how absurd it all is. To detach a little.

But detachment only works until life gets personal again. Until everything starts falling apart and suddenly the floating rock doesn’t feel so light anymore. Awareness doesn’t erase the weight; it just makes you painfully conscious of how much of it you’re carrying alone.

I don’t know when people decided that suffering had to be theatrical to be believed. That you need to crash, cry, and confess in order to be deserving of care. Why we only offer compassion to those visibly unraveling, and not to those who’ve learned how to bleed neatly. Why can’t steadiness also be a form of pain? Why can’t strength coexist with softness?

Sometimes I wish people understood that the person who “always figures it out” still needs to be asked how they’re doing. That we don’t want saving, just softness. A small space to stop performing strength.

And the thing is, when you live like this long enough, you start depriving yourself too. You stop giving yourself empathy because you think you don’t need it. You minimize your own problems, calling them “inconveniences” instead of heartbreaks. You tell yourself, other people have it worse. You forget that pain doesn’t need to be ranked to be real.

I’m not complaining about always being there for others, or about doing the work no one else wants to do. I just sometimes wish there was acknowledgment that just because I carried it well, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t heavy.

So yes, I resonated with the video. Maybe too much.
Because I’m the person no one worries about.
Because I am fine, but I’m also tired of being fine.

Sometimes I wonder what it would take for someone to worry about me, but I hope I never have to find out.

I wish someone would just look at me and say, you don’t have to figure this one out. That would be enough.

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Thank you so much for reading! If this resonated and you want to help me keep writing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I’ll be posting more soon, some of it free, some of it behind the velvet rope.

And if you’re not ready to commit to a subscription, you can buy me a matcha at the overpriced café where I pretend to be extremely mysterious while staring at my screen. No pressure. Just eternal gratitude :)

buy me a matcha :)

Have you ever told yourself you’re fine with casual? Tried convincing your reflection like, “I don’t need much, I’m cool, I’m chill.” No daily check-ins, no loyalty, not even consistency. Just vibes. And then you tack on, “All I expect is respect,” like that isn’t apparently asking for the moon. Yeah. Me too. And spoiler: I’ve been lying to myself.

Case in point: a guy I hooked up with *and expected to keep hooking up with* decided to comment on my friend’s story.
“bAdDiEs.”
Asking about my other friends in the video.
Like I wasn’t going to see it. Like it wouldn’t matter. Like my Wi-Fi plan doesn’t include petty surveillance.
Sure, I don’t want him like that. He’s not soulmate material. He’s not even wait till you’re inside material (he actually is but for my ego’s sake today he’s not). But it still hit. Not because I wanted him to myself, but because I didn’t want him to be that sloppy. There’s a difference between not being mine and being careless with me.

And here’s the annoying part: I genuinely shrugged it off. Until he kept going. (I was trying to be unbothered but he insisted on being bothersome, a full-time job with benefits, apparently). And then I tried to think, It’s casual, who cares? But my chest still tightened. My brain still replayed the notification. My pride still whispered, Really? That’s who you’ve been fantasising about? Casual was supposed to be my shield, but all it did was leave me standing there naked, unarmed, and slightly humiliated.

We pretend casual is immunity. Immunity from disappointment, jealousy, betrayal, wanting things we swore we didn’t want. But casual is not immunity. Casual is a loophole. It’s a PR strategy we use on ourselves to make shitty treatment sound philosophical. Oh, he doesn’t respect me? Well, that’s okay because it’s casual. Babe, no.
It’s easier to roll our eyes and say “It didn’t matter anyway” than to face the fact that someone we let so close to us could treat us like we’re disposable.

And this is where I hate myself a little: I never demand anything from anyone. Not family, not friends, no one. I’m basically the UN of low expectations. I take everything lightly, with a grain of salt, with a kind of generosity that borders on reckless. The only thing I’ve ever expected — still, not demanded — is respect or consideration (people rarely offer both, let’s be honest). Because I’m full of it. Because I believe in community. Because if you don’t have at least one, you can’t have any other sentiment.

And yet — oh, the clownery — people show me time and again that not even the bare minimum should be expected. And still, I expect it. And every time it’s not met, I feel the sting of betrayal. There’s something so painfully disrespectful about only wanting the littlest of the littles and still being met with… flat out nothing. It’s almost funny. Almost.

That’s the scam of situationships: we call them casual, but they never are. Casual is a lie we tell ourselves to protect our egos from being bruised by other people’s actions. It’s easier to dismiss it, “it’s not that deep, it was casual”, than to admit that someone we gave access to basically spit in our faces.

And here’s the thing: situationships don’t usually break your heart. They bruise your ego. That’s the dirty trick. Because half the time, I’m not actually hurt that you didn’t want me. I’m irritated that you didn’t value me enough to treat me with the smallest shred of decency. I’m not mourning your absence; I’m mourning the insult.

Hurt I can forgive. Hurt I can fold away, chalk up to miscommunication, even let go of. But ego? Ego keeps receipts. Ego replays the moment at 3am. Ego whispers: “you really thought you mattered?” A bruised ego doesn’t cry, it seethes. And seething lasts longer than sadness.

And even if you really are detached, even if you really don’t want more, the truth is that people are never neutral. There are always unspoken contracts. Invisible rules. Tiny agreements you don’t realize you’ve signed until they’re broken. Don’t hit on my friends. Don’t embarrass me. Don’t act like I’m disposable just because you’re not in love with me.

But situationships blur those lines until you’re gaslighting yourself: Did I overreact? Was that even a rule? Do I sound crazy for expecting decency? (Spoiler: no, you don’t.)

We love situationships because they feel like freedom. Freedom from labels, from responsibility, from accountability. Except “freedom” is often just another word for I don’t have to consider you. And that’s the real allergy people have, not to love, not to commitment, but to consideration. The very thing I keep giving out like candy on Halloween, the very thing I keep expecting in return.

Am I saying we should scrap situationships altogether and never touch anyone we’re not in a relationship with? No. (But maybe we should. Civilization might improve.) What I am saying is that we should reinvent this shit. Introduce common decency. Bring basic respect into the mix. Because casual shouldn’t be a free pass for carelessness.

Casual doesn’t mean careless. It never did. Situationships will never be light because people never are. You can strip away titles, you can swear you’re not catching feelings, you can convince yourself you’re cool with anything, but the truth sneaks out the moment someone crosses a line. And that’s when you learn: it’s not that you asked for too much. It’s that they had nothing to offer.

No, I’m not heartbroken. I’m not secretly in love. But I’m irritated. And irritation is underrated, it’s the quiet proof that you’re still paying attention, it’s a sign something’s off. Annoyance is just anger in smaller shoes. So if I’m irritated, it means you stepped somewhere you shouldn’t have. And I’m tired of pretending irritation is too small to matter. Tired of swallowing these slights like they’re harmless when they chip away at me every time. I’m tired of acting like “casual” should equal “I’ll take whatever crumbs you throw my way.”

So now I’ve started treating irritation like data. Not feelings, not overreaction, just information. If something gets under my skin, it means a boundary has been crossed, even if I never said it out loud. That little jolt of annoyance is my body flagging: “Keep an eye out, this isn’t sitting right.”

Because if the only way to survive casual is to kill off your expectations completely, then what’s the point? I don’t need love to function, but I refuse to live without respect. If that makes me difficult, fine. If that makes me dramatic, even better. At least I’m not lying to myself.

Casual without respect isn’t casual, it’s cheap, it’s childish, it’s a situationshit, and honestly if decency is too much for you, keep your casual (and your hands) to yourself.

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Thank you so much for reading! If this resonated and you want to help me keep writing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I’ll be posting more soon, some of it free, some of it behind the velvet rope.

And if you’re not ready to commit to a subscription, you can buy me a matcha at the overpriced café where I pretend to be extremely mysterious while staring at my screen. No pressure. Just eternal gratitude :)

buy me a matcha :)

A few months ago, I wrote an essay about cheating. I got all self-righteous on the page, declaring I don’t condone it, dragging men who betray their girlfriends, and generally standing tall on my podium of principles.

But last week, I hooked up with someone’s boyfriend. Yes, I knew. No, he didn’t lie about being single.

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I keep a filing system in my head for people. They live in four boxes. Not based on what they did yesterday or how they handled a crisis, but on who they are overall. Their life patterns. Their orientation when you zoom out.

Four boxes, nothing scientific, just my framework for making sense of people, and maybe, to make peace with them. The boxes go like this:

1. Evil in nature, evil in action. The easy ones to spot. These are the people whose core leans toward harm and whose lives reflect it, but not always with awareness. They don’t sit around thinking, I’m evil. They’re simply indifferent. They hurt, exploit, manipulate, neglect, and it doesn’t strike them as something to fight against. They don’t feel the need to change, because their nature and their actions are aligned.

2. Good in nature, good in action. The rare unicorns. The people whose instincts are kind, and whose circumstances allow them to live out that kindness. They help without being asked, they mean what they say, their goodness is both innate and practiced. Their nature and their behavior match, not perfectly, but enough that you trust the alignment.

3. Evil in nature, good in action. The complicated ones. Their core may lean dark, selfish, cruel, with destructive impulses, but instead of surrendering to it, they work against it. Some of them know exactly who they are and want to be different. Others are pushed by their environment into practicing goodness they wouldn’t otherwise choose. Their actions are genuine, but they come from effort, not instinct.

4. Good in nature, evil in action. Maybe the saddest box. People whose hearts lean kind, but whose surroundings or choices drag them elsewhere. Some of them know this and suffer for it. Others don’t even realize their nature is good, because they’ve been swallowed by survival, pressure, bad influences, or learned patterns that calcified over time. They aren’t wired to be destructive, but they end up there anyway. You can sense their softness beneath it all, but they themselves might not.

I think it’s fascinating how often people don’t even know which box they’re in. Some convince themselves they’re good because their actions look good, even if their nature rots underneath. Others punish themselves for being “bad” when their circumstances have betrayed an otherwise soft core. Maybe nobody ever sees themselves clearly.

I don’t want this to read as if people flip between boxes depending on the day or a single decision. The boxes aren’t snapshots, they’re the sum of essence and history. Because most people will sometimes act out of character. A good-in-nature person might lash out, and an evil-in-nature person might surprise you with tenderness.

I carry these boxes with me like a lens, and sometimes I wonder what it does to me. Watching, weighing, scanning. It can be exhausting. I don’t just notice who people are, I measure them. Every kindness, every slight, every hesitation gets filed away, nudging someone closer to one box or another. There’s a strange protective comfort in it, but also a weight, as if keeping track of the world’s moral ledger is my personal responsibility. And sometimes, I’m afraid it makes me brittle, suspicious, or endlessly hesitant to trust.

When I think of people this way, the real challenge isn’t spotting the extremes. The truly good and the truly bad are easy. It’s the greys — the good natures living badly, the bad natures living well — that make life complicated. The people whose nature and action are misaligned pull at you in ways extremes never could. I’ve felt admiration for someone who I knew had a darkness at their core, only to watch them make choices that could hurt people I care about. I’ve felt frustration, even revulsion, toward someone whose intentions were pure, whose heart was soft, but whose decisions wreaked havoc. They confuse you, tug at your empathy, blur your boundaries, and make you question whether morality lives in essence or in evidence.

On one hand, actions feel undeniable. If someone consistently harms, cheats, lies, abuses, then their “good heart” doesn’t matter much. You can’t hug someone’s inner softness when their choices are destroying everything around them. At some point, the world doesn’t care what you meant to be, it only registers the wake you leave behind. History is written in deeds, not intentions. A person could die believing themselves “good in nature” while the rest of us carry the scars of their actions.

But on the other hand, nature is what makes me hesitate. Because action alone doesn’t tell the whole story. People act from fear, survival, pressure, trauma. Some people live entire lives acting out of character, swallowed by environments that don’t reflect who they are at their core. And I can’t bring myself to erase the softness I sense underneath. If someone’s instinct is kindness, even if it never fully got the chance to breathe, that matters to me. Their nature might not redeem their damage, but it complicates the judgment.

It’s a paradox: nature without action is invisible, but action without nature can feel hollow. A bad person doing good can change lives; a good person doing bad can ruin them. So which one carries more weight, the purity of the soul, or the evidence of the life lived?

I think the only honest answer is that it depends on who’s asking. Victims will always privilege actions. Friends, lovers, people who saw the good flicker in you, they might privilege nature. History, almost always remembers action. It doesn’t care about intention, it cares about impact. You could live your whole life with a soft heart, yet be remembered for the harm you couldn’t prevent or the kindness that never reached the light. And you? You’re left somewhere in between, trying to reconcile who someone is with what they’ve done, and who you want them to be with who they actually are.

Time is the ultimate judge of these boxes. Patterns take years to reveal themselves. I’ve watched people I assumed were one thing shift ever so slightly, only to settle into something I didn’t expect. Every decision, every compromise, every lapse or triumph nudges them toward a box. You don’t just meet someone once, you watch history being written in real time, and you’re a reluctant witness to the sum of their choices.

I’ve realized that thinking this way shapes me too. It makes me cautious, self-conscious, analytical. I notice my own inclinations, my own misalignments. I ask myself: is my nature good enough if my actions falter? Does my effort to do right compensate for impulses I can’t fully control? Observing others in this way forces a kind of honesty with yourself, you can’t hide, not from the boxes, not from yourself.

Eventually, we all settle into one box. The question is just whether it’s the one we thought we deserved. Which means the scariest truth might be this: the box you actually live in is chosen less by you, and more by everyone watching.

If I’m honest, I’ve always leaned toward judging people by their nature. I don’t mean I excuse the harm or good they do. I’ve cut people off, I’ve walked away, I’ve protected myself, but when I’m sorting through how I feel about someone, I can’t stop myself from looking for their softness. I look for the crack in their armor that tells me who they really are. It’s why I’ll still defend someone long after they’ve proven they’re capable of hurting me. I can feel their heart beating underneath it all, even if they’ve buried it so deep that they can’t reach it themselves.

It makes me forgiving to the point of foolishness. I tell myself it’s empathy, but sometimes I wonder if it’s just vanity, the belief that I can see people more clearly than they see themselves (palmas para o alecrim dourado),1 that I can tell which box they belong in, even when their life points the other way. I get attached to people’s potential, as if who they could be should weigh as much as who they’ve shown themselves to be.

But then I think: isn’t that what I want for myself? For people to read me generously, to see my intentions when my actions fall short? To believe I’m good, even when I’ve acted badly? To treat my nature as a north star, even if my map hasn’t always followed it?

That’s the uncomfortable mirror of it all. The way you judge others is usually the way you hope to be judged. And maybe that’s what this is all about: the grace we hope for ourselves. To be seen for our nature, not just our record.

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Women have been on an ongoing journey of decentering men. We're decentering them in our identities, our stories, our ambitions, our friendships, our wardrobes, our aesthetics, our sense of self-worth, even in our ideas of safety, romance, and success.

It’s a hard process, one of peeling back centuries of programming. Often painful, sometimes freeing, always necessary. We write about it. Cry about it. Joke about it. Heal through it.

I’ve been on that journey too. And somewhere along the way, I started to wonder:
Do men try to decenter women?
Do they need to?
Do they even want to?

And then it hit me, men don’t need to decenter women.

They have nothing to peel back. Because they never centered us to begin with.

They’ve never centered women a day in their lives.

Men center other men. Their obsession, rage, softness, ambition, fear, shame, and even their violence all trace back to how they measure up in the eyes of other men. The hierarchy. The approval. The shadow of the alpha.

It’s not women they’re chasing. It’s each other.

The people who haunt them, inspire them, compete with them, break them, and save them, are other men.

If anything, men need to decenter themselves, and each other.

Men need to decenter men.

Let’s talk about their egos for example, men are constantly performing, but the audience isn’t us, it’s other men.

The car, the job, the watch, the girlfriend — she’s a prop, not the point. The point is to be seen having her. The point is what the boys will say. Whether it’ll inspire jealousy or dap. Whether it earns a place in the pecking order.

Even “being a man of your word” is often less about integrity and more about being seen as solid by the boys. Loyalty isn’t necessarily about love, it’s about rank.

I’ll say it: most of these guys don’t even like women that much.

Even the men who seem like they live for women, the ones who chase, obsess, lust over, aren’t really doing it for women. Their desire isn’t about closeness, curiosity, or connection. It’s about access, ownership, gratification. It’s about proving something to themselves, or to other men. Even when it looks like it’s about us, it’s always about them. Their impulses. Their wants. Their feelings. Their relief. Their image. Their control.

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The image above is a surprisingly accurate depiction of my room on a random Tuesday. Full. Crowded. Alive. There’s always someone dropping by, someone laughing too loudly, someone telling a story that gets interrupted three times before it ends, (if it ends at all).

I love people. I love being surrounded by them, entertained by them, or simply sharing space in comfortable silence.

I’ve always been a social creature. Not in the performative, “life of the party” kind of way, but in the “my door is always open” way. I find comfort in proximity. I crave community like some people crave stillness. Even chaos, when shared, feels like communion. And maybe that’s the whole point: not that life needs to be tidy or quiet, but that it feels better when it’s lived around a table, noisy, warm, and never quite empty.

I have a friend who’s always with me (multiple actually). Not out of obligation, not because we’re codependent, not because we don’t have other people in our lives, but because we like being around each other. She comes with me to run errands, to lunch, to parties, even to the bathroom. She’s my go-to. My plus-one by default. A witness to my life in the smallest, silliest ways. And for some reason, that makes people uncomfortable.

People love to romanticize the idea of doing everything alone. “Take yourself on a solo date.” “I grabbed lunch by myself today.” “I don’t need anyone, I enjoy my own company.” Good for you. Genuinely. But when did enjoying other people become embarrassing?

Somehow, being independent became the highest form of maturity. Like if you can go to a restaurant alone and stare into the void while chewing salmon tartare, you’ve unlocked spiritual growth. And anything outside that, anything involving companionship, or god forbid, interdependence, is treated like a symptom of emotional weakness. If you’re always around someone, you must not know how to be alone. You must not be whole. You must be scared of silence. You must be one of those girls.

But here’s the thing: I can do things alone. I just don’t want to. And I hate that I feel like I have to prove otherwise in order to be taken seriously.

I like having people with me. I like sharing space. I like texting my friend “bathroom?” at a party and her nodding before I finish the sentence. I like that we orbit each other without explanation. That I don’t have to preface every invite with “if you’re free” or “don’t worry if you can’t.” She just comes. And I just go with her. It’s easy.

It doesn’t mean we don’t have boundaries. Or that we don’t have other relationships. It just means we choose each other, over and over, in the most ordinary ways. And apparently that’s terrifying to people who’ve built their identities around solo coffee dates and self-help books about detachment.

Honestly? Fuck you. Leave my friends alone. Stop projecting your self-sufficiency complex onto the rest of us like it’s a personality trait. We’re not lost, or lacking, or secretly crying for help just because we enjoy doing life together. We’re not broken. We’re not behind. We just believe in showing up for each other, loudly, consistently, and without shame. If that threatens your curated solitude, that’s a you problem.

People always clap when we’re not together. Like we’re conjoined twins who finally got the surgery. She’ll show up to something alone and someone will inevitably say, “Oh my God, where is she?” with the same energy you’d use for a missing child alert. It’s weird.

I’m tired of the applause. I’m tired of the teasing. I’m tired of people acting like our friendship is something we’ll grow out of, like baby teeth or embarrassing fashion choices. As if the ultimate goal is to stand alone, fully self-sufficient, emotionally unbothered, unfuckwithable. Maybe that’s your dream. It’s not mine.

I don’t want to become so strong I stop needing people. I don’t want to be so healed I never ask anyone to hold my hand. I don’t want to spend my whole life proving I can do it by myself. I can, but I don’t want to. And that should be enough.

So no, I’m not embarrassed that we do everything together. I don’t think it makes me any less grown, or whole, or emotionally intelligent. I think it makes me lucky. I think it makes me human.

You can keep your solo dates.
I’ll take my bathroom buddy every time.

And maybe that’s what really bothers people, that we’ve found a way to belong to each other without losing ourselves. That we’re not performing friendship for aesthetics or validation or mutual brand-building, but actually doing it. Day in, day out. The boring parts. The unposted parts. The “help me pick an outfit” FaceTime at 7am and the “don’t talk, just sit with me” kind of days.

We live in a world that keeps trying to make intimacy look like a weakness. As if needing anyone, for company, comfort, context, is some kind of moral failure. As if strength means never asking for help, never reaching out, never saying “stay.” But I think real strength is the opposite. I think it’s letting yourself be known. Letting someone witness you in the in-between. I think it’s vulnerability that keeps us alive.

People talk a lot about soft launches, of relationships, of friendships, of feelings. But we’re not soft. My girl and I? We’re loud. We’re visible. We’re always next to each other in the group photo, and we don’t apologise for that. I don’t need to explain why she’s here again, or why I’m there again, or why we’re still showing up, together. Some bonds don’t need disclaimers.

And no, it’s not always perfect. We get tired. We snap. We cancel. But even in the mess, there’s something sacred about having someone who stays close enough to notice. Someone who doesn’t flinch at your chaos. Someone who reminds you that being loved loudly is not something to hide, it’s something to celebrate.

So no, I’m not striving for some minimalist version of connection where everyone stays at a polite distance. I want the mess. The overlap. The ride-or-die at brunch and the accidental sleepover on a Tuesday. I want to be known in real-time, not just remembered fondly. If that makes me clingy, co-dependent, too much, fine. I’d rather be too much with people I love than just enough all by myself.

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Porn made our lives easier. At least at first. It was there when no one else was. A shortcut, a simulator, a crash course in how to be desired. No awkward conversations, no real vulnerability. Just tabs and tabs of instant gratification. Just bodies, always available, always ready, always saying yes.

We watched it like course material. We were studying. Like we were preparing for something. And in a way, we were. Because porn taught us what sex was supposed to be. Which is to say: loud, violent, fast, mechanical. A performance for someone else. A routine of being taken, not touched. Of being used, not seen. A little painful. A little humiliating. Okay, a lot humiliating. But in a hot way, right?

Porn taught us that if they didn’t want to ruin us, they didn’t want us. It made us think arousal was supposed to come with a side of fear. That love should feel like submission. That if we weren’t crying, gagging, or being punished, it wasn’t real. That pleasure only counts if someone else is watching.

Porn made our lives better. Who doesn’t want to be slapped, bruised, choked, and called a filthy whore? Who doesn’t want their first understanding of intimacy to come with a script written by men who think tenderness is a plot hole? To be wrapped up in degradation with HD lighting? Who wouldn’t want their baseline for intimacy shaped by people who rehearse their moans and take water breaks between scenes?

It gave us a framework. A visual aid. An instruction manual we didn’t know we were internalizing. I thought I was learning how to be sexy. Turns out, I was learning how to be silent. How to turn myself into a product. How to act like pleasure is something you perform, not something you feel. How to be desirable to men who never asked what I desired.

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There are wounds that heal, and there are wounds that just learn to hide. I thought I had tucked this one away for good, neatly, like a letter I never sent. But then someone I once loved reached back into the quiet, not with an apology, but with a drunken monologue delivered to someone else. Not to me. Never to me. Just about me.
They reached inside me with the same hands that once offered care, and all of it spilled out again.

It’s cruel how someone can hurt you again in the same place, like they remembered where you were soft. Like they aimed. And what hurts the most isn't always the action itself, but the confirmation of a pattern you were hoping you imagined.

I keep coming back to silence. Not because I want to, not this time. I wanted to stay loud. I wanted to grow out of that reflex, the one where I disappear into myself. But silence knows me. It knows where I live. And sometimes I think it misses me more than any person ever has.

They said I was great. That they regretted how things played out. That they didn’t mean for it to get so messy. That they just had other priorities.

And just like that, I was back in it.

Back in the ache I’d worked so hard to silence. Back in the remembering, not just of the hurt, but of the softness that came before it. How kind they were. How warm. How good. Until they weren’t. Until they were sharp-edged and gone and full of noise that I hadn’t chosen.

What broke me wasn’t just what they did. It was the clarity. The confirmation that they had understood me the whole time. That they saw me clearly — knew the way I moved, the way I loved, what would break me — and still did it anyway. Not out of confusion but out of choice.

They knew I was full of grace, and gave me none.
They called me peace and happiness and then left me with none to feel.

I keep thinking about how someone can say good things about you in hindsight while knowing they left you with nothing good to say in return. Like they get to hold onto a version of you that’s all warmth and light, while you’re stuck holding the memory of their coldness, their withdrawal, their absence.

I’d already done the hard work of moving on without an apology, without acknowledgment, without grace. And now, without asking, they’ve handed me their guilt like a flaming match and expected me to hold it.

They couldn’t even say these things to my face.

Not out of embarrassment. Not out of fear. Not even out of empathy for what it might do to me. But because — once again — someone else’s comfort was more important than my peace. They spoke my name like it was still theirs to hold, and somehow still didn’t speak to me. I was just a character in their little redemption arc. A footnote in their guilt.

I never wanted closure. I never even believed in it. I had already buried the hurt. I had already built something new on top of it, shaky, maybe, but mine. But then they showed up with a shovel. Not to dig me out. Just to bury me deeper.

There’s a wicked kind of greed in that. The kind that makes people mistake their conscience for permission. That makes them believe they can toss their regret into your lap and call it healing, as if the mess belongs to both of you equally. As if they didn’t create it and walk away.

Once, I hurt. Now, I’m just angry. Very angry.

Because how dare you return only to remind me that you always knew better. That you knew who I was, how I felt, what I gave, and still — still — chose to treat me like I was disposable. Replaceable. Erasable.

How much more of your audacity must I endure? What more could you possibly want from me? I gave you softness when I had none left. I gave you silence when you didn’t deserve it. I gave you a story with no villain in it, just so you could sleep at night.

But if you want to be the hero of your story, you don’t get to drop into mine like a ghost and ask to be forgiven just because you finally feel haunted.

You don’t get to hold tender memories of me.
You don’t get to like me in silence.
You don’t get to mourn me in private like I died in some tragic accident you had no part in.
You don’t get to tell my friends how amazing I am as if you didn’t already know that, as if you didn’t wreak havoc despite knowing that.
You don’t get to regret what you did to me and still not speak to me. You don’t get to deliver your guilt like a eulogy to the wrong audience and call that growth.

Because the truth is: things could have been different. But they weren’t.
Because you made sure they weren’t.

You were not confused. You were not overwhelmed. You were not lost.
You were certain.
You were deliberate.
You prioritized what you wanted. And it was yourself.

You don’t get to slip another body into the blame‑seat and pretend your hands were tied.
You chose the spotlight you wanted, the applause you needed, the comfort you prized, and it wasn’t mine.
Sure, someone marched you to the crossroad, but you stood there, looked me in the eye, and still turned away. So don’t rewrite the scene with a convenient antagonist.
The only author of that decision was you.

Don’t come back now with your sad little could’ve-beens and “she was so good to me”s.
Don’t whisper sweetness behind my back like it’s a gift.
Don’t cry over the softness you burned through.

I reject your guilt and the illusion that it’s enough. That silent admiration counts. That hindsight gets to rewrite harm.

You don’t get to hurt someone and still call them a blessing. You don’t get to speak fondly of what you buried.
You don’t get to say I was peace when you were the war.

You don’t get to make my people feel bad for you.
You don’t get to weaponize regret in front of the ones who picked me up off the floor.
You don’t get to look them in the eye like you’re the one who lost something precious. You lost it on purpose. So don’t act like it slipped through your fingers.

And you definitely don’t get to ask them to talk to me.
To “say something on your behalf.”
To test the water for you, like I’m some possibility you’re circling back to now that your conscience is loud.

You don’t get to plan some secret conversation, away from anyone who might hear it and take it back to your top priority.
You don’t get to think I’ll listen just because you finally feel ready to speak.

So no, you don’t get to come back, not as a whisper, not as a memory, not as a person learning their lesson too late.
There is no version of this where you return, there is no soft landing for you here.

I’m not your mirror and I’m not your priest. Whatever you’re carrying now, you carry alone, and I really hope it’s heavy.

You’re not misunderstood, you’re simply unwelcome. I don’t need revenge, I don’t need closure, I don’t even need to be right.

I just need to stay gone. And I will.

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Thank you so much for reading! If this resonated and you want to help me keep writing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I’ll be posting more soon, some of it free, some of it behind the velvet rope.

And if you’re not ready to commit to a subscription, you can buy me a matcha at the overpriced café where I pretend to be extremely mysterious while staring at my screen. No pressure. :)

buy me a matcha :)