One day, you realise that most of your suffering was never caused by people leaving.

It was caused by your refusal to accept that they wanted to.

We spend years believing that love can be proven through patience, that if we stay long enough, understand enough, forgive enough, people will eventually choose us,

But human beings do not stay because they are understood.

They stay because they want to.

And there is a strange freedom in accepting this.

Not everyone who enters your life is meant to remain in it. Some people are lessons disguised as love of our lives, some are mirrors, some are warnings, some are simply passing through.

The problem begins when we try to turn temporary things into permanent ones

We hold on.  We negotiate with reality. We exhaust ourselves trying to save what we have already lost

Yet the river never argues with the leaf that floats away.

It simply continues flowing

Perhaps maturity is realising that people belong to themselves before they belong to us,

Their choices are theirs, their distance is theirs, their absence is theirs,

And our peace should not depend on changing any of it

So let them misunderstand you, let them outgrow you, let them choose another path,

Not because they were right, and not because you were wrong,

But because life truly becomes lighter the moment you stop seeking what was never truly yours

Some doors are not meant to be closed with anger.

They are meant to be left open with acceptance.

And that’s when you walk away, not carrying resentment or hurt,

but carrying wisdom.

As children, we were always taught to dream big, and that anything is achievable as long as we work hard and put our minds to it, no matter how silly or impossible it may seem. We explore and live through multiple different lives to gain a feeling of what it is we might want to do with the rest of our lives.

My own memory betrays me as I confuse my own invincible childlike attitude with the encouragement of the adults around me. I remember the feeling like I can do anything, and there was no roof on life, allowing me to exceed all limitations. But most importandly i remember always being reminded to choose one thing. As I got older, it seemed like the advice I had been given became less about doing the impossible or even about being happy, but about staying confined to a path.

One that allows us to live beyond just survival, but at what cost?

Like almost every other teenager on the planet, I always feel as if I’m running out of time to truly live. In my years of lving i have conjured up so many different dreams looking in on doors of infinite possibilities of my future as I age each year, but that’s all I have done. Look in. Dream. I managed to single-handedly waste so much time thinking of what I could be instead of taking a chance on myself.

I can't speak for everyone, but I myself have become so suffocated with the amount of choices I thought I had that I ended up not doing anything. I spent all of this time attempting to live in a false reality, shifting the blame to my indecisiveness when it was daydreaming that had done most damage.

I think the reason I love Sylvia Plath’s Fig analogy because it perfectly captures the exact aching greed of wanting to do everything but allowing the indecisiveness to consume you so badly that you just let it slowly pass. You live your day-to-day life disassociated, indulging in the fantasies of what your live couldve been instead of acting on.

We let life continuously pass by us in exchange for our comfort, but why? At what point does daydreaming turn from a temporary escape to a zombifying disorder, and why have we normalised it?

It's necessary to acknowledge the fact that it’s not truly living to sacrifice your dreams to conform to a life of a meaningless pay cycle, but at the very same time theres’s no life in imagining the reality you longed for without producing the fruit of your thoughts.

Whether you have prolonged the process of acting on your dreams due to fear of failure, anxiety, or hesitancy dont allow yourself to be comfortable in fantasy that you don’t even attempt to achieve at least one of the things you have been trying to reach for.

Like Sylvia Plath, I too find myself sitting in the crotch of the fig tree, granting them the right to rot in front of me and complaining of my situation. We as a society have undermined the outstanding privilege of being able to have dreams and aspirations and shouldn’t take it forgranted.

So reader, please don’t be bound to the root of your fig tree your only given this life once 💌

But those parts still built me.

It’s weird when you start to realise you’re a mosaic of things you never asked for.

Your kindness? Maybe it came from being around people who weren’t kind. Your independence? Maybe because you got used to nobody showing up.

No one warns you that you can grow around your pain like vines around a fence. It can shape your sense of humour, your taste in music, the way you text “haha” when you’re actually kind of sad. Or that your trust issues might start dressing up as “boundaries.” And that detachment can look a lot like being chill, until you realise you haven’t cried in 6 months and don’t know how to say “I need you.”

I look around the girls I know. Pretty, quiet, strong, guarded. And I wonder how many of them are walking wounds. How many of us are made from memories we wish we could forget? How many of us learned to be lovable by being small? Or agreeable? Or easy to handle?

I wonder if we were ever really ourselves, or just the safest version of the version we had to become.

I think about younger me a lot. She didn’t deserve half of the things that happened to her. But I also don’t know who I’d be without those things.

I don’t want pain to be my personality. I want softness that isn’t born from suffering. I want to be gentle because I am, not because I had to be.

I grieve the girl I could’ve been if I didn’t have to be so strong all the time. I grieve the safety that never showed up.

Where do you go when the people you once held dear are the ones trying to rip you apart?

Where do you go when the boy you once loved now absolutely repulses you?

Where do you go when you realise there are people out there who wholeheartedly hate you?

Do you hide behind the shadows until the storm passes?

Or do you just lie dead on the withered grasses?

Do you still adore your own reflection?

Or do you break the glass at the slightest confrontation?

Do you still manage to twinkle the way you always had?

Or do the thoughts of self-doubt keep your nights jammed?

Living a life of constant discordance, I ask you a question today of utmost importance:

In this bleak world of pain and sorrow, where do you go to seek acceptance?

“Such is the way of Allah that has occurred before; and you will never find in the way of Allah any change.”

— Surah Al-Ahzab

Sometimes, I think I was doomed from the beginning. The rage that runs rampant in my veins, it was planted there before I even had the chance to be born. My fate was written out far before my time. I was doomed from the start. I’ve been angry since I was in the womb.

Do you know what it’s like to wear shame like a soaking wet wool blanket? To hide behind flushed cheeks and a stomach in knots. Or have you never felt it before: the heavy, dirty, sick weight that seeps into your skin and slips into your bloodstream. The feeling that you might not get the chance to explain yourself. They say the human brain cycles through five recurring thoughts. Just five. What happens if one of mine is ashamed? What does that make me?

How do you escape something you never asked for in the first place? How do you scrub yourself clean when it’s not dirt on your body but something lodged inside your chest? I push my body until my lungs ache, I sit in the sun until I’m dizzy, I swim until I’m nothing but liquid. But I am working on that last part. I refuse to become my father. I tell myself that over and over like a prayer, like a curse.

Shame can show up in a multitude of ways. I want you to think of what makes you feel shameful in your own life. Can you feel it buried deep within you, so far down that unless you looked hard enough, you’d think it wasn’t even there? We all have something shameful within us; some of us just carry more than others.

Shame, to me, feels like a cold sweat. Guilt feels like a fever. Grief feels like a faulty lung. I do not know life without them, but maybe neither do you.

To her, nostalgia doesn’t feel sweet. To her, it feels like she’s standing still while everyone else is moving on. Like life is happening in fast forward for them, and she’s frozen in place, watching from a distance.

She’s still holding onto old moments.

They’re making new ones.

She’s lonelier then ever.

It’s an interesting thing, nostalgia. It’s supposed to be sweet, a comfort in reliving something you’ve already experienced. But to her, it’s heavy. A reminder of everything that’s changed and what hasn’t.The permanent nature of growing up means that she can never go back. What should have been happy memories now leave an uneasy weight in her chest, like a song on the wrong note.

Maybe one day she’ll learn to carry it differently. But for now, she lingers, one foot in yesterday, the other hesitating to step into tomorrow.

(This was one of my most personal pieces I wrote. I hope you all like it <3)

Some questions don’t ask to be answered, they just need to be said out loud. Does it ever get better? It’s the kind of question whispered in dark rooms, thought during walks with music too loud, cried into pillows at night. Not because we’re dramatic, but because we’re tired. Of feeling stuck. Of not knowing if the ache goes away. Of pretending we’re fine. No one really prepares you for the way life can hurt quietly, not like a scream, but like a slow fading. Not like a storm, but like a fog that never fully lifts. And in the middle of it, all we want is a sign that we won’t feel this way forever.

Sometimes, it feels like everyone else is moving forward while you’re frozen in place. Like you’re watching life happen through a glass window you can’t break through. People smile more easily. They laugh without carrying the weight you seem to drag everywhere. And you try, you really do. You journal, you breathe, you text back eventually. But nothing seems to shift the heaviness. Healing is never loud. It doesn’t announce itself. And when days blur into each other and joy feels like something you used to understand, it’s easy to believe that maybe this is just how it’ll always feel.

But then, almost unnoticeably, something small happens. You laugh, and it isn’t forced. A song plays and instead of making you cry, it makes you feel… something else. You sleep through the night. You stop checking their page. You go an hour, then a day, without thinking about the thing that used to consume you. It’s not that you’re healed, it’s that you’re healing, quietly. Not in big declarations, but in little signs. And maybe that’s how it works. Not all at once. But moment by moment, until one day you realize the ache isn’t the loudest part of you anymore.

It’s easy to miss the moments where life begins to stitch itself back together, mostly because they don’t feel like fireworks. They feel like a deep breath you didn’t realize you were holding. A conversation that didn’t drain you. A morning that didn’t start with dread. You won’t always see progress in real time, but it’s there, tucked into the quiet, waiting for you to notice. The truth is, getting better rarely looks like you think it will. Sometimes, it just means you’re finally able to sit with the pain without letting it define you.

So does it ever get better?

Maybe not all at once. Maybe not in the way we expect. But yes, slowly, quietly, and often without warning, it does. You grow around what hurt you. You learn how to carry it differently. And even when the ache lingers, you begin to realize that it no longer controls the way you move through the world. There will still be hard days. But there will also be soft ones. And sometimes, better doesn’t mean perfect, it just means possible. And that, in its own way, is enough to keep going.

The phrase itself, ‘conditional love’, is quite the juxtaposition. If it has to be earned, bargained for, or rationed, can it even call itself love?

They play White. I play Black
1. e4 d5

2. exd5 Qxd5

The only love I am familiar with is that which is conditional. It was what I was raised on. It was the language I was spoken to in. It was never obvious. I think that is the worst part. Like a slow disease quietly devouring me from the inside out.

3. Nc3 Qe5+

4. Be2 Qxe2+

It would go unnoticed for years, my flesh decaying silently.

Affection was ripped from my hands the moment I made a mistake. Silence replaced softness when I spoke too loud, cried too long, asked for too much. Warm arms would no longer hold me, the only thing left to hold was their cold gaze. A reward system fronting as care, masked as love. They say,
‘Be good, be easy, be small, and I will love you.’
‘Otherwise, I have no love for you.’

5. Ngxe2 Nf6
6. d4 Nc6
7. d5 Nb4

“But I was a fool
Playing by the rules.”

8. a3 Nxc2+
9. Qxc2 Bf5

I would gut myself, discarding wants and needs like rotten flesh to make space for someone else with the hope that they would make a home in my skeleton. Siphoning life from my blood to pour it into an empty vessel just to feel like I mattered.

10. Qxf5 e6

If love were self-sacrifice, I was the willing lamb to be slaughtered.

11. Nd4 Be7

If those were the conditions, I would meet them without hesitation. Without question. I would play by their rules because nobody told me there are no rules in love.

12. dxe6 fxe6
13. Nxe6 Kf7

And I would only lose myself to conditional love. There was no victory for me.

14. O-O Bd6

The odds were never in my favour. The rules were constantly changing whenever the house wanted. The dice were rigged against me from the start. They won. I was never going to win. The House always wins.

15. Re1 Rhe8
16. Bg5 h6
17. Rad1 Rad8

“The loser has to fall.”

18. Bxf6 gxf6

And fall I did. Again and again.

19. Qxf6+ Kg8

I would come to wonder why I was so bruised, bloody and broken. It was not like they were directly injuring me. But why was I being punished? I was doing what everyone wanted me to? I didn’t know what it was.

20. Nxd8 Rxd8

I just knew that whatever I was doing in the name of love, it was leaving me more hollow than whole. Unconditional love was costing me.

21. Qxd8+ Bf8

I am laying down the weapons I have pointed at my own heart. The performing, the people-pleasing, the pleading. I have sacrificed so many pieces of myself trying to be an equal.

22. Re8 Kf7

If ‘love’ comes with terms, it can keep them. I have played my hand, my cards exposed for all to see, and I surrender.

23. Rxf8+
I have nothing left for you to take.

I resign.

Most of us don’t ruin things because we don’t care. We ruin them because we care more than we know how to handle. That’s the uncomfortable truth behind self sabotage. It isn’t laziness, or a lack of discipline, or some dramatic desire for chaos. It’s a quiet, often invisible reaction that shows up when something actually matters to us. When the stakes are low, we function just fine. But when something begins to feel important, real, or meaningful, something in us tightens. We hesitate. We pull back. We make choices that don’t make sense even to ourselves.

Self sabotage often gets framed as a character flaw, but it’s much closer to a protection strategy. At some point, our brain learned that wanting something deeply can hurt. Wanting creates vulnerability. It introduces uncertainty. It opens the door to disappointment, rejection, or loss. So instead of waiting for something to be taken away, we take control by undoing it ourselves. That way, the pain feels familiar. Predictable. Almost safer.

What’s frustrating is that sabotage rarely looks dramatic in the moment. It looks small. We procrastinate when something could move us forward. We stop putting in effort once things start going well. We pick fights when we feel close to someone. We downplay opportunities we secretly care about. We tell ourselves we’ll try later, or that it doesn’t matter that much anyway. On the surface, these choices seem harmless. But over time, they create distance between us and the life we say we want.

A lot of this comes down to fear, but not the obvious kind. We’re taught to talk about fear of failure, but many people are actually more afraid of success. Not success in the bragging sense, but success in the “this changes things” sense. Getting what we want often means we have to show up consistently. It means expectations increase. It means we can’t hide behind potential anymore. Once something becomes real, we can’t pretend we’re fine without it. And for people who have learned to survive by staying emotionally guarded, that level of exposure feels dangerous.

There’s also the issue of identity. We grow comfortable with certain stories about ourselves, even if they’re limiting. The person who never quite commits. The person who almost had it. The person who is “still figuring things out.” When something threatens to rewrite that story, it can feel destabilising. If we succeed, or heal, or become happier, we lose the familiarity of who we’ve been. That loss can feel bigger than we expect, especially if struggle has been part of our identity for a long time.

Another reason we sabotage what we want is that our nervous system doesn’t always catch up with our goals. We can consciously want growth, connection, stability, or fulfilment, but our body might still be operating from older experiences. If closeness once led to disappointment, closeness can trigger stress even when the present situation is different. If effort once went unrewarded, trying again can feel exhausting before we’ve even started. So when something good appears, our system reacts not to what’s happening now, but to what happened before.

This is why people often say things like “I don’t know why I did that” after they sabotage something important. On a logical level, they do know better. But logic isn’t in charge during moments of perceived threat. The brain prioritises safety over satisfaction. Familiar pain over unfamiliar possibility. Walking away hurts, but staying and risking more might hurt worse. At least, that’s what the brain predicts.

It’s also worth acknowledging how much shame plays a role here. Many of us internalize the idea that wanting something badly makes us needy or weak. So when we notice ourselves caring, we feel exposed. Instead of admitting that vulnerability, we cover it with detachment. We pretend we don’t care. We act uninterested. We pull back before anyone can see how much something matters to us. Sabotage becomes a way of preserving dignity, even though it costs us fulfillment.

What makes this pattern so persistent is that it often works in the short term. Avoidance reduces anxiety temporarily. Backing out provides immediate relief. Letting something fall apart confirms our expectations and keeps us in familiar territory. But over time, that relief turns into regret. We look back and see patterns. Missed chances. Relationships that could have been different. Versions of ourselves we never gave a fair shot.

Understanding self-sabotage doesn’t mean excusing it, but it does mean reframing it. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” the more useful question is, “What am I trying to protect myself from?” That question shifts the focus from self-criticism to self-awareness. It allows us to see sabotage not as a personal failure, but as a learned response that can be unlearned.

The hardest part is that stopping self-sabotage doesn’t feel like relief at first. It feels like sitting with discomfort. Letting things be uncertain. Allowing ourselves to want something without guarantees. Staying present when the urge is to run. That’s not easy, and it’s not something people master overnight. But recognizing the pattern is often the first crack in it.

We sabotage the things we want most because wanting means risking. And risking means we might have to feel things we’ve spent a long time avoiding. The irony is that the same sensitivity that makes us protect ourselves so fiercely is also what allows us to care deeply in the first place. The goal isn’t to stop caring. It’s to learn that wanting something doesn’t automatically mean we’ll lose ourselves in the process.

Sometimes self-sabotage isn’t a sign that we’re incapable of having what we want. It’s a sign that we haven’t yet learned how to feel safe when good things stay.

It seems harder and harder these days to get through a string of conversations without either my feelings or someone else’s getting hurt.

Maybe I’m just hyper-aware and an over-thinker, or overly sensitive and sentimental, as I’ve been told. Or maybe it’s something bigger that extends beyond just me.

For most of my life, I assumed the problem was mine alone, that my sensitivity was a flaw I needed to “toughen out.” But as I started paying closer attention, I’ve noticed the patterns are undeniably everywhere. The tension didn’t start with the start of my teenage years, but with my childhood. With the ways many of us were taught to dismiss and suppress our emotions before we even learned how to name them.

I am no stranger to the ways of a dismissive parent, the diminishing, the invalidating of emotions and expressions. I am no less a stranger to the phrase “you’re too sensitive” than I am to the family members who spoke it. Unfortunately, as I’ve learned far too late in life, this is a person’s way of manipulating situations and avoiding accountability for pain caused by their actions.

For anyone who needs to hear it, there is no such thing as too sensitive. Sensitivity is a trait the same as kindness and compassion, yet no one says “you’re too understanding”, or “you’re too good-willed”. People only label something “too much” when its ordinary presence is something that unsettles them.

The phrase “you’re too sensitive” is solely a default for people who want to hurt other people, but don’t want to admit to themselves that they did. They like to believe that it’s not what they said, but rather how the other person “took it”. That way, the problem lies not in their words but in the listener’s supposed flaws, their inner issues, their tendency to instigate by “making things into a big deal”. Over time, these tricks train the brain. It begins to believe that any expression of discomfort, pain, anger, or indignation is “too much” and, therefore, that it’s not valid. This way of thinking becomes a way of living, and it bleeds into everything a person does.

The reason this manipulation works so often is not because its victims are weak or stupid or defenceless, but because we as people are naturally quick to self-reproach.

We are, in many ways, our own biggest haters. We hold ourselves to stricter standards, so we have the tendency to blame and judge ourselves more harshly than we would others. We keep double standards for the consequences of our actions, even when evaluating the very same faults in another person. Our own scars always appear darker and deeper, because they are closer to our eyes but also our hearts.

So, when someone is quick to blame us, we are just as quick to believe it.

For those of us who grew up with victimizing parents, this is more than just a natural consequence of being human. It is a recombined strand of our DNA. It’s why we are hardwired people-pleasers. Why do we struggle with confrontation? Why do we cry when we’re angry? Why, when asked what’s wrong, do we say “nothing”, while our soul screams at us to tell the truth?

There are two kinds of people: ones like this, who bend themselves to keep the peace, and those who move through the world without that burden.

More and more, I’ve begun to notice how this dynamic bleeds into everyday interactions, including those between strangers. It appears all around me in both slight and transparent ways. In the way, I can open any comment section on nearly any type of media and without fail, someone will have started an argument. Sometimes the disagreement is valid and necessary, fighting against injustice, misinformation, and cruelty. But more often, it’s not about the truth at all. It’s about winning. About silencing. About that same instinct to push the other person’s feelings away before they can be fully acknowledged. The same reflex that I and so many others learned to fear in childhood, now bleeding into public discourse.

We live in a world where everyone’s emotions are on display for strangers to pick apart. That constant exposure means we’re all operating with frayed nerves. Still, we’ve been taught, consciously or not, to meet vulnerability with mockery and disagreement with hostility. It’s no wonder our conversations, online or in person, so often end in hurt feelings or bruised egos.

Being vulnerable is an act in itself, and one of the hardest things humans are capable of. But when you become afraid of your emotions, you start to resent them in others. You become the person who pushes other people’s feelings away, not out of cruelty, but because you’ve been taught to fear them. Mostly, it’s because you don’t know how to hold them. And if you were never taught how to hold your own, never shown what it looks like to care for another, how can you even begin to respond to the emotions of others?

And so I circle back to my question: is everyone an asshole, or are we all just too sensitive? Maybe the majority of us are neither. Maybe we’re just collectively terrible at emotional communication.

Maybe the truth is that we’ve created an environment where our emotional reflexes have been so badly twisted, where the people who have learned to suppress their own feelings now treat others’ emotions like threats, and the people who still feel deeply are told they’re wrong for doing so. Maybe the truth is that both forces are at work; we’ve grown more sensitive and more combative at the same time.

On one side, we have people who were taught to distrust their own feelings, who carry an ingrained fear of emotional expression. They’ve learned that the safest way to deal with someone else’s vulnerability is to push it away, to diminish it before it poisons their own consciousness. On the other side, we have people who have been hurt enough times that every slight, real or perceived, feels like proof that they were right to expect harm. Neither side is wrong for being the way they are. Both sides are reacting to the same root problem: we were never taught how to sit with emotions, our own or anyone else’s, without immediately trying to end them, deny them, or win against them.

This is why “asshole” and “too sensitive” feel like the only categories left. If you speak plainly and it lands badly, you’re the asshole. If you voice your hurt, you’re too sensitive. The irony is, most of us don’t actually want to be assholes. And most of us don’t want to be “too sensitive” either. We just don’t know how to allow facts and feelings to coexist without one being the “winner”.

My biggest fear has come true: our world’s communication, or lack thereof, is a large-scale reflection of my childhood. We’ve forgotten how to speak to each other without turning every feeling into a fight. And I know first-hand the kind of war this makes out of people, the divides it leaves, the resentment that lingers inside closed walls. The kinds of things I thought I left behind in the home, I only ever mentally escaped or hope I did. Things are now written in the much, much wider and inescapable walls of our world.

I want to be someone’s reason for staying.

"I’m not being a footnote.” “A footnote?” “Yeah. In the story of your life.”- One Day

A lot of my life has consisted of friendships and relationships, though I use the term relationship loosely, which have been short-lived and temporary. Though I keep in contact with old school friends, it is evident that we are all beginning to outgrow each other. Even my best friend, whose mind and body I have borne witness to. Some of the most meaningful people in my life only stayed for a few short months. A few months too short. It was a fact that I became content with. Expected, even. And though these little interactions brought me much happiness, I was beginning to feel replaceable. Even if it was not right for me or them, I find myself wishing they had stayed a moment longer.

“I wish you’d stayed.” - Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind

Every time I form new connections, there is a voice in my head telling me that this, too, will be short-lived. That I would soon deal with the loss of another. I would stop expecting people to stay in my life. I would not fight for them to stay, I shouldn’t have to. I didn’t want to. Even if I longed for their permanence. I would prepare myself for their departure, believing it to be inevitable. The house of my life would only be a home to me. Everyone was a guest. Who would ever make a home in my life?

I have known nothing better than abandonment. Whether they walk away silently while I sleep or slam the door in my face. Some even just fade out of existence. Almost as if they never existed. Maybe they didn’t. But my mind has never had the power of forgetting, and with that, they will always exist within me. I might find myself sitting with my back against the door, hoping to hear them knock and return, that they had come to regret their decision. Or I would stand with the door open, calling out their name, believing that maybe if they saw me, that would be enough to change their mind. They have always left me behind.

I just want to be enough for someone to stay.

I do not want someone to stay out of pity. I do not want someone to stay out of obligation. I want someone who will see the beauty and the ugly in me, and still stay. I want them to stay because of that beauty and ugliness. I want someone who will appreciate my presence and fear my absence. I want someone who will stay for me. Not the person I might be. Not the ideal version they imagine. I want someone to think, ‘I hope I never have to lose you. It would destroy me.’ It is advised that we, as a collective, should not make homes out of people. But against all advice, it would be lovely if someone made a home out of me. I would like that very much, I think.