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I’ve never denied my selfishness; I’ve never denied my morbid longing for untainted autonomy, for the utmost isolation of my unravelled daily routine, which I am wholly obsessed over. I hate with such insurmountable rage whenever my routine is prodded, especially when the catalyst names itself a person, an external force not wavered by my own thoughts and consciousness. Anguish and angst lapse into each other, warming my core with emotion and numbing my limbs of energy, threatening the structure of my being with quiet collapse.

No, no, I was wrong. What I meant to articulate was that I foster a fear that encompasses me, shoving away the things and ones I love in pursuit of solitude. It is a great paradox which both amuses and vexes; I yearn for intensity because without it I sink into languid boredom, but I need the quiet, reserved solace of a bubble from within I watch yet not participate. There is a rare humility in this; the emotion of nostalgia washes over me because this feeling of estranged yearning is no alien; she has followed me around as a shadow does ever since I was a kid. I’ve worn her like second skin, the scent of quiet resignation and a pained sense of angst enveloping me. I’ve had the choice to throw her away, feel the fabric wrinkle over time and then eventually watch myself outgrow it, but none has happened. So I watch, and I listen, and I learn.

To love is to risk, all the great poets have said.

I say love makes masochists of us all.

It is to be greedy, irrevocably stupid to the point of losing most sense of self-preservation. It is to open up, unravel the skin of oneself and learn the other’s soul. It is to know, it is to learn and to understand. There does not exist a greater intimacy than this. It is to let the sting of the other’s flaws fade into acceptance and forgiveness; it is to trust and become vulnerable.

But as with everything, it is to some extent, control. A control of how much is revealed, how much is shown, and how much is traded off for acceptance. It is a controlled concept of masochism. Franz Kafka wrote once to his lover, ‘You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.’

And I agree.

Love for anything with no pain and sacrifice is idealisation. It is murder of one own’s sanity painted as grand fantasy, it is a confetti of optimism that you choke on, it is hope of your favourite wine tasting saccharine sweet of poison. It is to drown foolishly in a false utopian world.

I believe that the final and most significant act of love is not the whole consumption of individualities but the quiet altercations; it is to imprint over the other, it is to thread their strings of autonomy together, it is to co-exist as mutually beneficial beings in the eco-system of constant change, humour and pain. It is to surrender, but I think it would never be complete. It will always be controlled, measured by time and expectations, subjective to person. I might be wrong, but I think the measure is prominent. It is an arduous balance on the tightrope of love; rush, and you’ll fall into the depths of despair, and thorns of misaligned expectations pierce through you; go slowly, and you’re bound to lose your balance eventually. I have always mistaken warmth for safety.

I forget that flesh erodes faster in the sun.

What nourishes us is often what leaves us exposed; what grants life also hastens decay. Love is no exception. I think love is controlled conceptual masochism.

—sans

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header picture : Rest Energy by marina abramovic & ulay

I know, and I perfectly understand already the definition of possibility being only a probability. Something can and cannot be, yet both exist as a superposition under the notion of probability. Nothing is inherently impossible, logic dictates, as my philosophy argues. So while at some time, I’ve been practical, there is always a probability that argues I’ve not.

I realised that all my intellectual romantic hyper-idealism was only a translucent veil draped over the true identity of being an avoidant. I’ve built walls of absurd virtues and morals to ground and encompass the relationships I want to harbour in life. If it’s unattainable, the comfort of my fake ideals would wrap itself around me, and I have no excuse to be pulled out of my mythologized bubble. So I continue my play on the moral theatre but I both thrive in ambiguity and yearn for clarity at the same time. I will not move forward, but staying stagnant makes my bones ache with excruciating hope. So I oscillate heavily between both states, each time integrating traits of both my avoidance and yearning as probabilities. I used to think that perhaps when genuine connections arrive, I would be ready to host and nurture them. But I absolutely loathe the idea that it will latch onto me and twine itself around my individuality. I don’t like change, especially when I am not the conscious catalyst.

I tell myself I like balance, when in truth I seek the bittersweet taste of some grey space between two incredibly different states. I cannot tell yet if it’s the fear of letting one become definitive at the expense of losing the other. But the fear is real. It’s this heavy metaphorical cloud that somehow manages to seep into me, engulfing me, and I won’t be able to pry it off my skin in time. It will meld and become a part of me, and I’ll have to carry it into my future and ingrain it in my past.

The only solution I think of is to intellectualise it. If I understand it, I’ll know what to expect, and the uncertainty of it won’t hurt me.

But intellectualising something so abstract is subjective, and I fall into a spiral of self-sabotage and uncomfortable reflection; my brain simply would not rest without.

The consuming urge for balance almost becomes hedonistic, and I pry off weeds of uninvited, explorative, seeping intimacy from the field of my mind almost with violent precision. If it’s alien to my sight, it’s uncertain, and I will only accept uncertainty on my terms. It is like this that I exist as a paradox, almost like everyone else who preaches ideals that they would contradict the moment the curtains fall. I string something beautifully idealistic, pure, and untainted with the brutal nature of my truth, so my mind finds solace in the delusion of my utopian reality.

But human nature is paradoxical. I can yearn and still hate a concept. Concepts can feel aphoristic yet grow repulsive from their reality. Emotions can grow so complex, they can only exist in a superficial plane of certainty. And to dissect them each would be misery, as it would be to embed them. It is with this, I admit with a strange sense of relief and humility that my greatest humanity has always been, and will always remain, existing as a subject of mythic paradox. I hate Wednesdays.

— sans

I chew and nibble on my past, spitting out the seeds of shame and fear. It’s almost a ritual of practice, all in the name of character development at the expense of bits of my sanity.

But sanity has never been the measure of truth.

So I make a discipline out of digesting memory. Slowly, deliberately and intentionally. To let the metallic, raw, bitter, and saccharine notes linger on my tongue, to understand my rights and wrongs, and to mould it all into a new conscience. That is character development no?

The act of rebirth is nothing but the consumption of older versions of bad habits and good tics. Reflect, indulge in introspection, and delve your fingers into the flesh of truth and feast. When the version we hold our truths to no longer serves us, we cut it off, if not rot with. Eat or be eaten. This is the metamorphosis of self, insistent and visceral.

There are days when I swear the universe has its hands inside my ribcage, rummaging through my organs like it lost something important, probably my sense of stability. Or my patience. Or the last soft part of me I hadn’t already sacrificed in the name of being “reasonable.”

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you when you’re growing up:

A woman doesn’t become powerful by becoming calm.

She becomes powerful by becoming honest.

I’ve begun to think feminine rage isn’t just emotional, it’s metabolic.

A biological imperative.

An intergenerational hunger passed down like a secret recipe,

whispered from mother to daughter to bone.

And honesty, real honesty the kind that peels your skin from the bone, strips compassion from truth, is never pretty. It arrives like a divine slap: sudden, disorienting, and inconveniently timed (usually right before an exam, after a heartbreak, or while you’re buying discounted salmon at Tesco).

I used to think feminine rage was embarrassing.

Dramatic. Excessive. Violent even.

Something to be tidied away like an unmade bed.

But recently I’ve discovered it’s actually the closest I’ve ever been to God.

Not the God of temples or textbooks.

The God of thresholds the one who appears the moment you realize no one is coming to save you because you were always meant to save yourself.

That God.

The one who watches you stop shrinking.

There is a rumor in mythology that goddesses were once monsters

before they learned to pass as human.

I believe it.

I believe every woman carries a creature inside her ribcage,

one that knows the taste of freedom

and the texture of bones.

Not violence but knowledge.

The knowledge that nothing can truly take from you

what you are willing to devour back from the world.

Sometimes I feel like I’m made of teeth.

Not the sharp kind, but the patient kind the ones that grind the old self down slowly, into ash, into grain,

into something I can finally digest.

Self-transformation requires a stomach.

And I have one now.

Because here’s the grotesquely beautiful thing:

every time life tried to eat me alive,

I learned another way to survive it.

I learned to chew my heartbreak until it tasted like clarity.

I learned to swallow disappointment whole until it became discipline.

I learned to feast on the versions of myself that begged to be loved

just so the newer ones could grow.

Call it dark.

Call it dramatic.

Call it unhinged.

But evolution is always cannibalistic.

If this is madness, then let it be devout.

Feminine rage isn’t chaos.

It’s digestion.

It’s the sacred act of breaking down everything you once believed

in order to build something truer.

It is the moment you finally stop apologizing for having teeth.

If anyone knew the power of a woman finding her rage, they would pray differently.

And that right there is the closest we might ever come to divinity. A truth that has always resided under our hearts.

— sans

It is very trivial to think of what-ifs and imagine just how different life would have been if events had followed the course of our direction, of our choice, but that is the beauty of the unknown, the nature of fate, and the events of time. We drift off from our said set path, thinking that there is nothing more capable of learning the self than ourselves, only in the end to circle right back in after the inevitable. I am here, and today I know the warmth in my heart comes from genuine gratitude both for time and for the self, because without either, I would not be, I would have never become. Understanding this metamorphosis is niche yet so enthralling that it might make you spiral for hours and years. To live is to change; it is to metamorphose with time. Change is evidence of life, and time is the scale of it all.

I can only wonder what would be in another twenty years. What would I see and all the things I would be. I feel fear for the unknown, I feel excitement for the hidden element of surprise in it all. But most of all, I feel a strange calm basking in the truth, the future might not be a stranger after all, I see her sometimes in the mirror, in the way my voice reverbrates in the air, in the gold of sun I catch with my eyes and the soft touch of my palms pressed together whenever I pray. My relief comes from a profound state of acceptance and contentment, that I will grow old in my skin, that my feet will pad against the earth the same way it once pressed up against my mother’s womb. My lungs will hold air, and my heart will beat within the quiet sanctuary of my ribs. I am home, as I have always been. If I have known love, I’ve known it my whole life, perhaps even before I could think; it has always been a seed in my soul.

I will be twenty today, and I will let time embrace my youth with her tingle of truth and glimmer of hope. Tomorrow, I will grow older, and with every day after, I will know that I grow closer to becoming infinite.

I find myself often grappled by the daunting reality of some impossibility. Of course, as someone who believes firmly in logic, I realise that truly impossibility itself is a wryly wrapped paradox, because everything can and does exist as a probability. I cannot for sure, with

complete certainty, assuming I have no evidence of a counterfeit, state an event or concept impossible because there is always a hidden element of the unknown, and to ignore it is to be foolish. I digress, but what I mean to say is, I sometimes am engulfed with the assumptive knowledge that perhaps the things I yearn for most will dry themselves out as impossible concepts, that I might never get to experience these hopes and desires, that it might all rather collapse upon itself with time like the death of a star: the birth of the black hole, the birth of my melancholic resignation.

And perhaps that in itself is one of life’s unfathomable tragedies; to hope and crave even in dire realities.

I learnt that the greatest sin you could commit was to capture one’s most beloved treasure, something they have found solace in or built their will to live over or adore with their entire subject of existence, and dangle it in front of them holding it out of their reach but enough for them to try and grasp for, or simply stare helplessly, their eyes bulging, their skin burning with need and out to seek some contact. it is to make them yearn desperately until they descend into a spiral of madness, and until the only thing they can think of becomes what you’ve held out of reach. and i think this is the cruel masquerade of life’s course. To prode and to make yearn.

At times my sense of melancholy would grow so large, it’d engulf my being and tinge my soul blue, and i wouldn’t thaw until I sought and latched onto the concept of absurdism. The absurd is the only companion that does not betray; it does not dangle, it does not tease. It acknowledges the impossibility and the yearning, the spirals and the hopeless stretches of longing, and yet it offers a kind of quiet freedom. To embrace absurdity is to admit that the world owes you nothing, that hope is never guaranteed, and that meaning must be carved from the void itself.

Absurdity is freedom of thought, of individuality, and of being. It teaches you that life has no inherent meaning, and yet everything will cease to exist one day. It stills the nerves in you and curls her morally translucent fingers around your heart, she delves and prods at your mind not to disturb but only to numb the thoughts that scream too much and the ideas that rattle havoc. Personally, I’m too much of an idealist to be an absurdist; instead, I bask in the concept of existentialism. Perhaps I think that is why I am unable to accept this paradoxical certainty of impossibility. I find myself quavering at the idea of nothing to look for, nothing to curate for. Absurdity is significantly freeing, but as Kafka once said, “I am lost because I am free”.

That is the thing about freedom, it births limited free will, and even then, so the mind is a prison most of the time when it is empty.

I have digressed, but what I want to say is, I’m afraid one day my mind too will grow vacant of thoughts, and this melancholy will only intensify with time, that I will be cursed for life with wanting to find meaning only in the end to be presented face to face with absurdism. Nothing mattered, nothing ever will. I will know then that all of that I would have been will remain insignificant, despite all my emotions and my successes and the depths of feeling, I simply was only a fragment of time. Melancholy won’t save me, but neither will absurdity.

I usually end my personal essays with an optimistic twist, but for this piece, I want to honour melancholy, drape a velvet cloak of acceptance over her, let her meld into my bones and seep into every pore of my being. With melancholy, the act of suffering takes on a strange beauty, mourning turns quietly romantic, and sorrow becomes a delicate companion. I will linger in her quiet notes, savouring the subtle cadence of her presence, letting it echo in the hollows of my chest. I will trace the contours of her silence, the gentle weight of her stillness, and allow myself to sit fully within her embrace. For once, I will not try to escape, to resist, or to reason her away. I will let her speak, let her linger, and let her teach me the patience of feeling everything without the promise of resolution. Only then, after she has seeped into every corner of me, will I find the faintest spark of understanding, not a triumph, not a revelation, but a quiet, unwavering acceptance of the melancholy that shapes and sustains me. It is a blessing in disguise, melancholy’s grasp on my soul, for without it, I would never have truly known life; for one to know joy, one must first know sorrow.

— sans🍵

What is ambiguity? It is nothing but the vastness of some singular concept and its outstretched arms of relations. Without ambiguity, of course our world would lack visionaries and creativity with our brains dried on concrete logic, no ifs and buts, no imagination to spiral into and no madness of life to descend to. Simple yet straightforward directions of cold hard logic.

And what is idealism? It is hope, belief and visions. It is a rather strict yet creatively bound state of existential mind. Without it, we’d be mindless sheep with no sense of motivation and no yearning for better. We’d be good as dead load.

For example, I consider myself, at least for the most of time to be an idealist. Because I believe in high ideals in my world and the place I have in it. I’m an idealist but I’m also adaptive, I like change but only when I have notice of it or when I’m the stimuli of the course of action. I despise change when it is unwelcome and unhinged. But maybe it is the lack of power I hold over my own life I fear. So you can imagine with change being the constant catalyst in life, in its pure unadulterated chaotic surge of energetic form, how often I find myself disappointed or anxious.

But I found a loophole, and it is to adapt the concept of idealism in my head, and to do so, I must both embrace and narrow its ambiguity to the best of my capability.

To narrow ambiguity is not to kill it, but to place borders where it threatens to drown me. Because too much possibility becomes chaos, and too much chaos becomes despair. Idealism without structure is nothing but fantasy, and fantasy without a door to reality is only torment. So my “idealism” becomes a negotiation: between what I dream of, and what I can stand to lose.

The morality of it is where the knot sits. If my ideals are mine alone, am I righteous for following them, or selfish for ignoring another’s? If my ideals demand sacrifice, am I noble or am I cruel? Idealism does not absolve us of consequences; it sharpens them. For every vision of perfection, there is a shadow where someone else’s vision collapses. And here lies the ambiguous morality: do we pursue what we call better even when it hurts others, or do we compromise and dilute the very ideals we swore to uphold?

I’ve begun to believe there is no clean answer. Idealism is neither good nor evil. It is a compass that always points forward, but never guarantees safe passage. Perhaps the morality of idealism is not in its absolutes, but in how gently we hold it. How willing we are to admit that my “better world” is not always your better world.

And maybe that is where ambiguity rescues us. Ambiguity keeps us soft, it prevents us from becoming tyrants in the name of ideals. It reminds us that perfection is slippery, that our visions must remain pliable, and that sometimes the most idealistic act is not to impose, but to listen.

So I return to my so-called loophole: to live as an idealist, but one who bends. To cling to visions, but allow them to breathe. To believe fiercely, and yet admit I may be wrong. That is not a flawless philosophy but it is a livable one. And perhaps that is the truest form of idealism: not perfection, but the endless, hopeful, stumbling attempt.

— sans 🍵

There’s a very specific kind of grief reserved for people who believed things would turn out okay and then lived long enough to realise they don’t.

I was an idealist the way some girls are dancers or academic prodigies: obsessively, early, and with delusion-level dedication. I used to think if I did everything right, and that if I paved my way out of goodness and honesty, the universe would keep score. That hard work was a spell, strong morality a currency, and love — pure, feral, world-ending love — was not only possible, but inevitable.

I wrote essays about truth and beauty, cried over novel characters, and believed that somewhere out there was a person, or a city, or a moment that would make it all make sense.

And when I say person, I don’t necessarily mean romantic, because I believe that the greatest gift you can acquire as a human being is the intimacy of been understood by another. Through and through, as you are. No moulding of personality or sudden fluctuations in the tone you speak in.

I thought somewhere, between time and ideas, I would find absolute solace in myself and my idealistic perspective of life.

Reader, I did not. At least, not yet.

I don’t think people understand the violence of having ideals in a world that rewards detachment. You spend your entire childhood clutching dreams like rosaries, thinking maybe they’re holy. You romanticise everything, your pain, your future, even your failures, because at least then it’s beautiful, it plants seed for your future enlightenment and progress. Idealism doesn’t bloom — it calcifies. It becomes this pretty little cage made out of what-ifs and wouldn’t-it-be-nices.

And by the time you realise the world isn’t made for people like you, you’ve already designed your whole identity around the belief that it is. Individuality would have become nothing but a myth.

✦ Idealism Is a Kind of Hunger

Idealism is a quiet violence. It is a kind of hunger, that devours your being whole and spits out a more oddly angry version of yourself. It doesn’t hit you like a train, it dissolves you, and then it becomes you. Pixel by pixel, fibre of being by fibre of being, until you’re left as this translucent thing hovering between belief and burnout.

It convinces you that effort equals outcome, that meaning can be mined from suffering, that timing is just a plot device before your moment arrives. It swallows you into the oblivion which calls itself the ‘optimal’ version of the future.

But idealism doesn’t prepare you for the ghosting. The ghosting of dreams, of meaning, of people you swore would never turn into strangers. It doesn’t warn you that the world doesn’t hand out karmic receipts, it just keeps spinning, indifferent.

I’ve lost friends I thought I’d grow old with,

I’ve lost hope on ideas I thought I’d make my breakthrough with,

But most pitifully, somewhere along, I cannot help but mourn for a lost version of myself.

✦ The Grey morality of people

What people say, they almost never mean. And I’ve never quite learned how to tell the liars apart — or whether I’m one of them.

Sometimes, I try to crawl into other people’s minds. Level my gaze with theirs. Just to understand why they lie. Why they offer comfort they never meant to give. Why they build worlds they never plan to inhabit Why do they lure others in with false promises, why do they build their own haven of fake security and most important of it all — is this a universal cycle of superficiality we’re all doomed to be trapped in. Maybe this drift from idealism is wired into our DNA. Maybe deceit isn’t the exception — it’s the default. .It is something we cannot escape because perhaps a significant part of us itself is to be imperfect, to be flawed and flecked with stains of lies and tolerance?

Even worse, idealism made me perform. Not like on a stage, but in life. I became someone who smiled through pain, forgave before being asked, and saw “potential” where there were only patterns. I gave people the benefit of the doubt until all the doubt was mine.

It is a terrifying thing — to realise your suffering has no symbolic meaning. That your heartbreak isn’t foreshadowing. That your patience is not noble, it’s just silence. That perhaps truly, idealism is nothing but sheer propaganda — polished, palatable, and just detached enough to sell.

✦ The Yearning for Perfection

Perfection is a myth. It is subjective. it lies in the eyes of the perceiver. It is infinite and it is everything. But when filtered through idealism, perfection begins to blur. It frays into the lines of superficiality. It looses it’s essence of achievability.

And idealism doesn’t seek reality — it postures itself as a metaphysical high, a spiritual hallucination of control.

I enjoy perfection, I simmer in it and bask in the warmth of the familiarity of success and silent validation of my abilities. But, perfection is never easy, it calls but it not always appears.

Idealism is cloaked as ambition and perfection wraps Idealism around herself like a blanket.

Intricately layered, one over the other, it sends any perceiver into spirals of thoughts and sparks a desperate ache of want within them. The yearn for perfection. The yearn for quiet validation. The yearn to be seen within the space of success.

Perfection sometimes, just lingers — distant, watching — as you contort yourself trying to reach it.

✦ The Distorted Collapse of Perspective

Like a star collapsing upon itself, the truth shatters idealism.

It breaks spirits and twists the creative life out of one.

But true strength lies in endurance.

It lies in the ability to see the truth, pick up broken hope, and still carry it — fragile, flickering — like a lantern through the dark.

It is not about being untouched by disillusionment,

but about learning to walk through it with grace.

To accept that meaning may not arrive, that closure may not come,

and yet still choose to move, to create, to love.

Perspective collapses, yes.

But in its ruins, a new one emerges — quieter, more feral, less golden but more real.

Idealism might have ruined me, but it also gave me quiet resilience. She taught me versatility. She taught me right and wrong and why. Idealism made me stronger, I’ve been pushed out of my comforts, I’ve learnt and I’ve excelled.

Idealism has made me a better person.

Despite everything,

I still believe in the beauty of trying.

I still believe in meaning, even when it doesn’t arrive.

not because it’s guaranteed,

but because choosing to believe

feels more human than giving up.

Idealism has ruined my life.

And I would do it all over again.

— sans 🍵🌸

I sometimes think my lack of it, has meddled with my ability to converse. I will not lie, I have yearned sometimes to be held by one, someone I would like. Even I’m human after all, I am bound to an inexplicable morbid need for human connection, it’s embedded into my dna and I cannot fight it. But in my head, there’s a raging fit; to be vulnerable or not to.

✦ I oscillate heavily between wanting to romanticise what I should love and bluntly rejecting every form of unwanted desire. I both adore and despise being the object of one’s affection. I adore it because I relish in the knowledge that I am someone’s want, and I despise it because that’ll be all I’ll ever be.

Perhaps that is why I think I thrive in solitude. I have all the company I need, all in my head. But it’s not healthy said my mother, but I’m not unhappy I replied. I’m not ecstatic either but I’m in a profound state of solace. One not just anyone can waltz into.

Nowadays, I perceive every manner of interaction as a complex exchange of motives, with subtle psychological stimuli thinly veiled with each smile and arch of the brow. In this study lies, perhaps, the secret art of manipulation or ‘persuasion’ if the optimists prefer. This perceiving is as much as a gift as it is a curse. Because it stops your natural reaction, it makes you think before you act which to some extent tips the scale of naturalism and perfection.

I promise you I’m not a cynic, I just prefer the truth. What lies under the charming dimpled smiles and high toned cheers and the corner creasing of one’s eyes when they smile. I want to unravel their mind, delve my fingers into the soft folds of their brain and crawl into their ribs. I want to understand. And I think that is perhaps the most intimate act of souls.

And if that’s how I like to merely converse with people you can only imagine how intense I’d hold affection for someone, dare I say even love them. But I wouldn’t know for sure even myself because frankly, I’ve never come close to being in love with a person. I have no idea independent of modern rom-com and vintage literature influence, when it comes to how love feels like.

Is it a bit absurd that I find both relief and a morbid gut-wrenching angst in the realisation that perhaps this is all my life will hold? Yearning. Yearning. Then yearning for me. Like a sick dog clawing at the door of death violently. It doesn’t die but nether does it live. It’s stuck in a constant state of stagnant melancholy.

Not to be pretentious but I’ve never met anyone like me before, not even close. It scares me if I’m being honest, makes me feel more alone than I already am. This alienation then drives me to desire being perceived only as a concept. I think it’s better that way, to be looked upon and not tainted with influence. I like who I am, I don’t completely hate myself.

✦There are times I wish I was better, but never different. And it is during these times, I realise that love itself has seeped into every pore of mine, that life comes from within me. My heart, my mind, my lungs. Every breath I take, there are perhaps millions of beings within me moving, transforming, nudging me to be a better subject of existence.

I look in the mirror, and I know that if I’ve ever known love, it’s staring right back. I am both the poet and the muse, the myths and the truths, intricately layered to create a complex being full of ideas and emotions. I know I will be loved, as long as there in air in my lungs and blood in my veins.

I know I’ll be loved, not just by myself but by one other else. It is then when I’ll let myself be unraveled, I will drop the weights of anti-romanticism I carry and will bask in the warmth of pure unadulterated affection. Till then, I will wait, and adore the person I’ve become.

— sans🍵

✦ It is ancient longing, aesthetic violence, and the quiet tyranny of perfection

A line most profoundly haunting in Donna Tartt’s novel, the Secret History. Yes I am obssessed with the book, yes I am in love with Henry Marchbanks Winter and yes I know the entire cleverly designed psychological plot of the entire story. It’s very essence is embedded into the one sentence above, that beauty is indeed terror, and if we romanticize anything too much, we can probably even learn to adore the most grotesque, obscure concepts.

From a murder committed by an elitist intellectual group of Ancient Greek History students, to the very end of the story revolving around more death of both ideas and fascinating characters, this book is the very reason for my morbid obsession with greek mythology. Why I know Ovid’s Metamorphosis and why I even have an altar dedicated to Aphrodite.

The whole story — bloodied, brilliant, brutal — revolves around that one idea: that beauty isn’t gentle. It’s dangerous. And when we romanticise the world too much, we begin to worship what could destroy us.

A group of elite Greek students perform a Bacchic ritual to escape the modern world. It ends in murder, madness, and a slow, spiralling collapse of innocence. The book is the reason why I believe mythology is the original therapy.

✦ What is Beauty?

Beauty is often seen as the epitome of both life and death. It is both and all that is in between. It seeks out from the most insignificant moments and hidden under intricate layers of thought and art. Beauty is the perceiver. Because without him, all is only bland and just things. No poetry, no colours, no breath of awe or life. Paradoxically, even this results in a vicious cycle, because like I said before even in the most insignificant moments, even in blandness and blackness there can be beauty if one is able to perceive it. Beauty is infinite.

✦ And what is Terror?

Terror is the blood in our veins, it is the cold in our feet and the quivering of every pore on our skin. It is the churning in our stomachs of both loss and anticipation. It is excitement, it is shock and it is sometimes grotesque. It makes us hallucinate for brief moments, it makes us disbelieve what we thought was the truth. Terror is power. It can manipulate a sinner into a saint and a saint into a sinner. It is Dionysian madness, it is the dance of our sense as we sway between reality and our imagination. What is the truth and what is what we’ve imagined? Terror is not observed — it is lived. It is the experiencer and the experienced. It lingers longer, it crawls into fragments of our soul and sometimes becomes a part of us, our past and our future. Fear, Horror, Shock. It all can be triggered from past terrors. Terror stays with us. It haunts us, like beauty. But it is not infinite, it spans for a long time until it is forgotten before it is remembered again, a little changed, a little less intense.

✦ So why is Beauty Terror?

Because beauty asks to be worshipped adorned, adored, placed gently on the tongue like a sacrament. And terror? Terror doesn’t ask. It arrives. Uninvited, unrelenting, and unforgettable. One seduces, the other consumes. But together, they create devotion. Together, they make religion out of longing.

They are the twin forces behind every obsession, every myth, every self-inflicted bruise we call art. Behind the way we cry over poems we don’t fully understand. Behind the silence we hold after hearing a chord progression that makes our ribs ache. Behind every moment we whisper “this is too beautiful, I can’t bear it.”

Because beauty shows you what is possible — what could be yours in another lifetime, on another street, with another face. And terror? Terror shows you what it might cost. The sacrifice. The ache. The inevitability of loss. It reminds you that to touch something divine is to risk never being whole again.

And perhaps the most terrifying thing of all?

Beauty lingers. In memory. In dreams. In that half-second before sleep when your brain replays something small — a smile, a phrase, the way someone once looked at you like you were poetry.

Because every time we fall in love with something — a person, an idea, a moment — we are not just loving it.

We are preparing to mourn it.

And some part of us knows that.

Still, we beg to be ruined.

But beautifully.

— sans🍵

Orpheus was the son of a Muse, which meant music ran through his blood like prophecy. Blessed by Apollo, he played the lyre like it was a second language. They said even wild beasts would lie at his feet just to hear the melody. Even the stones softened. Even death paused.

Then came Eurydice, all soft steps and sunlit hair. She didn’t need to speak poetry. She was it. They fell in love the way all doomed lovers do: fast, eternal, and unaware of the ticking gods.

On their wedding day, she was bitten by a snake. A single step away from forever — and she was gone.

Orpheus broke open, but not in the loud, masculine way of war and rage. He broke quietly. He broke into song.

And his grief was so precise, so devastatingly composed, that the gods of the underworld — Hades and Persephone — wept. They gave him one impossible chance: he could lead Eurydice back to the world of the living, but only if he walked ahead of her and did not look back until they were both out of the dark.

He almost made it.

Almost.

But just before the last step, before sunlight touched her skin again — he turned.

He looked back.

And Eurydice was pulled away forever.

✦

The world calls him foolish.

They say, “How could he?”

They say, “She was right there.”

But I don’t see a fool when I read that story.

I see a desperate lover with trembling hands and a heart swollen with silence.

Do you know how loud it gets in the dark when the person you love doesn’t make a sound?

Do you know how much you start to doubt the universe, the gods, yourself?

He didn’t look back because he didn’t believe in her.

He looked back because he couldn’t bear not knowing.

Because the silence behind him started to sound like loss.

Because sometimes love doesn’t ask for patience — it demands proof.

✦

And Eurydice?

I don’t think she resented him in that moment.

I don’t think she screamed or cursed or condemned.

Because when he turned, she saw not a failure — but a boy so desperate to be sure she was still his, he was willing to risk eternity.

That isn’t weakness.

That’s devotion — raw, trembling, reckless.

That’s the kind of love that doesn’t care if it ends badly, as long as it ends together.

✦

I think love, real love, lives in that dangerous moment before the light.

That in-between breath where hope feels like a question mark and not a promise.

And the myth doesn’t warn us against love — it warns us about time.

He looked back too soon.

Had he waited one more second, maybe she’d be alive.

Had she called his name, maybe he wouldn’t have turned.

Had the gods given them music instead of silence, maybe he’d have had something to follow.

But love is rarely patient.

Grief is rarely obedient.

And silence?

Silence is louder than any hymn.

✦

So no, I don’t think Orpheus failed.

I think he loved her in the only way he knew how —

By wanting to see her.

By needing to know.

By turning around, even if it meant losing her.

And maybe she didn’t hate him for it.

Maybe she loved him even more.

Because what a holy kind of heartbreak it is —

to be loved so deeply someone risks the wrath of the underworld just to be sure you’re still there.

✦

True love isn’t born of lust or impatience.

It’s born of trust. Of quiet. Of the kind of peace that doesn’t perform.

It doesn’t shout to be seen.

It waits — not for attention, but for alignment.

It blooms in the insignificant — in the brush of fingertips, in shared silence, in the way someone says your name without urgency.

It grows when everything else is still.

It is infinite — not because it is loud or lasting,

but because it makes even a fleeting moment feel eternal.

It exists without condition, without performance,

in the rare, sacred space where presence is enough.

Where you don’t have to be looked at to be known.

And sometimes —

even if he turns too soon,

even if the story ends in shadow —

the love remains.

Because he looked back.

And that was the proof.

Orpheus and his Love, one as true as the other’s devotion.

✦ But the story doesn’t end at the glance.

After Eurydice faded — after her soft form slipped back into the shadows — Orpheus didn’t rage. He didn’t beg again. He didn’t curse the gods.

Hades turned him away, and his spirits broke.

He simply… sang.

Each note was soaked in mourning. Not the dramatic, thunderous kind, but the slow, dissolving sort. The kind that seeps into bark and bone.

He wandered the forests of Thrace, lyre in hand, singing to the trees, to the stars, to the quiet. Refusing all company — especially that of women, who offered him warmth and life and touch. But his heart was stitched to shadow.

They say he never looked at another. That the underworld took more than his muse — it took his desire to return.

And when the Maenads came — wild, god-drunk women who demanded celebration, frenzy, worship — he would not join them.

He would not sing for Bacchus.

So they tore him apart.

Limbs like petals, voice still trembling from his throat as they scattered him. His head floated down the Hebrus river, lyre still humming in the reeds. Even in death, Orpheus sang.

Maybe that’s the most tragic part —

Not that he looked back.

In the bleak darkness, they join again —

golden light pouring out of their souls as they reach over and remember.

No fear this time.

No glance forbidden.

No conditions from Hades.

Just the quiet certainty of reunion.

Fingers threading back together like they never parted.

But that he kept loving long after the world had given him no reason to.

Because some of us are like that.

We don’t stop singing just because no one’s left to listen.

We love like myths —

even when it ruins us.

- sans🍵

✦ Clotho spun the thread of my life with trembling hands —

or maybe she wasn’t trembling.

Maybe it was me.

Mistaking fate for fear, destiny for disorder.

Maybe the thread was never smooth to begin with — maybe it was barbed wire dipped in honey, braided with every woman’s inheritance: grief, longing, a name we didn’t ask for.

✦ Lachesis measured it in silence. Inch by inch.

A teacup chipped in childhood. A father’s absence.

A mother humming over the stove with eyes elsewhere.

A breakup in a thunderstorm. A heartbreak that didn’t even look like heartbreak —

just a girl in a hoodie walking home with nothing to say.

✦ And Atropos?

She waits. She watches.

Scissors poised like she’s always known where this story ends.

✦ But here’s the part they never carved into the myth:

Women have always known how to make something from nothing.

Bread from dust. Joy from ruin.

Love from absence.

We were born spinning thread.

So what if I unspool the one they gave me and spin it again —

this time, in gold?

✦ Femininity is a thread too — delicate, deliberate, divine.

And yes, sometimes deceiving.

But it binds us. Wraps us in silks and softness.

Still, we are told softness is weakness.

But I have bled in softness.

I have broken quietly.

I have cried into rose-scented sheets and woken up whole.

✦ So now I spin.

Now I claim the sacred art of weaving myself back into being —

with Aphrodite’s blessing,

with lace like armour and perfume like protest.

I say this:

My softness is not your currency.

It is my sword.

✦ I was told fate cannot be undone.

But I am not undoing it.

I am remaking it.

I’m weaving rage with reverence.

I’m knotting grief into glamour.

I’m letting my tears varnish the thread into gold.

And when Atropos comes to cut it —

I’ll tie it into a bow and pin it to my chest.

Like a relic.

Like a rebellion.

Like a girl who rewrote the stars and called it survival.

✦ Some threads you can’t unspool.

Some things are written in the marrow before you ever learn to stand —

before you learn how to lace silence with lipstick,

how to smile while the world folds around you like laundry.

Fate is not fair.

But it is faithful.

✦ You will always meet what was meant for you —

sometimes with open arms, sometimes on your knees.

The Moirai never miss.

Clotho spins, and you are born where you are born — not by accident, but with astonishing precision.

Lachesis measures, not with mercy, but meaning.

And Atropos? She cuts only when the story is complete.

No act of resistance can outrun what is already etched into the loom.

✦ There is comfort in surrendering.

The love you lost?

It was supposed to shape you.

The job that broke you?

It carved out space for what’s coming.

The girl you were five heartbreaks ago?

She had to shatter for the woman writing this now.

Fate is a brutal teacher.

But it is never random.

✦ And darling, the ache you carry — the loneliness, the quiet prayers you whispered into tea and bathwater and pillow seams?

They were heard.

They are already being answered.

Not by force.

Not by productivity.

But by design.

✦ Aphrodite doesn’t chase.

She waits — adored, adorned, divine.

So must you.

Let the thread tighten.

Let it pull you toward what already knows your name.

You do not need to fight to deserve.

You do not need to earn your arrival.

The life meant for you will arrive exactly when it’s time.

And when it does, you will recognise it not by its grandeur, but by its gentleness.

It will feel like home —

the one you thought you lost in someone else.

✦ So what do you do until then?

You spin gold from grief.

You sit with the soft.

And when Atropos comes to cut the thread?

Let her.

Because what you were meant to live — you already did.

Everything else now is bonus.

Beauty.

Benediction.

And —

It was always going to be you.

This is the aestheticisation of breakdown.

This is what happens when even our pain needs to be photogenic.

We post trauma like it’s a moodboard. We caption spirals with lowercase softness, “healing softly. slowly. always.” — while internally screaming into the void. And who could blame us? We grew up in a world that told us that pain without polish is messy, inappropriate, uncomfortable to witness. So we turned it into art. Into pastel-tinted survival.

Into milk, honey, and emotional decay.

✦

The Myth of Softness

Softness, you see, is no longer just a temperament — it’s currency. In an age of digital girlhood and pastel capitalism, “being soft” has become an aesthetic brand.

The Soft Girl is curated, fragile, and blushing — but never too much. She cries, but cutely. She breaks down, but there’s always a candle flickering in the background.

Her grief is screen-lit. Her silence is marketable.

And yet, underneath the ribbons and velvet and whispered affirmations, there’s something darker. A sacred rot.

Softness, when performed, is theatre.

But softness, when lived truthfully?

It’s holy. It’s sacred. It’s intimate. It’s unadulterated purity.

✦

Aphrodite Was Never Subtle

Let’s talk myth.

Let’s talk Aphrodite — goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and chaos. People forget that last one. They remember the seashell and the golden hair and the doves, but they forget the blood-foam. The war she caused. The destruction she left in her kiss’s wake.

Femininity isn’t docile. It’s not polite.

It’s not just bubble baths and blush palettes.

It’s rage in a pink dress.

It’s desire as devotion.

It’s divine contradiction.

To embrace femininity is to embrace that contradiction. To honour softness and fire. Honey and venom. Love and decay. Because Aphrodite never asked to be understood. She asked to be worshipped — in all her glittering ruin. She loved fiercely, but she raged just as more.

✦

The Ritual of Falling Apart

There’s a kind of ceremony to decay.

You start slow. A chipped nail here. An unanswered message there. A missed call. A cracked mug. You stay in bed a little longer. You let the laundry pile up. You cry while slicing peaches, then pretend they’re tears of joy.

The beauty of rot is how intimately it knows you. How it sits beside you like an old friend, saying, “Don’t worry. We’ll bloom again. But first, let it hurt.”

And so you do.

Softly.

Fully.

With lip balm and lullabies.

✦

We Are the Saints of Sentimentality

Somewhere between being too much and not enough, we created altars of ourselves.

We lit incense for our past.

We blessed the people who left us.

We wrote poems no one read, made playlists no one listened to, cried on bathroom floors no one cleaned.

And still, we rose.

We put honey on our toast even when the world tasted bitter.

We painted our nails even when no one would hold our hand.

We stayed alive.

Not because it was easy.

Not because it was graceful.

But because there’s something stubbornly magical about surviving —

softly.

✦

Conclusion: Let It Rot (Beautifully)

You don’t need to be okay.

You don’t need to be radiant, or thriving, or healed on anyone else’s schedule.

You can be crumbling like an overripe peach and still be divine.

Let the world mock your softness.

Let them call you sensitive, dramatic, too much.

You know the truth.

You know that to feel deeply in a world that rewards numbness is a superpower.

So let the petals fall. Let the tea go cold. Let your sadness be scented with vanilla and violets.

And if you’re decaying?

Darling, decay like art.

Decay like myth.

Decay like milk and honey poured over a poem written in your own blood.

You are the altar.

You are the goddess.

You are the grief, the glitter, the girl.

And you are sacred.

It looks like crying in the bath while Mitski or Ethel Cain plays in the background, accidentally romanticising your existential crisis because the candlelight hit your tears just right. This isn’t a comeback story. This is the messy, magnificent interlude, the part where you fall apart gorgeously, without turning it into content or capital.

This piece is for the ones quietly surviving. For the ones naming their breakdowns like they’re old friends. For the ones whispering “I’m fine” while wearing the same hoodie for four days and hoping no one notices or maybe hoping someone does.

Welcome to your soft, beautiful ruin.

Here’s how to romanticise your breakdown — without capitalism winning.

✦ Step one: Cry. Sob. Scream into the void. But make it aesthetic.

You know the drill, soft lighting, rain on the window, Bon Iver playing faintly in the background. You’re not collapsing, you’re wilting poetically. A lavender candle flickers in the corner. There’s a mug of herbal tea you’re not drinking, and your journal is open to a page titled: “Things That Broke Me But Also Made Me Hot.”

This isn’t a meltdown. It’s a cinematic sequence.

And no, this isn’t productivity. This is protagonist energy. You are not healing in a straight line. You are spiralling in italics, sobbing in metaphors, and recovering like a mythical creature dragged through a Sylvia Plath poem.

Once your soul is sufficiently wrung out:

Hydrate for the tears lost. Pull the blanket over your head like it’s a second skin. Take the longest, hottest bath known to humankind. Watch something dumb and beautiful. Text someone who gets it.

Maybe it’s your best friend. Maybe it’s your Notes app.

It’s done. It’s over. And it’ll pass.

And when it does, you’ll rise. Not like a productivity guru. But like a slightly unhinged poet who survived.

Because that’s what you are.

✦ Breakdown, but soft launch it.

Don’t tell people you’re not okay. Just start wearing your old hoodie and staring at birds more than usual. Whisper “nothing matters” into a matcha latte and then post a picture of your book splayed open next to dried rose petals and write “just breathing rn.”

No one needs to know what chapter of grief you’re in, let them guess based on your Spotify playlists.

You’re not emotionally spiralling, you’re curating a vibe. You’re soft-launching your breakdown like a true chaotic-neutral aesthete.

✦ Step two: Do NOT let capitalism commodify this.

Your pain is not a personal brand. You are not “#lowvibe” content. You are a living paradox, not an opportunity for someone’s newsletter click-through rate. Romanticise for yourself, not for your digital metrics.

Post if you must, but do it for the theatre. For the art. For the girlies who get it. Not for an algorithm that wants you to turn your inner apocalypse into “relatable content.”

Break down in your room, not your Reels tab.

Don’t splurge, even if it brings you an odd sense of comfort in that single moment, it won’t heal you in the long term. Save the money, keep it for better times. Spend it when you’re happy and when you know what you want.

✦ Step three: Make it weirdly tender.

Buy yourself a peach and eat it dramatically. Watch Studio Ghibli alone at 2 AM and sob when the wind rustles the grass. Walk into a bookstore and ask for something that will ruin your entire month. Light a candle just to blow it out. Write a love letter to your younger self and tuck it into a shoe box like a relic.

Live in the moment. Let every fibre of warmth seep into the pores of your skin and soak up every sense of comfort. Just live, live and live.

This is your era of divine decay. Let it rot a little.

✦ Step four: Declare a soft rebellion.

Skip the grind. Romanticise the pause.

Wear your comfiest, ugliest sweater like it’s Chanel couture and you’re walking the runway of your own recovery. Wrap yourself in fleece and disinterest. Cancel plans with quiet authority. Let your inbox rot like overripe fruit. Ghost those emails. They’ll survive.

Write poetry in your Notes app at 2:07 AM — the kind that makes your stomach twist — then delete it immediately because it felt too raw, too tender, too real. That was never meant for anyone else anyway. It was a spell. It worked.

Make your silence sacred. Make your slowness art.

You are not behind. You are becoming.

Slowly. Softly. Painfully. Beautifully.

The world will try to convince you that healing needs a timeline. That you’re wasting time. That productivity is the only proof of worth. But what if your stillness is divine? What if your blank days are compost for the bloom that’s coming?

Do not rush.

Let yourself unfurl the way wild things do — unsure, awkward, glorious. Let comfort be optional. Let safety be felt in your bones, even in unfamiliar places. Let joy show up strange and small: in the smell of toast, the way your tea cools just right, the crackle of a candle, a well-timed meme.

You don’t owe anyone a triumphant comeback.

Just let your breath come back to you.

Gently. Quietly. On your own terms.

✦ Step five: Let yourself be boring.

You don’t have to glow up. You don’t have to bounce back.

This isn’t a makeover montage. This is real life. Your under-eye circles don’t need correcting — they’re war paint. You are tired because you’ve been carrying everything. And no, you don’t have to turn your heartbreak into a brand.

You don’t have to take up hot yoga, journal your way to enlightenment, or blend kale with intention. You are allowed to not grow for a moment. To decay a little. To rot gently in your softest hoodie.

It is okay if your biggest achievement today was brushing your teeth before 3 p.m.

It is okay if you watched six episodes of a show you barely remember.

It is okay if the most connection you felt was naming your new chin pimple “Gregory” and apologising when you accidentally bumped him with your blanket.

You don’t have to harvest meaning from every ache.

You don’t have to make your pain palatable for others.

You can just be.

In sweats.

On the floor.

Staring at your ceiling fan like it might blink back.

Because sometimes, survival is the most rebellious thing you can do.

No productivity. No transformation arc. No five-step plan.

Just breathing.

Just enduring.

Just staying.

And if that isn’t enough for them, let it be everything for you.

✦ Final step: Don’t perform your healing.

Feel it.

You don’t owe anyone a timeline. You don’t owe anyone a “thriving now!” arc. You owe yourself tenderness. You owe yourself softness. You owe yourself mornings where you don’t try to be anything other than a person who made it to morning.

You owe yourself tenderness.

You owe yourself slowness — mornings where the sun rises and you don’t. Where your only accomplishment is breathing, blinking, maybe making it to the kettle. Mornings where you don’t perform strength, you just exist in your body, half-draped in yesterday’s feelings and the scent of sleep.

You owe yourself softness — not the romantic, Instagrammable kind, but the kind that sits quietly with your ache. That says:

“It’s okay. You don’t have to become anything today.”

You owe yourself permission to not be okay.

To not “turn pain into purpose” before you’re ready.

To not run a race you never signed up for.

You’re allowed to pause. To curl inwards.

To wake up and just… be a person who made it to morning.

And that?

That’s holy. That’s heroic. That’s enough.

So if you’re falling apart right now, darling?

Do it with candles.

Do it with softness.

Do it without turning it into content.

Let the world keep spinning. You? You are so much more than your past, failures and flaws.

And remember, that something greater will always be waiting for you. 💗🍵

And I have so much to say. From the way my inner monologue screamed at nearly every scene, to how viscerally, adoringly, absurdly in love I am with Fleabag herself.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, you absolute genius. I hope your brain is insured.

Let’s rewind. Back to Episode 1, Season 1 — the chaotic birth of Fleabag.

She’s introduced as this angsty, deadpan, weirdly magnetic woman who runs a guinea pig-themed café (yes, really), while trying to stay afloat post-grief, post-mess, post-everything.

Her sister Claire is her exact opposite: polished, precise, emotionally constipated, and with a spine straighter than any Euclidean line. She’s got two degrees, a Burberry coat, and a husband.

Their father? Emotionally MIA. Buys them tickets to a feminist lecture his idea of support after their mum’s death.

Fleabag goes, of course. And then, when posed the question

“Please raise your hands, if you would trade five years of your life for the so-called perfect body”

Both fleabag and Claire raise their hands.

I stare at them in new found awe and even a little shame shared with the rest of the crowd in the theatre. And just like that, the fourth wall cracks. And so do we.

After a torturous date with a bunny-toothed man and a tense, eggshell walkaround with her new stepmother (played by the utterly brilliant Olivia Colman), the episode closes with Fleabag slipping a stolen statuette into her coat pocket — smirking directly at us through the lens.

And we’re in. Helplessly, completely in…

Episode two is just a crazy whirlwind around Fleabag’s theatre boyfriend, meek Harry and they’re suboptimal relationship. It’s just so evident that the two characters stay together purely out of familiarity and no sense of compatibility. They’re together, for the sake of it.

And through a glimpse of Fleabag’s past endeavours it’s almost as though..she’s afraid to be alone. Afraid to simply be with the quiet of her own presence. And that is something strikingly familiar. The episode then ends with a difference in their opinions of a surprise and a dramatic argument when Fleabag breaks a relationship new resolution and this time again, he leaves the dinosaur toy behind. It is shown as their break-up ritual, they fight and he packs up, cleans the whole house to erase any evidence of his presence and leaves.

But he always leaves this dinosaur toy wedged between shelve or hidden behind cabinets, a rather silent signal to hint at his return..most probably after Fleabag gets drunk and calls out for him through the mailbox slot.

Episode 3 revolves around Claire’s surprise birthday party, one she plans for and is completely aware for. She tells Fleabag, ‘So, it's a 7pm arrival for a 7.30 surprise okay?’ At this point we already get the sense that Claire is not frigid but rather she is the epitome of thriving under pressure. She lives for chaos just like Fleabag, but Claire is fuelled by ambition and morbid need for control. She changes up things a little, revealed later in the show, and tries to re-invent tiny aspects of her life, either braiding her hair or wearing an incredibly suited spandex of bright blue. It was her way of coping. Her way of initiating change before it transforms her first, without warning and without a notice letter. Martin is Claire’s husband.

Anyways, Martin and fleabag venture on a gift-shopping trip and the balding, paltry almost cunning man who ends up a little too close to fleabag at the party. Fleabag’s in shock and so was I as she leaves hurriedly with her bunny-toothed date who then tries to almost assassinate the guinea pig at the cafe while convincingly crying out ‘It’s a rat.’

The final three episodes pick up pace, a chaotic blur of revelations, betrayals, and one painfully symbolic silent retreat. We watch Fleabag unravel slowly, delicately, devastatingly.

There’s the female-only silent retreat (with optional screaming exercises for men), a family memorial lunch laced with passive aggression, and then the finale: the exhibition.

Claire, after showing a flicker of spine, goes back on her word and stays with her walking red flag of a husband, the same man who twisted the narrative and blamed Fleabag for his own predatory behaviour.

And our darling, Fleabag ? She’s humiliated into playing waiter at her own stepmother’s art show, the same woman who’s been psychologically pickling her for years. Even Harry is there, glowing in the arms of a disturbingly healthy new girlfriend. Her father, spineless as ever, sides with his new wife like it’s a reflex.

So she does what any emotionally feral soul would do: downs champagne, smashes a few glasses, and spirals in high definition.

That’s the thing about Fleabag. No matter how much love she gives, how much good she tries to do, the world and the people in it — keep choosing someone else. And somehow, she always ends up alone. Not dramatically. Not loudly. Just… quietly. And it lingers.

She thinks of Boo, her best friend. She thinks of her loss, and her grief which follows her around like a stray dog. She realises how truly alone she is.

The series ends not with closure, but with a quiet, heart-wrenching revelation.

Fleabag’s grief swells until the entire storyline feels like a dissociative, agonising dream. A surreal gallery of shame, love, loss, framed in memory and lit with regret.

Everything unravels.

Everything floats.

And then, it all falls into space.

I hold my breathe and clutch my imaginary pearls as I wait for the next season to start playing. I’m already fixed on seeing her comeback. Maybe she’ll finally save her cafe, maybe she’ll learn to find solace in solitude and see that all she’s ever needed is herself..and maybe she’ll find a hot priest with an irrational fear of stalking foxes.

I think I finally understand why I love Fleabag.

It’s because deep down, I know she’s not a bad person. She’s just a person bad things happened to. She’s not heartless, she’s heart-bruised. She’s lost, she’s messed up, she’s spiralled. But she’s still here.

And honestly? That’s the most human thing in the world.

To be human is to err, sure. But more than that — it’s to carry our grief like luggage we refuse to check in. To let our mistakes shape us, haunt us, narrate us. Sometimes, even define us.

Fleabag isn’t flawless. She’s not even trying to be.

She’s alone. She’s filthy. She’s unhinged.

But she’s also alive — in the most painfully honest, unpretentiously raw way.

And that’s why she stays with us.

Part two coming soon 💗

It’s me again. And guess what? I went to the bookstore cafe alone.

Not in a sad girl way. In a "Let me get some iced latte and browse books from the racks directly" way. It slapped.

There’s something so sacred about sitting across from no one but your spiralling thoughts, a slightly overpriced sandwich, and maybe a pigeon or two staring and judging to see if you’d toss a few crumbs their way or not. No small talk. No social choreography. Just you, your mind, and whatever you ordered because it “looked pretty on the menu.”

This is your sign to stop treating solitude like it needs to be fixed. Or healed. Or scheduled between a hangout and a FaceTime.

Solitude is not the villain here. In fact, she might be the most emotionally intelligent character in your story. She brings snacks and soft epiphanies. She helps you make eye contact with your own chaos and pats your back, "It's okay, I got you." She’s your best friend, because she’s the best reflection of you.

Let’s get this straight: solitude is not the same as loneliness.

Loneliness is an empty inbox. It’s depressive yearning for company that might not even fill the void in you.

Solitude is Do Not Disturb mode with a candle lit and a playlist called "Contemplative Angel Hours." It’s yearning for peace and a sense of self-fulfilment.

Loneliness is craving noise. Solitude is sipping silence like herbal tea, because you're finally not trying to impress anyone. Not even the existential void.

In solitude, your inner narrator gets a mic. She might start off weird: "Why did you say that thing in 2018?" , “Do you think she still thinks about what you did?” But give her time, a little iced tea, and a soft cashmere pink scarf to keep her warm.

Eventually, she starts telling you what you actually need. Not what the algorithm thinks you want. Not what your ego tells you to chase. Not what your emotionally unavailable crush with forearm tattoos wants. What you need, and what your soul craves.

Spoiler: it might just be matcha, better boundaries, and an afternoon nap.

Solitude is soul food because it lets you digest life. Modern life is a buffet of stimulation. You can’t keep consuming without ever chewing. So many people, so much influence, and endless hot pot you sink deeper into. Solitude is when you sit down, napkin in lap, and actually taste your thoughts one by one. Some are bitter. Some are sweet. A few are mildly unhinged. But they’re yours.

That’s what makes them so special. In this world of change and life of pace, the relationship you have with yourself is most special. It’s intricate and delicate, it’s all the things you love and believe. It morphs the vision of your future. Solitude holds you in her grasp while letting the soft calm run over and soothe the ache of ambiguity in your bones. Let her tell you little secrets, let her make you understand yourself a little better. Without her, introspection would just be a weird abstract idea, and individuality a myth. Let her remind you and shape you into the best possible version of yourself.

And that’s the whole point.

Because when you realise that you own your life, you live it wholly. Every breath you take has your name written across it. Little cells in your body jump and yelp for some good nutrients so they can keep you happy and healthy. So drop the pessimism, drop the self-loathing, and for once, admire who you are and everything you’ve become. Because if the past little version of you saw you right now, they’d be so proud of how far you’ve come.

Embedded within you are a thousand different versions of yourself, each just as widely vibrant and fascinatingly different. Like intricately layered art.

So here’s your homework: Romanticise solitude. Go full main character. Take yourself on a date. Read poetry out loud in your room like it’s a TED talk. Dance like no one’s watching, because truly, no one is. Light a candle. Name it. Tell it your dreams.

Soul food doesn’t always come in a bowl. Sometimes it comes in silence and with a side of contemplating.

Stay weird, stay unbothered, and spiritually feral.

— sans🍵

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A mortal king cursed to push a boulder up a hill for all of eternity. It doesn’t seem like a vile punishment, not when there are others like Prometheus’. The king tricked death and played the games of mischief with the Fates, only in the end to have gained immortality but at the cost of suffering for all of time. If he stops, of course, the most that would happen is that he’d hold up the boulder before it crushes him. Time won’t stop, nor his punishment. And I cannot think of a more mundane yet agonising way of spending the rest of one’s life.

Since birth, we’re forced into this illusion that life indeed has much to offer, but what we don’t recognise is that we are the ones bringing our offers to the world and to life in turn.

At some point after being a wandering youth, I realised that life indeed is its own simulative loop. That there is no constant in life, and that all elements are as volatile as a tide in a storm and a simple ripple in a stream. I like to think that this is the universe’s way of keeping its balance. One cannot have too much of something if he does not possess too little of another.

It is a universal rule most of us overlook, and fall into the trap of the ‘fulfilled life.’ We become so obsessed with fighting for the ideal version of what we want that we forget that even then, when we achieve it, a macabre, inexplicable sense of emptiness will take over. And it’s not just because we’re greedy and our hunger cannot be fed. It is rather because we are always half of what we think we are.

One might be wealthy but not wealthy enough. Or he might have never found true companionship with anyone. Another might have been so emotionally satisfied in his life, and every validation sated, yet he finds himself lacking in the most soul-grappling way. Perhaps he is ugly, or simply feels so.

Perfection, in this case, is a myth, an illusion, or a paradox meant to lure people in with its twisted, beautiful arms while holding a grotesque and quite well-camouflaged trap underneath, calling it comparison.

Because without comparison, there would be no perfection. There would be no points to discuss, no pros to count, and no flaws to weep over.

I digress. But my point here is: everything in its own way is an excruciating, vivacious cycle of its own, with a timeline and a pattern, a balance.

And sometimes, I lose myself in this very spiral. If there is no purpose, then why suffer? Why push the boulder?

In 1942, Albert Camus published a book called The Myth of Sisyphus, and expectantly, he had a very existentialist manner of proving that, despite life’s hardships, and more accurately, its meaninglessness one must strive to push forward, to walk up the hill holding up the burden, because it may very well shape who he is and give him a proper purpose.

Meaning, like almost everything else, is profoundly subjective. Had you asked different people for outlooks on their lives, and then asked them to judge each other’s, each and every one of them would contradict the other and yet all be right. But what they cannot for sure guess is the singular paths each of them had taken, the depths and the heights, the sudden drops and the pulls of life strung out to be fate.

And it is sometimes good to think that perhaps it is not the boulder we push that gives us purpose, but the ache in our muscles, the triumph of another step, the rush of blood in our veins. Just perhaps, that is what gives us meaning.

Each of us walks up a different path, but one thing is common: there is no other way than up.

I am often consumed by the unearthly realisation that I might never be enough. That I might not reach my goals. That no matter how hard I push the boulder, and no matter how many times I slip and let it roll onto me, crushing my bones and spirit, I might never relish in the feeling of pride and self-confidence.

I oscillate heavily between my superficial sense of intellectual superiority and a gut-wrenching sense of insignificance.

I am performing for the audience in my head while pulling stunts for the nothingness behind me.

I look ahead and I see a vision, a vision of myself, where I am both everything and anything. Where I am infinite.

Who am I without my sense of vision? I’ll only be Sisyphus without his boulder, refusing to walk up the hill with my muscles still sore and my veins still throbbing. I will grow weak and limp, until the earth below me swallows me whole. I will be nothing where I once stood alive.

And I believe that this overwhelming fear stems from my pathological sense of idealism. Idealism has both ruined and made my life.

I would be satisfied without it, I think. But I would not be happy.

One would revert to the idea of simply enjoying being , taking a break and living, just.

And that’s what I decided to do.

To exist wholly. To feel the sun on my skin and the taste of salt in the air, count the syllables in every word, and hum the tunes I could remember hearing as a child.

And in these moments, I realise that I am so much more than who I think. That I am both my past and my future, dancing precariously on the lines of the present.

I realised that with absurdism and idealism, one can birth existentialism into their lives.

To exist is not to suffer, but to endure. It is to feel the weight of the boulder, of our expectations, of our hardships and still, with courage, take another step.

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From Greek myths to my weekly existential crises, from oddly specific thought spirals to philosophical hot takes no one asked for, I write about everything, everywhere, all at once (and then some).

If you’ve ever cried over Camus and craved hot chicken soup in the same hour, you’re probably in the right place.

Stay if you like your reflections a little too deep, your metaphors mildly unhinged and existentialism wrapped up in a pink ribbon .

Think of this as a philosophical diary disguised as a newsletter — part rant, part revelation, part metaphysical coping mechanism.

I post when inspiration strikes or when reality does, whichever comes first.

You can also find me over on Medium where I philosophise like it’s a competitive sport, on my website where I pretend to be a professional, and on Spotify where I host a podcast that currently has more existential dread than episodes (new ones coming soon, pinky promise).

Basically, if it’s a platform where you can overshare with style, I’m probably already there, sipping matcha and writing about the meaning of everything.

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