I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what your room looks like tonight, or what you had for dinner. I don’t know what you have been carrying quietly, or what you have convinced everyone else you have already moved on from. I don’t even know why you are reading this.

Maybe you found this because someone sent it to you. Maybe you stumbled across it right now in this ungodly hour when sleep refused to come. Maybe you were looking for something you couldn’t name but whatever the reason, I want you to know that I am glad you are here.

There is something strange about writing a letter to someone you have never met. Usually, when we write, we know who we are speaking to. We know their name. We know their face but this letter belongs to no one in particular, which somehow makes it belong to everyone.

So, dear person, wherever this finds you; I hope you have been gentle with yourself and I mean that because I think we are often much kinder to people we love than we are to ourselves.

We forgive other people for being tired. We understand when they need time, and tell them that one mistake does not define their entire life. But when it comes to ourselves, suddenly we become judges.

We measure our worth by how productive we were today. We replay conversations from years ago and punish ourselves for the things we should have said differently. We look at people our age and wonder why their lives seem to be moving while ours feels suspended somewhere between who we were and who we are supposed to become.

But stranger if I’m being honest with you, there is absolutely no shame in who you are. I think we have been taught to treat life like a race with checkpoints. Graduate by this age. Fall in love by this age. Find your purpose at this age. Make money at this age. Build something at this age. Become someone at this age but you are not late nor behind. You are not failing simply because your life does not resemble the life you imagined when you were younger.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we stopped asking, “Where should I be by now?” and started asking, “Who am I becoming because of where I am?”

Dear person, please come back to your life. There is still so much of it left to live and I know sometimes that sentence is difficult to believe but perhaps tomorrow will surprise you. So, wherever you are reading this from please stay curious about your own life. There are still pages you haven’t read and places you haven’t been. And when you finally do, I hope you realise that you were never as lost as you thought.

With love,

Someone who doesn’t know your name, but hopes you’re okay.

For the girl receiving it? It was a sensory assault that a notification badge or DM could never replicate. Receiving a letter wasn’t a passive event; it was a ritual. You didn’t read it in public while waiting in line for a coffee. You took it to your room, locked the door, sat on the floor, and opened the envelope like it was contraband.

Imagine being able to decipher a boy’s entire psychological state just by the slant of the letters. Was he rushing? Was he calm? A love letter was simple. You could tuck it under your pillow. You could read it until the creases turned white and thin from being folded and unfolded a thousand times in the dark.

It gave a girl a private sanctuary. She didn’t have to wonder if he was texting five other people the exact same phrase; the sheer labour of a letter proved she was the only one occupying his mind( I think that’s how you must’ve felt or maybe I’m wrong).

But these days we have optimized the inconvenience out of romance, and in doing so, we’ve found ourselves drowning in instant connection but starving for actual expression. A text says, “I’m thinking about you right now.” A letter says, “I sat still for an hour and thought about nothing else but you.” Maybe it’s time to put down the phones, get a paper and pen, and figure out how envelopes work again. Let’s make love high-stakes and beautifully inconvenient once more.

If you’re reading this and your immediate reaction to the word “Christianity” is a wave of genuine anger, then I want to start by saying I get it; seriously I do.

We live in a culture where the loudest representatives of the faith often look nothing like the person they claim to follow. If your primary exposure to Christianity has been through the lens of judgmental megachurch pastors, hypocritical family members, or a childhood steeped in religious trauma and shame, it makes total sense why you’d want nothing to do with it.

You don’t hate Christianity because you’re “blinded by the world” or whatever cliché Christian culture likes to throw around to avoid self-reflection ( eish ). You hate it because you hate injustice. You hate it because you hate arrogance, exclusion, manipulation; and the irony is that Jesus hated those things too.

Much of what is rejected today under the banner of Christianity isn’t actually Christianity at all. It’s a cheap, plastic imitation. It’s a club used to maintain social control rather than a cross used to display sacrificial love. The only people Jesus ever threw hands with were the religious elites who used God’s name to exploit the poor and gatekeep spiritual life; so if you are angry at religious hypocrisy, then you are in direct alignment with Christ.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” Matthew 23:27

If the church you walked away from looked more like a whitewashed tomb than a place of healing, walking away wasn’t a sign of moral failing on your part, in fact it was probably the best decision you’ve ever made in your life.

Imagine walking into an art gallery to see a masterpiece by a famous artist. But before you can look at the canvas, a crowd of art critics stands in front of it, throwing mud at each other and blocking your view. You’d probably walk out of the gallery disgusted.

But would you be disgusted by the artist or by the crowd?

The absolute truth is that humans are deeply flawed, self-serving, and prone to corrupting even the most beautiful things, and Christians are definitely no exception. We screw up CONSTANTLY. But Christianity’s validity doesn’t hinge on the perfection of Christians; it hinges on the perfection of Christ.

So my words to you are to keep your boundaries against toxic religious environments. You don’t have to excuse the harm that has been done in the name of God. But as you clear away the wreckage of spiritual abuse and cultural hypocrisy, don’t just leave a void. Look at the empty space left behind and ask “Who was Jesus, really?”

You have every right to walk away from a broken subculture. But before you close the book on the entire faith, make sure you aren’t letting the people who got Jesus wrong rob you of the chance to know Him for who He actually is.

When a long-term relationship ends, the world understands. There are shared assets to divide, a clear timeline to mourn, and an unspoken social agreement that you are allowed to be a mess for a while.

But when a situationship dissolves? The grief feels illegitimate. You find yourself sitting on your bedroom floor, crying over text messages, while a nagging voice in your head whispers: “Why are you this upset? You guys weren’t even official.”

We enter situationships for all kinds of reasons. Maybe we’re focused on our careers, or maybe we fell for the modern dating myth that keeping things “casual” protects our hearts. We tell ourselves it’s low-stakes but human emotions don’t care about labels.

You can’t bargain with chemistry. You can’t tell your nervous system, “Hey, don’t get attached, we haven’t had the ‘What Are We’ talk yet.” The intimacy feels and is real, even if the commitment was never there.

Why It Hurts (Sometimes More Than a Breakup)

In many ways, ending a situationship can be more confusing and painful than a traditional breakup. When a defined relationship ends, you usually know why. You tried, you clashed, or you grew apart. You are mourning the past. In a situationship, you are mourning the future. You are grieving the potential of what could have been if they had just chosen you.

Because there were no official boundaries, there is rarely an official ending so you’re left holding a puzzle with half the pieces missing. The reality of it all is that you are allowed to mourn a connection you felt deeply, regardless of whether it fit into a neat societal box.

The hardest part of a situationship is often the internal battles you have to have with yourself. You spend the entire duration of the connection trying to act cool, casual, and unaffected. You wait twenty minutes to text back. You don’t ask where things are going because you don’t want to seem “crazy” or “needy.”

To love someone without a safety net or the security of a label and a promise of tomorrow takes a lot of vulnerability. It means you risked your heart. So, don’t let the lack of a title minimise what you felt. You didn’t imagine the chemistry, and you didn’t imagine the connection. Your heartbreak is real, but your ability to heal and find someone who chooses you completely is just as real.

You laugh about that suicide letter because you’re terrified of the silence that comes after it. The sad part about it is that you have become so good at being ‘ironic,’ haven’t you? You’ve turned your brain into these layers of sarcasm so thick that nothing can actually touch you. You jokingly post about ending your life because if you treat your life like a shitty TV show, then the stakes don’t feel real.

If the letter is a joke, then the pain isn’t permanent. The thing nobody wants to say in the comment sections is that irony is a coward’s way of mourning. You laugh because if you stop laughing, even for a second, you might have to feel the actual weight of the person who sat down, picked up a pen, and decided that the world was better off without their heartbeat. And that is a heavy, jagged thing to carry.

Your irony isn’t an aesthetic, it’s a confession that you’re too weak to look at the truth; and you’ve turned the most agonising decision a human being can make into a personality trait.

You want to know why you really laugh? It’s because if you don’t turn it into a joke, you have to admit that you’re scared. You’re scared that the person who wrote that letter might be right. You’re scared that the world is that dark. And instead of doing the hard work of building a life worth living, or actually showing up for a friend who’s drowning, you just post a ‘skull emoji’ and move on to the next video.

Your ‘dark humour’ isn’t a coping mechanism and you’re burying your empathy because you’re too tired to use it. If you’re actually hurting, have the balls to say it without a layer of sarcasm. If you’re actually struggling, put down the jokes and ask for help like a person who actually wants to survive.

If you can laugh at the dark, it means you still have a voice. It means there’s still air in your chest. Now, use that air for something else. Use it to tell someone you’re struggling, and for real this time. Use it to tell a friend that you’re glad they’re still here. Use it to breathe through the next ten minutes, and then the ten after that.

Put the phone down. Go look at the sky, and remember that you are part of all of this. I’m glad you’re here. I’m really, really glad you’re here. PROTECT YOUR MENTAL.

I don’t think I ever asked for perfect parents. I didn’t ask for ones who never raised their voice, never misunderstood me, never got it wrong. I just asked for two words.

“I’m sorry.”

But somehow, those words felt heavier than everything else in the house. Heavier than discipline or the silence that went on for days after an argument like we were both waiting for something neither of us had the courage to say. Parents teach accountability, but rarely practice it.

They tell you to own up to your mistakes. To apologise when you hurt someone even when it’s uncomfortable but when they hurt you, suddenly accountability became optional. Suddenly, they were doing it for your own good. Suddenly it didn’t happen the way you think it did. Suddenly you are ungrateful because you talk back.

And just like that, your feelings became negotiable and they wonder why you don’t tell them about your life. Psychology will tell you that when parents apologise, it builds trust, it creates emotional safety, it teaches children that being wrong doesn’t make you weak; it makes you human.

But they didn’t need psychology. They just needed to look at you because every time they refused to say sorry, you learned something they never intended to teach: That love can exist without accountability. That authority is allowed to hurt you without explanation, and silence is a valid response to someone else’s pain, so you carry that.

Into friendships. Into relationships. Into the way you apologised too much for things that weren’t your fault and stayed quiet about things that were. Because if the people who raised you couldn’t admit when they were wrong, who are you to expect anyone else to?

The truth is you didn’t need them to be right all the time. You needed them to be real. To say, “I shouldn’t have said that, I handled that wrong and it hurt you, and I see it now.” Not because it fixes everything but because it tells you that you matter enough to be acknowledged. Because apologies don’t erase pain, they recognise it.

But without that, love starts to feel one-sided. Like YOU are the only one expected to grow and become better while they remain untouched by the same standards they raised you with.

So if you ask me, I don’t want perfect parents. I don’t want flawless people who never get it wrong. I just want parents who understand that respect is not a one-way street, that authority does not cancel out responsibility, and that sometimes the most powerful thing you can say to your child is I AM SORRY.

Because those three words would’ve changed everything. Not the past, but the way most people learned to survive it. But again, maybe you’re just being ungrateful I guess.

FOR CONTEXT, THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO EVERYONE ! Okay let’s get down to business, enjoy.

Let’s make it worse because sometimes the girl smiling in your face, hyping your relationship, asking “how’s he?” a little too sweetly, is not your friend.

She’s studying your man. Not every “friend” is innocent. Some of them are quiet opportunists. Sitting there, watching how he moves, how you tolerate him, where the cracks are; waiting for their moment to slip in like they were always meant to be there.

And you are just playing tour guide by bringing him around. Letting them joke a little too comfortably, laughing when boundaries are being tested right in front of you because you don’t want to look “insecure.”

In actual fact there’s a difference between being friendly and being familiar with someone’s partner. And some of your friends get familiar very quickly. The lingering eye contact or the “playful” touches ( if you went through that tough boy ), or even inside jokes that somehow don’t include you.

And instead of checking it, you tell yourself you’re overthinking. You convince yourself that’s just how she is nah nah nah nah nah , that’s just how she is with your man.

But don’t get it twisted it’s not just her, were gonna get to the guy now. Honey if that is your man then he will shut that down immediately and not entertain it. I don’t think he will create space for another woman, especially your friend, to feel comfortable crossing lines.

So if your “friend” feels bold enough to act like that its simple ke, it’s because he made it feel safe. Come to think of it okare it is two people betraying you at different speeds. One pretending to be your sister and the other pretending to be your man. And you’re stuck in the middle, trying to play peacekeeper in a situation that should’ve never existed.

All I am saying ne, in MY opinion, MY opinion akere; if you don’t set boundaries, people will create their own. And their version of boundaries is usually whatever they can get away with. So now you’ve got a man who’s too comfortable and a friend who’s too curious, and suddenly “my man” starts sounding real communal.

It’s OUR MAN now mosadi. And the crazy part is they’ll both look you in the face like nothing is happening and you’re the problem for noticing, or ba tla re you’re doing too much.

Mara you are not stupid chommie, you’re just finally seeing enough. So PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEUUHHHH stop trying to be the cool girlfriend. Stop trying to be the chill friend because the same people you’re trying not to offend are the same ones quietly testing how far they can go. Same way goes for the gents, boundaries niggalations, boundaries !

And if you keep staying silent they will go far enough that one day you won’t even recognize your own relationship. Mara I am not saying don’t say My Man, shame if it’s the right relationship for you, be proud of it wena because you are being treated well, but this time, ask yourself why does it feel like you have to guard him from the very people who are supposed to respect you?

And more importantly, why is he not guarding the relationship with you?

And the funny part is it was never said as a threat. It sounded almost like a promise—like adulthood was this quiet room where all the answers were neatly folded, waiting for you. As kids, we took it as curiosity. What would we see? What secrets were adults keeping behind that sentence they dropped so casually?

Now we’ve grown. And we’ve seen. INFACT WE ARE SEEING IT IN 4K! And some of us would like to unsee.

Because what they didn’t say is that growing up doesn’t just reveal answers, it reveals weight. It reveals the cost of things that once felt free. It shows you that love is not just butterflies and late-night calls, but timing, effort, miscommunication, and sometimes walking away even when you don’t want to. It shows you that friendships can expire without a dramatic ending( I’m triggered ) just silence that stretches too long. It shows you that the people you thought had everything figured out were just guessing, JUST LIKE YOU, isn’t that crazy bro?

They didn’t tell us we would see our parents as flawed, tired and trying human beings. That one day, their authority would soften into humanity ( cough cough ). That we would notice the sacrifices they never announced, and the fears they tried to hide behind discipline. That we would understand them, and sometimes resent them, and sometimes forgive them. Repeat that sentence please and go heal !

They didn’t tell us we would see how fragile stability really is. How money comes and goes, especially how it GOES ( gone kanje ). How opportunities don’t always knock, they pass quietly while you’re distracted, unsure, or unready.

They didn’t tell us we would see ourselves so clearly; the confident, certain, “I’ll never make those mistakes” people we thought we were. It’s until you SEE these things that YOU are the one who sometimes repeats the very patterns they swore they’d break.

But all of this just leads to a more deeper void because how do you tell a child that growing up means understanding things you wish you didn’t have to understand? That clarity can feel heavy? That awareness comes with responsibility and sometimes, with grief?

So they left it at that. Grow up, and you’ll see. Kula u ta swi vona.

And now we have, but honestly I have seen enough. I would like to unsee just a little sometimes knowing very well that’s not how it works.

Maybe the point was never to stay untouched by what we see, but to learn how to carry it. To hold truth without letting it harden us. My fellow comrades, I was told that growing up isn’t just about seeing but about choosing what you do with what you’ve seen.

There’s a sentence I keep seeing women use yaz : “I’m coming to you as a woman.” And every time I hear it, I have to pause Because what does that even mean anymore?

You’re coming to a stranger who didn’t promise you anything or even hold your hand and say “I choose you” while the man who actually betrayed you is somewhere silent, comfortable, and somehow still yours? Make it make sense bafazi ( new word alert ).

But still, you’re not coming to her as a woman, you’re coming to her as someone avoiding the real confrontation because it’s easier to text her than to look at him. It’s easier to demand respect from a stranger than to admit the person you love didn’t respect you.

So you dress it up. “I just want to talk woman to woman.” but what you really want is to redistribute accountability. You want her to feel guilty enough so you don’t have to feel foolish but she didn’t cheat on you, he did. She didn’t owe you loyalty, he did. She didn’t wake up one day and decide to betray a relationship she wasn’t even in and yet somehow, she becomes the villain in a story she didn’t write.

And I’m not saying she’s innocent because some women know exactly what they’re doing. But even then, why is your energy louder for her than for him? Why are you writing paragraphs to her and giving him silence?

Why are you asking her to “respect your relationship” when the man inside that relationship didn’t even do that?

Because real woman-to-woman conversations honestly don’t start with confrontation but with clarity.

And clarity would tell you that if he could lie to you, he can lie to her. If he could disrespect you, he can disrespect her. Wena sphinya are not fighting over a prize but arguing over a pattern and instead of walking away from the source, YOU ARE NEGOTIATING WITH THE SYMPTOM.

And that’s where it gets dangerous because now you’re not just hurt, you’re participating in your own disrespect and asking another woman to step back from a man who never stepped up. Ehbaba read that again.

You’re defending a position he already abandoned. And the saddest part is even if she leaves, even if she apologizes, and even if she disappears completely, you still have to go home to the person who made this possible.

So what did you really solve? SHOW ME !!

At the end of the day accountability isn’t loud. It doesn’t come with long messages and voice notes. Sometimes its just the realisation that you actually have the FREE WILL to walk away and choose yourself without needing an audience.

The strongest thing you can do is not confront the other woman. Th thing that needs confronting is the reality that the person you loved didn’t choose you the way you chose them and that’s a conversation we will talk about ( next time next time eish )

MARA ESVAR FOR NOW.

A lot of us don’t actually have ‘‘standards.” We have things we got used to. Things we tolerated long enough that they started to feel normal. Things we survived, so now we expect everyone else to survive them too.

There are people who take what they can tolerate, what they believe, what they survived, and turn it into a measuring stick for everyone else. They want you to be more like them so they can understand you because difference makes them uncomfortable.

See, it’s easier to label someone as dramatic than to admit you’ve normalized emotional neglect. It’s easier to call someone “too much” than to admit you’ve been taught to make yourself small. It’s easier to dismiss someone’s boundaries than to confront the fact that you’ve never had any.

So instead of questioning themselves, they question you. They weaponize their “standards.” But not all standards are healthy. Some are just well-decorated wounds. Some are defensive mechanisms that learned how to speak confidently.

Some are just fear pretending to be wisdom, and the problem isn’t that you have standards, the problem is when you think yours are superior by default. When you start treating your way of living like it’s the correct way of living because now you’re no longer just existing you’re policing.

You’re correcting people who were never asking for your approval. You’re judging people who are simply choosing differently. You’re projecting your limits onto lives that were never meant to be confined by them.

NOT EVERYONE WANTS WHAT YOU WANT . NOT EVERYONE HEALS THE WAY YOU HEAL. NOT EVERYONE LOVES THE WAY YOU LOVE!!!

Not everyone stays quiet about things you’ve learned to tolerate and that doesn’t make them wrong, it just makes them different.

But difference threatens people who have built their identity on being “right.” So they double down. They shame softness because they had to be hard. They mock vulnerability because they were never allowed to feel. They reject growth that looks unfamiliar because it exposes how stagnant they’ve been.

And suddenly, your evolution becomes offensive, simply because it doesn’t mirror theirs. Let’s be honest, a lot of people aren’t protecting standards; they’re protecting comfort.

Comfort in what they know, comfort in what they’ve accepted, comfort in not having to unlearn because unlearning all of that is humbling. It requires you to admit that maybe the way you’ve been doing things isn’t the only way.

Your standard is yours. It should guide your life, not control someone else’s. You don’t get to invalidate someone’s boundaries because they’re higher than yours. You don’t get to shame someone’s softness because you hardened too early. You don’t get to rush someone’s healing because you avoided your own.

And you definitely don’t get to use God as a co-signer for your limitations because sometimes, what you call “conviction” is just fear of doing things differently, and sometimes, what you call “standards” are just walls you never questioned.

So before you tell someone they’re doing too much, ask yourself if you’ve been doing too little with your own growth. Before you call someone unrealistic, ask yourself if you’ve settled so deeply that anything better feels like fantasy. Before you dismiss someone’s boundaries, ask yourself why access means so much to you.

Because not everyone is meant to agree with you, not everyone is meant to live like you and not everyone is meant to make themselves small to fit your understanding.

And that’s okay but what’s not okay is trying to make them.

Just because it’s your standard; doesn’t mean it’s THE standard.

There’s a difference between trusting God and hiding behind Him. And I think you know which one you’ve been doing because hunger doesn’t sound like “I’m waiting on God.”

Hunger sounds like discipline. Hunger sounds like showing up when you don’t feel chosen. Hunger looks like consistency when nobody is clapping for you. But lately you’ve been calling your comfort “faith.”

You say, “If it’s God’s will, it will happen.” But you don’t apply nor practice. You don’t try again after failing the first time and somehow, God is the reason?

No buddy be honest with yourself, you’re dressing your fear in scripture. You’re not hungry enough because hungry people move. Hungry people knock on doors until their knuckles forget what rest feels like, and they surely don’t romanticize the calling, instead, they build capacity for it.

But you have mastered this amazing language of purpose without committing to the process. You post about destiny. You talk about timing. You quote verses about patience but truly behind closed doors, you’re inconsistent.

And the truth is uncomfortable. God is not responsible for what you refuse to pursue. GOD IS NOT YOUR PROCRASTINATION PLAN. He didn’t tell you to stay where it’s safe. He didn’t tell you to avoid discomfort. He didn’t tell you to keep delaying the thing you keep praying about.

Sometimes you’re not waiting on God, He is waiting on you. Because faith without movement becomes an excuse.

You pray for opportunities but ignore preparation. You ask for elevation but avoid responsibility. You want visibility but refuse to be stretched and then you say, “Maybe it’s just not my time.”

But what if it is your time, and you’re just not ready? But chommie hunger changes everything. When you’re hungry, you stop negotiating with your laziness. You stop needing motivation to start. You stop waiting to feel inspired. You just simply move even when it’s hard. Even when it feels like nothing is working.

Because hunger understands something comfort never will, and it’s that no one is coming to save you from your potential. This doesn’t mean abandon faith, it means live it properly.

Pray but also prepare. Trust but also try. Believe but also build. Because God doesn’t bless who you say you are, He works with who you show up as.

So be honest with yourself; Are you really waiting on God, or are you avoiding the work it takes to meet Him halfway? If you were truly hungry, your actions would look different and deep down you know that.

You keep ending up with people who cheat, disrespect you, or move funny behind your back. At some point, you have to stop asking “ why do they keep doing this to me?” and start asking:

“Why do I keep choosing people like this and letting them stay ?“

Because that’s the part nobody wants to say out loud.

You ignore obvious signs. You see the inconsistency early, but you explain it away. You notice the lack of effort, but you tell yourself they’ll improve. You feel something is off, but you stay quiet because you don’t want to seem “crazy.”

You don’t trust your instincts, buddy you negotiate with them.

And that’s where it starts going wrong.

The fact that you don’t have strong BOUNDARIES and always let things slide that should’ve ended the relationship immediately says alot.

You soon realise that disrespect becomes a conversation instead of a consequence, lies become something to “work through” and bare minimum EFFORT becomes something you’re grateful for ( lol ).

So from their perspective, if you really think about it, I don’t think there’s no real risk in messing up. Let’s be even more direct and not hold each other’s hands. Some of you stay after the first red flag. Some of you stay after the first lie. Some of you go through the extra mile to even stay after the first time they cheat HAIBOOOO!!!!

So what exactly is stopping them from doing it again? Be honest with yourself.

And your friends? They see everything.

They see how you defend someone who clearly isn’t serious about you. They see how your mood depends on someone who treats you like an option. They see you slowly lose confidence while trying to “make it work.” But they don’t say much anymore because every time they do, you shut it down.

You justify the person.
You minimize what happened.
You act like they’re overreacting.

So they stop, not because they don’t care but because you’re not ready to hear it. People don’t just cheat because they can, they cheat because they know they can get away with it WITH YOU. That doesn’t mean you deserve it. It means you’re not enforcing consequences, there’s a difference.

This is really about standards. If YOUR standards are low or inconsistent, people will meet you there. If you keep accepting behavior that hurts you, you’re teaching people that hurting you is acceptable, simple.

But you can change this. You don’t need to become cold or toxic. You don’t need to stop loving people. You just need to stop abandoning yourself to keep someone else.

And that all starts with you trusting your instincts without needing proof or simply understanding that being alone is better than being constantly disrespected.

Because the moment you become someone who actually walks away, you stop attracting people who think they can play with you.

So no, it’s not just that they cheat. It’s that up until now,
you’ve been allowing access to people who don’t deserve you.

The good news mntase, is that this is something you can fix.

And once you do you won’t need to worry about who might cheat on you.

You’ll only deal with people who know they’d lose you IF THEY TRIED.

Yes, sometimes it’s because you didn’t have a dad and that’s not even an insult. It’s an explanation we’ve been too afraid to say out loud.

Because somewhere along the way, we decided that acknowledging fatherlessness sounds like weakness or an excuse. So instead, we let people bleed in silence and call it “maturity”.

But if we’re honest enough about it, we can trace it. We can see it in the way some people love like they’re negotiating abandonment, or in the way they overstay where they’re not respected because leaving feels far too familiar. Or here’s a better example for you my dear friend - maybe it’s in the way they crave validation but don’t trust it when it comes.

You not needing anyone is not a flex really, sometimes it sounds like survival strategies you handed yourself.

Because when a father is absent, it’s not just a person that’s missing, it’s structure. It’s the first blueprint of what love from a man is supposed to feel like or what being a man is supposed to look like.

And when that blueprint is blank you don’t stop building, you just start guessing. Some guess with anger, some guess with silence and then we wonder why cycles repeat. Why some men grow up trying to prove their masculinity instead of understanding it. Why some women grow up trying to earn love INSTEAD OF EXPECTING IT !

No one wants to say it, but the truth is absence teaches too.

It teaches you how to survive without guidance. How to become your own protector. How to normalise being left.

AND REPEAT AFTER ME : WHEN YOU NORMALISE BEING LEFT,
YOU START CHOOSING PEOPLE WHO MAKE LEAVING EASY.

And at the end of the day always remind yourself that it’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility. You didn’t choose the absence. You didn’t wake up as a child and decide, “ I want to grow up without a father figure in my life.”

But now that you’re grown and conscious, you do have a choice in what you do with it. You can either keep letting that absence define your reactions or you can start questioning them. And honesty is where healing starts.

This is NOT about blaming fathers. Some left. Some didn’t know how to stay.
Some were physically present but emotionally absent - which, if we’re being real, can hurt just as much.

This is about acknowledging impact because healing starts with naming the wound. Because you are not just a product of what you lacked, you are also a product of what you choose to build next.

YES YOU can learn what wasn’t taught.
YES YOU can unlearn what survival forced you to believe.
YES YOU can become the stability you never had.

But not if you keep pretending there’s nothing to heal from.