Her mother eventually deteriorated and she came to the hospital carrying more guilt than luggage. She stood in front of me apologizing for circumstances she did not create, blaming herself for a poverty she did not choose. She broke down. I comforted her, or at least, I tried to. On the surface I said the right things. I listened. I reassured her. I stayed. But something felt different.

There was a time when I would have walked away carrying a piece of her pain with me. Today, I walked away feeling... empty. Not indifferent. Empty. That realization honestly frightened me more than her tears. It is strange to notice your compassion changing. You begin to realize there is a finite amount of yourself you have been giving away every day, and one morning you wake up to find the cupboard isn't full anymore. Healthcare teaches you to witness suffering, it does not always teach you how to recover from witnessing it. People will arrive carrying stories they have never said aloud, they hand them to you for a few minutes, then they leave. But you stay and collect fragments of grief that were never yours. Eventually, your own life begins asking for the same attention you've been giving everyone else and you have nothing left to offer.

I live alone in a city that still doesn't feel like home.Technically, I have somewhere to go after work but emotionally, I don't. I wish I had a friend whose couch I could collapse onto without explanation. Someone who would hand me food, tell me to stop apologizing, and let me sleep until morning. No conversation. No performance. No expectation. Just rest. Instead, I go home. I wake up tired. I go to work tired. I return home tired and wonder why writing feels harder, why joy feels quieter, why I don't even have the energy to be angry anymore.

That part surprised me.

People think exhaustion looks dramatic, but sometimes it can look like nothing at all. It looks like emotional silence. Like staring at the ceiling because crying feels like too much work. Like caring deeply while feeling strangely numb. I've worked for months and I still don't have the savings I imagined I'd have. Every paycheck seems to disappear into survival before it has the chance to become security. I keep telling myself things will settle, that next month will be different, that next year will be easier. Maybe it will, but today, I don't need another promise about the future, I need permission to admit that the present, this present is heavy.

I'm still writing tho. Some days, that feels like the smallest accomplishment, other days, it feels like the only proof that I haven't disappeared beneath the weight of everything.

So this is my proof.

If you've ever found yourself caring for everyone while quietly running on empty, I hope you know this:

You are not heartless because you're tired.

You are not failing because you need rest.

You are not weak because you've reached the edge of what you can carry.

Sometimes the bravest thing you do all day is remain kind when your own heart is asking for somewhere safe to lie down.

I'm still looking for that place and until I find it, I'll keep writing.

PS: I wrote this at 3am in scrubs

Nare.

Let me wait a while.
Let me encounter difference with the spirit of limerence.
Let me view an abyss in all that it is.
Let me not rush.
Let me wait a while, and a while, and a while.

Patience has caught me.
Let me pat my back and nurse myself with time.
Let me be a patient this time.
Let me wait a while, and a while, and a while.

For in all I have done I crave to be undone by synergy, by chaos.
Past, present, Future.
Let me.
Let me wait a while, and a while, and a while.

Tis not the desire of man to be slow.
Tis not the anchor of humanity to dwell.
It is mine not to be man.
To be matter and matter.
To sing and sleep and cry till I am swept to unknown.
To wear brightest of Yellows and darkest of Blacks.
So again I plead.
Let me.
Let me wait a while, and a while, and a while.

Let me
Let me be
Just as I am

-nare

Subscribe now

Share

Perhaps we've all been diagnosed by someone.

Perhaps we've all mistaken a label for a person.

Subscribe now

Share

I have a peculiar habit.

I only write honest thoughts in black ink. I find that anything academic, practical, or transactional, I reach for blue. Notes for class. To-do lists. Applications. Forms. They all feel wrong in black. Even stranger, I stop writing in cursive…at least my version of it. My handwriting straightens itself, becomes efficient, almost clinical. As if a different part of me has taken over. But when I'm writing poetry, journaling, or trying to understand why a certain sentence has refused to leave me alone for three days, it has to be black ink. It has to be cursive.

It feels less like writing and more like confessing.

I've much pondered if this says something more about me. Is there a psychological explanation? Am I compartmentalizing different versions of myself? Have I quietly assigned personalities to pens and handwriting styles? Or is my brain simply performing one of those strange rituals humans invent without realizing it?

Developmental psychology often talks about context-dependent behavior. We are not exactly the same person at work as we are with our closest friend. We code-switch. We adjust. We slip into roles that fit the environment. None of that necessarily means we have fractured identities, it means the mind is remarkably good at creating cues for itself.

Perhaps my black pen has become one of those cues.

Over the years, my brain has learned that black ink means, "We're safe now. You don't have to impress anyone. Tell the truth." Cursive slows me down. It forces every thought to remain connected to the next. There is no rushing through a feeling in cursive. Every letter holds the hand of another. It feels less like constructing language and more like uncovering it.

Academic writing asks me to prove.

Creative writing asks me to reveal.

Maybe that's why they refuse to wear the same handwriting.

Virginia Woolf once wrote that "No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."

Perhaps my black pen understood that long before I did. I don't think this is dissociation. I don't think there are two people living inside me, taking turns depending on the stationery aisle¿

I think there are simply different doors into the same house. One opens into the library, where facts are organized neatly on shelves. The other opens into the attic, where memories, unfinished poems, and inconvenient truths are covered in dust sheets waiting for someone brave enough to pull them away.

The strange thing is that my hand seems to know which room I'm entering before I do. So I've stopped trying to correct it.

If my mind insists that honesty belongs in black ink and cursive, who am I to argue with a ritual that has given me so many pages of myself?

I'm curious whether this is only me.

-Yours in cursive confession

nare.

Do you have rituals your mind invented without asking your permission? Ones that seem irrational until you realize they've quietly become the language your brain uses to separate thinking from feeling? Or do you think I'm simply giving my pens an unnecessary existential crisis?

.

There is something I have been too embarrassed to admit. I wish people loved me less. Not because I dislike being loved, but because somewhere along the line, I forgot how to receive what I have spent my whole life giving away. Simply put, affection my end now feels like a burden,

People meet me and assume I am built for intimacy because I ask questions, I listen, I remember insignificant details and I become curious about the architecture of their minds. It looks like love and it’s unfortunate really, and I feel guilty, not because I have deceived them, but because I cannot find within myself the same urgency they have found for me.

Perhaps it is emotional exhaustion..

I think people love me in the wrong season. They meet me while I’m still entertaining their curiosity. While I’m still asking questions, still listening with dangerous attention, still making them feel like the most fascinating person in the room because tis true… people fascinate me. But then, they mistake observation for attachment.

I don’t blame them.

Sometimes I mistake it too… Although not in the way most will relate to.

The problem is that by the time they’ve decided they love me, I’m still trying to decide whether they’re real.

Dear Echo,

I don’t trust anyone.

Not because everyone is dishonest, I simply don’t believe human beings reveal themselves voluntarily. We curate. We perform. We negotiate our personalities depending on who is watching. The first version of a person is almost always public relations. I am interested in who you become after disappointment, after rejection, after your pride has been bruised, after nobody is applauding. Basically the negatives… not always but “despite” reveals more than “because”. That person tells me much more. So while you’re deciding whether you love me, I’m still studying your contradictions.

I’ve become embarrassingly self-aware. Not the romantic kind people write captions about. The exhausting kind.

The kind where you catch yourself manipulating a conversation before you’ve even finished the sentence. Where you notice every selfish impulse before you act on it. Where you know exactly which parts of your kindness are genuine and which parts are driven by guilt, ego, or the desire to be needed. I don’t think I’m easy to love once I’m fully known. I know how calculating I can become. How detached. How quickly I retreat into my own head and convince myself that solitude is safer than vulnerability.

People often tell me I’m mysterious. I wouldn’t refer to myself as such, I’m just transparent to myself. That’s the problem. There are no illusions left.

I know the ugliness I’m capable of. I know how cruel I can become when I feel the need to be. I know how quickly I can emotionally leave a room before my body follows. I know how often I confuse independence with emotional avoidance. Knowing yourself this well isn’t all that peaceful but I am at peace with it.

Yours defeated by self,

nare.

“Love” makes me uncomfortable. Now don’t make this a “childhood trauma” thing because it’s not. I’m comfortable with the idea mentally, as a concept or in actions, but once it is professed…No. Not because I don’t want it but because I don’t understand how you’ve arrived there so quickly.

You’ve met the version of me that’s socially acceptable but haven’t met the one that questions every atom, the one who assumes affection is temporary, the one who’s already rehearsing your departure before you’ve even settled in, the one who secretly believes that if you knew every thought I’ve ever had, every contradiction I’ve entertained, every ugly corner I’ve quietly swept under the rug, you would become a stranger overnight. So when someone says, “I love you,” my first instinct isn’t warmth. It’s suspicion. Of them. Of their conclusion.

I wonder what evidence they used…because I am still gathering mine.

There is a strange loneliness in being difficult to convince. Affection arrives. Trust doesn’t. And the distance between those two things has become the place where I live… that’s why I wish people loved me less. I don’t think less of their affection, I wish they’d take longer. Long enough to meet the parts of me that don’t speak beautifully, to discover that I am not made of profound conversations and carefully arranged sentences. Long enough to see me fail, contradict myself, disappoint them, withdraw, become ordinary and not carry the responsibility of their own emotions.

And if, after all that, they still decide to stay...YOU decide to love me after you’ve seen me disappear for a week because I needed silence, after you’ve realized my distance is not punishment, after the mystery fades and the ordinary remains, when I stop being interesting and start becoming real, when I seem difficult to reach… I still wouldn’t believe you, them, all.

Yours askew,

nare.

What's one opinion you hold about love that most people would disagree with?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

I was minding my business on TikTok when I stumbled across a man explaining that any woman who lives with her boyfriend or has sex outside marriage is, by definition, a concubine. Now, before anyone starts sharpening their theological swords, let me clarify something.

I am not writing this as someone who advocates for casual sex. Not because somebody threatened me with eternal damnation, not because I think my body is a limited-edition collector's item, and not because I am preserving myself in a temperature-controlled glass case for a future husband. I have my reasons. Some are spiritual. Some are personal. Some are practical.

Anyways..

What interested me wasn't his conclusion, it was the mathematics. Because unless reproduction has undergone a dramatic software update that nobody informed me about, sex still requires two participants. Yet somehow, after the act is completed, one person receives a title, a moral lecture, a character assessment, and a lifetime subscription to public scrutiny.

The other guy?

Gone.Vanished.Evaporated. Like a magician's assistant, except this time the assistant is accountability.

The Mystery of the Missing Man

The thing about these conversations is that they often reveal more about society than they do about morality.

A woman has sex:

Suddenly she becomes a concubine, impure, worldly, fallen, misguided, and possibly the reason civilization is collapsing.

A man has sex:

He is experiencing a season. A journey. A struggle. A learning opportunity. An opportunity for growth. A future conference speaker perhaps.

One of the most fascinating features of human psychology is our ability to create rules and then selectively enforce them. We do this constantly, not because we are evil, but because we are biased. People often assume they arrive at conclusions through logic and then form emotions around them.

Psychology suggests the opposite happens far more often. We feel first, then we build arguments that support the feeling.

The feeling, in this case, seems to be that female sexuality is dangerous and therefore requires management. Everything else gets constructed afterward.

The Rebranding Department

One of the claims made in the video was that nothing is new under the sun. Fair enough…That phrase comes from Scripture. Human behavior repeats itself as has been proven time and time again but if we're going to be historically accurate, let's commit to the bit.

Historically, a concubine was not simply a woman having sex. A concubine occupied a specific social position within a patriarchal structure. She existed in relation to a man. The role itself depended on male participation.

So… if we're reviving ancient labels, consistency demands that we revive the entire arrangement. You cannot have a concubine without the man who keeps one, that's like declaring somebody a tenant while insisting there is no landlord.

This is not to say he has agency over her body or choices Quite the opposite really. The comparison works because these titles are relational. They describe a social arrangement involving more than one person. A tenant does not exist as a tenant in isolation. The title emerges because there is another party involved. Likewise, the historical concept of a concubine was never a standalone identity that a woman magically acquired through sexual activity. It described her position within a relationship structure. The man was not a background character. He was not an innocent bystander. He was not a casualty of circumstance who happened to wander into the scene carrying flowers and poor judgment. He was a necessary component of the arrangement.

Which is why I find these conversations so fascinating. Somehow we have reached a point where two people participate in the same relationship, make the same decisions, engage in the same behavior, and yet only one receives a title. That is not theology. That is selective accounting.

Imagine if we applied this logic elsewhere:

A person takes out a loan. We spend hours discussing the borrower while pretending the lender is a mythological creature.

A marriage exists. We analyze the wife while questioning whether husbands are even real.

A football match takes place. We passionately debate one team while acting confused about why there is another team on the field… At some point the omission becomes more interesting than the argument itself. The title only exists because the relationship exists.

What strikes me most is how effortlessly we transform women into symbols while allowing men to remain individuals. The woman becomes "the concubine."The man remains David or John, or Michael.

Funny how the woman gets the label while the man gets diplomatic immunity.

Religion and the Female Body

Religion did not invent the regulation of female sexuality. Societies were doing that long before many modern religious traditions emerged. Religion simply became one of the tools used to reinforce existing social structures.

Before DNA testing existed, paternity was uncertain. Maternity was obvious. If a society wanted to control inheritance, property, bloodlines, and social order, regulating women's sexuality became a practical solution. Over time, practical concerns transformed into moral concerns.

Then moral concerns transformed into spiritual concerns. Then spiritual concerns transformed into identity, and before long, people weren't discussing behavior anymore. They were discussing worth. That is where things become dangerous, because behavior and worth are not the same thing as a person can make choices you disagree with without becoming a lesser human being.

The World's Favorite Hobby

There is something strangely comforting about making women symbolic… Women become symbols of purity. Symbols of temptation. Symbols of morality. Symbols of decline. Symbols of national values. Symbols of family values. Symbols of literally everything except themselves.

The average woman wakes up wanting coffee, financial stability, and fewer awkward conversations, in essence, peace. Society wakes up and says, "Excellent. You will now represent the moral condition of the entire civilization." An exhausting arrangement, if you ask me.

The Funny Thing About Standards

The interesting part is that many people claim their standards are universal, yet when the same action is performed by a man, the emotional intensity disappears. The outrage softens. The language changes. The consequences shrink. That doesn't look like a moral principle, it looks like favoritism wearing a moral costume, and if a standard only becomes severe when applied to one gender, people are eventually going to question whether the standard was ever the point.

My Position

I still believe people should think seriously about intimacy. I still believe our choices have consequences. I still believe faith and values should influence behavior. What I do not believe is that morality requires intellectual inconsistency.

If sex outside marriage is wrong, then it is wrong for everyone involved. If accountability matters, then everyone should be accountable. If labels must be assigned, then assign them evenly. Otherwise, we are not defending morality. We are defending a hierarchy, and those are two very different things. If we are serious about morality, faith, history, or truth, we should be suspicious of any framework that consistently turns one group into symbols while preserving the humanity of another. Because if a moral standard is sound, it should survive equal application and if it collapses the moment we ask where the man fits into the story, then perhaps the issue was never the morality. Perhaps it was the target.

Whenever I hear someone call a woman a “concubine” or other similar slurs for participating in a relationship, I find myself asking a simple question:

If she is the concubine, then what exactly is he?

Because unless human reproduction has become a solo activity, there appears to be a missing character in this story.

And somehow, it's always the man.

-Yours, still looking for the missing man,

nare.

There are people who sell their bodies and then there are people who prostitute their emotions. Who hand out pieces of themselves with such terrifying generosity that eventually there is nothing left untouched and absolutely nothing left unoffered. We romanticize this kind of person because they sound poetic in books, passionate, deep, loving. But in real life, they are usually exhausted

I think some of us were taught that our worth was proportional to how much of ourselves we could give away, so we learned to become emotionally excessive. We became listeners. Caretakers. Human confession boxes. We learned how to absorb pain so naturally that people stopped apologizing for unloading it onto us. And at first, it feels noble to be needed, to be trusted, to be chosen as the place where others place their ugliness. Until one day you realize people have mistaken your openness for public property. Suddenly everybody has access.Access to your time. Access to your tenderness. Access to your softness. Access to your ability to understand even the things that should not be forgiven.

Commically, because you survive through feeling, because emotion is the language your soul naturally speaks, you keep giving. Even when it costs you sleep. Even when it costs you peace. Even when you can physically feel yourself becoming emotionally malnourished. That is the strange thing about people who overfeel. You know when something is destroying you but simply continue anyway. Not because we are weak, but because somewhere along the line, suffering began to resemble intimacy.

I have noticed how quickly people become addicted to being understood. Especially by someone willing to reach into the uglier corners of them without immediately recoiling. People crave emotional absolution more than honesty. They want to be seen without consequence. And people like (Fill in a name) become dangerous because they are capable of seeing too much and still staying.

That is not always kindness. Sometimes it is self-betrayal disguised as compassion.

There is a violence in constantly abandoning yourself to accommodate the emotional weather of others. A slow erosion. Like standing too long at the edge of an ocean and pretending you do not notice the tide carrying parts of you away. I used to think love meant total access. Complete emotional exposure. The removal of every wall. Now I think that is how people lose themselves.

Not suddenly. Not dramatically.

But in teaspoons.

A little more understanding here. A little more patience there. Another excuse made for someone who would never dismantle themselves with the same devotion for you.

And perhaps the cruelest part is this:

The people who feel the deepest are often the loneliest.

There is a specific humiliation in realizing you have made homes out of people who only visited you temporarily.

So yes. Maybe I have been a prostitute of feelings, maybe you have too.

Selling emotional labor for fragments of connection. Trading pieces of our inner world for temporary closeness. Allowing people to consume the softest parts of us because we mistook being emotionally useful for being loved.

But I think I am learning.

Learning that not everybody deserves access to the deepest rooms in me. Learning that understanding someone does not obligate me to endure them. Learning that empathy without boundaries becomes self-destruction.

And perhaps most importantly:

Learning that love should not feel like emotional homelessness.

I no longer want to be admired for how much pain I can carry.

There is a theory people love to mention called the boiling frog theory: If you throw a frog into boiling water, it jumps out immediately. But if you slowly increase the temperature, it stays until it dies, adapting itself into destruction.

I used to think that theory was about relationships. Now I think it is about people like us. About emotional tolerance. About slowly normalizing neglect. About explaining away disappointment until betrayal starts looking reasonable.

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become emotionally depleted. It happens gradually. One unanswered message. One-sided affection. One more excuse. One more night spent understanding people who never studied you with the same devotion.

And because the temperature rises slowly, you stay. You call it patience. Maturity. Empathy. Meanwhile your nervous system is quietly filing for bankruptcy.

I think that is why books like “The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath”unsettled me so deeply. Not because Esther was dramatic, but because deterioration is often quiet before it becomes visible. Or “No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai” where alienation becomes performance until the character no longer knows where the mask ends. Even “The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde ” understood that corruption rarely arrives looking monstrous. It arrives charming. Beautiful. Easy to justify. It is unfortunate because I personally would prefer if emotional destruction arrived wearing a name tag and carrying legal documentation. Something clear, something dramatic. A thunderstorm perhaps. Not a slow emotional tax deducted from my spirit in microscopic amounts.

Dear Echo,

I wonder if loneliness becomes lighter once it is named enough times.

Or does it simply echo louder.

I have spent so much time understanding other people that sometimes I feel translucent. Like a window mistaken for a person. Everyone looks through me and calls it intimacy. And maybe I allowed it. Maybe there is vanity in being needed. A strange arrogance in believing your softness can save people committed to remaining broken.

Lately I have been thinking about silence. Not the peaceful kind. The kind that arrives after emotional exhaustion. After you have overexplained your wounds until even your pain sounds rehearsed.

I think some people become oceans because nobody ever taught them how to be held. So they flood. They pour. They drown themselves trying to quench the thirst of others. I no longer want to disappear inside people. I want to arrive somewhere and remain intact.

-Yours in emotional rebellion

nare

I no longer want to be celebrated for my ability to survive emotional starvation with grace. I want reciprocity. I want the terrifying intimacy of being met halfway. Not rented. Not emotionally borrowed.Fully. Quietly. Without having to auction fragments of my soul to receive it.

But how?

-nare

Share

Subscribe now

In this episode, we explore Grabovoi codes through the lenses of philosophy, psychology, numerology, and human behavior. We examine our deep desire for certainty, the mind's tendency to find patterns, and the role symbols play in shaping belief. From Pythagoras and sacred numbers to Jung's theories of the unconscious, this conversation asks whether the power lies in the numbers themselves or in the meaning we give them. More importantly, it asks what ideas like Grabovoi codes should ultimately evolve into: superstition, symbolism, or something deeper. A reflection on belief, attention, and the human need to make sense of the unknown.

Subscribe now

Share

In this episode, I reflect on growing older, not as a number, but as a psychological and philosophical experience. We talk about the grief hidden inside growth, the pressure of timelines, the discomfort of becoming, and the quiet realization that every year changes you in ways you do not immediately notice. This is an episode about slowness, self awareness, and learning to sit with the person time is slowly shaping you into.

There is something terrifying about how adaptable human beings are. Not inspiring, not admirable but simply terrifying. We romanticize survival because history sounds cleaner when rewritten by people who lived long enough to narrate it. But while reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, I kept realizing that survival is not always noble. Sometimes it is humiliating. Sometimes it is mechanical. Sometimes it is sipping soup two hours after speaking to a man who is now dead because grief has become too expensive for the nervous system to afford.

Frankl did not write like a man describing horror from afar. He writes like someone still carrying it’s temperature beneath skin, and that is what unsettled me most. The awareness that suffering changes the structure of perception itself. He speaks about apathy not as cruelty, but as adaptation. About emotional death as a protective shell. About how the mind, when cornered long enough, begins amputating it’s own reactions to survive.

“There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.”

That line stayed with me longer than I expected.

Subscribe now

We like to believe sanity is stable. Permanent. Moral, even. But Frankl reveals something darker. The human mind bends. It reshapes itself around unbearable conditions the same way water reshapes itself around a container

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation becomes normal behavior”

The prisoner becomes numb not because he is evil, but because feeling everything would kill him faster than starvation ever could. And somehow, within all this decay, Frankl still insists on meaning.

That is the frightening part.

Not the camps themselves. Not even the hunger. But the persistence of meaning inside them.

“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”

Dear Echo,

I have been thinking about that sentence obsessively. About how fragile and dangerous meaning is. How two people can stand in the same suffering and emerge differently depending on whether they believe there is something waiting for them beyond it. Frankl noticed prisoners who survived because they still loved someone. Because they still imagined finishing a manuscript. Because they still believed there was a future version of themselves worth delivering into existence.

Meaning is caloric. Hope is physiological.

We speak about purpose as though it is philosophical decoration. Something abstract. Inspirational. Optional. But meaning behaves more like a survival organ. Another lung. Another heartbeat. In places of suffering, purpose is not poetic. It becomes metabolic. The body seems to collapse much faster once the mind surrenders it’s reason to continue and I cannot stop thinking about how terrifying that is. That the human body listens to belief.
That despair is not merely emotional, but physical. That hopelessness alters posture, appetite, endurance, even the speed at which a person disappears into themselves.

Some people die long before death officially arrives. You see it in the way they move. Or stop moving. The way they no longer protect what little they have left. The way survival itself stops feeling urgent. The moment a person abandons the future, the body quietly follows after it.

I think we underestimate how much of living is anticipation.

The expectation of tomorrow. The assumption that there will be another conversation, another sunrise, another version of yourself waiting further ahead. Without that, existence becomes unbearably heavy. Time slows into something almost cruel, every action loses continuity, pain becomes absolute because there is no imagined relief standing beyond it. And maybe that is why people cling so desperately to love, ambition, religion, art, even fantasy. Not because humans are foolish, but because consciousness itself requires direction. We are creatures constantly leaning toward something. Some future moment. Some desired state. Some person. Some meaning.

Because suffering expands when it becomes eternal.

But once pain is given context, once it belongs to a narrative instead of chaos, the human mind bears it differently.

Not easily.
Not gracefully.
But differently.

And there is something almost tragic about realizing that meaning itself is unstable. Fragile. Human beings can lose it suddenly. A death. A betrayal. A failed dream. One moment you are oriented toward the future, the next you are suspended inside meaninglessness wondering why your body suddenly feels heavier than it did yesterday.

Hope is not optimism. It is necessity. Not a luxury. Not naïveté. A requirement for psychological survival.

And I think modern people misunderstand this. We chase happiness directly. We hunt fulfillment like consumers searching shelves for products labeled purpose. But meaning is usually discovered indirectly, often through responsibility, through love, through suffering itself. Not because suffering is holy, but because surviving it demands that we answer a terrifying question:

What now?

What remains when comfort disappears?
What remains when identity fractures?
What remains when life stops resembling the version you imagined?

Perhaps the cruel beauty of meaning is this:

It keeps the body alive long enough for the soul to continue searching for itself.

Meaning is caloric. Hope is physiological

-Yours Living,

nare

And then, there are the smaller horrors in the book. The details that feel almost too human to bear. Cigarettes becoming more valuable as soup than smoke. Men fighting over bread measured in ounces. A body no longer feeling like a body but “a small portion of a great mass of human flesh.” The humiliation of nakedness. The delusion of reprieve. The strange cruelty of hope appearing moments before destruction.

What frightened me most is how quickly man adjusts.

Share

“Textbooks tell lies!”

Yes They do…

Because no textbook can explain what it means for suffering to become routine. No academic language can fully capture what Frankl calls “barbed wire sickness.” The camps did not merely starve bodies. They altered time. Altered morality. Altered identity. A man became a number. 119,104. A person slowly dissolved into function.

And yet Frankl refuses nihilism.

That is why this book feels less like psychology and more like philosophy dragged through hell by its throat. He speaks about love with an almost unbearable sincerity. Not pleasure. Not achievement. Love.

“The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

And strangely enough, I believed him. Because throughout the book, love appears as the final untouched territory. The one thing suffering cannot fully contaminate. A man could still imagine his wife while standing in Auschwitz. Could still feel transcendence while starving. Could still hold inner conversations with beauty while surrounded by death.

There is something deeply human about that. Embarrassingly human, even.

Frankl also writes about humor in the camps, and I found that oddly moving. Men inventing ridiculous fantasies about the future. Tiny jokes surviving in places where dignity was being systematically erased. Humor not as entertainment, but rebellion. Proof that the mind still belonged to itself for a few seconds longer.

I think that is what this book ultimately taught me.

Human beings are horrifyingly fragile. And horrifyingly resilient.

We get used to almost anything. Frankl himself admits this, then immediately follows it with one of the coldest sentences I have ever read:

“Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.”

That “how” is the wound of the book.

Because adaptation always extracts payment.

Still, despite everything, Frankl leaves us with one stubborn truth. That even when stripped of comfort, certainty, identity, privacy, dignity, and safety, man retains one final freedom. The freedom to choose his response. And maybe that is what terrifies me most.

Not that suffering exists.
But that meaning does too.

-Yours still in search of the why,

nare.

Share Nare

There is something deeply unsettling about realizing you prefer your own company. Not in a poetic way or in the soft, curated way people post about on Instagram with candles and tea. I mean in a very real, slightly concerning way.
The kind where you look around and think, this is it? these are the options?

And then you go home.

I used to think solitude was something temporary. A waiting room. A phase between better things. Something you endured until life remembered to include you again… somewhere along the line, something shifted. I stopped seeing people as additions and started seeing them as disruptions. Not all of them. But enough. Enough to notice a pattern. Enough to ask a question I had been avoiding.

“Is this connection, or is this noise?”…. Because noise is easy. Noise fills space. Noise distracts. Noise makes you feel less alone without actually requiring anyone to see you. Connection wears heavier boots, demanding presence, honesty. It demands that someone meets you where you are without trying to rearrange you into something more convenient.

I realized something uncomfortable.

Most people do not want connection, they just want access. Access to your time, attention but most importantly, access to the version of you that is easiest to handle. So I have become stricter. Quietly. Without announcement. Without drama. Just a slow tightening of boundaries until only what feels right is allowed to stay. It is not bitterness. It is clarity. I looked around recently, truly looked, and I have not found anyone I would trade my solitude for. Not my time. Not my peace. Not the version of myself I have fought to understand.

That sounds harsh. It is not?….It is honest.

Because there is a difference between being alone and being undisturbed. And I have discovered that undisturbed is dangerously addictive as there is no performance required here. No adjusting, no shrinking, no explaining why I need space, or silence, or time to think. Just me. The strange thing is, I used to fear this version of my life. I thought it would feel empty. I thought it would echo. I thought I would eventually get tired of myself.

I have not.

If anything, I have become more interesting to myself. Which is either growth or a mild personality disorder. I am yet to decide.

But there is a quiet rebellion in choosing yourself this way. In refusing to dilute your standards just to feel accompanied. In understanding that loneliness is not always the absence of people, but sometimes the presence of the wrong ones.

So I have stopped negotiating. Stopped entertaining what drains me. Stopped romanticizing potential. Stopped confusing attention for care. And thus, what is left is simple. A kind of stillness that does not beg to be filled, peace that does not need witnesses. A kind of self that is enough.

It is not loud. It does not announce itself. It does not need validation. It just… stays

And for the first time, I am not trying to escape it or the thoughts that sit with me like this quiet, sharp, a little amusing.

So why am I writing this?

Some will think it is a signal or some kind of flare. A subtle request for validation so I can finally leave this island they assume I am stranded on. But I am not stranded. I walked here. I chose this ground. I named it mine. This is not a rescue note. It is a declaration, because there is something almost offensive about being enough for yourself. People do not trust it. They think it is a phase. A defense mechanism. A quiet cry disguised as independence. They wait for the moment I break character and admit I need them.

I do not.

If life is a game, and everyone insists on calling it chess, then I refuse to play as a piece waiting to be moved. I will be the board. I will be the player. I will be the one deciding which battles are worth engaging and which ones deserve silence.

Queen. King. Poet. Bishop. All of it. Or none of it. It does not matter.

What matters is this.

I am no longer negotiating my worth based on who stays.

There is a kind of wicked sufficiency in becoming whole on your own terms. It feels almost illegal at first. Like you are breaking an unspoken rule that says you must always need something, or someone, to complete you.

But I have learned something simple: Completion does not beg, does not perform, does not reach outward hoping to be held together.

It stands.

So if I am alone, let it be known. It is not absence. It is authorship.

-Forever an Author

nare

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

I first watched Persepolis years ago with the softness of ignorance. The way you watch animated films when you are young. Curious, entertained, impressed that the drawings move and the characters talk, but untouched by the weight beneath them. To me it was simply a story about a rebellious girl with a sharp tongue and a stubborn spirit. The black and white animation felt artistic, almost playful. I thought it was charming.

What I did not realize then is that Persepolis was not imagination. It is memory.

Watching it again now feels different. Age has a way of removing the soft filter we place over things. The same scenes that once felt quirky now feel heavy. Persepolis is not loud about it's politics, which somehow makes it more unsettling. It does not scream oppression at you. It shows something worse. The quiet normalization of it.

Girls are suddenly told to wear veils before they even understand what modesty means, schools transform into places of propaganda, families lower their voices in their own homes, music becomes contraband, Joy becomes something practiced carefully, like a secret handshake. The terrifying part is not the brutality itself, it is how quickly it begins to look like routine.

When I first watched Marjane, I thought she was simply dramatic. The way teenagers everywhere are dramatic. Now I see something else. I see resistance disguised as personality. A girl who refuses to shrink her mind even when her world insisted she shrink everything else.

And she is funny….painfully so. That is something people forget when talking about stories of struggle. Marjane is hilarious in the way only someone surviving absurdity can be. She argues with teachers, idolizes Bruce Lee like he is a personal life coach, lies badly, thinks she understands the world at twelve. In other words, she behaves exactly like every child who is convinced they are already wiser than the adults around them. Maybe they are after all. Who knows.

There is something comforting in that humour. It reminds you that oppression does not erase personality. People still laugh. They still complain. They still have awkward teenage phases even while history is rearranging the country around them.

I am not Iranian. I have never been. But there is something in Persepolis that feels strangely familiar anyway. The geography changes. The politics change. But the structure of women’s struggles echoes everywhere. Different language. Same negotiations. Safety versus voice. Silence versus survival.

Watching the film now, with everything unfolding in Iran, feels like reading a warning that has been sitting on a shelf for years while the world walked past it pretending not to notice. The women protesting today are not characters in a film. They are real, breathing people who decided that fear has had enough time to run the room.

Which is why watching Persepolis around International Women’s Day feels strangely appropriate. That day tends to arrive with pink graphics, inspirational quotes, and corporate social media accounts suddenly remembering that women exist. But beneath the slogans there is a quieter truth. The history of women has never been one smooth celebration. It has always been negotiation. Resistance. Survival.

Some women fight in streets.

Some fight in classrooms.

Some fight by simply refusing to disappear.

Marjane Satrapi shows us that resistance is not always heroic in the way movies promise. Sometimes it looks like a teenage girl wearing forbidden sneakers under her veil. Sometimes it looks like a grandmother whispering wisdom in the kitchen. Sometimes it looks like a girl leaving her country just to learn who she is allowed to be.

What stayed with me the most is that Persepolis never tries to turn suffering into poetry. Marjane is messy, angry, confused. Sometimes selfish, sometimes brave. She makes mistakes, she lies, she doubts herself. In other words, she is painfully human before she is inspirational.

And maybe that is the real tribute to women everywhere. Not the expectation that they must always be strong, or graceful, or endlessly resilient. But the recognition that they are allowed to be complicated.

When I first watched Persepolis, it was just an animated film to me. A rebellious girl with big opinions and questionable life decisions.

Now I watch it differently.

Now it feels less like a story and more like a mirror held up to history.

And somewhere, right now, there are girls living stories that will one day look deceptively simple in black and white drawings.

Yours, an International Woman

-Nare

Subscribe now

Share Nare

Share

I reckon my life is a movie

Not the clean kind. Not the ones where the music warns you before the heartbreak. Mine plays without permission, scenes change before I understand the last one. No rehearsal. No preparation. Just presence.

I have entered chapters confident and left them altered. I have trusted people who felt permanent and watched them fade into background characters. I have held onto moments that did not know they were temporary.

Some seasons moved slowly, like nothing was happening, yet everything was rearranging inside me. Other days arrived loud, demanding decisions before I felt ready to become the person required. I have been soft in places that punished softness. I have been strong in moments nobody witnessed. Growth rarely looked like victory in my script. Most times, it looked like silence, distance, restraint. There were versions of me that wanted approval, versions that stayed too long, versions that thought endurance was love. Each one had to exit so another could survive. No one hands you thenarration for your own life. You only get to understand the meaning after the scene has already cost you something.

I reckon my life is a movie… and somewhere in the middle of it, I started learning in two directions, acting multiple personalities.

I learned how to love without shrinking. How to leave without collapsing. How to accept softness as strength. How to sit in my femininity without apology. How to wear pink on certain days and not mistake it for weakness. How to admire what I admire, even when it stands alone. How to want different things and not explain them. How to move on with dignity. How to outgrow people without hatred.

But I also learned darker skills.

How to burn bridges before someone else strikes the match. How to strike first so I am not the one bleeding. How to keep my guard up even in quiet rooms. How to read a shift in tone and prepare for impact. How to trust selectively. How to become cold on command. How to be sharp with my words when I feel cornered. How to alter the script when the story threatens to embarrass me. I learned to leave where I was tolerated. I learned that attention is not care. I learned peace does not beg.

Both versions studied survival.

One learned to open.

One learned to protect.

Both are me.

Some days I mourn who I could have been with easier circumstances. Other days I respect the person that was built by difficult ones. My story did not become easier. I just ecame clearer, stopped chasing roles written by other people, stopped negotiating my boundaries for belonging, I stopped explaining decisions that protected me.

The camera kept rolling, and I kept changing.

If this is a film, it is still unfinished. No final act yet. No summary or voice over. Only movements starring ME.

Also me.

Still me.

-Your work in progress.

nare

Share Nare

Subscribe now

“If the attempt had worked, what age would you be forever?”

My answer was immediate. Thirty.

Not because I want to skip years. Not because I am tired of being young. But because thirty feels coherent. It feels like an age where my stillness would make sense. Where moving slowly would look intentional. Where depth would not feel out of place.

In this episode, I speak about feeling misplaced in time. About carrying a mindset that feels older than your body. About the quiet fear of being misunderstood because you do not rush the way others do. I explore psychology, identity, and the pressure of timelines. I question whether age brings clarity, or whether clarity is something you claim long before the calendar agrees.

This is a vulnerable one. It is about coherence. Permission. And the strange comfort of imagining an age where you finally fit into yourself.

Share

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

We Were Liars. It is something I sank into. Slowly. Quietly. Like water rising while you pretend your feet are still dry. E. Lockhart wrote pain with politeness, the kind that smiles while it rearranges your ribs. At first, everything looks gentle. Sun on skin. Salt in the air. Beaches. Wealth dressed as safety. Beautiful people teaching themselves how not to look at what is already rotting inside of them. But I felt the decay early, hiding in the white spaces between her words. Cadence’s voice was always soft, almost careful, and I trusted it before I understood it. I trusted it the way you trust your own thoughts when you brainwash yourself, then…the thoughts betray you.

“Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.”
“We are beautiful and rich and live on a private island.”
“I suffer migraines. I am a liar.”

What stayed with me is how memory becomes both shelter and punishment. She forgets so she can breathe, then remembers so she can ache. A rhythm humanity is all too familiar with.

The island did not feel like peace to me, it felt like an inheritance, silence handed down like furniture nobody admits is broken. And the Liars? I loved them but also feared them. They did what hurt people always do, turn fire into romance and call it courage while standing inside the smoke. By the end, I was not shocked. I was heavy. The tragedy is not only what happened. It is how love thought it was saving something and instead learned how to destroy it. I closed the book knowing innocence does not vanish. It burns quietly, and keeps burning, long after everyone agrees the house still looks beautiful.

“We are Sinclairs. No one is needy. No one is wrong”

“I used to be blond. Now my hair is black.
I used to be strong. Now I am weak.
I used to be pretty. Now I look sick.
It is true I suffer migraines since my accident.
It is true I do not suffer fools”

“He told my mother he was not a Sinclair and could not try to be one any longer. He could not smile. He could not lie. He could not join that beautiful family in those beautiful houses”
”Could not. Could not. Would not”

“It tasted like salt and failure. The red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch”

“Mummy snapped.
Get hold of yourself.
Be normal. Right now.
Do not cause a scene.
Breathe. Sit up.
I did what she asked”

“Me, Johnny, Mirren, and Gat”

“Gat, Mirren, Johnny, and me”

“That first night, I cried and bit my fingers and drank wine from the Clairmont pantry. I spun into the sky, raging, banging stars from their places. I hit my fist into the shower wall. I washed shame and anger in cold water. Then I shook in bed like an abandoned dog, skin trembling on bone”

“The next morning, and every day after, I acted normal. I lifted my square chin. We sailed. We built bonfires. I won the tennis tournament. We made vats of ice cream and lay in the sun”

“We have a warped view of humanity on Beechwood,” Gat said. “You do not see it.”

“My mother believes,” Gat said. “She was raised Buddhist. Now she goes to a Methodist church. She is not happy with me.”

“You do not believe because someone tells you to,” I said.

“No. The question is how to be good if I do not believe anymore.”

“She was quick to judge and played favorites, but she was also warm”

“Welcome, once again, to the Sinclair family.
We believe in outdoor exercise.
We believe time heals.
We believe in pills and the cocktail hour.
We do not discuss problems in restaurants.
We do not show distress.
Our lips stay stiff.
People watch us because we hide our hearts.
We enjoy being watched”

“I am a Sinclair. Part of a privileged clan. Part of a special story, only because I belong to it”

“This is how we were raised”

Sinclairs.
Sinclairs.

“Does she stay because she loves him like meat loves salt? Or does she stay because he promises a kingdom? She struggles to tell the difference”

Dear Echo,

Reading We Were Liars felt like watching a mirror argue with me. The Sinclairs say no one is needy. No one is wrong. I kept reading and thinking, people only say that when something is already broken. Cadence changed after the accident. Her hair darkens. Her strength leaves. Her beauty turns into sickness. I understood that part too well. Trauma edits you without warning. One day you recognize yourself. The next day your body and mind speak a language you never learned, a language you never encountered.

What stayed with me was how hard they try to look normal. Her mother tells her to breathe. Sit up. Do not cause a scene. I felt that pressure. The kind where pain embarrasses people or you, or the version of the person you’d kill to be. The kind where healing gets rushed because comfort matters more than truth.

That first night Cadence falls apart, then wakes up pretending. Sailing. Bonfires. Winning tournaments. I know that routine. You cry in private. You perform in daylight. People clap for the version of you that hurts least to watch. Beechwood warped them and privilege taught silence. Gat asks how to stay good without belief, and I paused there because once something breaks in you, rules stop working the same way. You start asking different questions. What hit me most was control, not loud control. Quiet family control. Smile control. Loyalty control. The type that dresses trauma in nice clothes.

While reading, I kept thinking how people confuse love with safety, and safety with staying. Sometimes you stay because affection feels familiar. Sometimes you stay because leaving feels like loss of identity.

By the time I had finished the book, I did not feel shocked. I felt exposed. Like the story touched places people decorate instead of heal. We Were Liars does not shout. It sits with you. And somehow, it sat with me a little too long.

Yours Perfect,

nare.

1Just in case you want a fast emotional hit, watch the movie. It gives faces, silence, and tension real weight. Beechwood feels alive on screen.

Still, the book holds the inner damage the film moves past. The movie lands harder. The book stays longer.

Share

Subscribe now

Malice. This was a word that explains a horrible life into a menial four letter word.

Danielle Steele’s Malice did not read like a story to me. It felt like a confession I was forced to carry. I sank into it, I cried, I felt, I wept. At some point, I stopped observing and started inhabiting her. Her fear crawled into my ribs. Her silence stabbed at my heart. For a moment, I was not reading her suffering, I was breathing it like thick black smoke.

What I loved most about the book was not the plot but the emotional endurance of Grace. A name much well suited for her and painfully so. Steele writes pain without spectacle. She does not decorate trauma but lets it ache. This suffering was slow. Human. Lingering. You watch innocence fracture in small, quiet ways at the mercy of the cruel patience of time.

“When the past is your enemy, all you have is the present”

“The nurse only worked in the daytime. Her father didn’t want them there at night”

“Everyone realized he hard a hard time accepting just how sick his wife was, and now he stood in the pew next to grace and cried like a baby”

“But it was grace who looked absolutely distraught and shattered as she stared straight ahead at the banks of the flowers at the alter”

He struck, and in a cruel twist, it was he who wore the mark of victimhood in the end. She bore consequences, braded and confined while the world refused to see the balance shift. Truth hid in shadows, those who saw it vanished, and those left behind would never grasp how the story truly bled. Justice, if it came at all arrived late, unfashionably so, dressed in couture irony.

“Even as a boy, people have always ben crazy about him”

“Everyone loved my dad, Grace thought. He was not close to anyone”

“It was Frank who went over all the contracts with a fine-tooth comb. But it was always john whom got all the glory, whom they asked for when they called”

“He had never had a roving eye, which was another nice thing people always said about him- “And Lord knows he had the right to, with Helen so sick and all, you’d think he would start to look around… but not John… he’s a right and decent husband”

I also hated parts of this book. Not because they were bad, but because they were too gentle with rage. The girl survives beautifully, but survival is not the same as justice. Her pain deserved thunder, not only grace. I kept waiting for the story to let her burn instead of bow. I wanted her anger allowed, not edited. And that is why the title Malice does not do her suffering justice.

Malice suggests intention. Evil. Sharp cruelty. What she lived through was more than malice. It was erosion. It was theft of safety. It was being undone quietly while the world watched politely. Malice feels too small a word for the weight she carried.

She suffered with restraint.

She is better than me.

Because if it were my story, I would not heal so softly. I would not forgive so cleanly. I would drag the world into hell with me and call it symmetry.

Malice made me feel, but more than that, it made me question the kind of survivor I am. Whether I become gentle like her, or dangerous like my thoughts.

Steel gave her grace.

I gave her my anger.

And for a moment, while reading, I became her.

Our mothers tell us there are no monsters under our beds, or hidden inside our closets but they don’t warn us that sometimes monsters come dressed as people that claim to love you more than the sun loves the moon. -Nikita Gill

When is a monster not a monster? Oh when you love it. -Caitlyn Siehl

“She was a pretty girl, or she would have been if she’d allowed herself to be. Most people were surprised by how pretty she was, if they really looked at her. but if you didn’t look twice, you’d never notice her at all”

“Mama never let me wear black. And I thought I should.”

This was the little frequencies nudging at her consciousness. This was it for me, for her. Defiance. It was just a black dress or perhaps it wasn’t.

“She never argued with him. There was no point. He always got what he wanted. He had been too good-looking and too successful for too long. Things had always worked for him, and he expected them to stay that way”

“It looked strange for a man like him to have an only child who dressed like an orphan”

She lost her sense of family before she lost her parents. Her mind reached it first, her clothes followed. She dressed the part.

“For all her shyness, she ran a home beautifully and had since she was thirteen. In the past four years she had done everything for her mother”

“I was thinking about how odd it will be now without your mama,” he said. “Maybe easier for both of us.”

“Ellen was gone. The nurses were gone. No one was left except the two of them. Yet he was not a man who dwelled on misfortune”

“A lump rose in her throat. It had been an awful day, an awful year, an awful four years. Sometimes she wished she could disappear into a puddle of water. But there was always another day, another duty. Sometimes she wished they had buried her instead of her mother”

“She was unaware of her beauty. Her long legs, graceful hips, appealing body meant nothing to her. She did not care”

“She did not want to remember the day her mother died, or the way she begged Grace to be good to her father. All her mother cared about was him. All Grace cared about was making him happy”

“Come on, baby. Let me in. We are both hurting.”

“I can’t.”

“Your mom isn’t here now,” he smiled. “That’s the point, Grace. It’s our life now. Our time. No one has to know.”

“The beatings were brutal but hidden. The bruises stayed explainable as long as Ellen allowed it”

“Ellen painted a terrifying picture and placed responsibility on Grace’s shoulders”

“Be good to Daddy, Grace. Take care of him.”

“It was a lonely life after that”

“Grace would do anything he wanted. Over and over, he made her prove it”

“She had been good enough”

“But she could not survive it anymore. She would have no life except to serve him. Whatever it took, she had to stop him”

“She did not remember leaving the room. She felt trapped in a cage. Quiet, afraid, yet dignified. There was something unmistakable about her. She had suffered, paid a high price for freedom, and thought it worth it, Molly York saw it the moment she looked at Grace”

“Did your father love you,” Molly asked, “or did he use you?”

“She’s sane,” Molly said. “Deeply depressed, for good reason.”

“Grace looked like an apparition. Nothing suggested a normal seventeen-year-old. No lightness. No ease. Only someone who had seen too much”

“There was menace in the place, yet it suited her. It was impersonal, and she liked it”

“She had never felt so grown and free. No one controlled her. No one wanted anything from her. She could do anything she wanted”

“You’ll regret it if you never marry,” they told her. “I don’t think so. I’ve been burned enough.”

They warned she would become an old maid. “Good,” Grace smiled. “Then no one will ask me out, and I won’t have to make excuses.”

Dear Echo,

I have thus absorbed yet another novel. One that allows my mind to lurk just outside the banks of rage and sympathy. There are a million different reasons to hate a man, make this novel a million and one. This was a book that made me fashionably late to my own mind. I started feeling a stopped with grace because she became as real as air to me.

How can someone be named so peacefully, so gracefully yet never received any of that from the world. whenever in time you stumble and think or with your utterance acknowledge you have the worst life. Think of GRACE not as comparison, but as witness. A word shaped like mercy. A life shaped like endurance. The irony is almost cruel. The universe handed her a peaceful title and never honoured it. She moved through suffering with a softness the world did not deserve. Say her name and remember how some people do not shatter loudly. They survive quietly, and quiet survival weighs more than any scream.

-Yours in recovery

nare

An audience that engages will always have my heart

Leave a comment

Share