quietly, without slamming any doors.

no matter how hard you try holding onto them, their exit has already been written from the moment they entered your life. we go through different seasons of life and so, some see the flowers bloom with you while some are around when the trees are bare. through these different seasons that you spend with people, you meet versions of yourself which you grow into or discard depending upon where life takes you.

and on a rainy night when youtube autoplays a song you listened to years ago on loop, you meet yourself again and wonder what happened to that version and the people who held you then.

there is grief in outgrowing the people you loved at some point but still hold dear to your heart. you wouldn’t necessarily be tempted to pick up the phone and dial their number. but you miss them from time to time and do not know what to do with it. it’s a lot like standing on a subway platform and seeing someone you knew from ages ago, stand on the opposite side of the station, buried deep in a book as the train passes away. you feel elated for a second in recognising them before quietly settling into being informed that even if you said hello, you wouldn’t know what to say next.

the realisation arrives a little late. not because you weren’t aware that they aren’t a part of your life anymore but because you probably forgot to mourn their departure. the train leaves the platform before you even had a moment to check where it was headed.

some people you outgrow because life pulls you away in a completely different direction. some because their ideologies didn’t match or the effort you put into nurturing the relationship did not receive reciprocation. some simply because proximity played a big role in your relationship with them. more importantly, some people you can outgrow and still choose to keep in your life. simply because you love them enough to keep the differences aside. the ones who you know you cannot and eventually need to fade, are those that sting the most.

the quiet departures tend to affect more than the ones which create a scene, if you’ve noticed. they draw it out of you. your inhibitions and why you cannot tolerate the disrespect you feel from them for the choices you choose to make. they make you question everything you stand for. it’s important to if it means breaking away from those who do not serve any meaningful purpose.

there is also grief in anticipating the departure of someone you know has fulfilled their purpose in your life. the time you spend with them slowly starts feeling like it requires a little more effort than it did earlier. and every time you meet them, you start shifting your goodbyes from long hugs to empty promises of future plans. you know that it is the beginning of the end. and every time someone leaves, you shed a little of your own skin bracing for the version of yourself you know is around the corner.

the sadness of outgrowing someone settles down though after some point. it passes. you recognise them in the coffee order of the person ahead of you in line or in a specific brand of puffer jacket on someone, but it passes. in those moments you remember how easy it felt to be held by them. especially because we tend to instinctively reminisce the good bits and ignore anything that did not feel nice.

acceptance comes hard but you learn to become better with it. people outgrow versions of you that even you wouldn’t be able to recognise in yourself anymore. what made you accept behaviour, ideologies or their level of effort becomes a question you cannot answer easily. lean into it. it helps in understanding where you draw the line.

the quiet grief that you mourn in letting people go translates into love being poured into your own self. it’s beautiful how you get closer with your own self when someone you have outgrown leaves. you learn to accept that they are restricted to knowing a part of you or your life which no one else did. and that it was beautiful for the time it lasted. all the moments you shared, the laughter you can still hear and the plans you made with them innocently. you accept that that’s just how some things are meant to be.

i suppose what the red string theory misses is that the invisible red thread that connects us with the people we are destined to meet eventually ends up being wrapped up around your own self. and eventually, that you come back to only one person who you love, no matter how many times you outgrow them.

yourself.

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1. seeing my friends succeed in life

i love each and every one of them. yet, i find it hard to not reflect on my own trajectory every time they hit a milestone. i am left questioning my path in spite of knowing that i’m doing okay. the thought of falling behind in my own eyes with the expectations i have set for myself haunts me. and seeing them achieve their goals makes me feel like i am not doing enough to achieve mine.

2. eating the last bite on the table

if it’s tiramisu, i’m sorry, but i want it. out of respect, i may try not getting the last bite and offer it to everyone on the table but best know that i really really want it. i will feel guilty after i eat it but that won’t stop me from getting it, ever. psa: a good method of landing the final bite is offering it to someone because 9/10 times they will politely decline. unless it’s your brother, then it’s just war.

3. choosing to spend time with my friends and not mum and dad

seeing their faces fall every time i tell them that i want to spend time with my friends over the holidays and not with them is a horror movie in itself. obsession could not compete. especially if i take multiple trips with my friends because the alternative could be just visiting them instead. the barter between spending time with them and living my own life drives a hard bargain which i do not believe will ever come close to being the same.

4. liking male validation

i love being single and enjoy it a little too much sometimes. but i also like getting attention from men. the care, the validation, oomph. the feeling of being desired - nothing matches it. i feel guilty for wanting it when i know i do not want anything more than that. if i could, i’d love to keep it at that but i also know that i cannot feed into it falsely and string someone along for the ride.

5. not wanting to pay for the plastic bag at the grocery store

i’m not a saint. there have been a few times where i have been extremely tempted to not pay for the 40p use-for-life plastic bag. why would i pay for a bag that ends up in the landfill? i still do but i’d be guilty as charged for not wanting to pay for it, like ever. i’d be lying if i said i didn’t resent it.

6. staring into the screen of someone sitting next to me

i am always, always tempted to check the screen of the person sitting next to me. who are they texting? what game are they playing? which stocks are they trading? especially on the commute. which book are they reading? who is the author? omg, are they really reading literotica? i do be nosy but not in a judgemental kind of way. it’s ironic because i use a privacy glass for my own phone and do not extend the courtesy to anyone sitting next to me.

7. not using my privilege enough

i tend to always look at someone who does not have access to resources, financially or physically, the way i do and judge myself for having them. which translates into guilt where i believe that i am not using the privilege i have been lucky to have to the best of my capacity. i should be maximising and building something that takes care of at least a few families. empower them enough to build a good life for themselves and their future generations.

8. big companies eating every independent store

i hate seeing gentrified high streets which barely have any independent stores or cafes anymore. but i still choose to go to a costa coffee and not walk a few minutes to get a cuppa from a local store which is probably tucked away because they cannot afford high-street rents. largely because of the loyalty program that promises a free coffee every month. i feel guilt every time i cash in on it. same goes for fast fashion clothing and mass produced furniture.

9. attaching my self worth to my work

i work for a capitalist company which derives profits from businesses which are also capitalistic. and yet, i attach my self worth to my work. if i quit, they’d find someone else in a week’s time and my existence would be reduced to a handover stored somewhere on their unorganised google drive. i barely volunteer for causes i actually care about and yet, attach all my self worth to a job that didn’t even exist a decade ago.

10. buying a cup of coffee

i could literally make coffee at home and drink four cups instead of the one i buy every time i step out. i wouldn’t be able to stomach the acidity but point being, i’d at least be saving some money and not feel guilty. yet, i treat is as an experience i love and have convinced myself is something i need every weekend. the £4 i spend on the coffee could buy me a top from a thrift store, yet, i choose to buy a coffee and battle with myself.

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for the longest time, i have had an extremely unhealthy relationship with instagram. the pressure of being aesthetic on it really got to me after one point where i realised that if i did not edit my pictures enough to match the vibe i wanted to give off, no photo was good enough. back in the day, instagram started off as just another way of staying connected with people from school. and it truly was fun - getting likes from my acquaintances felt more of an acknowledgement than anything else. that they see what i am upto and vice versa.

when it was only raw photos being posted and the camera quality did not matter, i really enjoyed it and so, getting a social media marketing internship only felt natural. the first brand handle i managed was for a pet store. i was constantly being ambushed with cute dogs in my client meetings and i never once felt like i was being sucked into a black hole. up until the point influencer marketing started picking up. being an influencer is quite easy but managing one can really be a pain. amidst shoot directions and managing briefs with their expectations, my reality started getting blurry. the amount of sway an influencer can hold over their audience is really undermined by a consumer of their content. as a consumer, you believe it to be a one on one relationship with the creator. but there are thousands feeding into the clout and as a marketer, it is my job to keep everyone hooked.

having been on the other side, i can tell you that your attention is the currency being traded and you, my friend, are always on an overdraft. it took a while for me to realise it, after all, i do still continue to work in marketing and it’s my job to ensure that my clients make money. but being in the industry made me realise that i needed to start touching more grass than open the app. somewhere along the line, i stopped realising that my own attention was being traded heavily.

every time i saw someone get into harvard, or get married or move cities, i would start questioning my own life decisions. this wasn’t to say that i hadn’t made leaps and bounds in my own life, i have always been quite satisfied with the pace and with all the achievements i have made so far. but somewhere, seeing somebody post a story or a photo of a new chapter in their life, served as a trigger i didn’t need.

i also failed to realise that i had started losing my sense of individuality as i continued to feed into the norm. i went to a yoga class a couple weeks ago with a friend who doesn’t use social media. she asked if there was a dress code she had missed after the class because everyone in the class alternated between the same two brands of workout gear. ironically, a majority of them had stanley cups on them too and i didn’t even realise it until she pointed it out to me.

there also is less of an allure or mystery behind someone’s life anymore, solely because it is all over social media. especially a celebrity because their life feels so within reach that it feels disappointing when their online presence doesn’t match their off-screen one. i went for a book launch event of an actress i had been following for a while. i really liked her content on instagram so i naturally assumed that it’d match her intellect in conversation on the panel. her character in the show i know her from has a lot of depth and she makes a very valid case on the relationship we have with sex which i’m sure has changed the trajectory of a fair few conversations. but when i heard her on the panel, it felt like there was such a mismatch to her social media persona.

the lives we curate on social media and the content we consume is often so curated, yet, we knowingly continue to feed into it. if we ever need a distraction from life’s messiness, instagram becomes an easy escape. the instant dopamine hit makes us forget about everything going south in our lives. especially because there is always a creator going through the exact same thing - and they have already turned it into content.

it’s such a trap - i want more of it in spite of knowing that it isn’t good for me. it took me app locks and a whole lot of willpower to not instinctively reach out for my phone to scroll or check what my friends sent me when i first started distancing myself from it. switching my notifications off has helped a tonne but the withdrawal symptoms in the beginning really felt dysmorphic.

cultivating a life outside of instagram which is not ruled by getting my insecurities validated positively or negatively feels freeing. i have now graduated into doing something and not wanting to post it online. a photo can just be an invitation to a memory i’ve captured. it doesn’t need to match any brand guidelines i’ve built in my head. and if i do post something, it doesn’t make me judge myself. i’ve realised that while i did think a lot about my followers, i was my hardest critic to please. i still have my moments but i’m now far more self-aware than i was and it’s incredibly liberating to say the least.

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i’m gonna say it out loud. i hate having a digital village. i hate having friends who are all over the world because we all choose to live our separate lives and not be around each other as much.

i know that’s how life works, don’t give me logic. i know everyone is on their own path and everything in your 20s is transient - jobs, friendships, relationships, home, everything. i also know that you can make new friends around easily. yes, i can just go for a walk outside, say hi to a new person, vibe with them for a brief amount of time and make them mine. as an extrovert, i’ve always found it easy. but being an adult who needs to find ‘convenience’ in friendships to make them last, sucks.

i hate it when someone says, join a run club, put yourself out there, you’ll meet more people and soon you’ll have a whole new social circle. i get it, Sophie, but shut up. for the love of god, i want my friends who i could just frolic around with before we all decided to move out to ‘grow’ and become our best versions.

i’m proud of each one of them but i hate that we cannot choose to ultimately all come back and stay in the same area. when someone asks me where is home, i never think about a specific place because home is all over the globe now. i initially thought it’s because i moved out which is why i cannot associate home to where my parents live anymore. and maybe it’s because i’ve changed so much. maybe because my newer self exists in my current city and that is home to me now. but nope, i’ve realised it’s literally because all my people who saw me grow up, become the person that i am are just spread across different cities. some have moved back to where they came from, some are digital nomads, some are moving in with their partners, some are taking up new jobs. everyone is on a different tangent, and from their perspective, so am I.

but where does that leave us? being so well connected in spite of not being geographically available in each other’s lives, where does it leave us? i’ll tell you. it leaves us feeling like we are alone. the funniest thing i have ever heard is from my past self who was in a full blown committed live-in relationship, tell her boyfriend that we’re now going to be alone together because a close friend decided to move cities. and all he could say to make me feel better is that people come and go, Sarah. when someone leaves, it opens up space for new people to enter your life. oh what bull.

why do you inherently feel lonely in spite of being surrounded by people? why do you feel like you have no one even if you have a tonne of friends and a thriving social circle?

my theory is that when we turn into fully functioning adults, we start living in nostalgia. adulthood really can get messy. amidst transient and complex relationships with people who are also learning to discover themselves - knowingly and unknowingly, we turn towards the past where we made happy memories with our most innocent selves. we yearn for the company we had in ourselves when we were younger.

we weren’t constantly addressing things that needed our attention. we were happily living hour to hour, saying yes to every plan without a care in the world. there was so much more to discover, so many questions unanswered, so much of our innocence yet to be destroyed. now? we have so much life admin to catch up on that taking time out to socialise or maintain relationships becomes an active choice.

someone told me that their social battery now feels like it’s solar powered and i couldn’t agree more.

everyone is lonely yet not alone. some are alone and not lonely. such a dichotomy of adulthood, it breaks my mind. we lack the sense of continuity. we lack the shared context with whoever we meet because they meet the most current version of ourselves. they don’t know which colour water bottle was our favourite. or how we crammed up before taking up a test. they don’t know which brand of alcohol can make our guts churn. everything is brand new. it’s a clean slate.

maybe that’s why adulthood feels lonely. because not everyone you meet ends up knowing your whole story. these friendships are beautiful in their own way but more often than not, they end up in between gaps on your calendar as catch-ups over coffee. when all you really want, is being able to shout your friend's name while standing outside their house, holding a bag of takeaway food that you both love, knowing their mum would open the door.

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point being, i was a scaredy cat. i never gave myself a shot at being alone because i was always dating someone since i was seventeen. one relationship after the other or some kind of male attention which kept me hooked. and all good times, in fact - it felt amazing to come home and cuddle with my partner after a long day. which feels ironic because i now so look forward to my night time routine of watching an episode of my favourite show, eating a dark chocolate chip cookie or reading my book before dozing off.

i really wasn’t this person before. being by myself felt like a nightmare that would never end. i understand that introverts cannot relate to this, but when you grow up in a city teeming with crowds, a large family that never leaves you alone and a thriving social circle, the quiet feels like the monster under your bed. you know there is nothing under there but you still are wary of what could be.

and while it took a lot of character development to get here, these are a few things i’ve learnt are untrue about being by yourself.

you look like a weirdo sitting alone at a restaurant.

absolutely not. but it took me a good three meals where i avoided eye-contact with the server before i started feeling comfortable enough to not just go with the easiest option on the menu. i felt so judged the first time i went by myself, i almost walked out of the door. the second time, i booked myself a table for one facing the window so that i could have my back against the world. the third time, i brought my favourite book along for familiarity. slowly, i started enjoying building stories in my head of people who walked by. i ended up having good conversations with those sitting next to me and i started eating with a lot more intention. it’s safe to say that i can now raw-dog a meal by myself in a full restaurant at peak dinnertime.

no one will be around if you need help.

one of my biggest fears even today is the thought that in case something happened to me, no one would know. my family would of course start freaking out if i stopped answering their calls and my flatmate would probably get concerned if i didn’t come out of my room for a whole day. but it gnaws at me that there is no person who is responsible in some way to check on me every hour. it really is a terrifying thought even today. but i’ve learnt to live with it.

i know that if i ever feel lonely, i can always call one of my friends and have a good conversation. or i could go for a walk where i see a tonne of people and know that i am not alone in this world. the more i step out on the streets everyday, the more i realise that we’re all part of the same universe and we all feel just as alone even if we are with someone. which brings me to my next point.

being with someone meant that i would be happy.

while i agree that it is nice to have that aspect of life sorted, i know that being with someone can only make you feel like you are not alone. that’s it. i know it’s a cliché but you will only ever feel happy with someone if you truly feel happy being by yourself. the minute your happiness starts being dependent on how your partner feels, you start giving away small parts of yourself and end up seeking validation from them which should’ve come from yourself. being with someone does not cure loneliness, it only changes its shape.

loneliness is something that will happen to you.

a year ago, when the loneliness epidemic started garnering attention, i was fresh off a breakup and truly felt like i would be left by myself with no one around. most importantly, winter was upon us and amidst 3pm sunsets and the bone-chilling cold, seasonal depression hit me in full swing. what matters most is that all my friends are spread across the globe so when the sun set each day, all of them were already asleep leaving me with no one to talk to. having a digital village meant that i woke up to a tonne of messages but by 3pm my time, all my friends were already snoring in their beds.

this left me with a lot of time and thankfully, at the behest of getting deeply into neuroplasticity, i picked up doing things that i loved but had abandoned in the pursuit of avoiding my own thoughts. reading in bed started feeling more like intentional self-care than an escape from reality. cooking with no music on started feeling much more than just a regular chore. i started enjoying being lonely. and meeting my friends or making new ones started feeling so much more deliberate than just an attempt at trying to fill my space and time.

being by myself has been such a trying journey. i struggle with it on some days still but i love knowing that i’ll be coming home to myself. i feel so much more at peace knowing that i have created a life which is fulfilling at the very least and purposeful at its best. i stopped treating life like a waiting room and started doing things which i would have otherwise waited for my friends, family or a partner to accompany me with.

there is a quiet relief in realising that no one is trying to pull your attention away. it took me a good amount of time to learn it. you learn to enjoy your own company so much, when someone cancels a plan, you still choose to go and do it yourself. you still buy yourself a cup of coffee, sit outside the cafe and watch people go by their day. you greet a stranger with no intention of having a conversation and developing a connection. you let people live their lives and go back to living yours.

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As a seventeen-year-old who went to an all-girls convent school, I never valued female friendships. I found the girls from my school a lil too bitchy. In all fairness, a majority of them went crazy for the boys from our co-ed rival school. Somehow, getting attention from the head boy was their sole purpose - especially if their best friend had already managed to grab his attention. I remember the then head boy of said school - he really gave me the ick back then. He was a known Casanova and rumour had it that he went around sleeping with every single girl from the elite girl gang in my school. I now realise that we really did lead a Europhia-esque life back then.

This boy somehow internalised my belief that the girls in my school were stupid and whenever I saw them flutter their eyelashes at him, I kept judging them harder. I was then fuelled by my consumption of movies where female protagonists were largely written by men and so, I made up my mind that girls are ‘too much’ to deal with and it’s better to just hang out with guys because they are less drama. Such pick-me behaviour, I’m now aware.

I avoided girls for a while. I had one girl best friend but other than that, I always chose to talk to boys first at high school, knowing I’d be able to get along with them better. And I did I suppose, to a larger extent. I was a loud tomboy who could chill and become an easy ‘bro’ to any man. While I initially took pride in this sentiment, I later realised that being a bro really is no fun. Sure, the boys would get vulnerable with me easily because I was that one girl friend who they could talk to but it became lonely after a while because I only ever received an invitation to drink if I started getting real with my feelings with them. The drink really felt like a bandaid over their inability to sit with any kind of feelings, much less their own. Their range of emotions scares me even today because they really barely have any - or at least the capacity to show them.

I still had my girl bestie so I did get the emotional support I wanted and I really didn’t feel the need to have more friends or even girl friends around because she was more than enough. I still couldn’t completely bring myself to associate with ‘girly’ girls because they really did feel like a lot to handle. Until I met this one girl who I also knew more guys than girls say, ‘‘No matter what, it’s always been my girls who have seen me through everything. I cannot imagine a life without them.’’

I do not know why, but it really stayed with me when she said that. I started questioning my pick-me attitude and started taking effort into interacting with girls who felt were more my vibe. And the more I spent time with them, the more I realised that the level of support, comfort and joy is so much more genuine and real with them.

I actively started paying attention to how warm girls could be, especially in public bathrooms. It really feels like we’re a part of this unsaid community of girlhood. I remember that some random girl held my hair when I threw up in a nightclub washroom on a particularly horrid night. She kept crooning a melody in my ears to calm me down which I now use for anyone who throws up in front of me. Receiving compliments from random girls on my outfit in the powder room feels so much more rewarding than when any guy compliments me.

I’ve also learnt that no bond is stronger than that of two women going through a heartbreak simultaneously. They really are a force to reckon with. Something my male counterparts always tell me they are jealous about because they do not seem to get that kind of support.

My girls have supported me through some of the worst breakups ever. They have trash talked my exes, rolled their eyes if I said anything which lowered my self-esteem, checked up on me every couple hours and never once complained that I was being too much for talking their ears off over the same issue for the hundredth time.

The best way to explain a girl gang hang, I’ve realised, is that you can breathe easy. You don’t even need to talk, somehow, you will feel at peace even if you sit in silence with them. I suppose it is because there is an undercurrent of love. No scarcity of love. Of ever feeling like I do not belong. My friendships have definitely evolved over the years with all my girl friends as we navigate different phases of life. Through moving cities and partners (thankfully no kids yet), we have somehow managed to always find our way back to each other.

On bad days, I may not recommend romantic love, but I most definitely will always recommend the love you receive from a girl friend. She won’t just show up with wine and a tub of ice cream at your doorstep. She’ll have gotten you a week’s worth of groceries, your mail from the concierge and a fresh set of clothes knowing you haven’t gotten around to doing your laundry.