I catch myself in the glass—
coffee-shop window.
My face laid over strangers
like the world is trying me on.
For a second, everyone fits.
Then the light changes and I am all I can see.
Small and unchanging.
The habituated questioning starts:
Am I-
Interesting?
Beautiful?
Necessary?
Lovable?

It rarely stops with me,
I do it to strangers:
sorting saints from salesmen,
brides from beggars,
bright from stupid,
safe from strange,
As if I’m holding the beam and balance
of the universe,
as if I haven’t spent my whole life
begging the world
to spare me the crucible.

Still,
that old ache to be witnessed
wakes hungry.
We want worth with weight.
Something receipt-shaped.
Ring-shaped.
House-shaped.
Something we can hold up and say:
See?
See me?
See, I mattered.
So we build the Good Life
out of good lighting.
Good job.
Good skin.
Good kitchen.
Good becomes goods
becomes Gucci
becomes gold
becomes God.
Pick your G.

Funny how worship
as a different placeholder
depending on our particular flavour of
Insatiability.

“What interests you?”
“I don’t know.”
I hate how quickly I say it.
Between us, hope sits
in the palm of his hand,
a toothpick cathedral.
Ridiculous thing.
Still standing.
And suddenly I know:
I’m not afraid it will collapse.
I’m afraid it won’t.
That I’ll get the face,
the love,
the room with morning light,
roses and inexhaustible happiness.
and the ache will step across the threshold,
unhoused by what it finally holds, and ask what’s next?

Maybe hunger has no opposite.
Maybe arrival is just desire
pouring itself into the abyss.
So we shift the furniture.
Pivot the mirror. Rename the ache.
New posture. New partner.
Same posture. New postcode.
And the truer truth breaks through the noise:
I’ve never actually asked,
Am I loved?
I’ve only stood in the mirror asking,
What must I become
to be done becoming?
The answer is a void.

The answer is nothing.

There is no podium.
No final version of my life
worth the congratulations.
So I stop searching for beauty in my complexion
stop longing for love in strangers,
stop trying to build cathedrals out of toothpicks.
I let hunger sit at the table.
I let the wanting burn its light.
I let the world remain too huge to hold,
and myself—
wild and breathing,
thank God—

too alive to arrive.

Thanks for reading Beautiful Ache,

Lish xx

From this I became wary of it. I remember obsessively counting. Numbers. Steps. Objects. The cracks in a path. I tried to trap it. I bought a wristwatch, a heavy hanging wall clock, a brass bedside alarm clock, and found myself timing everything. The mechanics I wound became psychological, a mental twisting—the only mechanism that seemed to make life work. And with it life became a relentless tick-tick-tick, a strange mechanical orchestra that warped and blurred until it sounded like a single shifting heartbeat.

I loved the cold, geometric certainty of it. When the dial hit 12:00 PM, it was precisely 12:00 PM—a solitary island, knowable and simple, in a life crowded by things I could neither predict nor fix. 5:30 AM breakfast. 6:00 AM run. 2:00 PM shift. Like a timekeeper, I tended the hours precisely.

But a clock only measures change; it doesn’t hold it.

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People tend to say that “life goes by in a blip” to remind themselves to notice sunsets, laughter and rollercoasters before they disappear. But I don’t think that’s where life slips through our fingers. The greater danger isn’t forgetting the beautiful moments. It’s wishing away the ugly ones.

We become experts at bargaining with the clock.

Just get through today.

Be Friday already.

Let this meeting finish.

Let winter end.

Let the grief become nothing but a memory.

Every terrible day carries within it the quiet wish that time would hurry up, catch fire and burn. We imagine we are only skipping pain. But disappearing hours are still our lives.

When I stopped counting time as a way of controlling it, I slowly realised it wasn’t so important to track time as it was to stand inside it. That single pathway across the field suddenly branched. The question was no longer, What time is it? but What is asking to be seen here?

The trouble with the “blip” theory is that it only applies when you are looking backwards through clean windows. Inside my chest, I felt an aquarium. The glass had grown cloudy with green algae until I could no longer see what was moving inside—only the vague, heavy shifts of something still breathing beneath the murk. My mind became a cluttered drawer of miscellaneous objects, thoughts colliding like loose nails whenever it was pulled open. Time was a ghost promising an end.

Around this time, I heard a story about a woman with cancer whose hair had begun falling out in handfuls. Instead of burying throwing it in the trash, or refusing to acknowledge her new reflection, she invited her closest friends to enact a ritual. Together, one by one, each person placed their hand on her head, lightly removing the loose strands from her shoulders and scalp, they carried them outside, laid them in a fire and danced around the smoke and honoured he egregious fate of losing ones hair during chemotherapy. They refused to let loss happen privately, clinically, efficiently or quietly without cognisance. They turned the ugliest part of the illness into a sacrificial, heartwarming ritual.

The story stayed with me because it shook up and dismantled something I believed.

They did not wait until the cancer was over before looking for beauty.

They walked directly toward what was unbearable and gave it rite, ceremony and anointment.

It made me wonder whether beauty isn’t something waiting at the end of suffering, but something that appears the moment we stop trying to outrun it.

In the thick of living, time behaves almost like physics: mass slows it down. Presence is mass. When you are fully there, the moment accumulates weight. It gathers an orbit. You step out of the frantic chronology of what comes next? and sink into the heavier territory of what is here? Time ceases to be an abstract sky we walk beneath; it becomes an ocean we enter.

Perhaps that is why the hardest days always seem both endless and strangely absent from memory. We spend them trying to survive rather than inhabit them.

There are afternoons at work when my chest feels scooped hollow. Every instinct tells me to let the hours disappear. The dark carpet. The hallowed stares. The replaceability and repetition of it. But when I remember that woman dancing around the fire, I try something different. I move closer instead of further away. I force my eyes and body to notice the detail of it all. The atoms of soil, the scent of glue, the way the clouds gather and evaporate in the afternoon.

Birds suspended on the fence pole as the children leap and hop on the pavement. The rainbow beads caught on the stained carpet floor. The way every chair in the room seems to lean imperceptibly toward the window. Nothing has improved. Yet something has changed.

People often wonder where the years have gone. I suspect they disappear wherever we refuse to look. Into hospital corridors. Into fluorescent offices. Into funerals. Into Monday mornings. Into arguments, waiting rooms, lonely dinners and ordinary Tuesdays. We lose our lives not because they are short, but because we spend so much of them asking time to take us somewhere else.

Time reminds us that we cannot manipulate it, pause it or reverse it. It does move like sand draining through an hourglass. Time cannot solve me. It cannot change the outcome. It cannot lie about what has happened here. We cannot ignore what lives inside time any more than we can drink our sorrow into oblivion.But our attention gives that sand colour, texture and weight.

Being present does not mean life becomes wonderful. It does not erase mishap, disappointment or grief. It simply allows us to place each thing where it belongs, it allows us to believe in the idea I read in Kate Bowler’s novel ‘Joyful, Anyway’, where she talks about how she imagines God as an overzealous interior designer rearranging the furniture of a life.

This goes here. That belongs there. The scar. The addiction. The laughter. The unbearable Tuesday. The missed invitation. The lousy date. The horrid sting of the past. The ordinary afternoon. The uplifting conversation. The children playing. In this, we also get to decide what gets our attention, what gathers our presence and creates the orbit we besiege. We might say no, not there. This table belongs by the window. That heartbreak doesn’t get the whole room; it only gets the lime-green armchair. The room is still the same room. Nothing has disappeared. But everything finally belongs somewhere and you see it all. You feel it all. Time becomes full on your terms.

When the carpet feels one shade too dark, the faces slightly too scowled, the seats too still, and everything either too much or not enough of something, I try to move closer instead of away. I notice the scattered rainbow shards colouring the carpet. The gloss of tired eyes. The way every chair tilts toward the afternoon sun.

I blink twice into a more inhabited day.

Perhaps that is how life doesn’t become a blip.

Not by filling it with beautiful moments, but by refusing to abandon the ugly ones.

What’s ugly doesn’t become beautiful because it changes.

It becomes beautiful because, at last, someone stayed long enough to see it. Someone decides to host the conversation. Sit and fully take in the dirt, the pain, the way things might not be quite right, to take an honest look at life's brevity, and perhaps then it won’t feel like it went by in a blip.

Thanks for reading Beautiful Ache,

Lish xx

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I live under the impression that imagined destinies always come true. In all my loud, unselfconscious singing, I believe the world is willing to sing back. But gradually, then all at once, the things that give me that unbridled sense of self begin to fall apart. As I step out of primary school, then high school, then university, I learn that lights do not always turn green for me. Clean hair, pretty dreams, essay skills, and good manners do not earn the approval I crave. When I graduate, I meet a version of myself I swear I’ve never seen before. Suddenly my skin is blemished, my hair loses its gold, and I stop singing.

By twenty‑three, I’m a teacher who can’t withstand the intensity of a classroom. No man survives the emotional theatrics I put him through. My bank account is a quiet humiliation. And because my self‑worth is tied to these fragile things, their collapse feels like proof that I am unworthy. I begin to despise myself.

I’m driven back into myself, like a musician trying to play in an orchestra without sheet music. I’m forced to redesign what it means to like myself at all. At first I’m desperate. I search for a sense of self in employers, at poetry slams, in friend meet‑ups, in Uber rides, on Hinge dates, in the faces of strangers at checkouts. I’m lost, like a feverish child waiting for applause, for acknowledgement, for something that might sanctify my ordinary life. I want recognition to rescue me from mediocrity. But no smile, no poem, no work ethic, no kiss, no good intention can overcome the shame I feel. I still can’t sing with any honest freedom.

Joan Didion whispers the truth to me:
“Self‑respect has nothing to do with the approval of others… nothing to do with reputation.”

So I go home.

Staying in my parents’ living room in my twenties teaches me the irrevocable. I begin to understand that even the most primal bonds require tending, often through a thicket of misunderstanding. I stand in that ordinary room longing for some perfected emotional destination, and I realise those destinations don’t exist.

There is no arrival in love. There is only the ground beneath my feet and the imperfect people before me. Happiness, if it exists, is simply the decision to remain in the room when disappointment enters. It’s the refusal to demand that reality match the fantasy.

As Didion says, anything worth having has its price. Adulthood becomes the slow death of imagined identities: the ideal child, the ideal parent, the ideal friendship, the ideal life. Relationships aren’t failures because they contain frustration or boredom or distance. The measure of a life is whether I can continue to love in spite of these things.

By twenty‑four, I understand that achievement doesn’t transform anyone. Competence doesn’t create dignity. Intelligence doesn’t guarantee stability. Character is something far more difficult to obtain. I lose my innocence, my naive hopes, my belief that choices are reversible. I lose the conviction that honourable actions make me honourable. Performance cannot generate selfhood. Even love cannot deliver arrival. Character, if it exists, is harder won than I ever imagined.

At first, this disappoints me. I assume adulthood involves arrival — a place where shame dissolves, relationships make sense, and the self becomes coherent. Instead, adulthood looks suspiciously ordinary. Public transport because I have no car. Mould creeping across ceilings. Drunk people after midnight. Crumbs, missed calls, awkward conversations, mistakes repeated for the third and hundredth time.

Adulthood is something I come to understand late at night, lying awake between 1:00 and 3:00 AM in the uncomfortable bed I should have thrown out years ago. It’s most deeply felt when I gather the courage to witness all the ways I let myself down — the sins of omission, the cowardice, the carelessness, the conversations I fail to smooth over. I watch the disappointing montage of my life and resist the urge to look away.

Adulthood, to me, is learning to face one’s infinite failings without flinching. It isn’t about loving myself. It’s about telling the truth about the life I’ve lived, refusing denial or ignorance. It’s realising that my failed attempts are not rehearsal. They are the play.

The revelation is not that I will someday overcome my imperfections. The revelation is that life is happening in the midst of them. There is no future version of myself waiting beyond the horizon. There is only the ground beneath my feet and the life already unfolding.

I know this world is imperfect. I know clean hair and good manners won’t buy lasting love or approval. I know lights don’t always turn green. And like Andrea Gibson writes, “I’m not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.”

But I no longer believe that life’s value lies beyond its disappointments. The mouldy ceilings, the scuffed shoes, the misunderstandings, the green lights, the moonlight, the people who stay and the people who leave, this isn’t preparation for life. This is life.

For years, I think happiness lives elsewhere: in the next achievement, the next relationship, the next version of myself. I wait for the moment when everything settles and I can begin living properly. Instead, I find this ordinary, trembling existence.

The missed calls. The friendships that shift. The parents who love me imperfectly. The loves that arrive and depart. The fresh peaches on a Saturday morning. The conversations that linger. The rooms I outgrow. The shitty conversations.

And perhaps David Whyte is right:
We are more real in our simple wish for home, friendship, and love than in any destination.

The golden hair disappears. The smart shoes wear out. The smoke clears. But the room remains. The ground remains. The people before me remain.

And despite everything, I find myself loving this life. Not because it is perfect. Not because it redeems every disappointment. Not because it delivers the destination I imagined. But because it trembles. And it is beautiful trembling.

Perhaps adulthood is not learning to transcend the ordinary. Perhaps adulthood is learning to stay present for it — to watch, steady and unguarded, as life unfolds in all its clumsy, unfinished glory. To know the lights will not always turn green. And to sing, off‑key in the mirror, a little less pleased with my reflection.

Singing anyway.

Thanks for reading Beautiful Ache,

Lish xx

I sang on the way to school,
on the monkey bars,
and staring into my bedroom mirror.

Standing there, I faintly remember what it felt like to like myself.

Gold hair. Unblemished skin.

Living in the naivety that convinced me
that my life would unfold cleanly.

I thought I was made for smart shoes. Stability.
Christmas lights. Babies and zero mistakes.
A world in which all imagined destinies came true.

Back then, the world still seemed willing to sing back.

Somehow puberty came with an entourage of self-hatred,
and somehow self-hatred stole my innocence.

And no innocence meant no singing.

Gradually. Then all at once.

There was a stranger in the mirror,
a self I swore I’d never seen in my life.

Suddenly, I had blemished skin
and dull hair absent of gold.

Suddenly... I was twenty-three years old,
with no smart shoes, no stability, and plenty of mistakes.

Adulthood was

mould spreading across ceilings,
public transport because I had no car,
drunk people at midnight,
crumbs and missed phone calls.

Adulthood is a lesson in the irrevocable.

It’s standing on ordinary carpet,
facing your parents,
having them misunderstand you for the 100th time,
longing for some perfected emotional destination that doesn’t exist.

Adulthood is waking up at 3:00 AM,
beyond the reach of warm milk,
in that notoriously uncomfortable bed
that you should have thrown with the last furniture removal,

having the courage to feel and taste and watch
all the ways you let yourself down.

To count your sins of omission.

To see your sloth and pure cowardice.
Your carelessness.
The strangers’ beds you slept in.
The ambivalent conversations you were unable to smooth.

To see all the trouble you caused.

And to stare plainly at the everlasting documentary,
the disappointing montage of your life.

Dealing with one’s infinite failings
and resisting the urge to look away.

Adulthood, it turns out, is not about loving oneself.

It’s about being willing, unflinching,
to admit the terrifying story of the life you’ve lived.

At twenty-nine, I realised there is no arrival,
you don’t suddenly break free of shame.

There is only the ground you stand on,
and the version of yourself you keep chasing.

Happiness, if it breathes at all,
is smoke fading halos.

But despite them fading,
I suppose I love this life.

And we all have different reasons for forgetting to sing.

And I knew life would tremble—
but doesn’t it look beautiful trembling?

I know this world is far from perfect.

I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.

I know lights will not always turn green for me.

Clean hair and good manners won’t buy me lasting love.

But I believe our failed attempts at life
aren’t the rehearsals.

This is life begetting life.

We are always so close.

Always scratching at the edge of the ultimate secret:

that we are more real in our simple, clumsy,
blemished skin and unremarkable hair;

in mould spreading across ceilings,
public transport,
drunk people after midnight,
crumbs and missed phone calls;

in our attempts to look good in smart shoes,
find stability,
buy fresh peaches,
sit in piano bars,
and build a home, a family, a love—

than we ever are in the destination itself.

And the distance between not knowing that
and finally knowing it?

That is as close as we come to happiness,

its smoke fading halos.

The golden hair is gone.

The smart shoes are gone.

But the room is still here.

The ground is still here.

And you are still here.

And I am finally ready to watch.

Willing, and unflinching,
to admit the story of my life.

Adulthood is, in fact,

green lights,
moonlight,
smoke fading halos,

lights not turning green,
parents not responding in the way you need—

mouldy ceilings
and scuffed shoes,

and singing anyway.

If this poem resonated, please feel free to leave a comment answering: What did adulthood turn out to be for you?

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Lish xx

In this instant, you are met by a bright trouble. You realise it is the same light you saw the first time you opened your eyes after birth, the same light that made you cry your first tears, and the same light that was your first fear.

You feel the heat prickling the bridge of your nose and your eyes well with little tears, and you think about how it is too much and yet it is everything. Standing there, held in this contradiction, you realise something difficult: that the world is radiant and indifferent at once. Everything is beautiful, and everything is at risk, held in a state of unscripted heat and ruin, and beneath both, there is no final reason for any of it. Standing there, you come to realise that this might be the very reason you suffer at all.

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Maybe this is why we walk around carefully, averting our faces this way and that, keeping ourselves from the full power of the light. Maybe this is also why we resist giving ourselves fully to what is beautiful, knowing how easily it can be taken from us. To look directly at the sun is to feel how easily everything could be undone, how everything is always undoing itself.

Maybe this is why, in the late 18th century, tourists would look through a Claude Glass: a convex mirror. Instead of looking directly at a scene, they would turn their back on the landscape itself and look instead at its reflection. The Claude Glass would darken colours, soften detail, and compress the scene. In this way, the filtered world became more palatable, and only then would we let ourselves “see the sun set in all its glory.” Not because the sun is hostile, but because it is too much—too bright, too uneven, too alive.

It’s as though we hold back, because stepping fully into the world’s brightness doesn’t feel innocent—it feels like an agreement to see everything that lives beside it. To stand in that brightness is to feel its warmth and its ruin at once, and sometimes that is more than we’re willing to bare.

So, we invent millions of small fabrications designed to take the edge off staring into the beauty and indifferent nature of everything. These small fabrications allow us to look without being implicated, to participate at a distance. We wear darkened lenses, draw the curtains, drink the wine, turn on the AC, and press record instead of simply seeing and being as we are. We listen through headphones, speak through screens, remember through photographs. We angle ourselves away from eye contact, we edit our words before they are spoken, we reach instinctively for our phones—those modern, pocket-sized Claude Glasses. They are small panes of black mirror that allow us, again and again, to look away while believing we are still living.

Sometimes, our slight methods of turning away are so slight they’re imperceptible. Where you drink to cover up the deeper feelings of wanting to curl up in bed and not participate—see the friend, attend the work, stand in front of people in any capacity. Moments you find yourself wanting life to imitate art because at some point you decided art was better than the real thing. Moments where you held your parents and the deep felt sense that at some point not long from now they won’t be here to hug you. Along the way, you walked into a hundred rooms in a thousand different moments where you felt judged and like the wrong person for the occasion.

Sitting out at dinner, it happened again, with a group of girlfriends. You begin to notice it: the way their eyes slide past yours and settle back into their laps, into their feeds. The glow of their screens robbing the rawness of experience between you. Conversation becomes like loose threads unsewn—someone starts to say, “I’ve been thinking about leaving my—” but something stops them, the sentence hangs mid-air, abandoned and unstitched. You feel, suddenly, how easily presence can be withdrawn without so much as a look to appease it. They change the conversation to something easier. Bathroom tiles. The restaurants choice of décor. An image they saw of a friend on vacation.

You feel yourself immediately wish to exit your body. You order another vodka, they refresh there Instagram feed, you posture yourself differently. You absorb your own battering by leaning on distraction and a kind of practiced self-containment. You too build up the void of your own inauthenticity to avoid the sharper edges of being seen. Somewhere along the way we learnt that it feels safer to bid for the attention of strangers than to look up and ask something real of each other. You want so much of this experience to be rearranged. You watch as they return to their phone, you return to your vodka—now a buffer between you and the sharp aliveness of the world, and the feelings it awakens that you would rather keep buried.

And somewhere in that exchange, in the constant turning away, in your inability to show your vulnerability, you lose everything. In trying to mean something “out there,” you become nothing to the people sitting right in front of you.

In this moment your heart screams to stare into the sun, for them to look up, for someone to notice the beauty and terror of everything that lives in you.

Why does this feel safer? Why does it seem easier to be seen out there—through something arranged, something edited—than to be known here, like this? Do we prefer being loved through our orchestrated selves, so that we never have to risk being loved for what is true and broken and complicated about us?

Standing there later, looking out over the coastline, the thought barges in insistent to have you realise...

Maybe our egos grow in the spaces where no one really sees us. Maybe that’s why we choose this kind of visibility—the kind that asks nothing. The kind where we can perform louder, sharper, more impressive versions of ourselves, just to fill whatever keeps hollowing out underneath. And then something else harder to ignore interrupts. What if letting yourself be a little exposed, misread, even humiliated is the first real step toward anything honest? What if connection only begins there, in that risk? In the fragile test of whether someone can hold what is vulnerable in you without turning away.

Maybe that’s how it shifts. Slowly. Unlearning the instinct to reach for those small fabrications that keep you at a distance from the full force of it: the terror, and the beauty, of being alive.

As these questions circle, the vast, indifferent rhythm of the tide pulls your gaze toward the shoreline. There, contrasted against the massive, ancient scale of the sea, you notice a small white dog to the left of your periphery. You turn toward it to see it roll over onto its back and present its soft pink belly. Staring down at this small creature, you marvel at the courage of its ability to be so completely vulnerable to you and the many passing strangers that walk by. It offers you the place most fragile, trusting that you and the world won’t bite or strike where it could most hurt.

In that moment, you realise how hard it is for humans to trust the world like that, to show it your belly. You feel a pang of fear coiled deep within you—something intensely fragile quivers. You feel that there’s something that lives in you that resists turning itself outward.

Each person has their own weak point, a particular kind of tenderness, a metaphorical soft pink underbelly. And to show someone where you can be hurt feels terrifying, because if they choose to strike where you are most earnest, you may not recover. This much you know is true. Albeit an equal insurmountable truth appears. It is not as simple as staring directly at the sun’s radiance or as prescriptive as standing present in the rawness of experience, but that we find another to partake in it, another’s eyes into which we can gaze and glimpse our own bright reflection. It’s important that when we roll over and bare our belly to the world that the person witnessing our truth has faith in us, someone that will tell you that people like you deserve the world’s love and admiration.

And if there is one thing you regret, it’s that. That sitting out at dinner with a group of girlfriends, you were too hurt not being seen to offer the gift of seeing, unable to grant that tender faith that so many of us need. In this, the photogenic “Good Life” becomes the replacement. When we fail to notice the mysterious intelligence of another, we crave the applause of strangers.

So maybe if we were truly seen, if we were truly noticed like a mountain is noticed by the wind, or a secret is noticed by the heart—we would learn to trust the feeling of exposure. To me, the most beautiful thing is to make yourself vulnerable to the beauty and all the ways it might disappoint you.

Looking back, I can finally empathise. I can finally see that turning to the glow of their screens was not ignorance, nor immaturity, nor cowardice. It was survival. Because maybe the “gram” and the “polish” are just an effort to survive—the fear of being reduced to nothing. The fear of being seen in your strange, complex, bored, fearful plainness.

Maybe we are all a little scared that if we show the world our belly, it will devour us or love us so completely that we would be overcome. And so, we wear the armour of vanity, and hide behind the great walls of sarcasm, and only glimpse beauty with our backs turned and our palms out whilst we stare into our phones—those modern Claude Glasses that soften the blow of the real.

In all of this, you realise that at some point in life, the world must become enough. You don’t need the headphones, the screens, or the photographs—you need eye contact, unedited words, and moments of authentic vulnerability.

The only real choice, as we mature, is how we inhabit that vulnerability—how we allow it to make us larger, more courageous, more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. We can inhabit it as generous citizens of loss, fully and robustly, or as misers and complainers—reluctant and fearful—lingering at the gates of existence, never quite willing to enter, never risking ourselves, never fully walking through the door.

By embracing the beauty and terror of human life—by acknowledging its fragility and fleeting nature—you can, paradoxically, arrive at a deeper, more authentic appreciation of being alive: its beauty, its ruin, and its raw, unclaimed nature. Recognising our instinct to avert our gaze from the brightness, the unevenness, the sheer aliveness of life is not a cause for despair, but the beginning of a more honest engagement with the world, here and now.

And here, the question of vulnerability sharpens. To face something directly—a landscape, a person, a feeling—is to risk being overwhelmed by it, much like looking into the sun. It asks for a kind of surrender, an openness to being affected without control.

And so, I try to turn toward the light, the truth, the moment—belly out, and I tell myself: the temperature is just right, the mood is just right, the view is just right. And even if it is not. Even if it hurts—they laugh, they reject, they recoil and move away. Even if I feel forgotten, mistaken, burdensome and weak, this too is okay. Life isn’t meant to feel like a picture, you’re not meant to feel inebriated with the euphoria of alcohol, it’s okay to want to curl up in bed and not participate—see the friend, attend the work, stand in front of people in any capacity. It’s okay to feel the grief and the splendour of the tender embrace of your parents whilst knowing they won’t be around forever. You won’t always feel like the right person for the occasion, if ever. But that too is okay. Life isn’t a picture, it isn’t like a god, it is life and it is beautiful and unscripted all at once and it is enough.

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So, I invite you to hold someone’s gaze a second longer than is customary; to let a voice carry, unedited, across a room; to sit beside your friend let her drift past something she is not ready to tell you. To watch an animal roll onto its back, offering the most delicate part of itself and hope one day you might come to possess the same quality without negotiation; to stand before a sunset and resist the impulse to look away, to surrender, to be affected, to be seen, to risk being met by the beauty and terror and meaninglessness of everything.

Lish xx

For me, anxiety has been less a visitor and more a resident. The first time I encountered it was at twelve. It arrived at night when I could not sleep, each night stretching like a taut wire, humming with a restless pulse, hating how I felt like I was the only human left awake. On the worst nights, I would call for my mother. I would curl up beside her half-conscious bearlike body, listen to the rhythm of her breathing. Through the darkness of her bedroom, and the glow of her digital clock reading 1:32 AM, she spoke about how life is like a stream, of how to hold my breath and let it go, and later warned that if I kept being sleepless, I would wake to find the skin of an old woman pressed across my eyes.

Despite all her efforts, I would enter the day unbroken, heavy-eyed, limp-bodied, and achingly conscious that the things that made me wired and shy would send any real sufferer straight to sleep.

But for me, I couldn’t release my acute sense of being a body in the midst of the profound, miserable, wonderful and unpredictable universe. I began to worry about everything. I would obsess over moral failings, question the nature of how people converse, worry about my shyness, and all the likely catastrophes that might be playing out in the world. Causing me to feel like I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time, like I was besieged by a bad omen. Like my body was haunted by a troubled houseguest, a guest who did not believe they deserved the rest and hospitality that the body or the world could offer. So, my thoughts would frantically pace every corner and hall back and forth, back and forth, looping and never settling.

I would later learn the clinical word for these long, wired and restless nights: anxiety-induced insomnia.

At first, it just meant losing a few nights of sleep each month. But over the years, without the care of a mother and the routine of younger life, it became far more sinister. It would arrive first as a faint mental churning that watches and scrutinises every corner of my life—the cheap shampoo I use, the blackheads that refuse to clear, the empty squares on my calendar—turning ordinary things into low-worth paraphernalia. Then, it became an indistinct feeling that something bad would happen, a disquieting sensation that I simultaneously matter too much and too little. Eventually, it insinuated itself into my very body; it made my hands damp, my breath uncertain, and my stomach twist with premonitions of failure. Now, it has my skin feel like a secret, poisonous plant is growing just beneath the surface—permanent and pervasive.

Anxiety has occasioned my mistakes: the car I crashed, the things I took, the things I hid and lost. It has persuaded me to quit the work I once loved, to turn away from the people who might have done me good, to grasp at the reins of life when some things are meant to be soft, spontaneous and unanticipated.

In all its harm, the most relentless of its burdens is that it has made me feel that every misstep is proof of my own fundamental insufficiency.

There are still nights I cannot sleep and many reasons why I feel wired and anxious. Instead of curling up beside my mother, I use what the books and podcasts tell me to do. I use gratitude, prayer, positive affirmation, and science. I pray, asking God to soften the taut wire of my mind. I drink plenty of water. I remind myself to stand up straighter, that the body releases more serotonin when I straighten my posture. I journal. I tell myself that I am brave, that I am enough, that I just need to breathe. I meditate. I abstain from mirrors. I listen to music. I try out silence. But anxiety is stubborn. It often refuses to listen. In the grip of anxiety, very little is understood or accepted, as though I only see the world through an inverted telescope, where everything is made smaller, harder to see, and harder to understand, like an old photograph, faded, distant, and impossible to make out. In the grip of anxiety, the jailor within me closes the door, failing to see that the “criminals” I fear are in fact innocent.

So, in an effort that was part curiosity and part desperation, I went to the cinemas to see the 2026 film Addition, hoping to observe anxiety at a safe aesthetic distance rather than from within its grip. The film follows a woman named Grace, played by Teresa Palmer, living with severe anxiety and OCD, for whom counting becomes an obsession. In scene after scene, she hovers on the verge of breaking. We see her hunched over her basin in tears, counting the thousand tiny plastic bristles on her toothbrush. We see her nervously counting the hundreds of eyelashes on her boyfriend’s eyelid on their first date, and worriedly counting tables in any given room she walks into.

As the narrative unfolds and she begins, slowly, to heal, it becomes clear that her compulsion to count is an instrument of escape. Her devotion to numbers offers temporary relief from a deeper grief, a habit adopted in the aftermath of witnessing her baby brother’s death at the age of six. It is a way of reducing unbearable sorrow to something finite, measurable, and containable.

Watching the film, I recognised the strategy. Anxiety can be a form of arithmetic, a method of dividing life into smaller sums so we do not have to feel its full weight at once. I realised that anxiety is, at heart, a strategy of avoidance. A defence against what we know, deep down, could wound us. A defence against the vulnerabilities of intimacy, a way of keeping people at arm’s length. It becomes a way of never encountering the full measure of anguish or joy. A way to never feel the full blow of life itself. A way to never fully experience the pain of being offended, slighted, embarrassed, ridiculed, misunderstood, rejected or undervalued. A way to never truly inhabit the real. Anxiety always tells us we are somehow just about to be injured by reality, by another or by the body itself, that nothing is ever to be fully trusted.

Anxiety is how I turn away from the pain the world caused me, is causing me, and will cause me. It keeps me occupied.

So that night, when this realisation kept swirling in my head, I needed a more resolute explanation, so I turned to David Whyte’s redefinition of anxiety in his book Consolations II. He writes: “Anxiety is my temporary ally and my daily saviour from the abiding pain of real heartbreak. I am not anxious because I worry too much, I am anxious because I do not want to feel the full vulnerability of being visible and touchable in a difficult world.”

So, there it was, put rather poetically, and I began to understand anxiety as both refuge and refusal. It shields us from the full exposure of being visible and touchable in a difficult world, yet it also keeps others at a distance. To feel besieged by anxiety is, in its own way, to remain safely behind walls. It becomes an ongoing excuse for avoiding intimacy, for keeping what we fear from coming too close, for staying well clear of our own heartache. The protection is double-edged: the very shield that guards the heart also prevents us from fully living.

So I decided to have a proper conversation with my anxious self. I asked, “Sweet anxious girl, what is it you are avoiding?”

And somewhere within, she answered, “I am avoiding the parts of me that feel deficient, the knowledge people live with ease and I do not, the possibility that nothing is actually wrong with me, that I am simply ordinary, that I am too sensitive for this life.”

I realised that my anxiety then did something strange. It coloured my perception. Anxiety is not merely a response to what might happen outside of me, but also a way of avoiding what is inside. I realised that what causes me anxiety isn’t what I condemn in others, but instead what I have condemned inside myself. I began to notice how I exaggerate others’ faults in order to avoid meeting the same tendencies within myself. The judgment reassures us that we are on the “right” side of the moral divide to stabilise the anxiety, albeit it only intensifies it.

Slowly, I traced the things that presently give me anxiety and potentially have always been the root cause of my sleepless, taut-wire mind: emotional disingenuousness, conversational formalities, limited depth of thought, and self-absorption. I tell myself I am reacting to their inauthenticity or their lack of depth. But if I am honest, what unsettles me is something more intimate. Their ease highlights my tension. Their social fluency exposes my awkwardness. Their simple-minded focus throws my heaviness into grief. And this makes me feel alone in my body in the midst of the profound, miserable, wonderful and unpredictable universe.

Rather than admitting that I struggle to be carefree, or that I sometimes wish I could move through the world without such self-scrutiny, I construct an accusation. I turn their traits into moral failings. In doing so, I protect the identity I have built around being thoughtful, serious, and emotionally attuned—tight and pacing. If they are shallow, then I am deep. If they are superficial, then I am noteworthy; each allegation instils another anxious stone in my conscience.

The charge I feel is often proportional to the disowned desire. The parts of me that long to be lighter, less vigilant, less entangled in worry are the parts I exile. And when I see them embodied in someone else, I experience not admiration, but agitation.

Anxiety, then, is not only fear of the world. It is the strain of maintaining a self-image. It is the effort of defending my preferred virtues while disallowing my own contradictions. I vilify in order to avoid vulnerability. I judge in order not to grieve what I lack. And all the while, the body keeps score, tightening, bracing, preparing for a threat that is, more often than not, internal.

So, alas, perhaps the antidote to anxiety is learning to forget the self that first felt the fateful need to condemn, worry, fix and improve, the one who grips her mother tightly in the night, begging for her appeasement.

Perhaps the antidote to anxiety is to become whole. To allow life to be light and heavy, virtuous and flawed, eventful and eventless, sometimes all before noon. To learn that we in fact do not need to stand at either end of experience in order to feel grounded. We can stand in the middle, in the trembling centre of our terrible and benign days, and let the opposites coexist, to let the full weight of life’s tensions rest like a ship on the ocean, large enough for it to float. Perhaps the antidote to anxiety is to let ourselves be humiliated, misunderstood, rejected or undervalued, to almost wish for it. To trust that the boat will hold, that the world will continue to offer us rest and hospitality even when we deny it.

If only my twelve-year-old self had known this. The cure is not in shaming ourselves for being frightened by life, sleepless and ill-equipped at handling its profundity, occasional misery, wonder and unpredictability. It is not about becoming someone invulnerable, someone impervious to embarrassment or heartbreak. Nor is it in attempting to condemn the other and hold them as prisoners, it is in realising that the “criminals” I fear are in fact innocent. It is in breathing, in noticing, in accepting our small, anxious selves as we would a child who has woken from a nightmare, in letting our heartbreak without fear.

In doing this, we acknowledge that our inner weather will not always resemble the sky outside or the moods of those we love. We acknowledge that people will not always greet us with perfect hospitality. In doing this, we stop insisting that our feelings match the room. We stop treating our sensitivity as a defect or the contrast we see in others as a threat. We unlock the places we have barricaded. We refuse to let fear rob us of a proper and tender relationship with others and the world.

In turn, sleep becomes rather peaceful. Thoughts arrive in still, steady sentences that regard every corner of my life as fortune- the cheap shampoo is just practicality, the blackheads just skin, and the scrutiny that once turned the calendar self-worth paraphernalia dissolves into a genuine curiosity for the immediate. The threshold of a room is merely a transition of light rather than a boundary of dread. Slowly but surely, I begin to believe my body has an inherent right to occupy the air. I begin to see that I am neither too much nor too little, but precisely enough. My hands dry, my breath feels steady, my body releases its rehearsals of failure, and I begin to hear the birds again, to watch cloud shapes shift without seeing them as omens. Now, my body is not plotting against me but keeping me here.

Anxiety has occasioned my mistakes, yes, but it has made me more compassionate, more awake to the precariousness of being human. And now, with every new step, I have grace for it all—to catch the strange feelings toward the day not as a distraction from a spinning mind, but as a witness to a sudden shift that requires nothing from me.

Here, the grip on the reins of life finally slackens. I begin to understand that the soft and the unanticipated are not threats to be managed but the very places where life actually happens. In the middle—at the edge of love and heartbreak. In these moments, a misstep is stripped of its power to define me; it becomes nothing more than the natural, clumsy movement of a person learning to be human.

In this unfolding, I come closer to the real measure of living. Not a life free from anxiety, but a life no longer organised around it. A life that allows itself to feel the full blow and the full beauty, because some things are meant to be soft, spontaneous and unanticipated.

It’s New Years Eve, you’re full of hope, anguish, and cocktails. It all feels too much, too much cigarette smoke, too much lipstick, too much superfluity. A guy beside you with sweaty palms won’t stop trying to kiss you. It all feels like an ostentatious effort to be in a “happy new year” mood.

No cosmic reset. No kings restored. No vows to gods. No booms or crackles. Just the knowledge that 365 days are gone and you’re 365 days older.

Suddenly, the year before feels obsolete, as though what was, is now faulty.

The night feels like coming to the end of a long passageway. A walkway that crept slow and held you for a time. A month-long corridor between December and January. A tunnel that announced the crossing between beforehand and thereafter. The crossing comes loud and bright, whether you’re ready or not.

You behave as if the past must be discarded for the

future to begin. Or perhaps New Years parties, soirees, bush doofs are simply how people fend off cosmic repetition—by staging a temporal doorway and daring themselves to miraculously change, to renew.

The ritual heightens you—at midnight it instructs you to look up, drink, confess, cry, kiss, and make vows you will later have to execute, and probably reconsider.
With the splitting of now from later, dread begins to rise as you sober up. Somewhere inside the stupor, you feel a visitation from your older, wiser self, asking: What is it you want, my dear?

As you gather an answer, the rehearsal of old, complicated stories wears thin. The doorway to tomorrow—to the thousands of tiny happenings of now and then, now and then, now and then—begins to open and close: pain to relief, thoughts to words, silence to laughter, desire to grief, resentment to indifference, day to night, airborne to grounded. Thoughts surface; memories weaken. Joy appears edged with the knowledge that it will end—from the top of the stairs to the base. Knowing something is over before it officially ends. Wanting less. Wanting more. Becoming someone else entirely.

You decide that the space between the two is what you prefer. You prefer to be suspended. The key half-turned before it clicks the door wide open. The second before the words leave your lips. The moment of waiting, before anything has happened. Suspended in the image, the anticipation—frozen, braced, unrealised, undiscovered. The precipice of something new, but not quite there yet. The liminal.

This idea intrigues you so you look up the meaning of the world to find that liminal comes from the Latin word “limen,” which means threshold. You google search images of what liminal spaces look like- this is what you find:

The images calm you: stairwells, roads, bridges, corridors, hotel lobbies, elevators, train stations, footpaths, piers, lookouts, spare rooms, forest edges, estuaries—all devoid of demands, expecting no one. What others find eerie, claustrophobic, or sad, you find calming, cosy, and undemanding. Here, in the liminal, you feel seen without being known. You can exist without explanation. Time behaves strangely. Attention loosens, becomes free. It reminds you how often you are caught between a longing to belong and a quieter habit of hesitating at the threshold—acquiescing out of fear of what will follow.

You discover this version of yourself in airport terminals. You eat white bread sandwiches with unassuming condiments. You buy nuts in small, expensive packets. You watch people drink beer at hours that don’t correspond to anyone’s idea of appropriate. No one talks to you. No one expects you to explain where you’re from or where you’re going. It is deeply comforting.

You sit among strangers who are also between things, all of you facing departure boards like secular altars. Announcements arrive half-heard, names of cities passing through you without consequence. Time loosens its grip. You are not late, not early—just present enough to exist. Conversation feels unnecessary. Silence becomes generous.

There is relief in being unremarkable. In being another body with a boarding pass, another person waiting. You notice how little you require in these moments: sustenance, somewhere to sit, the permission to remain unaccounted for. You enjoy the way life narrows to its essentials. Eat. Wait. Move when told.

It feels like a rehearsal for something simpler—a life without performance, without narrative. Just you, suspended in transit, nourished by modest things, quietly enjoying the rare freedom of not having to arrive yet.

Everything that follows this, so violent it almost feels impolite; at others, so dull it haunts. And the in-between remains patient and unsuspecting, something entrusted to you—like a mother’s embrace. This is what the month-long corridor between December and January became: imperturbable, sympathetic.

Again, your older, wiser self asks: What is it you actually want? A liminal space to rest — but what about everything else?

After some thought, you realise that the aesthetics of liminality, or its undemanding nature, can’t be the answer. The liminal can’t be all you want.

It isn’t the stairwells, airport terminals, roads, or forest edges that are calming, cosy, and undemanding. Nor the footpaths, piers, and estuaries that feel patient, unsuspecting, entrusted — imperturbable and sympathetic. What calms you is that these spaces invite a kind of rest you forget to allow yourself elsewhere.

Outside them — in crowds, boardrooms, offices, schools, bedrooms, arguments, break-ups, supermarkets, friend groups, communities — you begin to notice how many places you have decided are wary of improvisation, prone to hesitation, afraid of risk. In the fullness of experience, your radar is overwhelmed as you try to take everything in at once.

Crossing the threshold invites out the parts of you that liminal spaces keep quiet. Visibility without exit. Interpretation without warrant. Closeness without intimacy. The unspoken demand of a continuous identity performance — and with it, comparison and self-doubt. Crossing the threshold has you feel trapped in expectation.

So, you crave the roads of travel that come before it all. Before the exposure. Before the shame.
And yet —

These liminal spaces are reminders of the sympathy, understanding, and compassion your surface self needs from your inner heart and mind to get by. You realise that, despite everything, you are already doing your best—surviving, trying to maintain control in a restless, uncontrollable world that continues to surprise you.

Yet no matter how comfortable and cosy tunnels, pathways, and corridors feel, life outside persists, insisting that you experience all of it.

Life outside asks you to fess up — to expose and bear your scars, asymmetries, mis-phrased idioms, soiled clothes, uneven complexion, your afraid-ness, and all the reasons you feel crazy, broken, or too much. Because that is always what life asks of you.

It asks you to own what you are doing with your life. To receive the knowledge of your eventual demise. To admit the scarcity of your money. To recognise your inconsequentiality within the infinity of the universe.

It asks you to notice the pain you cause, the questions you leave others with, the risks you incite, the grounding or activation you create, the ways tension releases or tightens. To get honest about your drifting attention, your unsteadiness, and your unwillingness to stay. As well as the ways you make someone else want to drift, feel unsteady, or race away.

And it also asks that you be okay with all of it. All these things only become issues if you are in denial of them. Sure, they aren’t ideal, but they are life.

You realise that to truly belong outside of the liminal, you must disown, hide, or avoid none of it. You must possess a willingness to pass through the barriers of unpleasant emotions and claim your true place. To do this, you must move past mere survival — past the expectations of what you are told to want, to be, to say, or to feel. Past the lies about what you think you ought to be in the classroom, the office, the luncheon, or the dinner party.

You come to terms with this “letting go and letting be” when you read David Whyte’s essay in Consolations II. He writes:

“We are each made in such a profoundly particular, alchemical way that the very particularity of what we have to offer as individuals is beyond what our everyday minds can recognise. The particularity of what we are imagining cannot be comprehended by the surface mind, whose job is to name, categorise, and smooth things over into generalities. To get down to this essentiality in each of us necessitates an undoing of our surface persona and a willingness to experience a more moveable, creative world inside — a world resistant to easy names, one we only misperceive as eccentric and slightly mad.”

It is our surface selves that try, in vain, to suffocate this unavoidable truth. In doing so, we become rigid, fearful, frozen when confronted with the difficult, constantly moving, overwhelming world. If we base our lives on defending against these wild, chaotic forces within us, we become a threat to ourselves — from the inside out. In the pursuit of immunity, in trying to resist the very vitality that makes us human, we risk becoming bland, inert, even dead.

You suddenly realise that the only way to stop living in the in-between — running, avoiding, waiting — is to finally let others be disappointed by you. Let them wish you were quieter, lighter, easier, more conversational. Let them wish you didn’t exist. And exist anyway.

Your wise self whispers:

“Because, baby, you’re far better off being a disappointment to others than being a quiet, distant, dulled replica of yourself. What we perceive as crazy inside us can be serious, even frighteningly pointed in its approach to life and in the expression of its own powers. But you need not be afraid, baby — you are not crazy. The brave thing is to let a little wildness have its way with you.”

This, you suppose is your ultimate perpetual liminal space- the space where you are yet to open the door to all that you are. A state of not choosing. Of not turning the key to unlock the door. Of not uttering the words you so desperately want to. Of not screaming when you’re mad. Of not crying when you’re hurting. Of staying put when you know you ought to move. Of hiding your scars, asymmetries, mis-phrased idioms, soiled clothes, uneven complexion, your afraid-ness, and all the reasons you feel crazy, broken, or too much. Because until you let these things spill over the edge of your surface self, you are liminal.

So, turns out new year’s wasn’t about cocktails or superfluity, booms or crackles, or even the knowledge that you are 365 older than January 1, 2025, it was about taking a moment to talk to your wiser self, to step back from keeping pace, so you can take inventory of what drains you—and what fuels you. Of what you really want. To choose all the ways you wish to enter—and exit the threshold again and again and again. Make those difficult decisions about the shape you want your life to take, with an eye to being resourced enough for your visionary capacity to serve life, rather than fearing it.

The only vow you make this year, the only resolution you have it to every day walk through your cosy liminal spaces, down paths, roadways and tunnels to see them as channels into your more beautiful life; a world that recognises your brilliance: a brilliance that enlivens both our own life and other’s. To keep walking through the tunnel to finally exit the threshold, beyond the in between, into your wild and precious life on the other side.

Happy New Year everyone.

May we all step through our preciously contained thresholds and into the more beautiful world that lives just beyond it.

Thank you for reading Beautiful Ache.

Please subscribe, restack or like—Your support keeps me going.

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Lish xx

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The first time you felt addressed by something larger than yourself you were standing at a pedestrian crossing, pushing the grimy metal button again and again, convinced it worked faster if the button knew of my eagerness to cross. You believed that the LED lights would flash green and that the digital sounds would pulse sooner because of your urgency. So, you pressed it again and when the light finally changed from red to green, you felt grateful, as though the world had responded to you personally. Though the feeling didn’t last. You almost immediately, reasoned with it, reminding yourself that you had attributed intention where there was only mechanism. Slowly, the world deadened.

You stopped expecting response. You stopped imagining presence. You stopped thanking the sky for sun and rain, you stopped having your gut flutter when a song seemed to find you at exactly the right time, and you eventually you stopped treating your dreams as clues to cosmic truths. Overruling these as coincidence, algorithmic patterns and the brains misfiring.

Gradually, you learned that meaning is something you project, not something that exists without your naming. And yet, you feel the pull for the world to notice you noticing, a desire to have the world reach toward your tiny body in the vast horizons of everything, and for you to reach right back.

You know It wasn’t always like this. As a child, everything feels alive and responsive: clouds are friends morphing into shapes to greet and humour you, stories are ancient elders reminding you of the truth, music is an escort to dreams, closets are hidey-holes that hospice secrets. Oranges are small leathery suns. Rabbits are white flashes of fur. Everything is alive with meaning. As a child, the world let you in on its grandeur. Then came the explanations. The pulse stopped. Clouds were merely water vapour, stories were for kids, music was something your algorithm requested, closets were uninteresting. The sun in your hand became a commodity. The rabbit became a pest. The world shrank. Your heart, still crying for these things to matter again.

Even now, you hear it. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. Clouds morph. Stories are spellbinding. Music transports. Oranges glow. Rabbits leap. The world persists, yet you keep not noticing.

The question becomes difficult to avoid:

What are you doing here, and how do you relearn a feeling for meaning after efficiency and rational ways of thinking have rendered the world orderly, useful and strangely thin?

You know these kinds of questions are not new. You know they have recurred since the Scientific and Industrial Revolution, when the world began to move faster than bodies could keep up with. When work was timed and monetised. When the natural world became something, we passed through. The worlds meaning dilute and hard to find.

You think about the way the World Wars led society to distrust people, systems and the world and its fractured notions of progress, morality and order. The way reality wavered and crumbled. You think of how people everywhere stopped asking the world for answers and retreated inward, how people began retreating further into their mind. You wonder about how environmental collapse, economic uncertainty, and social fragmentation were absorbed into vocabularies of self-help and self-responsibility. And how humans adapt and survive at all costs even if it means shrinking our focus toward what could be managed alone—a self-preservation method. You think about how the romantics—the poets and prophets tried to write hymns and ballads to rescue the human spirit and how anthropomorphising flowers and clouds was too light of a balm to soothe the ache of modernity’s ruins and the collective spiritual exhaustion civilisation felt after the long tension between competing world-orders. Wherein, introspection came to be about vigilance—a careful shoring of the psyche against a world that no longer guaranteed coherence.

But to dwell inwards offers only so much. In thinking of this you wonder about what it would mean to not turn toward nature with a childlike awe like the prophets and poets in the romantic era or inwards like to philosophers and thinkers of modernism but to rather return to recognise the forces and mysteries beyond the self without rhyme or psychoanalysis. To realise that to be well maybe is not to turn nature into metaphor or self into saint but to sit inside the reality that the universe is far larger, stranger, and more alive than our modern disenchanted perspectives allow us to fathom. It asks us to re-enchant ourselves.

So, you look up the definition:

Re-enchantment refers to the process of restoring a sense of wonder and meaning in a world often perceived as disenchanted or overly rational.

You keep reading.

In your search, you come across a passage by Timothy Florio (@timothyflorio), who writes:

“Re-enchantment is not about escaping into fantasy—it’s about recovering reality. Not just the material, measurable reality, but the layered, mysterious, sacred one that lies beneath it. It is not done out of childish nostalgia nor naive wonder; it is instead done out of realities a real and obvious strangeness, a strangeness that gives light to a higher force at work. It is the realisation that the ordinary is only that way because we’ve arbitrarily sold ourselves this lie.”

Once reading this you start to realise that Re-enchantment is not a retreat into Netflix, video games, pornography, or any other form of curated pleasure meant to numb the senses. It is not a way to slip past reality or invent a more comfortable narrative for ourselves—that would be another version of retreating into imagination to cope with our disorientation with reality. You realise that it’s not even about entertaining notions around the supernatural, witchcraft, ghosts, elves, pixies, or sorcerers, angels, demons, heaven and hell. True re-enchantment demands attention, engagement, and presence. It asks that we notice the strangeness in what already exists: the curve of a leaf, the alignment of moonlight and shadow, the improbability that we are here, awake, and observing. You think how that alone should feel curious and fascinating. The fact mathematics, even physics, cannot fully explain how consciousness arises from matter, or why the world simply is. We can chart stars, calculate probabilities, predict outcomes—but none of it touches the fact that we are alive to witness it. You come to learn that re-enchantment begins where calculation ends in the improbability, the insistence of reality itself. Fantasy and escapism and even science hide from strangeness; re-enchantment reaches toward it.

So, to re-enchant yourself you go camping and by ten o’clock the thick and hot humid air settles into the tent, and you find yourself missing the AC, so you drag your inflatable mattress outside to feel the breeze beneath the Stars. The ground full of small rocks glow white. The night feels awake full of mosquitos buzzing with insistence, as if the dark itself was asking you to come closer. For a moment you are humbled by the world around you. Out there, lying on the ground what other options did you have? Fight the mosquitos? Resent the heat? Be more miserable than necessary? Or accept them. Attend to them. Let the night be what it is without turning it into a personal grievance, place to control or sensation to escape.

So, you noticed, the shining moon and the dark tall tree trunks took on a new significance when you imagine lying in this exact place three hundred thousand years ago. And how rocks would have been used as markers, tools. The moon a light source, lore, record, story, and clock. The trees: pantry, shelter, boundary, and watchtower. Imagining this you begin to see how each element carries importance. What felt distant or vacant becomes intimate and instructive. Nature has not changed, only the way it is understood.

Out there beneath the freckled lick of stars and the iridescent crescent moon you decide that that was it—the way to reach the world in a state of re-enchantment was simply noticing her noticing you and for you to not reduce her vitality. To gather around a campfire. To Sing. Tell the truest stories. Connect with a different kind of faith than the idea that it’s all meaningless or that you are the centre of the story. You’ve lived this way for a long time, and you are tired.

Out there beneath the freckled lick of stars and the iridescent crescent moon you realise it’s not about rejecting science, mathematics or the knowledge people like Descartes, Galileo and Newton have brought the world, but that it’s about giving the cosmos back its voice; to not let the self be the only reason anything inherits meaning. You want to re-enter and intimacy not based on learning how things work, but by recovering what reason alone cannot carry: wonder, awe, closeness, the permission to hold answers that are incomplete but sustaining. A faith, not that you will master the mystery, but that you can survive inside it, together.

Re-enchantment does not ask you to believe in fairies or wizards; it asks you to see the world as it is, with sober attention and to be unassuming. It asks you to remember the wonder already present in the everyday, to remember the world is stranger, fuller, and more alive than you recognise. To see, without categories, all the ways the world is not fully graspable. To see that reality always exceeds thought. That all our myths, philosophies, theories, conventions, projections, fantasies, and dreams are small in comparison to the vast unfathomable universe. To see that the unexplainable and nonsensical are invitations: to loosen our grip on certainty, to rediscover wonder together, and to stop othering what we do not yet understand. They ask us to let the wolf inside, to reclaim our wildness, and to step into nature once more, in its fullness, its mystery, and its abundance. To believe, once more, that the world is not mute, but singing.

So the question becomes:

- How do you wish to see the world, as alive, meaningful, and mysterious or as flat, mechanical, and indifferent?

Would you rather live life like its merely about pleasure, productivity, and optimisation or lived as an imperfect dance toward something sacred, unnamed and fully felt?

This shift is no small feat. Our worldview is deeply consequential and engrained. It is the mechanism by which we decide how much meaning the world is permitted to hold. It determines whether reality addresses us or remains mute. It sets the limits of what we are willing to notice, revere, or dismiss. Worldview does not merely describe how we see the world—it actively shapes how much of the world is allowed to reach us.

Remember when the beauty of the moment feels 1000 miles away, when we can’t summon the joy to feel excited by the small surprises in everyday, when we wind up incorrectly reducing an orange to a commodity and a rabbit to a pest we need to pray- not necessarily to a god, but to the world itself: an act of turning toward it again, and saying, I am here. Not to name it but to feel it.

So, you return, not to the wilderness, not to the ancestors, not to the campground, but to the pedestrian crossing. The same grimy metal button. The same red light. Cars idling. The world still governed by systems, timing, circuitry. You press the button once. You don’t expect it to care. You don’t pretend it does. And still, you stand there attentive. Present. Available.

You notice the way your body waits. The way the street breathes between surges of traffic. The way the light changes, not because of you, yet somehow with you. When it turns green, you cross. And for a moment, you let yourself feel it again, not certainty, not control, not fantasy, but participation. The sense that you are inside something vast and ongoing, not sealed off from it.

This is not a return to childhood, nor a rejection of reason. It is a decision. To stop reducing. To stop flattening. To allow the world to meet you at the edge of what can be explained. To press the button not because it listens, but because you do.

You don’t thank the crossing for obeying you. You thank the world for continuing. For offering light changes and moonrises and oranges and songs that still arrive at the right moment. For remaining strange despite all our measurements. For not being mute.

And maybe that is what it means to live the lore not to invent meaning, nor to master mystery, but to stand in the middle of an ordinary street and let the world be larger than you again. To say, without embarrassment or demand: I am here. And to listen, in case something answers not with words, but with motion, rhythm, and a green light telling you when to—step forward.

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I’d also love to hear how you practise re-enchantment.
You’re welcome to reply, leave a comment, or send a note.

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Lish xx

As a girl, and unbeknownst to my mother with all her maternal over-attunement, I developed a subconscious habit of melodramatising my gloom. Whenever something went wrong—a bad day, a sore belly, a withdrawn mood—she would scoop me up and insist I give it a story. “Sweetheart,” she’d say, “I know something’s wrong. Talk to me. I can feel you’re not telling me something.” And so I learned to feed the sadness: to give it weight, to magnify it, to rouse it—in efforts to make it worthy of her hazel-eyed, intent gaze.

I learned early that whenever something went poorly in life, I should fixate on it, aggrandise it, and perform dramatic monologues about why it hurt. My mood would crumple into a heap, like a faint, sick child. My mother would tuck me in and blame the villains—secondarily—the world. She’d let me stay home for a week, search through every naturopath’s handbook, perform crystal reiki, and spiral anxiously alongside me.

In turn, I wasn’t taught how to risk myself in the face of life’s inevitable perils; I was taught how to overanalyse them and fuel their fire. I was taught that my mother’s tentative ear, her anxious solutions, and her endless talking were necessary to my survival. Which meant the pain of life became something to stave off—something to fret over, to smooth tentatively, to acknowledge without end.

Eventually, I came to realise that no matter the gentleness of her hand, no matter the way she tilts her head while stirring a pot and listening patiently to the retellings of yesterday’s disaster, the conversation must end. At some point, we all must return to your bed and fend off your own nightmare, must be left to find yourself alone in your particular pain of being in the world and realise that your particular inner experience is not consolable through anxious resolve or fixation, melodramatization, snacks, or explanations. It is ours alone, and it insists on being met by you—gentler and without fear.

We cannot expect another human being to guard us from loneliness, heartbreak, or suffering; no one can accompany us so completely that our pain reaches a point of absolute certainty or perfect containment. Nor should we wish for such a thing. No one can meet us in the places where we have not yet learned to meet ourselves, and it is often in the heroic attempts to block out discomfort that we usher in even deeper suffering. This, too, is an essential realisation—one that allows us to sit with our own restless ache in a way that neither agitates it nor turns it into something larger.

This truth is illustrated in a short scene in the 2025 film Bold Beautiful Journey, in which Colin Farrell plays a man guided—via a GPS system in a car he rents where he is guided through portals to confront the old wounds that has kept him emotionally closed and alone. In one scene, he revisits the night of his high-school play, the night his first love rejected him; a small humiliation that calcified into a lifelong belief that intimacy could only enjoyed in the pursuit but not its deliverance. When his younger self confesses, “When I’m sad or angry, I feel like the world might fall apart,” the adult Farrell says: “That’s the world, David. It’s messy and it’s shitty. It’s full of uncertainty. But...[your parents] tried to protect you from it. They made a promise they would… for better or for worse. And maybe, maybe it was for worse.”

Screenshot from Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), directed by by Kogonada.

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It is a moment that captures the paradox of love: that our caretakers, in their most earnest attempts to safeguard us, can inadvertently render us unprepared for the very world we must eventually inhabit alone.

Needless to say, pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. We spend our lives trying to avoid pain, yet it is the suffering—the story we build around the pain—that we ought to learn to manage. Neuroscientist Dr Jill Bolte Taylor’s research shows that the physiological lifespan of an emotion is only about ninety seconds. The jaw tightening with anger, the stomach clenching with fear, the nausea, the adrenaline spike—these biochemical surges rise and fall in a minute and a half, no more. What lingers afterward is what we feed with thought. When we revisit what hurt us, replay conversations, forecast outcomes, or attach narrative meaning, we create suffering. We stretch a ninety-second bodily response into minutes, hours, years—even decades. This is why the adage remains true: pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

Coming to see that our vulnerabilities hold our truest values is, I think, the adult wisdom that eventually rises from the residue of childhood hurt. It has taken me years to understand that the very sensitivities my mother tried to soothe into a resolve that would keep me from pain were, in fact, the parts of me that would one day provide a roadmap to my truest desires.

There has always been a weight in me—a small horror, almost—when looking up at adults hosting conversations I could contribute to, listening to teachers lecture in words I couldn’t yet spell, watching people live in a unconscious confident way I hadn’t mastered. Even in dreams, I saw versions of myself I hadn’t grown into. I wasn’t terrified of adulthood itself; I was terrified of meeting the capacities in me that had wandered so far ahead—across towns and villages and valleys—that I feared I hadn’t packed the right shoes for.

But the truth was that the small horrors and feelings of vulnerability were actually pointing at the power I possess that I hadn’t unlocked yet. They weren’t a call for concern, or a doctor’s appointment I needed to make, they were inviting me to the part of myself awaiting my arrival, to my life free of the pain that kept me from her.

The feeling of not being enough was not an indictment—it was a signal. A pinch, nudging me toward what I secretly knew I would one day grow into. The words I couldn’t spell would become the very tools of my life. The versions of myself that felt impossibly distant were simply waiting at a bend in the path, calling me forward, asking me to catch up.

The things that unsettle or endanger us are often the clearest indicators of what matters most. Because the opposite of vulnerability isn’t strength—it’s value. Whatever I most deeply long for will almost always feel dangerous to the part of me that has spent years armoured and alert, sad and crying because I wasn’t able to arrive yet. Only now do I see that standing at the edge of peril is what gives a life its wildness; it is not a warning to retreat, but an invitation to participate more fully. Pain and fear aren’t demands to shut down or dramatise—they are requests for courage, for presence, for a deeper willingness to be here.

Perhaps this is why growing older has always felt like standing at the edge of something vast. Some instinctive part of me has always known that I am not a single self progressing neatly through time. I am a field of selves—a small universe of might-have-beens and could-have-beens—stacked inside me like layers of sediment. When you turn a new age, your old ages don’t disappear; they gather. You stop judging what adulthood should have been, and instead you recognise that you aren’t simply twenty-eight. You are the seven-year-old who kept a wardrobe of Barbies, the child who loved the long ritual of having your hair combed, the teenager who quit guitar after three lessons and wanted to be famous pastry chef. You carry the selves you became and the selves you consciously let go of.

And sometimes, those forgotten selves appear like a figure standing on the far side of a stream, calling you over. A part of you that has gone ahead, serious about its desires—about intimacy, about work, about a life larger than the confines of where you currently stand. The stream is flowing. You will have to wade, to swim, to keep your head above water for a short while. Everything worthwhile requires crossing into the unknown, stepping onto a surface you’re not entirely sure will hold your weight.

Only now do I see how this all loops back to my mother. Her over-attunement taught me to amplify the ache rather than walk toward it. She tried to protect me from pain, not realising that all she was really protecting me from was my own becoming. In adulthood, I’ve had to relearn what she never meant to teach: that discomfort isn’t a catastrophe—it’s a compass. That I am capable of meeting my own fears without theatrics or collapse. That vulnerability isn’t the problem; it’s the doorway to realising what we truly value. And that pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

Most of what we call suffering is simply the retelling of old wounds—holding the narrative long after the body has processed the initial surge. As Dr Jill Bolte Taylor reminds us, the physiological life of an emotion is only ninety seconds. After that, whatever lingers is our own elaboration—our habit of returning, replaying, rehearsing. The melodramatisation I learned as a child could stretch a minute-long bodily reaction into a week-long saga. I didn’t yet understand that pain arrives to be felt and then released, not fed.

And so, this final lens returns me to the beginning:
my mother’s love, her anxious devotion, my early tragedy, the stories I learned to tell about my pain, and the adult I am now slowly catching up to.

I hope that some years from now when my daughter has bad day, a sore belly, a withdrawn mood that instead of asking her to give it a story I remind her she is capable of wading the waters alone and that feelings only lasts 90 seconds.

I would teacher her:
Not to fear pain, to walk through it.
Not to fixate, just sit quietly and let it pass.
And that pain isn’t a crisis, it’s a rite-of-passage calling you to the parts of yourself your destined to become.

Everything—from infancy to now—has been preparing me for the crossing.

Thanks for reading Beautiful Ache. If you like what you see, consider subscribing—free or paid. Paid is $4/month annually and helps me keep writing. I’d really appreciate it.

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Lish xx

Much like my dad, I have been acquiring foibles of my own, spanning years—rising early, two eggs and a double shot latte before jogging a familiar route with unerring memory: same playlist, same pace, same bend in the path where I imagine life might yet turn. Life on repeat to carnally work through the stuff that the mind can’t fix. Like my bodies patterns will somehow create eternal order.

I attend to things, tight things, good things, things that make me feel protected. Things that make time feel cut, smoothed over and wrapped stiff. I live inside a 5km fence—invisible, elastic, tightening each day I hospice it. Each time I get undressed for one person only, each time I lie in bed rehearsing the patterns of tomorrow and living out their familiar rhythms, wiping the same benchtop clean—I become the architect of my own confinement.

And this works, till doesn’t.

It serves me well, until habit entirely supplants marvel. Until I can predict the exact moment the sun descends upon the same side of the balcony, visible from my bedroom door at a precise forty-five-degree angle. It continues until the act of noticing itself becomes an effort of control; for knowing that it will occur, I find, I cannot summon the slightest wonder. There is safety here, yes—but safety has a way of hardening into restlessness.

At first, all appeared so spacious, so agreeable, so perfectly right—cooking dinner for two, resting upon his lap while watching a film, tracing, with a sonorous fascination, the folds of his fingers, preparing for sleep in the accustomed order—warm shower, dimmed lights, the door left half-open—where he stoops to plant a kiss, gentle enough to assure the heart of its security.

And yet, when the dream finally arrived, it lost its lucidity. The world itself, I perceived, could scarcely restore my wonder, even if it wished to. What had once seemed so vast, so good, so perfectly right, now felt confined, uneasy—an imitation of what it had been.

So, I turn to novelty—not as if it were the only path, nor as though it could promise perfection—but because it is the path most readily at hand when one senses that something is not quite right. It begins with the smallest deviations from the familiar: a street not yet walked, a window not yet opened, a gesture not yet claimed. And though novelty offers no certain cure, it offers movement, an assertion that the world can still surprise, and that the heart may still discover itself, however fleetingly, beyond the confines of routine.

And so, we fly to Paris.

The city arrives like a polite animal. A muffled television program that’s expensive and beautiful in a foreign a language you can’t change. Full of beauty and fracture. The perfect cure for marvels reverting to habits. Here marvel is everywhere.

So, I open it.

We visit the postcard landmarks, smell the wet cobblestone—the coppery sent, mixed with the traces of fish and burnt chocolate. The air carries the distant wail of ambulances horns and the elegant, clipped pronunciation of things we cannot comprehend. Men drunkenly laugh late into the night, and an old woman shushes me mid-morning. And I weep at the sight of the Eiffel Tower, undone by its majesty—a spectacle the eyes receive in full, without hesitation or protest, as if compelled by some natural law. It dazzles you.

Most mornings, I run beside the Seine—Paris’s honest spine. I take photographs, though none quite capture the way the light seems to mirror Paris back upon itself. The river, stretching some seventy-five kilometres. For four mornings, I treat it as my guide, hoping to map a routine resembling home; yet it will not permit such order. There is no polite custom of keeping left here. The benches, the cruise boats, the beggars, and the coffee markets all blend into a gentle disorder that feels almost deliberate.

I go to the museum, and there I become porous. The painters astute and gracious in their carvings, painting and stone statues. Known as the “the beating heart of the Western world”. It reminds me that morality is only perfected once polished and that you do not get to be immortalised without ardour.

Saintly failures everywhere, eyes that seem to follow you, dead kings immortalised in varnish are unexpectedly, unbelievably calming. On a Tuesday at noon, beneath the gentle authority of a chandelier, I am struck by the thought that recognising another’s grandeur might itself be a kind of cure. And yet, as the guard yawns, I realise that wonder, when held too long, wears thin; after all, even marvel fatigues beneath steady observation.

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On trains, I board and renounce incompetence in the way my demeanour carries the weight of firsts. I watch faces and imagine what it might be like to be someone other than myself—to speak broken English and not care about the random tourist seated beside me. I wonder what it would feel like to be more giving, more compassionate, braver—or even a little louder and a little more foolish. In that moment of reflection, I offer myself the possibility that I could be. I could be something else.

I catch glimpses of myself in the stranger’s cologne, in the lines of a young girl’s drawing. I notice the peach-coloured roofs, the way skylight falls across the sparse farmlands and all at once am aghast with joy that I made it here. On a train from Paris to Barcelona, I disembark—slightly altered, and without creed. The rest unfolds in a blur: tunnels and towers, smiling café owners, the shimmer of sailboats moored in the port. Barcelona appears brighter, louder, almost indecently alive—as though joy itself were a civic duty. But beneath its colour, a feverish haze begins to form. My partner and I fall ill, confined to the corners of our rented loft, curtains drawn against the merciless light. Outside, the city continues its revelry, indifferent to our quiet undoing.

Once arrived home, I realise travel is disinterested in its visitators. It doesn’t care about your booking- only that you’re on time, it doesn’t care about your way of travel only that you could spare a nickel for the poor. In my return: I bring nothing back except a better way to hold lightly my body at a sidewalk cafe beside three ladies smoking at noon. A better way to gesture through streets that threaten to spit me out whilst handing me a rose. And a way for ego disablement to feel like freedom rather than displacement.

Travel is the art of falling deliberately to pieces, trusting that its beautiful oddities will find a way to reassemble what routine has kept intact.

In the days that follow, I find myself suspended in a mild melancholia—a confusion of jetlag and temporal dislocation that makes me wonder whether this new state might be permanent. I feel both skittish and unmoored, as though travel has disturbed something that cannot easily return to itself.

A few days pass. Over the reheating of last night’s dinner, during a conversation so weary it seems to have neither beginning nor end, I begin to feel cursed. Not in the grand, romantic sense—the tragic lover condemned to endless yearning—but in a quieter, more insidious way: like a reluctant architect trapped inside her own design. The feeling at first is faint, a mild sickness rising in the throat.

I descend into my own bitterness, where the demons reveal themselves not as monsters but as a choir of neglected promises: I will stay open. I will be unafraid. I will not become bitter or cold. They murmur their lines softly, insistently, with the gentle cruelty of ideals I once believed I could sustain.

I try returning to my routine, I rise early—two eggs, a double shot latte, the same route mapped by muscle memory. Same pace, same bend, same hope that habit might yet restore what wonder has abandoned.

It seems that stepping outside the banalities of life has rearranged my inner furniture in ways I cannot undo. Perhaps routine exists to shield us from the quiet dust that settles over what we no longer see. Perhaps we seek novelty, to avoid what’s already broken into something pretty. Perhaps, I just can’t seem to stay in one place or be with the same person for too long.

The strange thing is that I wanted to keep the habitual forest track: the cosy bed, the path I crossed barefoot, the shore that held my tears and laughter, the lamppost that steadied me when drunk, the drain that saw me naked, the shopkeeper who smiled upon my arrival. It is not the place I wished to leave, but the smallness of myself within it.

It all began in Paris—the least likely of places for love to expire. Yet perhaps that is the nature of expansiveness: it does not respect comfort or habit. It turns out that where we went mattered less than who we were when we arrived. For, as the philosopher reminds us, wherever we travel, we inevitably find that wherever you go, there you are.

I’ve come to realise that losing love is like bubble gum losing its flavour, like asking fireworks to unexplode, or a star to undo its supernova. It cannot be undone—at least, I have yet to learn how to appreciate the new taste after the sweetness is gone, the black sky after the fireworks, or the new stars and life that emerge from a supernova’s aftermath. And so, I set sail again—not with certainty, nor with grand expectation, but with curiosity for what might lie beyond the horizon.

I hope for an expansiveness that snaps the rope of my five-kilometre fence, again and again, until my heart no longer wonders what else, who else and, how else I could be…I realise that whilst we eventually fall into our measured habits to necessarily keep our mania at bay, to carnally work through the stuff the mind can’t and create come sense of eternal order, we can choose to expand the limits of our confinement. We can become a little braver and a little more foolish.

Perhaps this is the true gift of travel: the knowledge that loss and longing, settling and striving are not conclusions but invitations—to navigate new spaces, to carry a small chapel in the chest, and to hum one’s own melody into a wide, forgiving world, grateful for the people you meet along the way, however long or short that may be.

“I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.”

An existential inquiry about the brain’s desire to cling…

On an afternoon stroll by the beach, it happens—the familiar swirling, looping, clinging, and fretting at the emptiness of my own sentience. Call it existential awareness, cognitive hyperactivity or ruminative anxiety—it leaves me hungry to be everything, to think up something clever, to embody a thought as dense and lustrous as a thousand tiny white pearls.

Psychologists now tell us that walking can ease these inner storms, the French call it flâneur—a deliberate wandering designed to restore one’s sense of meaning. So, I walk by the sea to calm this existential looping, that’s become oh so familiar to me. As I walk, I notice the dark-coloured sea rocks, the shape of the coastline and the wet textures of sand damp beneath my feet. Watching my surrounds I catch myself wishing I was like the shells—multicoloured and irregular, yet coherent; like the waves—steadily persistent yet mighty—the only of its kind, and the moon, remote yet seductive—enigmatic and ever present. I think, I want to be like them—textured, constant, luminous. A person less hell bent on conquering thought, more open to accompanying it.

Walking along the shore, my mind continues to swirl and hover above different thoughts, I’m vaguely aware of the myths I’ve read, the songs I know, lines of poetry, and notions of spirituality. I consider stopping to do some yoga, or perhaps some deep breath-work that podcasts tell me to do, though the thought alone seems like effort enough. So, I toy with the idea of cooking one of my mother’s old recipes when I arrive home or picking up a box-dye—two shades darker—to soften my stubborn auburn tones. Then, I think how losing a kilo might relieve the waistband of my jean shorts that I keep having to adjust as I walk. I ponder the meaning of last night’s film, half-listen to another podcast, I highlight and circle quotes in the novel I’ve been reading, and even google interpretations of the lyrics buzzing in my headphones. I text my sister. I call an old school friend. By the end of it, my mind is heavy with input yet curiously barren of sense, as though nothing truly landed. And so, at the crossing lights on the way home, I give the whole experience a name: Uncertainty Overdrive, and the Brain’s Desire to Cling.

Our mammalian brain and why we can’t put up the hammock and happily look at the sky…

Amid all the media I consume, I come across an explanation that lands with particular clarity in Antonia Case’s book Flourish. She describes how the emotional system of the brain includes not only rage, fear, care, grief, and play, but also ‘seeking’—what she calls it the mammalian motivational engine. She writes:

‘We love, more than anything, to be in a state of eager, directed purpose. It’s what compelled our ancient ancestors to dash about in search of food and shelter.’

Whilst, our survival may no longer depend on hunting, farming, our brains still drive us to search—our instinct to seek has not disappeared. While our ancestors spent most of their time hunting for nuts and roots, we spend ours scavenging for information. It is from this same drive that we ruminate on our bodies, hair colour, fashion choices, the meaning of life, and our very sense of self.

Once, we foraged for food; now, we forage for thought. Rather than hunter-gatherers, sharpening, stoking, and tracking, we are stuck in the restless default mode of analysing, clicking, listening, circling, reading. Rather than tracking and hunting in the wild, we plan the next big thing, money-making scheme, or over-seas trip- seeking new ideas, images, messages, connections. As Walt Whitman say “Urge, and urge, and urge; Always the procreant urge of the world”.

The more novel and exciting the outcome of our seeking is, the larger the surge of dopamine we get from it. Anything to have our urge to seek satiated. I noticed this on my 3:30 pm bus ride home, watching schoolkids, aged thirteen to seventeen, fixed on their screens watching—wrestling matches, car races, strangely animated games, all accompanied by vibrations and alerts. Each ‘ding’ announcing a new text or notification. Teenagers pulling the tops of the social media feeds to get the latest posts: refresh, refresh, refresh. All fuelling the same restless urge that once made us roam, search and procure tonight’s dinner. And, just as then, the process leaves us wired, restless, and endlessly curious. Ultimately, we are all searching for the same thing—for survival, except now it takes the form of knowledge, life direction, purpose and meaning.

From Chaos to Coherence: Engaging Fully with Ideas, Texts, and the Human Mind

I think our restless instability lies in the fact that our seeking is disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose. The 20-second reels we watch, fake news and the clickbait headlines we buy into as teens, and the thumbnails and hyperlinks teaching us about: radical new ideas about God, history, society, politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life. After some time these messages jumble up in the neurons of our brain. And become a big data collage of interweaving symbols, icons and pictures—tangled like a spiderweb pointing every which way.

The information we consume becomes dangerously superfluous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern to which it fits, and no higher purpose that it serves, just an algorithm sending you deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole. Lost in the nebulous—everywhere and nowhere, at once.

The Slow Button: From Seeking to Seeing…

Arriving back from my afternoon stroll by the beach, longing to be irregular yet coherent like a shell, steady and persistent like the waves, or remote and enigmatic like the moon, I realise that losing a kilo, softening my auburn tones or pinging from app to app may not provide the solace I crave. That the wrestling and lapping and crossing of symbols, icons, and images feeding my restless neurons requires a slow button, a pause, a breath, a gathering of input. Rather than skimming over the next text, video, or article—scrambling for the next new idea, image, message, or connection requires moving into deep thought. For me it’s in staying with a line of literature. It’s letting the cliffhanger of a single episode linger. It’s reflecting on the last conversation you shared rather than rushing to start a new one. It’s in the time you allow for deep learning to take place. As some of the best of human thought is captured in pause, in wait, in walking and letting the patters of the world appear.

Deep thinking and slow creative work or reflection allows us to organise, order, and reason with ourselves better. When we take our time writing, reading, or crafting something from beginning to end, our knowledge becomes solidified, comprehended, connected, and placed within a larger coherent framework. To engage with the written word—or to create with our hands—is to follow a line of thought that demands powers of classification, inference, reasoning, and coordination. The process of deep thinking and slow creative work detangles our minds spiderweb—it asks us to connect distant ideas and inward searchings through memory networks. In doing so we can turn weak or unusual “non-obvious” connections between ourselves and the outside world into strong obvious ones. By scanning and sorting through patterns, our brain binds information from different brain regions into a new, coherent whole, rewiring itself in a new configuration.

Perhaps, it’s about finding the thing that sets our brain into slow mode: perfecting a sourdough recipe, smoothing the curve of a hand-crafted jewel or boat hull, or watching tomato and basil flourish side by side in the garden you watered every morning. It might arrive when handcrafting a quilt, a mosaic, a portrait, a poem, an essay, or a novel. The form hardly matters. What matters is that it does not scatter or scramble, but lingers—on your fingers, your shoulders, your apron or smock—leaving your brow furrowed for a time before it eases. In doing so, we learn to attend to the small, intricate details while still keeping sight of the larger arc—the existential and even cosmic narrative. This quiets the appetite for more. It is like choosing one cherished pair of earrings over a pack of disposable studs. The reward is a richer, more grounded human experience, one that interrupts the cycle of restless, endless seeking. For a while, the mystery is unravelled, the thread is pulled through the needle, the riddle is solved, the system is- briefly hacked.

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You Contain Multitudes: Seeking, Memory, and the Architecture of the Self…

Watching the 2024 film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Life of Chuck brought this idea into striking focus. The story unfolds in three acts, told in reverse chronology, tracing Chuck’s life from childhood to death. We witness Chuck’s love of math, dance, and his grandparents, and eventually, his death, which coincides with the collapse of the universe itself. Through these moments, the film invites reflection on memory, identity, and the subtle, far-reaching consequences of seemingly trivial things.

A motif drawn from Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself’ written in 1855 threads through the story. About halfway through the film, young Chuck asks his English teacher what Whitman meant by the line, “I am large—I contain multitudes.” Surprised he was paying attention, she takes the opportunity to share the poems wisdom and positions her hands on either side of his head and asks, “What is in between my hands?” Chuck, confused, replies, “My brain.” But she urges him to dig a little deeper: between her hands lies not only his brain, but everything he has thought, everyone he knows, and everyone he will ever meet or love. She concludes “you contain multitudes.”

Later, after the deaths of his grandparents, Chuck, still a child and forbidden from entering the attic by his grandfather visits the prohibited room and sees himself aged and lying on his deathbed. In that moment, he whispers to himself, “I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.” It was then that it struck me: the vastness of our inner lives, the intricate architecture of the self, is composed not only of memory and experience but of the countless connections, loves, and possibilities that stretch beyond any single moment and our willingness to participate despite our impending departure. Whitman’s line reminds us that the self is neither singular nor simple, but an ever-changing assembly of voices. It is the suggestion that to be human is infinite in possibility, restless in spirit, and composed of more selves than we could ever register in a single moment, but try we might.

Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, believed that memory is the essence of self—that who we are is not reducible to biology or circumstance but is carried forward in recollection, in what we do and remember ourselves having done. In this way, Whitman’s vision expands upon Seneca’s: life is not only what we do, but also the myriad reflections, contradictions, and dormant selves that accompany our actions. Our days—whether we are scaling mountains barefoot or hunched over in our desk chairs—become the scaffolding of identity, fragments of a vaster architecture of being. Whitman reminds us:

“Out of the dimness opposite equals advance—always substance and increase, always sex; Always a knit of identity—always distinction—always a breed of life.”

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The work of identity, then, is not merely in the doing, but in the reflecting: in pausing long enough, to let our experiences linger, accumulate and shape us. So, I invite us to listen to the impulses we have; to seek the drive to expand outward, to discover, to create. To quiet the distractions and let a single line, song, show or moment linger a while. To pray to be more like the shells, waves and moon, less hell bent on conquering thought, more open to accompanying it.

Our hunger to know and to make has propelled us towards symphonies, languages, canvases, and philosophies; it has also been harnessed by an economy of diversions, keeping our curiosity on loop until it exhausts itself. But we can choose. We can choose the things we lend our attentions to. We are not reducible to distraction. We are defined by moments of attentiveness: like when we chose to see goodness in the ones dismissed as delinquent, when we questioned what others accepted and decided to deleted our Instagram, when we absorbed Whitman and allowed ourselves to think with him and be changed by his words.

Memory—true memory—depends on such concentration, on resting long enough with impressions that transforms into insight.

Seeking, then, is not trivial. It is a profound engagement with both self and cosmos. To seek is not simply to gather facts, but to grapple with identity and our place in an immeasurable universe. Each act of attention, each memory shaped, enlarges us. We contain, after all, multitudes.

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- Mandy Hale

My longing to escape loneliness stirs deep as my toes skim the edge of the tide rolling in from the Coral Sea. A name I only learned after consulting Google Maps. If you zoom out far enough, the Coral Sea becomes part of the vast South Pacific Ocean. And I can’t help but marvel at how we’ve carved the sea into discrete sections, as if its expansiveness could ever be confined. It’s strange, isn’t it? This habit of dividing what is inherently whole.

We do it with the earth—states, cities, towns, suburbs—and with ourselves. We label and classify: gender, race, religion, height, names, work status, relationship roles. We create distinctions to ensure Sarah Jane Miller is never mistaken for Sarah Jones Miller. These labels serve to separate us, to underline our uniqueness. And yet, here I stand at the shore of the Coral Sea, longing for the opposite. I crave oneness.

Stepping into the water, the tide pushes back at first, as if resisting my intrusion. But eventually, I am suspended, buoyant. Like a grain of sugar dissolving in tea, I lose all sense of where my skin begins and ends. For a moment, I am part of something larger.

This yearning for connection is illustrated in the 1995 film Before Sunrise. In it, Celine (played by Julie Delpy) and Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke) wander the streets of Vienna, spilling their souls in long, meandering conversations (the kind of whirlwind intellectually stimulating romantic connection I pine for). Near the end of the film, lying on the moonlit grass beneath a tree, Jesse admits something profound to Celine:

“Say you and I were together all the time, you’d start to hate a lot of my mannerisms. The way that every time we’d have people over, I’d be insecure, and I’d get a little too drunk. Or the way I tell the same stupid pseudo-intellectual story again and again. See, I’ve heard those stories, so of course, I’m sick of myself. But being with you, it’s made me feel like I was somebody else. I mean, the only way to lose yourself like that is dancing, alcohol, drugs, or… [sex].”

Before sunrise (1995)

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In that moment, they understand the inevitability of parting ways come morning. For one day, in Vienna, they had forgotten themselves. They had converged, coalesced, becoming like the tide and the shore—separate yet inseparable. Their shared air, their shared space, made them forget where one ended, and the other began.

I think that’s what all these things—dancing, alcohol, drugs, sex, even deep conversation—are about. Not escaping ourselves but finding a way back to the wholeness we lost or at least an attempt to do so.

In the beginning, before the first breath, there is no “self.” A baby, nestled in the womb, exists as an extension of the mother. There is no separation, no distinction. One nourishes the other, and both are complete only together. But the moment of birth changes everything. The cord is cut. From then on, the child begins the slow, traumatic realization: I am here, and you are there. Six months old, tiny hands reaching for connection, a baby’s brain begins to compute this truth. It is heartbreaking. And I think, from that moment, we spend our lives yearning to undo it.

We long to return to that Eden of symbiosis, where boundaries blur, and the self dissolves. So, we dance. We sing. We drink. We slip into the ocean, merging with the infinite. Or we go to Vienna and lie under a tree with someone who makes us forget ourselves for a while. Whatever form it takes, it’s the same desire: immersion.

It’s both a remembering and a forgetting. A remembering of how it feels to be whole. A forgetting of the lines that separate us. It’s being understood and being beyond understanding. It’s floating in the tide, suspended by another soul, buoyant and dissolved, unsure where our skin begins and there’s ends.

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Part 1- Immature love: childhood crushes and obsessive attachments

Recalling your earliest grasping of “love”, you picture your warm cheeks huddled over a blank-page being filled with red crayon hearts and your boyfriends’ initials T.W. You remember the romantic obsessions that flooded your brittle paranoid brain. For months on end, you’d be colonised by a feverish spectre, the first time when you were in grade one and every year since. Each year you’d try to snatch love; it would scurry away.

You would watch romance films as though they were law; learn love song lyrics as if they held the answers to everything; and drift off dreaming they’d someday love you back. And yet, for all the tracing, mapping, and memorising you practised as a girl, the meaning of love became vexation, angst, melancholia, and a fear of being “dumped.”

Your obsessive unhealthy affiliations with love were made worse by the heartbreak songs and teen-romance films you consumed—media that seemed to normalise toxic avoidants, romanticise unrequited love, and dramatize tragic lover-girl archetypes. They painted the moody poet and unavailable jock as beautiful, perfect, and powerful. These tropes ultimately kept you at a distance from love—from understanding it in an embodied and honest way.

Looking back, you realise that doodling red crayon hearts, watching romance films, and belting heartbreak songs at the top of your lungs were all attempts to fill an inner emptiness—an effort to conjure excitement, validation, fantasy, and escape. You mistook yearning for love, projection for intimacy. True love, you would come to find, was something else entirely.

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Part 2- the cultural shift from dependence to independence, media messaging of feminism and women’s need to be in the power seat

For a long time, romantic relationships felt cliché—like you were trying to reenact a scene from a movie, like you didn’t have a self to hold onto, only a boy to impress. These relationships withered you, and the shame was only compounded by a culture that had swung toward “pseudo-independence”—a culture that operates under the guise that we must be self-contained, autonomous units who don’t need anyone.

The voices of radical feminism whispered: “Stop being a pathetic lover girl.”
They told you: “To want too much, to ache for someone, is to betray yourself. ”To love deeply and to long is naïve. ”To fall is proof that you are performing womanhood exactly as patriarchy scripted it.” You were told to go on hot girl walks, dine alone, and pay your rent without assistance. But you soon realised that these messages were just another form of escape—an escape from the anxiety of vulnerability.

Part 3- Disruption to the narrative- begging the question ‘what is love-?’

So, you find yourself oscillating between filling the emptiness of separateness by sending double up messages, getting high on limerence, dressing up to get validation at bars, and buying into the woefully misleading romantic tropes fed to you in the media. Caught between feeling selfish for wanting more than anyone could give and worrying your desire for love is pathetic. Oscillating between desire and hesitation, attraction and retreat, until they all fold into one another, until you barely feel you understand love at all.

So, you try to get past your obsession with love. You realise that rom-coms radical feminism has only deformed your expectations of love. And you begin to recognise, with painful clarity, the limits of what a relationship can actually give—and what it was never meant to. And once you begin to do this you begin to remember what love was before you tried to grasp it…you begin to remember what it was before it had a name. You begin to remember the innate instinctual readiness you had for vulnerability and surrender—charmed by the world, blue eyed and naked.

Part 4- What love now is to you…

So, you find yourself, for the hundredth time, trailing the outlines of love. Its linage. Its fabric. Its feeling. Its magnitude. Its webwork. After your first glass of cabernet, you pour another, as if the answers might stick, spread, and gather into drops; pooling, trembling, and finally sliding down into a pond of meaning. Then upon the third sip it dawns on you. Love wasn’t meant to be used like drywall to fill an inner emptiness or an ointment that soothed your brittle esteem. Love was never meant to be cinematic passion or taking up the “power seat” in a battle of who needs less. Love is much fiercer and interesting. Love is piercing. Bizarre. Considerate. Hot. Deeply strange. Love smells like cinnamon, tastes like cheesy scramble, carries hope, and wears the same T-shirt three days in a row.

Love is the inexplicable holiness of a night spent doing nothing but talking. Love is a dialogue that never ends—an open thread, a lifelong improvisation. It has no limits on what it likes to explore. It talks about alpine-style houses and Danish desserts, nostalgic soundtracks and the way buffalos run toward storms. It wonders what it would feel like to age backwards like Benjamin Button. It lingers on the importance of unencumbered attention, the nuance of love languages, the mystery of astrological signs and the theories of déjà vu.

Love asks you to slink back from your innocent arrogances—the part of you that thinks you know how to appraise people properly, the part that believes our instant admiration or immediate distaste, the desirable or undesirable conclusions we draw the moment we meet someone, are somehow accurate. Love asks you to stay a while longer, to get under your own skin and fossick around a bit. It invites you to rest inside the simple truth: not every difference must undo you. That sometimes, what scratches against the skin can also soothe it—if only you let yourself be met. It’s the moment you notice your pacing change. Your walk becomes slower. Your sleep becomes longer. Your actions feel more deliberate. Your questions more inquisitive. You feel yourself listening more. You feel softer. More curious.

Love has your aperture widen, your retinas lock onto the colours in their iris, the waves of their hair, the stretch of their grin, their long waving fingers, the way they step, gesture, move about and think, their opinions on ordinary, stupid things, while everything else fades into the background. Love steeps your whole self in the stream of their mind, in the contents of their character, in the context of their lives.

Love is when they see you in the absolute mess of it—your pain, your pettiness, your darkness and insecurity and they stay to hold you, nestle their face in the nape of your neck and kiss you.

Love is when someone helps you to remember the goodness of your small existence. It has you notice all the ways you are eccentric and novel and cool. They remind you of your eloquence. Fashion sense. Sing-song voice. It has you want to know yourself better. And forget yourself entirely. Converge, coalesce, and become more of yourself.

You realise love wasn’t meant to be used like drywall to fill an inner emptiness or an ointment that soothed your brittle esteem. Love was never meant to be cinematic passion or taking up the “power seat” in a battle of who needs less. Love is when you want them to fill your pauses, finish your sentences, hold your gaze, silence your innocent arrogances, and notice the beauty within them and within you, anew.

Part 5- What Jack Gilbert and J.P. Monninger have taught me about love…

Our childish, deformed and acculturated notions of love, even our intimate peculiar romantic kinds necessarily undulate, cradle and crush us as we mature and grow. These notions remain incomplete. I realised this once I finished my second glass of cabernet reading Jack Gilbert’s poem ‘A Brief for the Defense’ and upon watching the 2025 film adaptation of the 2017 novel The Map That Leads to You by J.P. Monninger. All reflections pooling together helping me to realise that love isn’t just the act of being in unencumbered attention; love isn’t just about how it slows your pace, sharpens your curiosity, it isn’t just about how it asks you to shed your assumptions, or discover both their world and your own anew. Love is in fact infinite. Love is as common as bread, and we cannot live without it any more than we can live without air and water.

In The Map That Leads to You, Jack travels to Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cadaqués, Bilbao, Pamplona, Porto, Rome, and Santa Pau using his grandfather’s journal as a living travel guide, teaching him things about patterns of human behaviour, love, resilience, and beauty. At the end of the novel the grandfather recounts a moment of catharsis after the war—a visceral, symbolic dance that marks the return of life and hope.

I remember this being the most profound and evocative part of the book when I read it 8 years earlier. The entry in the journal conjures images of folkloric ritual: cowbells, masks, bonfires, and spinning women in skirts. He admits that for the first time since the war ended, his heart lifts, joy is reclaimed, and they dance. Reminding us that love is fluid, omnipresent, and essential. Not something we chase or possess, but as something that moves through us, like breath, music, water, energy or light. Even though we can’t always see it its always with us. Its everywhere. Inside you, around you and through you. We see it in the clasping of hands down sidewalks, the gaze of an audience watching a classical ballet performance, the concentrated mind of a teacher busting out gloriously obscure notes across an empty blackboard. It is everywhere.

J.P. Monninger, The Map That Leads to You (2017), writes:

“The woman danced with her skirt trailing out like the blade of a mower, and she spun and spun, her beauty heightened by the way she appeared as a wick in the center of her own candle… For the first time since the war ended, I felt my heart lift… Watching them, I learned that love is not static; love does not divide… Love finds us, passes through us, continues… Love is essential and as common as bread.” (p. 300)

Reading this as second time eight years later, you think about how you’ve been spinning wildly to transfigure your destructive energy into grace. Alchemising pain and chaos into its opposites. Spinning the raw material war, grief, and fear is into beauty, vitality, and love. But not just spinning aimlessly, orienting yourself toward longing, toward love. In short, I think the only real map of our lives is our yearning. To move through grief and uncertainty charting your lives by what we long for. And in longing, we are transformed. Love, then, is not static or sentimental. It’s the force that transfigures. It takes the raw material of suffering and spins it into connection. It’s the wick and the flame. It’s the dance and the lifting heart. It’s the map and the longing. Pirouetting in the square, dancing in the face of death. Longing shifts into presence and suffering is transfigured. Love, after all, organises us, perfectly.

To top it off Jack Gilbert, in his poem ‘A Brief for the Defense’ wrote “we must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world” and I believe this poem made it all click. I think he too was talking about the same thing. Speaking to the idea that the world is harsh. It burns, it scars, it tests us. But…we must risk delight—not because the world is gentle, but because love and joy is what makes life bearable and meaningful. It’s fierce. It’s what survives the furnace. Love is the very atmosphere from which we breathe and from which we make a meaningful life– and in the end, love seems to be the one and only cure for the pains, the vulnerabilities, the contradictions, the drama and the continued never-ending heartbreak of love itself. Love is a contagion that sets us alight and spinning.

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Part 6- Beyond the naming of ‘love’

In summary, you think culture has messed up our understanding of love in its simplest form. Love is not spectacle. Love is not commercial. Love is not glamorous. Love is not possession or fantasy-driven attachment, or even passionate intimacy. Love is beyond reason, beyond culture. Love is something both scientific and spiritual, like a biological delirium with spiritual side effects. Love doesn’t begin an end in a lover; it’s our love with life and our attention to its detail that has us begin to trace its linage, fabric, weight and webwork. It sharpens our senses to the sounds of birds outside, and the feel of the brisk breeze at hits your skin on a morning walk by the beach.

Love was here before humans attempt to named it, and it will be here long after humanity vanishes.

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“Love is the foundational embrace of creation. Love is an origin and an arrival all at the same time, giving the journey between origin and arrival, a new, surprising and burgeoning meaning, beyond our ability to name or understand [it]…love is a presence beyond words…love’s job is simply to rename us, and then in turn, to rename and redefine every part of our lives, turning our world and ourselves, inside out, and our outside, in.” (David Whyte, 2025).

Love is older than all of this. Love is the embrace of creation itself. Stretching beyond what we can fully understand. There is no blueprint. It tastes, sounds, looks different for everyone. But its texture is the same. The way it melds us is the same. The way it transfigures and keeps us surviving is the same.

Thanks for reading beautiful ache,

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Looking out from your balcony, at the silhouetted horizon, an existential anxiety visits you. Sitting there, you recall all the moments you’ve lied, hid and concealed the raw truth of who you are, out of the sickening dread you’d be seen as weak, bad or inept.

Standing there you begin to draw dark lines between the yearning you feel to protect yourself, and your deep feelings of powerlessness. These lines begin to scribble from one place to the next leaving dark specks everywhere. Blotches and shapes of self-sabotaging silence that manipulate you, play upon you, and trap you. These dark markings grumble in the background, quietly rearranging your sense of what is true and what is necessary. Some are born of love, but most are born out of the fear of losing it. All of them, in their own way, are attempts to hold yourself together.

You think about how in childhood, your secrets were light-hearted and fleeting. Whispers. Cupped hands. Passed notes. A time capsule buried one day and dug up the next—innocent, playful, and momentary. Before long, the lines between moral awareness and emotional survival diverge. Secrets became a way to claim your own agency, your own rebellion, your freedom. Overtime, secrets gather weight, and moral complexity. They deepen, harden, lose their innocence. They become heavier things—shameful, silent, often humourless. They settle. They wait. They haunt.

So, because your scrambled, lost and desperate you do some research about what it means to keep secrets. You learn that on average people keep around 13 secrets at any given time, five of which they’ve never told anyone. You learn that they come in different forms: lies, romantic desires, financial struggles, addictions, and violations of trust. You also learn that lying and secrecy are evolutionary survival strategies, a primal and subtle act of being human—like animals adapting and camouflaging to their terrain, humans learn to hide. Hiding is a necessary, though often unacknowledged, part of our existence. And like hiding secrets are a form of emotional survival. And somehow this makes the recollection of all the ways you’ve lied, hid and concealed less scrambled, less dark.

***

Swirling these thoughts around in your mind you arrive at two truths about secrets:

Truth number one-

Too much weight is placed on what others choose to reveal— sometimes more clarity can be found in what someone chooses not to say than in what they do.

Silence is seen as a withholding of truth, when sometimes it is simply a holding space—a pause where something is still becoming. Not every truth withheld is a betrayal. Sometimes, it’s a form of care. A shelter. A boundary. The secret, in many cases, is not the enemy of truth, but its cloak—a soft covering for something still raw, still shaping, still not ready to be placed in another’s hands or another’s heart.

Sitting there, looking to the horizon, you think about how withholding can be an act of protection—not just for others, but for yourself. It’s a way to honour the inner storm without letting it flood the room. A way to carry desire or doubt without needing to name it too soon. What you keep hidden may be the seed of something larger, something not yet able to survive in the open air.

You imagine it like this: If the quiet of an icy northern landscape were to melt, the Arctic animals would die, and oceans would rise. If a future summer rose were ripped from its stalk, it would never reach its full bloom. Or if a bear in winter could not hibernate, hunger would gnaw at it maddeningly, because the land offers nothing to feed it. In the same way, a secret—once let out, once spoken—risks intrusion. "If the truth is spoken too soon, before the delicate structure is ready to hold it, what was once held in serene isolation will be exposed too quickly—and it will come undone.

You think about how sometimes keeping something in silence—done properly—is an internal promise, a devoted commitment to a future truth, one that is ready for the world. How sometimes, withholding can protect you from misunderstandings, from being wrongly named, and from becoming trapped in projections that are not yours to carry. Afterall, so much of what is revealed—what is real and deep—can too often be too easily seen, too easily named.

You think about how so often people rush to share their thoughts, imaginings, and longings. How somewhere along the way we’ve been acculturated to disclose everything. Taught to let our innermost self be trespassed, violated, and invaded too early, too often. How our best and worst qualities are extracted into a world already soaked with ideas that tyrannise our sense of self and others.

But sometimes, secrets are not concealments of truth—they are its guardians. A way to ensure that when the truth is finally revealed, it is no less true than the lie that once shielded it. Sometimes, what is withheld holds a truer truth than what is shouted too soon. For example, “I love you” spoken too early is not a declaration, but a quiet coercion—a desire to make the feeling into something it is not yet ready to become.

Quiet, then, is often—if not more often than not—more than enough. What is real is almost always, at first, hidden. And it rarely wants to be understood by the part of you that insists it already knows what is happening.

The sun and the moon live out this paradox with grace. As David Whyte writes:

“The sun illuminates our way, the moon carries those powers hidden in our present that will fatefully influence our future.”

And just like the sun, our mind names, reveals, and exposes. But unlike the sun our subconscious—the moon carries the unnameable. It listens to what is not yet ready to be spoken. It honours the urgencies hidden beneath the surface—the quiet longings and silences that shape the very path we walk.

Upon this realisation, you think of the love your father has for your mother—unnameable, mysterious, constantly shifting—never fully able to touch the hidden terrain of her he adores. He knows he loves her. But to explain it, to say why, would be to diminish the very thing he treasures. The quirks, the mysteries, the parts of her she doesn’t even fully understand, to him and to her, are the heart of what binds them together, or truer still, the unknowability of why two faithful people choose to marry at all.

Or you think of your nine-year-old self, secretly lusting after forbidden chocolate cookies, caught between thrill and guilt. You hid the mischief, and in doing so, you revealed something deeper than mere disobedience: a longing to feel agency, to taste joy without permission, to grow in secrecy. What is precious inside you doesn’t want to be captured by the intellect or prematurely named. It wants space. It wants time. It wants to bloom in the dark.

The truth is that hiding is often a form of freedom. Freedom from others’ misunderstandings. Freedom from the pressure to be fully seen before you are fully formed. Freedom from a world that tries to label, reduce, and contain what is still becoming. Hiding is a bid for independence—from others, from mistaken ideas about yourself, and from the discomfort of total safety, management, sterility, and perfection.

Hiding is a bid for independence from your own mistaken self-definitions, from the quiet tyranny of being constantly known, tracked, or explained. It is an act of creative rebellion. Not a refusal to grow, but a refusal to be shaped by forces that do not honour the depth of your becoming. To leave the beauty of another unnamed, to leave a longing unspoken, is to let life become more of itself. Hiding thoughts, imaginings, and desires is not denial, but a radical act of patience. A necessary solitude. A kind of love.

Just as the Arctic must remain frozen for the polar bear to survive; just as the rose must stay closed until the warmth of spring arrives; just as the bear must sleep through winter’s hunger without waking too soon—so too must you honour what is not yet ready to emerge.

Sometimes, holding a secret is not about deception, but devotion. An internal compassion. A way of giving yourself time to catch up with what you already know deep down. A way of holding off full understanding until you are strong enough to receive it—ready to change, ready to live the new life it asks of you.

***

Truth number two-

Perhaps the real task is not to let the secrets you hold control you. Not to let the trickery you once practiced on your mother, or the quiet distance between you and the rest of the world take root in your heart. Not to let the shape of your secrets become the shape of you. To not let the guilt, the shame, or the fear of being discovered twist the stillness of your day. To not let the quiet hunger of your conscience demand the lie again. To instead let the weight of these hidden things fall from you, like droplets of rain from a petal after an evening storm—delicate and forgiving.

Standing there, you wait a moment longer as the sun almost sets and you think about how not naming also requires another delicate forgiveness. You think about how it’s important not to harbour all your thoughts, imaginings, and longings. Because it’s in harbouring that your secrets can turn into self-importance—into a private theatre where you obsess over your inner monologues, your childhood wounds, your betrayals, your quiet resentments and broken bonds.

You think how it’s important not to circle endlessly around your own shames, your unanswered questions, your existential doubts. Because, when you hold everything inside, you can begin to mistake secrecy for depth, when often it is simply fear dressed in introspection. Here we risk reading too deeply into what others say—or don’t say—about you. Here we risk narrating ourselves into corners: believing that if we can just find the right explanation, the perfect defence, we’ll finally feel at peace.

But this kind of rumination is only a temporary balm. A brief distraction from loneliness and uncertainty. It is not the same as solitude. It is not the same as clarity. Secrets, when hoarded, can become walls instead of wombs. And in doing so, a secret can sometimes fixate you on all the ways you are separate, powerful, and singular. When you name your inner landscape as wholly intimate and ignore the quiet magic that lives beyond you—in the world, in others—you risk reinforcing the illusion that you are alone in your suffering, or solely responsible for its resolution.

You begin to believe your silence is sacred, when in truth it might be isolating. Your private psychodramas can become thrones of self-importance, when what you often need is to step off the stage entirely.

There is refuge in turning your attention outward—to the broader sweep of human myth, where your problems and possibilities are not private aberrations, but ancient patterns. When you look to the background, to the deeper source from which all longings first arise, you are freed from the alienating orbit of your personal debris.

In doing so, you move toward something far more sustaining: a friendship with the wider world. A kinship with the human story that has always held you, long before you tried to hold yourself.

You begin to see that your burdens do not always need a solitary confessional.
Sometimes, what you carry can be softened simply by stepping into the river of life around you—the passing smile of a stranger, the sway of bodies and stomp of feet in a bar, the soft hush of wind in a tree not asking to be known.

In these moments, you are gently released from your worn-out narratives and the heaviness of the secrets you keep. The secrets you thought you had to bear alone begin to loosen their grip. You fall into the background, rather than insisting on being the foreground of every thought.

And in that quiet falling, something unexpected occurs: you are finally free from the need to be fully understood.

***

So how do you live in the silence of your unnamed complexities whilst sharing in its sombre unravelling?
You come to realise the blue of the sky rather than a singular rain-cloud. The light pouring behind the silhouetted tree, the world as life is happening before it is made into a story for your taking. The opposite of a secret is life as it occurs before you wrap your hands around it, report on it or disguise it—life without its cover-up. Life itself.

In the things you already know but never say: That the sky is wide and you are small. That you are terrified of being left. That you are desperate to be seen—and even more terrified of being understood.

Because the truth is this: Mystery may attract attention. But it’s shared context—shared rain, shared grief, shared music—that keeps people close. You don’t need to be alluring. You need to be here. In the foreground and the background. In the light and in the mess. In cloud and the sky, in the day swimming for fish after hibernation. And in this you are instantly known, without labels, at the dizzy cliff face of life and its realities.

To let a secret live unnamed is not always an act of shame, but one of self-respect.
Sometimes, it's in living unnoticed—in the background—that you are freed from the weight of being understood too soon or too crudely.

When you stop insisting on naming everything—yourself included—what once felt like guilt or concealment becomes something else entirely: beauty. Quiet, sacred, and right on time.

Thanks for reading Beautiful Ache, this is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It’s only $4/mo. when you sign up for the year. I would really appreciate it.

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Lish xx

Mother. Father. Sister. Brother. Son. Daughter. Grandmother. Grandfather. Cousin. Friend. Aunt. Uncle. Husband. Wife. Stranger.

You’re trained to believe that relationships need confining to give them shape, function, and meaning. You're led to believe you must give people containers—assigning roles through which to interpret your connections—imbuing them with expectations and rules to guide how you interact. You're taught that people require terms and conditions; that without conventional definitions outlining their purpose and role, they’ll run riot, neglect you, or simply leave. You're trained to believe that without this, they will scatter, spill, and dissolve, flowing in countless directions without form or permanence.

All of it—a gauntlet of intimate dependence. A silent pact. The dynamics of familiars and strangers coming together under conditions in which one side of the encounter is somewhat indentured to the other for the course of a life. Politics of every relationship between you and other humans is an unwritten rule.

to be the follower of their lead, obedient to their discipline, flirtatious to their courtship. No matter how fiercely you try to remain self-contained, you still long to need and rely on another, the way a child does its mother.

And yet, from this surrender—from your willingness to rely—comes a strange, almost inhuman resilience. All fight, no flight. You endure because you care. To have your neighbour, your foe, your ally, your lover matter dearly is to be open to all the ways they might hurt you. And when you agree on a label—a girlfriend, a best friend, a rival—you’re entering a contract of sorts. You’re agreeing on terms and conditions. You’re deciding that you are much more than strangers.

The container of mother, is like a giant urn, demands nurture and sacrifice. It holds the mother accountable for the tears and triumphs of her child, shaping her into a giver, a protector, a teacher. The sisterhood container is different—a flotation vessel of rivalry, camaraderie, and lifelong familiarity. Friendship fits into a looser mould, like a hessian sack, one marked by humour, mutual support, and a love that feels freeing precisely because it is not tied to obligation. The container of romantic partnership is sculpted like a locked box—beautiful, heavy, and sealed with expectation. It carries the weight of exclusivity, fidelity, and permanence, shaped by centuries of tradition. The container of father and son is forged more like an anvil—solid, cold, resistant to softness. In its traditional form, it holds legacy, lineage, instruction. The container of brotherhood is more like a wrestling ring—equal parts sport and struggle. It carries echoes of shared bedrooms, bruises, laughter, secrets kept and lines crossed.

These labels guide us, yes, but they also confine us. This stability often comes at the cost of authenticity. Roles can become prisons, confining us to behaviours and expectations that no longer align with who we are or what we desire. A "mother" who longs to be seen as more than a caregiver, a "friend" who feels the stirrings of romantic love, a "spouse" who yearns for independence—each finds themselves trapped by the labels that once brought comfort.

These roles reduce the complex, ever-shifting nature of human connection to something predictable, manageable, and static. For better or worse, people cling to their roles, giving and receiving in ways that align with the functions prescribed by the container. They impose rules on the fluid, ever-changing nature of human connection. And when the roles fail to fit—when the husband longs to be a brother, when the best friend becomes the lover, when the mother yearns to simply be—the container cracks. And we the indentured are all fight no flight even when the relationship has become one-sided, full of unmet expectation. Full of unforgiveness. Full yet empty.

So, what would it mean to meet someone without pouring the relationship into a container? To let the water, sand, or ash flow freely, taking whatever shape it desires? What if, instead of adhering to scripts, we acted purely on intuition, responding to the unique texture of each interaction?

Imagine a mother unburdened by the obligation to teach or civilise her child, instead allowing their relationship to unfold like a dance, guided by mutual curiosity and respect. Or a spouse who feels no compulsion to prepare meals, offer sympathy, or perform acts of service, but instead gives freely from a place of genuine desire. What if a sibling didn’t reprimand, compete, or protect but simply existed as a companion, unbound by cultural conditioning?

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When a container breaks, it leaves us grasping for meaning. A "lover" becomes an "ex." A "friend" turns "foe." A "child" grows into an "adult." The person remains, unchanged in their essence, yet we struggle to reconcile who they were with who they are now. We struggle not only with the loss of connection but with the loss of the container that held it. Without the label, we’re left staring at the person in their raw, unstructured form. This can lead to unnecessary resent.

This rupture forces us to confront the truth: we never really knew them. What we knew was the role they played in our lives, the version of themselves that fit the container we provided. When the container shatters, so too does our understanding of who they are. This is why breakups, estrangements, and transitions are so painful.

Perhaps the greatest illusion of human connection is the belief that we can truly know someone. The truth is we only see the parts they choose to reveal, the facets that align with the roles they play in our lives. A father is a provider, a drinker of beer, a teller of bad jokes—but he is also a man with fears and desires we may never touch. A sibling is a sharer of childhood memories, a keeper of family secrets, a rival for the first pancake—but they are also a person with dreams that outgrow the family home and silences we may never understand. A mother is a tender of scraped knees, a singer of Fleetwood Mac, a holder of strange art projects—but she is also a woman with her own insecurities and histories that existed before we were ever born. A friend is a laugher at inside jokes, a giver of cute dresses, a companion for heartfelt conversation—but they are also someone whose private struggles and hidden depths we may only ever glimpse. A lover is a maker of promises, a giver of physical intimacy, a presence that makes the ordinary exciting—but they are also a soul with a shadow we may never fully know.

This unknowability is both a curse and a gift. It reminds us that relationships are not about possession or mastery but about trust and acceptance. To love someone, then, is to accept their mystery. It is to let go of the illusion that we can ever fully know, capture and contain them and instead trust in their essence. It is to release the container and let the relationship take whatever shape it needs to, moment by moment. And to accept that sometimes there is nothing left, the container is empty and to learn to forgive. Forgive that fact there is nothing where something used to be.

To let go of containers is not to abandon structure entirely but to allow relationships to evolve, change and grow and occasionally be set free. To see them as ambiguous, unlabelled, methodless and free from conventional definitions. A parent may also be a friend. A sibling may become a confidant. A lover may transform into a co-parent, a companion, or even a memory. The key is to see labels not as prisons but as tools, flexible and adaptable, capable of growing and changing alongside the relationships they describe.

Human connections—like water, sand, and ash, are ever-shifting, impossible to pin down. Yet, in their fluidity lies their beauty. To love is to let go of certainty, to trust in the essence of another, even as they transform before your eyes. It is to embrace the mess. In the end, perhaps our task is not to pour relationships into containers but to let them flow—to trust that, whether they last a moment or a lifetime, they are valuable simply because they existed. Maybe such relationships, while disorienting and unpredictable, might be the most authentic or worthwhile kind. And in this, we find the paradox of human connection: it is both fleeting and eternal, fragile and unbreakable, unknowable and deeply, profoundly known.

As the cold night air sets in you wish you’d ordered the large glass of shiraz rather than the small, you wish the room's lights were three times dimmer, and that you’d worn a jacket twice as thick. You think how you want to be anywhere but here.

You feel it in the way the words get stuck in your mouth and the way the air seems to thicken as you try to piece your story together neatly and without pause, hoping the words you choose will ignite care and suggest value. In want of calm to suffocate this feeling, you try stuffing your mouth with more food, your ears with more noise.

This sensation isn’t new to you; you experience it more regularly than any other. Moments where you fracture and split—one foot here and one foot in the ruins of a future that never came. It doesn’t burst like anger or burn like jealousy or bubble over like joy, it brews slow and arrives swift, and has as a way of lingering well past its welcome.

A sensation that feels elusive, hard to trace its lines back to its nesting place, harder to specify and pin down. Potentially ignited by the faint dismay present in the other’s eyes or in the distracted flick of a hand when you try to explain your troubles. In the way they wait for their turn to speak—impatiently and impartial to what you just said, as if your rightful place at the table is only to receive and never transmit, and because of this, it seems your oxygen is wasted. Here you become lost in the gap between where you are and where you’d rather be. In the space between wanting and fearing. Between effort and avoidance. Between silence and desire. Maybe this is where disappointment lives.

***

And so, I’ve come to learn unmet expectations undo me. Again and again. I carry them too heavily. I don’t know how to wave them off or laugh about them or just try again the next day. I think I’ve always been this way. I found it hard to want to bat again after striking out. I found it hard to want to visit the relative that frowned during our last visit. I found hard to want to sit next to the classmate that refused to share.

Somehow these moments of disappointment get darker with age. It shows up when someone doesn’t. It arises when your teacher draws crosses instead of ticks. When parents forget and when friends leave us wanting more, or something else entirely. Discouragement, resent and resignation—all a darker hue you’d rather not wear. When something doesn’t turn out the way you thought, you take it personally. You let it get under your skin. It taints things. Starts as tiny smudges till there’s dark blotches everywhere.

You think about how maybe that’s all anyone is, in the end. Disappointments. To ourselves, to each other. Small failures in expectation. Misalignments in love. A series of almost and not-quiets. You think about how maybe disappointment isn’t the exception; maybe it’s the standard and everything else is a pleasant surprise. The rain that didn’t come when we needed it. The pay check that reads smaller than the bill. The conversations that always feel like half-truths and a wanting that never arrives.

For a long while life has felt like the scale of disappointment and satisfaction slipped. That the scales have weighed far heavier on the side of disappointment and you don’t know how to invite things into your life that matter, without feeling like you’re setting yourself up to be destroyed. For a long while you’ve lived in the liminal space between wanting and fearing. In the doorway between attempt and avoidance. Between apathy and desire.

So how do you learn to want, attempt, desire and learn to soften the blow when things don’t go exactly as you hoped? Well, the thing is you don’t.

Each day offers a thousand ways to feel a little let down. A little discouraged. A little eroded. A death by a million tiny gashes. A thousand accidental slip-ups—knocking shoulders with strangers in bathrooms, being shouted at for crossing the road too soon, eating meals that didn’t quite satisfy, silences that went unsoothed, a glance that landed just shy of tenderness. But being vulnerable to disappointment keeps us honest.

The problem isn’t that life offers disappointments, the problem lies in the fact that in life we tend to learn to love the people, situations and things that prevent us undergoing our necessary heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak that points us toward the right kind of love, friends and interests. To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to our truer self that lives beyond any false self we projected upon the outer world. We accept poor treatment and accept the disappointment of it…but once we admit our disappointment, we get to know all the ways we’ve wrongfully loved mismatched people. And in turn get to instead love ourselves and our lives and the people we choose even deeper. Disappointment is key to letting go of all the ways we’ve trapped ourselves. As David Whyte says, “what we call disappointment may be just the first stage of our emancipation into the next greater pattern of existence.”

So maybe disappointment is necessary. Maybe not being disappointed is settling for an existence you don’t want—a prison sentence. Maybe living a life free of disappointment is a life without any substance to draw upon, that serves as a reminder of what we want, who we are and where we’d rather be. A place from which we become clearer to ourselves. Maybe it helped you to learn you don’t like baseball. The relative was you were forced to visit was unkind. And the classmate that refused to share was not a friend. And at best regardless of these disappointments you stayed upright. You can handle life and all its upsets.

Strangely, a life free of disappointment seems to be a place of peace, yet that life only seems alluring because of the dull ache found in all the other things we know we cannot stand. By getting to know the un-soothed silences, the agitating bumps, the impatient vacant stares, we come to know the true gift of soothed silences, the smooth drives, the attentive nods of approval—a slow reckoning toward all our understood hopes and dreams.

No matter the settled nature of a good relationship, its quality is made rich by the fact of what it’s not. By the felt absence of disappointment. Thus, the willingness to join the conversation between the thing you want and the thing you fear, the thing you attempt and the thing you avoid, the thing you dislike and the thing you desire is the doorway to claiming the love you want, the relationship you crave and the job you wish. Discouragement, resent and resignation draws us to the future we long.

What I now realise, is that our fear of disappointment is what makes it so crushing. This is because disappointment asks for courage where it’s not. Sitting across from a friend at dinner in the cool swell of disappointment, you were being called to courageously embrace the chill. It was asking you to turn towards it rather than away. It was asking you to get comfortable with having your heartbroken, to be let down and brought to earth. Not to except poor treatment, or disinterested acquaintances but to bravely stare at the painstaking reality of things. It was asking you to plant your feet on the ground and learn to be okay with the empty wine glass, the bright lights and the cold air.

The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of our world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that makes us retreat from further participation.

I think the lesson is to let the vague feeling of disappointment be a teacher, to let it breathe an alternative understanding into our life. To get curious about the ways in which our new self is unfolding as we step into the unknown future, rearranged by what we have come to know. What we come to decide about what enlivens us and what deadens us. What we choose to accept and what we don’t.

Disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both truth and kindness in the assessment of our self and others, a test of earnestness and a catalyst of resilience. I think disappointment is just the initial meeting with the borderline of a forever-evolving life, an invitation to meet reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something more difficult and strangely, in the end more real and exciting.

Thanks for reading Beautiful Ache! This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It’s only $4/mo. when you sign up for the year. I would really appreciate it.

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Lish xx

So, what is age?
Is in the loss of freedom and vitality?
Is it felt in the slow fading of beautiful, in the growing sense of invisibility?
Is it marked by the impulse to book that first round of Botox, to soften the lines carved by worry and time?
Is it the greying of our hair?
The practice of restraint, the taming of joy?
Is it the instinct to hide your age—to escape the feeling of being constrained by time, and the discomfort of reckoning with how you’ve spent your days?

I hope not.

I hope aging, for you, means returning to your deepest knowing—the part of you that once moved with certainty, that knew what you loved, what lit you up, what brought you joy without permission or hesitation. I hope it means coming home to your true self, even as the days slow, your skin thins, and your hair dulls. Aging, I believe, should be about the process of returning to that inner knowing. Back to the thing you were born with. Back to what lives beneath the surface, beneath the noise of performance and protection. Back to the part of you that remains whole, even when everything else feels fragmented.

Aging shouldn’t be the opposite of what you miss about being young.
Getting older should mean wizening—learning how to unlatch yourself from the illusions, falsehoods, and distractions that stole your joy for a time.
It’s the process of unwinding the clock—back through the years you chased pleasure, power, or possessions as a way to escape yourself.
Wizening asks you to name the moments you disconnected, felt shame, or ignored the signals that something wasn’t right.

It asks you to recognise the ways you abandoned yourself.
The times you turned away from the version of you that already knew what you needed to feel free. The subtle, everyday betrayals you committed against your own knowing.

Because, deep down, you do know.
You know how to stay soft in the heat of an argument.
You know how to apologise when you’ve messed up.
You know how to name what you need when you're vulnerable.
You even know—sometimes painfully—when it’s time to leave the job, the friendship, the relationship, the room.

But instead of listening, you hesitate. You freeze. You withdraw. You try to control. You deny.
And in doing so, you lock yourself in a cage of your own making—your own damn zoo.

The trouble is rarely in not knowing. The trouble lies in the distance, the excuses, the methods you adopt to shut down the parts of you that do.

For the longest time, you didn’t listen. You told your inner voice it was wrong—just anxiety, just overthinking. You told yourself the hollow silences, the blank stares out the window while washing dishes for the tenth time that week, were just tiredness. Just timing. Just life. You convinced yourself the lack of warmth was something you caused—worse, something you deserved. You told yourself that laying down your future, your voice, your very self for someone else’s life was love.

But it wasn’t love. It was forgetting. A slow, steady drift away from the part of you that knew. Your peace flailed like a coat too thin for the storm—you kept pulling it tighter, but the cold still crept in. And like the cold, your truth got in. No matter how hard you denied it, suppressed it, ignored it—it found you.

And returning to this knowing is not a gentle road. Maybe that’s why you long to stay young, naive, unwounded. Why you hide the grey hairs and worry lines. Why you cling to birthday candles and confetti as if they mark life’s meaning, rather than the lessons that shaped you into someone wiser. Because once you begin to listen, you’ll have to face the countless times you abandoned yourself. And the truth might shake you. The list might take a lifetime to work through.

You may resist getting honest about what you really feel—about your work, your partner, your friendships—because the answers in your heart don’t align with the life you’ve settled into. For some, awakening might mean meeting a version of yourself you barely recognise. And depending on how long you’ve been gone, that self might come back loud.

You’ll have to journey through the woods of your own misery—tossed around like a ship without a rudder—until, eventually, you find your way back to peace, to clarity, to home.
And to do that, you’ll need to get real quiet. And real brave.

Because the hardest part is resisting the call of your deep inner knowing—the part that whispers that the life you’ve built is a hollow version of the life you truly want. You’d rather live in a polite apparition than in a disruptive truth. But that’s not to say that once you claim your truth everything will feel good. It won’t. Speaking it aloud will bring discomfort, confrontation, and tears. But at least, when you live inside the truth, the life you’re living will finally be yours.

And there is peace in that.

Speaking with my mum, I realised I was grateful—for aging, for birthdays, for the strange beauty in the way we accumulate time. But I also realised something else: time itself is far more indifferent than we’d like to believe. It doesn’t mean well, nor ill—it simply moves. It is survival. It is evolution. It doesn’t act out of care, but out of course.

Time doesn’t ask where we’re going. It only insists that we keep moving with the tide of its pull.

To age well requires more than simply passing through the years. The rate at which we truly wisen depends not on the ticking of clocks, but on the depth of our revelations and the potency of our reflection.

After all, time doesn’t confer wisdom. It changes us from the outside in—but for some, that change remains only skin deep. To age well, to reach wisdom rather than cynicism, to avoid becoming bitter or resentful, I believe we must come to truly know something. And to know anything deeply, we must volunteer for it. We must enter the library of life willingly. And to do that, we have to confront the painful moments that shape us. These are our teachers, trying to wisen us.

We have to feel it all in order to return to ourselves.

To come back to inner peace and sanity, we must polish the mirror of the heart.

That innate, unrelenting ache that lives inside me—inside all of us—draws us into lives we will eventually outgrow. It also leads us into the right kind of peril—the kind that stops us in our tracks and leaves us standing still, uncertain, and somehow new again.

Time itself was never an external ancient force stirring the still parts of my being into a different shape. Like a fairy godmother or some divine intervention, working silently, tentatively and artfully; strumming the strings of wisdom in my very soul. No. It was me.

The same way we attend to our work, a crying child or a simmering pot over a stove we must learn to give attention to this inner voice, we must learn to get wise. Because the amount of attention or lack of attention to the pain and beauty of our life will become our life.

It takes patience, effort, and surrender to grapple with the realities of this world—its sorrows, its demands, its quiet undoing’s.

No one tells you that growing wiser often feels like being weathered by time. The kind of weather that doesn’t announce itself with thunder, but slips in like a cold draft beneath the door, unsettling you just enough to notice something’s not quite right.

Our minds filter experience like slow, deliberate stamps in the photo album of our lives. And over time, a pattern emerges:

You begin to see where you’ve been.
What you’ve wanted.
Who you are.
And where you no longer wish to go.

I think our ability to wisen lives in our willingness to look inward—to open the cellar door and descend into the dim light of our own truth. To sit with what hurts. To let the winds of time shape, corrode, and smooth us in turn.

Wisening asks you to let pain do its work on you, to stop sweeping it away like dust that doesn’t belong in a clean life. It asks you to dig, to trace the fault lines of your pain stories and unearth the grainy, buried truths they carry. The ones etched into all the moments when your outer life didn’t match your inner knowing. And to reckon with them. To promise yourself you’ll try to let your truth lead next time.

Because that’s what it means to wisen: to let your inner knowing conduct the orchestra of your life. To quit the job that silences you. To seek the partner your soul longs for. To stand beside friends who inspire you, not drain you.

The clocks will keep ticking, but that alone won’t change anything. Growth takes effort.
Cold, honest, breath-snatching effort. The kind that feels like truth sneaking into your warm house, blowing out the birthday candles you lit in denial—leaving you in the quiet to tend to the stove of your attention.

Because that’s the thing, your attention is the flame that keeps you alive. And your truth is always trying to get in.

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Lish xx

You begin to notice the lines and shapes of the world around you—slightly off-centre. The tilted mailboxes, crooked garden paths, rogue vines, rusted doorknobs. The tarmac is uneven beneath your feet, the picket fences snake and bend, no two houses quite the same. The air carries a mixture of soil and soap, and the orange glow leaking from windows already lit for the night. You pass small moments of return—children being called in from the yard, dogs tugging their owners toward the gate, someone collecting the mail. There’s a rhythm to it all, a quiet choreography you’re not part of.

The importance of these small, seemingly insignificant things begins to press in as you walk the neighbourhood streets. There’s something about moving through other people’s spaces—without ever entering them—that heightens your awareness. You’re between worlds here, not quite anchored, just passing through. From the footpath, you catch fragments of other lives: a man stacking firewood in his driveway, the soft clink of dishes through an open window, the shadow of someone drawing their curtains for the night.

These lives seem quiet, self-contained, protected somehow from the inner turbulence you’ve known—untouched, at least from this distance, by anger, anxiety, or the sharp ache of wanting. You know those emotions are there, hidden behind closed doors and drawn blinds, but still… from where you stand, they feel softened. Distant. As if muted by layers you can’t quite see through.

You remain on the outside of it all. Not because you’ve been turned away, but because this is the vantage point you’ve chosen—the safer edge of things, where you can observe without having to enter, witness without the discomfort of intimacy A safer refuge.

You walk through quiet streets was a way to dwell on the rim of experience, where the tide cannot reach you, where the world passes through its gestures without ever truly effecting you. To only think of the memories, because that’s where the myth of love lives, the warmth of family stays, where the fatale shames and ill-acts from child-to-adult are containable, editable, muted. An archive of memories that feel less harsh in their remembering. Because the past is unchanging whereas the future allows for deterioration of what seems great to turn ugly. Like old holey socks, chipped mugs or peeled paint on window seals, the imperfect details standout like landmarks in time, unpleasant in the moment, but like a holy ruin in your mind once it ends. All relics of a time that once asked everything of you, and which now asks only for reverence. Anger becomes elegy. Loneliness softens.

There is a strange comfort in this distance. The suburban streets speak to the part of you that long to go unnoticed, the part that finds relief in being unimportant, muted from all life’s hardness and the burn of ruptured connections. It’s just you here, wandering the thresholds of other people’s lives—your footsteps brushing past garden beds and letterboxes, your presence unreached, unnecessary, untouched.

Here, no one leaves. No one forgets your name at dinner. No one sighs after you speak. Here, you are spared the weight of being known, of hoping, of failing to be met in your most human need. You escape the insult left hanging in a half-finished compliment, the burnt offering of a meal made for someone who never arrived. You escape all the fevered pangs of wanting. You escape love. But in truth, you escape into a void. You trade risk for repetition. Pain for stillness. And so, you return—again and again—not because you belong, but because these avenues require nothing from you. Because invisibility is a kind of peace.

For a while, I made walking through neighbourhood streets a ritual. Because somewhere along the way beach fronts and their waves became a reminder of my loneliness, the restaurant fronts reminded me that I was not invited. Even the forest, once my confessional, became too honest, too fluent in the language of what I had lost. So, I chose bitumen over trail, pavement over pilgrimage. Not because it healed me, but because it did not demand I admit I was in need of healing. So, I’d stroll. Stroll through quiet neighbourhood streets rather than along sunny beaches, pristine park tracks, and lit-up sidewalks. To avoid and resist the truth. I was sad and lonely. Too consumed by the love I didn’t get, to notice the love I did. Too scared to step into a new self, so I hid. Sad to have failed and failed again.

But lately—slowly—I am stirring. There is a soft lift in the light, a rising in the sap. I feel myself waking into waves again, into leaf and sky and the golden clatter of café windows. I feel the part of me returning that longs not just to observe, but to enter. He came—a man. Not perfect, but green. Not hungry, but whole in his solitude. Loyal not because he must be, but because something in him chooses constancy.

There is no trumpet in this closeness. No great crescendo. But there is presence. There is a steady hand on the lower of my back. There is interest, quiet and real, offered without spectacle as the day rolls by.

And maybe that’s what this lone journey was meant for. I see now I wasn’t walking away—I was walking toward. Waiting out winter down the long suburban avenues of my forgetting, denying and resisting. Nudging myself toward life again. Those glowing windows weren’t just reminders of what I’d lost—they were invitations. The nostalgia of the glowing homes reminding me that there was something in it that wanted to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited me, but which I originally refused. An invitation to re-annunciate that the past as I knew it was in fact finally coming to an end, ready for a new story to begin.

And now, the blinds lift. The door opens. His lights left on and arms wide, inviting me to be touched again.

Let the ache return. Let the noise come. Let the heart burn loud and luminous in the centre of this life. Like melting pools of orange and green light, rushing us toward life, I begin again.

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Lish

xx

You’re sitting with your sisters at a high-top table, the sun at its peak, and it hits you—how the air can be soft and heavy at once.

Something shifts.

One of your sisters’ scowls at the waitress turning to walk away before taking her drink order. The other didn’t like that. She thought it was rude. Entitled. Unkind. And just like that, you were in it. The tension ignited.

So, she retorts—not about the waitress, but about all the other things that had stacked up. About how she didn’t like the way your sister talked to strangers in taxis. About how she didn’t like the way she walked too far ahead in crowds without checking if you both were still behind her. To her, that felt careless. Selfish. Dishonourable.

So, hurt and offended your sister stands to leave.

In an instant you think how fallible and fragile the pleasantries of our tongues are, how easily they can twist and gouge up gunk from years buried, turning kin into something crueller. Turning conversation at a high-top table, the sun at its peak, into something heavy and low.

You think about the parts of yourself you’d rather dissolve. How if you could pierce the little monsters nesting inside you, those crusted, ancient things, you would. You’d pierce each one clean. Just to keep the air soft. Just to keep words from twisting. Just to keep the gunk buried. Like a self-sacrificial fool.

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If you asked your sisters what fuels their friction, they’d probably shrug and say, “irreconcilable differences.” Like it’s just how they are. Just how they’re wired. Whether it was their astrological signs, their experiences, nature or nurture—moment by moment, wound by wound, praise by praise—they turned out different. One is wild. The other, tame. One is simple. The other, layered. One holds everything in until it hardens. The other lets it all out, heart-first, every damn time.

But suddenly instead of only seeing them as black-and-white chalk-and-cheese, you start you see how both sisters are fierce in holding and stating their truths. Neither cowering. Both standing firm in their knowing of what’s right and good and fair. None of this was really about a scowl or an overly friendly car-ride conversation with a strange taxi man. It was about two sisters carrying their own version of right and wrong, trying to love each other while defending their borders. And in that moment, you realise, that the shouting, the friction, the brushing up against each other’s raw parts wasn’t the problem. That rather, their disagreeing and fighting off tensions was the reminder. The proof. It was their way of saying, “I still see you.” And maybe that is love, just dressed in its most unflattering outfit.

The problem wasn’t twisting tongues or gouged gunk. The problem was you. The one who stays neutral because she doesn’t want to “rock the boat”. Bending like you always do—around the edges of other people’s convictions. Playing neutral, scanning the room for who’s upset. Instead of being yourself you become what’s needed. And so, you disappear. And when you disappear long enough, you start to believe your silence is love. But it’s not. It’s just fear dressed up as kindness. Disconnect dressed up in the most flattering outfit.

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So, whilst the day turned out fine and the weekend was pleasant, you began to realise it wasn’t about the little tiff between sisters, it was about you, feeling like you always had to be Switzerland. Feeling like the only way you could be loved was to play the metaphorical sacrificial lamb. Planting yourself in the neutral zone like it’s a virtue. And realising that it’s not virtue. It’s playing dead, bleeding out on the floor while everyone else eats. And this was just sad. Because skip forward in time to all the moments you refused to take up space, refused to rage, refused to speak up when you knew something was amiss, unfair, or wrong—moment-by-unsettling-moment you come to forget who you are. Mean you choose to implode, to bury the anger, the hurt, the heartbreak, and then you call it nice. But it’s not nice. Its fear dressed up in good manners. It’s refusing to own how you really feel. Scared to have needs. Scared to announce boundaries. Ultimately…scared to be alone.

You see, you’ve played the Self-Sacrificing Martyr. The one who says, “I do so much for everyone and no one cares.” And in that story, the people you love become the villains—the selfish ones, the ungrateful ones. But the truth? You never actually asked for what you needed. Not once. Not clearly. Not bravely. Too afraid to say what you need to show the wailing girl underneath the silence. To ask for a hug. A thank you. To have somebody say: “I see you. I’m glad you’re here.”

You’ve played the Moral High Ground. “I would never say that. I’m better than that.” But really, you just didn’t want to look at you’re own mess.

You’ve played the Wounded Child. The Enlightened One. The Heartbroken Heroine. You’ve told every story that made you the good guy. The gracious one. The victim. The sacrificial Lamb.

Every time you swallowed your anger, you thought you was keeping the peace. But what you were really doing was betraying yourself. Every time you said yes to keep the peace, whilst the world around you filled with thorns and venom, you weren’t being generous—you were being dishonest.

At the time, you think its easier. To wash the dishes, you didn’t make. To sit idle and watch the show you don’t like. To stay up late when you are achingly tired. You tell people how good you were to them, that they were the emotionally unavailable ex. The unthankful sister. The self-absorbed friend. To bypass the fact, you were passive and undemanding. You played the Martyr because it’s easier than admitting the truth: You have anger. You have unmet needs. You are tired. You have edges and shadows and fire. And when you refuse to feel those things, when you deny them, they don’t go away. They just get quieter and heavier. They twist themselves into a smile, into silence, into a woman whose soul and life force slowly chips away, one breath at a time. One dutiful act, solemn gesture, quiet nod—at a time.

The problem isn’t being inconveniences, helping when someone needs it or decidedly not bringing up an argument, no. The problem is the fact you felt you needed enemies to be a whole human. You’ve needed enemies—not because you’re cruel, but because it’s hard to hold complexity. It’s hard to know who you are unless you know who you’re not. It’s hard to admit you were hurt and you hurt. That they were wrong and you were too. That you were not just the broken-hearted one. The wounded one. The enlightened One—you were also the one who stayed silent, who avoided conflict, who made peace when what you needed was war. You were the one who forgot who you were, and what you needed. You were the one choosing to disappear rather than have needs.

I used to say I was Switzerland. The Innocent. The lamb. Neutral. Balanced. Above the drama.

I wore it like a badge. Like being the one who never picks sides somehow made me evolved. But lately I’ve had to face a harder truth: being Switzerland wasn’t maturity—it was a cop-out.

It was me avoiding the discomfort of being disliked.

It was me choosing safety over honesty.

Because neutrality, for me, was never really about peace. It was about control. If I stayed agreeable, if I didn’t ruffle feathers, if I nodded and smoothed things over and kept my opinions soft and my voice softer—then maybe no one would get mad at me. Maybe everyone would still love me. Maybe I could keep my place at the table.

So maybe the real work—the brave, gut-wrenching work—is not to keep being neutral. Maybe it’s to finally feel the anger. To own the fire. To let go of the need to be the good girl and let myself be human instead.

Because peace isn’t pretending nothing’s wrong. Peace is saying the truth out loud—and surviving it.

Turns out I envy my sisters…I envy their ability to say the dreaded thing, to claim what they need, to shout and leave the table.

Because wanting to dissolve the little monsters nesting inside to keep the air soft, words from twisting and the gunk buried is not an option. Because the gunk will fester, the twisting will seethe inside, the heaviness will hang over your heart.

Instead, I am starting to see that when you make everyone else comfortable, you end up deeply uncomfortable with yourself.

You lose your voice. You lose your fire. You lose the beautiful, messy, opinionated, boundary-having woman you are.

Switzerland isn’t where the truth lives. It’s where fear hides. Sacrificial lambs don’t die for a cause; they die to satisfy a fear. And I don’t want to hide anymore. I don’t want to disappear, I want to want. Yell. Demand more. Leave the damn table if I have to. Alone or loved, but brave enough to say the truth out loud, and trusting that I am woman enough to survive it.

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Lish xx

I sat there, stunned and uneasy, wondering whether this is the fate awaiting many of us when there are only so many weeks left, or chances to dream big, eating brownies by the sea. In that moment, I feared that my life, might too boil down to a recurring labyrinth of walking, eating, sleeping, and longing—for adventures that never came. Her talk of time running out—of windows narrowing and creaking shut—reflected a thought I’ve had tucked somewhere deep inside me. That old people might have it right, that “time flies” and that “it will be over before you know it”. Though life is the longest thing we’ll ever do, it so often feels slow. We wait—for Christmas to come, for the parcel to arrive, for the rain to stop. Sometimes, life itself feels like an eternity. But as it begins to near its close, and we grasp the endlessness of what continues without us—the births and deaths, the wars and revolutions, the inventions and extinctions, the floods and fires—we begin to understand: we are just a single note in the vast symphony of entropy. And suddenly, our time here feels infinitesimal. And because of that, we long for more of it. Near the end, we inevitably come face-to-face with our mortality, with its unflinching, undeniable nature. We come to see that we already and have always been running out of time. And that perhaps by the time we reach our sixties, we all feel a desperation to grasp whatever joy, novelty, or wonder the world still has left in store for us.

So, if this is true for all of us, then shouldn’t we just accept that time is finite? Shouldn’t we be glad that routines, however, tired and worn out our daily, dedicated and repeated visitations are a way of creating, deepening and keeping the good things—however boring—in our life? Raising a family, building a home. Tending to a garden, a friendship, a piece of art, or a workplace—these are the things that keep our well-loved lives in existence, even in their often-overlooked ways.

Having my mother complain about routine, in some ways, felt like a betrayal of all she had built through it. The life she cultivated with devotion—raising a family, keeping a home, being a wife. She poured her life force into those necessary, daily tasks, offering herself up to duty. And in doing so, she lost touch with a world beyond it. A world brimming with possibility, excitement, and choices. In that alternate life—the one she didn’t choose—she might have had freedom. She could have flown to Europe on a whim, sailed on a yacht, bought a caravan, made decisions without permission. Without routine, her life could have been shaped free from the weight of expectations, motherhood, and wifehood—the rules they impose.

Sometimes I bring my hands together and ask the world to bend—just slightly—towards that version of her life. The one she buried. I imagine her getting the chance to live what she deeply wanted, even if it meant forfeiting my own existence. In that moment eating brownies and coffee by the sea, I pictured a world where she didn’t marry my father. A world where love, not duty, rooted her relationship. A world where she was on a holiday in Europe and not with me speaking of longing and small windows. Maybe then, something wilder might have grown.

And yet, I’m not sure this is the answer either. A larger part of me resents how modern society has come to idolise the idea of adventure. As if raising a family, tending a garden, nursing a cup of coffee, and reminiscing over the particularities of life somehow stopped being enough. Adventure isn’t just something my mother craves—it seems to be something we all crave. Skydiving, mountain climbing, visiting extravagant cities, sampling outlandish dishes, mastering advanced yoga, exploring new forms of art, dance, and sex. To be adventurous has become a kind of social currency—something to advertise on dating apps under “what I’m looking for,” or to showcase on Instagram as proof that we’re really living. Adventure has become the shorthand for meaning, proof that we’re not wasting our lives. The further we travel, the more spontaneous our plans, the more curated our experiences, the more valid our existence seems to get.

Yet, the more urgency we feel to go to different places, see new things, try new foods, and collect as many experiences as possible, the more we widen the gap between what we can realistically experience in one lifetime and the ever-growing range of experiences available to humanity. That is, the closer we come to living what might be considered a truly “fulfilled life”—one packed to the brim with novelty and stimulation—the more incapable we seem to be able to enjoy the one we’re actually living. Like my mother on a beach holiday with her daughter eating brownies by the sea.

Oliver Burkeman, in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, reminds us that in pre-modern times—before sundials and clock towers, before we stopped believing in the afterlife—there was no concept of “one precious life,” no time management strategies, no urgency to squeeze every drop of experience from our days. Ninety percent of people were peasants. They woke, they worked, they ate, they prayed, they slept. There was no corporate ladders to climb, no bio-hacks to extend youth, no illusion of engineering our way into eternity. Life wasn’t a project to optimise. It was simply what unfolded—one season after the next, shaped more by necessity than desire. And maybe that’s what makes the modern obsession with adventure feel so desperate at times. Because now that we believe this is our one precious life, now that we’ve unhooked ourselves from eternity, we feel we must fill every moment with novelty, with stimulation, with motion. We chase adventure not just for joy, but to justify our existence—proof that we made the most of it. But in doing so, we often forget how to actually be in it. We forget that a meaningful life might not be the one filled with the most experiences, but the one most fully inhabited.

With the advent of the calendars, capital hierarchies and travel blogs—we all feel like we aren’t doing life quite right…that life should have more on offer for us—that life it supposed to feel more joyful, more beautiful, and more exotic. That we aren’t meant to hate Mondays and live for the weekends. Mostly, I think we all flail blindly in a world that expects us to understand it, expects us to understand a world we cannot properly see. Bound up with pressure and longing to experience more than the slice of pie we got served. To experience the lives equal to the dazzling display of other people’s experiences we see broadcasted all over the internet. And because of this, we forget to look up to see the entire sky and its sheer size of the blue. We forget to appreciate the song of birds on a summer evening, the smell of roses after a storm—the world worlding all around us. Because if we did, the mere sky might be enough to crush your tiny hearts into pieces. So, we keep hoping for all that’s left out their untouched by us, because somehow it feels safer to long than it is to be swept away but all that is, right here in front of us.

The same day my mother spoke of wanting to live more adventurously, was the same day I realised she already was. In an instant, the decaying impending metaphorical window she spoke of seemed large and sparkly as I watched her sit—silent, unbothered and unapologetic—in a spa crowded with children and young mothers, entirely free of embarrassment or self-consciousness. I was so delighted by her that once the others had gone, I walked over and took several photos of her beaming, wanting to preserve her in that moment of full-throttle grace.

Watching my mother sit in the spa reminded me that, beyond our basic ability to savour the small things—like a spa, the pink of a sunset, or the comfort of a warm cup of coffee—so much of what we chase is because of our forgetting. A forgetting to immerse ourselves in the sensations of now. In that moment, I wished she could see that the truest form of adventure might be exactly this: sitting in a spa, utterly unbothered by social pleasantries—the “excuse me’s,” the “oh no, you and your family should have the spa instead of me” performance. It wasn’t skydiving or mountain climbing, exploring a new city, trying a new recipe, embracing various spiritualities, or learning new activities. Adventure, in its most honest form, is unapologetic presence—free from shame or demands, free from haste or fear. Sure, those other things are fun, new, exciting. But without presence, they can become just a collection of generic “adventurous” experiences we parade around to justify our existence. One moment—no matter how small—can weigh more than all the mountains, cities, and dishes combined. Because most of the things we curate or chase in the name of aliveness—the wild, the electric—rarely hold meaning once they’re over. A person might travel the whole world, gulp down waterfalls and walk mountains, or live with remote tribes—and experience no feeling of adventure or aliveness at all.

So, I suppose—whether my mum realised it or not—I think it’s in facing death, in living within the narrowing gap of time we have left, that we finally learn to live. Not out of panic, but out of reverence.

To live adventurously, to me, doesn’t mean making everyday extravagant. It simply invites you to make it real. You don’t need to climb Everest, swim with sharks, or island-hop through Greece. Maybe you just need to say what you mean more often. Maybe you just need to laugh—uncomposed, lungs-hurting, belly-aching laughs. Maybe you just need to live more truthfully, without fear of judgement. To cry when it hurts. To switch off and lie in silence without the need to exist in lives that aren’t this one. And maybe—just maybe—lead a simpler, kinder life. One that’s yours. One that’s free from everyone else’s expectations.

Before I die—feeling the metaphorical window of my life close in, all I want is for it to have been honest, messy, and imperfect. Not adventuring. Not performing. Juts living fully in my own skin. On your own terms. Un-adventurously.

Thanks for reading,
Lish xx

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