I recently reread a book by an author whose work I first encountered a while back, without fully remembering which book or what happened in it. I picked up Too Little Too Late again a few days ago, before moving on to its sequel, Better Late Than Never, which I am reading now. And you know what they say about rereading something after time has passed, that whatever you feel the second time will not be the same as the first. That was exactly it. I know for certain I did not feel this way the first time I read it, because the first time, I was simply more innocent than I am now.

The old version of me reading that book would have thought, how can people be so deceptive ? How do you have genuinely good people in your life and still go ahead to jinx it yourself? What’s the point of being deceptive, why perform warmth you do not actually feel? I used to wonder, honestly baffled, how anyone does terrible things behind someone’s back while staying sweet and pretentious to their face. It made no sense to me,because obviously even though I am no saint, I don’t see myself doing that to someone.

In the book, the male lead, Ibrahim, does exactly this to Ayra (Her middle name was Leilani btw and I just added it to the 20 list of names I love and would name my kids,lol). The he-goat and his friends, pretending so convincingly whenever she and her best friend were around, all smiles, all affection, that particular kind of deception dressed up as closeness. It is genuinely a very impressive acting, honestly, the kind of performance that should come with an award category of its own. Best Supporting Liar in a Group Chat. Reading it this time, having recently lived through something similar myself, with people I would not necessarily call friends, but people I was cordial with, people I had genuinely good intentions toward, none of it felt strange to me anymore. Even though something in me still finds it hard to fully reconcile. Why be nice to someone you do not actually like? What is the entire point, when you are a grown adult, when nobody is going to hurt you for simply being honest instead? It is almost funny, if I am honest. Ibrahim in that book is a full grown man, in his right mind, with his own resources, his own agency, presumably his own means of getting a haircut and paying his own rent, and yet he still chose the long, exhausting, elaborate route of pretending just to please his parents What exactly was the point of pulling an innocent person into his deception and breaking her the way he did, when the honest option was right there the entire time, free of charge, requiring significantly less effort?

I was talking about the book with a friend recently, and we both loved it, though we did not love that in the sequel, Ayra ends up with someone else, and Ibrahim, after coming to his senses ends up with someone else too. Some small delusional romantic part of us wished they had just found their way back to each other, since the chemistry had been so ticklish from the start. We were fully prepared to be unreasonable about it, the way you get when a book has successfully hijacked your judgment for three hundred pages (It was 500+ pages though). But even we had to admit, if this happened in real life, we would be cursing Ibrahim out completely, possibly in more than one language. What he did was horrible, and no woman deserves to go through that. We only wanted the fantasy version because it was fiction, because we had fallen for their story before the betrayal came to the limelight. Nobody actually wants a partner who cheats, no matter how good his chemistry with the female lead was in chapters one through fourteen. Or no matter how handsome or performatively romantic he was portrayed to be. In real life, he would deserve everything that came after, including Ayra leaving,Ibty slapping his idiotic face, including being brutally betrayed by the friend group he did everything for,being cut off from the business and everything!

But the real highlight, for me, was recognizing the exact emotions I had recently lived through, laid out on the page, and finally being able to release them, because this time they were not abstract. I also recognized something else. The way Ayra was able to act completely normal after discovering everything, without ever confronting him right away, without breaking it to his face, staying calm on the surface in a way that honestly deserves its own line item on a resume under special skills. I have done the exact same thing and I really do not regret it a bit nor do I feel some kind of hatred or anger. I have heard, through other people and my own ears, some of the horrible things said about me by people who were sweet to my face. And I still see them. I still exist in the same spaces as them, greeting them normally, not asking after their day obv, but while privately having filed the entire situation under closed, no further comments, case dismissed.

And I have realized something through that. You do not always need closure from the other person. You do not need the confrontation, the big conversation, the moment where you say everything you have been holding, the one that exists so vividly in your head at two in the morning complete with their shocked apology and your perfectly worded response. Sometimes the only closure you actually need is the one you give yourself. You saw what you needed to see. You already know what you know. You simply decide, quietly, that you are done, and that is enough. You do not owe anyone the scene where you say it out loud for it to be real. Honestly, skipping the confrontation saves you the trouble of them getting to respond at all, which, depending on the person, might be the real win here.

I am not entirely sure what larger point I am making with all of this, if I am being honest. But this is what it is, and it felt true enough to write down, somewhere between a book review and group therapy I did not sign up for.

The book is Too Little Too Late by Latifah Efua and you should absolutely check it out! She writes so wellll.

Dare I add one more thing I found funny in the book. Anytime Ayra tells Ibrahim “I love you”,the mumu tells her “What else is there to feel?”. She was feeling like she won some Shakespearean husband type shii,lol. Little did she know he meant it. Oh well,not to be a spoiler,check the book out yourself.

Ciaoooo.

I also know this is not personal to me because I know a bunch of other people who can relate to this, and honestly if you are being truthful with yourself, you can too. It is one of those things that is very funny and frustrating , the kind that is very different from confusion or ignorance, because at least with those two you have an excuse, but this is something else entirely. You are informed and you are aware and you know the problem and you know the solution, and you know it so well that if someone woke you up at 2am and asked, you could recite it without blinking, and still, somehow, you are not doing it.

There is a very wide gap between knowledge and implementation, and that gap is where most of us are actually living.

Take something simple, like say you have a skill, a real one, something you are genuinely good at, and for me it is graphic design. And like most people who have something they are good at, you want to build something out of it, maybe impact, maybe money, maybe both, because you know these broke Nigerian student things? You should understand. And you know the steps, like you know them well enough that listing them feels almost embarrassing because of how obvious they are. Build your portfolio, upskill consistently, learn the marketing side of the work and not just the creative side, start sending cold emails, show up even when you do not feel like it, go to YouTube for what you do not yet understand and download the course and be consistent, because that is really the whole thing and everybody knows it and everybody keeps saying it and everywhere you turn it is the same advice, and yet there you are, not doing it. Because there is something invisible standing between you and the first step, and it is not stupidity and it is not confusion and it is not even a lack of motivation exactly.

And I think part of it is a very strange trick the mind plays on you once you know what to do, because the knowledge of something starts to feel like a kind of progress on its own even though it is not, and it feels like you have already done the difficult part, the figuring it out part, and all that is left is this small administrative task of simply executing. But the execution is not small at all, because the execution is an entire mountain, and knowing what to do is just standing at the base with the map in your hand, knowing the safe path and the fastest route and having studied the terrain, but you are still at the bottom, and somehow having the map convinces you that you have already climbed partway up when really you have not moved an inch from where you started.

And if you sit with yourself honestly you will find this pattern everywhere, in every single area of your life where you are not where you want to be and you cannot even blame ignorance for it.

You want to get fit, fine, and you are not an expert but you know the basics and the basics are genuinely enough to start, like cut out the midnight junk and the overly processed foods and the late night snacking, move your body, get sunlight, drink water, get some steps in every day, and you know all of this, so there you are eating the exact thing you told yourself yesterday you would stop eating while being fully conscious of what you are doing and why you should not be doing it, which is somehow worse than not knowing at all because at least not knowing gives you somewhere to hide.

And I do not think this is laziness, and I want to push back on that word because I think it gets used too easily, because laziness means indifference and indifference means you do not care, but you do care, you care a lot, you care enough to write it down at the beginning of every quarter and make the vision board and tell your friends about the goal, and you care so much that the caring itself becomes part of the weight you carry around without moving anywhere, so no, this is not laziness.

I think it is fear that has learned to dress itself in more acceptable clothing, like procrastination and overthinking and excessive research and buying another self-help book when you have not implemented anything from the last one, because what the fear is actually protecting is the belief that as long as you have not tried in full, you still have the comfort of knowing you could have done it if you really wanted to, and that belief is comfortable because it keeps the possibility alive, but the moment you try and fail you lose the fantasy along with the attempt, so some part of you, without announcing it, decides that not starting is the safest way to keep the version of yourself that is still full of potential intact.

And then there is something even simpler and more biological underneath all of that, because the discomfort of not doing the thing is familiar and you have lived inside it long enough that your body knows its shape, but the discomfort of starting is foreign and unknown and the kind you cannot predict or prepare for, and the brain will almost always choose the known pain over the unknown one, not because you are broken but because staying where you are is, at a chemical level, genuinely easier than beginning. Starting means leaving the version of yourself who has not yet tried, and there is a strange safety in her because she is still full of potential and cannot be found lacking in any measurable way, and the moment you start, all of that changes.

I realized all of this early this morning while I was reading, which is ironic because the thing I realized is that reading might actually be part of the problem.

I went through the goals I wrote down at the beginning of this year, first quarter, second quarter, third, and I sat with the honest version of where things actually are, and some things I have done but a lot of things I have not touched, and what made it sting was that I could not blame not knowing because I have read the books and I have the highlights and the folded pages and I have watched the YouTube videos and listened to all the podcasts and read every Substack essay on discipline and identity and habit formation, and I know in embarrassing detail what ‘becoming that girl’ looks like.

And then Snapchat showed me a memory from three years ago, a photo of my journal at that time where I was telling myself the exact same things, same goals, same self-awareness, same detailed plan, three years ago, and I just sat there with that for a while.

So the knowledge was never the problem… and yet every time I hit this wall my instinct is to go look for more information, one more article, one more framework, one more strategy that will finally be the one that makes the implementation follow automatically, but it does not work like that and it has never worked like that and I have enough evidence in my own life now to know better.

Most of us in this generation are not short on advice because we are sitting on more tips and strategies and frameworks than we could implement in a year if we started today, and we are still going looking for more because looking for more feels like doing something, it feels responsible, it gives you the sensation of forward motion without requiring you to actually move, and buying the self-help book feels like investment and saving the productivity thread feels like preparation, and before you know it the gathering of information has become the whole project and the actual thing you wanted to do is still exactly where you left it.

At some point the honest thing stops being about learning what to do because you already know what to do, and it starts being about picking the smallest piece of what you already know and doing just that one piece, imperfectly, without waiting until you feel ready, because the readiness does not come before the action and sometimes it comes after and sometimes it does not come at all and you do it anyway.

Implementation is the fraud in the room, the thing nobody wants to talk about directly because talking about it means admitting that the information was never really the problem, and that is uncomfortable because information is something you can always go get more of, but implementation requires you to sit with yourself and begin, poorly and slowly and without an audience, and that is the part most of us keep finding very creative ways to avoid.

I do not have a clean answer and I am in it as deep as you, but I think the first honest step is to stop treating the gap like it is a research problem because it is not, and you do not need more information, you just need to do the thing.

Just begin.

So here it is. Thank you. And also, I am sorry to see you go, and also, some part of me is glad, and I do not know how all three of those can sit in one chest at once, but they do. I have been trying to write this for days now, starting it and abandoning it, because every time I sit down to say goodbye properly I feel this lump gather in my throat that I do not fully understand. You would think saying farewell to a stretch of years would be simple. It is not. It feels like closing a door on a room I lived in my whole life without ever really tidying it, and now I am standing outside it wondering what I left behind in there, what I am walking away with, and what got left to gather dust.

Being a teenager used to sound like such a big deal when I was eleven. Twelve was my favorite age. I do not have all the smooth memories of what actually happened that year, I could not tell you the details if you asked, but I loved myself so much then. I was in my element. Even now I hold onto this notion that twelve was the best of me, whether or not I can prove it with facts. Then thirteen came and I started to feel old, which is such a strange thing to say about being thirteen, but it is true. I have never once in my life yearned to be older. I have always wanted to stay young, and unfortunately you have to die to remain at a particular age, so that was never actually possible. The world was never going to pause for me. I think some part of me has spent every year since twelve quietly grieving the fact that I could not just stay there, frozen, safe, unbothered by anything that came after. It sounds foolish to say that a twelve year old had less to carry, but she did, and I miss her lightness more than I know how to explain.

When I sit with myself and really think about my life, I realize I still feel like the same child I always was. I cannot fully believe my teenage years are over, even as I write this sentence. Before I became a teenager I had so many things I wanted to do, to enjoy, and when the transition actually happened I did not feel it the way I expected to. No lightning bolt. Just SS1 arriving quietly and bringing a different kind of storm with it.

That was when I had my first real crisis, not a midlife one, obviously, but something that felt just as enormous at the time. The Arts or science dilemma. Following what my heart wanted or following what my environment had already decided for me. I was so confused. They say experience is the greatest teacher and I did not understand how true that was until now, because the me writing this can make those same decisions so easily. But teenage me fought hard for that clarity. Teenage me cried herself to sleep over it and did not want to open up or ask anyone for advice. The one time I did ask, I still ended up so conflicted I think I chose wrong. I do not hate the life that came out of it, Alhamdulillah, everything is still fine. But if I could go back, there is a lot I would redo, even though I do not regret what I actually did. I think about that girl often, the one crying quietly into her pillow at night, terrified of disappointing people she loved, terrified of disappointing herself even more, and I wish I could reach back through the years and hold her face in my hands and tell her that whichever way she chose, she was going to be alright. I wish someone had told her that. I am telling her now, even though it is far too late for it to change anything for her, only for me.

Teenage me was free spirited. I think I still am, somewhere underneath everything. She was spontaneous. She was fully herself without asking permission for it. I do mourn that those years are over. I mourn it the way you mourn something you cannot point to directly, something that leaves through the back door while you are busy watching the front one, so that by the time you notice it is gone you cannot even remember the exact moment it left. If you are a teenager reading this, please just enjoy it, because you only get to be one once, and I promise it will feel unbelievable when you say out loud that it is over. You will not believe your own ears. I still do not believe mine.

I turned twenty in the labour ward, on night call, and when midnight struck I stood there under the fluorescent lights with people all around me, wanting to cry and unable to. That was the moment it became real. This one is gone, I thought, standing there in scrubs surrounded by the sound of other people’s pain and joy colliding into each other the way they do in that ward, and somewhere in the middle of all that noise I quietly said goodbye to a version of myself nobody else in that room could see me mourning. All I can do now is make sure that by the time I reach my thirties, In Shaa Allah , I am not looking back at my twenties wishing I had done more. I am going to try to maximize these years properly, even though tonight, if I am honest, I do not fully know what that means yet.

I finished the last draft of my book this year. I organized a TEDx event from nothing into something real. My sister got married. My little brother finished his memorization. I got closer to my parents. Good things kept happening close enough to touch. And still a lot of things have not been adding up, God has felt difficult to reach some days in a way I am ashamed to admit, my academic life slipped without me noticing until I looked up and it had already fallen, and I ended my teenage years on a bit of a foolish note, if I am honest, derailing in ways I did not expect from myself. I did not spend my last few months as a teenager in the most judicious way. But Alhamdulillah, when there is life, there is hope.

I have decided that being accomplished is relative to whatever standards you have set for yourself, and I am choosing to let go of some of the harsher ones, because regardless of everything I just said, I have done a lot of great things. I am proud of what I have achieved. I look forward to what comes next, even carrying all of this unfinished feeling with me.

Thank you, teenage years, for teaching me to be resilient, to be someone who could tell her friends to be confident, to stop shrinking themselves, even on the days I was quietly battling the exact same thing inside my own head and never said it out loud. Thank you for teaching me to be okay with life however it comes, to trust that whatever happens is decreed and will be fine, because panicking never actually changes anything. I think I have internalized that so well that it borders on being too nonchalant sometimes, but I will work on that.

Thank you for not letting me do too much foolishness, even though I did some, the regular kind that comes with being a teenager. I am told the people who did the big reckless things are still dying of embarrassment every other day thinking about it, so Alhamdulillah for that too.

I am not going to pretend this goodbye is clean. Some part of me wants to hold onto you a little longer, teenage years, because at least inside you I had an excuse. At least inside you, not having it figured out still made sense. Nobody expects a teenager to have all the answers, but somehow the expectation changes the second you turn twenty, as if a switch flips overnight and suddenly you are supposed to know things you were never taught, supposed to have healed from things you never had time to sit with, supposed to be a whole different person just because a number changed. I do not feel like a whole different person. I feel like the same uncertain girl, just older, just a little more tired, just holding more than she used to.

If I am being fully honest, some nights before you left, I cried quietly, the way I have always cried about things, holding it in until I am alone and then letting it out where nobody can see. I cried about it tonight, actually, writing this. I do not think that is weakness. I think it just means I loved these years enough to feel their leaving in my body, not just in my head.

I do not know how to end this properly, so I will not try to. I will just say it plainly, the way I should have said it from the very first line.

Thank you, teenage years. Thank you for everything you gave me and everything you took, for the girl I became inside you and the one I am still becoming outside of you. I loved you, even the parts that hurt. Especially the parts that hurt, maybe, because they are the ones that shaped me the most.

This is goodbye.

~𝓜𝓾𝓱𝓼𝓲𝓷𝓪𝓱 ᥫ᭡

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

It’s 1:32 AM and I’m lying in my childhood bedroom, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling that I put up when I was ten. They don’t glow anymore. Haven’t for years. But I never took them down because somehow, removing them feels like admitting something I’m not ready to admit yet.

I came home for the weekend. That’s what I told everyone. But the truth is I fled. Fled from my life at the university, from the person I’m supposed to be becoming, from the constant pressure of moving forward when all I want to do is stand still and remember what it felt like to be certain about anything.

There’s this poem I saw on Facebook during my summer semester exams, Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” About a man who returned home after years of war and adventure, only to find that home wasn’t enough anymore. That he’d changed too much, seen too much, become too much of a wanderer to settle back into the life he’d left behind. And I remember sitting in that lecture theatre thinking, “At least he got to leave. At least he had somewhere to return to.”

But lying here now, I realize I’m him. Not the adventurous part, not the hero who sailed across seas and fought monsters. I’m the after part. The part where you come back and nothing fits anymore. Where home is still home but you’re no longer the person who lived here. Where everyone expects you to morph back into your old self like a comfortable sweater, except the sweater doesn’t fit and you can’t explain why without sounding ungrateful.

My mother made my favorite meal tonight. The one she always makes when she wants to apologize. And I ate it and said all the right things, but the truth is it didn’t taste the way I remembered. Not because she made it differently, but because I’m different. The person who loved that meal unconditionally is gone, replaced by someone who’s developed new tastes, new preferences, new hungers that can’t be satisfied by childhood favorites.

My younger brother asked me what university life is like. And I didn’t know how to answer. How do I tell him it’s everything and nothing like I thought it would be? That I’m learning so much but understanding less? That I’ve met hundreds of people but feel lonelier than I ever did in this small town where everyone knows my family name? That I’m becoming someone new but I’m not sure I like who I’m becoming?

There’s this line in the poem: “I cannot rest from travel.” Honestly? It sounded aspirational. The restless spirit, always seeking, never satisfied with staying still. But now I think it might be a curse. Because what if you can’t rest from travel not because you’re brave or adventurous, but because you’ve lost the ability to be still? What if you’re not running toward something but away from everything?

I went out this afternoon. Past my old secondary school, past the shop where we used to buy snacks, past the field where we’d hang out after school with nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it. And it all looked smaller somehow. Not physically, but in significance. These places that used to define my entire universe have shrunk down to just places. Buildings. Landmarks. Nothing special. Nothing that holds all the magic I remember.

I ran into one old friend. We used to be inseparable. Used to talk for hours about everything and nothing. Used to plan our futures together like we’d be living parallel lives forever. And today we had nothing to say to each other beyond the basics. “How’s school?” “It’s good.” “How are your parents?” “They’re fine.” Small talk between people who used to claim to share souls. And when we said goodbye, we both knew we wouldn’t make plans to meet up again. What’s the point? We’re not those people anymore.

There’s another line: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!”

When I’m here, I feel like I’m rusting. Like I’m supposed to be out there, doing something, becoming something, moving toward some version of myself that’s better, smarter, more complete. But when I’m there, at the university, living that life, I feel empty. Like I’m performing forward motion without actually going anywhere that matters.

My father and I barely spoke today. Not because we’re fighting, but because we don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. He asks about my studies and I give him the sanitized version, the one that sounds impressive and purposeful. I don’t tell him about the existential crises at 3 AM. About the doubt that creeps in when everyone around me seems so certain about their paths and I’m just guessing, hoping I’m moving in something resembling the right direction.

He looks at me sometimes like he’s trying to recognize me. Like he’s searching for his daughter in this stranger who comes home every few months with new opinions and new vocabulary and new distance in her eyes. And I want to tell him I’m still here, still me, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore. I think pieces of the old me are still scattered around this house, this town, but the person I’m becoming has outgrown them.

In the poem, Ulysses decides to leave again. To set sail one more time, to seek a newer world, to drink life to the lees. And everyone talks about how inspiring that is, how brave, how admirable. But what about the people he leaves behind? His son who has to rule in his absence? His wife who waited years for him to come home only to watch him leave again? What about the home that’s never enough, no matter how much it tries to be?

I’m leaving tomorrow. Going back to my other life, my university life, the life where I’m supposed to be finding myself. And my mother will pack food for me like she always does. My father will check the car and give me money I don’t need but won’t refuse. My brother will hug me awkwardly and tell me to visit more often. And I’ll promise I will, knowing that each visit will be like this one: me trying to fit back into a space I’ve outgrown, them trying to hold onto a version of me that doesn’t exist anymore.

You know, I’m not brave like Ulysses. I’m not setting sail toward adventure. I’m just drifting. Moving because staying still feels wrong, but not actually going anywhere that feels right. I’m caught between two worlds: the one I came from that no longer fits, and the one I’m in that doesn’t feel like home yet. Maybe never will.

There’s this other poem, by Cavafy, about Ithaca. About how the journey matters more than the destination, how what you learn along the way is the real treasure, how by the time you arrive home, you’re supposed to be wise enough to understand what Ithaca meant all along. But what if you’re not? What if you get there and you’re just tired? What if all the journeying just left you displaced, belonging nowhere fully, at home nowhere completely?

It’s almost 3 AM now and I still can’t sleep. The stars on my ceiling are completely dark. Just stickers now, plastic shapes that lost their glow years ago. And I’m lying here wondering if that’s what happens to all of us. We start out bright, luminous with potential and certainty. And then slowly, gradually, without noticing, we lose our glow. Not all at once. Just a slow deliberate fade until one day we’re just going through the motions, stuck between who we were and who we’re supposed to become.

In the morning, I’ll pack my things. I’ll hug my family. I’ll travel back to my other life. And I’ll spend the whole drive trying to figure out which version of myself is real: the one who feels suffocated here or the one who feels lost there. The one who wants to leave or the one who wants to stay. The one who’s moving forward or the one who’s just running away.

Maybe that’s what being Ulysses really means. Not the adventure or the heroism. Just the permanent state of not belonging anywhere completely. Of carrying home with you wherever you go but never being able to inhabit it fully. Of always being between journeys, between selves, between the person you were and the person you’re becoming.

As a truth or as a consolation, we’re all Ulysses. All sailing toward something we can’t pin down, away from something we can’t recover. All looking for home in the very act of leaving it behind.

And as melancholic as the thought is, maybe it’s not tragic. Maybe it’s just what growing up is. An endless odyssey where the destination keeps changing, where home becomes a memory rather than a place, where the only constant is the journey itself and the slow, steady transformation of who you are along the way.

But right now, in this dark room with dead stars on the ceiling, it just feels lonely. Like being lost at sea with no lighthouse to guide you home. Like realizing that even if you found your way back to Ithaca, you’d no longer be the person who left. And the Ithaca you return to will never be the Ithaca you remember.

So you keep sailing. Because what else is there to do?

You keep moving forward, even when forward feels like nowhere. You keep becoming, even when you miss who you used to be. You keep journeying, even when the journey feels pointless.

Because maybe Tennyson was right. Maybe it is better to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Or maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes yielding is okay. Maybe sometimes it’s okay to admit you’re tired, you’re lost, you don’t know where you’re going or who you’re becoming.

Maybe sometimes it’s okay to just be, without the constant pressure of becoming.

But I don’t know how to do that yet. Don’t know how to be still when everything in me is screaming to keep moving.

So tomorrow, I’ll sail again. Back to my other life. My other self. My other attempt at figuring out where home is when home is no longer a place you can return to.

And maybe someday, I’ll understand what all this wandering was for.

Or maybe I won’t.

Maybe the point is just to keep going. Keep sailing. Keep searching.

Even when you’re not sure what you’re searching for anymore.

-
The prompt was Ulysses

Not because it bears some delicious fruit. Not because it offers shade in any reliable way either . It only blooms for maybe two weeks in spring — sometimes less, if the wind comes early and is unruly — and then it is over. The cherry blossom falls before you have finished getting used to looking at it. And yet people travel thousands of miles to stand underneath it. They lay blankets on the ground. They tilt their faces upward and they stay there, doing nothing productive, just there, because somewhere in the human animal is a knowledge, old and unspoken, that some beauty is only worth what it costs you to witness it fully before it goes.

The Japanese call it mono no aware.The bittersweet ache of passing things. The transient beauty of life.

I didn’t know there was a word for it until recently. But I have known the feeling my whole life.

I asked Google once why butterflies die so early. Not in a sad moment, just curious, the idle kind of curiosity that finds you at 2am when your brain has decided sleep is optional and answers are urgent. The response was clean and biological. Something about purpose. Reproduction. The passing of genetic material. The butterfly lives long enough to complete its function and then, accordingly, it is finished. I remember Ayo from a storybook I read when I was eight asking his father the same question. I can’t remember the title but the author was a child like me too.

I closed the tab. That wasn’t what I was asking.

I wasn’t asking about biology. I was asking about the offense of it. The specific, almost personal cruelty of a design that produces something so structurally impractical, so committed to being beautiful in a world that grinds beautiful things to dust — wings like cathedral glass, like someone pressed light between two surfaces and let it dry — and then gives it days. Not seasons. Not years. Days. As though the universe sketched it just to prove it could, admired it for a moment, and then moved on to other things.

Why do butterflies have to die.

Not a question. A grievance I keep filing with no return address.

Here is what I have noticed, across enough years of paying attention to be allowed to say it: the things that have the most light tend to travel the lightest. They arrive without ceremony. No announcement. No excessive luggage. They don’t perform their own beauty just because.. and this is the part that breaks me open every time , they don’t seem to know about it. The sakura doesn’t hold itself carefully. The butterfly doesn’t ration its wings. They are simply, completely, extravagantly themselves, for however long they have, and the world gets to be richer for it whether or not it deserves to be.

And then they go.

And the tree is still standing. And the meadow looks exactly the same. And you are left trying to explain to people who weren’t there what it is you’re mourning, and the words keep seeming too small for the size of the actual absence, and you realize that grief for beautiful things is its own particular loneliness, because the world did not stop when it left, and you cannot understand why the world did not stop.

There is a kind of mourning that doesn’t begin at the ending.

It begins the first time you look at something and feel the knowing settle in,quiet and unwelcome, that it will not last. That you are already, even now, in the aftermath of this. That loving it and losing it are not two separate events but one long continuous experience you have already begun. I have felt this with seasons. With certain versions of cities I loved before they changed. With people who moved through the world so gently that being near them felt like standing in a lit room, and you did not know, until they were gone, that the light had been theirs.

My grandmother had a word she used for people like that. She said they were people whose shadow was comforting: even the absence of them comforts you. Even the space they left has something in it. The beauty of knowing you knew them.

That time we were talking about her first love, who happened to be my mom’s father and it was two days to my little brother’s naming ceremony and I remember every detail about that evening. Until last week, I haven’t actively thought about this. But now, am. About whether it is a mercy or a cruelty that some people leave just their sweet shadows. Whether it is better to have known and to now carry the grief of the knowing, or whether it would have been kinder for the world to have simply not made them at all, had nothing for you to miss.

I know the answer. I know it is better to have known. But I ask the question anyway because grief is not rational and does not respond to correct answers.

The philosophy says impermanence is what makes things beautiful.

That a cherry blossom which couldn’t fall would stop being a cherry blossom and become just furniture. That the butterfly’s wings are that color because something was sacrificed, a tradeoff in the biology, a cost, and the cost is time. That we are only able to see things, truly see them, because they are already leaving. That longing and beauty are not two different experiences but one experience wearing two faces.

I believe this. On my better days, I believe this completely.

On my worse days I think it is the kind of thing people say because the alternative – that beautiful things die for no reason, that the universe is simply indifferent and made no promises — is too heavy a burden to harbor in our hearts.

Both things can be true. I have learned to let them be however they come.

What I keep returning to is this: the butterfly did not spend its days being careful.

It did not ration the wings. Did not keep some color in reserve in case it needed it later, in case the world turned out to be less trustworthy than it appeared. It opened completely, every day, and spent itself, and when the spending was finished the wings folded and the thing was done. And every human being who ever stopped to watch it got to take something away that the butterfly did not know it was giving.

I think about that. About what it means to live like that. To be so fully yourself that your just being becomes a gift you’re not even aware you’re giving. To not save or edit yourself for later. To bloom in the full, embarrassing, impractical way of cherry blossoms — all at once, briefly, extravagantly — without waiting for a guarantee that the wind will be kind.

I think about the people I have known who lived like that. How they never seemed to know they were doing it. How they just were, in the same way the blossom just is. How the light they carried did not belong to ambition or performance — it was simply the light of someone who had, somehow, decided to be completely present in their own life.

And how the world, which is mostly distracted, mostly in a hurry, mostly looking at its phone — the world stopped for them, the same way it stops for the blossoms.

I don’t know why beautiful things don’t last.

I’ve looked. In religion, which says beauty belongs to another world entirely and what we’re glimpsing here is only its reflection through water — rippling, impermanent, just enough to make you certain something true is on the other side. In philosophy, which says the ache is the point. In the well-meaning words of people who say at least you had it, which is technically true and emotionally useless in the moment when you are standing in the fact of no longer having it.

None of it is wrong.

What I have instead is this: a practice of looking properly. Of not saving the noticing for after. Of standing under the blooming tree and staying there, unhurried, doing the useless and necessary work of being present to something beautiful before it goes. Because that is all any of us can do, really. We cannot hold the blossom. We cannot negotiate with the season. We can only look — fully, without reservation, without the self-protective habit of looking away before we’re too moved — and let it do to us whatever it was made to do.

The butterfly does not need our grief. It was complete.

But I think our grief is also part of the design. I think the ache we feel when beautiful things leave is not a malfunction. It is the proof that we were paying attention. It is the body’s way of saying: I was here. I saw it. I let it matter.

That feels like enough, on most days.

On some days it doesn’t.

How are we doing?

It's been a while, and I had to take a break because life has been such a rollercoaster lately…both in the best ways and in some really challenging ways too.

There have been moments that left me exhausted, moments that made me incredibly grateful, moments that made me proud of myself, and moments that reminded me that life rarely ever moves in a straight line.

There's so much to tell you all. There's so much to write about. And honestly, there's so much I've missed from my favourite substackers as well.

I've already started catching up and reading some of the newsletters I've missed. Every now and then, I'd think about writing, catch myself wondering what everyone was up to, and then get pulled back into whatever was demanding my attention at the time. Priorities, I guess.

But one thing that actually kept me anchored was something someone once told me. Well, not just one person, actually. It was one of those messages that stayed with me.

At the time when I was writing consistently, someone told me that my consistency was inspiring. I remember reading that message and smiling, but I don't think I fully understood what it meant until much later.

Then, someone else gave me a handwritten letter and said something similar in it.

And somehow, those words just stuck with me.

Every time I disappeared for too long, every time I thought, "Maybe I'll just stop writing for a while," I'd remember those messages and think, "No, I have to get back to this."

Not because I think I'm a great writer or because I have some profound wisdom to share, but because it reminded me that sometimes the things we do quietly have an impact we don't even realize.

So here I am.

One of the biggest things that happened during my little disappearance is that after more than two years of back and forth, planning, setbacks, tears, uncertainty, and trying again, I finally organized my first TEDx event…with the help of the most amazing team ever.

And sometimes I just sit down and think about it.

I still haven't fully processed it.

In my head, it still feels like a dream.

Like, wait... did that actually happen?

Because for a very long time, it was one of those goals that felt distant enough to keep dreaming about but difficult enough to stop feeling impossible.

I don't know if you get what I mean.

You know how you watch movies and see people doing incredible things, and part of you quietly admires them while another part of you assumes that's a life reserved for other people?

That's what it felt like sometimes.

There were days when the dream felt impossibly far away. There were days when it felt just within reach. There were days when I questioned whether I was qualified, capable, connected enough, or experienced enough.

But somehow, after all the twists and turns, it finally happened.

And I think that's one of the biggest lessons this season has taught me: sometimes the things that seem furthest away are simply taking longer to arrive.

Beyond that, I've been working on a few other things that I'm not quite ready to talk about publicly yet, and a few more things that are still in progress.

Hopefully, when the time is right, I'll get to share all of those stories too.

And to be very honest...funny enough, I think I completely fell off a lot of things that I had previously integrated into my routine—things that were genuinely important to me. I pray I get back in sync soon.

One of them was journaling.

If you know me, you know that's a big deal.

Normally, I journal before I start my day and again before I go to bed. It's something that helps me process my thoughts, keep track of my growth, and make sense of whatever season of life I'm in.

But life happened.

And for me to completely fall off journaling should honestly tell you the extent of how stressed, occupied, and mentally stretched I've been these past few months.

Thankfully, I found an alternative that has surprisingly worked in the meantime.

For the past few weeks, especially while I was still in school, I've been recording short videos every morning and every evening.

Nothing fancy.

Just me documenting what happened during the day, how I'm feeling, what I'm working on, what I'm worried about, what I'm excited about, and sometimes just random thoughts that decide to visit my brain at odd hours.

In a way, it's become my temporary journal.

I also do it in form of keeping Snapchat streaks with my closest friends (classic,because I used to judge people who had Snapchat 🌚)

It's helped me preserve memories and keep track of this particular season of my life, even when I don't have the energy to sit down and write about it.

And honestly, I'm grateful I started doing it because so much has happened in such a short amount of time.

The funny thing is that if I decided to start publishing consistently on Substack again, I would have absolutely no shortage of things to write about.

My drafts are full.

And when I say full, I mean full.

There are notes buried somewhere in my old phone. There are documents sitting in my Microsoft Word. There are half-finished pieces on my laptop. There are random paragraphs hiding in different note-taking apps.

I've written far more than I've actually published.

The problem is that every single time I go back and read some of those drafts, I cringe.

Deeply.

Violently.

Some of them are extremely expressive. Some were written based on emotions I observed in other people. Others were written from my own emotions in moments when I wasn't trying to sound polished or profound.

And those ones are usually the hardest to revisit.

Because they capture versions of me that were confused, emotional, overwhelmed, excited, hopeful, scared, ambitious, exhausted –or sometimes all of those things at once.

Reading them feels a little like opening a time capsule and finding old versions of yourself staring back at you.

Part of me thinks that's probably what honest writing looks like.

Another part of me thinks I'm simply my own harshest critic.

Maybe both are true.

Either way, those drafts are still there.

And perhaps one day they'll finally see the light of day.

For now, though, I just wanted to say hello since I've already popped back in here.

I'm still alive.

I'm still here.

I'm still trying to write whenever I can.

I'm still documenting things because, honestly, what is the evidence of all the hard work if you have nothing to show for it later?

Hopefully, I'll be sharing more of it with you soon.

And you know, one of the reasons I started most of my writing in the first place was because I wanted a space where I could be unfiltered. A space where I could be honest, slightly chaotic, occasionally unhinged, and completely myself.

The funny thing is that now, I don't know if I still have the courage to be that unhinged.

Maybe adulthood? Or self-awareness ? Or not.

Maybe I've just become too conscious of the fact that people actually read these things.

Who knows?

Anyways, that's my rant for now.

Thank you for sticking around.🤍

At that time, I didn’t have the words to express it. I only felt a deep-rooted certainty in my heart, solid and unquestionable. I was destined to do something. To be someone. Not necessarily famous or wealthy in the typical sense kids envision, but significant and purposeful. And yes, wealthy enough to have everything I needed. I envisioned myself as a person whose life would make sense upon reflection.

I was so convinced.

I think back to that little girl from those days, not with nostalgia or fondness, but more out of curiosity, like examining a photograph of someone you once knew. She was confident about things she hadn’t yet grasped, and that certainty was genuine. It showed in how she approached her tasks, in her speech, and in her demeanor.

And I can’t help but wonder: if she could see me now, amidst all this growth and evolution into adulthood, what would she think?"

To be honest, I really don't have a clear answer.

That uncertainty keeps me awake at night more than any fear of failure ever could.

Failure is something I can identify. I can point it out, account for it, and make it into a story about growth, resilience, and the determination to try again. But this question, whether the person I'm becoming aligns with what my former self would have chosen…this is much harder to resolve.

Somewhere between then and now, my desires became complex. So complex that I can't fully express it in a single piece or perhaps even in an entire book.

It changed from being about feelings to focusing on metrics. The grades, the timelines, the invisible checklist that no one provided but which I've somehow internalized so deeply that I can no longer trace its origin. I've found myself measuring against standards that seem to change every time I get close to them, pursuing an elusive notion of "enough" that's always just out of reach.

The younger version of me didn’t have a checklist. She just had a feeling. She wanted her life to have significance, and for her, meaning wasn’t found in acting; it was simply about existing in the world,you know, being awake, intentional, and truly alive in ways that would bring comfort to her heart and fulfillment to her days.

When she looks at some aspects of who I've become now, she might not recognize them. The anxiety that masquerades as ambition. The need to prove myself that has quietly taken the place of personal growth. The tendency I have to turn any positive experience into proof of what I still haven’t accomplished.

That part is something I doubt she would grasp.

Yet, there’s also this truth:

She didn’t exactly understand the cost involved. How could she? Childhood certainty feels pure precisely because it hasn’t yet encountered reality. It hasn’t had to endure the world as it truly is, with its rejections, compromises, and gradual weariness. She cherished her dreams lightly because she hadn’t yet realized how challenging they can become when time moves on and the gap between who you are and who you envisioned yourself becoming starts to feel like a judgment.

I'm not saying she was naive or overly confident, because some of her certainty still lives within me. I can only say she was a little untouched by experience.

What I carry now is something she couldn't have shouldered back then. The complexity isn’t a betrayal of that little girl; it’s simply what happened as she grew up and continued on.

This is the part no one prepares you for when growing up: your core self remains familiar, but the way it manifests changes almost beyond recognition. The little girl who wanted to matter is still here. I can sense her in those moments that cut through all the chaos, when I write something genuine, when I sit with a friend in their pain and truly help, when I make a choice that costs me yet aligns with my beliefs. She's present in those instances, as clear as ever.

It's just that in between those moments lies a lot of life. A great deal of doubt and reassessment, along with days where I'm uncertain about which way growth is leading me. A lot of time spent grappling with whether I'm intentionally becoming someone or merely drifting along and calling it progress.

That part wasn’t part of her dreams. But I don't think she'd dismiss it either.

I believe she would observe the effort, me truly trying, rather than merely performing—and see a reflection of herself in it. The unwillingness to settle. The desire for something genuine. The realization that the question still holds significance for me, that I continue to care about whether my life has enough meaning to justify its existence.

That concern originates from her.

So would she feel proud?

For her, pride wouldn’t manifest as a sense of having gotten to her dream destination. She didn’t envision completed outcomes. Instead, she dreamed in emotions, of purpose, of depth, of a life actively chosen rather than one that just happened.

And I am still in the process of choosing. Even when my choices are misguided. Even when I choose and then second-guess myself only to choose again. Even on days when I feel furthest from who I intended to be, I remain present, still questioning, still refusing to accept "it doesn't matter" as an answer.

Perhaps that's what she would notice, not the accomplishments or the spaces between them. Not the titles or their absence. Just the simple fact that despite everything, I still care about becoming someone worth being.

You think you chose your fears, your patterns, the way you shut down when someone raises their voice or the reason you can't accept a compliment without immediately deflecting it. You think these are just personality. Just you. But most of what you call yourself was knitted together in rooms you were too young to remember, by people who were themselves shaped by rooms they were too young to remember, and so on, backwards into a history you never consented to inherit.

That's the uncomfortable beginning of this conversation.

Science has been arguing with itself about this for centuries. Nature: you are your genes, your biology, the code written into you before you took your first breath. Nurture: you are your environment, your early experiences, the detailed texture of how you were loved or weren't. For a long time people chose sides. Now the honest answer is that the question itself was always slightly wrong, because nature and nurture do not compete. They collaborate. And the collaboration begins earlier than most people want to believe.

In the womb, a mother's cortisol levels cross the placental barrier and reach the developing brain of her child. Chronic stress during pregnancy has been shown to alter fetal brain development, affecting the very architecture of how that child will later process fear and regulate emotion. The child hasn't been born yet. Probably hasn't been named. And the environment is already writing in on them.

This is not pessimism. It is just the truth about how early the shaping begins.

Then you are born. And the first thing your nervous system does, before language, before any memory, before any concept of self, is look for a safe base.

John Bowlby spent his career watching this. What he found was something so fundamental it bordered on obvious once named: children need a consistent, responsive caregiver not just for survival but for the development of their entire emotional architecture. When that need is met reliably, something called secure attachment forms. The child learns, at the level of the body, that the world is basically safe, that people can be trusted, that when you reach out a hand you will usually find something there.

When it isn't met — when the caregiver is inconsistent, frightening, absent, or simply too overwhelmed by their own unprocessed pain to show up fully — the child's nervous system adapts. It develops strategies. The anxiously attached child learns to amplify distress, to cry louder, cling harder, because inconsistency has taught them that connection requires performance. The avoidantly attached child learns to need less, or to appear to — to become self-sufficient in that hollow way that looks like independence and functions like loneliness. The child didn't choose these strategies. They were the most intelligent responses available to a little human with no other options.

Here is what Bowlby understood that we still struggle to accept: those early strategies don't stay in childhood. They linger. They show up in your adult relationships wearing different clothes. The person who clings too hard in love, who needs constant reassurance, who reads abandonment into every unreturned message — they are not being irrational. They are being faithful to the first lesson their nervous system ever learned. The person who pulls away when things get close, who is most comfortable when they don't need anyone too much — they are not cold. They are protected. By a very old and very loyal wound.

Consider two children. Born in the same city, same year, even similar temperaments at birth — curious, sensitive, a little intense.

The first grows up in a home where emotions are named and regarded. When she cries, someone comes. When she is afraid, she is not told to stop being afraid — she is sat with inside the fear until it passes. She internalizes, slowly, that her inner world is not a problem to be managed but a reality to be witnessed. She grows into an adult who can tolerate discomfort without dissolving, who can be close to people without losing herself, who can say I'm not okay without the sky falling.

The second grows up somewhere that doesn't have space for his sensitivity. He learns early that certain emotions make the people around him uncomfortable, and because he needs those people to survive, he begins to manage himself on their behalf. He becomes good at it. Impressively good. He learns to read rooms, to perform okayness, to keep the difficult things internal where they can't inconvenience anyone. He grows into an adult who is remarkably capable and profoundly alone. Who everyone assumes is fine. Who sometimes sits with a problem for weeks without telling a single person because he has done the calculation and determined the risk isn't worth it.

Same beginningsm. Radically different outcomes.

This is nurture. Not destiny, but direction. A current that runs beneath everything.

Robert Greene writes that humans are social animals shaped entirely by the mirrors around them — that who you become is inseparable from who reflected you back, and how. Gibran writes that your children are not your children, that they pass through you but do not belong to you, that life's longing for itself moves through them forward.

Together they are saying the same thing from different angles: you were formed by forces larger than yourself, and yet you are not only those forces. The shaping is real. And so is the one being shaped.

This is where it gets complicated in the best way.

Because epigenetics — the study of how environment affects gene expression — has shown us that experience can literally turn genes on or off. Trauma can be inherited not just psychologically but biologically, passed down through generations in the stress responses of children who never experienced the original wound. But the reverse is also true. Healing changes the body. Therapy, genuine connection, consistent safety over time — these don't just change your mind. They change your brain. The neural pathways carved by early experience are not permanent sentences. They are, with effort and the right conditions, rewritable.

You are not free from your history. But you are not only your history either.

The most honest thing I can say about nature versus nurture is that the debate was always a distraction from the more important question, which is: given everything that shaped you, what do you do now?

You did not choose the womb you developed in. You did not choose the attachment style that formed before you started to speak. You did not choose the way your early environment carved its patterns into your nervous system and then handed you the result and called it a personality.

But at some point — not all at once, not without the struggle of shedding a skin you’ve known all your life, not without occasionally sliding back — you get to look at what you were given and decide what to keep building with it. You get to to decide what to hold on to and what to let go of.

Why can’t I just delete the number? It’s been sitting in my phone for months now, no new messages, no calls, just a name that I scroll past every time I’m looking for someone else. And every time I see it, I think “I should delete this” but I never do. Why? What am I holding onto? What am I waiting for?

Why did I spend an hour choosing my outfit this morning for class when I know no one really cares what I’m wearing? Why do I rehearse casual conversations in my head before having them, scripting responses to questions no one will probably even ask? Why do I care so much about things that apparently don’t matter?

Why do I remember exactly what you said to me three years ago in that one conversation, the specific words you used, the tone of your voice, while you’ve probably forgotten it happened at all? Why does my brain keep every slight, every disappointment, every moment I felt small, stored in perfect detail, ready to replay at 2 AM when I’m trying to sleep?

Why do I apologize for everything? For taking up space, for having opinions, for existing in a way that might inconvenience someone. “Sorry, can I just squeeze past?” “Sorry, I have a question.” “Sorry to bother you.” Sorry for what? For being here? For being human? Why can’t I just exist without this constant apology for my existence?

Why do I say “I’m fine” when I’m not fine? When someone asks how I am and I’m actually struggling, drowning, barely holding it together, why do I smile and say “I’m good, thanks” and change the subject? Why is honesty about pain so much harder than lying about being okay?

Why did I cry in the bathroom during lunch break yesterday over something so small? A comment someone made that they probably didn’t even mean the way I took it, but it sounded wrong and suddenly I couldn’t breathe and I had to lock myself in a stall until I could pull myself together enough to go back out and pretend everything was fine.

Why do I read meaning into everything? A delayed text response becomes evidence they don’t want to talk to me. A short reply means I said something wrong. No reply at all means I’m being ghosted, abandoned, confirmed in my belief that I’m too much, too boring, too something. Why can’t I just accept that sometimes people are busy? That not everything is about me?

Why do I give so much to people who give so little back? I’m the one who remembers details, who checks in, who shows up, who listens for hours about their problems. And when I need something, when I’m the one struggling, where are they? Why do I keep watering dead plants, hoping they’ll somehow bloom?

Why can’t I let things go? That argument from last year that everyone else has forgotten, I’m still thinking about it. Still wishing I’d said something different, something better, something that would have made them understand. Still carrying it around like a stone in my chest. Why? What’s the point? It’s over. It’s done. Why can’t I just release it?

Why do I compare myself to everyone? She’s smarter. She’s prettier. She’s more confident. She has more friends. She seems to have life figured out while I’m just stumbling through, pretending I know what I’m doing. Why can’t I just be content being me? Why is everyone else’s life always the measuring stick for my own inadequacy?

Why did I spend twenty minutes crafting that text message, writing and rewriting it, trying to sound casual but not too casual, interested but not too eager, like I care but not too much? And why, after all that effort, did I get a “lol ok” in response? Why do I put so much thought into things that other people don’t think about at all?

Why do I feel guilty for resting? For taking a break, for doing nothing, for not being productive every single second. Why do I feel like I have to earn my existence through constant achievement, constant improvement, constant hustle? Why isn’t just being enough?

Why do I lie awake replaying conversations, analyzing every word I said, every response I got, looking for hidden meanings, for signs that I messed up, that I was too much or not enough? Why can’t I just talk to people and then let it go? Why does every interaction have to be dissected like it’s evidence in a trial where I’m both the defendant and the prosecutor?

Why do I make myself small? In group conversations, I wait for a gap that never comes, holding my thought until it’s no longer relevant and I swallow it back down. I let people talk over me. I laugh at jokes that aren’t funny. I agree with opinions I don’t share. Why? To keep the peace? To be liked? To avoid the discomfort of being seen as difficult?

Why do I sabotage good things? When something’s going well, when someone’s being kind, when life feels manageable, why do I start looking for problems? Start waiting for the other shoe to drop? Start testing people to see if they’ll stay? Why can’t I just accept good things when they come instead of destroying them with my doubt?

Why do I care what they think? People I don’t even like, people whose opinions shouldn’t matter, people who’ve shown me they don’t value me, why am I still seeking their approval? Still hoping they’ll see me differently? Still wanting them to like me even though I don’t particularly like them?

Why do I hold onto hurt? Someone apologized, tried to make it right, showed genuine remorse, but I’m still angry. Still keeping score. Still bringing it up in arguments that have nothing to do with it. Why? What am I gaining from this grudge except the bitter satisfaction of being the wronged party?

Why can’t I ask for help? Why do I struggle alone with things that other people could easily help me with, convince myself I have to figure everything out by myself, that needing support is weakness? Why do I make life harder than it needs to be by refusing to admit I can’t do everything alone?

Why do I expect so much from people who’ve shown me exactly who they are? They’ve disappointed me before. They’ve let me down repeatedly. They’ve proven they’re not capable of giving me what I need. So why do I keep hoping this time will be different? Why do I keep testing a locked door, expecting it to suddenly open?

Why do I perform happiness when I’m sad? Take smiling photos on days when I’ve been crying. Share quotes about positivity when I’m drowning in negativity. Present a version of my life that’s so far from reality it might as well be fiction. Why? Who am I trying to convince? Them or me?

Why am I so hard on myself? I make one mistake and I’m incompetent. I have one bad day and I’m a failure. I don’t meet my own impossible standards and I’m worthless. But when others mess up, I’m all understanding and grace. Why can’t I extend to myself the same compassion I give so freely to everyone else?

Why do I start things I never finish? Projects, hobbies, goals, all abandoned halfway through when the initial excitement wears off and it becomes actual work. Why can’t I push through? Why do I give up the moment it gets difficult? Why is my attention span so short, my commitment so weak?

Why do I say yes when I mean no? “Can you help me with this?” Yes. “Can you give this to me?” Yes. “Can you do me a favor?” Yes yes yes, even when I’m exhausted, even when I have my own things to do, even when I desperately want to say no. Why can’t I just be honest about my limits?

Why do I think about the past so much? Replaying conversations from years ago, relationships that ended, choices I made that I can’t unmake. What’s the point? I can’t change any of it. The past is done. So why do I live there, in that museum of regrets, instead of here, in the present where I actually have some control?

Why do I assume the worst? Someone doesn’t text back and I assume they hate me. A plan gets cancelled and I assume they never wanted to see me anyway. Someone’s busy and I assume I’m not a priority. Why is my default setting always catastrophe? Why can’t I assume good intent, assume people care, assume I’m wanted?

Why do I need everyone to like me? I can’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I know this. I understand this. But I still try. Still adjust myself, still perform, still exhaust myself trying to be palatable to people who wouldn’t care if I disappeared tomorrow. Why? What am I trying to prove?

Why can’t I just be? Why is everything so complicated, so analyzed, so heavy? Why can’t I just live without this constant commentary running in my head about everything I’m doing wrong, everything I should be doing differently, everything I am that I shouldn’t be?

Why do I keep asking why? As if understanding will change anything. As if knowing the reason will make it hurt less, make it easier, make it better.

Maybe there are no answers. Maybe some things just are. Maybe I’m just wired this way, built to overthink and overanalyze and over-feel everything. Maybe all these whys don’t have tangible explanations, don’t have solutions, don’t have an ending where everything makes sense.

Maybe the question isn’t why. Maybe the question is: now what? Now that I know I do these things, now that I see these patterns, now that I’ve named all these whys, what am I going to do about it?

But I don’t know the answer to that either. So I’m back to why. Always back to why. Asking questions I can’t answer about behavior I can’t change about a person I don’t know how to be different from.

Why.

Just... why…

Alone,but not fully alone . Pople are still littered around,some girls are at my front, washing and talking about boys. But it doesn't compare to the specific suffocation of six people in one room, where you're never quite by yourself and never quite with anyone either. That in-between space where loneliness and company exist simultaneously and somehow make each other worse.

I needed air.

So here I am.

The past few weeks have been a lot. Except I'm not sure I'm allowed to say that, because if I'm being honest, my life has always been this much. Nothing much ever really changes. I just keep finding new ways to live with it without making noise.

I made a resolution sometime at the end of last year, quiet and private the way I make most decisions: this year, I'm going to be more intentional about my friendships. If something is wrong, I will say so. And a bunch of other things.

I wrote it down like it was simple because was supposed to be.

But it is currently sitting on my to-do list, untouched.

Here is the irony that is not lost on me.

I believe I am a friend that shows up. Or used to. The one you can call when the thing you've been dealing with finally gets too heavy. I will sit with your problem like it's my own, turn it over, help you find the edges of it. I am good at that. Patient with other people's pain in a way I have never quite managed with my own.

But when my friends come around on the days I am not in the right frame, something in me goes completely still. The words are there,fine. The need for a listening ear is there too. And I end up saying nothing.

Not because nothing is wrong. Because something is deeply, specifically wrong and I cannot make my mouth form the sentence

I've been sitting with why.

And I think, if I'm honest in the way I'm only honest with myself at odd hours on the gravel or on the road back from the faculty or on the balcony in the midnight, it's because I can already predict how it goes.

I tell someone. They say one of three things. Either: you're a strong girl( i’ve written something about this before), you'll get through this…which is kind, and useless too, and sends me back to myself with nothing but the awareness that I've now exposed something tender to someone who didn't know what to do with it. Now that I'm writing this, I remember having a writeup about just listening instead of always trying to fix your friend's problems, that's entirely different from this. Or they give me advice that doesn't fit the particular shape of how my mind works. Or they dismiss it. Not cruelly. Just insufficiently. And I'm left holding the original problem plus the new weight of having opened up and not been met.

Maybe I'm being paranoid. Maybe I've written the ending before the story starts. I know that about myself. Everything has to be logical first. I need to understand the risk before I take it, and when I run the numbers on vulnerability, the numbers keep coming back unfavorable.

But here is what I'm slowly, reluctantly learning:

Even when I've identified the problem, traced it to its root, sat with it until I understand it fully… sometimes that isn't enough. Sometimes the human thing isn't a solution. It's just someone sitting across from you saying yeah, that sounds terrible and meaning it. Sometimes the rant is the point. The release is the point. Not because it fixes anything but because living through something alone has a burden that sharing, even imperfectly, reduces.

I know this. I know it intellectually.

And still.

There's something else I haven't said yet.

I'm a little secretive. I'll say it plainly since I'm already out here being honest. I get defensive when people get close to the interior , my experiences, my actual thoughts, the stuff underneath the composed exterior I've apparently been maintaining so well that people are surprised when I suggest I might not be fine.

Part of it is control. If I don't give you the information, I don't have to worry about what you do with it. But part of it is the aftermath. The morning after oversharing, when you see the person in the corridor and you are suddenly, acutely aware of everything you said and you want to fold yourself into a very small shape and disappear.

I'm terrified of that feeling.

So I mostly don't talk.

So,Eid this this year,

I missed the actual prayer. And I spent most of the day inside my own head, watching everyone around me move in groups, doing the thing Eid is supposed to look like. And I just stood there thinking about one of my friends,more like a sister. And the fact that I'm not on talking terms with her right now.

Here's what happened: I messed up our Eid plans. I texted her about it kind of as a joke, she didn't reply, and I just left it. I didn't explain. I didn't follow up.

And she's still mad at me.

And I understand why. But I didn't explain because I was already harbouring something from before. A few weeks earlier, I had opened up to her about something that was bothering me for the longest time,which, if you know me, or if you've read this far, you know is not something I do easily. She was advising me as we walked back to the hostel. We got to my door, she said goodbye and she just kept going. Continued down to her room like the conversation had reached its conclusion, when it hadn't. When I hadn't. And she never asked about it again after then.

I stood at my door and felt stupid for having said anything.

So when Eid came and I messed up and she was waiting for an explanation, something in me snapped. And in a petty way, I just left her.

That's whybwe are here now. Not talking. And I'm not fully happy about it and I'm not fully wrong about it and I don't know what to do with something that is both of those things at once.

The irony of this particular week is that two of my other friends came to me separately with friendship problems of their own.

And I advised both of them. Calmly. Clearly. I told them conflict in friendship is normal, that relationships require navigation, that they needed to talk it out, face to face, actually have the difficult conversations.

Good advice. Solid advice, I know.

And the whole time I was giving it, I was thinking about my own situation. Watching myself prescribe something I wasn't taking. Encouraging an openness I keep finding reasons to avoid.

I didn't mention any of that to them.

Of course I didn't.

What exhausts me most is not the conflict itself. Conflict I can survive. What exhausts me is the mental load of it. The constant calculation , whether to explain or stay silent, whether the silence is protecting me or just prolonging something, whether the friendship will outlive what actually happened or whether bringing it up creates a different problem on top of the original one.

My brain does not rest from this. It just keeps running the numbers.

And underneath all of it is this feeling I keep brushing past and coming back to: I don't think I have anyone who would receive my problems the way I need them to be received. Not dramatically. Just honestly. I look at the people I call friends and I can already predict the response and the prediction doesn't make me want to try.

Maybe I'm wrong. Probably I'm overthinking. I know I'm overthinking.

But knowing that doesn't make the feeling smaller. It just means I'm overthinking and lonely at the same time, which is somehow worse than either one alone.

Eid is supposed to be uncomplicated joy. And I've had those Eids. I know what they feel like. Even if they were far from home.

This one felt like sitting in the middle of a conversation I didn't know how to finish. With my friend. With myself. With whatever friendship is supposed to mean, because I'm genuinely no longer sure my definition of it matches what I actually have.

I don't have a resolution. I had one ready, something about wanting to be known and not just familiar, about wanting the gravel outside at odd hours to be a choice and not a refuge. And I still mean all of that.

But right now I'm just tired.

Tired and quietly heartbroken in the way that doesn't make a sound. The way nobody notices because you've always been the one holding it together, listening, advising, showing up, and so everyone assumes you're fine because you've never given them evidence otherwise. Or maybe everyone's not doing fine too and we're all just pretending. But somehow it feels like I'm alone in my ‘not-being-fine’ness.

This is the end of my rant and thank you for reading. I'm going in to find what to eat then I'll proceed to overwork myself so I won't have time to think about my friendships or anything. And yes, I'm back to posting consistently on here.

Stay safe and sane.🤍

-one of my shots from Eid -

born into a sky empty as a mother's arms

after her children have been taken by war.

The darkness wraps around me like burial cloth,

thick and final as the silence that follows prayer

in a cathedral where no one comes anymore.

I hang here like a wound that refuses to heal,

a silver coin thrown into a well

that has no bottom, no echo, no answer.

The night is a desert where I am the only water,

but what good is water when there are no lips to drink,

no throats parched with the thirst of longing?

If you could see how I press my face

against the cold glass of eternity,

searching for even one small fire

to burn beside me in this endless winter.

I am a bride who waits at the altar

while the wedding guests slowly disappear

into the morning that swallows everything.

My light spills onto empty fields

where no shepherd counts his flock,

where no lover carves initials into bark,

where no child makes wishes on dandelions

blown into the wind like prayers

that God has stopped collecting.

I remember the taste of companionship

though I have never known it,

the way an orphan remembers

the weight of arms that never held him.

There is a hunger in my silver belly

for voices that sound like home,

for the gossip of distant suns

sharing stories across the void.

The earth below turns its seasons

like a mill grinding sorrow into flour,

and I watch the years pile up like snow

in the courtyard of a house

where the family died in their sleep

and no one came to wake them.

What is light without witness?

What is beauty without the sharp intake of breath

that says yes, I see you, I know you,

you matter in this brief moment

between being born and being forgotten?

I am the last candle in a city under siege,

burning alone while the walls crumble

and the enemy sleeps in the streets.

My flame is both rebellion and surrender,

defiance and the deepest grief

that comes when you realize

you will die as you lived,

singular and luminous and utterly alone.

Even my craters are empty theaters

where no applause has ever echoed,

where the only audience is the wind

that carries away my songs

before they can learn to become

the lullabies that rock the world to sleep.

Just realised I haven't posted anything in a while and yes, I saw this prompt last year and wrote this piece then. The beauty of it being that you can interpret it in different ways.🤍

Later , I went online this afternoon and opened the LCU MSSN sisters group chat.

LCU was my first university. The place where I made my first real friends after secondary school and madrasah. Where I also learned what sisterhood felt like outside of family. Where everything was new and intense and formative in the way first experiences always are.

But left after a year and a few months. I've been at my new school for three years now. I said ‘new’ because somehow,every single day that I awaken here, everything still feels strange and LCU feels like home even when I'm no longer there.

And for most of those three years, the feeling still looms. This persistent feeling that nothing here measures up to what I had there. That the friendships here aren't as deep. That the spirit of sisterhood isn't as strong. That I made a huge mistake leaving even though I had valid reasons.

I've romanticized LCU the way you romanticize anything you didn't get to finish.

But today, I don’t why but my thought process was different. I looked at that group chat and had my bouts of nostalgia and then finally thought about it differently. Honestly, for the first time ever.

I weighed the two experiences against each other. Not emotionally. Objectively.

And I realized: there isn't actually much difference between the friendships I made there and the ones I have here.

The difference is psychological.

LCU was my very first exposure. Where I met my first university friends. First taste of that specific kind of closeness. So it imprinted on me in a way nothing else could. Psychologists call this the primacy effect. The first experience in a category becomes the standard against which everything else is measured. It gets encoded differently in memory. Weighted differently in significance.

And because I only spent a year and a few months there, I never got past the honeymoon phase. I never stayed long enough to see my friends' faults clearly, never stayed long enough for any disappointment to accumulate, never stayed long enough for the reality to complicate the ideal.

So in my memory, those friendships stayed as perfect as ever. Frozen in that early state of intensity and promise.

Meanwhile, here at this school, I've been present for three full years. I've seen my friends at their worst. I've watched them fail to meet my expectations. I've experienced the disappointment that comes with longevity. I've seen the mundane reality underneath the initial excitement.

And because I'd already decided when I left LCU that nothing could ever compare, I've been interpreting everything here through that lens. Confirmation bias. I was looking for proof that this place was inferior, so of course I found it.

But the truth is simpler,that is what suddenly occurred to me this scorching evening as I sit in front of my hostel, I barely really knew my LCU friends. Not really. Not the way I know the people I've spent three years with. I knew the version of them that exists in brief, intense friendship. The version that hadn't yet had time to let me down.

And so, I sat with it and I think this is is exactly what happens with haram relationships.

I have a piece in my draftsbabout discipline in Islam, maybe i’ll put it out sometime soon. It's basically about how every act of ibadah connects to psychological principles we're only now discovering through research. How praying five times a day builds consistency and emotional regulation. How fasting teaches delayed gratification and impulse control. How Islam's structure around relationships protects us from specific patterns of self-sabotage.

And this thing I've been doing with my friendships? This romanticizing of the past, this unfair comparison, this attachment to something incomplete?

This is what happens when you have romantic or intimate experiences before marriage. You create imprints. You form attachments to people you were never supposed to build a life with. You collect experiences that become the measuring stick for everything that comes after.

Then when you finally do get married, you enter it already preparing comparisons. You're already holding your spouse up against memories that have been edited by time and distance into something unrealistically perfect. Already disappointed because reality can't compete with fantasy.

You spend your marriage longing for a past that probably wasn't even as good as you remember it being.

Islam protects us from this by design. No dating. No trial runs. No collecting experiences with people you won't end up with. You marry once, ideally, and that person becomes your entire reference point for intimacy. There's no ex to compare them to. No "better" version in your memory that they have to compete with.

As restrictive as the rules seem now, it's protective.

Because the human brain is terrible at objective memory. We don't remember things as they were. We remember them as we felt about them. And feelings change based on context. The friendship that felt magical at LCU would probably feel ordinary if I examined it now with three years of distance and maturity. But I'll never know, because I left before the magic wore off.

And that's the trap.

When you don't stay long enough to see the whole picture, you preserve the illusion. When you move on before reality sets in, you get to keep the idealized version forever. And then you spend the rest of your life measuring new experiences against an impossible standard.

This is why Islam says: don't engage before you're ready to commit. Don't create attachments you'll have to break. Don't collect memories with people who won't be in your future.

Because those memories become ghosts. They haunt your present. They make you ungrateful for what you have because you're too busy mourning what you think you lost.

And if I can do this with friendship, imagine what it does with romance. With intimacy. With the person you're supposed to spend your life with.

Every prior relationship becomes a comparison point. Every ex becomes a ghost at the table. Every memory becomes evidence that maybe you settled. Maybe there was someone better. Maybe you made the wrong choice.

Islam removes that possibility entirely. It says: this is your person. This is your only reference point. Learn them. Grow with them. Don't waste energy comparing them to people who were never meant to be yours.

And I'm only just now understanding it, three years into romanticizing a past that probably wasn't as beautiful as I've convinced myself it was.

The friends I have here are good friends. Real friends. Friends who've shown up consistently for three years. Friends who've seen me at my worst and stayed. Friends who've disappointed me, yes, but also friends who've had the chance to repair, to grow, to prove their commitment over time.

The friends I left at LCU are still good friends too. But they're not better. They're just unfinished. And unfinished things always look more appealing than completed ones because you get to imagine how perfect they would have been.

But imagination is not reality.

And Islam, in its wisdom, knows this.

It knows we're prone to nostalgia. Prone to comparison. Prone to building altars to the past and then feeling robbed when the present doesn't worship at them.

That's what I'm teaching myself today.

This does not apply just in marriage, though that's where it matters most. But in everything. In friendship. In places. In life experiences.

Stay long enough to see the raw edges. Don't leave before reality sets in and then spend years mourning an illusion.

The present deserves better than to compete with a past you've mythologized.

And there are lots of lessons to pick from this. Of which the most important is that you,my dearest reader, preserve your heart from premarital attachments and entanglements that'll set some kind of imaginary platform for comparison in your future.. And you should also learn,to be grateful for the present,to find your balance in it rather than spending your days wallowing in a past that isn't really better.

Took this picture during a study session with my friends here,that day I travelled back to my 100 level study session days with my LCU friends and I let it rob me of the magic of the moment. Not anymore⁠)⁠/⁠～⁠♡

In poetry, what we mean is

I'm bleeding quietly, but I've made it into a rhyme.

We call it fiction because it's easier

than saying this happened to me.

Because the truth, when written raw,

feels like standing naked in a crowded room.

So we hand our pain to strangers,

dress it up in pretty lines,

and pretend it's someone else's story.

Eighty percent of the time,

it's not imagination

it's a memory in disguise.

A heartbreak reworded,

a joy replayed,

a fear rewritten until it feels like art.

And when they ask,

"What inspired this?"

we smile and say,

"Oh, it's fiction."

But deep down we know

every writer is just someone

who learned how to hide their truths

in plain sight.

We give our protagonist a different name,

change the setting from our bedroom to Paris,

make the ending hopeful when ours wasn't.

We call it creative license

when really it's self-preservation

taking what broke us

and breaking it differently on paper

so maybe this time it makes sense.

The poems about longing?

Those are letters I never sent.

The ones about loss?

Eulogies for things still breathing.

The love poems?

Confessions I'm too afraid

to say without a metaphor standing guard.

I write about a girl who fell first

and call her fictional

because admitting she's me

means admitting I'm still harbouring

the burden of wanting someone

who existed just fine without me.

I write about grief like it's a character

when really it's my roommate,

the one who doesn't pay rent

but refuses to leave.

I write about faith and doubt

like they're debating in some abstract space

when really they're wrestling

in my chest at 3am

while I'm trying to pray.

Fiction is just the mask we wear

so the world won't ask too many questions.

So they won't look at us with pity

or worse, recognition.

So they won't say,

"Oh, you're the girl from that poem,"

“Oh that happened to you? Crazy!”

and suddenly we're exposed,

suddenly we're accountable

for all the feeling we put into words.

We write fiction

because nonfiction requires courage

we're still gathering.

Because saying "this is real"

means someone might say

"that's not how I remember it"

or "you're being dramatic"

or "it wasn't that deep."

So we hide behind imagination.

We claim invention.

We say we made it all up

even though anyone who knows us

can trace the bloodline

from our lives to our lines.

My colleague once told me,

"Writers don't lie, they just tweak the words

until it's bearable."

And she was right.

Every story I've written

is just my life

with the names changed

and the endings edited

to feel less like failure.

Every poem is a diary entry

I've dressed up for company.

Every character is some version of me

the brave one I wish I was,

the reckless one I'm afraid to be,

the broken one I'm trying to fix

by giving her a better story than mine.

So yes, I write fiction.

But this fiction is just a truth

that learned to wear lipstick,

a truth that got a makeover,

a truth that decided

it didn't want to be recognized

at the grocery store.

Fiction is honesty

with a pseudonym.

It's me telling you everything

while pretending I'm telling you nothing.

It's the safest way I know

to be vulnerable

to bleed in public

but call it performance art.

And maybe that's what all writing is:

a way to confess without confessing,

to scream without making a sound,

to say "this hurt me"

without having to watch you

decide what to do with that information.

So when you read my work

and something feels familiar,

when a line lands too close

to home,

when you think,

"She must have lived this"

You're right.

I did.

I just called it fiction

so I could survive

telling you the truth.

_Fiction(⁠灬⁠º⁠‿⁠º⁠灬⁠)⁠♡

One day her space beside was always occupied, the next day our Ustadh announced she was gone. I remember staring at the empty space, waiting for some enormous feeling to arrive and tell me what death meant. It never came through. I didn't cry. I didn't understand grief yet. My brain simply filed the information away and moved on because at nine, I genuinely believed I was going to live forever.

I believed everyone I loved was going to live forever too.

That's the thing about perception when you're young. You don't see reality. You see a version of reality filtered through whatever cognitive framework your brain has developed so far. And my framework at then was simple: I was special. My life was perfect. Bad things happened to other people.

I had classmates whose mothers had died. Classmates whose fathers were gone. Classmates who couldn't afford breakfast. And somehow, in my child's mind, these facts existed separately from me. They were part of their reality, not mine. I was the prototype, the exception, the girl with smooth skin and good grades and a family that felt very permanent.

Looking back now, I realize my life wasn't actually perfect then. Things were happening around me. Difficulties existed. But the way I chose to interpret them, the way my developing brain processed information, created a narrative where everything was fine. Where I was safe. Where loss and drama was something that happened in other people's stories.

Psychologists call this the personal fable, a cognitive distortion common in childhood and adolescence where you believe you're special, unique, somehow exempt from the universal rules that apply to everyone else. It's a protective mechanism. Your brain isn't developed enough to process existential threat, so it simply decides you're invincible.

I held that belief until reality forcibly corrected it. More people that I knew died. More absences appeared where presence used to be. And slowly, very painfully, my perception migrated from "I'm special and untouchable" to "oh, none of us are actually safe."

But that's just one example of how perception works. How the stories we tell ourselves about reality are often more powerful than reality itself.

Here's another: I spent quite a few years believing I was ugly because of a comment someone made about my nose in secondary school.

One comment. One girl whose face I barely remember now, who had her own insecurities that were obvious and probably spoke from them, told me my nose was big. And I absorbed that comment like a gospel truth. Kept it with me for years. Used it as evidence every time I looked in the mirror and felt inadequate.

The absurd part? When I look at photos from that time now, when I actually examine my face objectively, my nose is completely normal. Proportional. Fine. Not big, not small, just a nose that fits my face the way noses are supposed to.

But perception doesn't care about objective reality. It cares about the story you've accepted as true.

Before that comment, I'd loved my face a whole lot. I'd been one of the shortest girls in my class, a bit chubby, dark or caramel skinned depending on the season, and none of it had bothered me. I was content in my own body in a way that's almost impossible to reclaim once you lose it.

Then I got access to my mother's tablet when our data processing teacher started giving us assignments that required the use of internet. From there, I'd casually drift into her Facebook out of curiosity, then I started seeing other people's faces on social media. Started consuming images of what beauty supposedly looked like. And suddenly, my own face wasn't enough anymore.

The pimples that appeared in SS2 didn't bother me initially. I barely noticed them but I knew it was resultant from the Eid that I used my sister's powder foam (or whatever the thing is called). I saw them, told myself my sister was beautiful even though she had pimples and I moved on just fine. But then I saw other girls online with clear skin and started deciding mine was now a problem. That was when I started perceiving my normal adolescent skin as a flaw that needed fixing.

This is what they mean when they say you become what you consume. Your perception of yourself is shaped not just by what you see in the mirror, but by what you compare that mirror image to. And social media floods you with comparisons that didn't exist before screens.

There's research on this. A 2014 study in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking found that the more time people spend on social media, the more likely they are to experience body dissatisfaction and decreased self-esteem. Not because social media is inherently evil, but because it provides unlimited access to curated, filtered versions of other people's lives that you then measure your unfiltered reality against.

Before social media, my reference point for beauty was the girls in my immediate environment and to the best of my knowledge, I was a masterpiece. Now it was girls across the world with professional lighting and editing software. My perception of what was normal totally changed, and suddenly I wasn't normal anymore.

Now it's not just about beauty. Perception shapes everything about how we exist through the world.

I grew up Muslim in a diverse environment, and when I got to university, I met people whose only perception of Islam came from the news or from growing up in homogeneous communities where Muslims were abstract concepts rather than actual humans. Some of them assumed I was Hausa because their mental framework said "Muslim equals Hausa." Some of them had negative associations with Islam because that's what their environment had taught them to perceive.

None of these perceptions were based on knowing me or knowing Islam. They were based on the information their brains had been exposed to, the narratives they'd absorbed, the cognitive shortcuts their minds had developed to make sense of groups they didn't have direct experience with.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote about this in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Our brains are constantly creating shortcuts, heuristics, quick judgments based on limited information because processing everything consciously would be overwhelming. So we develop patterns. Categories. Perceptions that let us navigate the world efficiently even if they're not accurate.

The problem is we don't recognize we're doing this. We think our perceptions are objective observations of reality when really they're subjective interpretations filtered through our experiences, our environment, our cognitive limitations.

What prompted this mostly was that sometime last year, I got distracted during a reading session and found myself scrolling Pinterest in search of what I didn't lose. Somehow I came across a quote about perception that lodged itself in my brain and refused to leave. I can't remember the exact words now, but they prompted me to download two books on the psychology of perception. I finished one and abandoned the other halfway through to start reading fiction. Typical me.

The one I finished was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks, and it was everything. The exact kind of book that keeps your brows furrowed through the entire read, the kind that makes you question every assumption you have about how the brain constructs reality. Psychology is so intriguing, so unsettling in the best way.

Sacks writes about patients with neurological conditions that reveal just how constructed our perception actually is. A man who can't recognize faces, including his own wife's. A woman who loses her proprioception and has to relearn how to move her body by watching it. People whose brains have been damaged in ways that completely alter how they experience reality.

The book makes one thing brutally clear: what we perceive as objective reality is actually our brain's best guess based on incomplete information. We're all walking around assuming we see the world as it is, when really we see a version our brain has constructed from sensory input, past experience, and cognitive shortcuts.

And this becomes even more complicated when you start questioning your own identity.

Lately, I've been asking myself: who am I when no one is watching?

Who am I at home, alone, with no audience to perform for? If nobody complimented my Qira’ah, would I still recite daily? If nobody noticed how I dressed, would I still dress this way? If nobody praised my discipline or my reading habits or any of the things I've built my identity around, would I still do them?

The question unsettles me because I'm not sure I know the answer.

Psychologist Carl Rogers distinguished between the "real self" and the "ideal self." The real self is who you actually are. The ideal self is who you think you should be. And the gap between them creates anxiety, drives behavior, shapes how you present yourself to the world.

But there's a third category Rogers didn't name explicitly: the perceived self. The version of you that exists because other people's perceptions have shaped how you see yourself. The identity you've constructed based on external feedback, social expectations, the roles you've been assigned or have claimed.

I call myself a bibliophile. I love reading. But do I love it intrinsically, or have I built an identity around being "the girl who reads" and now I'm maintaining that identity to stay consistent with how I'm perceived?

I pray five times a day, recite my Qur’an, follow Islamic guidelines. But am I doing these things because they're genuinely core to who I am, or because I've been socialized into them, because they're expected, because my environment has shaped my perception of what a good Muslim looks like and I'm performing that perception?

I don't think the answer is binary. It's probably both. Some parts of my identity are genuinely mine, chosen and claimed and real. Other parts are performances I've internalized so deeply I can't tell where the performance ends and my authentic self begins.

And maybe that's okay. Or not. I figure identity is always a mix of what's intrinsic and what's absorbed from environment. And we're all constantly negotiating between who we actually are and who we've learned to be.

I don't even know the point I'm trying to drive home with this but I love that it stimulated my brain and made me retrospect. Now, I believe it matters that we ask the question. That we examine our perceptions of ourselves instead of accepting them as fixed truth.

Peprception is malleable. It changes based on what we consume, who we're around, what stories we tell ourselves. The girl who thought she was invincible learned she wasn't. The girl who thought her nose was too big learned it was fine. The version of yourself you're performing today might not be the version you'd choose if you stripped away all external influence and sat with who you actually are underneath.

Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She was talking about gender, but the principle applies more broadly: we're not born with fixed identities. We become who we are through a process of perception, interpretation, socialization, choice.

The question is whether we're becoming consciously or unconsciously. Whether we're examining our perceptions or just accepting them. Whether we're choosing our identities or letting them be chosen for us by environment, by expectation, by the accumulated weight of other people's perceptions. This also reminds me of what Ali Abdaal said,is the concept of “Be yourself” really advisable when being yourself leaves you mediocre and stuck?

I don't have clean answers to all these questions. And I din’t know if they all make sense. I'm still figuring out who I really am when nobody's watching. Still trying to distinguish between the parts of myself that are genuine and the parts that are performances.

This piece has been sitting in my drafts since I finished that Sacks book, waiting for me to find the words to make sense of what perception actually means. Not the academic definition, but the lived experience of realizing your entire reality is constructed by a brain that's doing its best with limited information and unlimited bias.

But I think the asking matters. The examination matters. Because perception shapes reality, and if you never question your perceptions, you never get to choose which reality you're living in.

You just accept the one your brain constructed from whatever information it happened to encounter. And that seems like too important a thing to leave to chance.

Not a journal exactly, more like a record. She'd been keeping it for eight months without meaning to, writing down every interaction she had with Tariq. The time he held the door open for her at the library. The way he laughed during their group study session, his head tilting back slightly, eyes closing for a split second. The afternoon he wore that particular shade of blue that made his skin glow under the lecture hall lights. The time their fingers almost touched reaching for the same textbook.

Almost.

She filled fourteen pages with almost.

This is what unrequited love actually looks like. Not the cinematic version where you pine beautifully from a distance and eventually the person notices you and everything falls into place. It looks like this. A notebook full of moments that meant nothing to one person and everything to another. A girl cataloguing evidence of a connection that exists entirely in her own mind, building a case for something that was never there.

Tariq didn't know Fatima was in love with him. He barely knew she existed outside of the lectures they shared. She was just another face in his peripheral vision, someone whose name he'd learned to associate with the study group, someone he was polite to the way you're polite to people whose last name you can pronounce.

And Fatima knew this. Somewhere beneath all the hope and the longing and the careful observation, she knew. But knowing something intellectually and feeling it are two completely different things, and her feelings were so loud they drowned out everything else.

In 2005, anthropologist Helen Fisher placed people who described themselves as being in love inside MRI machines. Not people in stable relationships. People in the obsessive, consuming early stages of infatuation, the kind that feels like your chest is physically caving in.

The results were striking. The regions that lit up were the same ones that activate in cocaine addicts experiencing cravings. The ventral tegmental area. The caudate nucleus. The parts of your brain responsible for reward-seeking, for fixation, for the kind of laser-focused attention that makes you scan every room for one specific face.

Fisher's conclusion was blunt: love, at least in its early stages, isn't an emotion in the way we think of it. It's a drive. A biological mechanism designed to make you pursue one person with single-minded intensity, flooding your system with dopamine until that person becomes the only thing that matters.

The critical detail Fisher emphasized was this: the mechanism doesn't evaluate whether the person deserves that intensity before activating. It doesn't check whether they feel the same way. It simply selects a target and fires.

So the extraordinary feeling you have when you think about someone? That feeling of electricity, of significance, of the universe conspiring to bring you together? That's not a signal that they're special. That's your dopamine system doing its job, which is to make you obsessed with someone long enough to pursue them. Nothing more.

Fatima understood none of this while it was happening. All she understood was that when Tariq walked into a room, something in her chest physically moved..like tectonic plates shifting. That when he spoke to her directly, even about something mundane like borrowing a pen, her hands would shake slightly afterward. That she'd check his Instagram story seventeen times a day not because she expected anything there but because seeing his face, even through a screen, provided temporary relief from the ache.

This is what psychologists call limerence. A state of intense, obsessive, one-sided infatuation that can last anywhere from months to years. Dr. Dorothy Tennov, who first described the phenomenon in detail, noted that people experiencing limerence often describe it as involuntary, as if their mind has been hijacked by something they didn't choose and can't control.

And that's exactly how Fatima described it to her roommate one night, crying over nothing specific, just the burden of wanting someone who didn't want her back. "I didn't ask for this," she said. "I don't even like the version of myself that does this. But I can't stop."

She couldn't stop because her brain wouldn't let her.

In 1966, psychologists conducted what became known as the suspension bridge experiment. They stationed an attractive woman at the end of two different bridges, one stable and safe, one rickety and terrifying, swaying over a canyon. She asked men crossing each bridge to fill out a survey. The men on the frightening bridge were significantly more likely to call her afterward, not because she was more attractive there, but because their brains took the adrenaline produced by fear and misidentified it as attraction.

The lesson was uncomfortable: your body can't always distinguish between fear and desire. Between anxiety and chemistry. Between the arousal of danger and the arousal of wanting someone.

Fatima was a living proof of this. She met Tariq during one of the most stressful periods of her life, deep into her fifth year of school, exhausted and lonely and terrified of the future. Her nervous system was already running hot. And then this person appeared, someone who was kind to her, who made her feel seen in small ways, and her brain took all that existing stress and said "this must be him."

It wasn't him. It was never going to be him.

But try telling that to a brain that has already decided.

The thing about one-sided love that nobody talks about honestly is how it distorts your perception of the other person. You don't fall in love with them. You fall in love with the version of them you've constructed in your own mind, built from fragments of real interactions and enormous amounts of projection.

Tariq was probably a decent person. Kind enough. Reasonably smart. But Fatima had turned him into something else entirely in her head. Every small gesture became profound. Every neutral expression became meaningful. She read depth into his silences, saw vulnerability in his awkwardness, imagined a rich inner life that matched the one she'd assigned him.

The real Tariq was just a guy. Ordinary. Going about his life. Thinking about his own problems, his own crushes, his own complicated relationship with his father that had nothing to do with Fatima.

But she couldn't see the real Tariq because the version in her head was louder.

Psychologist John Bowlby spent decades studying attachment and discovered something that explains why unrequited feelings tend to intensify rather than fade over time. Humans bond most intensely with figures who are inconsistently available,the irony of it. When someone responds to you sometimes but not others, when their attention comes in unpredictable bursts, your brain interprets that inconsistency as significance rather than indifference.

Tariq was inconsistent with Fatima only because he wasn't thinking about her at all. Some days he'd greet her warmly because he was in a good mood. Other days he'd walk past without acknowledging her because he was distracted. To Fatima, these fluctuations felt like a pattern with meaning behind it, like if she could just decode his behavior she'd understand what he really felt.

There was nothing to decode. There was no hidden meaning in his inconsistency. He was just a person whose attention had nothing to do with her.

But limerence doesn't care about logic. It feeds on uncertainty, grows stronger with every unanswered question, gets more consuming with every ambiguous interaction. The more you don't know, the more your brain fills the gaps with hope, and hope is the most addictive substance your nervous system can produce.

Fatima eventually told a friend what she was feeling, not about Tariq specifically, but about the pattern. About how she'd spent months building an elaborate emotional world around someone who had no idea she existed in any meaningful way. About how exhausting it was to maintain this silent, one-sided devotion to someone who would never know.

Her friend asked her a simple question: "What do you actually know about him? Not what you imagine. What do you actually know?"

Fatima sat with that question for a long time.

What she actually knew about Tariq: his name. His year in school. The colour of his favourite jacket. That he laughed easily and had a quiet voice and sometimes wore his cap on corporate to campus.

What she'd invented about Tariq: his depth. His sensitivity. The way he supposedly felt when they were in the same room. The future they might have. The reasons behind every expression that crossed his face.

The ratio of reality to fantasy was devastating when she actually examined it.

Realistically,the image you have of someone you're in love with is not an image of them. It's an image of yourself in love. Your brain creates a painting of this person using colours that come entirely from your own emotional state, and then you mistake the painting for the person.

Some people really are stars among satellites. Some people genuinely shine brighter, genuinely possess qualities that make them extraordinary. But even those people aren't extraordinary because of the specific magic you've attributed to them. They're just people whose qualities happen to activate your reward system more intensely than others.

And there are other stars. Billions of them. Other people who could activate that same reward system if the timing were right and your chemistry were ready. You just can't see them because you're staring so intently at one particular light that your eyes have adjusted to nothing else.

Fatima stopped writing in the notebook sometime in February. Not because she made a conscious decision to stop loving Tariq. But because she finally started seeing him clearly, without the filter her brain had spent months constructing.

She saw him talk to another girl one afternoon with the same easy warmth she'd been interpreting as something secret and significant when he directed it at her. She watched him laugh at something that had nothing to do with her, and for the first time, the laugh didn't feel like it belonged to some imagined shared world between them. It was just a laugh. He was just a person.

The spell didn't break dramatically. It dissolved slowly, the way fog lifts in the morning, until one day she realized she could look at him and feel nothing more than the ordinary recognition you feel when you see someone you once shared a classroom with.

You're allowed to love deeply. You're allowed to feel things so intensely they frighten you. Love is supposed to be enormous, supposed to rearrange your priorities and make you see the world differently.

But when it's one-sided, when you're pouring everything into someone who isn't pouring anything back, the love isn't sustaining you. It's consuming you. It's eating away at your peace, your self-worth, your ability to see yourself as complete without their attention.

And at some point, you have to choose yourself.

There’llalways be other stars. You'll find them when you finally stop squinting at the one that doesn't see you.

The comments section exploded. Thousands of people sharing their own stories of being looked at, being judged, being made to feel less Muslim by women in longer hijabs and abayas in the comments. The narrative was clear: the modestly dressed sisters are self-righteous hypocrites who think they're better than everyone else.

And look, I'm not even going to pretend that problem doesn't exist. It does. There are women who wear niqab and treat sisters in shorter hijabs like they're walking sins. There are communities where the length of your abaya determines your worth. That's real. It's wrong. And it needs to be addressed.

But somewhere between addressing legitimate judgment and creating content, people have turned this into a trend. A performance. A way to position yourself as the humble, real Muslim fighting against the oppressive, judgmental ones.

And I need us to be introspective about what's actually happening here.

A sister walks into the mosque wearing a cap that shows her edges, maybe her neck is visible, her jeans are tight and all that stuff. Another sister, in proper jilbab ,is sitting there minding her own business, probably thinking about her own sins, her own struggles, what she needs to pick up from the market after Maghrib.

They don't make eye contact. Maybe the sister in proper jilbab didn't hear the salam because she was distracted. Maybe she's socially awkward. Maybe she's going through something exhausting and doesn't have the energy for pleasantries.

But the assumption is immediate: she didn't respond because she's judging me. Because she thinks she's better than me. Because she sees my short hijab and has decided I'm not ‘Muslim enough’.

And suddenly there's a TikTok about it. Or a thread about it. A whole narrative about how judgmental the "long hijab" sisters are, how they make people feel unwelcome, how they're the reason people leave Islam.

But here's the question nobody wants to ask: are they actually judging you, or are you projecting your own discomfort onto them?

Because if you know what you're wearing isn't quite right, if you're aware that your hijab isn't meeting the requirements, then seeing someone who is meeting those requirements will make you uncomfortable. Not because they're judging you. But because their presence reminds you of the standard you're not meeting.

And instead of sitting with that discomfort, instead of asking yourself why it bothers you, it's easier to decide they're the problem. They're judgmental. They're self-righteous. They think they're perfect.

Meanwhile, that sister probably isn't thinking about you at all.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying judgment doesn't happen. I'm saying we've gotten so comfortable crying "judgment" that we've made it impossible to have honest conversations about what Islam actually requires.

Because if there's one thing I've noticed in these previous years, and now in 2026. There's this whole aesthetic of "I'm on my journey, don't judge me, we're all sinners, only Allah can judge."

And it sounds very humble and lovely. It sounds spiritual. It sounds like the kind of thing a mature, self-aware Muslim would say.

But let's be brutally honest about what it actually means in practice: I'm doing what I want, and I don't want you to say anything about it even though Islam is a religion with rules and a literal manual for every single thing.

It is literally everywhere. The "modest fashion influencer" whose edges and neck are always visible. The "hijabi" whose hijab is purely decorative, doing none of the things hijab is actually supposed to do. The "Muslim content creator" making videos about Islam while dressed in ways that directly contradict Islamic guidelines on modesty.

And when anyone points this out, when anyone gently suggests that maybe if you're representing Islam online you should try to follow Islamic dress code, the response is immediate and rehearsed:

"Don't judge me, I'm on my journey."

“Here comes the haram police.”

"We're all sinners."

"Only Allah can judge."

"Actions are judged by intentions."

And my favorite: "Worry about your own sins."

Let me address these one by one, because we need to stop using Islamic concepts to excuse Islamic violations.

"I'm on my journey." Beautiful sentiment. But a journey implies movement. If you learned three years ago that hijab requires covering your hair and neck, and you're still not doing it three years later while calling yourself a hijabi influencer, you're not on a journey. You're parked. You've decided this is where you're staying, and you're using "journey" language to make it sound temporary when really it's permanent.

Islam does recognize that people are at different stages. That change takes time. That some people need to grow into certain obligations gradually. But the key word is growing. If you're comfortable where you are, if you have no intention of changing, if you're actually building a brand around your current state, that's not a journey. That's a destination you've chosen while pretending you're still traveling.

"We're all sinners." True. Absolutely true. But not all sins are equal, and not all sins are treated the same way in Islam.

There's a difference between sinning privately and sinning publicly. There's a difference between struggling with something and celebrating it. There's a difference between falling short and teaching others that falling short is fine.

When you have 100,000 followers and you're presenting yourself as a Muslim woman while consistently not meeting basic requirements of hijab, you're not just sinning for yourself. You're teaching other women that this is acceptable. You're normalizing something Islam explicitly addresses. You're making sisters who are trying to follow the guidelines properly feel like they're the weird ones, the extreme ones, the ones who are "too much."

That's not the same as someone who sins in private, feels bad about it, tries to do better. That's public sin that influences others. And Islam treats those very differently.

"Only Allah can judge." This one kills me because it's technically true but completely misapplied.

Yes, only Allah can judge your heart. Only Allah knows your intentions. Only Allah can determine your ultimate fate.

But Allah also gave us a Book and a Sunnah with clear guidelines. And when someone is publicly violating those guidelines while claiming to represent Islam, we're allowed to say "that's not in line with what Allah said."

That's not judgment. That's just stating facts.

If someone posted a video drinking alcohol and said "don't judge me, I'm Muslim and I'm on my journey," we'd all recognize that as ridiculous. We'd say "you can call yourself Muslim, but you can't drink alcohol and represent it as Islamically acceptable."

But somehow when it comes to hijab, we've decided that any mention of the actual requirements is judgment, oppression, making people feel bad.

Why?

"Actions are judged by intentions." This is my favorite misuse of hadith. Yes, the Prophet (peace be upon him) said actions are judged by intentions. But that doesn't mean good intentions make wrong actions right.

If I intend to pray but face the wrong direction, my prayer isn't valid just because I meant well. If I intend to fast but eat and drink all day, I'm not fasting just because I had good intentions. Intention matters, but it doesn't override the actual requirements of an act of worship.

Hijab has requirements. Covering the hair, neck, and body except face and hands. Loose enough not to show the shape of your body. Not attracting attention through bright colors or decorations that defeat the purpose.

You can have all the good intentions in the world, but if you're not meeting those requirements, you're not wearing hijab. You're wearing a scarf in a style you've decided is close enough.

And here's the part that makes me the most tired: we've created this culture where the people trying to follow the guidelines properly are made to feel bad.

The sister who wears proper hijab in 40-degree heat? She's "extreme." The sister who doesn't show her edges and admonishes you just ince not to show yours. She's "judgmental." The sister who gently explains what hijab actually requires? She's "making people feel bad about themselves."

We've somehow twisted things so that following Islam makes you the problem, and the people who want to follow Islam their own way are the victims.

Let me say something that's going to make people uncomfortable: not everything is a journey. Some things are just choices.

If you've been Muslim for ten years, you know hijab is required. You know what it entails. You've had scholars explain it, you've read the verses, you've heard the hadith. At this point, you're not on a journey of discovering what hijab is. You're making a choice about whether to do it.

And that's between you and Allah. Genuinely. Your hijab or lack of hijab is your business and Allah's business.

But the minute you make it public, the minute you build a platform around it, the minute you present yourself as a Muslim woman to thousands or millions of people while not following the guidelines, it stops being just between you and Allah. Now you're teaching. You're influencing. You're showing young girls that this is what a Muslim woman looks like.

And that's where the rest of us are allowed to say: no, that's not what Islam teaches.

That's not judgment. That's pure correction. And Islam not only permits correction, it requires it in certain situations.

The Prophet (peace be upon him) said whoever sees an evil should change it with his hand, and if he cannot, then with his tongue, and if he cannot, then with his heart, and that is the weakest of faith.

When someone is publicly representing Islam incorrectly, speaking up isn't judgment. It's literally what we're supposed to do.

But we've been so conditioned by this "don't judge" culture that we can't even have these conversations anymore. Any attempt to discuss Islamic guidelines is immediately shut down as judgment, as making people feel bad, as driving people away from Islam.

And meanwhile, what's actually driving people away from Islam? The confusion. The mixed messages. The "Muslim influencers" who present one version of Islam that's easy and comfortable and accommodating, so when someone actually tries to learn what Islam requires, it feels harsh and extreme by comparison.

We're creating a generation of Muslims who think Islam is whatever they're comfortable with. Who think "journey" means you never have to arrive at a particular eureka moment. Who think "intentions" matter more than actions. Who think being corrected is the same as being attacked.

And the sisters who are actually trying to follow Islam properly? They're exhausted. They're tired of being made to feel like extremists for doing what's required. They're tired of being called judgmental for existing in proper hijab while others exist in improper hijab. They're tired of bending over backwards to make people comfortable with not following guidelines that are clear and explicit.

Let me end with this: we are all sinners. That part is true. Every single one of us falls short in some way. Every single one of us has things we need to work on.

But there's a difference between struggling with sin and celebrating it. Between falling short privately and teaching others it's fine. Between working on yourself and building a brand around your shortcomings.

If you're genuinely on a journey, good. May Allah make it easy for you. But a journey requires movement. It requires effort. It requires actually trying to get closer to the standard, not just staying where you are while calling it progress.

And if you're going to be public about your Islam, if you're going to have a platform, if you're going to represent this religion to others, then yes, you're going to be held to the standard. Not by me. By the Book and the Sunnah that you claim to follow.

That's not judgment. That's just what Islam is.

And we need to stop pretending they're the same thing.

May Allah grant us all thabaat.

Amina was in her fifth year, three weeks into her paediatrics posting, twenty-eight hours deep into a night call that had shattered her in small, accumulating ways. Her navy blue hijab had slipped back almost to her hairline hours ago. Her white coat smeared with stains she'd stopped noticing, betadine on the left sleeve, something darker on the pocket. She stood by the vending machine on the fourth floor, staring at packets of Cabin biscuits she was too exhausted to want, when she heard someone crying.

Not loud crying. The kind that happens when you're trying not to make a scene in a public place. The kind that sounds like breathing except the breath keeps catching, breaking, failing to complete itself.

She found him in the family waiting area, a man about her age, maybe a year or two older, folded forward with his face buried in his palms. He wore a rumpled blue kaftan. His keys and gadgets sat beside him on the plastic chair. The fluorescent lights overhead made everything look sickly, unreal.

His younger sister had just been admitted to the ICU. What had started as pneumonia three days ago had progressed to sepsis. The consultant had used words like "guarded prognosis" and "next forty-eight hours critical" and he didn't know how to convey those words back to his mother who was also very sick at home, who had sent him to check on her daughter, who was expecting good news.

Amina lowered herself into the chair beside him, not close enough to violate the appropriate distance between strangers but close enough to be a presence. She didn't speak immediately. Just sat there in her tired clothes, two people who didn't know each other holding space for the same species of fear.

"Is she going to die?" he asked finally, his voice muffled by his hands.

"I don't know," Amina said, because she had learned in four years of medical school that sometimes honesty, gentle and plain, is the only real kindness. "But she's in the ICU now. They're monitoring her closely. And you're here, which means she isn't going through this alone."

His name was Ibrahim. His sister was Safiya, sixteen years old, a fresh student at UNILAG. And in the suspended, peculiar intimacy of hospital waiting rooms where time stretches differently and strangers witness each other's most fragile moments, they talked until the call to Fajr echoed from a nearby mosque and the sky began its slow shift from black to grey.

He returned the next evening. Safiya was stable, responding to antibiotics, her fever finally responding. He brought Amina a bottle of chilled Ribena from the hospital cafeteria, sweating with condensation, and they talked for twenty minutes that felt like two. The day after, he came again, and this time it wasn't about Safiya.

Within three months, their families were meeting. Within six months, there was a formal proposal, the kind with his parents visiting hers with fruits and carefully constructed questions about compatibility. Within ten months, they were married in a small ceremony at the Central Mosque in Ikoyi, two families joining with prayers and optimism, everyone certain that this was blessed.

They loved each other with the kind of sureness that makes people recite poetry at weddings. The kind that feels like confirmation that God answers prayers.

But it wasn't enough.

Three years into the marriage, Amina sat in her car outside the apartment they rented in Yaba, boxes of her belongings stacked on the back seat and in the boot, her makeup running in the humid heat because the car's AC had died and she hadn't noticed. She was trying to understand how you could love someone with every part of your soul and still need to leave them.

Here's what nobody tells you when you're young and faithful and raised on stories where love and prayer solve everything: love doesn't solve structural incompatibility. Love is the foundation, yes, essential and necessary, but you cannot live inside a foundation alone. You need walls that protect, a roof that shelters, rooms arranged in ways that accommodate the lives you're each trying to live.

We've been raised on a beautiful, devastating lie sold by some Nollywood films, ‘Islamic’ romance stories, every aunty who insisted that if you're just patient and prayerful, everything works out. The lie that love conquers all. That if two people truly love each other, if they're both Muslim and pray their five daily prayers and make dua, then every obstacle will dissolve. That love is the ultimate answer.

But love is only one answer. Marriage asks a thousand questions.

Love doesn’t compensate for gaps in intelligence or curiosity, when one person wants to think deeply about the world and the other is content never interrogating it. It doesn’t magically create emotional intelligence where there is none, doesn’t teach someone how to name their feelings, sit with discomfort, or reconcile after conflict.

Love doesn’t fix radically different relationships with money,when one person sees finances as something to plan, discuss, and protect and multiply, and the other sees it as something to spend, hide, or defer responsibility for. It doesn’t reconcile clashing belief systems, even when both people share a religion but practice it through entirely different lenses…one rigid, one reflective; one heavy on culture, the other in conscious choice.

See, love doesn’t equalize ambition, doesn’t close the gap when one person is constantly growing and the other feels threatened by growth. It doesn’t teach respect, doesn’t manufacture maturity, doesn’t turn potential into reality. At best, love highlights these differences. At worst, it asks you to shrink yourself so they don’t feel so stark.

Well, back to the story,the issue wasn't children. Ibrahim wanted them, talked about them with the easy certainty of someone who'd never questioned it. Four children, he said. Maybe five. A full house, loud with life, the way his parents' home had been.

The issue was where they would build that life.

Ibrahim's father had died eight months into their marriage. Massive stroke. No warning. And suddenly Ibrahim, the eldest son, became responsible for everything, his mother, his three younger siblings still in school, the family house in Ibadan that needed repairs, the debts his father had left behind. His mother had no pension. His father's business had collapsed years ago. There was no inheritance except responsibility.

"We need to move to Ibadan," Ibrahim said six weeks after the burial, after the mourning period, after reality had settled into its new, immovable shape. "My mother can't manage alone. Safiya is transferring this year. The twins are writing JAMB. They need me there."

Amina had just started her residency in paediatrics at LUTH. Three years of training she'd fought to secure, a consultant who'd taken her on despite dozens of other applicants, a career path she'd been working toward since her clinical years. Moving to Ibadan meant abandoning all of it. Starting over. Maybe not even finding a residency slot there. Certainly not one as good.

"What about my training?" she asked, her voice careful, controlled, because she knew how this would sound. How easily "what about my career" could be misread as "I don't care about your family."

"You can defer," he said. "Or just apply again in Ibadan."

"I'm already two years into residency, Ibrahim. If I leave now, I lose the slot. I'll have to start over completely."

"My mother needs me, Amina. What am I supposed to do? Abandon her?"

Neither of them was wrong. That was the cruelty of it. His mother did need him. Islamic responsibility was clear, honour your parents, care for them, especially in widowhood. And Amina's career mattered too. Years of work, sacrificed sleep, deferred dreams, all building toward something she couldn't just walk away from.

But marriage requires someone to sacrifice. And increasingly, it was clear that someone was expected to be her.

They tried compromises. Long-distance marriagehim in Ibadan during the week, her in Lagos, reuniting on weekends. But marriages don't always thrive on weekends. Intimacy doesn't grow in two-day increments. Resentment, however, grows magnificently in distance.

He suggested she work in a private hospital in Ibadan, something part-time, flexible. She tried explaining that paediatrics residency doesn't work like that. You can't train part-time. You can't become a consultant through flexibility.

"Why is your career more important than our family?" he asked one night after Taraweeh during their third Ramadan together, his voice not angry, just tired, defeated.

"Why is your family more important than my future?" she replied, and the silence that followed was the kind that breaks things permanently.

John Gottman, the psychologist who spent decades studying marriages, discovered something that shatters the myth we've built around love. He could predict with ninety-four percent accuracy which marriages would survive. Not based on how much couples loved each other. Not based on faith or attraction or how many times they prayed together. But based on how they fought. How they repaired after hurting each other. How they responded to each other's bids for connection and attention.

Love wasn't the determining factor. Compatibility of vision was. Shared values were. The thousand small, unglamorous negotiations that make up real marriage mattered more than the feeling that brought two people together.

Plenty of couples who loved each other profoundly still divorced. Because love doesn't teach you how to navigate impossible choices. Love doesn't make competing obligations suddenly align. Love doesn't resolve the question of whose dream gets sacrificed when both dreams are valid but mutually exclusive.

Love is the easy part. Everything else is the infrastructure. And infrastructure determines whether the foundation ever becomes a home.

Amina knew a couple from medical school, childhood friends from the same neighbourhood in Kano, whose families had been planning their marriage since they were teenagers. When it finally happened, everyone called it destiny written by God Himself. They had history. Shared language. Shared faith. And a love built on decades of knowing each other.

The marriage lasted fourteen months.

Because he believed marriage meant she'd leave her work as a pharmacist to focus on home and children eventually. And she'd spent six years in university and three years building a career she had no intention of abandoning. As friends, this difference had been theoretical, abstract. As spouses sharing a bank account and making decisions about whose job determined where they lived, it became a chasm neither could cross.

They divorced quietly, with deep sadness but no bitterness, because the love had been real and it still wasn't enough to bridge the gap between two incompatible visions of marriage.

That's the truth that breaks hearts but needs hearing: you can love someone with everything in you and still be wrong for each other. You can pray Tahajjud asking Allah to make it work and it still won't. You can give it every ounce of effort you possess and still reach the conclusion that staying means slowly destroying yourself.

Because marriage requires more than love. It requires compatible answers to fundamental questions. Where will we live? Whose career takes priority? How do we balance extended family obligations with nuclear family needs? What does partnership mean when one person's culture says the husband leads and the wife follows, and the other person's understanding of Islam emphasizes mutual consultation and equality?

You cannot love someone into sharing your answers to these questions. You cannot pray someone into wanting what you want. You cannot sacrifice yourself into making incompatibility disappear.

Amina tried everything. She suggested marriage counseling. They went twice. The counselor, an older woman who'd been married forty years, kept emphasizing patience, flexibility, the wife's role in maintaining peace. She read books about modern Muslim marriages navigating dual careers and extended family obligations. She compromised on everything she could, took fewer shifts, called his mother every day, sent money to help with household expenses even when their own rent was due.

She told herself maybe she could be happy giving up residency if it meant keeping Ibrahim. That maybe love should be enough.

But resentment is insidious. It grows in the space between what you need to be whole and what you're getting. It grows slowly, quietly, like rust on metal you can't see until suddenly the structure fails completely.

One night in their third year, sitting across from each other at iftar, she looked at him and realized she was angry. Not at him specifically. At the impossible situation. At the unfairness of two good people with genuine love still being unable to make it work. At a world that demanded she choose between being a good wife and being the doctor she'd worked so hard to become.

"I need to leave," she said after they prayed Isha together, her voice steady despite everything breaking inside her. "Not because I stopped loving you. But because staying means losing myself. And I can't do that. Not even for you."

He didn't fight her. Because he loved her too. And loving her meant understanding that asking her to give up everything she'd worked for wasn't love, it was suffocation. Even if letting her go destroyed him.

That's what love looks like when it's real but insufficient. Two people who cherish each other making the brutal choice to separate because staying means one of them dying slowly inside.

The University of Denver tracked couples from engagement through their first decade of marriage. They found that the intensity of premarital love had almost no correlation with long-term marital satisfaction.

What predicted lasting happiness? Compatible expectations. Effective communication. Similar approaches to conflict. Aligned values around money, family obligations, career ambitions, and the practical structure of daily life.

Couples desperately in love but fundamentally incompatible ended up miserable. Couples with steady affection but high compatibility ended up content.

Because love doesn't resolve the argument about whose family you live near. Love doesn't fix the problem when one person's dream requires staying put and the other's requires moving away. Love doesn't bridge the gap when one person believes marriage means the wife's career is secondary and the other believes partnership means equal consideration.

Love just exists, present and real and powerless, while everything else determines whether you survive.

I'm not saying love doesn't matter. It matters immensely. Marriage cannot exist without it. But love alone isn't enough. It's like the soil, necessary for growth, but you need more than soil. You need sun and water and the right climate. You need compatible conditions.

You need aligned life goals. You need similar values. You need emotional intelligence and conflict resolution skills and the willingness to repair after wounding each other. You need to be walking toward the same destination, not just holding hands while going opposite directions.

Without these things, love can't save you. It will just make the breaking hurt more.

Amina and Ibrahim are both remarried now. She married a paediatrician she met during residency, someone who understood the demands of medical training because he lived them too. They have two daughters and a practice they run together in Lekki. Ibrahim married a teacher from Ibadan who'd always planned to stay close to her own family. They have a son and live three streets from his mother's house.

They saw each other once, two and a half years after the divorce, at a mutual friend's wedding in Abuja. They smiled across the crowded hall with all the careful politeness of people who once knew each other intimately and now were strangers. There was no bitterness. No regret. Just the quiet, sad acknowledgment that they'd loved each other truly and it hadn't been enough.

So yes, love deeply. Love sincerely. Love with your whole heart the way Allah commands. But don't convince yourself love solves structural problems. Don't dash into a relationship where love seems to be the only thing you share and everything else conflicts. Don't sacrifice your essential self because you've been told love should be enough.

It isn't enough.

Knowing when to walk away from someone your heart feels at ease with because your lives are fundamentally incompatible isn't failure. It's wisdom. Understanding that some people are meant to be loved from a distance. That some marriages too, however sincere the love, aren't meant to survive because love is earnestly never enough.

Eight billion hearts beating. Eight billion minds thinking. Eight billion people waking up, going to work, eating meals, scrolling phones, living lives that feel unique to them but look identical from above.

From a satellite, we're just pixels. From a hiring manager's desk, we're just resumes in a stack. From a university admissions office, we're just application numbers. From the algorithm's perspective, we're just data points in a pattern it's seen a million times before.

You are one of eight billion.

And if that doesn't terrify you into action, I don't know what will.

There's a study from 2019 that analyzed over 10,000 job applications for entry-level positions at major companies. The researchers found that recruiters spent an average of 7.4 seconds reviewing each resume before deciding whether to move forward or reject.

Seven point four seconds.

That's how long you have to convince someone you're worth more attention than the 247 other people who applied for the same position. That's how long you have to prove you're different, valuable, worth the risk of an interview.

Seven seconds to get out of the pile.

But here's what most people do with those seven seconds: they blend in. They use the same resume template everyone else downloaded from the same website. They list the same skills in the same corporate language. They describe their experience using the same boring action verbs. "Responsible for." "Assisted with." "Participated in."

They make themselves invisible while desperately hoping to be seen.

Let us cite Eniola, a 20 years old Nigerian. Very brilliant girl. Top of her class, even. Genuinely smart, hardworking, everything you're supposed to be. She applied to 87 jobs after graduation.

Eighty-seven applications with carefully tailored cover letter and perfectly formatted resumes. Every qualification they asked for, she had. Every requirement they listed, she met.

She got 11 responses. Four interviews. Zero offers.

Not because she wasn't qualified. But because 86 other people were also qualified. And when everyone is qualified, qualification becomes meaningless. When everyone meets the requirements, meeting the requirements is just the entry fee, not the prize.

She was in the pile. And the pile is where dreams go to die quietly while you keep checking your email hoping this time will be different.

The pile exists everywhere. The pile of university applications. The pile of manuscript submissions. The pile of business proposals. The pile of people trying to get noticed, trying to get chosen, trying to get the opportunity that will change everything.

And the brutal truth is: most people in the pile stay in the pile. Because being in the pile means you're doing what everyone else is doing. And doing what everyone else is doing guarantees you'll get the same results everyone else is getting, which is nothing.

You want to know what gets you out of the pile?

Not being in it in the first place.

In 2011, a college student wanted an internship at a marketing firm in New York. Competitive field. Hundreds of applicants. Standard process: submit resume online, wait for response, probably get rejected.

He didn't submit a resume.

Instead, he created a mock advertising campaign for the firm itself. He analyzed their current marketing, identified gaps, proposed solutions. Then, he put together a full presentation, pnted it, bound it professionally, and showed up at their office unannounced.

"I'm not here to apply for the internship," he told the receptionist. "I'm here to show you why your current approach to hiring interns is missing the best candidates. I've prepared a presentation. It'll take ten minutes. If you're not interested after five, I'll leave."

They gave him fifteen minutes. Then they gave him the internship. Then they hired him full-time after graduation.

He never entered the pile. He bypassed it entirely by doing what everyone else was too scared or too conventional to do.

That's not a feel-good story about thinking outside the box. That's a tactical example of understanding how the world actually works versus how we're told it works.

We're told: follow the process, be patient, your qualifications will speak for themselves.

Reality: the process is designed to eliminate, patience is how you lose to people who act faster, and your qualifications are identical to 300 other people so they say nothing.

You have to do something different. Not just slightly different. Dramatically different. Uncomfortably different. Different enough that people notice because you're impossible to ignore.

There's a writer I know who wanted to get published. She wrote a novel. Very good novel. She followed all the advice: researched agents, wrote query letters, submitted according to their guidelines. Sent out 142 queries over two years.

She got 12 requests for partial manuscripts. Three requests for full manuscripts. Zero offers of representation.

The feedback was always the same: "Well-written, but not quite right for our list." "Strong voice, but similar to other projects we're currently representing." "Impressive work, but we're not sure how to position this in the current market."

Translation: you're good, but you're not different enough to be worth the risk.

So she stopped querying. Started a newsletter instead. Began posting chapters of her novel online for free. Then, built an audience of 400 people who loved her work. Then 1,000. Then 5,000.

Eventually,she self-published the novel and sold 10,000 copies in the first year through her newsletter and word of mouth. A publisher noticed. Not because she was in their submissions pile, but because she'd created demand they couldn't ignore.

Now she has a three-book deal and an agent who once rejected her query.

She got out of the pile by refusing to wait for permission. By building her own platform. By making herself valuable enough that the gatekeepers came to her.

I know what you're thinking. "But I'm not that bold. I'm not that creative. I don't have some genius plan to bypass the system."

You don't need to be genius. You only need the courage to be uncomfortable.

What does it feel like to be in the pile? It's comfortable. Submitting a resume is comfortable. Following the standard process is comfortable. Doing what everyone else does is comfortable because if you fail, at least you failed the normal way, the acceptable way, the way nobody can criticize you for.

But comfortable is how you stay invisible.

There are 8 billion people on this planet. Do you know how many of them are doing exactly what you're doing? Applying to the same schools, the same jobs, the same programs? Using the same strategies? Following the same advice?

Millions. Literally millions of people doing the exact same thing you're doing, hoping for different results.

And you think you're going to win that lottery? You think you're going to be the one person they pick out of the pile of identical applications?

You won't. The math doesn't work. The odds don't work. Hope is not a strategy.

But you know what works? Making yourself very impossible to ignore.

A student wanted to get into a competitive medical school abroad. Her grades were good but not exceptional. Her test scores were above average but not remarkable. She was qualified, certainly, but so were the 6,000 other people applying for 150 spots.

She could have written a standard personal statement about why she wanted to be a doctor. She could have listed her volunteer experiences and research projects like everyone else. She could have hoped that somehow, her application would stand out from the pile.

Instead, she made a video. Not a polished, professional video. A raw, honest video about the patient who changed her life. The 12-year-old girl with leukemia she volunteered with. The day that girl died. What she learned about medicine, about suffering, about the difference between treating disease and caring for humans.

She sent the video link with her application. Added a note: "I know this isn't standard. But if you're going to spend four years teaching me to be a doctor, you should know why I'm willing to spend four years learning."

The admissions director watched it and showed it to the committee. They interviewed her first and actually accepted her early.

Not because the video was perfectly produced. But because it was real, specific, impossible to ignore. Because it showed them who she was in a way a resume never could. Because it got her out of the pile.

You don't have to make a video. You don't have to show up at offices unannounced. You don't have to build a newsletter with thousands of subscribers.

But you have to do something that makes you different. Something that makes you memorable. Something that makes the person reviewing your application or reading your submission or considering your proposal stop and actually see you instead of just seeing another indistinguishable face in the crowd.

It's rarely the most qualified person. It's the most memorable person. The person who made the decision-maker's job easy by being impossible to overlook.

You are one of eight billion people. In your field, in your city, in your demographic, you're one of thousands or millions trying to do the same thing.

The question isn't whether you're good enough. You probably are. The question is: are you different enough?

Because good enough gets you into the pile. Different gets you out of it.

Get uncomfortable. Take the risk. Do the thing that scares you because it's unconventional or bold or might not workk.

Because there are 8 billion people on this planet, and most of them will live and die without anyone noticing they were here.

Don't be most people.

Be impossible to ignore.

Women were dying in his maternity ward. Not from childbirth complications and not from diseases. They were dying from something the doctors were bringing them. He watched physician after physician move from autopsy room to delivery room without washing their hands, and he watched women develop fevers and die within days.

So Semmelweis did something radical: he made his doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution before touching patients.

The death rate dropped from 18% to 2% almost immediately.

He had the evidence. He had the results. He had saved thousands of lives with a simple intervention that cost almost nothing.

The medical establishment destroyed him for it.

They rejected his findings. Mocked his theory. Called him crazy. Forced him out of his position. He died in an asylum at 47, beaten by guards, his hands infected with the very disease he'd spent his life trying to prevent others from getting.

Fifteen years after his death, Louis Pasteur's germ theory proved Semmelweis had been right all along.

But by then, thousands more women had died. Died because Semmelweis was right too early. Died because he didn't know how to wait, how to build alliances, how to let his idea mature before forcing it into a world that wasn't ready. Died because being correct before the world is ready to hear it is functionally identical to being wrong.

To be right too early is to be wrong.

Not because your facts are incorrect. Not because your logic is flawed. And not because your evidence isn't sound enough. But because every truth needs an audience ready to receive it, and timing determines whether your correctness becomes revolution or becomes your ruin.

You know this feeling. You might have lived it. You've been the person who saw something clearly while everyone around you was still blind to it. You've been the one who understood what was coming before it happened. You've been right, provably right, and watched people reject you anyway because they weren't ready to hear it yet.

You warned your friend about their relationship. Saw the red flags they couldn't see, predicted the ending they refused to believe was coming. You were right. But you were right six months too early, so instead of being thanked, you were called judgmental, jealous, unsupportive. They cut you off. Chose the person who would eventually prove you right but not until after the damage was done.

When it finally ended exactly as you said it would, did they apologize? Did they acknowledge you'd been right all along? Or did they just quietly distance themselves, unable to face you without confronting their own willful blindness?

Being right too early costs you the relationship. Being right on time makes you a hero. The difference isn't accuracy. The difference is whether people are ready to hear what you already know.

Or maybe it was a work thing. You saw the project was failing. You raised your concerns. You had the data, evidence, clear indicators that the approach wouldn't work. You spoke up in meetings. You sent emails. You tried to warn people.

And you were ignored. Dismissed. Labeled as negative, as not a team player, as someone who didn't believe in the vision. They pushed forward with the plan you knew would fail. And when it did fail, spectacularly and expensively, nobody remembered that you'd predicted it. They just remembered you'd been difficult during the planning stages.

You were right. But you were right too early, which made you wrong in every way that matters: politically, socially, professionally.

The world doesn't reward accurate prediction. It rewards accurate prediction that arrives at the moment people are willing to hear it. Come too soon and you're a prophet without honor. Come too late and you're stating the obvious. The window for being right in a way that matters is incredibly narrow, and it has almost nothing to do with the quality of your insight.

But here's what Semmelweis didn't understand, what most people who are right too early fail to grasp: just having the truth isn't enough. You need the strategy. You need the patience. You need to let your idea mature, to build quietly, to wait for the conditions that make people receptive.

Galileo was right about heliocentrism. He had the math. He had the observations. He had proof that the Earth orbited the sun.

The Catholic Church put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. His books were banned. His ideas were declared heresy. He died blind and isolated, with his work suppressed.

It took the Church 359 years to officially admit he'd been right.

But consider Copernicus, who had the same idea decades earlier. He published his heliocentric theory on his deathbed, after years of circulating it privately among trusted scholars, after building a foundation of support, after waiting for the right moment. His work survived. His ideas spread. He died peacefully in his bed.

The same concept. Different strategy. And definitely different outcome.

As a creative, a friend, an employee, anything really, you need to know this: it's not enough to be right. You have to be strategic about your rightness. You have to understand that ideas are like fruit. Present them before they're ripe and people spit them out. Wait too long and they rot. The skill isn't just in having the insight. The skill is knowing when to share it.

Semmelweis burst into the medical establishment and demanded immediate change. He alienated colleagues. He insulted the very people whose support he needed. He was right, but he was aggressive in his rightness, impatient with anyone who didn't immediately see what he saw.

Compare that to Florence Nightingale, who had similar insights about sanitation and hospital hygiene decades later. She was strategic. She collected data quietly. She built relationships with powerful people. She presented her findings in ways that made others feel like collaborators rather than fools. She let her ideas mature in the minds of decision-makers before pushing for implementation.

Both were right. Only one succeeded in their lifetime.

The difference wasn't the quality of their insight. The difference was understanding that being right is only the first step. The second step is preparing the ground for your truth to take root.

You can see something clearly and still know that saying it right now will accomplish nothing except making you a target. You can have the answer and still choose to wait until people are asking the question. You can be correct and still be patient enough to let others arrive at your conclusion on their own, at their own pace, so they feel ownership of the idea instead of resentment toward you for forcing it on them.

And here's one very important thing too': the danger of announcing ideas before they're ready. Before you've done the hard work. Before you've tested them. Before you're even certain they're worth pursuing.

We live in an age of instant announcement. You get an idea and immediately post it. Tweet it. Tell everyone. Seek validation before you've even begun the work. And there's a psychological cost to this that nobody warns you about.

When you announce an idea prematurely, you invite criticism before you've built conviction. You expose vulnerable thoughts to hostile environments. You let other people's doubt seep in before you've fortified your own belief. And worst of all, you get a hit of satisfaction from the announcement itself, a small dopamine reward that your brain mistakes for the satisfaction of actually completing the work. So you feel productive without being productive. You feel accomplished without accomplishing anything.

I watched this happen to someone close to me growing up. My cousin was brilliant with his hands, always building things, creating gadgets, solving mechanical problems the rest of us couldn't even understand. But he had this habit: every time he got an idea, he'd announce it. Tell everyone what he was planning to build, what invention he was working on, how it would change everything.

And every time, the same thing happened. People would discourage him. Point out flaws. Tell him it wouldn't work. Explain why someone else had probably already tried it or that he would never be able to get the resources he needed. And his conviction would crumble before he'd even started.

Not because the ideas were bad. But because he shared them before they were strong enough to withstand scrutiny. Before he'd done the work to make them real enough to defend. Before they'd matured from fragile possibilities into concrete plans.

There's profound wisdom in silence. In letting big ideas sit. In giving them time to develop roots in your own mind before exposing them to the elements.

When you have a genuinely big idea, something that could actually matter, your first instinct shouldn't be announcement. It should be protection. Write it down. Sit with it. Test it privately. Pray about it if that's your practice. Start working on it in secret.

Let the idea prove itself to you first before asking others to believe in it. Let it mature from vague possibility into concrete reality. Let it develop strength through your own work before subjecting it to other people's doubt.

In 1933, a German-Jewish physicist tried to warn people about what was coming. He saw Hitler's rise. He saw the nationalism spreading. He saw how easily hate could metastasize into policy. He told everyone who would listen: get out now, while you still can.

People called him paranoid. Alarmist. Dramatic. Said he was overreacting. That it wouldn't get that bad. Said he was being too political, too negative, too fearful.

He left anyway. Saved himself and his family. And then watched from abroad as everyone who'd called him paranoid discovered he'd been exactly right.

But by then it was too late for them.

He was right too early. And the people who needed to hear him couldn't hear him because they weren't ready to believe what he could already see.

But imagine if he'd been more strategic. If instead of prophesying doom, he'd quietly helped people make escape plans without framing them as escapes. If he'd planted seeds of concern without demanding immediate action. If he'd prepared people psychologically for what was coming instead of shocking them with predictions they couldn't process.

Would more people have survived? Would his truth have been more effective if he'd delivered it differently?

We'll never know. But the question matters because it's the question you face every time you see something others don't see yet.

Do you speak immediately and risk rejection? Or do you wait, strategically, building toward the moment when your truth can actually land?

Being right too early is to be wrong because the only truth that matters is a truth people can act on. Truth they can integrate. Truth they're psychologically ready to accept. Everything else is just noise that annoys them.

You can be right about your friend's toxic relationship, but if they're not ready to leave, your rightness is just interference. Better to plant small seeds of doubt. Better to ask questions that let them arrive at the conclusion themselves. Better to be there when they're ready rather than pushing them before they can accomodate it.

You can be right about the failing project, but if the team isn't ready to pivot, your rightness is just obstruction. Better to document your concerns privately. Better to build alliances with people who share your skepticism. Better to wait for the first sign of failure and then offer your alternative as a solution rather than as an "I told you so."

You can be right about the danger ahead, but if people aren't ready to change course, your rightness is just fear-mongering. Better to prepare quietly. Better to help individuals protect themselves without trying to save everyone. Better to let reality teach the lesson you can't teach.

This is the hard part. The part that feels like compromise. Like cowardice. Like betraying your own clarity by not speaking it loudly and immediately.

But there's a big difference between withholding and timing. Between hiding what you know and knowing when to reveal it. Between being silent and being strategic.

Some truths need to marinate. In your own mind first, so you're absolutely certain you're not mistaking fear for foresight or bias for insight. Then in the minds of a few trusted people who can pressure-test your thinking, challenge your assumptions, help you refine the message. Then in carefully chosen moments when the audience is primed to hear it.

This is how revolutions actually happen.

Darwin sat on his theory of evolution for twenty years. Not because he doubted it. But because he understood that presenting it before the world was ready would destroy both the idea and himself. He waited. He gathered more evidence. He built relationships with influential scientists. He let others publish preliminary ideas that prepared the ground. And when he finally published, the world was ready. Still controversial, still shocking, but ready enough that the idea could survive and spread.

But

The truth emerges eventually. With or without you. But whether you survive the emergence, whether your insight leads to change or just to your own isolation, depends entirely on your understanding of timing.

To be right too early is to be wrong in every way that matters socially, politically, professionally. The only place you get to be right is inside your own head, in your own integrity, in your own knowledge that you saw clearly even when others couldn't.

But you can choose to be strategic with that rightness. You can choose to let your ideas mature before exposing them to hostile environments. You can choose to build support systems before you need them. You can choose to wait for the moment when your truth can actually change something instead of just marking you as difficult.

Otherwise, the alternative is Semmelweis. Correct, vindicated posthumously, but destroyed by his own inability to understand that being right too early requires more than rightness. It requires wisdom. Strategy. The discipline to let truth mature until the world is ready to receive it.

That's its own kind of vindication. Slower. Less satisfying. But infinitely more effective.

And sometimes, effectiveness matters more than being first.

Not her real name, obviously, but let's call her that. Sarah who you've known since first year. Sarah who sits next to you in class because you both arrived late that first day and those were the only two seats left together. Sarah who you exchange notes with, laugh with between lectures, grab lunch with when your schedules align.

Sarah who you're not entirely sure is actually your friend.

No, scratch that. You know she's not your friend. Not really. But you keep pretending she is because admitting the truth feels mean, feels judgmental, feels like you're being the problem when really you're just noticing a pattern you've been ignoring for months.

Here's the pattern:

Sarah texts you when she needs something. Notes from the class she missed. Help understanding a concept. Someone to sit with at an event because going alone feels pathetic. Complaining about her situationship because her other friends are tired of hearing about it.

Sarah is available when it's convenient. When she's bored. When her other plans fell through. When the friends she actually wants to hang out with are busy.

Sarah never asks how you're doing unless you've just finished helping her with something and she feels obligated to reciprocate with the social minimum.

And you know this. You've known this. But you keep showing up because, well, what's the alternative? Being alone? Being the girl with no friends? Admitting that you're so desperate for connection that you'll accept this watered-down version of friendship where you're the supporting character in someone else's life?

Yeah. That's exactly what you're doing.

Welcome to the world of friendships built on convenience, where nobody's technically doing anything wrong but everyone's vaguely unsatisfied and no one knows how to exit without seeming dramatic.

Let me ask you something: when was the last time someone chose you first?

Not because you were available. Not because their better option fell through. Not because you happened to be there. But because they actively wanted your company, your perspective, your presence?

When was the last time someone texted you just to talk? Not to ask for something. Not to vent. Not because they needed a study partner or someone to split an order with. Just because they were thinking about you and wanted to connect?

When was the last time someone made plans with you and actually kept them? Without canceling last minute because something better came up? Without showing up thirty minutes late because you weren't the priority?

If you're struggling to answer these questions, congratulations. You've collected a roster of convenience friends. People who like you just enough to use you but not enough to value you. People who keep you around as a backup plan, an option, a "better than nothing."

And the worst part? You know it. You feel it every time you're the one initiating. Every time they cancel. Every time they disappear for weeks and then pop up when they need something. Every time you finish helping them and they immediately end the conversation instead of asking about your life.

You know it, and you accept it, because you've convinced yourself that this is normal. That all friendships are transactional to some degree. That everyone's busy and you're being too sensitive expecting more. That having surface-level friendships is better than having no friendships at all.

But is it, though?

Is it better to have friends who make you feel lonely than to actually be alone? Is it better to be surrounded by people who don't really see you than to have space for people who might? Is it better to settle for convenience than to hold out for connection?

I'm watching this play out everywhere. In group chats that only activate when someone needs something. In friendships that exist exclusively in one location—at work, at school, at the gym—but never translate to real life. In relationships where you're always the giver and they're always the taker and everyone pretends not to notice the imbalance.

The girl who only calls when she's going through a crisis but is mysteriously unavailable when you're struggling. The friend who loves your company but never introduces you to their other friends because you're in different social categories. The person who's happy to grab lunch if you're paying but somehow broke every time it's their turn.

These aren't friendships. These are arrangements. Transactions. Conveniences.

And we accept them because we're scared. Scared of being alone. Scared of seeming needy. Scared of admitting that we deserve better and then having to actually do the work of finding it.

Here's a test: stop initiating.

Stop being the one who texts first, who makes plans, who follows up, who keeps the friendship alive through sheer force of will. Just stop. And see what happens.

I did this once. Decided I was tired of being everyone's backup friend, their convenient option, their "she's always available anyway" plan. So I stopped reaching out. Stopped initiating. Stopped carrying conversations that other people started but wouldn't sustain.

You want to know what happened?

Silence.

Weeks of it. Then months. People I thought were friends just... evaporated. Because our friendship wasn't actually a friendship, it was me doing all the work and them showing up when it suited them.

And it hurt. Of course it hurt. Because even though I knew these weren't real friendships, losing them still felt like loss. Still felt like proof that I was right, that I wasn't actually important to these people, that I was disposable.

But here's what else happened: space.

Space for me to stop the circus show. Space for me to stop settling. Space for me to notice the few people who did reach out, who did notice my absence, who did value me beyond what I could do for them.

Space to realize that I'd rather have two real friends than twenty convenient ones.

Because that's the thing about convenience friendships—they're easy until they're not. They're fine until you need something and realize these people won't show up for you the way you've shown up for them. They're comfortable until you notice you're doing all the emotional labor and getting none of the support.

You know what real friendship looks like? Reciprocity. Effort. Consistency.

Real friends text you just because. They remember things you told them weeks ago. They show up when you need them even when it's inconvenient. They celebrate your wins without making it about them. They're present, not just physically but emotionally.

Real friends don't make you feel like you're bothering them by existing. They don't only contact you when they need something. They don't treat your time and energy like it's infinite and disposable.

Real friends make you feel chosen, not convenient.

And if you don't have that, you don't have friends. You have acquaintances. Colleagues. People you know. People who are nice enough when it costs them nothing.

But not friends.

So here's what I'm saying: stop settling.

Stop accepting scraps of attention from people who should be giving you full meals. Stop making excuses for people who consistently show you they don't value you. Stop nurturing friendships that wouldn't exist if you stopped lifting them.

I know it's scary. I know being alone feels like failure in a world that measures worth by how many friends you have, how many people show up to your ceremonies,how active your group chat is.

But you know what's scarier? Spending years of your life investing in people who will drop you the second you stop being useful. Building your social life on a foundation of convenience that will crumble the moment you need support.

Let them go and make space for better. For people who choose you. For friendships that don't require you to shrink yourself or lower your standards or pretend you don't notice you're the only one trying.

The right people won't feel like work. They won't make you question if you matter to them. They won't leave you wondering if you're important or just convenient.

The right people will show you. Consistently. Without you having to beg for it.

And until those people show up, stop wasting your energy on the wrong ones.

You deserve more than being someone's backup plan.

You deserve more than friendships that only exist when it's easy.

You deserve to be chosen, not settled for.

And the only way to get that is to stop accepting anything less.

So stop texting Sarah. Stop initiating conversations with people who wouldn't notice if you disappeared. Stop showing up for people who wouldn't show up for you.

And start showing up for yourself.