I have been chosen by the spiders.

I cannot tell you when this peculiar allegiance began. Perhaps there was a meeting held somewhere in the dark corners of my house, beneath old cupboards and behind forgotten books, where eight-legged creatures gathered and decided that I belonged to them.

I only know that because wherever I go they find me.

For quite some time now, these peculiar creatures have had a habit of finding me.

I say finding because appearing no longer feels like the appropriate word. An appearance is accidental. You appear in the same café as an old friend. You appear in someone’s photograph by mistake. But when something happens often enough, coincidence begins to feel like a rather lazy explanation.

And the spiders always FIND me.

They descend from nowhere and land upon my shoulders. They appear beside whatever chair I have chosen to sit in. Sometimes I will be entirely occupied with something else when a thin silver thread lowers itself into my vision, and there one is, dangling before me as though it has travelled an immeasurable distance simply to make my acquaintance.

As any normal person I used to be frightened of them in the beginning.

I would flinch. Sometimes jump. Once or twice I may have abandoned an entire corner of a room to a creature no larger than my fingernail.

But one can only be startled by the arrival of an unexpected guest so many times before the guest ceases to be unexpected.

So I stopped flinching.

Now, when one finds me, I look at it for a moment. You again.

I gently move it somewhere else and thank it for coming. For what exactly I am thanking it, I haven’t decided.

Perhaps for visiting. Perhaps for watching over me. Perhaps there exists some ancient obligation between myself and spiders that I have somehow forgotten but they, with their eight little legs and remarkable persistence, have dutifully remembered.

I like to imagine there is a reason for it.

Maybe somewhere, hidden in the corners of the world where humans rarely bother to look, word has spread about me.

Maybe a year ago I spared one of them without thinking too much of it. And it scurried home and told another, who told another, until eventually some peculiar little legend began circulating amongst them.

There is a girl who will not hurt you.

And so they come.

One by one.

Little messengers carrying messages they cannot speak. Little guardians appointed to a girl who never asked for guarding.

I’m sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this.

There usually is.

Perhaps I notice spiders more than other people do. Perhaps I unknowingly frequent the sorts of places spiders enjoy. Perhaps there is nothing peculiar about any of it, and I have simply taken a collection of ordinary coincidences and stitched them together until they resembled a story.

But what a terribly dull explanation that would be.

I think I would rather be chosen.

There is something comforting about believing that the world still contains tiny mysteries meant only for us. That among all the things which happen without reason, there might occasionally be something that happens to you, deliberately. Something small enough that nobody else would notice.

So when another spider inevitably lowers itself beside me, I will not scream.

I will move it gently from my shoulder, place it somewhere safe and thank it for finding me once again.

Whatever message they have been trying to deliver all this time, I hope one day I learn how to understand it.

Until next time angels🪽

I finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde a few days ago and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Reading the book after having watched the movie made me realize how little I understood Dorian Gray’s character. I remember at some point whilst watching the movie I felt a pang of sadness for Dorian.

I can confidently say that after reading the book all the sadness transformed into some sort of resentment towards Dorian.

Let me explain why.

Our first glimpse of Dorian Gray is through the eyes of someone who adores him. In Basil Hallward’s studio, his beauty is almost treated as something sacred. He’s young, his eyes glistening with youth. Completely unaware that the face everyone worships will be his greatest privilege and greatest curse.

Notice how I never called him innocent.

Unaware of the power he holds over people?

Yes.

Innocent?

No.

Dorian Gray, my dearest readers, is anything but innocent and no one can convince me otherwise.

I remember when I first watched the movie, I blamed Lord Henry for everything, influencing and corrupting Dorian. It’s natural to place all the blame on him because he undeniably played a major role in Dorian’s corruption.

But then I read the book and found myself wondering. Was it really all Lord Henry’s fault?

He influenced Dorian certainly but Dorian had a choice, did he not?

He could have rejected Lord Henry’s ideas.

Yet he embraced them.

I don’t believe Dorian was entirely corrupt before meeting Lord Henry, but the possibility of corruption already existed within him. Lord Henry did not create Dorian’s vanity, selfishness, or fear of growing old. He merely awakened them and gave Dorian a philosophy with which to justify them.

I would give my soul for that! — Dorian Gray

As for the portrait it became proof that morality was still Dorian's choice. It showed him the consequences of every cruel act yet instead of changing his behavior, he chose to conceal the evidence.

What disturbed me is that for a time he was even fascinated by it. He liked knowing he could remain young and beautiful while the portrait carried the ugliness of his soul. No one would ever have to know what he truly was.

Oh also I would like to come back to Lord Henry because oh my god he fills me with so much rage.

He treated his philosophies as little more than clever conversation, but Dorian turned them into a way of life. Henry could indulge his darkest fantasies through Dorian without ever suffering the consequences himself.

This is what makes Lord Henry a coward, he wanted to witness destruction, but never stain his own hand YES.

And yet, Lord Henry’s cowardice does not absolve Dorian. True he may have planted the seed, but Dorian chose to water it.

After putting the book back into my bookshelf and adding it to my book journal I realized quite a lot of things.

This is what I wrote in my journal:

“The portrait didn’t corrupt him it merely revealed what beauty allowed him to hide. When Dorian finally raised the knife, he wasn’t destroying the evidence of his sins. He was attempting to destroy the truth of himself.”

I’ll say this again.

Dorian Gray was never merely the victim of another man’s influence.

He was his own greatest enemy, and ultimately, his own villain.

I absolutely loved this book it was my first classic book and I couldn’t put it down. I’ve read a lot of books and every-time a character has haunted me because I pitied them but this time it was so different. Dorian Gray hunted me because I couldn’t pity him.

Until next time angels🪽

People have called me all sorts of things when they are angry with me. Selfish has to be the one they mean the most. I’m cold, difficult, heartless, and cruel if they’re feeling particularly dramatic.

I admit I have never really been good at defending myself against any of it.

I mean what would I say? That I’m not?

That I care, just not enough?

That I loved them, just not enough to stay?

That I would rather lose someone than lose myself trying to keep them?

Yeah none of these things would make me sound better.

The truth is, I’ve always liked myself too much to completely belong to anyone else.

I don’t think I was built for devotion. I like people. I can love them in my own strange little ways. I can miss them terribly and still not call. I can think about someone every day and still be perfectly happy without speaking to them. I can want someone close and then, the moment they get comfortable there, feel an almost unbearable need for space.

And you know what pisses me off the most? There are people out there who believe that if you love someone enough, you should be willing to inconvenience yourself for them. You should stay when it’s difficult. You should make room. You should compromise.

Well too bad I’ve never been really good at that. I care about myself first, I always have.

Maybe that makes me a terrible person I don’t know but then again I’ve never been particularly interested in being a good one.

I like my life when it belongs entirely to me. I like my time untouched, my plans changeable, my phone silent. I like knowing that I can wake up one morning and decide I no longer want something without having to explain myself to anyone.

People find that cruel.

Though I don’t understand why I have to pretend otherwise to make myself easier to love.

I watched people give themselves away in the name of love, friendship, loyalty, family. They call it devotion. They call it being there for someone. They call it caring.

Sometimes i genuinely rethink my whole life and think they must be happier than I am.

Then I look at what it cost them. And I don’t want it.

I have lost people because of this, I’ve hurt many people because of this.

I’ve let good things become bad simply because I couldn’t stand the weight of being expected to care about them as much as they cared about me.

I ruin things, and sometimes I know im ruining them while doing so.

There is something almost satisfying about being the one who ends it. No waiting around to be disappointed. No wondering when someone will change their mind. If im going to lose something I would rather be the one who lets go.

Maybe that’s the ugliest thing about me. Or maybe im just being too honest.

I know exactly what I am, and I know exactly what people say when I leave the room.

I know I could probably be softer.

I simply don’t know if I want to be.

Because after all these years, after all the people who have called me selfish and well watched me prove them right every single time, I cannot bring myself to feel ashamed of choosing myself.

I suppose someone has to be the bad guy and im not bothered that it is me.

I won’t set myself on fire to make you feel comfortable.

There is a certain freedom in not needing to be understood.

Until next time angels🪽

Have you ever sat, called, texted someone for hours or maybe even days. Listening to them talking about their endless problems and at first you sympathize with them, you offer your help and try your best to be there for them.

But they just REFUSE to get out of the situation they’re in.

Be it a toxic relationship, failed friendships or problems at work.

They complain for days, go on about it for hours about how sick of it they are and it’s making them depressed.

However, the moment you find them a solution, a way out. They deflect.

It’s as though they enjoy being right there in whatever hole they’ve dug for themselves. I repeat the same hole THEY have dug for themselves.

And maybe that sounds cruel but hear me out.

Of course i understand it’s not always that simple. Sometimes people genuinely don’t know how to leave. Sometimes they’re scared. Sometimes they’re emotionally attached to situations that hurt them.

But there is a difference between not knowing how to leave and refusing every opportunity to leave.

I have found myself in that situation quite frequently, in the beginning you want to help. You listen. You reassure them. You stay up late answering their messages. You analyze every detail with them. You tell them they deserve better.

And then after hours of listening you finally say:

“Then leave.”

Suddenly there are a hundred reasons why they can’t.

So you try again.

Another solution.

Another suggestion.

Another conversation.

Eventually you realize you’re having the same conversation you had last week.

And the week before that.

Nothing has changed except that you’re more exhausted.

At some point, you have to ask yourself am I actually helping this person, or am I simply helping them remain comfortable in their discomfort.

Because sometimes people don’t want solutions. They want somewhere to put their frustration.

And that’s okay.

Sometimes you just need to vent, not every problem needs to be solved immediately. Not everyone who comes to you with a problem is asking you to fix it.

Something I’ve found to work for myself when someone comes to me a week later or month later with the same exact problem is one question. Do you want me to listen, or do you want my advice?

It’s a simple question but it changes everything.

If they just want to vent, listen. Sympathize. Let them get it out.

But if they want advice, give it once.

I repeat GIVE IT ONCE.

Tell them what you think. Offer a practical solution. And then let the decision belong to them.

If they choose to stay that is their problem not yours.

You can care about someone without becoming their emotional dumping ground. You can love someone and still say, “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

At the end of the day it’s their problem to fix.

You can offer a hand.

You can show them the way out.

But you really cannot climb out of a hole for someone else.

Anyway, just a thought that’s been sitting with me lately.

Until next time angels🪽

There is something strange about the way we treat winners. We admire people for rising above everyone else, for breaking records and doing what seemed impossible. Yet, sometimes, the moment their success becomes too consistent, admiration begins to curdle into resentment. The winner becomes arrogant, overrated, lucky, undeserving. We start looking for reasons to bring them back down.

It makes one wonder why?

Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory suggests that we evaluate ourselves by comparing ourselves to others. Perhaps then the discomfort we feel toward those who continually succeed has less to do with the winner themselves and more to with what their success reflects back to us.

Festinger’s theory becomes particularly relevant when we look upward, toward those we preceive as more successful than ourselves. Their achievements can inspire us, but they can also make us more aware of what we lack. A person who seems to have everything we wish for can become less of an inspiration and more of a reminder of where we believe we fall short.

This is where admiration can begin to resemble envy. We don’t necessarily resent someone simply because they have succeeded; sometimes, we resent what their success makes us feel about ourselves. And perhaps that is why the most successful people become the easiest to criticize. If we cannot change the fact that they have won, we can at least try to change what their victory means.

Not all envy, however, looks the same. Sometimes seeing someone ahead of us makes us want to work harder; their success becomes proof of what might be possible for us too. This is often described as benign envy. But there is another side to it: malicious envy. Instead of wanting to rise to the level of the person we admire, we want to see them brought back down to ours.

Perhaps this is exactly where our relationship with winners begin to change. We no longer ask, “how did they get there?” but “why do they deserve to be there?” Their success becomes something to question, minimize, or explain away. We call them overrated, lucky, undeserving. In doing so, we don’t have to confront the uncomfortable possibility that someone else simply have achieved something we have not.

Maybe the easiest way to deal with someone else’s success is to convince ourselves that it does not really count. If we already believe someone is overrated, arrogant, or undeserving, their continued success creates a contradiction: reality keeps telling us one thing, while our beliefs tells us another. Rather than changing our beliefs, we can change the story we tell ourselves about their success.

They were lucky. The judges were biased. The competition was weak. They had more advantages. They didn’t actually deserve it. Some of these explanations may occasionally be true, but the interesting part is what happens when we become unwilling to consider any explanation that gives the winner credit. We begin looking for evidence that confirms what we already believe and dismissing whatever contradicts.

At that point, criticism is no longer necessarily about evaluating the winner. It becomes about protecting our own perception of them.

But there is something else I’d like to mention, sometimes our relationship with winners aren’t always individual.

Sometimes, the people we admire or despise become tied to the group we belong to. This is where winning can become personal.

Social Identity Theory suggests that part of our sense of self comes from the groups we identify with. In sports, this can be especially obvious. We don’t simply support a player or a team; we become part of a side. There is an “us” and a “them,” and when one side wins, it can feel as though we have won with them, or lost with them.

Perhaps this is why some rivalries become so much more intense that the sport itself. A player can stop being viewed as an individual and start becoming a symbol of everything the opposing side dislikes. At that point, disliking them is no longer simply a matter of preference. It can become part of one’s identity.

Football is perhaps one of the clearest places to see this happen.

We all know the Messi and Ronaldo rivalry has grown far beyond a debate about who is the better footballer. For many fans, choosing one can feel like choosing a side, and the other player becomes someone to discredit rather than simply someone to disagree about.

I find Messi fascinating. He’s an interesting example because his success has made him almost impossible to separate from the arguments surrounding him. His achievements are celebrated by millions, yet there is an equally persistent effort online to diminish them, reinterpret them, or find reasons why they should not count. The point is not that every criticism of Messi is irrational, nor that disliking is inherently wrong. It is that there is a major difference between saying, “I don’t think he’s the greatest,” and making the rejection of someone else’s success part of your identity.

And that’s why that distinction is where the question becomes more interesting: when does disliking someone stop being an opinion and start becoming an identity?

The internet makes this distinction even harder to see. Online disagreement rarely stays quiet. The most extreme opinions are often the ones that attract the most attention, and outrage can become its own form of entertainment. A person who dislikes a winner can find thousands of others who feel the same way, reinforcing the belief that their hostility is justified.

What begins as a preference can gradually become a community.

People repeat the same criticisms, collect evidence against the same person, celebrate each other’s agreement. Eventually, the winner is no longer being judged as an individual; they are being judged through a narrative that has already been built around them.

And this is perhaps the strangest part of it all: sometimes the more successful someone becomes, the more determined people become to prove that their success means nothing.

None of this really means that every criticism of a successful person is rooted in envy, insecurity, or tribalism. Sometimes people simply disagree which is okay. A winner can be arrogant. They can make mistakes. They can benefit from unfair circumstances. Being successful doesn’t make someone immune to criticism. I have always said that.

What I want to say is that the distinction lies in what we do with that criticism. There is a difference between questioning someone’s achievements and becoming determined to make those achievements illegitimate. There is a difference between preferring their rival and needing their rival to be inferior. And there is a difference between disliking someone and dedicating yourself to proving that they never deserved to win.

This is why I keep thinking about Messi. Not because I want to defend him, or convince anyone that he is the greatest, but because the sheer persistence of the need to discredit him says something more interesting than any argument about football ever could. At some point, the question stops being whether Messi is the greatest and becomes: why do feel such a strong need to prove that he isn’t?

You don’t have to love Messi. You don’t have to consider him the greatest footballer of all time. You can prefer someone else, disagree with him, or simply not care for him. But when someone else’s success becomes something you feel compelled to diminish at every opportunity, perhaps the subject is no longer the winner.

It’s us.

This piece was born admittedly from watching all the anti-Messi discourse. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to write about Messi himself and the more I wanted to understand what that hostility might reveal about us. This isn’t an argument for who the greatest footballer is, nor is it a defense of Messi. It is simply an attempt to understand why we sometimes find it easier to diminish someone else’s success than to sit with it.

Until next time angels🪽

I have been called kind more times than I can count.

What no one ever noticed was that my kindness was often another name for my silence.

Another name for making myself smaller.

Another name for disappearing.

So tell me…

Is this what it takes to choose myself?

I’ve spent my entire life putting the one person who was always supposed to come first second: myself.

I made myself smaller so my mother could be happy. I bent until I almost broke so my father could be proud. I became the friend everyone could lean on, even when I had no one to lean on myself.

Somewhere along the way I confused self-abandonment with love. I believed that to be a good daughter, a good sister, a good friend, I had to become less of myself so everyone else could have more.

So is this the cost of finally choosing myself?

To become the villain in someone else’s story?

The selfish daughter.

The selfish sister.

The selfish friend.

The one who suddenly changed.

The one who doesn’t care anymore.

If this is what selfish looks like, then I’ll gladly accept the title.

Because if you cannot respect me when I choose myself, then perhaps you only loved the version of me that was convenient. The version that never said no. The version that never asked for anything in return. The version that gave and gave until there was nothing left of her to give.

Learning to choose yourself isn’t an easy thing to do. Because guilt has a way of disguising itself as kindness.

It whispers:

“Did I upset them?”

“Am I asking for too much?”

“Did I overreact?”

But I’ve learnt that maybe these aren’t the questions I’m supposed to ask.

The real question is this:

Why do I feel guilty for protecting the very person I’ve spent my entire life neglecting?

We’re taught that saying “no” is disrespectful. That keeping peace matters more than keeping ourselves whole. That we should smile when our boundaries are crossed because they’re older, because they’re family, because that’s just how things are.

Well respectfully BULLSHIT.

“Respect your elders,” they say.

And I will.

But respect has never been a one-way street.

I will not tolerate disrespect simply because someone is older than me.

I will not sacrifice my peace to make someone else comfortable.

I will not apologize for protecting the parts of myself I’ve spent years trying to rebuild.

What I’m trying to say is this:

Boundaries aren’t walls built to keep people out. They’re promises we make ourselves that we will no longer abandon who we are just to be accepted.

So if choosing myself means disappointing people who only loved me when i was easy to use, then so be it.

I’d rather be misunderstood if it means I get to keep my peace.

For the first time in my life I’m choosing myself.

And that isn’t selfish.

It was a long time coming.

Until next time angels🪽

No one tells you that friendships can break your heart, too.

There are no songs written about the friend who slowly stopped choosing you. No films where the ending isn’t a dramatic betrayal, but two people who simply become strangers while pretending everything is fine. We have a language for romantic heartbreak. We know what it means to be left by someone we love.

But no one teaches you how to grieve a friend who is still alive.

No one tells you what to do when every conversation begins to feel like something you have to recover from instead of something looking forward to.

I used to think the strongest friendships were the ones that survived everything.

Distance.

Misunderstandings.

Time.

I believed that if you loved someone enough, if you were patient enough, forgiving enough, understanding enough, then your friendship would always find its way back to what it once was.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I don’t know when exactly it changed.

Maybe that’s the cruelest part.

Heartbreak is easier to understand when it arrives all at once. When someone leaves. When someone says goodbye. When there’s a moment you can replay in your head and blame for everything that came after.

Friendships don’t always end that way.

Sometimes it dies by a thousand almosts.

Almost replying.

Almost showing up.

Almost remembering.

Almost choosing you.

You spend so long excusing the little things that you don’t realize they’ve become the whole relationship.

I started measuring our friendship in waiting.

Waiting for replies.

Waiting for plans that never quite happened.

Waiting for the version of them I knew would return if I was just patient enough.

I kept telling myself that this phase would pass.

That people get busy.

That life happens.

That love is patient.

What I didn’t realize was that patience has a way of disguising self-abandonment.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether they cared about me and started asking what else I could do to make them care.

I became smaller.

Less demanding.

Less honest.

I convinced myself that needing reassurance made me difficult to love.

So I accepted crumbs and called it understanding.

I accepted inconsistency and called it grace.

I accepted being forgotten and called it maturity.

The strange thing about one-sided friendships is that they don’t usually make you angry.

They make you doubt yourself.

You begin collecting evidence against your own heart.

Maybe you’re overthinking.

Maybe you’re remembering it wrong.

Maybe you’re asking for too much.

It’s a dangerous thing to stop trusting your own feelings.

Because the moment you start apologizing for wounds you didn’t create.

You become grateful for the bare minimum because you’ve forgotten what being genuinely cared for feels like.

The worst part wasn’t realizing I had become the second choice.

It was realizing how desperately I tried to convince myself that second place was enough.

Looking back, I don’t think I was grieving the friendship.

I was grieving the future I had imagined for it.

The conversations I thought we’d still be having years from now.

The promises I quietly believed.

The version of us that only existed because I kept carrying it alone.

When I decided to leave, it wasn’t one decision.

It was hundreds of tiny decisions.

The day I stopped checking my phone every five minutes.

The day I realized silence felt more peaceful than another disappointing conversation.

The day I no longer felt guilty for imagining a life without them in it.

People say friendships require effort.

They’re right.

But I wish past me knew that effort and exhaustion are not the same thing.

Love should ask you to grow.

It should never ask you to disappear.

I don’t resent them anymore.

I don’t even wish things had turned out differently.

Some people are meant to teach you what friendship feels like.

Others teach you what it should never feel like again.

I think both are acts of love.

Just different kinds.

I wrote this for anyone who’s ever mistaken endurance for love, loyalty for self-sacrifice, or silence for peace. If these words find you at the right time, I hope they remind you that you were never asking for too much.

Until next time angels🪽

I have a dragon named Cinnamon Latte.

Now, you might all call me crazy, but anyone who knows me must know that Cinnamon is one of the main characters in my life.

I’m going to be honest, he despises the name. He believes he is the mightiest dragon to have ever lived, and a name like Cinnamon Latte hardly inspires fear. Though I know better. Secretly, he loves it.

I found Cinnamon when I had only just learned to walk. At the time he wasn’t named cinnamon though. I called him dragon. He was only a baby then, no bigger than a hound, all oversized wings and curious golden eyes. Somewhere along the way, he became my baby dragon.

Cinnamon is warm and wise. His golden eyes glow through the night, a quiet reminder that even in the deepest darkness, I will never be alone. He possesses the power to freeze his enemies where they stand, yet the same magic can wrap those he loves in comforting warmth.

As I grew older, so did he. His tail sprouted formidable spikes, his horns sharpened into weapons capable of felling any foe, and his wings stretched so wide they could blanket an entire country.

His fawn-colored scales glimmered with gold beneath the sun, while tiny milky stars were scattered across his body as though the night sky itself had kissed him. I always told him the stars had chosen him as their favorite. He’d roll his eyes and mutter, “you’re too caught up in your dreams.”

“And you’re far too proud,” I’d tell him.

Unlike any other dragons, my Cinnamon never smelled of smoke or ash. He smelled of hot marshmallow chocolate on a snowy night. The kind of scent that made you feel safe before you even realized you were afraid.

Cinnamon has never left my side. Even now, at twenty, he’s there when I walk through the halls of university, when I sit for hours chasing the right words across a page, and when I finally close my eyes after another long day. It doesn’t matter whether the day was extraordinary or painfully ordinary, I always find my way back to him.

I tell him everything.

The awkward conversations, the little victories, the articles I can’t seem to finish, the people I met, the ones who annoyed me. He listens with the patience of someone who has lived long enough to know that even the smallest stories deserve to be told.

Then, as he always has, he carries me into the sky.

His enormous wings carve the night air while the stars gather above us like old friends. The wind steals every worry from my shoulders, and for a little while, the world below becomes wonderfully small. I like to think the stars shine a little brighter whenever they see Cinnamon.

“I still think you’re their favorite,” I whisper.

“They’re stars,” he sighs. “They don’t have favorites.”

“They do.”

“They don’t.”

“They absolutely do.”

He lets out the most dramatic groan a dragon can manage.

Before we part ways, he narrows his golden eyes at me.

“You’re not writing about me again, are you?”

“I might.”

“Cinnamon,” he mutters, “i am a legendary dragon. I should inspire awe, not sound like a seasonal drink.”

I laugh.

“You secretly love the name.”

“I most certainly do not.”

“Then why did you come running the last time I called?”

He opens his mouth to argue, thinks better of it, looks away.

“…Don’t put that part in.”

Too late.

Author’s note:

Cinnamon asked me to not publish this.

He also asked me to mention that he’s a fearsome dragon worthy of legends.

I told him legends can smell like hot marshmallow chocolate too.

I don’t know when Cinnamon first appeared. Maybe he arrived the day I learned to dream, or maybe he’s been waiting for me all along.

Either way, he’s been with me ever since. I hope this piece reminds you of someone—something—you always return to.

Until next time angels🪽

Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. —V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Thetis, the mother of the legendary hero Achilles, knew her son had two possible fates. He could live a long, quiet life, slowly fading into obscurity, or he could die young in the Trojan war and be remembered for eternity.

Achilles knew this, too.

And still, he chose the latter.

He chose a short life in exchange for everlasting glory.

Years ago, I picked up The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. It left a mark on me unlike any other book. I annotated nearly every page, convinced it was simply because I loved the writing.

Looking back, I realize there was another reason.

My fourteen years old self was trying to leave a mark just as desperately as Addie was.

Addie is cursed to live forever, yet no one can remember her. Every conversation vanishes the moment she walks away. Every connection is erased. She has endless time, but no legacy.

Achilles sacrificed life for memory.

Addie sacrificed memory for life.

Two stories separated by thousand of years, yet both ask the same question:

What is life worth if no one remembers it?

Humans have always feared death. But perhaps what we fear just as much is what comes after it, not oblivion itself, but being forgotten.

A second death.

Maybe that’s why we journal. Why we recommend our favorite books to friends. Why we share playlists that remind us of people we love. Why we post photographs, create art, build families, write stories, and hope that somewhere, in someone else’s memory, a small part of us continues to exist.

Psychologists have a name for part of this. Terror Management Theory, inspired by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, suggests that because we are aware of our own mortality, we search for ways to cope with the anxiety that knowledge creates. We create meaning. We chase purpose. We leave things behind.

They call it symbolic immortality, the belief that although our bodies will one day disappear, something of us can remain. Our words. Our kindness. Our art. Our children. The stories people tell about us.

When I was fourteen I thought I loved The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue because of it’s beautiful prose.

Now I think I loved it because it gave a name to a fear I hadn’t yet learned how to describe.

The fear wasn’t death.

It was living a life that disappeared without a trace.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if we’ve misunderstood what it means to be remembered.

When I was younger, I thought leaving a mark meant doing something extraordinary. Writing a bestselling novel. Discovering something no one else had. Becoming someone whose name would outlive them.

Now I’m not so sure.

Most of us will never have status built in our honor. Our names won’t appear in history books, and centuries from now, no one will know we ever existed.

Yet that doesn’t make our lives insignificant.

Perhaps we’ve mistaken fame for remembrance.

I don’t want to be remembered because my name appears in a textbook.

I want to be remembered because one afternoon I gave a stranger directions to a café they ended up loving. Because I recommended a book that became someone’s favorite. Because I made someone laugh on a day they thought they couldn’t.

Those moments won’t survive for thousand of years.

They don’t have to.

Maybe symbolic immortality isn’t about living forever. Maybe it’s about passing little pieces of yourself from one person to another, knowing you’ll never see how far they’ll travel.

A book recommendation becomes someone else’s comfort read.

A kind word becomes the reason someone chooses kindness the next day.

A story inspires another story.

Perhaps this is how humans have always lived forever, not through monuments, but through one another.

Until next time🤍🤍

It is in our nature to be drawn to love, security, and familiarity.

There are those who seek for love in hopes to replace the one they lost.

And those who simply search to give meanings to their lives.

But what of those who never search?

The sweet scent of the cinnamon apple candle filled the air. Rain tapped against my window. The dim yellow lights in my room cast a quiet warmth across the room.

My once-steaming tea had gone cold, waiting for me to finally take a sip.

I had been staring into nothing until my gaze eventually settled on the statue of Athena, a gift from my dearest friend.

I had always admired Athena. Her strength and wisdom, the way she approached every challenge with thought rather than impulse, had always fascinated me. She reminded me of the nights I'd curl myself beneath a blanket, escaping the world around me in the stories of Greek mythology.

We're all familiar with the stories of Odysseus and Penelope, Eurydice and Orpheus, Cupid and Psyche.

Yet none of those stories stayed with me quite as much as this one.

In Symposium, Aristophanes tells of a time when Zeus, the king of gods, created humans with four arms, four legs, two faces, and one head.

As time passed, Zeus came to fear them, plagued by the thought that they might one day challenge the gods.

As punishment, he split every human in two.

Ever since, each half has wandered the earth searching for its other half, longing to become whole again.

Had I never read this story years ago, l might've called it fate.

How else can you explain the affinity between two people whose paths happened to cross?

How do you explain feeling so understood by someone who barely knows your name?

For years, I found myself returning to that story.

I wondered every night if my other half was out there somewhere.

Waiting to be found, just as I was.

I felt their presence long before I ever saw them.

Without realizing it, every page I filled somehow became a letter addressed to them.

I imagined our eyes speaking long before our lips ever could.

I imagined reaching out my hand in the dark, knowing it would always find theirs.

The years passed quietly, and with them, so did the certainty that someone was searching for me too.

The letters became fewer with each passing year.

Eventually dust had collected on the letters I'd written to someone I had stopped searching for.

I had made peace with the idea that some stories were only ever meant to remain stories.

Until a soul I had accidentally stumbled upon set the night sky ablaze once more.

The first time they spoke my name, it felt less like an introduction and more like a remembrance.

A strange feeling settled over me.

As though I had not met a stranger, but stumbled upon a story I had been waiting years to read it.

There was comfort in the unfamiliar.

A quiet certainty that needed no explanation.

I did not question why their presence felt so natural.

I did not ask why conversations flowed as though they had begun long before we ever spoke.

Perhaps that is the most dangerous thing about longing.

It does not always arrive as an ache.

Sometimes it arrives as an answer.

Sometimes it appears in the form of a person and convinces us that everything we have been searching for has finally found it’s way to us.

And maybe that is why we surrender so easily.

Because when someone feels like a place we have always known, we rarely stop to wonder whether we have arrived somewhere new…

Or simply returned to somewhere we created ourselves.

But perhaps the danger was never in believing that someone could feel like home. Perhaps the danger was in forgetting that a home is not something another person can build inside of us. We spend so much of our lives searching for the missing half of ourselves that we forget the person we were before the search began. We mistake recognition for completion, and we confuse being understood with finally being whole.

I let my gaze linger on Athena for a while longer.

She remained exactly as she always had, watching over the room with the same unwavering gaze.

I reached for my pen.

Turned to a blank page.

And, for the first time, questioned the story I had loved for so many years.

What if Aristophanes was right?

Just not in the way we imagined.

For centuries we have searched the faces of strangers for the half Zeus was said to have taken from us.

Perhaps Zeus never condemned us to spend our lives searching for another half.

Perhaps he condemned us to spend our lives finding the one we left behind the moment we began believing someone else could make us whole.

And maybe this is what makes certain encounters so unforgettable. Not that they give us something we were missing, but that they reveal something we had forgotten. They hold up a mirror to the parts of ourselves we had abandoned, the dreams we had silenced, and the tenderness we had convinced ourselves we no longer deserved. Sometimes a person does not enter out life to become our missing piece; sometimes they arrive only to remind us that we were never incomplete to begin with.

Unable are the Loved to die. For Love is Immortality ~ Emily Dickinson

Thank you all for reading.

Until next time🪽🤍

A few nights ago I was watching a television programme expecting to learn something new.

The programme was about sexual harassment in universities.

Sadly it wasn’t the stories that stayed with me, they were horrifying yes, but it was the questions that kept me awake long after the programme had ended.

It had me wondering how, in 2026 people are still asking the wrong questions.

“Why did she let him?”

Another wondered why she was “too nice”.

Not once did they ask why the professor, someone entrusted with educating young women. Believed he had the right to touch one in the first place.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

Where does the audacity come from?

Why does a man think his actions will be less questioned than hers?

We spend years studying for one goal: Getting into university.

Not to calculate which corridor is the safest to walk through.

Not to memorize which professor to avoid.

Why have our young men been taught to hold the woman accountable?

Why haven’t they been taught to question the man’s actions?

From the moment we’re old enough to understand danger, we’re handed a list of instructions.

Cover yourself.

Don’t walk home alone.

Don’t make him feel embarrassed.

Don’t be too friendly.

Don’t stay out too late.

Don’t smile too much.

Don’t get into the elevator with a strange man.

Don’t, don’t, don’t.

Somewhere along the way girls are handed an endless list of rules for surviving this world.

Some call themselves religious. Some proudly call themselves men of god.

If that is true then how come they don’t follow god’s words?

Surah Al-Nur in the Quran states “Tell the believing men to lower their gazes and guard their chastity. That is purer for them. Surely Allah is All-Aware of what they do.”

“Why did she let him?”

Why did he look?

Someone old enough to be her father.

“Why was she nice?”

Must kindness now be mistaken for consent?

What of the children?

Were they also tempting?

“They should’ve come forward”

To whom, may I ask?

The family who values reputation over their daughter’s safety?

The teacher who has been working with him for twenty years?

The university afraid of publicity?

The people who ask for proof before offering compassion?

Speaking up isn’t the end of the story.

Sometimes it’s just the beginning.

She still has to walk into his classroom.

She still has to hear him call her name for attendance.

She still has to wonder if everyone knows.

He still has the authority to grade her work.

To fail her.

To remind her, every lecture, that he still has the power.

To rip her dreams away.

And he knows it.

What frightened me the most wasn’t the abuse.

It was how ordinary it seemed.

Some of their colleagues know exactly what’s happening, yet they choose silence. Not because they don’t believe the victim, but because speaking up might cost them their careers. Some stay quiet because the abuser has something on them too. And in some cases, the silence becomes something darker. Stories emerge of lecturers sending female students to the very man they know is dangerous, choosing to protect themselves instead of the young woman placed in their care.

This was the moment it stopped feeling like someone else’s story.

One day, I will send my baby sister to university.

One day, I might have children of my own.

How am I supposed to tell them education is where dreams begin when I can’t promise they’ll be safe once they get there.

These ideas don’t appear out of nowhere.

Children learn by watching adults around them. Boys, grow up seeing women questioned without being believed first. They hear mothers blamed, sisters doubted, and victims asked to explain someone else’s actions. Then they open social media and find influencers telling them that dominance is masculinity and that women exist to be controlled rather than respected.

Not every boy believes those messages.

But enough do that girls grow up asking themselves a question they should never have to ask.

When a man looks at me, does he see a human being or does he simply see an object?

Perhaps the problem was never that women didn’t speak loudly enough.

Perhaps the problem is that too many people heard them but chose to not listen.

If someone trusts you with their story, if they tell you they’ve been harassed, assaulted, or abused, and your first instinct is to doubt them, protect his reputation, or look the other way, then your silence doesn’t make you innocent.

It makes you part of the reason why he’ll do it again.

Predators rarely succeed alone.

They succeed because they’re surrounded by people who decide that comfort is more important than courage.

So perhaps it’s time to stop asking women why they didn’t do more.

And start asking ourselves why we didn’t.

Violence against bodies has been made possible on an epic scale by violence against voices— Rebecca Solnit

Thank you for reading.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feel free to share in the comments.

Until next time.

I was eighteen when I sat in the psychiatrist’s office. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the child my parents knew.

Neither was I.

For seventeen years, I was the “perfect” daughter. The daughter they never had to worry about, the straight-A student always the top of her class, the one who never got called to the principal’s office. I was praised by my teachers before my parents had the chance to.

I’m twenty now, three years have passed since i sat in that office. Looking back I understand why the psychiatrist looked at me the way he did. At the time I didn’t.

When he asked me what was wrong, I answered so calmly and confidently that even he seemed surprised.

He scribbled something on the paper in front of him, then he looked at me for what felt like forever.

What he said next changed everything.

“Your daughter is a perfectionist” he said to my parents, “She’s a blessing to you and everyone around her, but a curse to herself”.

A curse.

I was a curse to myself and at the time it felt impossible to disagree.

He told me to loosen up. To let go, slowly.

But if I let go, who am I?

Well I wish I could tell you that I walked out of the office and changed overnight.

If anything I became even better at hiding my perfectionism.

As a matter of fact, I was quite happy with his diagnosis, I smiled like a menace in his office.

Surely he wasn’t right. A curse?

If perfectionism was such a curse then how were my grades so high?

How did the teachers trust me so much?

How was I always chosen for every activity?

It was the reason people called me “mature for my age”.

Perfectionism wasn’t something to hide, it was something to be proud of.

Or so I thought.

Because that’s the thing, people only saw me holding my certificates and medals around my neck, they saw my grades and congratulated me and my parents.

What they didn’t see was the version of me who’d break things because she couldn’t write the first sentence of a paragraph “perfectly”.

The one who turned down a lot of opportunities because she was scared she wasn’t good enough.

The jealousy when someone was better at something I wasn’t good at.

I would cry and keep repeating one line from a book I had read years earlier.

“If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse.”

At some point, it stopped feeling like Jude’s words.

They became mine.

People think perfectionism means producing good work.

In my experience, it often meant not producing anything at all.

Because if I didn’t finish anything, no one could judge the result.

If I never tried, I never had to discover if I was ordinary.

I changed five majors. Attended three universities. I changed my style. My hair. My perfumes. My hobbies, the moment I felt they no longer made me unique, I abandoned it.

It all starts when you’re constantly compared to those around you, at least that’s how it started for me.

“She’s smarter.”

“She’s better.”

“Why can’t you be like her.”

As cliché as this will sound, it awakened a monster in me that could never be satisfied.

From the age of nine to seventeen, I measured my worth by my grades, and my achievements.

I felt like the zero before the decimal point— present, but overlooked.

Nothing was enough.

You keep chasing more, never stopping long enough to enjoy what you’ve achieved.

The funny thing about perfectionism is that it disguises itself as ambition. People applaud you for your discipline. They admire your work ethic. They congratulate your achievements. No one notices you’re running on fear instead of confidence.

Neither did I.

At eighteen, everything seemed so massive.

I thought I could never make it out of the life I have always known.

I didn’t, don’t get your hopes up dear readers.

I didn’t just wake up and “loosened up”. It took me time and time again of self-reflection and understanding where all this greed for perfection came from, and once you understand the root of the issue you start getting a hold of it slowly.

For me at least, instead of letting perfectionism control my very being, I started controlling it.

Through journaling and long hours of rediscovering myself.

Looking back, perfectionism was never about being perfect.

It was about control.

If I was perfect, no one could control me.

If I was perfect, no one could reject me.

The irony is that I wholeheartedly believed that perfectionism was giving me confidence, when in reality, it was stealing it.

Sometimes I catch myself striving for doing the most basic task of my life perfectly. I still hear the voices whispering in my ears telling me being good isn’t enough. The only difference now is I recognize that voice now. I know whose voice it is, and I don’t always listen.

Maybe one day I’ll walk back into the psychiatrist’s office.

Not because i need another diagnosis.

But because I want to tell him that he was right.

I was a curse to myself, and every curse can be broken.

At last I want to leave you with a quote that stuck with me long ago.

And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”—John Steinbeck

If you’re reading this, thank you.

This is my first personal essay I’ve ever shared publicly, and I couldn’t think of a more honest place to begin than here.

I hope if you’ve ever felt the weight of perfectionism, you find a small piece of yourself somewhere in these words.