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

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

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

Even good people are not enough for me.

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

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

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

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

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

Because suddenly I realized this was never only about men.

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

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

That realization made me cry harder than heartbreak itself.

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

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

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

Peace is quiet, but longing is loud.

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

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

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

I kept emotionally orbiting people while slowly abandoning myself.

And perhaps that is why nothing ever fully feels enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These days, I think I want something simpler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My CEO made this terrible judgment on me in March.

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

I had understood before the sentence finished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am beginning to believe Q1 was the second kind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just haven’t gotten there yet.

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

How to Know You’re in Misalignment

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

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

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

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

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

Let your misalignment guide you into Q2.

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

Now tell me: what misalignment have you recently realise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then I started flirting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Especially in your twenties.

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

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

Lesson one: Everyone here is performing. Including you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He can, which is precisely the painful part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone is hustling. Everyone is managing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I found in the quiet surprised me.

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

Isolation is not the same thing as loneliness.

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

One is a wound. The other is a practice.

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

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

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

Work will not love you back.

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

I do the job. Someone else receives the warmth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything except the writing.

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

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

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

Not as consolation, rather, a discovery.

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody told me God could be known.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is part of that exploration.

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

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

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

I wanted structure for my inward soul.

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

🌒 I have watched people manipulating God my whole life.

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

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

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

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

🌓 Witnessed, diminished

A friend saw me pray once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t want to be reduced.

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

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

As a result, every day, I cry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🌓 Nothing becomes truth until you own it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to support Sabella

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS:

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

These are the uncomfortable things being as for motherhood.

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

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

Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Surrender, Wounds, and Prayers

I’m not mad at you anymore, mom.

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

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

But anger exhausts, and it’s always incomplete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll become the mothers we needed.

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

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

I want to support Sabella’s writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before I go into these, a heads up.

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

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

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

Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t.

This is how they actually live in me:

1. Loneliness came first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s… lonely too.

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

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

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

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

Both nights, are lonely.

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

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

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

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

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

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

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

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

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

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

And still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now I’m learning to wait for myself.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not what happened.

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

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

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

4. Intention dies without consistency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because intention needs consistency to stay alive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. You can’t curate real connections.

Real connection stripped me of strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s to February.

To living deliberately.

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

Support this space if you wish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

• A meditative podcast that has been mothering me for years

  Sarah Blondin

  ---

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take this year slowly.

We’ll figure out the rest together.

PS:

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

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

That’s more than enough.

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS:

Before you go, I left something for you.

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

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

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

If they keep you company, I’m glad :)

I'll take this gift

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of them told me he was sapiosexual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone once told me: “Don’t take things personally. It’s not about you.”

I thought that was the dumbest advice for dealing with parents. How can it NOT be personal? They raised me. Their words shaped me. Everything they do feels like it’s about me, especially when it hurts.

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But watching my father photograph receipts on our last family vacation, watching my mother perform happiness for Facebook while I sat there disappearing - something finally clicked.

Their anxiety, their need for validation, their inability to just be present - it’s not about me. It never was. It’s about what they lost when they stopped being the people they used to be.

And that realisation is both heartbreaking and freeing.

“You’re so quiet,” my father said at breakfast on the third morning. He was smiling, but not really. “Always sleeping. It’s okay, don’t be shy if you’re sleepy.”

It sounded like a joke. Like teasing. But it wasn’t.

My mother laughed. That nervous laugh she does when she wants to smooth things over.

I smiled back, the way you do when you’re very far away but your face is still sitting at the table. “Just tired from work.”

“Still working on holiday?” He shook his head. “You young people. Can’t even rest properly.”

This convo is to show you what I’ve learnt about my family: they only know how to talk in jokes and comments. Not real conversations. Teasing is their way of showing attention, but it lands like dismissal.

My father probably doesn’t realise how his words stick. He’s never been taught to see emotions as something valuable. Just something to brush off.

So when I show up quiet, withdrawn, he doesn’t ask what’s wrong. He makes it into a joke. Something that lets him acknowledge my presence without actually seeing me.

And for years, I took that personally. I thought: “I’m not interesting enough. I’m disappointing him. I’m failing at being the daughter he wants.”

But the truth is simpler and sadder: he doesn’t know how to do this differently. This is all he has.

The day before, we’d gone to a restaurant my sister recommended. One of those places with good lighting and a view.

My mother spent the first ten minutes taking photos. The table setting. The view. Her drink with a little umbrella in it.

My father checked the menu. “How much is the pasta?”

“Twenty-two,” I said.

He made a face. Then pulled out his phone. “The place near our house does pasta for eight.”

My mother nodded but didn’t look up. She was already posting the photos. Writing something about “blessed family time.”

After we paid (hmm I paid), my father took a photo of the receipt.

“For comparison,” he said.

I used to think these moments were about me. About my choices. About whether I was spending money wisely or taking them to the right places.

But they’re not.

They’re about my father trying to hold onto some sense of expertise in a world where he no longer feels expert at anything. They’re about my mother trying to prove to her friends that retirement hasn’t made them irrelevant.

Every price comparison. Every Facebook post. Every performance of happiness.

It’s not about me. It’s about them trying to survive the loss of who they used to be.

And then I’ve learned about retirement and my father: it didn’t just take away his job. It took away his identity.

He used to be the one who picked up checks. Who took us places. Who had the power that comes with providing. That was his whole sense of self.

When that disappeared, something in him broke.

Now my sister and I pay for things. But he still needs to feel like he’s in control of something. So he controls the narrative. He measures. He compares. He posts online about all the nice places we take him.

Not because he’s ungrateful. But because he’s desperate to prove to himself, to his friends, to the world that he’s still living a life that matters.

And my mother? Her anxiety about money, about status, about what people think - it existed long before I showed up. It’s about her own fears of scarcity. Her own need to be seen as successful.

None of it is about me.

But because I grew up under their emotional weather, I internalised all of it. I thought their anxiety meant I wasn’t doing enough. I thought their disappointment meant I was failing them.

I thought their pain was proof of my inadequacy.

That’s where “don’t take it personally” becomes powerful.

Not as a way to dismiss the hurt. Not as permission to ignore how their behaviour affects me.

But as a way to understand: this pain isn’t mine to carry.

Their unhealed wounds. Their unprocessed losses. Their inability to show up emotionally - those are theirs. They existed before me. They’ll exist after me.

I didn’t cause them. And I can’t fix them.

When my father makes comments about me being sleepy, he’s not really seeing me. He’s projecting his own discomfort with vulnerability.

When my mother gets anxious about money, she’s not really worried about my spending. She’s wrestling with her own lifelong fear of not having enough.

When they turn every moment into a performance, they’re not dismissing my presence. They’re desperately trying to construct meaning in lives that feel increasingly empty.

And understanding that (really, literally, understanding it) changes everything.

It doesn’t erase the hurt. But it does release me from the belief that I caused it. Or that I have the power to fix it.

The last morning, I woke up at five. The house was still dark.

I packed quietly. Every item I folded felt like I was building distance between myself and this weekend.

My father caught me in the hallway.

“Leaving already? We were going to have breakfast.”

“I have an early flight.”

He nodded. His face did that thing. That small collapse that says: You’re disappointing me.

And for the first time, I didn’t absorb that disappointment as mine.

I saw it for what it was: his disappointment with how his life has turned out. His disappointment that he’s no longer the one in control. His disappointment that aging has stripped away the identity he spent a lifetime building.

None of that is about me.

“Okay. Travel safe.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

I hugged him. Brief. Automatic.

And then I left.

On the plane, I opened my notes app and typed:

Their disappointment isn’t about me. Their anxiety isn’t about me. Their need for validation isn’t about me.

I didn’t cause their pain. I can’t fix their pain. I can only choose whether or not to carry it.

And I’m choosing to put it down.

I stared at those words for a long time.

Then I added:

This doesn’t mean I stop loving them. It means I stop letting their unhealed wounds determine my worth.

So here’s what I’m learning: you can have compassion for your parents’ pain without making it your responsibility.

You can understand why they behave the way they do without accepting behaviour that hurts you.

You can see their wounds clearly and still protect yourself from them.

And most importantly: you can stop taking their chaos personally and still show up with love.

Just from a distance that lets you breathe.

To you reading this: Have you ever realised that your parents’ behaviour wasn’t actually about you?

Have you ever felt both relief and heartbreak when you understood that their pain was always theirs, never yours to fix?

I’m still learning how to hold this truth without bitterness. Maybe you are, too.

Sometimes the deepest pain isn’t caused by what’s happening around us. It’s caused by what’s happening inside us when everything outside looks fine.

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On the surface, life moves forward. People talk, work, laugh. Nothing dramatic happens. No explosions, no betrayals, no major conflict. If someone looked at my life from the outside, they’d probably say it seems okay.

But inside me, there’s a storm no one else can see.

Last week, I was having coffee with a friend. She was telling me about her weekend - something about a dinner party, a man who’d complimented her dress, the way she’d laughed too loudly and felt embarrassed after. I was there, present, listening. Nodding at the right moments. Making the right sounds of sympathy and amusement.

But underneath my responses, there was this pain I couldn’t name.

Nothing she said triggered it. Nothing in the moment caused it. It was just there, like a bruise I kept pressing on without meaning to. I could feel it spreading through my chest, this heaviness that had nothing to do with her words and everything to do with something I couldn’t quite reach.

She must have noticed something shift in my face because she stopped mid-sentence.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just tired.”

She looked at me for a moment longer, like she wasn’t really convinced, but then let it go. Changed the subject. And I was grateful, because I didn’t know how to explain something I didn’t understand myself.

The whole truth was that I didn’t know what was wrong. And that not knowing made it worse.

I went home that day and sat on my bed, still in my coat, staring at nothing. Trying to understand why I felt so heavy when nothing bad had actually happened. When my friend had been lovely. When the coffee had been good. When the day itself had been perfectly ordinary.

You know that feeling? When you’re trying to solve a puzzle, but you don’t even know what the picture is supposed to be?

That’s when it hit me: the pain I was feeling didn’t come from what people do. It comes from what I feel in response to them. The world outside stays steady, but my inner world is anything beyond.

And that’s the confusing part, isn’t it? When the source of pain is external, you can point to it. You can say, “This happened, and that’s why I hurt.” There’s a logic to it. A story that makes sense.

But when the pain comes from inside, when it rises up even on good days, it feels like you’re drowning in something invisible. Something you can’t explain to anyone else because you barely understand it yourself.

People can’t see it. Sometimes you can’t even explain it. And that makes it lonelier than anything else.

I’ve tried, though. I’ve tried to explain it to people. I’ve said things like, “I just feel sad,” or “I don’t know, something feels off.” And they’ve been kind. They’ve tried to help. They’ve asked if something happened, if someone hurt me, if there’s anything they can do.

And I’ve had to say, “No, nothing happened. I just feel this way.”

Which sounds ridiculous, even to my own ears. How do you explain pain that has no clear cause? How do you make someone understand that sometimes your heart just pains for reasons you can’t name?

My psychologist keeps telling me about automatic thoughts. How the brain creates stories that aren’t always true. How feelings colour everything we see until we can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what we’ve made up.

“You can’t always trust your brain,” he said once.

And I always wanted to argue with him. Because if I can’t trust my brain, what can I trust? If my feelings aren’t real, then what am I?

But I think I’m starting to understand what he means. Not that the feelings aren’t real - they are. But they’re not always telling me the truth about what’s actually happening. My brain can convince me I’m in danger when I’m sitting on my couch. It can make me feel rejected when no one has rejected me. It can create entire narratives about what someone thinks of me based on nothing but the tone of a text message.

And I’m supposed to live with this? With a mind that lies to me?

Then comes the harder question: what do I do with this?

If I ignore my inner world because the outside looks fine, I feel like I’m betraying myself. When I silence that part of me, I shrink. My inner voice goes unheard, and I feel like I’ve abandoned my own truth.

I’ve done this before. Pushed down what I felt because it didn’t seem to match the moment. Told myself I was being dramatic, that I should just be grateful, that other people have real problems and mine are just feelings.

And every time, I paid for it later. The feelings didn’t disappear. They just grew louder, more insistent, until I had no choice but to listen. Until they came out sideways - in irritability, in tears over small things, in a restlessness I couldn’t shake.

But if I spend too much time digging into my wounds, I get lost there. I lose the rhythm of life. The hurt becomes the centre of everything.

I’ve done this too. Spiralled so deep into my feelings that I couldn’t see anything else. Days would pass, and I’d realise I’d been so consumed by my inner storm that I forgot to live outside of it. I’d miss calls. Cancel plans. Sit in my apartment picking at the same thoughts like scabs, unable to move forward.

So I’m trying to learn balance. And honestly, it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do.

Maybe that’s what meditation is trying to teach us. To build a bridge between the inner world and the outer one. To notice when your mind is spinning stories and gently remind yourself that the external world is actually okay. Actually safe. That the danger you feel isn’t always the danger that exists.

Or sometimes it works the other way when the external world feels chaotic, meditation asks you to find that still point inside yourself. The place that remains calm even when everything outside is falling apart.

Either way, it’s about learning to see clearly. To separate what’s real from what your brain is making up.

I’m not very good at it yet. Most days, I can’t tell the difference. My thoughts feel so automatic, so convincing, that I believe them without question. And by the time I realise I’ve been lost in a story my brain created, hours have passed and I’m exhausted from living through something that never actually happened.

The other day, I was watching a podcast with Alain de Botton. I wasn’t really planning to watch it. It just came up on my feed, and I clicked on it while I was eating dinner alone. He was talking about victimhood, about how we can get trapped in our own narratives of suffering.

Then he said something that made me stop chewing. He said, “You need to go outside and see the starry night, to remind yourself that not everything is about you.”

At first, I almost dismissed it. Go look at the stars? That’s the solution? It sounded like the kind of advice you’d find on an inspirational quote overlaid on a sunset photo. Too simple. Too neat.

But something about it wouldn’t leave me alone. It stayed with me through the rest of the episode, through washing my dishes, through getting ready for bed.

Maybe part of balance is learning to step outside my storm and remember the bigger picture. The universe doesn’t revolve around my wounds, even if they feel heavy. There’s a whole sky above me that keeps shining, no matter what I’m carrying.

That doesn’t erase the pain. But it puts it in perspective.

I tried it. That same night, I walked outside. It was cold, and I hadn’t bothered with a proper coat, just threw on a cardigan and stepped onto my street. I looked up. The stars were there, like they always are, indifferent to my heartache.

And for a moment, I felt smaller, but not in a bad way. In a way that reminded me I’m part of something bigger. That my pain, as real as it is, doesn’t have to consume the whole sky.

I stood there for a while, until my fingers went numb. Until I could breathe a little deeper. Until the pain in my chest felt less like the only thing in the world and more like just one thing among many.

Maybe you’ve felt this too. The confusion of having a heart that feels far more than what the world around you shows. The way your inner world can break you down, while everything outside looks steady and unchanged.

And maybe you’ve asked yourself the same questions I do: “Am I too much? Am I overthinking? Shouldn’t I just be grateful everything outside looks fine?”

I’ve asked myself these questions so many times I’ve lost count. And every time, I feel this pull to shrink, to make myself smaller, to apologise for feeling so much when there’s no clear reason to.

But what I’m starting to believe is: feeling deeply isn’t a flaw. It’s a sign we’re alive. It’s a sign our hearts are awake, even if the world around us stays shallow.

The challenge isn’t to erase the inner world. It’s to learn how to hold it without drowning in it. To let it speak without letting it consume. To trust that our inner storms are part of what makes us human, not broken.

Because our capacity to feel is also our capacity to love, to create, to connect. If we numb the pain, we numb everything else too. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to go through life half-asleep just to avoid the pain.

So instead, I’m learning to make room for both. The inner storm and the outer calm. The feelings that rise up and the life that keeps moving forward.

I’m learning that I can honour my pain without letting it hijack my days. That I can listen to my heart without letting it drown out everything else.

I don’t have it figured out. I’m still fumbling through the balance. Some days I betray myself by ignoring my pain. Some days I over-identify with it. But I know the work lives in the middle space.

I’m telling you this not because I have answers. But because maybe you need to hear that someone else is fumbling through it too. That you’re not alone in feeling too much when the world around you feels like it’s asking you to feel less.

My current state of mind is that I let myself feel, but I don’t let it define me. I notice the pain, but I also keep living. I make room for my inner world without letting it steal the air from everything else.

Some days, that looks like journaling until my hand cramps, letting everything pour out onto the page. Other days, it looks like going for a walk and reminding myself there’s a world outside my head. And some days, it’s just sitting with the discomfort, not trying to fix it or understand it, just letting it be there.

It’s not perfect. But maybe it doesn’t have to be.

Maybe the goal isn’t to stop feeling so much. Maybe it’s to learn how to carry it with grace. To honor the depth of our inner worlds while still showing up for the life outside. To remember that we can hold pain and joy at the same time, that we can be tender and strong, that we can feel everything and still keep going.

Do you ever feel this too? The pain inside weighing more than the calm outside? How do you carry it without losing yourself in it?

I’d love to hear.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Most of us aren’t living our lives. We’re just getting through them.

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I’m lying in bed right now, trying to fall asleep, and I keep rewinding. Playing back my day like a film I barely remember watching. From the moment I woke up to this exact second, my head on the pillow, my eyes half-closed. And what scares me is how much of it I almost let slip through my fingers without ever really holding it.

It took me a while to realise what “living” actually felt like. But this is how I started noticing the days that used to blur together.

This morning I woke up fresh. Not tired, just fresh. My body had actually rested. My mind felt clear. But I didn’t think anything of it then. I just opened my eyes, sat up, and swung my legs over the side of the bed. Got up and moved on to the next thing, the way we always do when we’re running on autopilot.

“It was good,” I tell myself now, in the dark. “You should have noticed it.”

But I didn’t. Because I’ve trained myself to keep moving. To not pause. To not feel too much because if I stop, if I really stop, I might have to confront something I’m not ready to see.

Maybe noticing is the whole point.

I made coffee. That sounds simple, right? But the thing is: yesterday I finally opened this bag of beans I’d been saving since January. From Bali. I have all these different coffees stored up in my cabinet, collected from places I’ve been to, little souvenirs from trips and moments I wanted to remember. And I never open them. I just keep buying instant coffee, the easy kind, because it’s faster and I don’t have to think about it. Because thinking about it means slowing down, and slowing down means feeling, and feeling is dangerous when you’re just trying to get through the day.

But yesterday something shifted. I stood in front of my cabinet, staring at that bag from Bali, and something inside me said, “Open it.”

“I want to try the Bali one,” I said to no one. “I want to slow down.”

So I did a V60 brew. Took my time with it. Heated the water to the right temperature. Wet the filter. Poured slowly, watching the coffee bloom. The taste was firm, thick. More like robusta than arabica. Exactly how I like it. And it smelled so good - earthy and rich and alive. This morning I made it again, standing in my kitchen with the steam rising to my face, and I thought, “I could do this every day. This could be my small ritual. My one beautiful thing.”

But the reality is, I almost didn’t notice it. I almost drank it while scrolling through my phone, while thinking about my to-do list, while already moving on to the next task. I almost let this small act of care for myself become just another checkbox.

That’s what we do, isn’t it? We move through our lives like we’re checking boxes. Wake up, check. Coffee, check. Work, check. We forget that life is already happening right now while we’re too busy planning for the next one.

I work from home. No office in Jakarta. No commute through traffic and crowds and all that chaos that drains you before your day even begins. I just sit on my sofa and start my day. I can wash dishes whenever I want. Go to the bathroom without feeling watched or timed or like I’m stealing company time. I have this huge TV screen I put on sometimes, 4K nature scenes or whatever, just to feel less alone in my apartment. To pretend I’m somewhere else, or maybe to pretend I’m more here. I don’t know.

This is a privilege. I know this is a privilege. And yet I take it for granted almost every single day.

But today was different. Today I had something I don’t always have: a stable mind. No spiralling thoughts dragging me into dark places. No overwhelming distractions pulling me under. Just focus. Just presence. I felt in control of myself, and that’s rare enough that I should probably light a candle for it or something.

And maybe that’s why I remembered God today.

That doesn’t happen every day. Naturally, I forget. I get busy or distracted or too tired, and He slips to the back of my mind like someone I used to know. But today I pushed myself. Today I sat down and closed my eyes and opened my heart.

“I need to talk to You,” I said. Really talked. Not just reciting prayers I’ve memorised. Not just going through motions. I cried. I begged for protection from the world, from myself, from this loneliness that lives in my chest like a second heart. I praised Him for the small things - the fresh morning, the coffee, the stable mind. I was with Him, really with Him.

And as a believer, those moments feel like coming home. Like being held. Like I’m not alone in this life, even when I feel so terribly alone.

Then I worked. Full-time job stuff, meetings with clients and my team. Talking about deadlines and deliverables and all those words that make work feel like work. Then, my volunteer work after that. More meetings, more tasks, more things that needed to be done. It wasn’t perfect. The outcomes weren’t the best I’ve done. But I got through it without feeling destroyed, without collapsing into bed at 3 PM because I couldn’t take it anymore.

And that felt like enough. That felt like something worth celebrating, even if no one else would understand why.

At lunch, I left my apartment to pick up food. There’s this small takeaway place just a few blocks away, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and the food is cheap and good. I was ordering, talking to the woman behind the counter about what I wanted, when this old man sitting nearby said something.

A gross, sexist joke.

“Oh, you want to be picked up, huh?” Something like that. His voice was loud enough for everyone to hear. Like I was asking for something just by existing in his line of sight. Just by being a woman in public, talking to another woman about food.

His laugh was wet and ugly. No one else laughed. My face burned.

It was disgusting. Cringy. The kind of moment that makes you want to disappear or scream or both.

But I didn’t do either. I managed my feelings. I stayed calm. I ordered my food and paid and left. But it stayed with me. It always stays with me.

Because this is what it’s like to be a woman moving through the world. People think they have the right to comment on you. To make jokes about you. To look at your body before they look at your face. They make assumptions about what you want, what you’re asking for, just because you exist in their space. They throw comments and jokes and stares, taking up space in your day without permission, leaving their mark without consequence.

In the late afternoon, after work, after the volunteer meetings, after sitting alone in my apartment for hours, I decided to go out again. Just for a little while. Just to feel less alone.

There’s this coffee shop near my apartment, my usual spot. My refuge. The place where I go when I need to remember that there are people in the world who see me as something more than a body.

The waiter knows me. He smiled when I walked in.

“How are you today?” he asked, his voice warm, genuine. Made small talk while he prepared my drink. Asked about my week. Told me about his.

And I realised, as I sat there with my chamomile tea, that this matters. These small recognitions. These tiny moments of being known, even just a little bit. Of being seen as a person, not an object. Of having someone remember your name, your order, your face.

It felt good. It felt human.

It had rained earlier, but by the time I left, it had stopped. The air was cool and a little windy, and the streets were wet and shining under the streetlights. It felt good to be outside, even just for a few minutes. Even just to walk to the café and back. To breathe air that wasn’t recycled through my apartment. To move my body through space that wasn’t my four walls.

And that’s when loneliness hit my day.

I left the café with my chamomile tea in my hand, the warmth seeping through the paper cup into my palm. Started walking back to my apartment, just a few blocks. And halfway there, right in the middle of the wet street with the streetlights reflecting off the puddles, it just came over me.

And I keep my head down when I walk now because I know they’re looking. I wear my earphones so I don’t have to hear them. I pretend I’m in my own world, untouchable, protected by my own silence. But sometimes I still hear them. Sometimes their voices cut through anyway.

Once, I was walking past a couple, and I heard the woman say to her partner, “Watch your eyes!!”

Her voice was sharp, embarrassed, angry. I didn’t look up. I just kept walking, kept my eyes on the pavement, kept moving forward like I didn’t hear anything. But I heard it. And I didn’t know how to feel.

Proud that I’m beautiful? That I’m the kind of woman who makes men look? Violated that beauty is all they see? That I can never just exist without being observed, evaluated, and consumed? Both? Neither?

This wave. This grief. I felt it in my chest first, then my throat, then my whole body. The loneliness of being looked at but not seen. Of being admired but not loved. Of moving through the world as something beautiful and untouchable instead of something human and soft. Of being desired by strangers who will never know my name, never hear my voice, never hold me when I cry.

I’m so tired of being seen but not known.

Maybe the feeling doesn’t matter because the outcome is always the same: I’m admired but not known. Looked at but not held. Desired but not loved.

And that’s the loneliness that lives inside me. The one I carry everywhere, even on good days.

“Just get home,” I told myself, walking faster now, my vision blurring. “Just get home so you can cry.”

And when I did, when I finally closed my apartment door behind me and locked it and pressed my back against it, I let it out. I slid down to the floor and cried. For maybe ten minutes. Not long. But enough.

I cry almost every day now, for one reason or another. Mostly about this. About being a woman in her late twenties who’s still trying to figure out how to be soft and powerful at the same time. How to be beautiful without being reduced to it. How to be present without being consumed. How to move through the world without hardening completely, without losing the soft parts of myself that make me human.

But here’s what I’m starting to understand: the crying is part of it. The noticing is part of it. The feeling, even when it hurts, is the whole point.

“What are you even doing?” I ask myself sometimes, sitting on my floor with tears on my face. “Just surviving? Just getting through?”

Because if I don’t pay attention, if I don’t let myself feel my own life (the good and the bad, the coffee and the tears, the small kindnesses and the gross comments) then that’s all I’m doing. Surviving. Getting through. Waiting for some future moment when life will feel more real, more alive, more worth living.

But that moment is now. It’s always now. And I keep missing it.

In the evening, after I’d washed my face and made myself another tea and sat on my sofa staring at nothing, I checked my phone. I realised I got some likes on my Substack today. Little notifications that someone, somewhere, had read my words and felt something.

That felt good. It reminded me that someone out there is listening. That maybe I’m not just shouting into the void. That maybe being seen, even through a screen, even by strangers who will never know my face, counts for something. That maybe there are other women out there who feel this same loneliness, this same exhaustion of being looked at but not known.

Maybe we’re all trying to figure this out together.

Now I’m here, lying in bed, talking to God again before I sleep.

“Tomorrow is October 1st,” I whisper into the dark. “A new month.”

And I’m trying to remember that life isn’t just about moving through it. It’s about being in it. Feeling it. Noticing the coffee and the rain and the tears and the tea and the loneliness and the love. All of it. Every single moment. The beautiful and the ugly and everything in between.

Because if I don’t, I’ll wake up one day and realise I spent my whole life waiting to live instead of actually living it.

So I’m asking you: when was the last time you really felt your own life? What’s one thing from today you almost let pass by without noticing?

Every good decision costs something. Every bad decision costs more.

Let me tell you about the day I spent two hours in Jakarta traffic to sit alone for forty-seven minutes, and why it was the most expensive therapy session I never knew I needed.

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You know that feeling when you wake up and your apartment feels like a cage? Not because it’s small (though mine is, indeed), but because you’ve been so careful with money, so responsible with your heart, so practical with your dreams that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to want something just because you want it.

That was this morning. Coffee shop or instant coffee at home. 5 dollars or free. Such a small choice, but when you’re 27 and everything feels like practice for a life you’re not sure you want, even coffee becomes existential.

I chose the coffee shop. I always choose the coffee shop, and I always feel guilty about it.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” I asked my reflection in the café window later, stirring a little bit of brown sugar into overpriced caffeine while the Jakarta morning buzzed around me. But I already knew the answer. Because staying home feels like giving up, and I’m not ready to give up yet.

I bought cup noodles too - the fancy ones that cost more than a proper meal should - because if I’m going to eat depression food, at least it can taste good. Back home, I doctored them up with green onions and cheese, the way my inner self taught me to make something beautiful from almost nothing.

My client meeting went well enough. Video calls from my tiny living room, pretending my background says “successful consultant” instead of “woman who can’t afford a proper office.” Afterwards, I stood on my balcony looking out at the city sprawling in every direction, the afternoon heat making everything shimmer like a mirage.

The weather was decent enough to stay in. Smart choice, right? Stay home, save money, be a responsible adult who doesn’t blow her budget on feelings.

But here’s the thing about being responsible: it tastes like nothing.

I’d been avoiding this one place for weeks. Months, or more than a year, maybe. This French café in Cipete that used to be ours (mine and someone who no longer returns my texts). You know how places can hold the shape of other people’s laughter? How they can turn you into a ghost of your own life?

“You need to go back,” I told myself, the way you might coach a friend through something scary. “Not for him. For you. To prove you can exist in that space without his story swallowing yours whole.”

The decision felt enormous in my chest. Not because it was complicated, but because it was simple, and simple things shouldn’t cost this much courage.

I booked the expensive car. Forty-five minutes each way instead of the two-hour bus journey, because I wanted to feel cared for, even if I had to pay for it. The driver was kind in that genuine Indonesian way that he noticed my perfume, complimented it without expecting anything in return.

“You smell like comfort,” he said, and I almost cried right there in the backseat because when did I become the kind of person who tears up over kindness from strangers?

“Thank you,” I managed. “It’s just a free sample from some event.”

“The best things usually are,” he replied, and we drove the rest of the way in comfortable silence.

The café looked different in late afternoon light. Softer somehow, less like a crime scene of old happiness. I ordered a chamomile tea and one of those delicate pastries that cost more than my breakfast, lunch, and dinner combined, racing against closing time at 8:30 pm.

“Just you today?” the server asked, the kind of question that shouldn’t sting but does.

“Just me,” I confirmed, settling into a corner table with a view of the street.

For forty-seven minutes, I practiced existing alone in a beautiful space. Watched couples share desserts, families argue over the bill, solo diners like me pretending to read while actually just breathing through the loneliness.

When the servers started their closing routine, I felt that familiar panic: was this worth it? All this money, all this effort, for less than an hour of reclaiming my own story?

But I wasn’t ready to go home yet. Not when I’d come this far.

“One more stop,” I told my next driver, giving him the address of the Four Seasons. “Just need to charge my phone,” I lied, because the truth - that I needed to prove I could exist in places designed for people more successful than me- felt too raw to speak aloud.

The hotel bar was smaller than I’d imagined. Everything always is. I ordered a hot cocktail and found myself lying to the bartender - small lies, nothing dramatic, just the usual fiction of being more put-together than I am.

“Nice place you have in Kuningan,” he said, referring to my made-up address in Jakarta’s busiest neighbourhood.

“Thanks, I love the area,” I replied, hating myself a little for the ease of it. Since when did I become someone who lies about her life to make conversation?

That’s when he walked in. Payment (yes, that’s actually his name?!). From LA, just moved to Jakarta for work, with the kind of face that makes you remember why you still believe in possibility. He sat two stools down and ordered a whiskey neat.

“First time at this bar?” he asked, the universal opening of people who travel alone.

“Something like that,” I said. “You?”

“Always,” he smiled. “I collect hotel bars the way some people collect stamps.”

We talked for maybe ten minutes - from Jakarta traffic to cocktail menus served with unique traditional snacks. Nothing profound, everything important. The kind of conversation that feels like a small miracle until your phone buzzes with the driver notification and real life resumes its scheduled programming.

“I have to go,” I said, gathering my things.

“Story of my life,” he replied, raising his glass in a mock toast. “Safe travels.”

As I walked away, I watched him settle back into his solitude with practiced ease, and I realised something: he wasn’t lonely. He was alone, but not lonely. There’s a difference, and it’s one I’m still learning.

In the car home, watching Jakarta’s lights blur past the window, I did the math. Coffee, noodles, expensive rides, overpriced drinks - I’d spent more in one day than I usually do in a week.

“Was it worth it?” the rational part of my brain asked.

“Ask me tomorrow,” I replied, but already I knew the answer.

Every day I negotiate with three versions of myself: the one who needs financial security, the one who craves connection, and the one who’s barely keeping it together. They never want the same things at the same time.

Choose mental health, sacrifice savings. Choose financial responsibility, sacrifice your soul. Choose solitude, sacrifice connection. Choose connection, sacrifice peace. The arithmetic of almost thirty never balances cleanly.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe your late twenties aren’t supposed to make sense. Maybe they’re supposed to teach you that taking care of yourself isn’t always practical or affordable or easy to explain to people who think healing should be linear and cheap.

Today I reclaimed a space that used to belong to someone else’s story. I practiced existing alone in beautiful places. I had a genuine conversation with a stranger who reminded me that solitude and loneliness aren’t the same thing. I reminded myself that I can take care of myself, even imperfectly, even expensively.

Tomorrow I’ll eat the leftover pastries from my overpriced afternoon and remember the taste of choosing myself. Even when it doesn’t make sense. Even when it costs more than I planned. Even when it ends in hotel bars with men named Payment who disappear as gracefully as they arrive.

This is what almost thirty feels like in Jakarta: expensive and necessary and full of small choices that feel enormous in your chest.

What’s the most expensive thing you’ve ever done for your own peace of mind? Tell me it was worth every penny, even if you’re still not sure.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat in a room where big decisions were being made… and said nothing.

Not because I had nothing to add, but because I couldn’t get the words out.

Last week, I sat through yet another meeting where million-dollar decisions were being discussed. I had insights. I had questions that could have shifted the entire conversation. But I stayed silent, nodding along like the good, agreeable woman I’d been trained to be. Walking out, I felt that familiar sting of invisibility, that crushing sense that I was meant for more but somehow couldn’t claim it.

At 27, I’m starting to wonder: what if my voice is still learning how to walk?

Maybe you know this feeling too. Maybe you’ve been in rooms where your voice could have mattered, but something held you back. Maybe you’ve wondered if you’re built for big conversations or if you should just accept being the nice girl who smiles and agrees. Maybe you’ve questioned whether you actually want a seat at that table or if you’re just supposed to want it.

Here’s what I’m learning: the problem isn’t that we lack knowledge or communication skills. The problem is that we’ve been conditioned to believe our perspectives matter less.

We’ve been taught that being agreeable is more valuable than being insightful. That asking questions makes us look stupid instead of curious. That speaking up is pushy, not powerful. We’ve internalized the idea that there are “important people” who belong in those conversations, and then there’s us.

But what if that’s all wrong?

I used to think I needed more credentials before I could contribute meaningfully. More experience. More expertise. More everything. I told myself I wasn’t ready, wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t quick enough on my feet. I convinced myself that someday, when I had accumulated enough knowledge and polished my communication skills, then I’d be worthy of those conversations.

The truth hit me differently. Those boardroom discussions I’d been idealising? Half the time, they’re not as brilliant as I thought. They’re just people with confidence talking through problems, making educated guesses, and hoping for the best. The difference isn’t intelligence or preparation. It’s permission.

They gave themselves permission to matter.

I started small. In the next meeting, I asked one question. Just one. Not groundbreaking, not revolutionary, just genuine curiosity about something that wasn’t clear to me. The conversation shifted. People built on my question. It opened up a thread that led to a better solution.

That question taught me something profound: my perspective has value precisely because it’s different. Because I haven’t been marinated in corporate speak for decades. Because I notice things others miss. Because I ask questions others assume they already know the answers to.

But claiming that space? That’s the real work.

It means unlearning the good girl programming that says our job is to make others comfortable. It means getting comfortable with the pause that happens when we speak up, the momentary shift in energy when we stop agreeing and start contributing. It means accepting that not everyone will love what we have to say, and that’s perfectly fine.

I’m still figuring this out. Some days I show up powerfully, and other days I retreat back into agreeable mode. Some days I trust my instincts, and other days I second-guess everything. This isn’t about having it all figured out. It’s about practicing showing up as ourselves, messy and uncertain as that might be.

Here’s what I know for sure: the world doesn’t need another person who thinks exactly like everyone else in that room. It needs people who see differently, question differently, and contribute differently. It needs perspectives that haven’t been sanitised by years of playing it safe.

Maybe you’re not meant to fit into existing conversations. Maybe you’re meant to change them.

I’m learning to trust that the things that make me different, the experiences that shaped me outside traditional power structures, the questions that feel obvious to me but haven’t been asked, these aren’t limitations. They’re strengths.

The experimenting I’m doing now, this awkward fumbling toward something bigger, this isn’t time wasted while I figure out my “real” path. This is the path. This stumbling forward, this testing of boundaries, this gradual expansion of what feels possible, this is how we grow into the women we’re meant to become.

Every time we speak up, we make it easier for the next woman to do the same. Every time we claim our space, we expand what’s possible. Every time we choose contribution over comfort, we model a different way of being.

I’m not asking you to become someone you’re not. I’m asking you to become more of who you already are. To let your natural curiosity lead. To trust that your questions matter. To believe that your perspective, shaped by your unique experiences and insights, is exactly what’s needed.

The table isn’t some exclusive club you need permission to join. It’s just people having conversations about things that matter. And you matter too.

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I spent three hours crying and processing old wounds instead of checking off my to-do list.

Yes, people would immediately say:

Dramatic. Unproductive. Successful people don’t let emotions derail their day.

I'd internalised this so deeply that I felt genuine shame about it.

I also called myself undisciplined for taking three hours to complete tasks that "should" take one hour.

I even somehow labelled my emotional processing sessions as "procrastination" and my need for rest as "weakness."

It took me months to realise the truth: I wasn't broken. The systemic culture was.

The Productivity Lie That's Destroying Us

Productivity culture has convinced sensitive women that our natural rhythms are pathological. We're told that needing time to process emotions is inefficiency. That working in deep, thorough bursts instead of consistent eight-hour stretches means we lack focus. That honoring our energy cycles makes us unreliable.

This is gaslighting in its purest form as it is making us question our reality and blame ourselves for systemic dysfunction.

Call me a hard-core feminine woman, but I believe the productivity industrial complex was built by and for men operating in masculine energy patterns: linear progress, consistent output, emotional detachment from work, and the ability to compartmentalise feelings.

These aren't universal human traits, they're one way of being that's been universalised and monetised.

But sensitive women? We work differently. We feel everything. We process while we produce. We create in spirals, not straight lines. Our nervous systems are more attuned to subtlety, which means we're also more easily overwhelmed. These aren't bugs in our system - they're features.

Yet productivity culture tells us we're doing it wrong.

The Real Cost of Productivity Gaslighting

This isn't just about missed morning workouts or unfinished to-do lists. Productivity gaslighting creates a specific kind of violence against sensitive women:

We exhaust our nervous systems trying to fit into systems that weren't designed for us.

We override our intuition in favor of productivity hacks that leave us depleted.

We sacrifice our natural gifts (depth, emotional intelligence, holistic thinking) on the altar of "efficiency."

I spent years believing I was fundamentally flawed because I couldn't maintain the robotic consistency that productivity culture demands.

I forced myself into morning routines that felt violent to my natural rhythm.

I shamed myself for taking emotional processing breaks, calling them "procrastination" instead of recognizing them as necessary nervous system maintenance.

The result? Chronic overwhelm, decision fatigue, and a deep disconnection from my own wisdom. I was productive by external metrics but dying inside.

What Productivity Culture Doesn't Want You to Know

Your three-hour deep work sessions aren't inefficiency; they're mastery. Most people skim the surface. You dive deep. That's why your work has impact.

Your emotional processing time isn't procrastination - it's integration. You can't separate your feelings from your work because you're not supposed to. Your sensitivity is your superpower, not your weakness.

Your need for flexible schedules isn't lack of discipline but it's honoring your natural rhythms. Women's energy naturally cycles. Forcing linear productivity onto cyclical beings is like trying to make the ocean flow in straight lines.

Your "distractibility" isn't ADHD. It’s pattern recognition. Your brain picks up on subtleties others miss. That's why you notice the emotional undercurrents in meetings, why you sense what's not being said, why you can hold complexity that others can't handle.

Reclaiming Your Natural Rhythm

Real self-regulation for sensitive women looks nothing like the productivity culture playbook:

Instead of rigid morning routines, create flexible rituals that honor your energy. Some days you wake up ready to conquer the world. Other days you need gentle easing into consciousness. Both are valid.

Instead of forcing eight-hour productivity marathons, work in cycles that match your natural rhythm. Deep focus when you feel it. Rest when you need it. Emotional processing when it arises.

Instead of suppressing your emotions for "efficiency," integrate them into your work flow. Your feelings carry information. Your tears clear energy blocks. Your joy fuels creativity.

Instead of measuring success by masculine metrics, define productivity by your own standards. Did you honor your energy? Did you create something meaningful? Did you stay connected to yourself while getting things done?

The Revolution is Personal

Every time you choose rest over grinding, you're rebelling. Every time you honor your emotional needs instead of pushing through, you're revolution.

Every time you work with your cycles instead of against them, you're dismantling a system that profits from your self-abandonment.

Productivity culture needs you to believe you're broken so you'll keep buying solutions to problems you don't have. It needs you exhausted and disconnected from your power so you won't realise how much magic you carry.

But what if you stopped trying to optimise yourself into someone else's idea of success? What if you trusted that your natural way of being is not only enough but extraordinary?

The most radical thing a sensitive woman can do in this culture is to stop apologising for taking up space, needing time, and feeling everything deeply.

Your sensitivity isn't something to overcome but it's something to honor, protect, and wield with intention.

Stop letting productivity culture convince you that you're the problem. You're not too much, too slow, too emotional, or too anything. You're exactly what this world needs - if you can remember who you are underneath all the gaslighting.

What would change if you stopped trying to fit into productivity culture and started designing a life that actually fits you?

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Every time I choose myself, I pay a price. It’s called loneliness.

I’ve been alone for as long as I can remember - at school, at university, at work. Living solo wasn’t a choice; it was survival. I learned to cope with being by myself because the world demanded it, not because it came naturally.

But lately, I’ve realised something I’ve long ignored: I’m craving someone who truly sees me, who understands me, who can hold space for me, even protect me. It’s been too long. I need that. And maybe, I was never meant to live entirely among people.

Being alone recently doesn’t feel freeing. It is painful. Going out, facing the world on my own, it’s not joyful. It’s a reminder of the gap: the absence of someone who truly understands me, who listens without judgment.

I try to tell myself different stories, to convince myself this solitude is enough, but the craving remains. I hope this will pass, but I know some of it is real: I want to be seen.

I’ve been tired of always being the one who shows up for others. I deserve care, too. The person who once filled that space for me can’t anymore, and I have to accept that their absence isn’t my fault.

Living in a big city for nearly three years hasn’t changed that. I have friends, yet I don’t reach out often. Most of them can’t fully understand me, and my expectation to be truly seen is high. I won’t settle for less.

Loneliness forced me to ask myself why I keep choosing myself over companionship. The answer was clear: my growth belongs to me.

My journey is shaped by my perception, not by the influence of others. I am learning who I am and what I want without anyone else’s unnecessary presence.

I’ve stopped comparing myself to others. That alone feels like freedom. I’ve missed experiences and friendships, yes - but only the ones that weren’t real. I’d rather feel the sharp edge of solitude than fill my life with shallow company.

Even in a room full of people, I often look inward for compassion. That’s the only place I know I’ll find it.

The truth is: being authentic comes with a cost. Saying no. Choosing yourself. Protecting your energy. Every time I do, the world narrows around me. People sense it. Some step back.

Last week, at a support group, a therapist said something I’ll never forget: the goal beyond love is authenticity. But no one tells you that authenticity is lonely work. It asks you to strip away the noise, the convenience, the people who exist in your life only because you tolerate them. It leaves you standing alone, raw, and exposed.

People say loneliness can be fixed by reaching out. I’ve tried. For a moment, it helps. But the ache comes back. Most people don’t want to hold your truth. They want you to exist, fill their gaps, and move on. Often, they lean on you to soothe themselves, not the other way around.

Being alone is painful. But it shapes you. Choosing authenticity means limiting who gets close. It means letting some doors close, so only the people who belong stay. Loneliness isn’t just being physically alone. It’s indeed the pain of wanting someone to be there for you emotionally, and realising no one is.

There’s no magic cure. But you can survive it. Small connections matter. Micro-moments with strangers, therapy sessions, creative circles - these let you be seen without draining yourself. Protect your energy. Say no. Nurture yourself. Seek reciprocity. These aren’t replacements for a soulmate or a perfect friend, but they keep you alive while you wait.

The person who once held space for you may no longer be able to. Grieve it. Their absence is not a reflection of your worth. It is only a measure of their limits.

Loneliness is the price of being real. It hurts. It isolates. But it makes you you. And that, above all, is worth it.

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The past few days, it’s been hard to hear my own thoughts. Hard to pray. Hard to sit with myself.

The reason is simple: the outside has been too loud.

Something happened in Indonesia recently that shook the whole country. From August 18 to early September, Jakarta saw one of its darkest political moments. A tragedy unfolded before our eyes, and no one was spared from its chaos. Streets filled with protesters, televisions played endless coverage, and social media turned into a collective mourning room. Suddenly, everyone carried it. The sadness wasn’t only on the news; it was indeed in the air.

Before all this, I had been busy mourning myself. My old wounds, my messy love life, my parents, all the things my inner world kept handing me to heal.

But the moment I saw that tragedy, all of that went silent. My pain was replaced by a heavier grief: the grief of a nation.

At first, I thought it would last for hours. But it didn’t. It stayed with me for weeks.

That’s when I realised how powerful collective emotion is. Psychologists call this kind of thing collective trauma, which is when an event doesn’t just affect individuals, but seeps into the shared emotional life of a community. Wars, pandemics, natural disasters, political crises - they all create this ripple. I once read the phrase “collective emotional bargain,” and I finally understood it: we take on each other’s grief, even if we don’t mean to.

And it’s not just Indonesia.

Think about Palestine. For generations, they have grown up in constant conflict. The grief there isn’t only personal because it’s carried as a people, shaping identity, family life, even childhood.

Or Rwanda. After the 1994 genocide, survivors didn’t just rebuild their homes, but they had to rebuild their inner worlds. Entire communities carried memories too heavy for any single person to hold. Healing circles, truth commissions, and rituals became necessary not just for justice, but for inner survival.

Or even the U.S. after 9/11. Fear slipped into airports, schools, and even conversations between neighbors. Suspicion reshaped everyday life. The “outside” event was just one day, but its echo lived inside millions of people for years.

And we all remember COVID-19. Numbers and lockdowns became the rhythm of life. Even if you didn’t catch the virus, you carried its shadow. The outside had entered every home.

What all of this shows is simple: the outside never stays outside.

It leaks in. Into our thoughts, our sleep, our bodies, our ability to love.

Empathy has a cost. It drains. It takes away from the small energy we keep for ourselves. That’s why I used to turn away from news of other countries in pain simply because I felt I had nothing left to give. But now, after living through this moment, I understand more. I see how politics or any crises aren’t just reactions, but they’re the power to rearrange our inner lives in seconds.

And that’s when the grief isn’t just personal, or national, or modern. It has changed throughout history, shifting with societies, cultures, and the world around us. How we mourn, how we carry loss, how it moves through us are patterns that are older and wider than any single tragedy.

If you want a deeper look at this, there’s a thoughtful piece exploring how grief has evolved through the ages. Because if the outside always gets in, then protecting the inside becomes sacred work.

So the question becomes: how do we guard that fragile space inside?

I’ve been trying a few things:

• Silence. Just ten minutes a day. No phone, no news, just breathing and listening.

• Rituals. Small anchors like lighting a candle, saying a prayer, or walking without headphones. They remind me of a rhythm older than chaos.

• Boundaries. Choosing when to read the news and when to stop. I don’t need every headline sitting in my chest.

• Compassionate company. Sitting with people who bring calm instead of more noise. Peace, like chaos, is contagious too.

  

I don’t want to numb myself to what happens in my country, or in Palestine, Cambodia, Rwanda, or anywhere else. But I also don’t want to drown in it.

But today, I’m choosing silence again. I turned off the news. I put away my phone. I’m writing this with birdsong in the background, a soft green view in front of me. Guarding that inner space feels like the most urgent work right now.

**Bonus read: How Grief Has Changed Throughout History