It really makes you wonder: What would you do for a brand deal? What would you say for a couple hundred dollars wired to your account?

I started creating content a few months ago and I have a lot of thoughts. A micro version of a micro influencer. I know that I am seeing just the tip of the iceberg but I’m already scared and I don’t get it and I have things to say about it. I will say, I see the allure. I do, I do , I do.

There’s a dopamine hit with every post, with every like, with every comment. There’s a feeling of being seen that just presses all the right buttons and makes you feel like you are a part of the world, people see you!! People see you and you’re smart and you matter and it feels sooooooooo good. For a second. Or a minute. And then you fade back into irrelevancy. So you post again, and again, and how do you beat the algorithm?? There’s a TikTok for that. You liked it? Here’s another and another and another and now your world is how to hack the TikTok algorithm and wait… what did you want to say in the first place?? Did you forget? Did you realize you had to be hot on the internet to be taken seriously and then you focused so much on that you forgot to be taken seriously and now you want to grow, more than you want to be taken seriously and wait! because if you want to grow you have to be in the right room at the right time and now you’re walking through the world with a camera pointed at your face and you are contemplating every insecurity you’ve ever had but wait! there’s a solution for it and if you buy the solution it won’t just solve your insecurity but it might actually solve your entire life.

Will it? Will the medicube undereye balm that you can buy 2 for 1 on TikTokShop solve your entire life?? It really really feels like it might for a second. And a second is all you need to add to cart, ship to the address saved in TikTok with the card saved on TikTok and it’s coming tomorrow somehow and now there’s an ad for something else and that girl is beautiful too and I can be beautiful too and its just one click away!! It’s always just one click away.

I was recently offered a not insignificant amount of money to promote a product on my TikTok page and I’m going to be honest: I thought about it. I sat down and immediately fantasized about all the things I could buy and the dinners I could go to and the things I could do with a little extra cash in my pocket. At what cost?? I could easily film three TikToks and tag the brand and dust my hands off and so what?

So what? Putting my name beside a product I’ve never actually used? If I stop and think about it for five seconds I realize again that that feels consequential to me. I want my word to mean something, I want my endorsement to mean something. To whom you may ask.

To myself!! To my friends!! To myself again and most importantly!!

We’ve normalized selling out!!! Content creation as a career works when you do it on the side and people love it and you become a content creator because that is what your life has steered you to. Content creating for the purpose of creating content? Brand deals for the purpose of brand deals? Why are you an ambassador for a sparkling water brand we all know you haven’t tried before you filmed that video?? What is going on???

I’ll ask a question I’ve asked myself multiple times in the last few months. What is more embarrassing: getting 50 likes on a tiktok that over 1000 people have seen or engaging in follow for follow content and signing brand deals for things I do not agree with? I’m holding out, I’m not sure yet. I’m hanging out in the 50 likes camp because I would rather be someone who tries and fails than someone who sells out but trust me when I say I am embarrassed about it! Sue me!! Everything is a bit embarrassing. Perhaps the only embarrassing option is to really not post at all.

I don’t know. I love social media. I really do/ I really did. I loooooove instagram and tiktok and I love making art on the internet and I love posting on the internet. It feels like it’s changed though. I open instagram and the first post on my feed always confuses me. Who is that?? Why is there a button for me to follow this random person that Instagram has thrown on my feed??? WHO IS THAT!!! Where are my friends??? I want to see them!!! I’m just seeing perfect people living perfect lives and it makes me feel lots of feelings and then it makes me feel really lonely. And now posting on instagram and tiktok has become…. I don’t even have the word to describe it??? And people say to me, but aditi!!! you love posting on instagram!!

And yes!! I do!! but I just like posting on instagram!!! I have photos to share!! What happened to the love of the game? The art of an instagram post without the #OpenAIpartner (that was a dig in case it wasn’t clear). The curation of a dump for the point of curating a dump. It’s modern art.

What photos look good together? What did you do with your week or your month or your quarter that resulted in a vibe that you wanted to coalesce into an Instagram post? I understand that I myself am playing jump rope with the line of hypocrisy here. You might say, aditi you’re literally talking about an Instagram post. Get off of your high horse. That’s not art. Go paint. Do something with your hands. And you would be so right.

I picked a happy medium that I can justify in my head and I am sure every single person at every single point on the spectrum between hands on art and being an open ai partner (lol) can justify their decisions to themselves. But lucky me, this is my substack and this is an opinion piece and I want to say it even if I am wrong, or even if it’s not perfectly worded and curated to be perfectly palatable to everyone who reads it.

Disagree with me!! Please. Or agree with me! Or have no opinion on my opinion but tell me something that this made you think of. I want to hear your thoughts on life and art and people and your opinion even if i hate your opinion I want to hear it because it is yours and this is mine and none of it will come from claude or chatgpt and i want to know what you like because you like it and not because you’re getting 350$ zelled to your account to talk about it on the internet.

You tell them about your life, and they smile and they nod along.

That guy never deserved you. Your ex-best friend was wrong. You even feel vindicated that you don’t talk to anyone from high school anymore because you meant well. and they? they just didn’t understand you.

Everyone seems to agree.

But you’re an unreliable narrator. We all are.

You clean up stories without meaning to. You smooth over the sharp edges, especially your own, the contradictions, the moments where you were unfair or selfish or just sixteen. You tell your life the way it makes sense now. Almost as if it happened to somebody else, because didn’t it? You aren’t her anymore. Not really.

I’ve met incredible people over the years, and I love them all. I loooooove making new friends. I love being new again, unmarked, unmoored, a sense of control that scratches the deepest itch within me to be understood.

But then. But then I spend time with old friends, and the illusion shatters.

It hits me slowly, then all at once, a simple truth that snakes beneath every interaction.

Wherever you go there you are. UGH!!!

Everywhere I go I have to bring myself along. Sometimes I hate it.

It calls to me. The allure of reinvention. Moving somewhere new, being someone new. Unburdened by ex boyfriends or things that happened that other people missed but you were crying, friendships that don’t exist anymore, lore that gets a laugh at the party but resides deep inside your bones. Stories spun with the kind of humor that only time passed can give it but the real story, the day by day is an ache that never really goes away. I dream of going somewhere where nobody knows my name and every time I do I still exist and my friends? My old friends? They see me. They might not bear the same scars but they remember what caused the wound. No makeup can fade it. No pretense of reinvention.

There is no reinvention. Reinvention is too simple. It’s an illusion.

You are and always will be every single version of you that existed before. I find it more and more interesting as I age, every choice I make today is because of choices made in the past (made by me or others), things that have inspired me to imitate, things that have scarred me and I avoid. I make major life decisions not through radical free will but through the eyes of a person built and broken and rebuilt again and again and again.

When I think about it a little too much I get unnerved, when I am too new I get a little nervous. I like the person inside of me and I always wonder how much of her am I hiding away in my pursuit of newness. Then, an old friend. It’s always an innocuous experience. Its just sitting on a couch but its sprawling on a couch they way you can only do with your family and people who knew you before it was impolite to throw yourself on furniture and open peoples fridges without asking. It’s going on a walk and talking but not having to provide context for the decisions you make. There’s no explaining away your personality or your choices, the good and the bad. It feels like a balm on raw raw skin.

Yes, they remind you in not so many words, yes, you are every mistake you have ever made but you are also every apology you have ever offered. You are every radical act of kindness you have attempted, every hand held, and every kiss planted.

Old friends are annoying, but in the way that only people you love so deeply can be annoying. The way you can roll your eyes at your mom and still hold her opinion in the highest regard. The way every word out of your siblings mouth triggers a reaction and yet when people ask you who your hero is you don’t really see anyone else flash across your mind. How lucky to be able to get annoyed at people you can never lose because you simply cannot make an old friend.

You cannot make a friend who watched you fight with your parents across the dinner table. Who sat next to you when you studied for the ACT and worried if you were going to get into college. Who you see working a job now and you know your friend and you trust your friend with your life but really? People are trusting that guy with all their money? People are trusting her, with their lives? It’s like watching a 16 year old play adult because they’re always going to be 16, or 12 or 6 or whatever age you’ve memorialized together.

You cannot make a friend who knows all of your embarrassing stories because they were there when they happened. Who remembers the versions of you that you’ve spent years trying to plaster over, and the versions you successfully have. Sometimes it feels like you’re the only person at the tombstone of one of your avatars, but you visit your friends past selves sometimes, in your mind, in your stories, and they must visit yours, and there’s company in that.

You cannot make a friend who watched you splinter and break and rebuild the way only teenagers really can.

Not anymore.

Because you’re an adult now. You’ve moved apartments and cities and jobs. You arrive already edited. You reinvent and reinvent and reinvent. You read books that change you. You make art that seeps into your bones. You change your hair, your clothes, your politics, your dreams. You meet yourself in the mirror a hundred little times until you almost forget who you started as.

Some days, some years you get lucky enough to spend a little more time with an old friend.

You realize you’ve collected a thousand tiny cuts over the years and patched each one so carefully that you hardly recognize the girl you used to be.

Yet somehow, they do.They always do. You recognize them too. Just a couple of kids playing adult. Playing together. ◡̈

This was a very special birthday for me. The year was special because it was the culmination of not only the four years of med school but also my gap year, four years of college, high school and truly everything I’ve ever worked towards since I could begin to read but this birthday was special too because it was also a culmination of a lot of friendships. The stars aligned phenomenally for me and not only was I able to get all my med school friends together for a celebration, I had family and family friends in town for a wedding, my best friend happened to be stopping by on a layover for a trip, and I got to see the fruits of (now) 27 years of labor ripen before my eyes. I think about all the people I’ve ever known and loved, and around 80% of them were in DC this weekend (!!) and the fact that that is so rare is what makes it so sweet. Living in one state with the same people for the first 22 years of my life and then moving twice across the country each time has made me realize how much I took for granted those early years and how sad it is to me that so many of my friends live inside of my phone and inside of my mind. This weekend I spent it snuggling with friends on my couch and holding hands by the monuments and watching people I lost my first tooth with meet people who I’m graduating school with meet people who I sat in college dorm rooms with and watching them all love each other so easily reminded me how rich life is and how special mine is.

I play the most obnoxious game on my birthday, and I have every year (and I will every year) and I make everyone go in a circle and say their favorite thing about me and I get to respond with my favorite thing about them and its extra but it is so fun because I get to feel so loved and I get to tell everyone what I love the most about them because I do and it bubbles up inside me every day and on my birthday is the only day I’m allowed to have the floor and wax poetic about the people I care about. And I think about it all the time but my most favorite thing about all of my favorite people is that everyone is always itching for a laugh. There are always crinkled eyes and heads thrown back and everyone is always smiling and it reminds me that I am perhaps the luckiest girl in the world because all my friends love life and I watch them every day and I think about how if I could be a little more like any of them I would be a better person and every day I get to hang out with the people who inspire me the most and sometimes I forget, in the stress of school and work and deadlines and small annoyances and getting to remember is the best birthday gift of all.

And the weekend ended, as all weekends do and this year I didn’t feel sad because the fact that it’ll never come again is what makes life so sweet. It’s so easy for me to mourn the things that will never come again but all I’ve learned this year is that more will always be there if you seek it out (and I love to seek it out).

I saw a quote once that changed how I look at my life:

I think about it all the time because every year is glorious and every year unbearable. And I sit on my birthday and I wonder how the next year will be glorious and how it will be unbearable and I can hypothesize all night but I can’t actually do anything but experience it. And so I must just let it begin… ◡̈

Then we promptly send them home to clothes that weren’t designed with them in mind.

Adaptive fashion sits at the intersection of function, dignity, and self-expression. At its core, it is clothing designed to make dressing easier, more comfortable, and more accessible for people with disabilities, chronic illness, or temporary physical limitations. This can manifest as magnetic closures instead of buttons, seated-friendly designs for wheelchair users, sensory-friendly fabrics, or garments that accommodate medical devices like ostomies or braces.

It’s important to note though, adaptive fashion is not just a niche category within the fashion industry. It is, fundamentally, a healthcare issue.

In medicine, again especially in fields like rehabilitation, we measure success by function. Can a patient dress themselves independently? Can they manage their daily activities? These are the outcomes we care about. And yet, we rarely stop to question whether the environment we’re sending patients back into is designed to help them succeed.

Clothing can be the difference between independence and reliance on a caregiver. It can impact whether a patient actually wears their brace, whether they feel comfortable leaving their home, whether they feel like themselves again after illness or injury. It affects dignity, adherence, mental health, all things we talk about constantly in healthcare, but don’t always connect back to something as seemingly simple as what someone wears.

There is a growing community already doing this work, a community of designers, advocates, and organizations pushing the boundaries of what inclusive fashion can look like. Groups like the Runway of Dreams Foundation, headed by Mindy Scheier, are leading the way in creating opportunities, including partnerships with universities across the United States to bring adaptive design into the next generation of creators. Organizations like Gamut Management, also founded by Mindy, are working directly with brands to make fashion more inclusive. The Adaptive Design Association focuses on custom solutions and community-based design, while Open Style Lab brings together designers, engineers, and clinicians to innovate at the intersection of fashion and function.

But there is still a major gap and healthcare has a role to play in closing it.

For healthcare trainees and providers, getting involved can start small. It can look like asking patients about the clothing challenges they face at home. It can mean incorporating clothing into functional assessments and advocating for more attention to these barriers in clinical settings.

For those in creative or design spaces, it means learning directly from disabled voices, questioning traditional design assumptions, and building with accessibility in mind from the start, not as an afterthought.

And for anyone interested, it can be as simple as supporting adaptive brands, amplifying the work already being done, and continuing to push for a more inclusive standard of design.

This is a space I’m continuing to explore as I enter my training in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. As I move to New York City for residency, I’m especially excited to be in a place where fashion and medicine both have such a strong, visible presence and to keep learning about how they intersect in real, tangible ways.

If you’re working in this space, whether in healthcare, fashion, advocacy, or industry, I would genuinely love to connect. I’m always interested in collaborating on projects, contributing to conversations, and helping build something that bridges these worlds in a meaningful way.

Because what we wear is not separate from how we function.

It’s an integral part of it.

I used to really believe that life was something that happened to me. I focused a lot on that. Life was happening to me and I was overcoming or bouncing back and I praised myself on my resilience and when I was deeply in my self care era I was big on learning to love myself. But resilience invokes a sense of armor, of protecting yourself from the world, being so strong that nothing can shake you, and the more resilient I forced myself to become, unchanging, the more it gave me anxiety. I swapped out one bad feeling for another. But luckily there are certain quotes that change your life and this one changed mine.

If you aren’t confident in the fact that you can give yourself the life that you want, you’ll attach yourself to people or places (or residency programs lol) in hopes they save you- which is a prison because you will inevitably be disappointed. There is no perfect path and there is no perfect person and there is no perfect friendship that’ll make you into the person you dream of being. You have to just make choices, live with the consequences, and enjoy the experience.

And truly wherever you go, whoever you date, what career you have there you are. I spent years practicing feeble attempts to escape myself by getting into relationships that I thought would save me and attaching myself to hobbies that would turn me into someone else and reinventing and reinventing myself only to find and to hate that I, the core of who I am, shone through every disguise i attempted to put on. and now? These last four years I’ve practiced a lot of radical acceptance. I let myself be angry when I feel angry instead of judging myself for being so. I cry when I need to and I’ve found that I cry way less than when I was pretending that things didn’t hurt my feelings. I tell people I love them when I feel like I do and I tell people they hurt me when I feel like they have. By allowing myself to be, I find myself more pliable. Mighty oak turned blade of grass. No longer an indomitable unshakeable force, I allow myself to bend when winds blow hard and to always regain my shape when trodden upon. I don’t have to stick in the mental mold turned prison I locked myself in.

I play with my new-found freedom most obviously in my clothes. I used to be obsessed with personal style and finding a niche and never leaving it but now I try and fail and try again. I wear something grungy one day and the next there are sparkles all over. I wear blazers and tube tops and maxi skirts and micro shorts and I enjoy each outfit I wear because I am not a caricature of a human who has to have an aesthetic. I’m a person who owns clothes and wants to wear them. and somehow in that, I find my style, my actual style peeping out more than ever.

I find myself, in the same way. I think we’re obsessed with ourselves nowadays. We watch ourselves doing the dishes and brushing our hair and painting our nails and we watch others watch themselves and we tell ourselves we aren’t doing it as daintily or as beautifully as the girl on the screen. In watching we also perform. If we are constantly looking and judging, are others not doing the same to us? This insane feedback loop of acting out life and losing ourselves at the same time. Every single influencer has merged into one: outfits and days in the life and it’s just content being created for the sake of content creation and the people who aren’t internet famous are influenced in their own right and have succumbed so fully to the loop of observing and being observed that they (me included) perform, to no audience but their own voyeuristic gaze. I’ve recently gotten really into reading books by monks (highly recommend Love for Imperfect Things) and I think so much of it boils down to: time spent thinking about ourselves can be time better spent enjoying the world. I’m speaking more to myself than anyone else but sometimes in conversation (always) I touch my hair and adjust my clothing and yet I have never once talked to someone and thought that I would be having a much better time if their hair looked a little different or their shirt was less wrinkled. I’m so focused on if everything is in the right spot on myself that I missed the last 2 minutes of the conversation and now I have to employ fake active listening skills to recenter myself.

I don’t want to live like that. I want to listen to listen not to be perceived as someone who listens. I want to dance because the music is good and it makes me feel something, not to be a body being watched dancing and wondering if I look good doing it. I want to read to feel something from the book I have chosen not to be classified as being both hot and literate. I want to write these long essays with multiple points and run on sentences and topics that change and feelings galore because these are the things running through my head and not some AI generated, easy to understand, perfectly cadenced piece that has no life behind it. I’m sick of perfection and wanting to be perfect and wanting to be seen as perfect and I, from now on, want to simply enjoy.

I had dinner with two of my favorite people last night and we talked for hours, nearly horizontal in the dumpling place, and near the end of it all I went to the bathroom and I caught a glimpse of myself for the first time all evening. Not my best look. And who even cares. Not them. Not me. An incredible data point.

How do you feel after you spend time with people? Anxious about being watched and judged, muscles sore from contorting yourself into a 2 dimensional character or just seen and understood, a little warm and messy.

1. Heart the Lover by Lily King

   1. Okay. Starting basic. At this point if you haven’t heard someone mention Heart the Lover or see it in an instagram carousel of must read books you’re living slightly under a rock. Named one of the best books of the year by the NYT, Washington Post, and a contender for the Goodreads Fan Favorite Award it was an instant classic. A phenomenal story about love and friendship and about the mundane being so incredibly impactful. Minor issues with people’s choices but a good reminder for me that just because I don’t agree with people’s choices and just because I would personally drop kick an ex boyfriend if he pulled up to my house in 20 years and told me he forgave me when he was wrong does not mean I can’t enjoy the story regardless. (but it did make it a little harder)

2. Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

   1. I usually am wary of celebrities turned author (the exception being Gucci Mane, I loved Gucci Mane’s autobiography more than I have ever loved any song he’s sang) but McCurdy’s foray into the world of fiction was amazing. This book was so intricate and it was about abuse but also so much more, power, neglect, the dangers of loneliness, overconsumption, getting the ick, craving being loved, and all of it was written so strikingly. It makes your skin crawl the way Lolita does and it is so interesting to read a story about a crazy and imperfect victim but a victim all the same.

3. Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L Wang

   1. I’ve been dabbling in fantasy more recently. My biggest issues with fantasy are that historically there are no female characters (or ones that pass the bechdel test) and each book is for some reason made into a trilogy with plot holes and time skips and the author’s inevitable reliance on a deus ex machina to make the story work. But this one? Amazing. Short (enough), female protagonist (with a male protagonist too, don’t worry men), and everything logically made sense outside of the magic of it all. This book was also a great social commentary and I think truly hit the nail on the head so many times without actually naming it and I think the best part of fantasy is that it can do that without causing immediate social backlash.

4. Playground by Richard Powers

   1. This book is a doozy for me. I was shocked the whole time and I was blown away with Richard Powers’ writing. There were so many times I had to stop reading to write down a sentence or two and I really enjoyed that this book was a book club book because I really liked discussing it with people. Really interesting commentary on technology and nature and people’s relationships with other people and the stories we tell ourselves to help us sleep at night. I could talk about this book to every single person I know and I feel like the conversation we would have would be unique each time. Immediately put all his other books on hold.

5. & my favorite: I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol. This book!! I was saving this book for the start of the year because I knew from the title alone I wanted it to set the tone of 2026 for me, and set the tone it did. A great book about nothing and everything and one woman’s pursuit for pleasure in Paris, it had social commentary, it analyzed the lies society attempts to make women believe, and more than anything it was just fun. I loved reading her thoughts about the deep and the mundane and how she savoured food, clothing, and her relationships with the people around her. This book in a very convoluted way reminded me of my favorite book of 2025 - Butter. Both left me feeling that life is for living and for tasting and for enjoying.

I think I never want to read a bad book again!!! Unfortunately I likely will. I have some promising books off hold on Libby right now so the future looks bright for the time being. Currently wading my way through my next Literature and Medicine book: Frankenstein and I have to be honest, I’m struggling. But Dan (book club leader, urologist extraordinaire, professional hobbyist) usually steers us right so I’m powering through.

I organized this sexual health event because when I came to medical school I had a lot of questions. About my own experiences. About my friends’. About things we whispered about, made long lists about, lists I carried with me to school and promised to figure the answers out and report back. I was told I’d figure it out someday and I (perhaps naively) assumed that someday would be medical school.

But last summer, I was sitting in my apartment, one year from graduation, and I came across that list and I realized, alarmingly, I still didn’t have the answers to most of them. These weren’t niche questions. They were so common. Common enough to affect at least 20% of the women I knew. That felt like a large enough sample size to matter….. And yet? Somehow it didn’t.

This is not the first conversation around sexual health, even in medical spaces. But what set this event apart for me, and for many of the speakers and attendees was its focus on fun. I talk about it a little here and it might sound trivial but I think it exposes one of medicine’s biggest flaws: the people who designed the system are very different than the people who are experiencing it (read as: lots of decision makers are old cis white men and most patients simply are not).

The prime time for learning about sexual health starting from naming anatomical landmarks, understanding pleasure and pain, learning consent, etc etc, occurs in early to mid adolescence. Children actually start looking at their bodies as early as TWO YEARS OLD. Sexual exploration begins between the ages of 4 to 12. And still?? For many people the first time that they learn what the Labia Minora is in medical school…. if they’re lucky. It should not take pursuing an MD to know your own anatomy. It should not take a traumatic life experience or a four figure “healing journey” to look at your own body for the first time. If other people get to see it, you do too. [If you haven’t, get a hand mirror, get comfy, and just take a peek].

I’ll hold off on sharing my exact sexual education manifesto (the world isn’t ready and I want people to read to the end of this without disagreeing about the minutiae) but I think young adults are the best demographic to be teaching sexual health to. This is when people explore their bodies and others, they are the most sexually active, the most vulnerable to coercion, and the most likely to normalize pain, discomfort, or confusion as “just how it should be”. Even in the most loving, respectful relationships, things can hurt, feel off, or not look exactly like the billion dollar porn industry insists is “ideal”.

I am a firm believer that the best events are put on by the people the event is for. As someone with a complicated relationship with the intricacies of sex and pain and consent and lack thereof I felt like this was the best use of my degree. This is what it was all for. I thought that coming to medical school I would have the answers to all the questions I spent much of my life ruminating over but I’m here, less than four months from graduation and every single thing I’ve learned about sexual health I had to seek out myself.

So this event was the culmination of that. About talking openly about pain and pleasure. About unlearning shame and fear. About practicing the kind of care I wish I had received, and having the kinds of conversations I want to have with my patients one day.

It was also, genuinely, my favorite thing I’ve ever done. I think I was put on this earth to ask people how they feel and if they want to talk about it a little more. I think bringing people together for a mission, and for community, is so meaningful especially in this political and technological climate right now and I was so happy that organizations and speakers I admire so much were able to come.

Groups like Tight Lipped, which is this grassroots organization that I actually discovered many years ago via podcast and they were the first people I had ever heard name vulvovaginal pain conditions and judging by the amount of followers they have, opened the door for a lot of people to just nod along and be like yup, i’ve felt that too. Volare is an organization based in DC that does Sexual Assault and Trauma informed care. You really can’t talk about sex without talking about the dark side of it and by naming what is uncomfortable and what is inappropriate you can arm people with the vocabulary and support systems needed to get out of tough situations. Conversely, I don’t think you can talk about sex without talking about the fun side of it and The Pelvic People have been so generous to donate tools for me to share with people. They make the coolest things to help people with entry pain, deep penetration, and really emphasize the science of the art of loving your body.

Speakers like Camille Espinoza who navigates the most stressful conversations with ease. Dr. Lauren Collins who has a history of working with sexual assault survivors and showed up with the most badass vagina model of all time. Dr. Rachel Rubin who took a break from jetsetting around the country after she got the FDA black box label removed from hormonal estrogen to show up and share and engage everyone in such interesting conversations.

Staying sexy is a mindset, and the foundation of that mindset is evidence based, trauma informed, accessible healthcare (and someone trustworthy to speak to…maybe even your doctor…… maybe even me in 5 years…).

PS: I have these amazing tools from The Pelvic People and I have a few of each and I really want to give them to someone who might benefit from them. I know this is the end of a really long substack post but if you or anyone you know is experiencing painful sex and wants to reach out to me please do!! I want them to be useful for someone!!

& because even though I am not the biggest fan of research as an act, I am still a student. Here are my references.

1. Haderxhanaj, L. T., Leichliter, J. S., Aral, S. O., & Chesson, H. W. (2014). Sex in a lifetime: Sexual behaviors in the United States by lifetime number of sex partners, 2006-2010. Sexually transmitted diseases, 41(6), 345–352. https://doi.org/10.1097/OLQ.0000000000000132

2. Hussein, J., & Ferguson, L. (2019). Eliminating stigma and discrimination in sexual and reproductive health care: a public health imperative. Sexual and reproductive health matters, 27(3), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/26410397.2019.1697103

3. Glicksman, Eve. “Stigma’s Toll on Sexual and Reproductive Health | Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine.” Public Health, Hopkin’s Bloomberg, 17 Oct. 2022, magazine.publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/stigmas-toll-sexual-and-reproductive-health.

4. “Normal Sexual Development vs. Sexually Harmful/Abusive Behaviors.” Safe Kids Thrive - Child Sexual Abuse Prevention, 4 June 2025, safekidsthrive.org/school-safety-manual/problematic-sexual-behavior/normal-sexual-development-vs-sexually-harmful-abusive-behaviors/.

5. “Sexual Development and Behaviour in Children.” NSPCC Learning, 5 Aug. 2022, learning.nspcc.org.uk/child-health-development/sexual-behaviour.

In planning it, I’ve had a lot of discussions with a lot of people (funders, faculty, etc etc), and I have been told again and again that my flyers are too pink, there are too many hearts on things, and it doesn’t look like a serious event. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I have chosen to ignore these comments. I want the event to be fun. I want to emphasize the message that sex, if you are choosing to have it, should be fun too. In fact, I think the thing it should be more than anything else, is fun.

Is this radical? Not really. Is it frowned upon in medicine?? Unfortunately.

Honestly, people are never talking about sex in the hospital, and when it is brought up, residents who have cut through organs in anatomy lab with abandon (yes I’m still traumatized), performed life saving CPR on patients with code alarms blaring in the background, and are able to manage 10, 15, 20 patients with ease suddenly turn into 15 year old boys blushing at the word and stammering through sentences. And everyone looks at me like I’m the one who is weird for asking if we should consider the patients sex life after a disfiguring disease, debilitating illness, or a change in ability.

(Don’t worry I sit and stare back at them. If its a game of chicken, trust me i’m not backing down)

After initial discomfort from most parties, and the realization that I’m being completely serious and unwilling to move on til the topic is addressed, the conversation starts to open. People start to nod, thinking methodically, and start listing ideas about risk, harm, prevention (all important don’t get me wrong), ultimately deciding as the patients hospital team that sex is out of our realm and we should refer the patient to someone they can follow outpatient.

Who? Unclear. Instructions only include: follow up with your inpatient team 4 to 6 weeks after discharge. Go to the Emergency Room if feeling chest pain, shortness of breath, or sudden drooping of the face and limb.

They tell me I can go tell the plan to the patient. I walk into the patient room, ask them if they feel comfortable talking about sexual health (consent always important), perch myself on the foot of the bed and ask them what will make them feel the best about their body. What felt good in the past? What do they want to continue feeling good in the future?

I report back to my team, flush with facts nobody asked for and I’m always left wondering why the pleasure of sex is something deemed “embarrassing” or “unserious”.

We so rarely teach students, residents, or even attendings about the importance of pleasure, even though I know for a fact this is something all of us care about in our own lives. Somewhere along the way we decided that pleasure is something separate from medicine.

But is medicine not a tool for health? And what is the point of being healthy if you can’t have a little fun ◡̈

I always forget to call myself that, in the midst of exams and applications and being a medical student it feels like being a medical student is the thing I am most. Doctor is the order but scientist is the kingdom (and you can fill in the domain, phylum, class, genus, species yourself) and sometimes I get to do things that remind me that inside me there is a little girl who has always dreamed of science and I realize that the girl I am right now gets to do it every day.

This week my friend and I met some guys at a bar and as the conversation pivoted to jobs they were asking us to explain why we picked medicine as a career. And the “why medicine” you have to give at a bar is very different than the “why medicine” that you polish in interviews and regurgitate to every attending you work with. I answered my why medicine with Morning Report. Morning Report is in essence a case, a group project, and a boards question all wrapped into one. Every morning at 11 am when you are on inpatient medicine you go to a little room and a resident presents a patient they have seen recently. They start with something simple: “42 year old woman comes in with abdominal distension” and then it’s fair game.You get basic labs and blood tests, people start arguing over the best first line imaging you need, and an ever growing list of differential diagnoses manifests on the side whiteboard. You have to think about every possible condition this person could have, prioritizing the most serious, and then you let your list shrink or expand as your data points come back. It’s a game. Everyone who presents complains when it is their turn but takes the extra time to pick a particularly interesting case. One with maybe a red herring or two. No elevated white count but the answer was something infectious. They came in with abnormal liver enzymes but if you probed a little further they also had had a dry cough for a few weeks and ultimately the thing that kept them in the hospital was disseminated histoplasmosis completely unrelated to their liver. Something drug induced that always catches everyone off guard because you never think the thing that’s supposed to save you might just be the thing that gets you in the end. Honestly, it’s fun. It’s practice with no consequences and it’s putting everything they have ever made you memorize or analyze to the test. Its good practice too, you sit in the room and you guess out loud and you argue about it and then you see a patient who is presenting curiously like last weeks Morning Report and you send an infectious panel earlier than you might have if you hadn’t paid attention. There’s a common saying in medicine, “when you hear hoofbeats think horses not zebras” which tells you to think about the common stuff before you go down a funky rabbit hole and Morning Report drills in how to identify a horse but gives you the binoculars to find the zebra that pops up every once in a while. It reminds you that medicine is a science, it’s collecting data points and understanding how to analyze them. It reminds you that patient care is an art but the practice is methodical, there are rules you follow and criteria you memorize and you become a better scientist with each patient you see.

This week I read Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which I highly highly recommend, she does love and loss and world building like nobody else. This time the world she built was at NASA, astronauts dreaming of the cosmos, and love and friendship within it. I was fascinated by the story and read it in one go, only interrupted by my googling of various astronomical phrases and I found myself downloading apps to see constellations and peering out my window trying to find meaning in stars I could not see. I finished the book thinking about love and friendship of course, but more than that I finished the book thinking about space.

It all reminded me of the year that I taught elementary school. At a school with a system that deemed it necessary that I teach my students alone for the last hour of the day of anything of my choosing. Unstructured educational time they called it (read as: underfunded schools, bad administration, the list goes on but a topic for another day). I, a fresh college graduate, and a knower of very few things picked a topic that I loved. Science. Broad, I know. But these were second graders and I was trying to come up with a topic I thought I could teach for one hour a day, five days a week, for the entirety of a school year. Thus The Lab was born. The Lab was the same exact classroom the students were in at 2:29 pm but as soon as the clock hit 2:30 every day the energy shifted. No longer students, they were budding scientists. I taught them about stars and planets and dinosaurs and rocks and volcanoes (complete with a baking soda demonstration. It was everyone’s favorite topic, and I had to break the bad news that climbing into real volcanoes was not a job as far as I knew). Near the end of the year when I was losing my sanity and topics to teach about, I spent four entire weeks teaching about the human body. My pre med knowledge came in handy, there was no reason for a group of 8 year olds to know the intricacies of immunology but there exists 29 (now) 12 year olds who can recite the coagulation cascade. It did give us a great excuse to watch Osmosis Jones and it gave me some of my favorite cards I’ve ever received telling me that they too, one day, wanted to become a doctor. In the fall of that year I dreaded The Lab, I was nervous to teach sans lesson plan and it coincided with the witching hour of an elementary school, when the end of the day is imminent and every student has one eye on the clock and one foot out the door. But science did what science does best. It drew them in and never let them go. I could barely finish a sentence without hands shooting up and students blurting out question after question. Why does ice melt? Why does lightning happen? Why do we sneeze and why does watching my friend sneeze make me? Why do bees make honey and why do I like it so much? (my favorite one) They were enamored with trying to understand the world. Childlike wonder. A love for learning. Two of the most beautiful things this world has to offer.

And so, nostalgic about the past, and curious about the atmosphere I found myself on a wednesday evening googling where can I stargaze in DC. Which brought me to last night when I found myself with my best friend and fellow scientist, traipsing deep downtown for the Air and Space Museum’s weekly stargazing event (which I unfortunately discovered right after the government shut down and yesterday was their last one until further notice, sorry DC friends). It was amazing. 5 telescopes set up on the corner of Independence and 7th and so so so many volunteers. Everyone was pointing out the sea’s on the moon and Saturn’s rings and everyone I talked to I asked them to tell me a fun fact about space and about the moment they realized they loved space. One of them asked me why I was there and when did I realize I love space and I had to reckon with the fact that my answer was about 48 hours ago. But I responded with “I’m a scientist too!”.

I often forget that I am, I forget in the act of studying medicine, in the shifts and the call and asking people to evaluate you and thanking them for the opportunity when the opportunity is doing something that you have never wanted to do. I forget it in the note writing and the documentation and the applications and the submissions and in the fact that it is tedious. Then there’s a moment. A moment that you get an Anki card right and you’re reading the explanation on the back and you’re nodding along and you didn’t guess it right this time, you actually knew it. It’s 11 am and Morning Report happens and someone thinks the next best step is to get an MRCP and you had thought so too and someone asks you to explain why and you realize that you can. You’re looking at the spinal x-ray and you can see what the radiologist is talking about and if you kind of think you could have identified it yourself if the read was taking a while and you had to figure out what to do next all by yourself.

I think about being a little kid sometimes, all of us in class next to each other, picking our favorite subjects in our head and excelling at them. It’s hard to remember the feeling of school sometimes, elementary school, real school, with lunchboxes and crayons and a desk that is yours and a cubby too. My year of teaching taught me a lot but nothing more than the fact that we were all second graders once. We were little people with big dreams and desires and we loudly exclaimed that we wanted to be archaeologists and ballerinas and people who discover. We’re grown up now but they are still inside of us and we have to remember. One of my best friends is a history/geography kind of guy. We travel and he points out buildings and shows me maps and he’s a guy who found something he loved learning about once and he never stopped. There’s a kid inside him poring over a globe and there’s the version of him now doing the same. We make fun of him but I love it so much, I love that he loves it and I love that he keeps looking for it everywhere. I am applying for residency and I want to get it because I want a stable job and a career and an income but I also want to get it because I love science and I am lucky in that I can learn about it forever and someone will pay me. I got lucky that my day job is science but I forget sometimes because it’s also just a job.

But sometimes, like this week, like the cosmos themselves, I discover something unknown, or known and forgotten, that other science exists and just because I’m not in second grade anymore doesn’t mean I can’t go learn about it.

Any girl on the internet is subject to intense scrutiny. The “lucky” ones pass the test. Images of them circulate, making their rounds, and adoration abounds, DMs bursting at the seams. But the unlucky? The unlucky suffer. Unsuspecting girls in bikinis edited to have paper bags covering their faces, side by side comparisons of strangers and animals, sometimes some men decimate a girls appearance and others rush to her defense by saying no!! You hate women!!! Don’t say that about her!! I would proudly have sex with her.

Look at that. A 21st century martyr.

How brave of you to stand and say that you would have sex with this woman who doesn’t know you. Thank you for giving her value.

It makes me think, often and sadly, about how it is so normal to talk about women's bodies. To stare at them and think that it is our right to. Not only to stare, but to evaluate and mock, and do it loudly and proudly. To state sexual intentions on the internet as a compliment, and more than anything to expect us to take it as such.

This article changed my life. The nudity of women is so normalized and it goes back hundreds of years. Yes, if you look for it some statues do show a man's penis but it's few and far between. Especially compared to the hordes of naked women saturating every single art form. Why would we draw and sculpt men when women are art? It's framed to be a compliment but is it really one? Are we being admired or forced to be watched? It's something that I’ve been thinking about ever since I read this quote “sex sells, everyone says sex sells but does it? Are we ever being sold sex or are we really just being sold naked vulnerable women?” I understand why underwear ads need to have near naked women in them but why does BMW use thinly veiled jokes of virginity to sell cars? Just one of many many examples of naked women in reality or in forced imagination used as a marketing tool. What are women if not objects for pleasure? Could they be consumers? Perhaps even people? No, not according to advertisers. Unfortunately this is not a new phenomenon. The aforementioned article shows vase paintings from ancient Greece and sex is shown, in a horrible, angry kind of way. Women contorted, men hitting, slapping, choking.

It's erotic. Is it? Or is it just violent and normalized?

Same with advertisements nowadays, video game ad taglines stating “feel free to do whatever you want in this game” underneath a scantily clad woman posed provocatively. It’s not even sex that's being sold, it's dominance. Popular shows like Game of Thrones depict every single female character being violently raped. When criticism arose, (male) fans were quick to defend that the show was simply trying to be accurate. While true that rape is used as a weapon of war, if we aim to be accurate I have to ask why every female character is completely hairless from the neck down, does Westeros have a laser hair removal place tucked away amongst the direwolves and night walkers? Accuracy has never been the goal, fantasy has. And the fantasy is not sex, it’s aggression, it’s power, it’s telling women that they can and should be looked at. And, that no matter what they choose to believe, they are being looked at. But why? Why do you look at us like this? Why do you imagine us on our knees, bent, broken, why are we to be watched, and looked at, and forced to dance?

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” this quote by Margaret Atwood is one that haunts me. Naked women are everywhere and the man inside my head is dancing. He consumes it all, and then he forces me to look in the mirror, and I am naked too. But I have to avert my eyes, and pretend I don’t see my own body. Men stare at me hungrily and I pretend I don’t notice. It makes them uncomfortable when I do. I’m trying to explain to you why and I’m realizing there is no better explanation than the quote “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “vanity” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.”

This article summarizes it perfectly, you teach women that they are meant to be desired while simultaneously shaming us for that desire. You teach men that women are to be won, trophies to march around with, and from a young age you teach men to look, without averting their eyes. Not only to look but to notice and to talk about. I don’t exist without you looking at me and you make it clear that without being looked at I’m not important and then you turn around and tell me I want people to look at me too much. There is no female body that someone has not sexualized and when nakedness is shamed but enforced what are we supposed to do. You leer on streets and out of car windows. I'm in jeans and a t- shirt. You stare when I wear pajamas to the corner store and when I wear scrubs in the hospital, and if you are staring anyways I might as well wear what I want. And it's hot outside so I put shorts on and a tank top- you can see a strip of my stomach and the curve of my breasts and then you tell me you’re not surprised that men stare. As if there has ever been a time or an outfit that a man hasn’t stared, in that unrelenting, unnerving kind of way. Eyes squinted as if they can see right through your clothes. You always have the fleeting thought that maybe they can.

You look at me, like you could have me for dinner, and there is nothing I can do about it, then you ask me why I think people are looking at me. It’s said deprecatingly, it always is. Your ego is too big, you say, don’t worry, people aren’t staring. As if I want them to. As if this is the goal, lecherous men, eyes on thighs and breasts, and necks, and fingers, and mouths, there's not a thing you can do that someone won’t turn sexual. “You look good doing it.” You say, “It's a compliment. I wish people told me how attractive I was every day!”.

Now I’m ungrateful too. And this is what I wanted wasn’t it? Ever since I was little I wanted to be pretty, to be noticed. I wished for it on birthday candles and dandelions and shooting stars that I swore I saw. I had other wishes too but how I looked was always one of them. I was obsessed. I have always been and I hate that I always might be a little. I don’t want to be but I know that I’m being watched. My body has never been just my body, it has always been something to look at. This experience is not unique to me in the least. Every girl knows the feeling, of being watched, of confidently wearing an outfit and then stepping outside and being overwhelmed with the urge to tug on the bottom of shorts and shirts, the safety of home feeling miles away and the eyes of strangers boring into skin. The feeling of being 13 and hearing sexual jokes, of being 15 and sexualized, of existing and being told that classmates (or relatives or friends) are tempted by the mere sight of you. The feeling of hating that people are looking at you but the perverse thought lingering in the back of your mind wondering if they like what they see.

It’s a prize of sorts, not one worth having by any means, but a prize we have always been taught to seek. And the game isn’t yet close to being broken so sometimes I play. I hate it but I play. We all do, we have to. We don’t even realize how much we’re playing because we were born into it. We spend hours on hair and skin and nails and outfits and we convince ourselves it is only for a love of it all that we do it. And we do love it but how much of that love has been forced upon us? Is every piece of media not aimed at making women want to be prettier? 20 step skin care routines and must have products and plastic surgery galore.

A sisyphean task because the goal is not attainable. It’s airbrushed advertisements, and edited pornography, and AI videos. You will never look the way they want you to. They profit off of your insecurities and they oppress you with the same. We’re condemned to a life of manicured fingers bloody from pushing the boulder up the hill and forced to flash smiles at those who sit and watch us.

What are we if not creatures to be ogled? What are we if not beautiful in our success, in our suffering, in our existence?

Whole again? She will never be whole again. She’s an amalgamation of pieces pretending to be human. There is an art in Japan called Kintsugi, the fixing of broken things with golden lacquer, never the same but perhaps more beautiful. She’s something of an artist herself and so she weaves lacy golden thread back and forth, creating a net, a safety net of sorts wrapped tightly around her. She’s afraid to lose a piece, her net catches the ones that fracture off and they are immediately reattached. She’s anxious, always, a little controlling, but can you ever really be in control again? She can try her best but at any point of time there are pieces missing, there always will be, there is at least one she knows she will never get back. She knows where it is - wedged between the backseats of that car; silver, old, unassuming. Where is that car now? She does not know and she does not care to. There's a ghost of hers that lives inside of it. She hopes that it haunts him.

She knows that it doesn’t. It feels like a knife everytime she reminds herself of that fact. She suffers a lot, mostly silently, sometimes to friends, but the hangouts end and people go home and she is left alone with invisible fingerprints digging into skin, haunting her, marks that will never go away. Pain and suffering can make people mean, it can make them want to make others feel as they have felt. But she’s strong, even if she doesn’t feel it, and she, ever the alchemist, turns the pain into softness. She invites the softness into her home and forces it to stay. All the anger, the rage, gets turned into soft blankets she lays on the girl she used to be. She fights with it, often, sometimes the anger wins but she gets up and she fights again. He haunts her, he changed her irrevocably and irreversibly. She tried to fight the change for a while, she pretended she was the same, she pretended for a long time that nothing had happened, that her body didn’t remember and her mind didn’t either. But then she learned that if you don’t bend you break and she began to let it change her. You cannot control the bad things that happen but you can control how you let it change you. She knows that there is loneliness in suffering. But there is unity in experience. So she shares, in whispered conversations and moments of trust because she is angry, and sad, and she is forever haunted. She is a lot of things but she will never be silenced again. Not by him.

She knows she is not the only one, she knows others too, people who have internalized a weak man’s actions as their own flaws. To be a woman is to perform, to be painted with blood, the colors of conflict, the textures of the wrath of male insecurity, and to emerge a monster and for those who painted, to blame the canvas for what was born. She is far from him now, in time and in place, she will never go back, not to the places nor to the people. There are reasons she left and there are ties that needed to be cut because there was disbelief when she tried to speak the first time, there was shame and biting words and acrid stares and she was young then, more innocent, more afraid so she stopped speaking. But now she is none of that, not innocent, not afraid, not anything more or less than a girl who would have saved the version of her that was killed that day.

There are so many reasons we should all be focusing on conservation and preservation but I don’t know if there is a better way to explain it than she did. I too love the fish and want the ocean to stay blue and I love watching things grow and I want there to be enough food for everyone and I love walking barefoot in the grass and I too do not want to move to Mars.

The kids understand that the simplest pleasures are the most meaningful and sometimes we get so caught up in the adult life of it all that we forget to do these things. We forget to sign letters “from, sincerely, love” even though all those things are true and we forget to love the little planet we live on that has given us a home. We go to work and school and come home and sit on our computers on couches or if we’re lucky on the balcony or the roof or the little green square that has been dubbed a “park” and it is so easy for us to forget about the world out there and what is happening to nature. I won’t make this another political essay but as funding goes towards militaries and billionaires it goes away from other things like education, people, and important here, the planet.

This winter has been brutal, D.C. has been drowned under snowfall after snowfall and hurricanes have hit multiple cities and now as it turns to spring fires have cropped up in LA and the UK and the world is falling apart. They called it Global Warming and Global Warming kind of sounded good, I would love a warmer planet. It seemed like the bad stuff would be a problem for the future but now we watch natural disasters happen one after the other and just hope they don’t reach where we live. We recycle sometimes, and online shop and use plastic water bottles and bags and people use AI because it is easier, and we do these things that make our lives “easier” at the cost of our planet. I do it too and it is so hard to stop because we convince ourselves that there is nothing any one person can do to stop this because companies are quite literally pouring oil into oceans and setting off bombs and destroying forests. And so we all try a little less, because it seems futile. But this earth day I made a commitment to stop ordering clothes online (even if I really want something) because while I can’t do everything I can do something. And if we all do a little something every day, every year, maybe we can coexist with this planet a little more mutually.

Anyways, I am not a climate change expert so I will leave you just with this sweet little letter from my sweet little girl. I hope you do something good for the earth today and take a second to remember how lovely she is (and i hope you also did this last week when it was actually earth day haha).

I looooooooooove my birthday. What is there not to love? Another day to celebrate life, to be the main character and to own it a little more, to tell people you love them and demand hugs and kisses and people have to acquiesce. I’m biased of course but I am of the opinion that an early spring birthday is the best kind, my new year blooms as the earth does, every winter is low and the build up heightens til my birth (day) and every april 14 I am born again.

she was right- it wasn’t even close to my birthday

Today, I turn 26. The last official year of my mid-twenties. I have never felt better. I spent the last 2 birthdays in a transient state, this birthday too I feel slightly transient because medical school is nearing the end and the next chapter is full of unknowns, but I feel solid at the same time. This birthday is different, I’m doing things I never would have done before and I am doing them happily. I sit here today on the roof of my building, 74 degrees in April, the universe bathing me in warmth. My birthday treat to myself. A glass of strawberry lemon poppi, a plate of dessert delivered by my family, and my favorite notebook. I think about what my past self would have dreamed about and what my future self would look fondly back at and I feel good. I used to dread getting older, consumed by anti aging hacks and societies hatred for women no longer in their youth but every year that passes teaches me so much more about myself. I’m figuring out what looks good on me and what feels good for me. I am getting older but I am aging well.

Growing up is hard and weird and lonely at times and every day I feel things I’m convinced I’m the only person in the world to feel and then I get off my phone and I read my book or talk to my friends and I’m back, emphatic nods from the people around me reminding me that the human experience is universal and I am so lucky to be feeling so many things so deeply. I am lucky to have a family that loves me in the states, parents unyieldingly in my corner, and family I miss- across state lines and waters, cousins and aunts and uncles in corners of the US and in India, and grandparents, all who are always thinking of me, rooting for me. I am lucky to have friends, from home, from college, from Seattle, and in D.C. people who I crossed paths with for less than a year, for the first 22 years of my life, or all the different amounts in between who have become a fixture. I always say I feel content in my friendships and I don’t need any more and then I meet a new forever friend and I am blown away by how many interesting wonderful people I get to meet in this lifetime. I am lucky to have people who understand me, and people who when they don’t stay on the phone with me anyways. I am lucky to have transient friendships, people I can talk to on rotations and in bars and leave warm and satiated even if the friendship doesn’t persist and I am lucky that I have never had an absence of love in my life. I know I never will because I grow it myself, painstakingly but always worth the drops of blood from the thorns of the flowers that bloom. I am lucky to be educated and to continue to experience education, I am the first to complain about medical school at times, it is hard and grueling and unrelenting, but it is a privilege to be able to pay for education, to learn what I desire to know and to follow through on that learning. I am lucky to have found hobbies I love, to write and to have now 150(!) people read my work. I love the little community of people I found here and am blown away every day by the interesting essays I get to read and write. I am lucky that I get to work out every day, even if it is at the school gym, and even though I complain about it, I love to climb the stairmaster and wave at the people in my class that walk by, from my little throne above the crowd. I am lucky to have an overflowing bookshelf, swapping books almost weekly with the little free libraries that line the Georgetown streets, updating Goodreads every chance I get. I am lucky to dance in my apartment, sharing videos with my forever dance partner growing up, keeping our love for the craft alive, connecting with our roots in the prettiest way reminding me how lucky I am to have such a rich culture I can constantly learn from. I am lucky to cook delicious meals and to eat and to share food with the people I love the most. I am lucky for my apartment, my little corner of the world I carved out, a place that is all mine and just mine. I am lucky for it all.

Life is for living and loving and I live it and I love it.

I am overwhelmed often by the amount of things to do, people to call, and lessons to learn but I remind myself everyday, and even more so today, how lucky I am to have these things to be overwhelmed by (also reminding myself that there is no need to be overwhelmed because things always always work out the way they are meant to).

Today for me, is a day I celebrate myself but more than that I celebrate all the people and things around me. I cry publicly and unabashedly every year on my birthday - always in my tipsy post cake cutting speech and after we play “name your favorite thing about aditi”, thanking my friends, telling them, through sniffles, that I can’t believe my luck! The universe bathes me with luck, it must, because how else could I be surrounded by the most amazing people the world has to offer. I say it every year, my friends affectionately rolling eyes, knowing that the water works are coming, but I can’t stop, and I won’t because it is my birthday and I get to do what I want, and what I want to do every day, but especially today, is make sure the world knows how much I love it. Because of that I believe the world tells me it loves me too, a little extra today. I’m a sucker for a sign and on my birthday I see them everywhere. I see flowers begin to bloom, wishes come true, and the sun sparkling over whatever body of water I’ve chosen to watch the sunrise over that year.

Happy birthday to me from me, and thank you, universe, god, fate, choice, destiny, whoever and whatever I can thank, because I am lucky and I am happy, and though I am all those things, today more than anything I am also 26 ◡̈

A random constellation of photos of birthdays past

People often say that not everyone can become a doctor, insinuating that many people cannot handle the rigor or sacrifices that medical school demands, and while true, many other people cannot become doctors because they are not afforded the opportunity to. There is privilege in medicine and there is privilege in politics and oftentimes they are intertwined. I am lucky I got to go a large majority of my life without understanding the nuances of geopolitics and I am lucky that I can live life in a way relatively unaffected by matters of the world. But what is the point of that luck if you can’t turn around and use it to help the people who haven’t been so lucky. I think about medicine in the past, nurses in wars, doctors in rural villages, they were healers in every essence of the word. Medicine should still be about healing. Not just the people with insurance in the sunny glass covered pavilions but all people. It is not just the flashy surgeries with the newest DaVinci or trials of cutting edge medications it is also the tasks many people deem beneath them. It is sips of juice when blood sugars run low and knowing when to tell people to rest. It is science and it is also conversation. The medic tent at the encampment taught me this. I watched medicine get practiced in ways I didn’t understand and people explained it to me. They took time to teach the students and train us and it is the kind of medicine and learning you can never get in a classroom.

On Sunday my friend and I went to watch The Encampments. I cried the entire runtime and then cried some more on the drive home. To watch the hope, the fight of the students interlaced with cut scenes of genocide, police brutality on our campuses, politicians with empty words, and blood and pain was devastating. On the drive back my friend asked me if I was okay because I was viscerally reacting to every bit of blood, every gun shot, and every person thrown to the ground. No, I was not okay. I was so distressed and I didn’t realize why until I got back into my apartment, peppered in smiley faces and flowers, buddhist flute music playing softly in the background and I realized that for the last few years I had unconsciously made a conscious effort to not consume any violent media. I had created a little bubble of sunshine and rainbows and joy for myself to live in. When I called some other people in my life and told them how distressed I was following that movie, they gave me the well intentioned advice to stop consuming the news so much because it is hard to watch and to read and it is better for our own sanity to not see it. They told me to go back into my bubble, keep studying, keep working, keep focusing on the good in my life - all great advice, and important to do. But there's a dissonance there. I do love my bubble, I love it so so much, but in spite of, or perhaps because of how much I love my bubble I want other people to be able to experience it too. I do not regret watching this movie (and in fact recommend all of you to watch it), I do not regret reading the news of babies getting murdered and seeing photos of young fathers holding headless children. It distresses me, I cry about it, I sit there and I have to name 5 things I can see and 4 things I can touch and so on and so forth to re-regulate myself but I force myself to continue to consume it because watching and reading is not even 1/100000000 the kind of pain that the people who experience it are facing. Some of us are lucky in this life to be able to separate ourselves from a majority of the atrocities in this world. Yes, our savings will take a hit and Trump is ruining everything at such a large scale that even the wealthy, even the educated, even the untouchables will be touched. But not as much and never as much as the people in the Middle East, in Sudan, in Congo, even in pockets of America.

Let’s assume we all know that the world is burning, we know people are dying, we know the stock market is plummeting, we are acutely aware of crisis. I won’t do you or your intelligence the injustice of assuming that I am sharing new information in reminding you of the current landscape of crimes against humanity. This assumption brings me to my next point: what can we do about it? Now what?

Truly now what? A question that sounds rhetorical but if you have an answer please tell me. Here is what I know and what I can tell you. Go to a protest near you. Watch The Encampments, understand that there is a narrative that the media is not sharing with you. Continue to educate yourself, here is a collection of books I recommend. Stop going to Starbucks and McDonalds and all the companies that profit off of the deaths of innocent people. Boycotts feel insignificant, but they aren’t. They work, slowly, but surely, here is a list of historical boycotts that have. But more than anything, keep talking about it. Do not let the world normalize this kind of violence. It doesn’t matter what your political opinions are honestly, a world where this scale of violence is considered normal is never a world that will be working for your best interests.

I know that it feels hopeless, maybe it is hopeless, maybe we still lose but maybe we can make the fight a little harder for the oppressors, make it more difficult for them to convince us that other people are subhuman just for existing and if nothing else, maybe it is enough that we do not let ourselves get turned into soulless creatures willing to wade through the blood of others for our own personal gain.

I love you all, and I encourage you to never stop talking about the things that matter, to never stop fighting for what you believe in, and to never stop finding and creating communities of people who want the world to be a better place.

This video, that I make every year and work on at least 300/365 days is a labor of love and my favorite long term project. In words, pictures, and videos, I try to remember all the moments- the exciting and the mundane- because they all mean something. and not just something, everything ◡̈

My resolution for 2025 was to get off of social media (yes I know substack is social media) but I have successfully not been on instagram or tiktok since January 1. I used to doomscroll under the pretense of inspiration, claiming that the outfits I wanted to buy, the jewelry I wanted to style, and the person I wanted to be was going to be found at the end of my scrolling. But now, with no social media around me I have been forced to find inspiration in the real world. In the people I see physically, and my god it is amazing. It is so easy to take things and people for granted. It is sooooo easy to meet someone wonderful and then in just a few hangs when they become a staple in your life to forget how lucky you felt that they chose you to spend time with in the first place. It is so easy to get desensitized to the uniqueness of people's personal style and personalities. I forget sometimes I used to admire these people secretly, and then they became my friend and I stopped watching them as strangers. But no longer. I am taking the time to watch people, friends and strangers alike, I stare openly, and if people catch me I smile at them and tell them exactly what I’ve been admiring about them. I sit on the bus and I look around, I asked the woman who sat next to me where she got her shoes and she listed her likes and dislikes about them and airdropped me a link within minutes. She showed me pictures of her and her friend on a trip they recently took to Cape Town and not only did I add it to my list, I left with restaurant recommendations and an art store that I cannot miss. I’m away from many of my friends right now (boo med school) but I think of them often and sometimes I see things at stores that remind me of them and I catalog it. My style is a reflection of so many of the people I have loved before and I want it to grow this way. I want to keep asking people on the street about what inspires them and I want to remember to ask the people I know the best too. I’ve decided that I don’t want to look like every girl on the internet but I do want to look like my friends a little.

pictured: a few beautiful pictures I’ve taken of beautiful people I’ve been admiring recently

Dear you,

You say you want community. You mourn the death of olden days, when you could ask your neighbors for a spoonful of sugar. You speak of your youth when you could knock on doors nearby and your friends would come out and play and you would spend hours into the evening laughing, talking, sharing food and secrets.

You say you want community but you never invite people into your home, citing mess, early bedtimes, one excuse or another until you forget that months have passed and the pack of 6 wine glasses you have only has lip prints on one. You make plans and then you flake the day of. It has never been so easy to say no. You can send a text, not even forcing yourself to hear the disappointment in the host's voice with a phone call. You can claim a self care day, in an era where doing anything at the slightest inconvenience to yourself is abandoning yourself and being a people pleaser. You respond maybe to invitations, especially on partiful, just so you can see who else is invited. Your acceptance, as well as your presence, is always conditional. You come to events late and you leave early, your multiple invitations badges of honor you show off. Your time is yours and you never sacrifice it for others, balking at people who ask you to. You never inconvenience yourself for others and yet you mourn community. If you were given a community you’d burn it to the ground.

You say you want community but you can’t even go to a coffee shop without taking your headphones off. You demand third spaces but everytime you enter one, you sit on your phone, scrolling, complaining, searching for things you can only get from the world directly in front of you. You frequent the same coffee shop you’ve been going to for months- can you pick the barista out of a crowd? Community is not just finding people that you love and adore and do not want to live a day without, it is also about befriending people that you only kind of like. It's having acquaintances and knowing people superficially because that is better than not at all. It’s taking the time and effort to pour into people that will do nothing for you, or will do the same whether or not you speak to them, and it's speaking to them anyways. It’s befriending the guy who fixed your car and the barista in the aforementioned coffee shop, it’s answering the Trader Joe’s cashier honestly when they ask about your day and asking them about theirs and wanting to hear the answer. Every person that you interact with on a daily basis has something in common with you even if you haven’t found it yet. How will you find it if you never try?

You’re afraid maybe. To be seen trying. You stumble over your words and are not the most charismatic person in the room, you assign yourself this title and so you never try. The most charismatic person in the room was not born that way, they became it. They tried and failed and tried again and if you’re embarrassed for them, don’t be. Let them dance, freely, unencumbered by the voice in your head telling you not to tap your foot to the music of life. You’re so afraid, and I understand. But do it anyway. Anything worth doing in this life; dance, art, sex, friendship, requires a degree of embarrassment, of vulnerability, of being looked at and talked about.

What is the worst that people can say about you? Oh no! There she goes again! The girl who tries! Maybe for a while they’ll call you the girl who fails. Be her. Wear it with pride. Better to be the girl who fails than the girl who does nothing at all. The years will pass and people will forget that they saw you trying and forget that they saw you failing and all you’ll be left with are the consequences of your actions.

People often talk about the consequences of your actions but what about the consequences of your inaction?

Inaction has consequences too. Far greater in my opinion. A long list of what - ifs to haunt you as you try to drift off to sleep. If you play, you may very well lose. But you can also win. Who knows? But there are no rewards for those who sit on the sidelines. I get it, life is busy, school is hard and work is dreary. The government is corrupt and the winters are colder than they used to be and the summers are hotter. It used to be easier to have a community. People lived in villages and then in neighborhoods with no screens to keep us inside. Now it's harder to go outside and it is so easy and warm and cozy to stay in your bed in your safe apartment. But good things in life take effort and everything you do is a choice. Choosing to show up or choosing to stay home. You say you want community but community requires effort and participation, neither of which you’re willing to do.

Do you need community? To survive, no. To thrive, yes. What will keep you sane as the world burns around you? Nobody will show up for you if you fail to show up for them time and time again. It is true that you technically don’t owe anyone anything but it is also true that you kind of do if you want to reap the rewards of community. You have to give to receive and you have to give regardless of if you receive or not.

Host the dinner, share a coffee, ask them to drinks, go on a walk, compliment someone and mean it, share a secret with an acquaintance and maybe they will become your friend, text someone twice letting them know that you think of them, do the thing that makes you feel the scary vulnerable feelings.

It will sometimes be hard but it will always be worth it.

xoxo,

aditi

dedicated to fadi - for never letting me accept less in friendship, commiserating with my angstiest thoughts, and more than anything for reminding me that family (& community) can be found in the unlikeliest of places.

A fallen angel but an angel all the same. Pieces of all but Abaddon the most. Occupying the space between good and evil, laying judgement in the name of righteousness but managing to end up siding with the devil in the end. She lays on the horn of her car, honking at the unsuspecting driver in front of her who has to bear her wrath from a litany of things, but the tipping point lay in the 30 second stretch of time that the light turned green and she stayed trapped, second car from the front of the line. Doors slam in her apartment, punctuating arguments she wins in her head, because the opponent lives only there, a fragment of time forgotten. She randomly awakens at 4 am, diaphoretic and clammy, more a creature than a woman. Haunted by the past, the present, the future. The versions of her that don’t exist yet and the ones that never will again. When pushed too far her words aim to kill, but eyes flicker soft immediately after, bathing you in kindness, and you sink into it, allowing the same voice that cut you to lay the salve on top of bruised egos. She’s angrier than she should be, when the facade drops. Only momentarily. She’s a girl who gets what she wants. She demands it. With anger, with tears, with insistent eyes, it’s impossible to say no. She’s larger than life and it’s palpable sometimes, throbbing, threatening to tear through the seams of yours. She’s stubborn, but an artist about it, you rarely realize how much you’re bending to her will until you’re about to break. She looks you in the eye and tells you that being open is the most important thing. You try to heed her advice. Tapping at a brick as if it’s the load bearing tile in a jenga tower. One finger only. Soft but insistent, teasing it out. You almost succeed. The corner catches. The bricks collapse. But they go up faster than they ever came down. Almost immediately, the tower is rebuilt. A slight tremble is the only indication it had laid in pieces just a moment before. She said she’s been there before. You say you’re different. The answer stays the same. You can watch her dance from here but you cannot touch. She knows she does better in memories than in arms.

Light as a feather, she floats away on clouds of abject apologies for things she never did. Doe eyes turned upward, long lashes painting a picture of naivety. She shares with abandon, regaling the room with stories of childhood, of high school, of college, of just yesterday. There is always something to talk about and always something blowing in or out of life, stirring up a storm even if she fans the clouds herself. She beats you to the punch when she self proclaims being an unreliable narrator, laughing as she admits it. She’s willing to be caught in exaggerations, details altered for the plot. She texts good morning and is at the cafe by 10, coat strewn over adjacent chairs, always holding a spot for someone. She bares her soul for five more minutes of conversation, exposes her deepest secrets just in case one of them resonates with you. She laughs as she does it, her best moments and her darkest are mere backstory, she tells it in a way that you can almost imagine it happened to someone else. It almost did, every version of her is fleeting but her presence is always felt, knee resting on yours, hand squeezing yours under the table, she demands that you know she’s real and she exists. She tells you that you exist too. She sees you, she asks questions most people don’t and she pays attention to the answer. Months will pass and she will ask you about something you’ve long forgotten you’ve shared. Her brain a filing system, constantly being updated. She talks about other people often, the people in her life become real in yours. Everything reminds her of someone she claims is her best friend, you want to tell her that best is a superlative and best friends don’t exist in multitudes but you can’t bring yourself to shatter her illusion. You know she talks about you too, slips your name into stories and immortalizes you in hers. She studies you, in an obvious sort of way but in a way you don’t completely mind. She turns you into art and asks you to admire it. Eyes soft, big, open, she looks at you, thanking you for your company. It made her whole day. She says it so earnestly, you have no choice but to believe her. Company, conversation, moments of time spent with people, places, or things, are sustenance to her. She needs it like people need water. Then just as quickly as she arrived she’s gone, slender fingers waving goodbye as she twirls away to her next stop. You hear her, already on the phone with someone else, loud laughter piercing the air.

Later, she sits on the couch with her older friends. The women, some grey streaked, some bouncing a baby on their hip, wedding rings glittering in the sun. They say this is just what your twenties are. They smile at her knowingly. They say that sometimes you will be one, sometimes the other but more often than not a curious amalgam of the two. She thinks so too. They know. They must. They were her once too. At night she stands naked, flushed from showers that burn the day off of her skin and she looks in the mirror, puts palm onto stomach, skin to skin, and there she is. Flesh and blood. A nightmare, and a conversationalist.

Read this substack piece the other week that changed my life and I wholeheartedly agree. They are taking color from our world; beiges, browns, and greys reigning supreme. Deemed intellectual, professional, etc etc other words that to me just mean boring. The author of that piece states that “stripping us of colour is an attempt to create more conformity. A grey toned, anxious, whitewashed society that buys what they’re told, maximizing shareholder value.” & so true! The lack of colour speaks to a lack of creative freedom. I have also fallen prey to the trend of neutrals but every day that I spend immersed in the colors of nature and out of the monochrome of the internet I realize that color is about expression and emotion.

This year I’ve been trying to reclaim color one pop at a time. First up: Cobalt Blue.

But even though I’ve been navigating the last few years like this I’m still claiming to be a hopeless romantic. I see love in everything and everyone. I’ve learned how to love better and how to hold on less tightly. No longer do I crush its wings in my hand so it cannot escape me, I’ve learned to let it rest on my skin, tracing patterns, leaving and returning. It is not mine to keep but mine to watch and admire. Love is no longer a distraction from myself but rather an addition. An exchange, all the parts of me for all the parts of you but nobody loses and everyone only becomes more.

A few years ago the perfect storm in my life occurred and set me up for a reset. So many things changed at once and thus the last few years were full of lessons and introspection and learning, so much learning. The laundry list of things I’ve learned from moving, a new chapter, a new city, new friends, living alone for the first time, etc. is too long for a substack essay but as time has passed there is one lesson that stands out above the rest, especially today.

Romantic love is not the only kind worth investing in.

This is not the first year I’ve sat and thought about life on Valentine’s day but it is the first year I haven’t been sad about it. This is the first year there hasn’t been a man shaped space in my life waiting to be filled or a man shaped man standing there awkwardly promising me things he will never deliver. This is the first year I woke up content because even though my life is not exactly what I want it to be, there is nothing I wish to take away from it. I’m building the life I want, slowly and intentionally and I have no reason to mourn. It is mine.

Disclaimer: this is by no means me denouncing romantic love. I would never do such a thing, I assure you. I will defend romantic love til the day I die. I hope everyone gets to experience true love, it’s something I wholeheartedly believe in and something I hope never to stop fighting for. But it is not the only thing worth fighting for. I am ashamed to admit that for a large majority of my life (i.e. pre three years ago) I thought romantic love was the only one that mattered. I knew family and friendships were important but I thought it all came second fiddle to soulmates. I thought my soulmate was going to save me, that it and by proxy he would be the answer to all my problems. I was willing to sacrifice almost anything in the pursuit of my soulmate. I haven’t met him yet but I now know that he is going to be just one of many puzzle pieces that make my life complete. I see love in all of my other relationships and I cultivate love in them too. I know now that I will not be satisfied with only loving my partner, the love my friends give me is an essential part in making me who I am. The love I give them teaches me about myself every single day. I learn from them how to communicate, to trust, to grieve, to fight and to forgive.

My life is full and I meet new people and I love new people and my heart overflows and then expands to accommodate them. Love is everywhere, I open my eyes and I see it. Love has found me time and time again in all of its forms and when romantic love comes, I will welcome it with open arms but until then I have nothing to miss. I only have other relationships to water and watch blossom. I learn from them the kind of partner I want to be one day because I want to be the kind of partner who is a good and loyal friend, who is a consistent daughter, who is intentional and impactful in all of her relationships. Who loves and loses and loves again.

Jenny Slate once said “as the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.” I stand here solid, flesh, blood and bone and I exist as a person, finally. I am whole and complete and I no longer feel that anyone can take my personhood away from me. I used to fall at the feet of people I loved (metaphorically), saying I’d change, I’d do anything, let's try again. Please. Let’s just try again. I can do it, I can do anything and for you I would do anything. And I thought that that was the most romantic thing of all. But I no longer think that. I take confessions of love and denials of love the same now, a statement of fact by someone else. One that does not add to or take away from the wholeness of my being. I can withstand the warm winds of love and the ocean spray of rejection because I exist regardless. My wants, needs, and desires remain and as they remain, so do I.

Is the greatest act of love to other people loving yourself? Giving yourself as you are, whole and complete to someone else and saying I hope you enjoy. Only then can you take people as they are, enjoy them as they are, see their flaws and hold their hand anyways. No false pretenses of shared interests, no calm waters of a lack of disagreements. There will be tension, there will be discourse, there will be friction, but that is what stokes the fire of love. This I have only learned through my friendships.

I used to think I had to agree with all of my friends. I am no longer friends with any of the people I blindly agreed with. The disagreements festered underneath the surface and they turned necrotic, eating away at each of us and our connections. My longest friends, three friends from childhood, have been the people who have annoyed me the most. They have told me truths I did not want to hear, but they told me them anyway. We grew up together and each of us have changed. I see them and I see what my life would have looked like had I chosen a different option at a fork in the road. We have had more than our share of disagreements, shown each other our worst angles and we come back together every time, even if some pauses are longer than others. We have held mirrors up to each other time and time again and loved each other through each iteration. We have had friendship ending fights and painstakingly rebuilt from the ground up. We have dated each others friends and had to navigate the aftermath. We have disagreed on every issue known to man and yet we come back, we try again, we see the best in each other and we forgive and forgive and love. One of my best friends from my gap year and I have had conversations that would have (and did) break up ex boyfriends and I. We have criticized each other and laid hearts bare on the table and the other one of us has picked up the needle, and stitched over the mistakes we made. I learned how to take criticism from her, understanding that for someone to tell you that you are not loving them correctly is the most important act of love because it means that you care enough to give them another chance. We do not know how to love each other perfectly from the time we meet but we have to learn. In learning, we have to fail and we have to accept that and we have to shed our ego and try again. One of my best friends in D.C. and I bicker like sisters. We shut down ideas, pout, and argue in public. In doing that, people have told us that that is not what friendship looks like. Is it not? Is true friendship not truth telling? Is it not telling someone they’re annoying the hell out of you and squeezing their hand under the table not even five seconds later? Is it not rolling eyes at each other in public but unwaveringly having each other’s backs in private? There is no posturing of love, no act for the world to adore. There just is. It is being and knowing and sitting in it. Knowing that we are not perfect, knowing that we annoy our friends sometimes and they will love us anyways. They will not leave without telling us why. They will not speak ill behind closed doors. They will say it to our face and an act that at first seems abrasive is the most merciful of all. What I have learned about unconditional love, I have learned from my friendships.

But all that being said, I will not pretend that platonic love and familial love are substitutes for romantic love. I am not above admitting that I want to love and be loved romantically. I do.

a lesser woman would have lost hope, a greater woman wouldn’t beg

- Taylor Swift, The Prophecy, The Tortured Poets Department 2024

I do both. At different times of day. The sun swells in the sky and so does hope and as it falls I too hit the ground, on my knees, begging god, the universe, anyone who might be listening. I want to feel it again. I’ve tasted its sweet fruits before and I’ve felt the sharp sting as it slipped through my grasp. My hands are raw from years of loving and losing and I long to feel that heat again. But as the years have passed, I have learned how to love myself. I have learned to take up space confidently and I no longer feel the need to sacrifice myself at the altar of love. In that I have to sacrifice the naivety of falling in love often and accept the loneliness and uncertainty that comes with waiting. When you’re willing to change everything about yourself it’s actually very easy to find love. Growing up I was rarely single and even when I was single on paper, I was floating away on daydreams of the next guy I was falling in love with. Now that I know myself and I know what I want and I stopped pouring myself into the mold of what the object of my desires dream woman would be, I have found that feeling the spark comes more rarely. Sometimes I lose faith, but then I feel it again. It flickers, not yet a raging fire. But it reminds me that it is possible. So I, even though patience is not a quality I will ever claim to have, will wait. Because I have learned that being single is better than being with the wrong person, but I still believe that being with the right person is even better. I want the prophecy to change, but not at the cost of myself. Only then can you be truly fulfilled in love. If someone loves who you are and not just who you pretend to be. So, I must wait. We all have to. Some longer than others, but there is someone out there for everyone. Someone who makes you feel more you. Someone who doesn’t shy away from your flame and takes the time to stoke the fire.

Until then (and even after) I hope that I never lose sight of all the other loves of my life. I hope I never stop investing in my friendships as equally as my relationships because these are people I want to know and love and learn from for the rest of my life. I hope I never forget about the nights I spent by myself, dancing in my apartment, falling exhausted to the floor, reading books and putting them down, face mask on, glass of sparkling water in hand. I hope I never forget that love is everywhere, no one person can complete you. You and only you will be with yourself forever, in the darkest moments and in the proudest. I hope that my list of people I love only grows and I hope that I grow with it.

I posted this a day late but I hope if you have a special someone today you squeeze them tight and think about how lucky you are to meet someone who understands the fractured pieces of you. I hope if you’re with someone and you’re not feeling too great about it that you find the courage to find better. I hope if you’re single (or partnered) you think about other ways that love has found you, I hope you think about the ideal way you want to be loved and I hope you never settle for anything less. If you read this and you don’t feel love in any of its forms today I hope you reach out (to me or to anyone) because there is love waiting for you to find it. Love rewards those who try and I hope you always have it in you to try one more time and just one more time. (Maya Angelou, paraphrased)