We eat alone, travel alone, spend whole weekends alone. We stop waiting for messages. We learn to give ourselves everything we once hoped someone else would.

A lot of that is good.

But when did growing up start to mean that nobody else should matter?

We’ve gotten too comfortable telling lonely people to love themselves. As if loneliness were a self-esteem problem. As if wanting to be held means you haven’t learned to hold yourself.

A whole Sunday alone stops feeling like a missed life. Your own thoughts turn out to be decent company.

So what happens when you learn all of that and still want someone there?

You like who you’ve become. You’re proud of the life you’re building. And at the end of a good day, you still want someone to tell.

Are you failing at loving yourself? Or did we mix up being fine alone with being meant to be alone?

At some point, independence stopped being a skill and became a personality. We admire the person who doesn’t chase, doesn’t double-text, never shows how much they care. We call it having standards. Some people you really do need to learn to live without. But needing fewer people and needing nobody are different things. One is freedom. Made into an ideal, the other is just a lonely way to live. How many of us are acting content because caring feels like a risk? Calling yourself independent is easier than explaining why being forgotten hurts.

The person you want isn’t always a partner. Sometimes it’s a friendship you’ve put years into. Sometimes you’re just the one who texts first, remembers birthdays, keeps the thing alive. Then you notice the gap. Would they have called if you hadn’t? Would they notice if you stopped? And you get embarrassed by how much you care. You check your phone. You feel lighter when they reply. You hate that you feel lighter. Someone who truly loved themselves, you think, wouldn’t care this much. So you try to become that person. You stop texting first. You act less interested. You call it choosing yourself. You still hope they’ll ask where you went. That isn’t weakness. You want to know the friendship can stand without you holding it up.

We’ve also decided a person should become everything they need. Their own best friend, their own comfort, their own witness to every small win and every bad day. I can like my own company and still want someone across the table at dinner. I can be proud of something and still want someone to be proud of me. Wanting someone to share your life with is ordinary. Why is it so hard to say out loud? Because wanting someone gives them power. Care, and they can let you down. Get attached, and they can leave. So we spend years bracing against hurt, and nobody gets to know us. Survival was never the only reason we wanted people.

Think about what you actually remember. A friend who saved you a seat. Someone who noticed you’d barely spoken all evening. A song someone sent because it made them think of you. You can tell yourself you matter. Being remembered by someone else is still different from remembering yourself. You don’t have to chase everyone who leaves. You can want people without needing them to fix your life.

Knowing you won’t abandon yourself when you’re alone is a kind of freedom.I just don’t want that freedom turned into one more rule to punish ourselves with. Pride in needing so little can turn into never admitting a need at all. And being numb can pass for being healed.

Loving yourself should make it easier to say you’re lonely. To text first without feeling pathetic. To ask a friend over instead of pretending you had plans. And some nights, it means coming home after a long day, being perfectly all right with who you are, and still wishing someone else were in the room.

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Substack is where the essays live. This is where everything else goes: notes from building a business, half-finished thoughts, things I’m reading, and the occasional update on the puppies.

If you’re new here, the essays are the best place to start. If you want to know what I’m doing this month, try the now page.

“You don’t fall for the person. You fall for the dynamic you have with that person.”

A friend said that to me once. I hated how much sense it made. I’ve fallen in love so many times that I’ve started to doubt the feeling itself. At some point you have to ask how often a person can fall in love before the word stops meaning anything. So I’ve been asking a harder question. Have I ever actually loved anyone?

My friend’s theory explains a lot. Sometimes it’s the late night conversations. Sometimes it’s being someone’s first choice. A dear one once called me at 2 am because she was scared the front door of her house was open. I was half asleep and I kept losing her voice under the fan. She just wanted me to stay on the call so she could feel safe. Of everyone she could have called, she called me. Maybe I fall for being needed. Maybe deep down I just want to know I matter to someone and that I’m not the only one in it, and the version of me that shows up around them is either a side effect of that or the whole point, I honestly can’t tell.

If that’s true, I’m not sure what to call it. Love? Attachment? Infatuation? Loneliness wearing perfume?

I don’t know, and that’s the part that bothers me. The human mind is bad at leaving questions open. We find patterns that might not be there and give names to things we don’t understand, because “I don’t know” feels unfinished. This theory could be one of those names. An answer that fits the evidence well enough to quiet the question. It does fit, though. Every person I’ve loved has a place in it. Every time I thought this one was different gets neatly filed away. It’s comforting, and that’s exactly why I don’t trust it.

What if I did love them? What if I loved the person and the dynamic at the same time, and the two were never separable in the first place?

There’s a quote I keep coming back to: “I know you’re not the one I’m looking for, but I am so cold and a fire is a fire even if it burns me.” I’m not sure I agree with it but I get it. Sometimes you don’t need something to be right to need it. You know the fire isn’t yours and you sit beside it anyway, because you’re cold. Some of my loves were probably that. A particular warmth that lived between two people for a while. I might have mistaken the warmth for the person. Or the warmth was the person, and I’ve been splitting hairs this whole time.

So have I ever loved anyone? I think so. I just can’t tell whether I loved them or the space between us, and I’m starting to suspect the distinction matters less than I think. I cared. I wanted them to be okay even after I stopped being part of their life. That might have been love. Or I’m just another person trying to name something that was never meant to have one.

If you’re one of the people I’ve loved, tell me what it was like on the other side. Did it feel like love, or like I was in love with the way we were together?

I’d really like to know.

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i think the best description of me came from a person i once loved

i hadn't known them that long, we only had a handful of conversations some of which were rather deep, like ones between two friends whove known eachother for a long time

they described me so well that it got me into tears, somehow, this person had written something that hit me to the core, and it was completely unexpected, never had i expected to read about myself like this, i felt happy, i was someone's muse, at last,

here's what it read

Manas,

what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, thats something ive been hearing for quite some time now and ive never had any reason to question it, until today.

i dont usually do this, infact i do the very opposite of whatvever this is, our conversation today made me sit with something i usually run away from. feelings. i am writing this now because people sometimes need to be loved in the way they pour to the world, You're people.

I sit down today spewing random feeling im feeling currently because you once told me you wanted it raw.

So here it is.

I hardly know you. We've talked only a handful times. But it's almost ironic the way you spend years surrounded by people who make you feel lonely. And on a random Sunday morning, you meet someone who makes you feel as if it's OK being you. Weird, sarcastic, and whatever else is fucked up with me. On a random evening. They summed you up to what you didn't even realize you were trying to put together into words. I remember you saying, "oh, you're being afraid of being understood" so casually after my yapping session. But you don't realize what weight those words held for me. Even if it was a flaw you pointed out, something clicked into place perfectly. Something I struggled to understand about myself for quite some time now. And on a random Tuesday night, the same night I sit down to write this, I kinda understood what made you you. More like i read it. I don't think I've ever read any of your work before, which isn't a bad thing I guess because I wouldn't have felt the depth of it, Had I read your words without knowing you as a person. I went through a heartbreak without being in love. That's how powerful those were. That's how pure the words were. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, they say. That's something I've been hearing for quite some time now. I've never had any reason to question it until today. Until our conversation, until I read your words.

Even though I'll probably never understand the extent of the pain you went through. I know enough to be sure it was enough to kill a weaker person. What doesn't kill you makes someone someone else a stronger person, perhaps in a way to in a way, you too. But more importantly, what didn't kill you made you softer. A better person. A kinder one perhaps. Someone who unknowingly understands people when they don't understand themselves. A person with kind words and kinder actions.

I cannot possibly sit here and write how you impact others or something equally moving ig ,because I'd be lying then. But I do know what you made me feel, so I thank you for that. I usually think not knowing everything until about someone is something less than desirable. I changed my mind today. I do not know you fully. And you know what? I'm glad I don't, because I certainly look forward to being your friend now, especially since now I know that didn't kill you-made you better.

There might be more pain that made you who you are today. As I said, I don't know you enough to conclude something about you. But I can only try. I don't know how right I am, but this is my interpretation of it.

I have certainly missed out on saying so much more because there's so much more to say and my memory is very volatile.

-----------------------------------------------

they had summed me up so well that whenever i have a bad time i read it again, every time i was sad, every time i lost myself and last night i found myself reaching for it and i don't even know why, i wasn't particularly sad, nothing had happened, i just wanted to read it again and maybe that's what got me thinking about happyness because for so long i've treated it like something i had to earn, like it would come after i became successful, after i figured my life out, after i found the right people, after i became whoever it is i keep thinking i need to become, there was always something, some future version of my life that would finally make me happy and i think i've been looking for it in the wrong places because when i actually think about the times i've been genuinely happy they're almost embarrassingly ordinary, just sitting with people i love talking absolute nonsense, or even sitting in complete silence, goingon a long drive with music playing, laughing at something so stupid that none of us can even remember what started it, someone remembering some tiny thing i said weeks ago, coming home after a long day and just lying down, those moments never felt like happiness when they were happening, they just felt like life and maybe that's the problem, maybe i've been so busy waiting for my life to become something worth being happy about that i forgot to notice the moments where i already was. i don't think happiness is some huge feeling anymore, i think sometimes it's just that weird little moment where you're somewhere with someone doing absolutely nothing important and suddenly you realise you don't want to be anywhere else and maybe that's what i want now, not a perfect life, not some massive reason to be happy, just more moments that make me forget to ask whether i'm happy, and maybe that's enough, maybe i've spent so much time looking for happiness that i forgot what it feels like when it isn't asking for anything from me, it just sits there quietly and maybe all i have to do is notice.

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She loved me with a certainty that should have anchored us, and I loved her enough to know I was ruining it. We are taught that love is a solvent for old wounds, that being held softly enough can convince you to put down your own weapons. But real love does not automatically grant you the capacity to receive it, and there is nothing more destructive than trying to build a home with someone who is actively burning down the foundation.

That is the cruelty of self-hatred: it rarely presents itself as malice. It looks like distance. It looks like making promises you genuinely mean at midnight and break by morning. It looks like retreating from the person you desperately want near because their gentleness feels like an unearned debt.

On the other side of that, she did not understand the rules of the war. All she knew was that she loved me. So she tried harder. She became more patient, reminded me of everything beautiful she saw, and tried to stand beside me when I could not stand beside myself. Slowly, without either of us intending it, her devotion became another mirror reflecting everything I felt guilty for being unable to hold.

That is where love can become tragic.

Not because it wasn’t real.

Real love does not automatically make a person capable of receiving it.

She loved me. And God, I loved her. But I hated myself more, and there was no competing with that.

No matter how gently she held me, I was always reaching for the parts of myself I wanted to destroy. She would hold my face in her hands and tell me I was worth loving, and somehow all I could think about was every reason she was wrong. I was fighting a war inside myself, and she kept stepping onto the battlefield thinking her love could make me put the weapon down.

I wanted it to work. I really did.

I thought that if I loved her enough, maybe I could become the person she believed I was. If I held her a little tighter, if I memorised the way she smiled, if I promised her that I would do better, maybe I could finally believe those promises myself. She stood between me and every ghost I carried, and I hated that I kept making her bleed for a war she never started.

But when you are drowning in your own reflection, you don’t know how to reach for the hand on the shore.

So I loved her in the only way I knew how. In fragments. In apologies. In late-night conversations where I meant every word and still somehow knew I would break every promise. I would hold her like she was the most precious thing in the world, and then disappear somewhere inside my own head.

I know what I must have looked like to her. Someone who could make her feel adored and abandoned in the same breath. Someone who could swear she meant everything to me and then make her question whether she ever did.

The worst part is that she did mean everything to me.

There were moments when the noise in my head went quiet, when the world stopped feeling so heavy, and I could just look at her. And in those moments, I understood why people write poems. Why people believe in forever. Why someone could look at another person and think, please, let me be worthy of this.

But then the noise came back.

And I kept choosing the version of myself that hurt me, even when I knew it would hurt her too.

Love was never the problem. She wasn’t asking for too much. She wasn’t failing to love me correctly. She couldn’t love the self-hatred out of me, no matter how hard she tried.

And that is the grief of being loved by someone when you don’t know how to love yourself.

You can give them flowers while setting fire to the garden. You can swear you never wanted to hurt them and mean it with every piece of your heart. You can love someone so deeply that losing them feels unbearable, and still be the reason you lose them.

I loved her.

I still do, in whatever broken, unfinished way I know how.

But I hated myself more.

And there was no competition in that.

Maybe that is what we misunderstand about certain endings.

We assume that if two people loved each other, they should have been able to stay. We look for someone to blame. Someone who didn’t try hard enough. Someone who didn’t communicate enough. Someone who stopped caring.

But sometimes there isn’t a villain.

Sometimes there are simply two people, one of whom is trying to love the other while the other is still trying to survive themselves.

And that doesn’t make the hurt any less real.

She deserved someone who could receive the love she was giving without turning it into another reason for her to hurt. I deserved to become someone who didn’t need another person to convince me that I was worth saving.

Those two things can be true at the same time.

Maybe that’s the hardest lesson of all.

You can love someone and still not be ready for them.

You can be loved perfectly and still be unable to believe it.

You can want forever with someone and still have too much inside yourself that you haven’t learned how to confront.

And sometimes, letting someone go isn’t an admission that the love wasn’t enough.

Sometimes it is finally admitting that love was never supposed to be the thing that saved you.

That part was always yours to do.

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I think I've been my own executioner.

Sure, it seems dramatic when you say it out loud.

For a long time, I believed people left me. It was an easy story to accept. People move on. People stop caring. People disappear.

But I'm starting to wonder if the story was ever that simple.

Sometimes, I'm the one who leaves.

I just slowly fade away. Replies take longer. Plans turn into "maybe next week." Our conversations become memories before we realize they are fading.

Every time I've done this, I've told myself I was protecting them.

I bottled up so much anger, hurt, and confusion that one day it all exploded. I said things I shouldn't have said. I placed emotions on someone that they never asked to carry. I nearly ruined something important.

Since then, staying away has felt safer. Safer for them. At least that's what I tell myself. If I disappear now, I can't hurt them again. If I stay away, they find peace.

It sounds kind. Almost noble.

But I'm beginning to question whether that's really true.

I know what it feels like when someone disappears. I know the confusion. The endless replaying of conversations. The wondering if you did something wrong. Whether you should reach out or if reaching out would just make things worse.

I know exactly how that feels.

And I've done that to someone else.

They never told me to leave. They never said I was too much. They never claimed I ruined their peace.

I decided all of that for them.

I decided what they needed. I decided how they felt. I decided forgiveness wasn't possible before they had a chance to respond.

Maybe that's what guilt does. It starts speaking for others. It tells you they deserve better. It tells you your absence is a gift. It tells you that leaving is kinder than staying.

Maybe sometimes it's right.

Or maybe it's just fear pretending to be kindness. Maybe it's some twisted sense of self-preservation masquerading as guilt, trying to convince me to walk away from things before they get too close to me.

I honestly don't know.

What I do know is that I've spent years thinking abandonment was something that happened to me. Like I was always the one getting left behind.

I never considered how many times I had chosen it myself. Not out of anger. Not out of indifference. I did it because I truly believed I was protecting someone I cared about.

Maybe I was protecting them. Maybe I wasn't. Maybe this is what I was doing all along.

I don't know if reaching out is the right choice. I don't know if enough time has passed. I don't know if they would even want to hear from me.

But it scares me to decide what's best for someone without asking them. There is something deeply wrong with deciding for someone that things would be better for them if I just disappeared one day. With deciding for them what is best without asking them for anything at all.

Maybe that's what I've been doing all along. Not giving them the chance to stay. Not giving them the chance to forgive. Not even giving them the chance to choose.

For years, I thought the worst pain someone could experience was abandonment.

I never imagined I would be the one doing it. I tell myself it's because I still care. I tell myself it's because they still matter. But somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that leaving was the kindest thing I could do. And I tell myself it is for their own good.

I'm still not sure if that's love...

or just fear disguising itself.

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I think I've been absurdly lucky.

It's not because life has been easy. It hasn't. And it's certainly not because everything worked out perfectly. Its just that at every stage, the universe has quietly placed extraordinary people in the middle of the most ordinary days, until those ordinary days became the ones I remember the most.

School gave me people I thought I'd never outgrow.

Then college somehow did it again.

Every chapter of my life has come with its own little family, and every single time I've been convinced that there is no possible way I could ever find people like this again.

And every single time, life has proven me wrong.

Sometimes I wonder what the odds of that are.

How many alternate versions of my life exist where I sat in a different classroom, chose a different bench, skipped one conversation, took another bus, and never met the people who would quietly become home.

I don't think my friends realize how often they've saved my life simply by behaving as though I'd always be there tomorrow.

Nobody ever sat me down and changed my life with a profound conversation. Nobody delivered speeches that I'd remember forever. They did something much smaller, and somehow much greater.

They kept saving me a seat before I arrived. They called my name across crowded corridors as though I'd always belonged there. They sent dumb reels at 2 AM because they knew I'd laugh anyway, stole food from my plate without asking, and somehow always made room for me, even in plans I didn't know existed.

They behaved as though I belonged, and without ever saying it out loud, they taught me what belonging actually feels like.

It turns out belonging is one of the quietest forms of love.

Maybe that's why cities feel different when the people who taught you how to belong are no longer there.

People say they miss places.

I don't think they do.

I think they miss the people who translated those places into memories.

Mysore still has the same roads.

The same tea stalls.

The same rain.

The same sunsets.

The same traffic that somehow never changes.

Nothing about the city is different.

And yet, everything is.

Not because Mysore became smaller.

Because my friends made it impossibly large.

Every road reminds me of someone.

Every tea stall remembers a conversation.

Every football ground still carries echoes of people who probably don't even remember that particular evening anymore.

It's funny.

The city hasn't forgotten them.

I haven't given it permission to.

And somewhere while walking through those familiar streets, I remembered a few lines that had been sitting quietly in my archives,

"Dooriyon ne chahe jitna bhi majboor kar diya ho,

Dil toh aaj bhi teri hi tasveer banata hai…

Is sheher ki raahon mein tanha chalte hain hum,

Par har mod pe tera naam leta hai mann.

Hawa bhi teri khushbu ki kahani sunati hai,

Chaand bhi teri yaadon ka geet gungunata hai.

Magar tu jo door hai, toh sab bekaar lagta hai,

Yeh sheher bhi ab sirf ek virana lagta hai.

Jo hasi kabhi teri awaaz mein basi thi,

Aaj woh khamoshi ka ek afsana lagta hai."

I always believed those lines belonged to lovers.

Today, I think they belong to friends.

Because who decided friendship deserved a smaller vocabulary than love?

Who decided that missing your best friends was somehow less poetic than missing one person?

Maybe that's why this city feels quieter.

Because all of you filled it so completely that silence finally has something to be compared against.

And strangely...

I don't resent that.

How lucky am I that I got to know people who could change the geography of an entire city for me?

How lucky am I that a canteen is no longer just a canteen?

That a football ground isn't just grass?

That a random stretch of road can still make me laugh because I remember exactly who tripped there years ago?

Most people walk through cities.

You guys left pieces of yourselves in this one.

And somehow, I'm still here, carrying them.

There's a line from Winnie-the-Pooh that has been sitting in my head ever since everyone started leaving.

"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."

I used to think it was just a beautiful quote.

Now I think it's one of the truest things ever written.

Because if goodbye hurts this much, then what came before it must have been extraordinary.

This ache isn't proof that I've lost something.

It's proof that I was lucky enough to have it in the first place.

People ask me why I love Mysore so much.

The truth is...

I don't know if I love the city.

I love the version of myself that only existed because all of you were in it.

The one who laughed louder.

Stayed out longer.

Never had to think twice about whether he belonged.

Maybe one day another city will become home.

Maybe another group of strangers will slowly become the kind of people I can't imagine living without.

I hope they do.

Because if life has taught me anything, it's that I have been ridiculously lucky once.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll be lucky enough for it to happen again.

Until then, thank you.

Not for the memories.

People thank each other for memories all the time.

Thank you for changing the map.

Thank you for making an ordinary city feel extraordinary.

Thank you for making random streets worth revisiting, tea stalls worth remembering, football grounds worth walking past a little slower.

Thank you for giving me a version of home that had nothing to do with buildings and everything to do with people.

Because no matter where life takes any of us...

Every time I walk through Mysore, I won't just see a city.

I'll see a thousand ordinary moments that quietly became the happiest years of my life.

And if missing all of you is the price I have to pay for having known you...

I don't think I got the worse end of that bargain.

I got incredibly, unbelievably lucky.

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I have a confession to make, and I am already lying about it.

Not in the words. The words are true. But in the tone, in the performance of confession itself. I am confessing to you as though I am not still, at this very moment, committing the crime I am confessing to. As though telling you about my destructiveness somehow absolves me of it.

It does not.

I don't think I've spent my life searching for love.

I've spent it searching for proof.

Proof that I could give more than anyone else. Proof that I could stay longer. Forgive quicker. Understand deeper. Carry heavier things.

But here is what I will not say out loud until forced: I have also spent my life ensuring that no one could ever love me the way I claim to want to be loved.

Because if they did, I would have to become a different person. And I am not sure I want to.

Somewhere along the way, I mistook endurance for love.

I built an altar out of unreciprocated affection and called it virtue.

It is a terrifying thing to realize that suffering can become a personality.

You wear it long enough, and eventually you stop asking to be healed. You begin asking to be witnessed.

People tell you that love is patient.

So you wait.

People tell you that love sacrifices.

So you bleed.

People tell you that love expects nothing.

So you convince yourself that wanting to be chosen is a moral failure.

And then one day you wake up unable to distinguish devotion from disappearance.

Perhaps I never wanted to be loved.

No.

That's too easy.

Perhaps I wanted to remain the kind of person who could never accuse the world of not trying. If I loved everyone beyond reason, then every empty-handed return became evidence of my goodness.

There is a strange comfort in being the one who loves more.

You never have to answer the more frightening question.

"What if someone loved me exactly as I have always begged to be loved?"

What then?

Would I know how to receive it?

Or would I distrust it?

Would I dismantle it piece by piece until it resembled every disappointment I'd ever survived?

There is an arrogance hidden inside perpetual heartbreak.

It whispers that nobody has ever understood you.

But perhaps they came close.

Perhaps you simply kept renovating the house every time someone learned the floor plan.

Every time someone found the door, you built another hallway.

Every time someone memorized your language, you changed the alphabet.

Then you stood among the ruins and called yourself unknowable.

What an extraordinary way to participate in your own loneliness.

Maybe that is why, after drowning once, I still look at the clouds with hope.

Not because I have forgotten the flood.

But because some irrational part of me still believes that this time the rain will remember it was once meant to help things grow.

There is a frightening possibility I have avoided my entire life.

Perhaps I do not fear abandonment.

Perhaps I fear the day no one abandons me.

Because then I would lose my oldest excuse.

If someone finally stayed, I could no longer blame absence for the emptiness inside me.

I would have to admit that loneliness and solitude are not the same disease.

One is cured by another person.

The other follows you into every room.

I have spent so long introducing myself through my wounds that I no longer know what remains after they heal.

Who am I if I am not the one who loved harder?

Who am I if I am not the one left behind?

There is an odd arrogance in believing your suffering is irreplaceable.

As though the universe selected you for a private tragedy.

As though pain itself recognized something exceptional in you.

What vanity.

Millions have loved.

Millions have buried dreams.

Millions have watched people leave.

The tragedy was never that I suffered.

The tragedy was believing suffering made me singular.

It didn't.

It only made me human.

I have begun to suspect that hope is not the opposite of despair.

Memory is.

Hope survives almost anything.

Memory does not.

Every time I love someone new, I perform a quiet act of betrayal.

Not against the people who hurt me.

Against the version of myself that swore, with absolute certainty, "Never again."

He was sincere.

He believed the verdict was final.

He did not know that the human heart is an unreliable witness.

It forgets.

Not the names.

Not the faces.

The pain.

Otherwise no mother would have a second child.

No widow would remarry.

No refugee would build another home.

No one would ever fall in love twice.

We call this resilience.

I am no longer sure.

Perhaps it is simply that the soul edits its own history in order to keep itself alive.

Because if we remembered suffering with perfect accuracy...

Hope would become impossible.

And yet...

Why, after drowning once, do I still look at the clouds with hope?

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You can love people deeply without them knowing all of you.

I think most of us spend our lives trying to prove that sentence wrong.

We grow up believing intimacy means complete honesty. That love asks for everything. Every fear, every contradiction, every ugly thought we've never said out loud. We imagine the strongest relationships are the ones where nothing is left hidden.

I used to believe that too.

Then I met someone who loved differently.

There's a strange mythology around fragmentation.

The idea of splitting yourself into pieces has always been treated like a tragedy. Something broken. Something incomplete.

The first thing that comes to mind is Horcruxes. Pieces of a soul hidden away in different places. We remember them as something monstrous.

I've started wondering if we've been looking at that idea from the wrong direction.

Maybe not every part of you is meant to live in the same place.

I know someone like this.

When we first became friends, I couldn't understand them.

They could be deeply present with someone without telling them everything. They could care about people while keeping entire rooms inside themselves closed. They weren't pretending. They weren't distant. They simply didn't believe every relationship needed access to every part of who they were.

It confused me.

I thought closeness meant completeness. I thought loving someone meant eventually knowing everything about them.

The spaces they kept felt like walls.

Somewhere along the way, something changed.

Not in them.

In me.

I stopped treating mystery like failure.

I realized they weren't hiding from people. They were simply choosing where different parts of themselves belonged.

Some people knew their laughter.

Some knew their fears.

Some knew the version of them that could sit in silence for hours.

Others would never meet that person, and that didn't make those relationships any less real.

For the first time, it didn't feel dishonest.

It felt intentional.

Maybe we've misunderstood what it means to know someone.

Maybe loving someone doesn't mean collecting every version of them until there's nothing left undiscovered.

It means accepting that no single person is supposed to carry another human being in their entirety.

Some parts belong with friends.

Some belong with family.

Some belong with the person you fall in love with.

Some belong nowhere except inside yourself.

Not everything that's hidden is a secret.

Sometimes it's simply yours.

I still don't know how to live that way.

I'm the kind of person who wants to hand people the whole map. If I trust someone, I want them to know almost everything.

Part of me still believes that's what intimacy looks like.

Maybe I'll grow out of that.

Maybe I won't.

Either way, I've stopped believing my way is the only way.

They've changed the way I think about love.

I don't spend my time trying to solve them anymore. I'm not waiting for one final version of them that suddenly makes everything make sense.

I've realized there probably isn't one.

There are just different pieces, shared with different people, at different moments.

Some days I get their humor.

Some days I get their silence.

Some days I get a version of them that nobody else sees.

And some days, I don't get a piece at all.

None of it feels dishonest anymore.

It just feels human.

You can love people deeply without them knowing all of youu.

You can love them without knowing all of them, too.

Maybe that's not distance.

Maybe that's respect.

Maybe loving someone isn't about being trusted with every room inside them.

Maybe it's being grateful whenever they decide to leave the door open.

And if, by some chance, you know this is about you...

I hope you never feel like you have to become whole for anyone.

I don't need every version of you to love you.

The pieces you've chosen to share have always been enough.

I'll care about you no matter which version of you I meet that day.

🍋❤️

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I’ve spent years becoming very good at something that doesn’t actually help: explaining myself. I can articulate my failures so precisely that people think I’ve moved past them. I can turn pain into prose and make it sound like wisdom. But articulation isn’t healing. Clarity isn’t resolution. And I’m still as broken as I was before I learned how to make it sound beautiful.

I wanted to be extraordinary. Not famous. Just more than I am. And I’m not. So now I’m very good at explaining why I’m not. Which is, I suppose, a kind of accomplishment. But it’s not the kind I wanted.

For years, people have told me to find myself. As though somewhere inside there’s a hidden answer waiting. But what if I’m afraid of what I’ll find? What if the person underneath everything is just... ordinary?

The dangerous thing about being articulate is that people confuse clarity with resolution.

I can tell you exactly what’s wrong withh me. I can name the fear, trace its origins, describe the shape it takes in my chest. I can make my sadness sound like philosophy. I can turn my broken things into beautiful sentences.

And everyone thinks I’ve healed.

They think that because I can articulate the wound, I must have already stopped bleeding.

I’ve noticed something, the more precisely I describe my pain, the less real it becomes to other people.

It transforms into content. Into something they can admire from a distance. Something they can feel moved by, then close the tab on.

They don’t realize that naming something doesn’t fix it. That understanding yourself doesn’t mean you’ve changed. That being able to write about your loneliness doesn’t make you any less lonely.

The worst part is that I’ve started using my own articulation against myself.

If I can write about ambition with enough intelligence, I must have already moved past the disappointment of it.

If I can describe my smallness eloquently enough, I must have already accepted it.

If I can turn my failures into metaphors, they must not actually be failures anymore.

But that’s not how it works.
I wanted to be extraordinary.
Not famous. Not impressive to strangers.
Just... more than I am.

I thought by the time I was this age, I would have become someone I recognized. Someone I could respect. Someone whose potential had actually meant something.

Instead, I’m just a person who’s very good at explaining why I’m not that person.

There’s a particular cruelty in being intelligent enough to understand your own ordinariness.

But if you’re smart enough to see it coming, if you can articulate the exact moment you realized you weren’t going to be exceptional, then you have to live with that knowledge. You have to carry the gap between who you thought you’d be and who you actually are.

And you have to do it while being aware of the gap. Which somehow makes it worse.

And there it is.

The ugly thing.

The jealousy.

There's a kind of jealousy we pretend doesn't exist. The kind that has nothing to do with beauty or success

The jealousy of realizing that the people who matter most to you have entire worlds that exist without you.

Sometimes I watch my closest friends laugh with someone else and feel something tighten. Not because I want them all to myself. But because some frightened part of me starts asking questions.

Are they closer to them than to me?
Would they miss me as much as I would miss them?
Am I replaceable?

People ask me how I write these things.
How I can be so sad, so honest...
And I never know how to tell them the truth: that this articulation is a kind of armor.That being able to name my failures before anyone else can means they can’t hurt me as much.

That if I get there first, if I say it before they think it, then at least I have some control over the narrative.

But there’s a cost to that.

The cost is that I’ve become so good at explaining myself that I’ve stopped actually knowing myself.

I know what I’m supposed to say about my ambitions. I know the right words for my disappointment. I know how to frame my ordinariness in a way that makes it sound like wisdom.

But underneath all that language, I’m not sure who I actually am anymore.

I know how ridiculous the jealousy sounds.

Human beings aren’t positions. Friendship isn’t a competition. People can care about more than one person.

I know all of this.

And yet feelings have never cared much for logic.

So I’m caught between two truths.

The first is that I genuinely want the people I love to have rich, beautiful lives with people who care about them.

The second is that sometimes I wish I was more important in those lives than I probably am.

Sometimes I want to be chosen. Sometimes I want to be the person they think of first. Sometimes I want proof that my place in their life is as secure as theirs is in mine.

And every time I admit that, I feel ashamed.

There’s something humiliating about wanting.

The shame of being caught needing something. The moment someone realizes you care more than you intended. The moment your loneliness becomes visible.

Maybe that’s why so many of us pretend. We pretend not to care. Pretend not to need. Pretend not to hope.

Not because we’re strong.
Because wanting is terrifying.

Sometimes I think the most honest thing I could do is stop writing.

Stop turning my life into sentences. Stop making sense of things that don’t make sense. Stop using intelligence as a shield.

Just sit with the mess without explaining it.

But I can’t do that either.

Because the moment I stop articulating, I disappear.

And I’m not sure which is worse: being known for a version of myself I’ve carefully constructed, or being unknown because I stopped bothering to construct anything at all.

Lately, I’m trying to tell myself something simple:

I’m not broken. I’m not failing.

I’m just human.

Human enough to be lonely in a crowded room. Human enough to fear what I might find in myself. Human enough to want things I can’t have. Human enough to still be sad while talking about happiness.

Maybe loneliness isn’t about being alone at all.

Maybe it’s standing in a room full of people you love and wondering if your absence would leave the same shape in their lives that theirs leaves in yours.

The ambition was supposed to mean something.

I was supposed to become something.

And instead, I just became very good at describing what it feels like to not become anything.

Which is its own kind of accomplishment, I guess…

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I am haunted by the things I've told people.

Not the embarrassing stories. Those dissolve like aspirin.

I am haunted by the rooms inside my mind that I opened because, for a moment, I thought someone was finally looking.

The fears that arrive at 2 AM like uninvited guests.

The dreams so fragile they shatter in daylight.

The strange architectures of myself I have handed over, piece by piece, to people who took them the way you take a coat at a party, held it briefly, forgot where they left it.

There are people walking around with pieces of me I will never reclaim.

And on certain nights, usually the worst ones, I wonder if they even remember the weight of what I gave them.

Or if those confessions meant as little to them as they meant everything to me.

I've always trusted too easily.

Or maybe, and this is the bitter part, maybe I've always believed that vulnerability is contagious. That if I hand you something real, you'll hand me something real back. That honesty is a trade. That if I step into the dark with you, you won't leave me there alone.

But people don't work that way.

You cannot seduce someone into closeness through sincerity.

You cannot force intimacy.

You cannot crack your own ribs open and expect them to do the same.

Connection refuses to be earned. It either blooms or it withers, and there is no negotiation in between.

I've spent years fighting this. Refusing to accept it.

The cruelest thing is when someone says it will pass.

Not that they love you back.

Not that they understand.

Just that the pain will fade eventually. That time will do what they won't. That you should wait for the hurt to become bearable, as if that's the same as being held.

Maybe that's all some people can offer.

The mercy of "it will pass" instead of the risk of "I love you too."

I ask strange questions.

Questions that seem to arrive from nowhere, like they're not really questions at all.

I've always told myself it's curiosity.

But lately, and this is the humiliating part, I've realized something.

Sometimes I ask questions because I already have the answer waiting inside me like a bomb. I am not searching for information. I am searching for an opening. A permission slip to show you the rooms inside my head. A chance to hand you a key and hope you decide to stay.

This is why I am drawn to curious people the way a moth is drawn to burning.

It's a different kind of death.

There is a line I read once that split me open:

"I have dreams of you asking me better questions. You were never as curious as I wanted you to be."

That sentence named the thing I couldn't name. The wound I didn't know how to describe.

I don't want admiration.

I don't want to be fixed.

I want to be wondered about.

I want someone to ask what keeps me awake. Why certain stories live in my chest. What I'm not saying. I want to feel like a puzzle worth solving. Like a mystery worth staying up late for.

Maybe all love, at its core, is just curiosity that refuses to stop looking.

And maybe heartbreak is the moment someone stops asking questions long before you've run out of answers.

It's the moment they decide your silence is easier than your complexity.

But here is what confuses me:

Despite all of this, despite the fear, the hunger, the terrible weight of wanting to be seen, life somehow continues.

We function. We are functional, which is obscene.

We wake.

Attend classes.

Reply to messages.

Laugh at jokes that don't land.

Cook things we don't want to eat.

Watch screens.

As if there isn't a hurricane living inside our chests.

As if our hearts aren't carrying entire universes that will die with us, unseen.

How do we survive ourselves?

How does nobody notice the terror from last night is still here this morning?

Perhaps we are all performing the same exhausting miracle.

Perhaps everyone is a grief masquerading as routine.

Perhaps we all wear the same mask so long we forget there's a face underneath.

And perhaps some of us are just better at smiling while saying "I love you" to people who can only say "It will pass."

And yet.

And yet.

Despite every disappointment, every question that went unanswered, every person who looked at me and saw only the surface, I still want connection.

Which is absurd. Which is insane.

Because connection demands you bleed first.

It asks you to reveal yourself without guarantees.

To care without certainty.

To love without ever owning what you love.

Most people want the prize without the risk.

They want heaven without the dying.

They want to be known without being vulnerable.

But every meaningful thing is a negotiation with loss.

Every friendship is a bet.

Every love is a surrender.

Every connection is a gamble that you won't become just another person they used to know.

And perhaps that is the bargain we make.

To be known is to become available to being forgotten.

To be loved is to become vulnerable to loss.

To trust is to hand someone the knife and hope they don't use it.

To say "I love you" is to stand there alone while they tell you it will pass.

Yet we continue anyway.

We keep asking.

We keep hoping.

We keep opening doors we know might lock behind us.

We keep loving people who can only offer us time.

Maybe that is not strength.

Maybe that is not even courage.

Maybe it's just the only way we know how to stay alive.

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I have spent my life trying to lodge myself inside other people like a splinter. Not for immortality. For evidence.

Every time I left, a city, a school, a version of myself that no longer fit, i watched the door close on people who would forget me by Thursday. But I carried them. Their jokes became my jokes. Conversations they've already discarded still live in my skull, turning over like stones. I remembered everything: the particular slant of their smile, what made them afraid, the small cruelties they didn't know they were capable of. Entire universes rotted inside me while I disappeared from theirs.

And the question that took root was this: Do they remember me?

Not tenderly. Not often. Just enough. Enough that my being there mattered. Enough that I didn't vanish.

I think I have organized my entire life around this hunger. Every remembered detail, every small kindness that masqueraded as selflessness, it was all negotiation. *Please let me matter. Please let me have changed something. Please don't let me disappear.*

The terror is not being forgotten. That's almost kind.

The terror is that I've spent decades carrying people who set me down so long ago they wouldn't recognize the weight of me if I returned.

Certain people are dangerous for this reason: they don't announce their importance. They arrive ordinary, just another face, another voice, and then one day you realize their silence can crack your entire evening. A sentence from them will nest in your brain for weeks. You'll want things you never wanted before. Look at me. Tell me I matter. Prove it.

And God, the courage it takes to say you matter to me.

Everyone sees a few careless words. A message at 2 AM. A confession stitched into a joke so it can be taken back. They don't see what's underneath the years spent playing dead. The years spent pretending exits don't bleed. The years spent teaching yourself that needing anyone is weakness.

When I finally tell someone they mean something to me, I am not expressing affection.

I am handing them a map of every wound.

And trusting them not to press their thumbs into it.

That's why silence is a kind of violence.

Not because it's mean.

Because it opens the door and lets all your ghosts walk in.

Did I imagine this?

Did I love too hard, too wrong?

Was I only ever passing through?

There are no answers. Human connection is built on uncertainty, we spend our lives as archaeologists of our own worthlessness, collecting scraps, replaying words, trying to calculate our weight in someone else's life. But significance doesn't announce itself. It hides. It lies. And so we guess and guess and guess.

Some nights I think my real fear has never been rejection.

Rejection is honest. It's an ending.

What destroys me is not knowing.

The possibility that I will spend my whole life as a ghost wondering if I ever really haunted anyone. Wondering if the people I still carry ever knew my name. Wondering if every attempt to make myself unforgettable was just a child learning early that everyone leaves, so maybe, maybe, if I was memorable enough, if I loved hard enough, if I remembered everything

Maybe I wouldn't disappear too.

The worst part isn't being unloved.

It's standing before someone with everything, you have, finally finding the courage to say you changed me, and realizing they may never understand what that confession cost you.

That they may never know you handed them your entire history and asked them not to drop it.

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Everything I dream of dies. Not violently, no, that would at least possess the dignity of tragedy. Instead, it decays quietly, almost intelligently, as though life studies my desires carefully and then invents the precise circumstances necessary to poison them. And the most terrible part is that I continue to dream regardless. What foolishness. What incurable, pathetic foolishness.

I search endlessly for peace, yet every road I take curves back toward suffering, as if my soul were tied to misery by some invisible chain. I try to distract myself with work, with conversations, with movement, with ambitions, but in every silence I encounter myself again, and I confess to you honestly: I am growing unbearable to my own company.

There are moments lately when I feel my mind turning against me with almost theological cruelty. Every attempt to improve my life somehow returns sharpened into punishment. I try to love and become consumed by longing. I try to let go and become haunted by absence. I try to hope and am made ridiculous by disappointment once more. It is as though existence itself rejects me each time I reach toward it sincerely.

And then people speak to me of perseverance. Perseverance! As if the human spirit were some inexhaustible machine. They do not understand that there comes a point when suffering ceases to feel dramatic and instead becomes unbearably ordinary. One wakes up exhausted before the day has even begun. One carries sadness not in the heart anymore, but in the body itself, in the bones, in the eyes, in the slow way one moves through the world.

Tell me then, why is it that everything I attempt collapses back onto me? Why does every path toward peace become another corridor leading into ruin? Is there truly something malformed within me, something destined only to destroy what it touches? Or is this simply the natural condition of consciousness: to desire endlessly in a world designed to remain indifferent?

Perhaps that is the cruelest part of being human: not that we suffer, but that we remain aware of our suffering while still carrying the absurd instinct to hope for more.

I do not know.

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