The Inner Lens

Tag: mental-health

  • 10. The slow burn of a river

    little by little, you carry away what no longer belongs to you—sand, silt, dirt – and then somewhere far downstream, you look around and realize you’ve become something undeniable. Not through a single plunge or a sudden flood, but through a long, patient insistence on being exactly what you are.

    We all believe that we have all this time left, that the future seems worlds away. But in the blink of an eye, time has passed by, and I am now in my 3rd year of university. the future that seemed so distant and far away now breathes down my neck, reminding me of its urgency – and I’ve never felt so sure yet so completely and utterly lost at the same time.

    Caught between my aspirations and fears, there are days where I feel suffocated. Wrestling with being present and intentional whilst feeling like I’m aimlessly floating in an endless void that leads nowhere. Caught between having the desire to achieve anything and everything I want but not feeling good enough to do so.

    And let’s not even tap into my own self-image. Because most days, I don’t even understand myself. Currently trying to become my own person while battling the voices from my past, the judgment of others, and the discourse happening in the present. Most days, my body feels like some kind of foreign entity; at times, we coexist peacefully, and at other times, it’s a constant war.

    Without a doubt I can proudly say I’ve come so far in the last few years, but yet I feel nowhere near where I want to be. The human experience is truly so unique and vast, I don’t think any number of words could ever really express what it’s like. But then again, that’s what this article is for me, an attempt at vocalizing and formally expressing those emotions that have flooded me in recent days.

    There is this quote by Van Gogh I really like, which says:

    “Life is a terrible reality and we ourselves are running straight into infinity”

    This life we get to live is ever-changing, beautiful, and tragic; it is impossible to wrap our heads around it all, to understand it all, to find an answer for it all. However, we live in a constant state of exploration, as every day we wake up and choose to pursue new answers, perspectives, and narratives. With each day, I, we, grow wiser and hungrier to find the answers we crave, and it is all in the attempt to build ourselves.

    But the making of ourselves is never an easy task, especially when we’re all brought up so differently. We’re all raised and taught different perspectives and outlooks on life. We all come with a set of beliefs, philosophies, and approaches to life that are given to us by our respective parental figures or just simply the environment we are surrounded by.

    However, for all of us, there comes a point in our lives when we wake up and realize that we, too, want to shape our own perspectives. We, too, want to analyse and process the world in a way that is ours to claim. It is no simple feat, but it is a process that all of us undergo one way or another; no matter the cause, we all set sail on the path towards becoming ourselves.

    Unfortunately, a tough realisation to this is that becoming your own person can be one of the most painful processes we go through in our lifetime. Why? – because the journey has no beginning or end. But I think for most of us, for me defiantly, it awakens when freshly entering into adulthood. Ever since I hit my 20s, 21 now, I can feel it creeping behind me and breathing down my neck (dramatic I know), manifesting itself as questions, arguments, and disagreements. It’s a deadly whisper, a quiet thief that shows up at our doorstep one day and robs us of all certainty.

    adulthood has always been painted as a kind of destination. as kids, we imagined that one day, without warning, the world would hand us a badge that says “grown-up.” we thought it would come with certainty, competence, and an unshakable sense of self. but then it happens, you turn 20 and realize the badge never arrives.

    It is an uncomfortable and weird process to get up one day and have it all hit you that everything you once deemed certain and indisputable is now fleeting and uncertain. It shakes you at your core, unsettles your soul, to go from feeling like you know yourself to looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger staring back at you. Everything you’ve built crumbles before you, and you cannot stop it; you can only hope that it can be rebuilt.

    But how do you build something you’ve never seen before? How do you fix something you never even knew needed fixing?

    Having your dreams, morals, and belief systems confronted can be disconcerting. Accepting that we no longer see things the same way; no longer want the same things we used to is incredibly confusing. Especially when you’re entering the realm of adulthood and everyone is scrutinizing your every move, expecting you to have it all sorted out.

    Which is why some of us enter this state of negation, in which we repeatedly tell ourselves that this is simply “a small crisis.” This is where denial kicks in.

    We resort to our old ways, hoping that with the remaining pieces we can rebuild ourselves again. We cling to our previous beliefs, in search for an answer, in search for some hope. Trying to convince ourselves this is a mere bump in the road, a small detour that’ll take us right back to where we used to be. However, as we try to rebuild, our building crumbles because our foundations are no longer there.

    Our old foundations no longer support us because they no longer represent us; they no longer align with our souls. But alas, we attempt it, not because we trust in the old foundations but because they are familiar and of course, being the beings, we are – familiarity feels safe, as opposed to launching ourselves into the unknown. Though deep down, we know and we acknowledge that this is no longer who we are, yet we hesitate to move forward, we hesitate to ask questions, because there is nothing more terrifying than going in a direction we’ve never been.

    Right here, in the known, in the familiar, this feels comfortable, this feels safe. But it is a fallacy, a facade; it is not who we are, but merely a blueprint that was crafted for us before we even had the capacity to consent. That familiarity is simply artificial, a bunch of make-believe fabricated to convince you that you are the person they taught you to be. And for a long time, it works; you grow up thinking this is who you really are, certain that your thoughts belong to you and that your beliefs are truly rooted within you.

    We’re conditioned not to question or doubt them because how can they be wrong? How could something you’ve always known be wrong? How can something we’ve been taught since the day we were born be wrong?

    It can, and one day, at a time when you least expect it, it all crumbles. The world that was once predigested for you now sits at the pit of your stomach, whole and heavy. Now it is you who has to consume the world and digest it on your own. This process can be uncomfortable, and we might sometimes choose things that unsettle us, but that is just a part of it. As we leave our past circles and enter new environments, we learn and unlearn, and we’re presented with new perspectives, ideas, and beliefs that challenge our current systems.

    As you begin rebuilding, you’re met with a million questions. Flooded with a trillion possible answers, and trying not to drown underneath them. And with everything you’ve ever known collapsing before you, life begins to feel infinite. The world that was once so simple becomes intricate and complex. Nothing is simple anymore; reality is tragic, feelings become profound and immeasurable, and you are but the shell of the person you once were.

    Despite all this, you pick up the pieces, dissecting them one by one. You begin to learn to ask hard questions, to take the good and leave the bad. To tread carefully when making difficult decisions. You begin to experience the world through your own unadulterated lens. You start shaping your own views and become the author of your own opinions.

    Truth be told, half of the time you will be unsure, most days the world and its persuasiveness might get to you. You will have to wrestle through it all, be open to other points of view without compromising your own and let others confront your opinions without yielding all control. Your dreams will be scrutinized, how you dress will be scrutinized, the movies you watch, the books you read, and the music you listen to. It will all be dissected and labelled, but through it all, you must not let it determine who you are.

    Identity is just the sum of the choices we make. We live in a world of infinite paths and endless possibilities. We can be anything, but choosing one thing means grieving the thousands we didn’t.

    When everything is possible, nothing feels certain. I’ve always wondered if I was on the “right” path, if some alternate version of me— the one who chose differently—might be living a better life.

    Choice, in theory, is freedom. But in practice, it can feel like a quiet paralysis. The world keeps spinning forward, while you’re still stuck. But maybe the point isn’t to choose the perfect life. Maybe the magic lies in choosing a life—your life, and walking it fully. Because when you do, even the smallest step begins to feel sacred. Not because it was the best possible choice, but because it was yours.

    Please don’t allow yourself or the world to condemn you for not knowing it all yet, for not having a concise answer to every question, for not having achieved your dreams yet. Remind yourself that you have set on a path of learning and discovery, a process many will delay for the sake of comfort and security.

    Oftentimes, the people with the most things to say are the most scared of all. They hide behind a facade of confidence and wisdom, but really, they are just as terrified and insecure as you are and are desperately hiding it.

    So, whenever you find yourself feeling doubtful about your decisions because of someone’s disapproval, remember that it is because you’ve probably made them confront their own uncertainties. And that is a sort of discomfort not everyone knows how to deal with.

    This can lead to people leaving us, but we need to remember that this, too, is part of the process.

    It can be a lonely path; growth and evolution can come with disapproval. People may not react kindly to this new person you are becoming, because the world isn’t always gentle or accepting of change. We might outgrow people, have difficult conversations with our loved ones, and we may have to leave or put distance between ourselves and them if they no longer align with who we are.

    With every passing day, we might find fewer and fewer things in common between ourselves and the people we’ve always known. Conversations begin to cease, and the desire to see each other may decrease until ultimately you no longer speak. On the other hand, there may be more destructive fallouts, arguments, and discussions may arise. Be it because you differ from someone’s political views, morals, or opinions. You may find yourself exasperated as you try to dabble in the attempt to make your voice heard to others.

    You may grow tired of explaining yourself as you set new boundaries for people who are used to you never having any. There will be days when you have to walk away, for the sake of yourself, and sometimes simply for the sake of salvaging whatever is left of your relationship with the other.

    Despite all of this, I want to say that it’s okay, it is perfectly valid to leave spaces where you’re no longer welcome simply because you disagree with others’ perspectives. I assure you that when one door closes, another one will open, new spaces and people will welcome your questions, perspectives, and ideas.

    In the same way that there will be people who challenge your newfound beliefs, there will also come people who cherish and indulge in them. People who will appreciate your outlook and help expand it at the same time. Spaces that will welcome your ideas and help them grow.

    The (dis)comfort of not knowing

    I would be lying if I said that I have all the answers now and everything figured out. And I will not pretend that it’s not excruciating. There are days when this ambiguity cuts me apart until I have nothing but the weight of my own breath and the haunting echo of “figure it out” constantly trailing me.

    But maybe there is a subtle grace in this uncertainty. Maybe not knowing is a liberation that allows us to rebuild without obligation, to become without inherited expectations. The self is never truly lost; it just waits to be rewritten.

    There’s comfort in discomfort. For every piece of you that was shed trying to fit into someone else’s shape, you’ve been gifted space — vast, open rooms within yourself where beauty can take root. This time, you get to decide which adjectives describe you.

    So for me personally, and where I’m at in life right now, I feel that the most important part of this entire ordeal is acceptance. Acceptance of your incompleteness, acceptance of your inadequacies, of your doubts, and your failures. Giving ourselves some grace for not having it all figured out, for changing our minds, for not knowing what we want just yet.

    Be okay with messing up, asking questions, and challenging the answers. Learn to let yourself grow in both abundance and deficiency, to allow yourself the space to recognize your errors and fix them, to ask forgiveness when needed but not have to when you’re not at fault. Embrace your humanness, your vulnerabilities and emotions, as well as your strength and resilience.

    This is the journey of a lifetime, an ongoing attempt at being the truest we can be to ourselves. This may look one way in our twenties and completely different in our forties, and that too is okay. The answers I find at twenty-one may not align with the ones I find at fifty, which is okay. We can be so sure of something one second and then not agree with it years later. We may invest so much time into a specific career and, further down the line, fall out of love with it. As well as we can fall in love with something at 13 and still love it at 60 – just like how at 21 I still love certain shows and games (yes anime and Roblox) back when I was a child/young teen.

    Bottom line is that it is hard to know; it is only by trying and challenging ourselves that we will be able to find out what it is that makes us feel alive. Life is so fragile and uncertain, and I am growing tired of rejecting this uncertainty, so I want to embrace it. To allow myself to grow in the areas I’m most scared of, to confront those ideas deeply rooted within me, and truly determine what they mean to me.

    I want to accept myself now and stop putting a due date on this acceptance. To stop waiting for certain things in my life to align, to say that I embrace who I am. Because the truth is, there is no telling if we’ll even get there. The version of me that is perfect and has her life “put together” only exists in the fiction of my mind. But the version of me that is messy and insecure exists right now, and I want to accept her, to tell her that she’s deserving of everything just as she is now as much as she will be in the future.

    So, stop waiting for the completion of your goals or to tick certain boxes to accept yourself. Accept yourself now, love yourself now, be yourself now, because life is much too fleeting and much too fragile, and whatever the future you want, it starts right here and now. In the honest attempt to accept yourself.

    We spend so much of our lives chasing a polished version of ourselves — as if one day we’ll wake up with a name that fits perfectly, a purpose that clicks into place, a life that finally makes sense. But the self is never meant to be a finished sculpture. It’s more like a river — shifting, expanding, carving new paths in quiet persistence.

    The harder you search for who you are, the more elusive it becomes.

  • 9. Let them wander

    Your reputation is built through consistent action over time, not through desperate attempts to manage every interpretation of your character – It is not your job to make sure everyone’s perception of you is accurate.

    We all carry a heavy load in the quiet, unseen corners of our hearts, we are familiar with it as the weight of how we are seen by others. How we are perceived, defined, and boxed in by the label’s others attach to us. And often, too often, we make the mistake of believing that how others see us is how we are. But the truth is, perception is a fragile, fleeting thing. It shifts with every passing moment, every passing thought. Perception of something is not permanent – It’s not grounded in our essence, our truth. It’s grounded in how the observer chooses to see, or fails to see, us.

    There is a particular kind of sadness in being misunderstood, a sadness that cuts so deep because it feels like it challenges the very core of who we are. It’s painful when the ones who are supposed to know us best, our family, our friends, the ones we’ve shared the most intimate moments with, misread us, judge us, or, even worse, hold us to expectations that were never ours to begin with. They might look at us and see who they want to see, not who we truly are. They might see the mistakes we’ve made, the missteps we’ve taken, the parts of us we’ve outgrown, and mistakenly decide that this is who we will always be.

    We operate under a comforting fiction that if we just work hard enough, explain ourselves clearly enough, or plan meticulously enough, we can shape our reality exactly as we want it. This belief drives us to over function, over explain, and over worry. We rehearse conversations that may never happen. We structure elaborate defences against misunderstandings. We treat every setback as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be acknowledged.

    The truth is far simpler and far more liberating. Most of what happens in our lives exists outside our sphere of influence. People will form opinions about us based on their own experiences, wounds, and perspectives, not on our carefully crafted explanations. Circumstances will shift in ways we never anticipated. Days will unfold badly despite our best intentions.

    This isn’t pessimism. It’s clarity.

    There are things that consume more energy than the need to be understood. When someone misreads our intentions or misconstrues our words, something in us is irked. We feel compelled to set the record straight, to make them see the truth, to ensure they know who we really are.

    But that urgency only reveals that we’re trying to control someone else’s inner world. We’re insisting that their perception must align with our intention. And in doing so, we give away our peace to anyone willing to misunderstand us. The people who matter will give you the benefit of the doubt. The people who don’t won’t be convinced by your explanations anyway. Your reputation is built through consistent action over time, not through desperate attempts to manage every interpretation of your character. Being misunderstood is not a crisis. It’s a natural consequence of being human in a complex world where everyone carries different lenses.

    So – what do we do with this hurt? How do we carry the weight of being misunderstood, especially by those we love?

    The first step, I believe, is to realize something painful yet liberating: you don’t owe anyone your authenticity. Not even the ones you love most. Not even those who have known you your entire life. You don’t owe them the version of yourself they are comfortable with.

    The truth is no one can fully understand the complexity of another human being. No matter how much they love you, no matter how much they think they know you, they will never, ever have the full picture. They will see parts of you through the lens of their own life, their own experiences, their own assumptions. They will fill in the gaps with what they think is true, and sometimes, that truth is so far from the real thing, it’s almost laughable.

    But here’s the thing: they don’t need to understand you to love you. And you don’t need to be understood to live in your truth. And it is also not your job to make sure everyone’s perception of you is accurate.

    Let them be wrong about you. Let them misunderstand your choices, your silence, your decisions. Let them mistake your independence for arrogance, your strength for coldness, your need for space for rejection. Let them label you with the words that fit their expectations. Let them be wrong. Because, in their misunderstanding, there is a deep freedom for you.

    The most freeing thing you can do is to stop trying to prove yourself to anyone. Stop waiting for their approval, their validation, their understanding. Live fully in the person you are becoming, even when they can’t see the evolution. Live your truth even when it makes them uncomfortable, even when they challenge you, even when they want to pull you back into the small box they’ve created for you.

    I’ve often thought about how painful it is when the people who are supposed to be your biggest supporters, the ones who’ve watched you grow, don’t understand the reasons behind your decisions. They see you changing, and their instinct is to hold on to the person you were before. But you have to change. Growth means leaving behind the person you were and stepping into the person you are becoming. And sometimes, people who love you can’t let go of the version of you they feel comfortable with.

    The hardest part is not letting their misconceptions break you. It’s not allowing their judgments to shape your identity. It’s allowing them to be wrong, and still, remaining unapologetically who you are.

    Let them be wrong about your decisions. Let them be wrong about your relationships. Let them be wrong about your career, your dreams, your fears, and the way you navigate the world. Their judgment will never define you unless you give it the power to. The weight of their wrongness is theirs to carry, not yours.

    We spend so much of our lives trying to get others to see us the way we see ourselves. We want them to understand the reasons behind our choices, the deep, personal motivations that drive us. But in the process, we lose sight of something essential: our worth is not bound by their understanding. Your worth is something intrinsic, something that can’t be captured by their limited view of you. It’s something deeper, something richer. And while you might long for them to understand, the truth is, their understanding isn’t what makes you valid.

    This doesn’t mean you shut yourself off from the people you love. This doesn’t mean you stop sharing, stop explaining, stop striving for connection. It simply means that you have to give yourself permission to be misunderstood. You have to allow others to hold opinions about you that are not rooted in the full reality of who you are. Because at the end of the day, their opinions are just that, opinions. And while their love and care matter, their ability to grasp every nuance of who you are does not.

    This might be the most painful lesson you’ll ever learn, but it’s also the most freeing: you can still be loved, still be accepted, and still be enough, even when others get it wrong.

    There will be moments when those who love you most will misinterpret your silence, misread your intentions, or question your choices. And in those moments, it’s important to remember that their wrongness doesn’t invalidate you. Their inability to see you as you truly are doesn’t diminish your worth. It only reveals their limitations, not yours.

    You’ve tried handing them a map of who you are — every path carefully drawn, every detour explained, as if clarity could guarantee understanding. You wanted this map to be easy to read, to spare them the effort of getting lost. But people rarely follow the directions you give them, that’s the thing about giving people a map, most won’t read it. They’ll glance once, fold it the wrong way, and still wander off in their own direction. They take shortcuts through your silences, mistake your stillness for walls, your depth for danger.

     You need to learn to stop drawing these maps for people who only spare a singular glance, to stop drawing paths for people who never intended to walk them carefully. Let them wander instead. If they mistake the forest for a maze, that’s on them. The truth has always been here — steady as the trees, patient as the roots. Some people will circle for years and call it confusion; others will stand still long enough to notice the clearing.

    So, let them be wrong. Let them misunderstand you. Let them make judgments from a place of limited perspective. You are not defined by what they think of you. You are not defined by their opinions. You are defined by your truth, your authenticity, your courage to be who you are, regardless of whether they see it or not.

    Peace doesn’t arrive when everything goes right. It emerges when you stop requiring everything to go right. It shows up in the quiet moments when someone misunderstands you and you choose not to spiral into explanation.

     Because one day, when they look back, they will see what you’ve always known: that the truest thing about you was never their perception of you, but the quiet, unwavering conviction you held in your own heart. And in the meantime, let them be wrong. Let them think what they will.

    Your life is yours to live, no one else’s.

  • 8. A mirror that reflects the sun

    I am fool for thinking I can ever stop running. and they are a fool for waiting at the finish line. The mirror’s brilliance deceives both itself and others into believing that reflection equals illumination.

    Something I’ve thought about heavily recently is the concept of good and evil. What makes a person a good being and one a bad being. In philosophy, there are several ethical frameworks that outline what it is that makes a being good – for example, in virtue ethics states that a good person is one who develops virtues that strive towards moral excellence. In Utilitarianism a good person promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In existentialist ethics, goodness in a person is found through creating value in our choices, living authentically and taking responsibility for the meanings, we create. And then we have the religious views of what it is to be a good person – someone who embodies love, compassion, humility and alignment with the divine or moral truth; being a good person often means transcending ego, acting selflessly and producing harmony with others.

    A view that has stuck with me the most, and the one I seem to question is the deontological ethic, Immanuel Kants Moral Philosophy. He states that the morality of an action depends on the intention behind it, not on the consequences it produces – for Kant, a person is good when they act from duty, meaning they do what is right because it is right, not because it brings pleasure, success or approval.

    “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world… which can be called good without qualification, except a good will.” — Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

    A simple example of this would be telling the truth even though it can cause trouble, but you do it anyways because honesty is the right thing to do. Even if the result is unpleasant, your intention was moral, therefore making you morally good.

     But does having good intentions really make you a good person if those good intentions produce suffering in others? What if those good intentions seem good to the individual carrying them but doesn’t make sense to everyone else around them? Do you still remain a good person then?

    It is comforting to believe that good intentions make us good individuals, after all if someone means well, how can their actions be wrong. But I beg to differ and believe it is more complicated – good intentions can coexist with behaviour that causes real harm, whether it is physical harm or emotional and mental harm. A person’s motive may be pure, but when fear, ego or even emotional unavailability is present and blinding to the impact of their choices, perhaps that’s when their ‘goodness’ becomes questionable.

    I’ve been thinking about this from an avoidant perspective. As someone who has avoidant attachment tendencies woven deep into their soul being, I have questioned myself on several occasions whether or not I am in fact a good person.  See, avoidant attachment is not just about a relationship style – it is a lens through which the world is perceived, a filter through which we interpret love and connection. At its core it is a defence mechanism, an attempt to protect ourselves from the vulnerabilities of emotional closeness. It can begin early, often as an outcome response to early experiences that were too overwhelming, too unpredictable, or too painful. It is a learned behaviour – something picked up along the way, sometimes without even realizing it was picked up.

    When it comes to connection and love, whether platonic or romantic, it can feel like a heavy burden, an anchor that tugs too forcefully at the soul. And most cases this is where people think that we are people who are heartless, people who never cared to begin with, when that’s not the case – it is not that we don’t long for love, it is that we have internalized the belief that love demands something we can’t afford to give. We have learned to be hyper-independent, to guard emotions and to avoid leaning too heavily on others – so when this balance is disrupted, we instantly get pulled under and feel a sense of suffocation, of entrapment.

    Yet this need for emotional distance, this urge to protect ourselves from the vulnerability that love demands, often backfires. Because the very thing we push away is the thing that could possibly heal us, the very thing that can fill the emptiness we carry. We long for it, but we don’t know how to accept it without feeling overwhelmed, consumed or trapped.

    And here is where the paradox comes forward – we want connection, we yearn for the kind of love and connection that is deep and lasting, the kind that provides comfort safety and understanding. But the second it is within our reach; we push it away. We sabotage relationships with people, sometimes aware, sometimes unaware, we pull back when things get too close, when someone tries to love us in a way that feels too demanding, too dependent, too personal. We become distant and cold – retreating into ourselves to preserve the sense of autonomy and independence we’ve spent so long cultivating.

    Truth is, it’s not that we don’t feel love, or that we never loved a person: it is simply that we don’t know how to manage it. The emotions that come with love feel too big, too intense, too overwhelming that they don’t nearly fit into the walls we’ve built around ourselves. So, in return we detach before it implodes, we build walls higher and higher, each brick adding another layer of protection.

    Now back to the main point, as an avoidant, I tend to question if my ‘good intentions’ even make me a good person at all. Because even though I am aware of my avoidance, and that when it is triggered, I tend to push away not only for myself but because I know for a fact that the person involved will not receive what love asks from me. I am aware that because of my avoidant nature, I cannot give a person what they deserve, that is why I go into fight or flight and retreat. I used to tell myself that by detaching sooner rather than later, I am doing a good thing by protecting the other person from future heartbreak or from future withdrawals, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I question if as an avoidant, even with right intentions, I can even be what is morally classed as a good person.

    Even though we care and truly love, avoidance often manifests as withdrawal, emotional distance or a refusal to connect deeply and the people who loves us most, become the ones who feel the brunt of this. To someone who just simply wants to love the avoidant, it can often feel like a punishment, a rejection.

    I will admit I have hurt people because of my avoidant nature; I’ve lost genuine relationships over distance and withdrawal all because I didn’t know how to sit with closeness. I’ve made people feel like they should apologise for their desire to be close, for just wanting to love me, when truth is, they should never have to apologise for such a thing – the work is mutual, they should be able to understand an avoidants fear, and the avoidants need to stop making those who love them the most pay for it.

    Love bombing can emerge from avoidant roots also, not in the same way as narcissistic abuse, but I will be honest I have had moments where I’ve also questioned if I’m really just a narcissist hiding behind an avoidant attachment style, not because it is the truth, I have been told professionally I am not, but simply because sometimes I feels like the damage I cause to others feels like the equivalent to what a narcissist would do. but love bombing for avoidants emerge as a panic response, sometimes we flood early intimacy with intensity, promises, poetic devotion – not because we are lying, but rather that in the moment, we want to truly believe we are safe. But as intimacy deepens, our nervous system gets flooded. The vulnerability becomes unbearable, so we vanish. Not because the connection and love weren’t real, but because it became too real, too quickly.

    This push-pull dynamic isn’t romantic nor healthy, for any form of relationship – it is destabilising, it erodes trust and if it is left unaware, it creates people to feel as though love should be earned, that safety is always temporary; that emotional warmth always comes with a cold front. The avoidants intention – to prevent harm – ironically becomes the very thing that causes it. In the good intention of trying to distance away in aim to create space for someone to get something better, something they truly deserve, we hurt them with suffering of neglect, lack of trust and betrayal – we make them feel punished for just simply trying to love.

    My avoidance, in most cases, proves to me how maybe I am not as much of a good person as I intend to be, even with my good intentions of attempting to prevent harm, I cause harm in other areas unintentionally – Hurt people hurt people, and I am a solid example of it. The way my mind decides to handle certain things in certain moments- it tends to forget that I’m not the only being on earth with feelings that need to be protected. Maybe I was doing the wrong things but with the right intentions, but even then, how is the person who falls victim to this supposed to know your intentions when your actions say otherwise.

    A person with good intentions but avoidant behaviour is like a mirror that reflects the sun yet never gives warmth. Their moral glow is only a reflection — an image of goodness rather than its living presence. They wish others well, speak kindly, and even recognize what is right, but their virtue remains inert – They mean well — they want to bring light, to be kind, to do no harm — but they stand always at a distance, untouched by the fire that gives life its warmth. True goodness demands more than right thinking; it asks for engagement, for the willingness to act even when it costs comfort or safety. The mirror’s brilliance deceives both itself and others into believing that reflection equals illumination. Yet genuine moral worth, like the sun’s light, lies not in the appearance of virtue but in the capacity to warm, to nurture, and to transform what it touches.

    Even though saying certain goodbyes doesn’t make me a bad person, I am not a good one either because I could’ve given kinder goodbyes, especially to those who were genuine. Even though letting go of certain relationships doesn’t make me a bad person, I am not a good person either because I allowed distance and silence to paint the conclusions that could’ve been made with communication. I am not a good person because I gave hope to people, promises I knew from the beginning I couldn’t keep – because in the desperate attempts of trying to heal and protect myself from this world, I fall and become the opposite of my ‘good intentions’. I don’t regret meeting people, I regret making them believe there is something to expect from me, when there isn’t. Maybe, within their hope for me, sparks a hope in me, and that’s what causes me to allow people in, even when I know the hard truth.  And the cost of it all is that we lose connections that could’ve still stayed if we had just sat a second longer rather than retreating, but most importantly, we emotionally damage people who didn’t deserve it.

    A lesson I learnt this year is that a person’s capacity for growth is directly linked to how much truth they can face about themselves without running away. As much as we try running away, I think the presence of self-awareness and our actions, independent from our internal intentions, is what brings out the truth, it makes you realise things you didn’t even think of within the moment, whether those things are good or bad.

    So perhaps, good intentions in fact does not make someone a good person, as goodness is not measured by internal motives alone, but by the effects of our actions also. But perhaps also, what defines a good person is the willingness to grow beyond intention, to face the discomfort of one’s own flaws, and to choose action that aligns care with accountability – that guilt we feel clarifies the want for change. It won’t undo anything that has already been done and set, as no amount of apologizing, no amount of remorse or regret can take back what’s already been set and let go of but – if there is guilt then there is awareness, and with that comes growth.

    – and with that I aim to do things differently, to become a good person.

  • 7. Traces Left In Clay

    “ a person is a person through other persons ” – Ubuntu philosophy

    During the moments where when I’m just casually walking the streets trying to get from a to b, when I am sat in a room silently filled with people are the moments where sonder hits the most. It is an obvious yet compelling concept to think about – of course every person on this earth has their own life, but to think deeper is to realise that every person faces complexities as vivid as yours.

    One person could be experiencing the best day of their life, maybe they won the lottery, while at the exact same moment, someone else is facing their worst, maybe they received a terminal diagnosis they never saw coming. One woman becomes a mother for the first time, while a few rooms down, another mourns the loss of her child – life is given to someone, while another loses it.

    You could speak to thousands of people in your lifetime, and none will share the exact same story. All those people you walk by on the street, you will never truly know what they carry. It’s beautiful in its own little way, how life is truly so vast that everything is happening all at once, and you don’t even know it – how everyone is shaped by things you’ll never witness.

    But what if sonder can also apply to those closest to us?

    We move through the world assuming we’ve mapped out the people closest to us. We know their coffee orders, their dating history, the last book they recommended – but these are surface level echoes, tidy exports of interior life – and interior life is rarely ever tidy. Our inquisitive nature is left often reserved for strangers and small talk.

    Truth is, we all contain secret cities, hidden interiors, rooms within rooms – these depths stay tucked away, because no one simply thought to ask, because life moves fast – because it’s rare to feel truly listened to.

    Funnily yet staringly enough, it’s often those closest to us that we stop being curious about. We fall into rhythms, into what we already know – hes the anxious one, she’s the advice giver, they’re the funny one – these roles we play so often we forget that they are merely just roles. Those closest to us become frozen in familiarity, their updates become unnoticed, and their edges dulled by memory. We stop noticing the slow tectonic shifts of their inner world. We relate to the last version of them we remember, not to the self still unfolding in real time

    Cognitive neuroscience has a name for this compressing tendency – it is called the “Theory of Mind” – our ability to infer what others are thinking or feeling. It is essential for empathy, but also means we’re constantly guessing, often lazily. We stop updating our internal models, we relate not to the person in front of us, but to their fossilized outline – we replace curiosity with prediction.

    But what if your closest friends still contain versions of themselves, you’ve never met? Versions of them that exist quietly, out of view, never for you to imagine – that gap between the person you thought you knew and the person besides you.

    What’s extraordinary is that our brain wants to model other people – it devotes much of its resting state to doing just that. The default mode network, the part of your brain that activates when you’re not focused on a task, spends so much of its time simulating other minds: rehearsing conversations, empathizing, reflecting, we are wired to think in relation.

    So, what happens when we take the shortcut of assumption? – we close off access to those rich simulations, and we lose touch with our own capacity for wonder.

    When we as humans come to the realisation of sonder, we are surprised by its vastness, not because the vastness has always been there, but because of how partial our perception had been, how much we flatten people into a convenient coherence, into a shortcut, because we are a species that likes shortcuts, that prefers something easy over something heavy – it is easier, after all, to compress people into neat narratives that fit inside our mental maps.

    But shortcuts don’t work when it comes to truly understanding someone. Clay doesn’t just shape itself into something – it needs the hands, the influence, the pressure, the guidance to take a form of something real, of something complex yet beautiful and meaningful. Without that, the clay stays the same – unshaped, unaware, stuck in a loop with no identity. You can’t skip steps when it comes to pottery, there are no shortcuts. People are like this too, shaped by factors and environments that we have no knowledge of no matter how much we think we do. What we assume may sometimes be half of the truth, but it is never the full truth.

    It’s never about lack of depth, everyone has depth, it’s about lack of invitation – “if someone seems boring to you…it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you” [Henrik Karlsson]. Actions speak louder than words, but words are actions, they land and rearrange. They build scaffolding for thought and memory – they reshape what becomes sayable, and in turn, what becomes thinkable. It is thew sole reason why a well- placed phrase can rewire your inner architecture, why a question can unlock a forgotten room, why a conversation can leave behind an invisible structure that you’ll forever keep returning to.

    When we really listen, we do more than just hear and begin to regulate. Our attention transforms into a co-therapist, a kind of social nervous system. This is called “Co-regulation” in polyvagal theory – it is the way our bodies attune to one another’s tone of voice, facial expression and breath. When someone listens gently with curiosity, your vagus nerve responds, your stress lowers and your capacity to think more freely expands.

    We don’t need to travel far to discover new worlds. Sometimes, they’re sitting across from us, sipping on the coffee order you’ve memorised, waiting to be seen again. Everybody in their lives is really waiting to for people to ask them questions – so then they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are,

    Ask the questions that linger, open and reveals. Listen for the answer, the pause before it, the subtle shift in posture, the breath they take before something brave. Because every interaction is a quiet invitation to be more alive with each other, to be mid-bloom together, to see, and be changed by the seeing.

    Vastness surrounds us, it is the sole reason for sonder, but it also surrounds us in the forms of those closest to us.

  • 6. The Pulse Of Persistence

    Life’s refusal to stop for our pain is not a punishment – It is the mechanism of our healing.

    An interaction I’ll always remember is when I had booked an uber. My driver was a man named Bekim, half Croatian, half Albanian, somewhere in his late 40s. He had more history to his name than one could imagine, a mouth that held a passion to express the chaos of politics; a heart which held tightly his culture and sole identity. He held a contained fatherly anger towards the world, as he spoke about his 8-year-old daughter and how her teachers didn’t bother to grasp the beauties and melodies of her rich name. He had transformed my hour journey to a few minutes. A few minutes that poured the presence of meeting someone who you needed to meet, to tell you what you needed to hear.

    As I sat quietly listening, he advised me to keep fighting- to never give up even if the entire world was against me. Alas we had reached my destination and the journey ended with him becoming a stranger once again, a stranger who changed my perspectives – a stranger whose name ill never be able to erase from my mind. One thing he said that I’ll never forget is – ‘you’re not allowed to worry about problems that have solutions.’

    Three years later, I’ve come to understand the sole meaning behind what he meant. As humans we tend to view inconveniences as a jarring concept, and in some cases, a catastrophe. How many times have we utterly lost it over small things, like our car breaking down, not getting immediate text replies, losing things, plans being ruined. We bleed energy that we don’t even have to begin with into things that was never ours to carry. These things aren’t unsolvable; they are just uncomfortable because we want perfection out of our lives instead of just rolling with the punches.

    Inconvenience isn’t a catastrophe, as annoying and uncomfortable it is to have a pebble in your shoe, they are not boulders in our path. They are things we can deal with and keep walking; it’s not something that completely stops us. If we fall apart over the little things in life, how are we, how are you, going to survive the big things that life unfortunately has to offer? How will you get through life, if you freak out every time your car breaks down, or you don’t receive a reply, or you don’t know where you placed your keys?

    And this is where I thought about the bigger problems. What about the bigger things, the things that drain us entirely. If we aren’t allowed to worry about the things that have solutions, then what about the things that feel like they don’t have solutions?

    And this is where Bekims words echoed once more – ‘keep fighting, never give up even if the entire world is against you’. Problems are inevitable, we can’t avoid them, but the more you stress about the little things, the more control life has over you – and when we do face the bigger problems, that’s when life completely consumes us with control.

    The first and hardest truth we have to accept is this: life doesn’t stop for anyone. Not for heartbreak, not for grief, not even for the moments that feel massive that it becomes excruciating.

    You could lose everything you thought you couldn’t live without – whether it is a person, a dream, a version of yourself that once felt secure – and yet, somewhere, not so far from where you stand breaking apart, a stranger will be falling in love for the very first time, a child will be laughing so hard they can barley breathe, a grocery store will be restocking its shelves with a quiet, ordinary insistence, as if the world hasn’t shifted at all.

    It feels cruel sometimes, the way life keeps moving forward, indifferent to whether you are able to move with it, the way hours and days and years continue to spill out across the floor of your life even when you have nothing left inside you to meet them.

    Maybe, deep down, a part of us expects, wants, the world to slow down out of respect for our losses. We believe, so heavily within our aching souls, that time should pause, that the noise and the rhythm of daily life should quiet itself long enough to catch your breath and get back up on your feet.

    But it doesn’t – and it won’t and never will.

    The sun continues to rise on the mornings that feel uninhabitable. The bills must continue to be paid on time, the strangers you pass on the street will continue to have their birthdays, their first kisses and last goodbyes- their lives will continue on, completely unaware that everything inside you have rearranged itself into something sharp and recognizable.

    There is no great cosmic stillness reserved for your sorrows, there is only life pulsing and continuing forward, as thoughtlessly as the steady flow of blood through our veins — constant, unrelenting, and purposeful. Even when we’re wounded, even when the heart aches or the mind feels overwhelmed, the blood doesn’t stop its course. It pulses forward, carrying oxygen to every cell, quietly doing its work, regardless of chaos or calm.

    And you, battered and broken, are somehow expected to keep moving too. You can try to hold still, to dig your heels into the soil of memory and refuse to be dragged forward, to replay the past again and again until the pain is transformed to feeling holy in familiarity.

    You can try to live there, inside everything that’s lost, convincing yourself that if you remain here long enough, life will notice your insistence and circle back to you.

    But it won’t.

    It will continue to slip past you, faster and faster – as will the entire days and weeks of your life that you don’t even realise are passing until you look back and see the blur, until you get asked ‘what day is it?’ and you are clueless. The longer you stay paralyzed in your pain, the harder it becomes to remember how to step back into the current without drowning.

    It is brutal thing to come to terms with and accept, yes, but it is also, somehow, a doorway. Because as much as it hurts to know that life does not stop for our sorrows, it is also the only reason any of us survive it.

    If time truly paused for every heartbreak, if the world truly honoured every loss by falling silent and still – we would never get unstuck, we would remain paralysed for eternity. We would never be able to leave the broken places behind us, we would never arrive to the mornings where the weight feels lighter and the laughter comes easier, where hope finally begins to stir again in our chests.

    Life’s refusal to stop for our pain is not a punishment – It is the mechanism of our healing.

    It doesn’t ask you to be ready, it doesn’t demand for you to be okay – it simply carries you forward, inch by inch, day by day, month by month – year by year. Until one day you wake up and come to realize you are not quite the same person who broke apart all those lifetimes ago. You are something new, unlikely something softer, but something stronger, wiser; someone who is shaped by their losses rather than defined by them.

    Resilience isn’t about waiting for life to stop throwing situations your way, life is consistent, it doesn’t stop for anyone. Resilience is about realising that problems don’t get to have ownership over you. You have survived 100% of your life up till now – every breakdown, every bill, every setback, every heartbreak, every inconvenience, every stressful moment – everything you convinced yourself you couldn’t survive, you have survived still. So, what makes you think this is the problem that is going to take you out?

    So yes, grieve, fall apart, feel everything – every jagged, searing impossible thing, because what you feel matters and deserve to be honoured. Mourn the version of your life that didn’t survive. Mourn the dreams you had to give up on. Mourn the people who are not coming back. But do not confuse mourning with living – do not build a permanent home in your grief.

    Because the truth simply is – the living is still continuing all around you, even when you cannot yet feel it pulsing under your skin. Just as our circulatory system adapts to injury, redirecting flow and healing from within, life, too, finds ways to keep moving. A setback isn’t a full stop; it’s a momentary clot, not a collapse. The body teaches us resilience — that motion continues, that healing is embedded in movement, and that stagnation is not our nature. We are built to endure, to adjust, and most importantly, to keep going.

    ‘Life goes on’ is not a dismissal of your pain, it is not a careless shrug at the things you have lost, and it is most definitely not a demand to hurry up and heal faster. We are humans, our sole purpose is to feel everything and anything. It is merely a promise that the story is not over, that you are not over. Life continues on because it carries you forward to become someone you have not yet met. And someday, maybe not today or anytime soon, you will meet that version of yourself who realizes you survived something that you had thought would destroy you.

    So, when the weight is heavy and your thoughts are complex- what do you do? How do you get over it when you feel as though there is nothing else to do, that there is no solution – what do you do? when you are hurt, broken and burnt out, what can you do?

    These are questions that are needed to ask oneself, because there will come and be moments where you will have to find out. You will be at the lowest point in your life, and everything will be against you – what will you do – what CAN you do?

    Certain sufferings in our lives will leave when we have learned from them. But only when we have learned from them will they leave. We must take initiative to allow ourselves to try and find the messages in these sufferings, Of course, there will be times where it is going to be difficult, without a doubt. But other times you must find the writing on the wall; you have to be willing to look around and analyse what’s going on in order for you to possibly get away from the suffering that is surrounding you. Instead of expecting the world to pause, instead of living in this pain, you need to learn in order to keep out of suffering. That’s the solution to the problems that are excruciatingly big.

    Life goes on, and somehow

    So do we.

  • 5. When the campfire grows cold

    ‘what matters more to you – how far you’ll go, or how far others can go because of you?’

    One thing I will never understand is the life of a people pleaser. By far, it is the most alienated concept to me, maybe because I am someone who has far drifted from the motivation of wanting to fit in or being liked by everyone, maybe because I just simply am not open enough to please just anyone.

    But it intrigues and confuses me all at once, how an individual anchors their happiness to the happiness of others. That if the people around them were smiling, if they had felt cared for within their company then that is when they could breathe, as if they earned the right to exist. Usually when I talk about this topic, I come across as mean and heartless, which is understandable – I’m all for making others happy, but to the extent that your happiness relies on others, where your needs come second and that your value comes solely from meeting the needs of others, is where my perspective on people pleasing diverts.

    We’ve all been there, wanting to be kind, having a pure desire to make everyone feel seen, loved and safe, that is the sole beauty behind kindness. But when I take a step back and see the full picture, I can’t help but see it as self-righteousness masked with selflessness.

    What people pleasers crave is not just affection, but validation – they have this burning need to be wanted and a desperate want to be needed. And once they taste the flavours of approval, they can’t stop. It becomes an addiction that’s far more difficult to let go of than any drug.

    Meeting new people no longer becomes an aim for connection, as much as they say it is, it becomes an aim of how instantly they can satisfy them. I used to know someone back in college where any new person we interacted with they would agree with everything they said, they’d ask question after question as if their life was more important and interesting than their own – they were determined to be liked. And I’d watch how their identity would instantly be buried; they’d become someone I didn’t know in aims of being liked by someone they didn’t know.

    People pleasers collect affection like they are points, and the more they gather the more proof they had that they were allowed in this world. If the people around them were pleased with their presence, then their worth was justified – giving them evidence that they deserved to exist.

    The main thing that infuriates me when it comes to individuals with a people pleasing mindset, is how they take back people that did them wrong. Especially when it comes to the people that, the minute they stopped pleasing, those same people showed their true colours, they show how they never truly respected their boundaries, how they never truly valued their emotions – yet people pleasers always fall back and allow them back into their lives. That’s one thing they fail to come to realise – the people they are exhausting themselves out in trying to please, become the very same people who disrespect them. People pleasers fail to understand that kindness is not meant to be given out to just everyone and anyone. This doesn’t go to say don’t be kind, this goes to say that there are people out there that will take advantage of your kindness for their own benefit.

    Why that is, I’m not sure, but my best guess is the feeling of familiarity – they know this person, so they rather them back in than holding their ground and saying ‘no’. Maybe it’s a product of neglect from early years, maybe it’s the fear of abandonment, maybe it’s the power to have control in how people view and feel about them in order to feel safe. But these individuals are so far deep into being consistent with keeping others happy, that a simple ‘no’ automatically makes them a bad person – when that’s not the case at all.

    They have this fire within them that is carefully built from their inner spark, offering warmth, light, and comfort. It spreads beyond its boundaries, reaching out to warm every corner, every shadow, every shivering figure nearby. It feeds on itself to meet every need, giving more than it has, never saying no to the next demand for heat. But they forget that even a flame must protect its core to survive, and without a spark a fire will cease to exist. They will burn themselves out for the sake of keeping other hands warm. And the funny thing about this is, they instantly blame themselves for not preserving the fire, for not continuously being able to keep others satisfied with warmth – but they never go to question why the hands they were keeping warm, didn’t offer anything in return, to keep it alive and to prevent it from ceasing. Why did no one kneel beside it with a log or even a handful of kindling? They circled close when the night was cold, held out their hands, basked in the glow—but when the flames began to flicker, when the light grew thin and the wood cracked low, they only stepped back and wondered what went wrong. Did they think the fire was endless? Did they believe warmth was its duty? Maybe they never saw the fire as something alive, something that needed tending too—only as a source, not a soul.

    So why is it then, do they not question the kind of people they are tirelessly trying to please.

    I see a major flaw in this system of living, because we live in a world of individuality, no matter how much you curate yourself, or how tirelessly you try to be agreeable or relatable – there will always be people who will dislike you anyways or people who take advantage. Why should you allow one disapproving glance, one unreturned smile to be enough to unravel your entire sense of worth?

    How long can you continue to throw yourself aside to please people – if someone you are trying to satisfy enjoys eating bell peppers and often cooks using them, knowing you have a dislike towards them, how many times will you have to fight back against a gag reflex before you admit that you don’t like bell peppers? – or will you just stop turning up to their house to avoid eating there and slowly start to let go of the relationship because it is less anxiety inducing than voicing your preference?.

    If anything, these individuals should take a lesson from the things they don’t like – think of the bell pepper, hypothetically – you hate it with a burning passion, not because of allergies or any explainable logic; it’s just pure, instinctive dislike. And yet, the bell pepper doesn’t try to convince you to like it, it doesn’t beg you to try it out or force you to enjoy its flavours. It simply just exists, knowing that there are countless others out there that enjoy it lovingly. What am I trying to get at here is that – you’re not for everyone, and that’s okay.

    The fact that some people will inevitably dislike you, no matter how well you perform, no matter how well you morph yourself into something just to satisfy their likes, will permit you to stop performing. Why exhaust yourself rehearsing for an audience that will never applaud, why twist yourself into a shape that will leave you unrecognisable in the mirror.

    To demand universal approval is both impossible and foolish, I understand that people pleasers have a heart as big as anything, and their souls are just filled to the brim with kindness, but as beautiful as that is in theory – it is destructive in practise. Perhaps what you need isn’t for the world to love you, but for you to love yourself.

    Here is a hard truth not many like to hear, but people pleasing can turn you manipulative – you lie to yourself, and you lie to others by going against your own thoughts and preferences, you become someone who lacks a voice of their own, and a duplicate of someone else. You bury everything that makes you, you, just for the sake of validation – your life no longer becomes yours, but it becomes the possession of those you please.

    Life has an unforgiving way of placing humans through experiences that produce heartbreaks and pain, making us very much aware that people come and go – but most importantly, it makes us aware that the only true companion, the only constant one we have and ever will have is ourselves. And so, perhaps the real work of living this life shouldn’t be to please the crowd, but to stand, on your own two feet, as a whole.

    You’re not for everyone; you will never be. Your flaws, your charm, your humour, your goals and talents, your desires, your shames, your ideas and beliefs – they are yours, and yours alone. If you fear your true self, fear your thoughts and opinions to be disliked, then the fault isn’t in you, the fault is in who you are choosing to surround yourself with – you should fear those people rather than the person that you are.

    The day you finally stop begging to fit into everyone’s world is the day you start building your own. Not everyone will like you – and that’s exactly how it should be.

  • 3. Truce Over Coffee

    ‘ between them, the coffee cooled like a truce neither wanted to end.’

    They say the heart wants what it wants – but they often tend to leave out how quickly it truly wants something. Long before the mind has had time to analyse, question, or rationalize all the potential ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, the heart has already made its move. It leaps, it aches, it decides – without any second thought, without the mind. And often, we only realise the weight of that decision once our mind finally catches up.

    Love, hope, fear and pain – these are not things we as beings intellectually process first. They arrive unannounced, stirring something deep within us. We feel the pull of someone new, the string of a goodbye, or the thrill of possibility; in that moment – no amount of reasoning can restrain what we feel. We act, speak, or fall in ways that logic cannot always justify.

    Some may say the heart is reckless, some say its honest – as it doesn’t wait for a perfect plan or a guaranteed outcome. It operates in truth, in instinct, in raw emotion. That’s its beauty – but also its own burning danger. It’s what pushes us to take the risks and open up, even when our minds are screaming warning signs.

    But of course, the head eventually catches up, and with a heavy breath finally steps in. It runs the numbers, weighs the consequences and scolds the heart for being too eager. But majority of the time, the mind is too late, and the heart has already changed the course of everything – and what’s done in the name of feeling, can’t always be undone by reason.

    This change of course is what most fear – it’s what I feared, it’s what has come true, and it’s what I continue to fear this very day. Although allowing yourself to feel every ounce of emotion is a natural thing, a beautiful one at that, the fear of the aftermath, of the possible destruction it may cause, is what has placed my heart into lockdown and my mind onto a pedestal – some may even view my mind as a tyrant for how much power it holds over my heart. Because even though it’s what keeps me safe, when my heart is offered something pure, something it yearns, no matter what – my mind will always say no and my heart will just accept in silence, no matter how much it aches.

    I guess some may argue that with destruction there can arrive peace also, but something within me has altered to not want to go through destruction for the sake of a possibility of peace. I’d rather sit still and wait for it to arrive when its time for it to, so I can feel all its glory in one piece, rather than go through the possible hell just for a possible peace to arrive – yes it arrives, but what at cost?

    It is as if after the last leap the heart took, the heart and mind sat across from each other in a quiet café, both nursing to their scars, two coffee mugs between them with steam curling upward and fading into the still air. They sat in a weary discussion, the mind pointing out how the heart always leapt like a flame towards any slight flicker, leaving the brain behind to gather the ashes. And for once the heart decided to listen, not to defend or argue – but to understand, as it stared down into the coffee, stirring without drinking, the mind, measured and calm, laid out its reasoning like a blueprint, showing how logic could protect them both from the wreckage of impulse. Silence stretched between them, the heart finally began to see the wisdom in restraint, in thinking before feeling too deeply. As the air filled with the heavy weight of lessons the heart had always been too eager to learn, the heart nodded in a quiet understanding, reaching for the coffee in a rare moment of stillness – the mind let out a bittersweet sigh, a mix of relief for the weight lifted but also resignation because it had noticed between them, the coffee had grown cold, as if it was symbolism for it being too late, or perhaps it grew cold like a truce neither wanted to end, but it was a quiet reminder that even peace takes time and with that – neither one took a sip and left behind their truce to steep in a cup, forever to remain untouched.

    I sometimes wonder if the reason for why I can’t seem to maintain relationships or friendships well, or for why I view things so harshly and raw is because of the decision of allowing my mind to be in control. As some people balance the heart and mind, only allowing one or the other out when it’s called for, I chose to only allow my mind to have the privilege to that freedom of stepping out in the open, I don’t really have a clear understanding as to why – all I know is that I fear the past from reoccurring, or that I fear others being hurt from my own actions – but that’s the funny thing, in the process of allowing my mind to take control with the aims of protecting myself and others, I end up hurting myself and others anyways – I wonder if my heart finds it comedic or is at utter distraught at the fact the sole reason its caged up is so it doesn’t have to be faced with pain, yet it is happening anyways, only difference is the pain I face isn’t something I feel or show emotionally, I feel it mentally – it shows in the way I think, in the way I write, in the way I perceive – you wont see me crying but you’ll see me view or word something a certain way, not because I’m hard headed, but because I’m emotionally incapable to allow myself to feel, at least out in the open anyways,  so I express my emotion via my thoughts, my words.

    It’s sort of sadistic to say, but I prefer it this way, it offers me a reassurance knowing that my mind wont have to run after my heart and scold it and yell ‘ I told you so’ – I prefer my mind making me aware and alert from the beginning ; not having to have my heart ignore it and continue, to then later return back being hurt – I prefer my mind expecting to be disappointed before anything has even happened rather than waiting for it to come out of nowhere, unprepared. Unfortunately, the price I must pay for this is that I appear unaffected by things that should clearly have an effect, which they do, I just don’t allow myself to physically and emotionally show it – only mentally – my mind just transforms emotions into intellect, my mind is the tyrant remember. But people don’t get that, they see it as cold hearted, someone who doesn’t care – but I don’t blame them when they view me like this, when you become someone who is surviving rather than living, someone who doesn’t allow their heart that sort of freedom, it’s expected to be viewed as heartless.

    However, as much as I find those who set their hearts out to be free to make every decision as foolish, I will admit, there will always be a silent admiration for those individuals. Because there is something profoundly human about this imbalance. It’s what allows us to love people we shouldn’t, chase dreams that seem out of reach and hold onto hope in hopeless moments, The heart may not always be right, but it’s often what makes life worth living.

    Acting from the heart can lead to heartbreak, disappointment, or regret – but it also leads to our most meaningful experiences – the moments we remember long after logic has faded. Those impulsive choices, those emotional leaps, they shape who we become.

    As often as I value control and caution, I do believe there’s courage in being led by feeling. Theres quiet a bravery in trusting your heart to guide you, even when the path is unclear, my heart, under its chains and locks, envies yet yearns for this kind of bravery – because while the mind might keep you safe, the heart is what keeps you alive, and sometimes I do question if me shutting off my heart emotionally is the sole answer to all my ‘whys’ – if the past made me shut off my heart, then maybe I am the way I am because of that reason too.

    Maybe the mind is there not to restrain the heart, but to help it find its way home – when will I allow that to happen? I don’t know. Instead I never go near a cup of coffee again.

  • 2. In Solitude

    To embrace solitude is to embrace self discovery, Run into aloneness with open arms and let it swallow you up – sit with silence and let it teach you what cannot be learned elsewhere. There’s liberation here.

    Humans are deeply social species, during evolutionary times we relied on being in groups to hunt, to protect and to survive. Through time, the human body evolved mechanisms to reward social closeness – releasing oxytocin, what we know as the ‘love hormone’, and dopamine when interacting with pleasurable social interactions, almost making it an addiction to the mind and body to encourage us to seek connection again and again.  

    Maslow’s hierarchy of needs state that connection and belonging, whether from friendships, intimacy or family, sits in the middle of Maslow’s pyramid, right after basic physiological and safety needs – and that without satisfying this level, it’s deemed as difficult to progress to higher levels like self –esteem and self-actualization. The self-determination theory states that as humans we have three innate psychological needs: 

    (1)Autonomy – control over our actions

    (2)Competence – feeling effective 

        (3) Relatedness – feeling connected to others. 

          Relatedness being the most essential for our mental health, claiming that without it we become isolated – as the self-identify theory states, belonging to a group helps form a stable sense of self and identity.  

          But what if I was to oppose these theories, what if I was to say that we don’t need to satisfy connection and belonging to progress to self-esteem – that relatedness can lead to the possibility of lacking autonomy – what if we become isolated from trying to relate and belong somewhere we don’t fit in – what if the reach for belonging leads us to instability and lose of self? 

          In today’s world, people have become thirstier for this addiction, the addiction of belonging, they’ve grown to fear to be lonely – to be alone. Humans have grown to take silence as rejection, they have adapted this instinct to not be alone or perceived as lonely at all costs, to avoid that ‘hollow’ feeling of being unwanted, unchosen or unseen – even to the extent that the thing they fear the most is being demonstrated by the people they surround themselves by all in the aims of ‘not being alone’. 

          One of my biggest fears used to be being alone, this stemmed from high school, where everyone was in groups and anyone who was seen on their own was perceived as an outcast, a loner. I remember people wouldn’t even go to the bathroom alone simply because of the fear of being perceived as someone who didn’t have friends. But, with the more observant I became, I came to the realisation that many of us surround ourselves with people, desperately trying to find a place of belonging just for the sake of not having to feel the effects of loneliness, that we were blinded by the type of people we were surrounding ourselves by – that the places we were seeking company in, were in fact somewhere we would never truly be ourselves in – I say this because constantly trying to belong somewhere becomes extremely exhausting ; if you belong somewhere, you will naturally fit into place, you wouldn’t need to exhaust yourself out to achieve a sense of belonging.  

          I feel as though people fear being alone because of two main reasons – they haven’t seen permeance therefore producing a dependence on others, or they haven’t learnt to experience their own silence. Both cases will lead a person to misinterpret and believe being alone for being lonely.  

          Of course, being lonely is a natural feeling we all ,as humans, will experience, as it is what drives us to want to have connections – but being able to be alone and being comfortable with your own silence allows us to detach from a route that leads to dependency on others, we should be able to have a drive for connection without that connection being the very thing that drives us to loss of self. 

          This doesn’t go to say that we shouldn’t seek connections, and all bonds are damaging –there are many connections I have made that have changed my life and my perspectives for the better. We can have connections, we can have relationships and find a comfort within them, but we should try, before anything, to find that comfort within ourselves – because as much as you desperately scavage around to belong somewhere, to someone, when the day comes – you will be entering your own grave alone.  So why fear being alone, when that is where our fate will end, why fear it when we can embrace it in ways where we can strive even if there was no one following behind. 

          I strive best in solitude, in being alone, because for a while now I’ve come to understand that you will never be yourself the way you can be in your own presence, in your own silence. In solitude, there is an acceptance offered by the silence – an acceptance that will never match to one given by human connection – because logically, humans are designed to make mistakes, we are made to disappoint – and when you survive life with the mindset of expecting disappointment no matter who or what, solitude becomes your friend.  Being alone, everything and anything is within your control, there is no influence, no disturbance to what you do.  

           Constantly being surrounded by people means you are constantly trying to fit in, no matter how much you decline this, it utterly means you will constantly be trying to fit in, whether its people you just met or people you’ve known for years, trying to fit in will always be there, consciously or unconsciously – it’s in the form of being relatable, it’s in the form of trying to be funny and in the form of trying to be relevant. My solitude has made me lack horrifically in group settings or in any setting that involves socialising– I am not a social butterfly; I tend to stay quiet and just listen – simply because my desire to fit in doesn’t exist. I’ve found my selective few of people where I feel comfortable with and no longer carry an interest to fit in elsewhere – and this comes from being okay with being alone, because if you no longer seek to fit in, you will see the places you naturally belong and the places you don’t, it no longer becomes a game of aggressively trying to force a puzzle piece into a place where it doesn’t belong, because the more you try forcing this piece to fit, the more damage it will have – ultimately disfiguring its original state and preventing it from fitting in the place where it truly belonged.   

          You don’t have to be liked by everyone; you don’t have to be seen as good or the best to everyone – these things aren’t what brings value you to you, value isn’t earnt via other people and what they think – value is non transactional – you make your own value, and constantly needing to be around people will place you in situations where you are surrounded by the wrong people – those who make your value a matter of transaction. 

          Learning to be comfortable in being alone will allow you to form your own value, a kind that will be unshackled, undisturbed, no matter who you interact with.  Sometimes, it’s not even the company alone that people crave, but it’s the validation that comes with having company – the recognition that we exist, but this all roots back to you, in how you value yourself or even see yourself, without knowing what it’s like to be alone, you’ll never understand yourself truly, hence why so many people fear being alone – they fear never being understood. 

          My solitude tends to be frowned upon by most, by those who can’t understand the importance of being comfortable in your own silence, your own time and your own presence. As much as it can be perceived as a blessing and a curse embodied in one, I will always view it as freedom – because my form of freedom isn’t happiness, something that is temporary – as all things that rise can also fall – my form of freedom is peace, and if it takes being alone to be at peace, then I’d never look back. Because within these walls of peace, I can grow to understand myself without overexplaining relentlessly trying to be understood, without having to make sense of the ‘whys’ to those who were never meant to understand to begin with – if i can make sense of the whys, or at least try to, to myself – why would I need to make sense of it to others? 

          Making sense of something to someone whose never experienced walking in your shoes is like trying to describe colour to someone whose only ever seen in black and white.  

          I tend to think of solitude as an astronaut drifting alone through the vastness of space – not lost but finally free from gravity, up there in great stillness they are utterly alone but not lonely. There is no noise but the rhythm of their own breath, no chaos but the quietness of their own thoughts. Each orbit around a distant world is reflection, and each sunrise he witnesses is a reminder that peace can exist without presence. The astronaut isn’t isolated – they are in communion with the universe. In solitude they don’t vanish, they expand – becoming small enough to be humble yet vast enough to feel infinite.

          So, when solitude is frowned upon, my mind will always go to the astronaut, how they chose to leave earth behind, not out of exile but out of calling, knowing that space will drift them far beyond the crowds, that communication will grow thin – they still choose to go. Because without accepting being alone, the astronaut would’ve never seen the beauties beyond our world, they would’ve never experienced the kind of silence that is comforting rather than deafening.  

          Solitude is what allows time to feel different – slower, gentler – it’s what allows my thoughts to stretch without interruption. Being okay with being alone allows you to notice things you would’ve never noticed in noise, it allows you to experience what peace sounds like when no one else is speaking – as selfish as it sounds – but for you to grow, for you to develop your character into something you want it to become, you have to learn to be okay with your own presence – because once you do, no one can influence who or what you become, that power is left to you to consume.  

          Become that astronaut who looks out at earth – seeing how small and far it truly is – coming to the realisation of how much you carry inside, whether a weight or a potential, that no one ever sees, and in that very moment solitude is no longer a fear, an emptiness – its expanse. A place where you rediscover your own voice.