We have somehow turned “nerd” into an insult and then spent years trying to make nerdiness attractive enough for everyone to accept it. Suddenly the nerd is not a person who knows too much about something. The nerd is a hot guy with rectangular glasses who reads obscure books, rolls up his sleeves, knows how to fix a computer, and looks mildly uncomfortable at parties. Or she is a beautiful woman with glasses, a tote bag, a stack of novels, wavy/curly hair, and some carefully chosen hobby that makes her look intelligent without ever becoming too intense. Apparently nerdiness is acceptable as long as the person doing it is attractive enough and the obsession is aesthetically pleasing.

That is not nerdiness. That is styling.

Real nerds are sometimes embarrassing. They talk too much. They interrupt themselves because they suddenly remembered another fact. They know an unreasonable amount about something nobody else cares about. They will explain the plot of a movie when everyone already watched it. They will spend forty minutes telling you why one tiny detail in a video game matters. They will send you down a rabbit hole you never asked to enter. They will own things related to their interests that they absolutely did not need to buy. They will correct a historical detail nobody asked them to correct. They will get genuinely excited when they find an old interview, a strange statistic, a new theory, a rare edition, a better explanation, or some ridiculous piece of information that has absolutely no practical use. THAT is what I want back.

And I don’t mean that every person needs to become some stereotypical guy sitting in a basement surrounded by computer parts. Nerdiness has never belonged to one personality, one gender, one appearance, or one subject. You can nerd out about architecture. You can nerd out about football. You can nerd out about makeup. You can nerd out about trains, cinema, fashion history, perfumes, insects, mythology, languages, Formula 1, old cameras, typography, cooking, literature, astronomy, politics, maps, birds, music production, architecture, sneakers, cars, coffee, mathematics, reality shows, or the weird history of your hometown. You can know every detail about a director’s filmography. You can spend your weekend learning how different fabrics are made. You can memorize every country’s capital. You can have a spreadsheet ranking your favourite albums. You can spend an entire night learning why your favourite building was designed the way it was. Nobody gets to decide that your interest is too stupid to deserve your attention.

Because that is what nerding out really gives you. It gives you depth.

Most people know a little about everything because that is what modern life encourages. You scroll, you see something interesting, you absorb thirty seconds of information, you move on to the next thing. You know the headline. You know the joke. You know the reference. You know enough to participate in the conversation and then you leave. There is nothing wrong with knowing a little about many things, but there is something beautiful about knowing a ridiculous amount about one thing simply because you wanted to.

There is a different feeling that comes with going deep. At first, something is just interesting. Then you start learning about it. Then you notice details you never noticed before. Then those details lead somewhere else. Suddenly you understand the context. You see patterns. You develop opinions. You start asking better questions. You stop consuming the thing and start actually engaging with it. A film becomes more than a film. A song becomes more than something playing in the background. A hobby becomes a whole little world.

And I think people underestimate how much personality comes from that.

You know what makes someone interesting to talk to? It is not always that they have travelled to twenty countries or have a crazy life story or know how to make conversation at a dinner party. Sometimes it is simply that there is one subject that makes their entire face change when they talk about it. They suddenly have something to say. They have stories. They have opinions. They have details. They have spent enough time with something to develop a relationship with it.

I would rather listen to someone passionately explain why they love a terrible television show than sit across from someone who has perfected the art of pretending to be interested in everything.

There is also something deeply sad about how many people censor their interests before anyone else gets the chance to judge them. They like something, then immediately ask themselves whether it is cool. They want to talk about it, then wonder whether they are talking too much. They want to buy something related to it, then decide it is childish. They discover a new hobby, then abandon it once the excitement becomes visible. They learn something, then keep it to themselves because they don’t want to look obsessed.

Why are you policing your own joy?

WHO are you performing normalcy for?

There is no prize for being the least excited person in the room.

And this is where I think the “nerdy people are boring” stereotype falls apart. Boring is not caring too much about something. Boring is having nothing you genuinely care about. A person can know every detail about something and still be boring if they have no curiosity beyond it. Another person can spend their entire life studying one tiny subject and be endlessly fascinating because they are curious, thoughtful, and alive inside their own interests.

The stereotype also assumes that nerds are socially awkward, sensitive, introverted, and incapable of having fun. As if intelligence and enthusiasm somehow cancel out a personality. As if someone who spends Saturday afternoon reading about ancient civilizations cannot also go dancing at night. As if a woman who loves video games cannot also be the loudest person at dinner. As if a guy who reads philosophy cannot also be obsessed with reality shows. People are complicated. That’s what makes them special.

And honestly, I think the recent internet version of the nerd has created another problem. We have become obsessed with making intelligence sexy instead of allowing intelligence to simply exist. The glasses have become an accessory. The books have become a prop. The slightly awkward mannerisms have become an aesthetic. The “nerdy” character is carefully designed to be desirable, while actual obsessive interests are left out of the picture.

It is funny how quickly people love nerdiness when it photographs well.

Give them a genuinely obsessed person who has spent five years learning everything about medieval manuscripts and suddenly the room gets uncomfortable. Give them someone who knows every detail about a niche video game and suddenly they are “too much.” Give them a person who wants to explain why a certain director’s early films are completely different from their later work and suddenly everyone needs to go outside.

Yet put a beautiful person in glasses holding a book and suddenly everyone is screaming about the nerdy aesthetic.

Please.

Let people be weird about things again.

Nerding out also teaches you how to be bad at something without immediately quitting. You discover something new and you are terrible at it. You don’t know the terminology. You don’t understand the references. You make stupid mistakes. You have to look things up. You ask questions that feel obvious. You spend time being a beginner. Then one day you realise you understand something that once seemed completely foreign.

That experience is valuable in a world where everyone wants to look competent immediately.

There is also a certain freedom in becoming the person who knows things. You stop waiting for someone else to validate your interest. You don’t need a friend to approve your hobby. You don’t need an algorithm to tell you that something is worth learning. You don’t need a community of thousands of people to prove that your interest is legitimate. You can simply decide that something fascinates you and go find out more.

And sometimes you will nerd out about something for six months and then completely lose interest. Good. You are allowed to do that too. Your hobby does not need to become your identity. You do not need to monetise it. You do not need to build a career around it. You do not need to become an expert. You do not need to post about it. You do not need to turn every interest into content.

You can learn something just because you want to know.

That might be the most underrated form of freedom left.

Because when you nerd out, you become more curious about the world. You start noticing things. You ask why. You look things up. You remember details. You make connections between subjects. You develop taste. You figure out what you like and, just as importantly, what you don’t like. You build a little map of the things that make your brain light up.

And that map becomes part of you.

So please, get obsessed with something. Find the stupid little subject that makes you lose track of time. Learn everything you can about it. Read the books. Watch the documentaries. Follow the weird forums. Buy the unnecessary notebook. Make the spreadsheet. Memorise the facts. Tell your friends about it until they beg you to stop. Let yourself be the person who knows way too much about something completely useless.

Read the books because you want to read them, not because they look good in a photograph.

Like the movie because you actually like the movie. Not for your letterbox.

Talk about your hobby even if nobody thinks it is cool.

And please, for the love of God, stop trying to make every interesting part of yourself look attractive before you allow yourself to enjoy it.

You do not need to make your curiosity palatable.

You need to nerd out.

If these words meant something to you, you can leave a little something behind. A coffee, perhaps. It helps me keep making room for the thoughts that are difficult to put into words, and for the stories that might otherwise stay unwritten. Either way, thank you for being here and reading.

Buy me a coffee.

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a day ago · 37 likes · 3 comments · hasif 💌

I think we have a weird relationship with love. We act like it only becomes real when two people want each other romantically. If nobody is texting you good morning, taking you on dates, kissing you, or asking you to spend forever with them, it can feel like you are somehow missing the most important kind of love there is.

And I understand why. Romantic love gets all the attention. There are songs about it, movies about it, books about it, entire weddings built around it. We know exactly what it is supposed to look like. Someone chooses you. You choose them. You fall in love, build a life together, and suddenly everything makes sense. We rarely talk about the other people who have been loving us the entire time.

Like your best friend.

The person who has known you through every embarrassing phase. The person who knows which topics will ruin your mood and which ones will make you laugh. The person you can call after months of barely talking and somehow continue the conversation like nothing happened. The person who has heard you complain about the same thing twenty times and still asks what happened next.

You might never fall in love with them in the romantic sense, yet there are parts of your life that belong to them.

There are memories you would not have without them. There are versions of yourself that only exist because you knew them at that particular age. There are jokes nobody else would understand. There are stories you will still tell when you’re old. I don’t know why we call that “just friendship” as if the word just is supposed to make it smaller.

Some friendships are love stories too. They simply don’t end with two people getting together.

And family can be like that too. Your mother asking if you ate. Your father remembering something you mentioned weeks ago. Your sibling making fun of you all day and then being the first person to defend you when someone else does it. None of it looks particularly romantic, and thankfully it doesn’t have to. Love doesn’t become less meaningful just because there is no attraction attached to it.

I think we sometimes confuse romance with being chosen.

We want someone to look at us and say, “Out of everyone in the world, I want you.” There is something incredibly powerful about that. We want to feel special to someone. We want to know that there is a person who sees all the other people they could have chosen and still wants to build a life with us.

The problem is that we can start believing that being chosen romantically is the only way to feel valuable.

So when we are single, we don’t just miss having a relationship. We start questioning ourselves. Why hasn’t anyone chosen me? What’s wrong with me? Why does everyone else seem to have someone? When will it finally be my turn?

And meanwhile, there are people choosing us every day.

A friend saves you a seat. Someone remembers your favourite food. Someone calls when they know you’ve had a difficult week. Someone sends you something stupid because they know it will make you laugh. Someone listens to the same story again because they know you needed to tell it.

We don’t always recognise these things as love because they aren’t packaged like romance.

There is no candlelit dinner. No anniversary. No Instagram post. No “I love you” whispered at midnight.

Sometimes there is just someone asking, “Did you get home?”

And somehow, that can mean everything.

I think about the people who have loved me without ever asking me to be anything other than myself, and there is something incredibly comforting about that. They didn’t need a future with me to care about my present. They didn’t need me to belong to them. They didn’t need a title for what we had.

They just cared.

That kind of love can be easy to overlook because it doesn’t demand much attention. It sits inside ordinary things. A conversation that goes on too long. Food shared without asking. Someone remembering a tiny detail about you. A person knowing you’re upset from the way you talk.

You don’t realise how much these things matter until one day they’re gone.

And losing a friendship can hurt in a way we don’t always know how to explain. There is no breakup announcement. No one asks how you’re coping. You just realise you haven’t spoken in months. You see something they would have found funny and instinctively reach for your phone before remembering that you don’t talk anymore.

That hurts.

So why do we pretend friendship is somehow less serious than romance?

Why do we reserve words like soulmate, heartbreak, forever, and unconditional love almost entirely for romantic relationships?

There are people who will never be our partners who will still know us better than most people ever will. There are people who won’t share our home but will always feel like home. There are people we won’t marry but will carry with us for the rest of our lives.

That matters.

And I think being single becomes a little less painful when you stop treating romantic love like the final piece of your life. You can want a relationship. You can miss having someone to hold. You can want someone to come home to. You can hope that one day you’ll meet someone who makes you feel all of those things.

You can want that and still recognise that your life is not empty without it.

Because loneliness is real, but so is being loved.

Those two things can exist at the same time.

You can desperately want romantic love and still have a friend who would drive across the city for you. You can sleep alone and still be someone’s favourite person to call. You can have nobody waiting for you at home and still be deeply woven into other people’s lives.

I think we forget that when we spend too much time looking for one particular kind of love.

Maybe love was never meant to be one person giving us everything.

Maybe it is your friend who makes you laugh. Your sibling who knows exactly how to annoy you. Your parent who still worries about whether you’ve eaten. The person who remembers your birthday without needing a reminder. The person you haven’t spoken to in years who still makes you smile when you think about them.

Maybe love is all of these people.

And maybe being loved is not always about being someone’s favourite person. Sometimes it is simply knowing that your existence matters to somebody else.

That you are remembered.

That you are missed.

That somewhere, in someone’s life, you have left something behind that cannot be replaced by another person.

I still want romantic love. Obviously. I am not writing this essay because I have suddenly transcended romance and become a person who is perfectly happy with friendship and a well-made cup of tea. I want the dates, the flirting, the stupid inside jokes, the person who looks at me like I am the only person in the room. I want all of it.

I just don’t want to spend my life thinking I am unloved while waiting for that person to show up. There is already so much love around me. My friends, my family, the people who remember me, the people who tolerate me, the people who know exactly how annoying I am and still invite me places.

So yes, love doesn’t have to be romantic.

It can be friendship. It can be family. It can be the person who checks if you got home. It can be someone remembering your favourite food.

It just wasn’t always romantic.

But that doesn’t make it less beautiful.

Because it makes it even better!

If these words meant something to you, you can leave a little something behind. A coffee, perhaps. It helps me keep making room for the thoughts that are difficult to put into words, and for the stories that might otherwise stay unwritten. Either way, thank you for being here and reading.

Buy me a coffee.

I am so tired of the internet taking perfectly normal human experiences, putting a cute font over them, giving them an aesthetic name, and then selling them back to us for $47. I genuinely cannot take it anymore. We used to just enjoy things. Now apparently everything needs a visual identity, a color palette, a playlist, a shopping guide, and a link in bio. You cannot simply like flowers anymore. You have to become a flower girl. You cannot enjoy reading. You need a carefully curated bookshelf, a reading journal, a specific tote bag, a little lamp, and approximately fourteen photographs of yourself holding a book you have been reading for three months. You cannot simply enjoy making coffee. Suddenly you need a specific mug, a specific machine, a specific syrup, a specific morning routine, and a personality built around drinking it.

And now they have come for whimsy.

Whimsy. Of all things.

Something that used to cost absolutely nothing. Something that was never supposed to be impressive. Something that belonged to children and strange adults and people who never quite stopped finding ordinary life interesting. Somehow, even that has become an aesthetic category that can be packaged and sold.

Want to be whimsical? Buy this vintage-looking lamp. Want your bedroom to feel magical? Here are seventeen things from a home decor store. Want to dress like you wandered out of a storybook? Here is a $300 outfit. Want to have a whimsical little picnic? You obviously need a wicker basket, gingham blanket, handmade ceramic plates, flowers, a film camera, and a basket of strawberries that somehow costs more than your actual lunch.

PLEASE.

You do not need a picnic basket to sit on the grass.

You do not need a vintage camera to remember something.

You do not need a $90 journal to write down what you were thinking.

You do not need a cottage in the countryside to make your life feel a little more magical.

And you absolutely do not need to buy a personality.

This is what bothers me so much about the internet now. It has become incredibly good at identifying the tiny things people are longing for and turning those longings into products. People are lonely, so suddenly there are apps, subscriptions, retreats, clubs, journals, candles and courses designed to help them “build community.” People are exhausted, so there is a wellness industry waiting with $80 supplements and a morning routine. People want to feel connected to nature, so there is a lifestyle brand ready to sell them linen clothes and a $60 candle that apparently smells like a forest.

And when people say, “I want my life to feel a little more magical,” capitalism does not hear that as a desire for imagination.

It hears a customer.

Because there is nothing wrong with beautiful things. There is nothing wrong with buying a gorgeous dress, decorating your room, collecting pretty mugs, making elaborate coffee, or spending money on something that genuinely makes you happy. I love beautiful things too. This is not an argument against having nice things. It is an argument against believing that the nice things are what make the experience meaningful.

A person sitting on the floor eating an orange can be whimsical.

A person sitting in a beautifully decorated apartment surrounded by expensive objects can be completely disconnected from themselves.

The objects are not the point.

The feeling is!!!!

Whimsy, at its core, is just the decision to let your imagination have a little influence over your life. It is the part of you that refuses to believe everything needs to be practical. It is curiosity mixed with playfulness. It is being willing to make something slightly more interesting simply because you can.

It is putting a tiny paper umbrella in your drink because you thought it would be funny.

It is giving your plants names.

It is deciding that your cat has a full-time job and making up what that job is.

It is taking a different road home because you have never walked down that street before.

It is buying a birthday cake for a friend on a random Tuesday because you know they have been having a bad week.

It is writing a ridiculous poem about your roommate’s terrible cooking.

It is keeping the movie ticket from a really good night out.

It is making pancakes shaped like stars even though you could have made perfectly normal pancakes in half the time.

It is putting flowers in an old glass bottle instead of throwing it away.

It is making up stories about the people sitting across from you on a train.

It is deciding that your friend group needs an annual tradition and inventing one.

It is looking at a cloud and actually wondering what it looks like.

It is naming your Wi-Fi something stupid.

It is wearing the outfit you were saving for a special occasion on a completely ordinary Wednesday.

It is buying yourself a small cake even though nobody’s birthday is coming.

It is writing in a notebook with absolutely no intention of turning the writing into anything.

It is dancing badly while cooking dinner.

It is leaving little notes for yourself inside old books.

It is getting excited about a tiny bookstore you discovered while walking around.

It is being delighted by something that does not improve your life in any measurable way.

That last one might be the most important.

Because we have become obsessed with measuring the usefulness of everything.

Will this make me healthier?

Will this make me richer?

Will this help my career?

Will this improve my appearance?

Will this increase my productivity?

Will this give me content?

Will this help me network?

Will this teach me something?

Will this make me more attractive?

Will this make me interesting?

Gawddddd, can we just do something because it is fun and sillyyyy?

Can we please stop asking every little joy to justify its existence?

You are allowed to spend an hour drawing terrible little pictures when you could have been doing something “productive.” You are allowed to read a children’s fantasy novel at twenty-five. You are allowed to collect rocks. You are allowed to know the names of birds even if nobody will ever ask you. You are allowed to learn how to bake one extremely specific dessert simply because you like eating it. You are allowed to spend an afternoon rearranging your bookshelf according to completely meaningless categories.

Books you loved.

Books you hated.

Books you want to reread.

Books you bought because the cover was pretty.

Books you have lied about finishing.

See? That is fun.

And I think this is where whimsy becomes especially important as we grow older.

Children are constantly finding ways to make the world more interesting. A cardboard box becomes a spaceship. A blanket becomes a castle. A stick becomes a sword. A puddle becomes an ocean. The hallway becomes a runway. A spoon becomes a microphone. A random rock becomes a pet.

Then adulthood comes along and asks us to stop.

We start learning that there are correct ways to behave. Correct ways to dress. Correct ways to speak. Correct things to be interested in. We become embarrassed by our own enthusiasm. We stop telling people about the weird little things we like because we are worried they will think they are stupid.

We learn to say, “I don’t know, I just saw it and thought it was cool,” instead of admitting that we spent twenty minutes looking at it because it made us happy.

And eventually, we become very good at being sensible.

Too good.

We become people who have calendars full of appointments but very few things we are genuinely excited about.

We become people who know how to optimize their lives but have forgotten how to play inside them.

That is why I think whimsy is worth protecting.

And you probably know someone who already has it.

They are the friend who sends you a postcard even though they could have sent a snap. They are the person who still gets excited about fireworks, old buildings, unusual clouds, roadside fruit stalls, tiny cafés, train journeys, handwritten signs, beautiful doors, strange little shops, or a song they have not heard in years.

They probably would never describe themselves as whimsical.

They just have not trained themselves out of being curious.

And I think that is the real enemy of whimsy: becoming embarrassed by your own curiosity.

There is a particular kind of adulthood where you start deciding that everything you enjoy needs to make sense to somebody else. You want to explain why you like something before allowing yourself to like it. You want a reason. You want evidence. You want other people to approve of it.

You do not need one.

You can make your own traditions.

You can be a little strange.

Please be a little strange.

The world has enough people trying to look normal.

Of course, there is another trap here, and I want to talk about it because I can already imagine the internet turning this essay into another checklist for becoming a “whimsical person.”

That is the last thing I want.

Please do not wake up tomorrow and decide that you need to perform whimsy.

You do not have to start collecting teacups. You do not need to buy a bunch of ribbons. You do not need to suddenly dress like a fairy. You do not need to force yourself to enjoy picnics. You do not need to decorate your bedroom with things you do not actually like.

If none of that interests you, leave it alone.

Whimsy is not a costume. It is not a personality type. It is not a lifestyle challenge. It is not another thing you need to become good at. The entire point is to follow your own curiosity.

If your version of whimsy is learning every weird fact about sharks, do that.

If it is baking bread, do that.

If it is making playlists with ridiculous titles, do that.

If it is going on solo walks and taking pictures of interesting doors, do that.

If it is collecting old coins, do that.

If it is watching terrible reality television with your friends and giving everyone fictional names, do that.

Your whimsy does not have to look good on Instagram or Snapchat.

Actually, I think it is better if it does not.

There should be parts of your life that would make absolutely terrible content.

Because once you start sharing every little thing online, it becomes incredibly easy to start experiencing your own life from the outside. You begin thinking about how something looks while you are doing it. You start wondering whether the moment is worth photographing. You start imagining the caption before you have even finished living the experience.

And I want you to have some moments that nobody sees.

Go somewhere beautiful and leave your phone in your bag.

Eat something delicious without photographing it.

Read a book without posting a picture of the cover.

Wear an outfit you love without taking a mirror selfie.

Have a funny conversation and let it exist only between the people who were there.

Find something interesting and keep it to yourself.

There is freedom in having a life that does not constantly need an audience.

And since I promised myself I would not turn this into another abstract speech about “finding magic in the little things,” here is the practical part.

If you want to bring a little more whimsy into your life, you do not need to spend money. You do not need to reinvent yourself. Pick one or two things that genuinely sound fun and try them.

A realistic little list for you:

• Take a different route home once a week and see what you find.

• Buy a small bunch of flowers from a local vendor and put them somewhere you will actually see them. And greet them whenever you feel alone because they were alone too.

• Give one object in your room a ridiculous name.

• Make a playlist with a completely absurd title.

• Write down three funny or interesting things you noticed during the day.

• Write a handwritten note and place it in public places.

• Have dessert before dinner one evening.

• Make your favorite breakfast for dinner.

• Learn the names of five flowers, birds, trees, or constellations around you.

• Keep a tiny box for things you find interesting: ticket stubs, leaves, coins, receipts, photographs, little notes, whatever.

• Take yourself somewhere you have never been in your own city.

• Make pancakes, toast, sandwiches, or cookies in a ridiculous shape.

• Watch a movie from your childhood again.

• Read a children’s book or a fantasy novel you loved when you were younger.

• Make up a completely fictional backstory for a building you pass often.

• Wear something you love on an ordinary day instead of saving it for an occasion.

• Have a picnic with whatever food you already have at home. You do not need a Pinterest setup.

• Sit outside at night and look at the moon for ten minutes.

• Make a tiny birthday-style celebration for a friend on a completely random day.

• Create a personal tradition. It can be as stupid as getting ice cream on the first Friday of every month.

• Leave a nice note somewhere for someone in your household to find.

• Make a playlist for a fictional character.

• Take pictures of ordinary things you find beautiful, and then keep the pictures for yourself.

• Buy a children’s coloring book and actually use it.

• Have a themed movie night with your friends, even if the theme is something stupid like “movies with terrible haircuts.”

• Make a recipe from a country you know nothing about.

• Pick a word you like and find out where it came from.

• Make your own little holiday. Give it a date, a food, and one ridiculous tradition.

• Leave your phone at home for a short walk.

• Learn how to recognize one constellation.

• Write a letter to your future self and put it somewhere you will forget about it.

• Buy yourself a tiny treat for no reason.

And if you try none of these, that is fine too.

Maybe your whimsy is something I could never think of.

That is the whole point.

I do not want everyone to become whimsical in the same way. That would just give the internet another aesthetic to copy and sell back to us. I want people to become more comfortable with their own strange little interests. I want us to stop sanding down every part of ourselves that seems unnecessary. I want us to stop assuming that adulthood means becoming permanently serious.

You can take your responsibilities seriously without taking yourself seriously every second of the day.

There is so much pressure to become polished. To become efficient. To become impressive. To become someone whose life looks good from the outside.

I would rather you become someone whose life feels good from the inside.

Because the world is already asking enough from you.

You do not need to give it your imagination too.

Keep the silly traditions.

And when the internet tries to turn your whimsy into a product, remember that you were never supposed to purchase it in the first place.

You already had it.

You had it when you were a child making entire worlds out of cardboard boxes. You had it when you gave names to toys. You had it when you stared at clouds and saw creatures in them. You had it when you stayed up making up stories in your head. You had it every time something tiny and completely unnecessary made you ridiculously happy.

It is still there.

You just have to stop being embarrassed by it.

So keep your whimsy.

Protect it from the algorithms.

Protect it from capitalism.

Protect it from the part of adulthood that wants everything to have a purpose.

And most importantly, protect it from the part of you that thinks you have finally grown out of it.

You haven’t.

You were never supposed to.

P.S. Anyway, if you enjoyed this little rant and would like to support my extremely serious career in yelling at capitalism through essays, you can obviously join my community for just $5 a month. You’ll get exclusive posts, behind-the-scenes nonsense, and the privilege of funding my continued existence on the internet.

HAHA, GOT YOU.

No, really. If you genuinely want to support my writing, you can buy me a coffee below. No subscription. No exclusive whimsical starter pack. No 17-page PDF called How To Become A Forest Fairy By Friday. Just a coffee, if you feel like it. ♡

Buy me a coffee.

next post on: “How To Become A Forest Fairy By Tuesday” coz friday is too far😞

There is a particular kind of loneliness that has very little to do with being alone. It comes from spending your life waiting for somewhere else to make you feel safe. You can be surrounded by people who love you and still carry a small ache inside you that keeps asking, When will I finally feel like I belong somewhere? Sometimes we imagine the answer will be a person. Sometimes it is a city, a career, a room with our name on the door, a version of our life that looks more certain than the one we have now. We keep looking outward, convinced that one day something will fit so perfectly around us that the restless part of us will finally loosen its grip. There is nothing foolish about wanting that. We are human. We want to be held by something larger than ourselves. We want somewhere to put our tiredness down.

Still, there comes a point when you have to ask yourself what happens if the place you have been searching for has been waiting inside you all along.

I think becoming your own home begins with understanding that home is more than a place where nothing hurts. Home is where you are allowed to be exactly as you are without having to negotiate your worth first. It is the place where your existence does not require an explanation. You do not have to perform happiness to deserve to stay there. You do not have to be impressive to be welcomed in. You do not have to have your life figured out before you are permitted to rest. Becoming your own home means learning to offer yourself that same permission.

There are years when we become strangers to ourselves in the pursuit of being loved correctly. We learn how to become easier to love. We make ourselves smaller around certain people. We swallow opinions before they reach our mouths. We become agreeable where we once had convictions. We learn the shape of someone else’s expectations and spend so much time fitting ourselves into them that eventually we forget what our own shape was. Then one ordinary day, perhaps while sitting alone in your room, you realise that you have spent years trying to make yourself feel at home in places where you were always required to ask for permission to exist.

That realisation hurts.

It also gives you your life back.

There is a tenderness in returning to yourself after years of abandonment. You begin with small things. You notice what you actually like. You admit when something hurts instead of convincing yourself that it should not. You let yourself change your mind. You stop treating your own needs as inconveniences. You begin to listen when your heart says.

This is what I mean when I say you have to become your own home. You have to become the person you can come back to.

Life will keep changing the furniture around you. People will leave. Some relationships will outgrow you. Some dreams will collapse in ways you never prepared for. There will be mornings when the future looks unfamiliar and evenings when you cannot understand how you ended up so far from the life you once imagined. If your entire sense of safety depends on everything outside you remaining exactly where you left it, every change will feel like a personal catastrophe. Yet when you have built some sense of shelter within yourself, change can still hurt without convincing you that you have been destroyed.

That is a different kind of strength. It is softer than the strength we are usually taught to admire.

We often think strength means becoming someone who cannot be shaken. I think it is closer to becoming someone who knows how to hold themselves when they are shaken. There is a profound difference between the two. One asks you to harden. The other asks you to develop enough tenderness toward yourself that even your worst days do not become evidence against your own existence. You can be disappointed and still trust yourself. You can fail and still respect yourself. You can lose someone and still know that losing them does not mean you have lost your place in the world.

Perhaps this is why some forms of heartbreak feel so devastating. We do not only lose the person. We lose the future we had attached to them. We lose the imaginary room we had built inside our minds where everything was finally going to make sense. We had given them the keys to a house we were supposed to be learning how to build within ourselves. When they leave, we stand outside that house wondering where we are supposed to go.

You go back to yourself.

You go back to the parts of you that existed before that relationship, before that rejection, before that failure, before somebody else’s opinion became the loudest voice in your head. You go back and knock on your own door. You may find dust there. You may find rooms you have neglected. You may find old dreams underneath the furniture and pieces of yourself you thought you had permanently lost. You do not need to rebuild everything in one afternoon. You simply begin making the place livable again.

There is something deeply hopeful about that.

Because if you are your own home, your life does not have to be perfect for you to feel held by it. You can live through an uncertain year without deciding that your entire future is uncertain. You can wake up without knowing what comes next and still make yourself breakfast. You can have a terrible week and still believe there will be another kind of week. You can sit in the middle of a life that feels unfinished and understand that unfinished does not mean ruined.

I wish more of us understood this before spending so much of our lives begging other people to give us what we were starving to learn how to give ourselves.

You deserve relationships that feel safe. You deserve friendships where you can exhale. You deserve a love that does not make you question whether you are too much or too little. You deserve people who recognise your tenderness and do not use it as a place to wound you. Becoming your own home does not mean becoming so self-sufficient that you stop needing anyone. It does not mean pretending that companionship is optional or that love is somehow beneath you. Humans need one another. There are forms of healing that can only happen in the presence of another person.

The difference is that love becomes a choice rather than a rescue mission.

You can love someone deeply without making them responsible for keeping you alive inside. You can miss someone without believing that your life has ended in their absence. You can want someone beside you without believing that their presence is what makes you worthy of being here. When you become your own home, another person can enter your life as a guest, a companion, a beloved person with whom you build something beautiful. They no longer have to carry the impossible burden of becoming your entire foundation.

And perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things we can offer another person: the freedom to love us without having to save us.

There is also a strange grief that comes with becoming your own home. You begin to realise how often you left yourself behind. You remember the times you betrayed your instincts to keep someone close. You remember every occasion when you knew something was wrong and talked yourself out of knowing it. You remember how many times you abandoned your own happiness in exchange for approval. There is no use turning that history into another reason to punish yourself. You were trying to survive with the tools you had at the time.

So forgive yourself.

Forgive the younger you who thought being chosen was the same thing as being loved. Forgive the version of you who stayed in places that made your heart feel homeless. Forgive yourself for confusing loneliness with failure. Forgive yourself for believing that you had to earn the right to take up space. You were learning. You were reaching for warmth wherever you could find it. You are allowed to become wiser without becoming cruel toward the person you once were.

Home is built through forgiveness more than perfection.

It is built when you stop making every mistake a referendum on your character. It is built when you learn that an uncomfortable feeling does not always need to be fixed immediately. It is built when you can sit with yourself on a difficult evening and say, I know this hurts. I am still here. The world may remain exactly as complicated as it was before. Yet something inside you begins to change when you stop running from your own pain.

You become a safer place for yourself to live.

And perhaps that is the deepest form of hope: knowing that wherever life takes you, you are still going with yourself.

You will lose things. You will outgrow things. You will discover that some dreams belonged to an older version of you. You will enter rooms where you feel like a stranger. You will have seasons where everything seems to be moving except you. There will be days when you look at your life and wonder whether you are falling behind. On those days, I hope you remember that a home does not become less of a home simply because the weather outside is terrible.

You are allowed to have difficult seasons without turning them into a definition of your life.

You are allowed to be unfinished.

You are allowed to be uncertain.

You are allowed to want more.

You are allowed to change.

You are allowed to leave.

You are allowed to stay.

You are allowed to begin again.

None of these things make you less deserving of your own love.

One day, I hope you stop asking your life to prove that you belong in it. I hope you stop waiting for a person to choose you before you decide that you are worth choosing. I hope you stop looking at every closed door as evidence that there is nowhere for you to go. There is still a room inside you with the lights on. There is still a part of you that has been waiting for your return.

Go there.

Sit with yourself. Learn yourself again. Make peace with the silence. Put your favourite things in the corners. Let the walls hold stories you no longer need to explain. Give yourself the patience you kept saving for someone else’s healing. Give yourself the loyalty you kept hoping someone else would offer. Let your own heart become somewhere you do not have to earn entry.

Because life is going to ask you to leave many homes.

Some will be places. Some will be people. Some will be identities you once thought you would carry forever. Some will disappear without giving you the closure you wanted. Others will end with a tenderness you never expected. You cannot control every departure. You cannot keep every person. You cannot preserve every version of your life.

What you can do is make sure that when everything familiar falls away, you still have somewhere to go.

You can go to yourself.

And I think there is a beautiful life waiting on the other side of that realisation. A life where love is welcomed rather than begged for. A life where solitude is not a punishment. A life where uncertainty does not automatically mean danger. A life where you can stand in the middle of an unfinished story and still feel held by the person living it.

You.

The person who has survived every version of yesterday. The person who has carried every heartbreak out of every room. The person who kept waking up even when the future looked nothing like what they had imagined. The person who is still here, still hoping, still capable of loving, still capable of becoming.

Build your life around that person.

Make a home there.

And when the world becomes unfamiliar, when somebody leaves, when the plan changes, when the door you wanted closes, when you find yourself standing somewhere you never expected to be, remember that you do not have to find your way back to who you were.

You only have to find your way back to yourself.

If these words meant something to you, you can leave a little something behind. A coffee, perhaps. It helps me keep making room for the thoughts that are difficult to put into words, and for the stories that might otherwise stay unwritten. Either way, thank you for being here and reading.

Buy me a coffee.

Letters from Hasif

Submit you Essays and Stories

Hello Fisi’s…

Read more

20 days ago · 20 likes · hasif core

A few months ago I started something that has quietly become one of my favorite parts of Postcards by Hasif.

The collaborative essays.

If you’ve never come across one before, here’s how they work.

You write an essay on a topic that interests you.

Then I read it and write a response of my own. Sometimes I agree with what you’ve written. Sometimes I see it differently. Sometimes your essay reminds me of something I hadn’t thought about in years.

The final post becomes two essays in one. Your perspective first, mine second.

I’ve loved doing these over the past few months, so I’m opening submissions again.

This time, I’m looking for essays to publish in October.

I’ll be selecting around 4–5 writers.

What should you write about?

Anything you’ve genuinely been thinking about.

You don’t have to pick something from a prompt list. If you’ve had an idea sitting in your notes for months, write that.

Here are some themes you can write about if you’d like inspiration:

• The Cost of Always Knowing What’s Happening

• When Curiosity Becomes a Way of Escaping Life

• Why Humans Invent Traditions

• The Beauty of Things That Were Never Finished

• The Burden of Having Too Many Choices

• Why Ordinary Days Are the Hardest to Appreciate

• The Psychology of Waiting

• The Invisible Influence of Weather on Human Emotion

• Why We Keep Rearranging Our Spaces

• The Human Desire to Make Sense of Randomness

• What We Lose When Everything Becomes Efficient

• The Kindness We Never Realize We Needed

• The Feeling of Standing at the Edge of Change

• The Quiet Joy of Being Inexperienced

• What Makes Something Feel Like Home Without Being Home (about environments rather than homesickness)

• Why We Resist Simplicity

• The Courage Required to Stay Curious

• The Emotional Life of Empty Spaces

• The Things We Learn Without Being Taught

• Why Humans Need Seasons, Not Just Weather

• The Beauty of Things That Cannot Be Owned

• Why Humans Love Watching Things Burn (Figuratively)

• The Beauty of Being Unremarkable

• What Makes an Idea Worth Dying For?

• The Quiet Violence of Certainty

• Why Every Generation Thinks It’s Living Through the End

• The Fear of Running Out of First Times

• The Stories We Tell to Make Randomness Feel Fair

• The Strange Comfort of Familiar Disappointment

• The Illusion of Fresh Starts

• Why Every Goodbye Creates a Different Person

• The Hidden Cost of Endless Information

• Why We Want Our Lives to Make Sense

• The Difference Between Being Alive and Feeling Alive

• Why Ordinary Days Are the Hardest to Appreciate

• The Psychology of Waiting

• The Beauty of Things That Cannot Be Owned

• The Difference Between Being Alive and Feeling Alive

• The Hidden Cost of Endless Information

• The Illusion of Fresh Starts

• Why Humans Need Seasons, Not Just Weather

• The Beauty of Being Unremarkable

And if none of those resonate with you, ignore them.

They’re only there to spark ideas.

Some of the strongest essays I’ve published came from writers who followed their own curiosity instead.

How the Collaboration Works?

Your Essay:

You’ll write a 500–600 word essay on the topic you choose. It can be personal, reflective, analytical, or narrative whatever style feels most natural to you.

You don’t need to arrive at a final answer. Sometimes the most powerful essays are simply explorations of a question.

My Response:

After reading your piece, I’ll write a 500-word response where I engage with your ideas. I might agree, challenge something you wrote, or add another perspective.

That’s what turns the essay into a genuine exchange of thoughts.

The Final Piece:

Your essay will appear first, followed by my response, forming a collaborative essay of 1100+ words that reads like a written conversation.

Submission Timeline

Submissions are currently open for Oct, Nov and Dec

You can send your essay anytime during these months, and it will be considered for one of the upcoming collaboration slots.

However, if you’re hoping to be featured in Oct, I recommend submitting sooner rather than later. Once selections are made, I’ll need time to review the essay, write my response, and schedule the post.

You’re also welcome to submit older essays you’ve written before, as long as they fit the reflective tone of Postcards by Hasif.

Since there are only a few spots each month, earlier submissions naturally have a better chance of being selected.

Once an essay is chosen, I’ll reach out personally via email to confirm the collaboration and schedule the publication date.

Submission Guidelines

Original Work Only:

All submissions must be your own original writing.

Word Count:

Your essay should be around 500–600 words.

Format:

Please send your submission as:

• Microsoft Word document

• Google Docs file

• PDF

Avoid pasting the full essay directly into the email.

Use a simple font such as Arial or Times New Roman, size 12.

At the top of the document, include:

• Your name

• Your Substack publication

You can also add a short optional bio at the end.

Send your essay to: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

Subject line: Co-Author Submission

In the email body include: [Chosen Topic] – [Your Name]

You’re also welcome to include links to your Substack or social media.

If Your Essay Is Selected

• You’ll receive a confirmation email & payment link.

• A $50 feature fee will be required only if your essay is selected. Entry to submit your essay is completely free.

• Before you jump in, I just want to say something important. I know when I introduce something like this, it can feel a bit transactional. But please don’t take it the wrong way. Postcards by Hasif will always remain free to read. I have no intention of turning it into a paid publication, and I never will. Every piece I write, your submissions, my reflections, and my essays will always be accessible to anyone who wants to read them. I also don’t want to bring in brands, sponsorships, or ads. This space is not about marketing, it isn’t about influencer culture, and it certainly isn’t about monetizing in a way that compromises the essence of what this publication stands for. This is about creating a genuine community of thinkers and writers, exploring topics that matter, sharing perspectives, and giving both you and me a chance to engage meaningfully with readers. The $50 fee isn’t about making a profit; it’s a small way to ensure this collaboration is valued and taken seriously while also helping me maintain the publication sustainably. Postcards by Hasif will always be my voice, my vision, my space. This collaboration is simply a way to bring in other voices I respect, share ideas, and build something together without compromising what this place stands for.

• Once payment is completed, we’ll coordinate with you via email to finalize the title, thumbnail, and posting dates.

• Your essay will be published in Postcards by Hasif. (150,000+ readers).

• Exposure to 150,000+ readers: Your voice will reach a large, engaged audience that values thoughtful, reflective writing.

• Recommendation of Your Substack: As part of the collaboration, I will recommend your Substack publication for a week. This means followers will see “Postcards by Hasif recommends {Your Publication Name},” increasing traffic to your page.

• Collaborative Content: This is more than just a guest post. You’re collaborating with me in a meaningful way, creating a written conversation that will resonate with readers.

What You’ll Receive

Your essay will be published on Postcards by Hasif, currently reaching 150,000+ readers.

You’ll also receive:

• Exposure to a large, engaged audience

• A collaborative essay featuring my written response

• A one-week recommendation of your Substack

Your publication will appear as:

“Postcards by Hasif recommends [Your Publication Name]”

which helps introduce your writing to new readers.

If you’ve been thinking about sending something for a while, I’d love to read it.

Whether it’s an idea you’ve carried for years or something that occurred to you yesterday afternoon, don’t worry about writing what you think I’ll want to publish.

Write the essay only you could have written.

I’m looking forward to reading it.

For any queries, please reach out: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

I understand why people become nonchalant. I do. There is relief in it. When you stop expecting, you stop waiting for disappointment. When you stop reaching, there is no hand left hanging in the air. When you stop asking for affection, you never have to hear that it cannot be given. There are times when I want that relief too. There are people I would never chase again. There are things I would never ask for twice. Sometimes you have to become indifferent to what keeps taking from you, or you will spend your entire life begging something to become what it has already shown you it is not.

But I cannot accept that this has to become the way we live.

I cannot accept the idea that healing means becoming so detached that nothing gets through anymore. I do not want to congratulate myself for how little I feel. I do not want to reach some imaginary point where I can lose people, lose love, lose hope, and simply shrug. What would I have actually gained? A heart that cannot be hurt is also a heart that has stopped opening. There is safety in that, yes. There is also an emptiness I do not want.

I think we have confused control with indifference. Being able to feel something without letting it control you is strength. Refusing to feel it at all is something else. There is a difference between saying, “This matters to me, and I will still walk away,” and saying, “This never mattered to me in the first place.” One takes honesty. The other takes denial. I know which one I would rather live with.

I want to be able to care without feeling stupid for caring. I want my feelings to exist without immediately asking whether they make me look weak. If someone matters to me, I do not want to spend half my time trying to make sure they never find out how much. That is such a strange way to live. To want to say something and stop yourself because you are afraid of what the honesty might cost you.

And I am angry that we have made this normal.

I am angry that people would rather leave a feeling unfinished than risk being vulnerable. I am angry that we praise the person who can walk away without showing anything while quietly judging the person who admits that they are hurt. I am angry that saying “I miss you” can feel like giving someone too much power. I am angry that people have learned to turn affection into a negotiation with their own pride. At some point, we stopped asking ourselves what we genuinely felt and started asking ourselves what would make us look least affected.

That cannot be the whole point of being alive.

I do not want to become someone who is always trying to win against their own emotions. I do not want to look back at something I once loved and feel proud that I managed to act like it meant nothing. If it meant something, then it meant something. I do not need to insult the past to prove that I have moved forward. I do not need to make someone insignificant just because they are no longer part of my life.

Some things can end and still remain important.

I think we forget that. We treat endings as if they erase everything that came before them. If something did not last, we assume it was foolish to care. If someone left, we convince ourselves we should never have wanted them. If a relationship failed, we act like the feeling itself was a mistake. I hate that way of thinking. Something does not become meaningless simply because it did not stay. A feeling does not become stupid just because it had nowhere to go.

There are people I would never go back to and still care about. There are things I would never choose again and still remember with tenderness. There are endings I know were necessary and still wish had been different. I do not see a contradiction there. I see honesty. My heart does not need to rewrite history every time my life changes direction.

Maybe that is what I want most: the freedom to tell the truth about what I felt without having to defend it.

I want to say that I loved someone and leave it there. I want to admit that I hoped for something and not feel ashamed when it did not happen. I want to say that I was hurt without turning that hurt into hatred. I want to leave without pretending I was never attached. I want to be able to carry what happened without making myself colder just to make the carrying easier.

Because I know what happens when you keep choosing indifference.

At first, it feels like freedom. Then it becomes habit. Eventually, you start keeping everything at a distance before it even has the chance to matter. You call it peace because that sounds better than fear. You call it standards because that sounds better than loneliness. You call yourself detached because admitting that you are afraid to need anyone feels far too honest.

I do not want that for myself.

I would rather risk being hurt.

I would rather have something matter enough to disturb me than spend my life protecting myself from every feeling that could leave a scar. I would rather be the person who cared and had to recover than the person who never cared enough to lose anything. Maybe that sounds foolish. Fine. I can live with being foolish. I cannot live with becoming empty and calling it maturity.

Still, I do believe in being nonchalant sometimes. I believe there are things that deserve no reaction from me. I believe there are people who should lose access to me without receiving one final explanation. I believe that chasing someone who has already made their choice is a form of self-abandonment. There is a point where you have to stop asking for what someone does not want to give, and there is nothing cold about knowing that point.

But I want my distance to come from clarity, not fear.

I want to walk away knowing that I cared. I want to choose silence knowing that I had something to say. I want to let someone go without pretending I never wanted them to stay. That feels far more honest than this performance of being unaffected. I can protect myself without pretending I have no heart.

And maybe that is where I draw the line.

I do not want to become nonchalant about everything. I do not want to lose my ability to be moved by people. I do not want to become so careful that love has to knock three times before I even consider opening the door. I do not want to treat every attachment as a threat to my independence. There is nothing wrong with needing people sometimes. There is nothing humiliating about being changed by someone you loved.

I think we are supposed to be changed by each other.

That is what makes relationships matter. That is what makes absence hurt. That is what makes reunion feel like something more than two people standing in the same place again. We leave pieces of ourselves in people without meaning to. They leave pieces of themselves in us. Sometimes those pieces stay long after the person has gone. I do not think we need to be ashamed of that.

I think we need to stop trying so hard to become untouchable.

There is a difference between having a soft heart and having no boundaries. There is a difference between loving someone and losing yourself to them. There is a difference between vulnerability and begging. I do not need to become cold to become wise. I do not need to stop caring to learn how to leave. I can have a heart that feels deeply and a mind that knows when enough is enough.

That is the kind of strength I want.

Not the strength that says, “Nothing matters.”

The strength that says, “This mattered to me, and I will survive it.”

I want to be able to say that without shame. I want to miss people without turning the feeling into a weakness. I want to love without constantly checking whether I am giving too much away. I want to be honest about what has hurt me without feeling like I have lost some invisible game. I want to stop treating my own tenderness like evidence against me.

Because I am tired of pretending.

I am tired of acting like the goal is to need nothing, want nothing, expect nothing, feel nothing. That is not the life I want. I want to care. I want to get attached. I want people to matter to me. I want to have things worth losing and feelings worth protecting. I want all the mess that comes with being human, and I want the courage to deal with it when it hurts.

Maybe I will get hurt.

Of course I will.

Maybe I will care about someone who does not care in the same way. Maybe I will hope for something that never happens. Maybe I will have to walk away from something I desperately wanted to keep. None of that makes the feeling foolish. It only means I was alive enough to want something that could be lost.

And I would rather have that than nothing.

Humans were never meant to be nonchalant. We were meant to be affected. We were meant to love things that could leave us, people who could disappoint us, lives that could change without asking permission. We were never promised that caring would be safe. We were only given the choice of whether we would care anyway.

I think I will.

I will learn when to leave. I will learn when to stop reaching. I will learn when silence is better than another explanation. I will protect myself where I need to. But I refuse to turn my heart into a locked room and then call the loneliness inside it peace.

Let me care.

Let it hurt when it hurts.

Let me miss what I miss.

Let something matter to me without forcing myself to become ashamed of it.

I do not want to be untouched. I want to be human, and being human means there will always be something that gets through.

If these words meant something to you, you can leave a little something behind. A coffee, perhaps. It helps me keep making room for the thoughts that are difficult to put into words, and for the stories that might otherwise stay unwritten. Either way, thank you for being here and reading.

Buy me a coffee.

Have something to share? Postcards by Hasif is always open to your stories, reflections, and little pieces of yourself that you want to put into words.

If you’d like to be featured in a future post, send your work to hasifnewsletter@gmail.com.

For submission guidelines and more details, check out Submit Your Essays and Get Featured.

~Hasif
Editor, Postcards by Hasif

I just got used to having an empty space beside me. At first, I noticed it everywhere. In the seat next to mine, in the silence after something funny happened, in the moments when my hand would reach for my phone before I remembered there was nobody I wanted to talk to anymore. Eventually, the emptiness stopped surprising me. It became part of the room. Part of the walk home. Part of waking up and realizing there was nothing waiting for me. I suppose that’s what happens when something hurts for long enough. You stop calling it pain and start calling it normal.

I remember when you first became part of my life. I don’t remember deciding to let you in. You just kept showing up until there was suddenly no version of my day that didn’t have you somewhere inside it. You knew the stupid details about me that nobody else cared about. I knew yours. We could talk until two in the morning about absolutely nothing and still feel like we hadn’t said enough. Back then, I thought that kind of closeness was something people got to keep. I didn’t know some people arrive in your life only to teach you exactly how much you can lose.

There was something peaceful about us in the beginning. I didn’t have to think before talking to you. I didn’t have to measure my words or wonder whether you would understand. I could tell you about the smallest thing that happened during my day and somehow it became worth telling because you were listening. I could sit beside you without speaking and never feel the pressure to fill the silence. You made ordinary days feel less ordinary. I don’t think you ever understood how much that mattered to me.

I started remembering everything about you without meaning to. The things you liked, the things you hated, the stories you told more than once, the way your voice changed when you were tired. I knew when you were lying about being okay. I knew when you wanted someone around but didn’t know how to ask. I knew when you were laughing because something was genuinely funny and when you were laughing because you didn’t want anyone to notice you were hurting. I collected these things quietly, the way people collect pieces of a place they don’t know they are going to leave.

Maybe that’s why losing you didn’t feel like losing one person.

It felt like losing a whole language.

Suddenly, all those little things I knew had nowhere to go. I would remember something about you and have no reason to say it. I would see something you would have loved and feel that old instinct to tell you, only for reality to arrive a second later. There is a particular kind of loneliness in having something to say to someone who no longer exists in your life. It isn’t silence exactly. It’s having a sentence with nowhere to end.

I think I knew we were disappearing before we actually did. The conversations became shorter. The gaps became longer. We stopped telling each other things because somewhere along the way, we had both started wondering whether the other person still wanted to know. I remember staring at messages and rewriting simple sentences because everything suddenly felt like it had consequences. We had once been able to say anything. Then even saying hello felt like knocking on a door you weren’t sure you were still allowed to enter.

And neither of us said anything.

That is what I remember most.

Just the silence. The slow, humiliating realization that something which had once felt so natural now required effort from both of us, and neither of us seemed willing to admit how badly we wanted it back. We let distance do the work for us. It was easier than asking why. Easier than hearing that maybe you didn’t feel the same anymore. Easier than discovering that perhaps I had been holding onto something you had already let go of.

After you left, life didn’t suddenly become terrible. That would have been easier to understand. Things continued. I went out. I laughed. I met people. I had good days. I had terrible days. From the outside, nothing looked particularly wrong. But something had gone quiet inside me, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn it back on.

There were mornings when getting out of bed felt like an unnecessary task. There was nowhere I particularly wanted to be and nobody I was particularly excited to see. I would stare at my ceiling for too long, watching the light change, wondering when existing had become something I did without actually participating in it. I never told anyone that part. It sounded too dramatic when spoken aloud. So I kept saying I was tired.

Maybe I was.

Just not in the way people meant.

I started becoming distant from things I used to love. Songs became background noise. Places became places. Food tasted like food. Days blurred into each other until I couldn’t remember what I had done the previous Tuesday. I stopped taking photographs because there was no one I wanted to send them to. I stopped telling stories because the person I wanted to hear them wasn’t there. Even happiness began to feel temporary, something I had to watch carefully because it would leave as quickly as it came.

Sometimes I wondered if you had any idea what happened after you left.

I wondered if you ever had a bad day and instinctively reached for your phone before remembering me. I wondered if you ever walked past somewhere we had been and felt that strange ache of recognition. I wondered if you remembered the things I remembered. The conversations. The stupid jokes. The nights when neither of us wanted to sleep because saying goodbye meant the day was over. I wondered if you had replaced all of it with something better.

I hoped you had.

And I hated myself for hoping that.

Because some part of me wanted you to be happy, even if your happiness had nothing to do with me. Another part of me wanted proof that I had mattered. Just once. Just enough to know that I hadn’t been the only person carrying those memories after they ended.

I never asked.

I don’t think I ever will.

There are things you eventually stop asking because you know the answer wouldn’t change anything. Whether you loved me. Whether you think about me. Whether you ever regretted leaving. Whether there was a moment when you wanted to come back and simply didn’t. Those questions used to keep me awake. Eventually they just became another quiet thing I carried.

That’s the strange thing about losing someone.

You don’t always stop loving them.

Sometimes you just become too tired to keep hoping.

So I stopped.

I stopped checking. I stopped waiting. I stopped imagining you walking back into my life with some perfect explanation for everything. I stopped thinking about what I would say if you ever came back. I let the years pass. I let new people occupy spaces you once occupied. I let myself become someone who could talk about you without my voice changing.

I thought that meant I was healed.

Maybe I was just numb.

Because every once in a while, something still catches me off guard. A song. A familiar laugh. A particular hour of the night when the world becomes quiet enough for old memories to breathe again. And suddenly I’m back there, younger and happier and completely unaware that I am living through something I will spend years trying to forget.

I don’t even want you back anymore.

That’s the part nobody understands.

I don’t want the relationship. I don’t want to go back and fix every mistake. I don’t want to repeat the same conversations or pretend nothing happened. I know we became different people. I know some things are better left in the past.

I just wish the past didn’t still feel like the happiest place I’ve ever been.

And maybe that’s what hurts most.

It’s that life continued after you, and I did too, but some version of me never really came with us.

In those ordinary afternoons. In those late-night conversations. In the silence between two people who hadn’t yet learned they were going to lose each other.

I didn’t miss you.

I just missed the person I was when I still believed I wouldn’t have to.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been grieving all this time.

Just the part of me that disappeared when you did.

The part that used to wake up excited about tomorrow.

The part that believed people stayed.

The part that thought being loved could make a life feel less lonely.

I didn’t miss you.

I just never learned how to live with everything that disappeared when you left.

And maybe I never will.

If these words meant something to you, you can leave a little something behind. A coffee, perhaps. It helps me keep making room for the thoughts that are difficult to put into words, and for the stories that might otherwise stay unwritten. Either way, thank you for being here and reading.

Buy me a coffee.

postcards by hasif

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a month ago · 64 likes · 5 comments · hasif 💌

Grief is weird because nobody ever tells you what it actually feels like. They tell you it hurts. They tell you it gets easier. They tell you to give it time, to be patient with yourself, to let yourself feel everything. People love giving grief instructions as if it is a recipe that works the same for everyone.

Then you finally meet grief, and it looks nothing like the stories you were told. It isn’t just crying. It isn’t just missing someone. Half the time it doesn’t even feel like sadness. It feels like confusion. It feels like walking into a room and forgetting why you went there, except the room is your own life. Everything still exists. The sky is still blue. Your coffee still gets cold. The world keeps acting like nothing happened, and somewhere inside you, there is a voice that keeps asking, “How?” How is everyone acting so normal? How did the earth decide today was still worth spinning?

I hate how ordinary grief is. I thought it would arrive like a thunderstorm. I thought I would recognize it every time it entered the room. Instead, it dresses itself up as completely normal moments. It hides inside grocery stores and traffic lights. It waits until I hear someone laugh in a way that reminds me of another laugh. It waits until I smell shampoo that belongs to a person I haven’t seen in years. It waits until I find an old receipt in the pocket of a jacket I forgot I owned.

There is something almost cruel about how little it takes.

Entire days can pass without a single thought, and then a coffee mug decides to remind me that life used to look different. I never knew objects could carry so much weight. I never knew a hallway, a song playing in the background, or the way sunlight falls through a bedroom window at four in the afternoon could make my chest feel heavy. It is strange that the things we touch every day become museums without asking for permission.

The worst part is that grief keeps changing what it misses. At first, it feels simple. You tell yourself you miss a person, or a place, or the life you used to have. Then months pass, and the feeling changes without telling you. One day you realize you don’t actually miss the conversation you had with someone. You miss being able to tell them about your day. Then you realize you don’t even miss that anymore. You miss the person you were whenever they were around. You miss the way you laughed. You miss how safe the world felt before everything changed. Then, somehow, even that changes. Years later, you wake up feeling heavy, and you cannot even explain why. You just know something is missing, but it has been gone for so long that your heart has forgotten its name. That is the strangest part to me. Grief keeps taking shape after the loss has already happened. It keeps introducing itself as something new. Every time I finally learn how to carry one weight, it quietly becomes another.

Nobody talks about grieving things that never officially existed. Everyone understands grieving a person. People know how to respond to that. They hug you. They tell you they are sorry. They bring food. They sit beside you in silence. But what do you do when you are grieving a future? What do you do when the thing you miss never actually happened? I have grieved friendships that never became what I hoped they would become. I have grieved dreams that ended before they even had the chance to begin. I have grieved old versions of my parents that only exist in family photographs now, smiling with faces that looked less tired than they do today. I have grieved the child I used to be without realizing that one afternoon would quietly become the last afternoon I ever spent believing life was simple.

Nobody prepares you for that kind of grief because there is nothing to bury. There is no funeral for the future you imagined. There are no flowers for the years you thought you would have. There is only this quiet feeling that something disappeared, and everyone else kept walking as if they never saw it.

Sometimes I wonder if grief is the only feeling that can make time move in opposite directions at once. Entire years disappear so quickly that I cannot believe they are gone, yet one memory can hold me still for an hour. I can sit on the edge of my bed thinking about a random Tuesday from eight years ago as if it happened this morning. I remember things that should have been impossible to remember. The way someone’s handwriting leaned slightly to the right. The sound of a gate opening outside my childhood home. The exact color of the blanket that used to be on my grandmother’s couch. None of those details seemed important while I was living them. They became important only after I lost the chance to see them again. It almost feels unfair. Life never tells you which moments deserve your full attention. It lets you rush through them, distracted by tomorrow, only to hand them back years later and whisper, “You should have looked a little longer.” If I had known which ordinary afternoons would become priceless, I would have sat in them until the sun went down!!!

The older I get, the more I realize grief isn’t always about losing people. Sometimes it is about watching life quietly replace itself while you aren’t paying attention. One day your parents stop asking you to hold their hand while crossing the road, and years later you realize you are the one reminding them to be careful while walking down the stairs. One day your school uniform disappears into the back of a cupboard, and you never wear it again without realizing the last time was the last time. One day your friends stop knocking on your door because everyone has jobs, responsibilities, rent, meetings, children, flights to catch, and lives that no longer fit together as easily as they once did. Because life simply keeps replacing itself with another life until you suddenly wake up surrounded by memories that never asked to become memories in the first place.

There is something else about grief that nobody warns you about. It makes you homesick for places that still exist. You can drive past the house you grew up in and still miss it. The walls are standing. The roof is still there. Someone else opens the front door now, someone else waters the plants, someone else calls it home, and suddenly you realize you were never attached to the building. You were attached to the life that happened inside it. You weren’t missing a place. You were missing a time that no longer has an address.

I used to believe grief only belonged to endings. Now I notice it hiding inside beginnings too. Every new chapter quietly asks you to leave another one behind. Starting university meant saying goodbye to the person who only worried about homework. Getting older meant saying goodbye to the child who believed adults had everything figured out. Every hello seems to ask for a goodbye somewhere else. We celebrate the new things so loudly that we almost never notice what they quietly took from us.

The strange thing is that grief can exist beside happiness without ruining it. I can have the best day of my life and still miss someone in the middle of it. I can be laughing until my stomach hurts and suddenly wish one more person had been there to laugh with me. Those feelings don’t fight each other. They simply sit together. For a long time I thought I had to choose one. Either I was healing or I was hurting. Life keeps proving that both can happen in the same hour.

Sometimes I wonder how many people are carrying grief without anyone noticing. We pass each other every day in supermarkets, airports, classrooms, cafés, and traffic, never realizing that someone is remembering a father because they saw his favorite biscuits on a shelf. Someone else is missing an old friendship because two strangers laughed the same way they used to. We think everyone is living inside the same afternoon, yet every person is carrying a different year inside their head.

People always say time heals everything. I have never liked that sentence. Time doesn’t return what was lost. It doesn’t erase empty chairs or unread messages or birthdays that feel different now. Time simply teaches you how to carry heavier things without putting them down every five minutes. The weight is still the weight. Your hands just become stronger without asking for credit.

There are moments when I wish I could go back, even for five minutes. Not to change anything. Just to notice it properly. I would stay at the dinner table a little longer. I would pay more attention to the way people laughed. I would stop rushing ordinary afternoons because I know now that ordinary afternoons are the ones that disappear first. Nobody ever misses the extraordinary moments as much as they miss the ones they thought would happen again tomorrow.

I think that is why photographs hurt so much. They prove that a moment existed, but they also prove that it ended. You look at a picture and everyone is smiling because nobody inside that frame knows what is waiting for them. They don’t know who will leave, who will grow apart, who will move away, or which house will eventually belong to strangers. There is something heartbreaking about seeing people live inside a future that you already know doesn’t last.

Grief has also made me kinder. I have stopped assuming that silence means someone is okay. I have stopped believing that everyone carries the same weight through the day. The quietest person in the room could be missing someone. The happiest laugh could belong to someone who cried before leaving the house. We know so little about each other, yet we keep expecting everyone to look exactly how they feel.

I still think grief is one of the weirdest things a human heart can experience. It can make you miss a person, a place, a season, a smell, a future, or even a small piece of yourself that disappeared while you were busy growing up. It can turn an ordinary Tuesday into the hardest day of the month for no reason at all. It can make you cry over a song you have heard a hundred times simply because today your heart decided to hear it differently.

I don’t want grief to make perfect sense anymore. If it did, love would probably feel smaller too. The people, places, and moments that leave the deepest marks on us were never ordinary to begin with. Grief is simply the echo of all the love we never got to keep forever. It is strange, unfair, beautiful, exhausting, and deeply human. I suppose that is why it feels so familiar. Every person who has ever loved anything has already met grief, even if they don’t know its name yet…..

If this essay made you pause, smile, or taught you something new, consider buying me a coffee. It helps me spend more time writing pieces like this and a little less time wondering what to make for dinner.

Buy me a coffee.

postcards by hasif

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a month ago · 37 likes · 3 comments · hasif 💌

The funny part is that almost nobody stops to explain what cortisol actually is. We hear the word so often that it has become another internet buzzword. People know they should be scared of it, but they don’t know why. That’s a problem because you can’t fix something you don’t understand.

So before we talk about lowering cortisol, let’s answer the most important question.

What even is cortisol?

Cortisol is a hormone produced by two tiny adrenal glands that sit right above your kidneys. Think of it as your body’s emergency manager. Whenever your brain believes you’re in danger, cortisol steps in to help you survive. It raises your blood sugar so your muscles have fuel. It increases your alertness so you can react faster. It changes where your body spends energy, putting less importance on things like digestion and more importance on keeping you alive. Without cortisol, waking up every morning would be difficult. Your blood pressure wouldn’t stay stable. Your body wouldn’t know how to respond during an emergency. In other words, cortisol isn’t your enemy. It’s one of the reasons you’re alive today.

The real problem begins when your body starts treating every single inconvenience as an emergency.

Thousands of years ago, this system worked perfectly. Imagine one of our ancestors walking through a forest and suddenly hearing something growl behind a tree. Within seconds, the brain would send out an alarm. Cortisol would rise, the heart would beat faster, breathing would become quicker, muscles would receive extra energy, and the body would prepare to either fight or run away. Once the danger disappeared, cortisol would drop back to normal. The emergency was over, so the body returned to business as usual.

Now look at how we live today.

We don’t spend our days running away from wild animals anymore. Instead, we wake up to ten notifications before our feet even touch the floor. We rush to college or work while worrying about deadlines. We compare ourselves to strangers online who seem to have perfect bodies, perfect careers and perfect lives. We overthink conversations from yesterday and create imaginary arguments about tomorrow. We drink coffee because we’re exhausted, then struggle to sleep because we’ve had too much caffeine, then wake up exhausted again and repeat the entire cycle.

The tiger disappeared.

The stress didn’t!!!!

The scary thing is that your brain doesn’t care whether the threat is real or imagined. It doesn’t know the difference between escaping a lion and panicking over an email from your manager. Stress is stress. As far as your brain is concerned, both situations deserve the same emergency response.

Now imagine this happening once.

Your body can handle it.

Imagine it happening every day.

Your body can still handle it.

Now imagine it happening every hour for months or even years.

That’s when things begin to fall apart.

Your body was built to experience stress for short periods, not to live inside it forever. Cortisol is supposed to rise when necessary and then return to normal once the danger has passed. Unfortunately, modern life rarely gives us that chance. There is always another assignment, another bill, another notification, another comparison, another deadline, another reason to worry. Even when nothing is actually happening, our brains are excellent at creating new things to stress about.

Eventually, your body starts believing that this constant pressure is your normal life.

This is where high cortisol becomes dangerous.

One of the first things people notice is that they’re always tired. Not the “I need a nap” tired. The deeper exhaustion where even after sleeping for eight hours, you still wake up feeling like someone secretly drained your battery overnight. Your brain feels heavy. Simple tasks require more effort than they should. You walk into a room and completely forget why you went there. Reading the same paragraph three times becomes normal because nothing seems to stay in your head.

Then your sleep begins to change.

Ironically, high cortisol can make you exhausted during the day while keeping your mind wide awake at night. You finally get into bed, close your eyes and instead of resting, your brain suddenly decides it’s the perfect time to replay every embarrassing thing you’ve ever done since primary school. One thought becomes five. Five become fifty. Before you know it, it’s two in the morning and you’re still negotiating with your own thoughts.

Poor sleep pushes cortisol even higher the next day.

Higher cortisol ruins the following night’s sleep.

Without realizing it, you’ve entered a cycle that’s surprisingly difficult to escape.

Your eating habits often change too. Ever noticed how stressful weeks make you crave chocolate, chips, burgers or sugary drinks? That’s not because you’ve suddenly lost discipline. Your body is searching for quick energy. Cortisol increases appetite because your brain believes you’re dealing with an emergency. From your body’s perspective, storing extra energy makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, your emergency isn’t climbing a mountain or escaping danger. It’s just surviving….

Over weeks and months, this can lead to weight gain, especially around the stomach. This is one of the reasons cortisol became so popular online. People noticed the physical changes but rarely understood what was happening underneath. Belly fat isn’t caused by cortisol alone. Diet, activity, sleep, genetics and many other factors all play important roles. However, constantly elevated cortisol can make managing body weight much more difficult than it needs to be.

Your skin often joins the protest as well. Some people notice more acne during stressful periods. Others experience increased hair fall, dull skin or slower healing after cuts and injuries. Once again, your body is simply deciding where its energy should go. During an emergency, having glowing skin isn’t exactly a top priority. Keeping you alive is.

Perhaps the biggest change happens inside your mind.

When cortisol stays high for too long, everything begins to feel bigger than it really is. Small problems suddenly feel impossible to solve. Tiny mistakes feel like disasters. Your patience becomes thinner. Your confidence starts disappearing. You overthink things that normally wouldn’t bother you. You become irritated more easily, laugh less often and find it harder to enjoy moments that once made you happy.

The frightening part is that this doesn’t happen overnight.

It happens so gradually that many people don’t even realize they’ve been living in survival mode for months.

The question now is simple.

If modern life keeps pushing cortisol higher, is there actually a way to bring it back down?

The answer is yes.

But before you start searching for expensive supplements, detox drinks or miracle powders that promise to “balance your hormones” in seven days, you need to understand one important thing.

Your body already knows how to regulate cortisol.

The problem isn’t that your body has forgotten what to do.

The problem is that we’ve forgotten how to give it the conditions it needs.

The good news is that lowering cortisol isn’t about finding one magical trick. There isn’t a secret tea that fixes it overnight. There isn’t a supplement that suddenly convinces your brain that life is peaceful again. If it were that easy, nobody would be stressed. Lowering cortisol is less about adding fancy habits and more about removing the things that constantly convince your body it’s in danger. Every healthy habit you build is simply another way of telling your nervous system, “You can relax now. We made it.”

It All Starts With Sleep

If there is one habit that deserves the most attention, it’s sleep. You can eat perfectly, exercise every day and drink enough water, but if you’re sleeping four or five hours every night, your body is already fighting an uphill battle. Sleep is when your brain repairs itself, your hormones reset, your muscles recover and your nervous system finally gets a break. It’s almost like your body shuts down the maintenance department during the day because it’s too busy keeping you alive, then opens it again while you’re asleep.

The problem is that most of us treat sleep like it’s optional. We proudly say things like, “I only slept for four hours,” making it sound like “cool”. We stay awake watching one more episode, scrolling through videos that we’ll forget tomorrow or replying to work emails that honestly could have waited until morning. Then we wonder why we feel anxious before breakfast.

Your body loves consistency. Going to bed at roughly the same time every night gives your brain something incredibly valuable: predictability. When your brain knows when it’s going to rest, it doesn’t have to stay on high alert. That’s one of the reasons people who maintain a regular sleep schedule often wake up feeling fresher, even if they don’t sleep much longer than everyone else.

There’s another mistake many people make without realizing it. They wake up and immediately grab their phone. Before they’ve even taken a sip of water, they’ve already checked social media, answered notifications, read stressful headlines and compared themselves to five strangers who somehow managed to travel to Bali, start a business and run a marathon before nine in the morning. Think about what that does to your brain. You’ve barely opened your eyes and your nervous system is already being told that the world is demanding your attention.

Imagine if every single morning someone burst into your room yelling about deadlines, bills and unfinished work before you even got out of bed. That’s essentially what your phone does. Giving yourself even fifteen or twenty quiet minutes before diving into the internet can completely change how your day begins. Open the curtains. Let sunlight hit your face. Drink a glass of water. Stretch for a minute. Let your brain wake up before asking it to solve twenty problems.

Feed Your Body Like It Matters

Food is another area where people accidentally make cortisol worse. Your body isn’t asking for perfection. It isn’t expecting organic vegetables from a mountain farm or smoothies filled with ingredients you can’t pronounce. What it does want is consistency. Skipping breakfast, surviving on coffee until afternoon and then eating one massive meal at night keeps your body guessing when its next source of energy will arrive. Uncertainty creates stress, and stress encourages cortisol to stay elevated.

Have you ever noticed how impossible it is to think clearly when you’re extremely hungry? You become impatient, distracted and irritated over things that normally wouldn’t bother you. That’s because your brain depends on a steady supply of glucose to function properly. When blood sugar drops too much, cortisol rises to help bring it back up. It’s your body’s backup plan. The issue is that many people trigger this backup plan every single day simply because they’re too busy to eat.

Protein, fruits, vegetables, whole grains and healthy fats all play their part because they provide steady energy instead of huge spikes followed by crashes. This doesn’t mean dessert is forbidden or that pizza has become your enemy. It simply means your everyday meals should support your body instead of forcing it into survival mode. One slice of cake won’t ruin your hormones. A lifestyle built around processed food, poor nutrition and unpredictable eating habits is a completely different story tho.

Caffeine deserves a quick conversation too because millions of people rely on it to survive their mornings. Coffee itself isn’t the villain. In fact, moderate amounts are perfectly fine for many people. The problem appears when coffee replaces sleep instead of complementing it. If you’re drinking multiple cups every day just to stay awake because you’re constantly exhausted, the real issue probably isn’t the lack of caffeine. It’s the lack of recovery.

Your Body Was Designed to Move

One of the strangest things about modern life is how little we actually move. We sit while studying. We sit while working. We sit while travelling. Then we come home and sit again while watching something on netflix. Our bodies were built to move, yet many of us spend most of our day completely still.

Exercise isn’t only about building muscle or losing weight. It’s one of the healthiest ways to tell your body that the danger has passed. During physical activity, your body uses the extra energy that stress prepared you for. Afterwards, many people notice something interesting. Their mind feels quieter. Their breathing feels calmer. They aren’t overthinking every tiny problem anymore.

You don’t have to become a marathon runner for this to happen. A walk around your neighbourhood, a gym session, dancing in your room, swimming, playing football with friends or even cycling through your city can all help. The goal isn’t to punish your body until you’re exhausted. The goal is to remind it that movement is normal, healthy and safe.

At the same time, remember that more exercise isn’t always better. Spending hours doing intense workouts every single day without proper recovery can actually increase physical stress. Just like everything else in health, balance matters more than extremes.

The Invisible Stress We Carry

Not every source of stress is obvious. Some of it exists entirely inside our heads.

Think about how often you replay conversations after they’ve already ended. Maybe you wonder if you sounded awkward. Maybe you regret saying something. Maybe you’re imagining an argument that hasn’t even happened yet. Our brains are incredibly creative, but unfortunately they often use that creativity to invent problems instead of solving them.

Overthinking convinces your body that danger is still present even when you’re sitting safely in your room. Your heart doesn’t know that the stressful conversation exists only inside your imagination. It responds anyway. Cortisol rises anyway.

This is why activities like journaling, meditation, prayer or simply talking honestly with someone you trust can feel surprisingly powerful. They aren’t magical solutions. They help clear the mental clutter that keeps convincing your brain it’s under attack. Sometimes writing your thoughts on paper is enough to realize that they sounded much scarier inside your head than they do in real life.

Another thing worth protecting is your attention. We live in a world where every app is competing for it. Every notification asks you to stop what you’re doing. Every video suggests another one. Every headline tells you something urgent has happened. Your brain rarely gets a chance to experience silence anymore.

Giving yourself moments without constant stimulation allows your nervous system to breathe. You don’t have to disappear into the mountains for a month. Sometimes sitting quietly with a cup of tea, walking without headphones or watching the sunset without reaching for your phone is enough to remind your brain that not every second needs to be filled with information.

The strange thing about lowering cortisol is that none of these habits are revolutionary. You’ve heard most of them before. Sleep well. Eat properly. Exercise. Spend time outside. Stay hydrated. Connect with people you love. They sound almost boring because we’ve heard them so many times. But perhaps that’s exactly why we ignore them. We keep searching for complicated answers while overlooking the simple ones that our bodies have been asking for all along.

Before we end, here’s something worth remembering. Lowering cortisol doesn’t always have to look like waking up at 5 a.m., drinking green juice, meditating for an hour and pretending you have your entire life together. Sometimes your nervous system just wants a little reminder that life can still be fun.

Here are a few delightfully ordinary things that might help your brain take a deep breath:

• Name the neighborhood crows and start recognizing them.

• Make tiny outfits for your pet. Apologize if they hate it.

• Learn the names of the trees on your street.

• Keep a tiny “good things” jar and drop one happy memory into it every week.

• Dance around your room to your favorite song like nobody’s watching.

• Put googly eyes on a potato and keep it on your desk as your emotional support potato.

• Buy a ridiculously tiny spoon and use it only for dessert.

• Pet a dog. If you don’t have one, politely ask the owner if you can say hello.

• Sit outside after it rains and enjoy that fresh-earth smell.

• Make yourself a cup of tea or hot chocolate and drink it without scrolling your phone.

• Read a few pages of a book you’ve been meaning to start.

• Bake cookies, brownies or a cake, even if they come out looking slightly questionable.

• Draw something absolutely terrible just for the fun of it.

• Watch your favorite comfort movie for the fifteenth time.

• Listen to birds instead of notifications for ten minutes.

• Build a pillow fort. Yes, adults are allowed!!

• Water your plants or buy one if you’ve always wanted to.

• Lie on the grass and name the clouds.

• Wear your favorite cozy hoodie even if you’re not going anywhere.

• Buy yourself flowers simply because you felt like it.

• Go for a walk with no destination in mind.

• Spend an evening doing absolutely nothing and refuse to feel guilty about it.

• Look up at the night sky for a few minutes and remember that the world is much bigger than today’s worries.

Life doesn’t become beautiful because we finally eliminate every bit of stress. It becomes beautiful because, somewhere between the deadlines, responsibilities and endless notifications, we still make room for wonderfully pointless little moments that remind us we’re human.

Your nervous system loves those moments far more than you probably realize.

If this essay made you pause, smile, or taught you something new, consider buying me a coffee. It helps me spend more time writing pieces like this and a little less time wondering what to make for dinner.

Buy me a coffee.

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a month ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · hasif 💌

I used to think homesickness belonged to people who had left somewhere behind. I thought it was the ache of looking out of a train window, of missing the smell of dinner from the kitchen, of wanting one more evening in a bedroom that no longer had their name on the door. I never understood it because I had never really left. Then one day I realized I had been homesick for years. The strange part was that I wasn’t missing a place I had known. I was missing a place that had never existed.

It is such a difficult feeling to explain. I wake up some mornings with this weight in my chest, like I have forgotten something important. I move through the day, finish what I have to finish, laugh when I need to laugh, and still there is this pull inside me. It feels like my heart keeps looking over my shoulder for something it has never seen.

Sometimes I think about a kitchen I have never stood in. Sunlight slips through the windows while water boils on the stove. There are books stacked on the counter because I never learned how to keep them in one place. A plant leans toward the light. My favorite mug has a tiny crack in it, and I refuse to throw it away. I miss that morning more than I miss some real memories.

I think about a couch that has never belonged to me. I imagine falling asleep there after a day that did not ask so much from me. There are blankets that smell familiar, framed photographs collected over years, and shelves filled with little things that mean nothing to anyone else. I have never seen that living room, yet I miss walking into it after a hard day.

I even miss the person I become inside that home. I imagine waking up without feeling like I have to prove I deserve another day. I picture myself moving through ordinary moments without rushing them.

For a long time I thought this feeling meant I was ungrateful. I thought I was always looking ahead instead of paying attention to what was already in front of me. I carried guilt with me, wondering why nothing ever felt complete. I kept asking myself why I could never settle into my own life without feeling like I was borrowing it from someone else.

There are days when I catch pieces of that home in ordinary places. A stranger watering flowers on a balcony. Fresh bedsheets hanging outside to dry. A bookstore with warm lights shining through the windows after sunset. They leave something inside me that I cannot name. It feels less like wanting those things and more like remembering them.

I think everyone carries a picture of happiness, even if they never admit it out loud. Mine has never been loud or expensive. I have never imagined giant houses or endless success. I only dream about ordinary days that feel safe enough to stay inside. I dream about opening my own front door and feeling my shoulders relax without thinking about it.

There is something painful about grieving a future that has not happened yet. It feels unfair to miss people I have not met, conversations I have not had, and evenings that are still waiting somewhere ahead of me. Still, my heart reaches for them with the same certainty it reaches for old memories, as if time has folded in on itself and forgotten to tell me where I belong.

I wonder if this is why I keep going even when I feel tired. There is a small part of me that believes the life I keep imagining is waiting somewhere beyond the next decision, the next city, the next year. I cannot point to it on a map. I cannot tell anyone how to find it. I only know that every step I take feels like I am searching for an address that already exists inside me.

There are nights when I try to convince myself that I have imagined all of this. I tell myself that home is only four walls and a roof, that I am asking life for too much. Then I catch myself picturing the same future all over again. It always returns with the same feeling, like a song I cannot stop humming even after it ends.

I do not think I am searching for perfection anymore. I think I am searching for peace that feels earned instead of borrowed. I want to make dinner without carrying the whole day into the kitchen. I want to sit by a window without feeling guilty for resting. I want ordinary hours that do not feel like they are slipping through my hands before I even notice them.

I imagine friends walking into my home without knocking twice. Their shoes end up by the door, someone starts making tea without asking, and laughter fills the rooms as if it has always lived there. Nobody is trying to impress anyone. Nobody is pretending to be lighter than they feel. I miss those evenings even though they have not happened yet.

I think about the books I will underline until the pages wrinkle. I think about little notes tucked inside them, forgotten for years, only to be found on an afternoon when I need them most. I think about my own handwriting becoming part of the furniture, scattered across drawers, calendars, grocery lists, and receipts that no one else would ever care about.

I picture rainy afternoons when I have nowhere important to be. The windows are open just enough to let the smell of the rain inside. There is a cup of tea growing cold beside me because I got distracted by a paragraph worth reading twice. The world outside keeps moving, and for once I do not feel like I have fallen behind it.

There is a shelf in my imagination that holds things no store could ever sell. Ticket stubs from places that changed me. Pebbles picked up during long walks. Letters folded too many times. Photographs that are slightly blurry because nobody cared about getting the perfect shot. I think that shelf has been waiting for me longer than I have been waiting for it.

Some days I wonder if I am really missing a home at all. I wonder if I am missing the feeling of finally fitting inside my own skin. There have been so many moments when I have looked around and felt like everyone else received instructions that I somehow missed. I kept waiting for the day everything would begin to make sense.

Growing older has taught me that nobody hands over that feeling. There is no morning when someone places a key in my hand and says, “Here, everything belongs to you now.” I have to build that feeling one choice at a time.

I think every decision leaves a brick behind. Every boundary I finally keep. Every goodbye I stop taking back. Every dream I choose even when it frightens me. They do not look like much while they are happening, though I wonder if one day I will turn around and realize they have been building my home all along.

The strange thing is that I no longer feel embarrassed by this longing. It reminds me that there is still something inside me reaching toward life. As long as I can picture that home, I know I have not stopped believing that I deserve to live there. I think hope often begins as a place that exists only in the imagination before it finds room in the real world.

I know that home will not fix everything. There will still be mornings when I wake up with too much on my mind. There will still be days that ask more from me than I have to give. I will still lose people, disappoint myself, and wonder if I am doing enough. I do not expect a different address to erase what it means to be human.

What I hope changes is the way I return to myself after all of it. I hope there is a place where I can put the weight down instead of carrying it into tomorrow. I hope I learn that rest is something I am allowed to have. I hope I stop treating my own heart like a place I have to earn the right to enter.

When I look closely, I think pieces of that home have already found me. They appear in the books that changed the way I think. In the meals I learned to cook for myself. In the songs I play while cleaning my room on a Wednesday afternoon. In the people who make me feel like I do not have to hide the untidy parts of who I am. None of them are the whole home, though each one feels like a room inside it.

I used to believe I was searching for one big moment that would finally make everything click into place. Now I think life is much different than that. It is built from ordinary afternoons that ask almost nothing from me. It is built from habits that make tomorrow a little easier than yesterday. It is built from choosing myself even when nobody is watching.

There are still days when I feel far away from the life I dream about. I still catch myself wondering how much longer it will take before everything feels real. Then I remember that homes are never finished in a single day. They collect fingerprints, scratches, stories, forgotten mugs, worn-out blankets, laughter from people who keep coming back, and little pieces of the person living inside them. I think hearts grow in the same way.

So I have stopped thinking of this longing as something that is wrong with me. I think it has been pointing me somewhere all along. It has been asking me to keep choosing the life that feels honest instead of the one that only looks good from the outside. It has been reminding me that I have always wanted more than success. I have wanted somewhere my soul could finally unclench.

I still feel homesick sometimes. The feeling has not disappeared. It still finds me in grocery stores, on quiet walks, while folding laundry, while boiling the milk, or when the evening light spills across the floor in a way that makes my chest ache. The difference is that I no longer think I am grieving something I can never have. I think I am grieving something that is still becoming.

And I like to believe that one day I will unlock a front door, set my keys on a table that belongs to me, and look around without searching for anything else. The books will already be on the shelves. The cracked mug will still be there. The windows will be open just enough to let the air wander in. I will stand in the middle of that ordinary room and realize that the feeling I carried for so many years has finally found its place. I will smile without even noticing it, and for the first time in my life, I will understand that I was never homesick for a house. I was homesick for the life I would one day have the courage to call my own.

If this essay stayed with you, and you’d like to support the time, thought, and coffee that go into writing pieces like this, you can buy me a coffee below. Every contribution helps me keep this little corner of the internet alive. Thank you for reading.

Buy me a coffee.

I think one of the strangest things about growing older is realizing that intelligence has its own fashion trends. There are seasons where everyone suddenly reads the same books, repeats the same opinions, quotes the same people, and somehow every conversation starts sounding like it came from one shared script. I used to think this meant everyone was learning together. Now I think many people are just trying to be seen learning.

I don’t even mean this in a judgmental way. I catch myself doing little versions of it too. You hear someone mention an author you’ve never read, so you make a mental note to casually bring that name up later. You finish half a podcast and suddenly feel qualified to speak with certainty. You save essays you never actually read, hoping the collection itself says something about you. There is a strange comfort in looking like someone who knows things.

On the other hand, curiosity is different; it feels different.

Curiosity has never cared about appearances. It asks questions that don’t sound impressive. It stays with topics nobody else finds exciting. It spends an hour searching for an answer that never becomes a social media post. It forgets time. It wanders into rabbit holes without wondering whether anyone will clap at the end.

I have always loved people who become completely absorbed by something. Someone explaining why octopuses solve puzzles. Someone talking about old train stations, old buildings. Someone spending twenty minutes telling me why a movie soundtrack or the colours changed the entire story. Their excitement is something else. It isn’t performing. It simply exists, taking up all their spaces.

Those conversations leave me feeling awake.

Then there are conversations where every sentence feels bland and carefully placed, enough to make them look interesting. Every reference lands with perfect timing. Every opinion sounds polished before it is even spoken. You start feeling less like you’re talking to a person and more like you’re attending a presentation. Somewhere beneath all the cleverness, you begin searching for them. The actual person. Sometimes they are there. Sometimes they disappear behind the performance.

I wonder how often people mistake vocabulary for depth.

There is a difference between collecting ideas and living with them. One fills a shelf. The other changes the way you notice the world. Someone can quote ten philosophers and still panic when asked what they actually believe. Someone else might never mention a single famous name and still say one sentence that stays in your head for weeks.

That difference fascinates me.

I think genuine curiosity is comfortable admitting ignorance. It says, “I don’t know,” without feeling embarrassed of not knowing. Performative intellectualism has a harder job. It has to keep proving itself. Every conversation becomes another test. Every disagreement feels personal.

That sounds exhausting.

Maybe that’s why curious people seem so effortlessly cool and calmer. They don’t carry the pressure of always appearing informed. They can laugh at their own mistakes. They can change their minds without treating it like defeat. They don’t build their identity around being the smartest person in the room. They just enjoy finding something they didn’t know yesterday.

I don’t think curiosity makes someone look intelligent all the time. Sometimes it makes you look clueless. You ask basic questions. You interrupt yourself. You admit confusion. You take the risk of sounding uninformed. There is something quietly brave about that. Pride usually wants polished answers. Curiosity wants honest ones.

I notice this whenever I meet someone who genuinely loves learning. They rarely rush toward conclusions. They stay with uncertainty longer than most people do. They keep asking one more question even after everyone else seems satisfied. There is patience in the way they think. Their confidence comes from knowing that every answer opens another door.

People chasing appearances often stop at the first answer that sounds convincing. Curiosity keeps walking.

I think social media has made this difference even easier to miss. Knowledge has become another aesthetic. Books become decorations before they become companions. Quotes travel farther than reflection. Reading lists grow faster than understanding. There is nothing wrong with sharing what you’re learning. I love seeing people excited about ideas. The strange part begins when looking thoughtful becomes more important than actually thinking.

You can almost feel the shift.

Someone recommends a book. Another person buys it immediately. A photo appears online. Weeks pass. The pages remain untouched. The image already served its purpose. Meanwhile another person quietly borrows the same book from a library, fills the margins with notes, disagrees with half of it, and never mentions reading it to anyone. Guess which person actually changed.

One thing I admire is how curious people let themselves be surprised. They aren’t searching for information that confirms what they already think. They enjoy finding out they were wrong. There is freedom in that. Every unexpected answer becomes another invitation instead of another threat.

Performance doesn’t have much room for surprise. It already decided how it wants to be perceived. New information can interrupt the role. Genuine curiosity welcomes the interruption.

I think this also changes friendships. You remember the people who ask questions and actually wait for your answer. They don’t listen for a chance to speak. They listen because your experience is genuinely interesting to them. Those conversations never feel rushed. You leave feeling understood instead of evaluated.

The opposite leaves a different feeling. You walk away remembering facts, references, opinions, and impressive sentences. Somehow you still know almost nothing about the person who said them.

That has always felt strange to me.

I hope I never lose the part of myself that follows random questions for no reason. The part that opens five tabs after hearing one unfamiliar word. The part that spends an evening wondering how something works even if nobody ever hears the answer. Those moments have given me far more than the times I tried to sound clever.

Maybe real learning has always been quieter than we imagine.

Years from now, I doubt anyone will remember who sounded the smartest in every conversation. People remember curiosity in different ways. They remember the friend whose eyes lit up while explaining something they loved. They remember the person who wasn’t afraid to ask another question. They remember someone who made learning feel welcoming instead of competitive.

That version of intelligence feels human.

And I think that’s the whole point. Genuine curiosity isn’t trying to win a room. It is trying to understand the world a little better today than it did yesterday. Somehow that keeps making people wiser without them chasing the title. Performance can impress a crowd for an evening. Curiosity keeps shaping a person for a lifetime, even when nobody is watching.

If this essay stayed with you, and you’d like to support the time, thought, and coffee that go into writing pieces like this, you can buy me a coffee below. Every contribution helps me keep this little corner of the internet alive. Thank you for reading.

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postcards by hasif

Submit Your Essays, Stories & Personal Writing

Hello Fifi’s…

Read more

a month ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · hasif 💌

This space was never built around trends or numbers. It was built around writing that feels human, that carries honesty, reflection, emotion, and the things people often struggle to say out loud.

Each month, I open submissions and select eight pieces to feature. Over time, it has become a place where writers can share the pieces that matter to them, and readers can find words that feel familiar to their own lives.

Submissions are now open for the August, September, and October Months.

And if you already have something you’d like to save for later in the year, you’re welcome to submit for future months too.

If you’ve been sitting on an essay you wrote late at night, something personal, reflective, or unfinished in your drafts, this might be the right place for it.

I read every submission myself, and every month, eight pieces are chosen to be published in The Open Letters.

What can you submit?

There’s no strict format.

Writers usually send in:

• Personal essays

• Reflective writing

• Open letters

• Poetry

• Creative nonfiction

• Think pieces

• Fictional letters

What matters most is not the category. It’s whether the writing feels honest. Whether it carries something real that someone else can feel too.

Current submission window

Submissions are currently open for:

August Issue
6 slots available

September Issue
8 slots available

October Issue
8 slots available

You can also submit for any later month if you’d prefer your piece to appear in a future issue.

Each Month features 8 selected essays.

A small note: selections for the August issue will be finalized by the end of July, so if you’re planning to submit for August, try sending your piece soon.

Older pieces are welcome too. If you’ve written something months ago and it still feels important, you can send it.

Submission requirements

Word count:
Minimum 900 words.

There’s no strict maximum. The only thing that matters is that the piece says what it needs to say.

Original work:

• Your piece must be your own.

• Plagiarism will not be accepted.

Format:
Please submit your essay as one of these:

• Word document

• Google Doc link

• PDF

Please don’t paste the full essay into the email body.

Use simple formatting:

• 12pt font

• Arial or Times New Roman

• Your name and Substack ID at the top

Author bio:

If you’d like, you can add a short bio (100–150 ish words) at the end of your document so readers can know a little about you.

How to submit:

Send your essay to: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

Subject line format:

Open Call Submission: [Month]

Example: Open Call Submission: August

If you’re submitting for August, Sept or later, just replace the month.

If your essay is selected

If your piece is chosen, you will receive a confirmation email.

A $25 feature fee will be required only if your essay is selected. Submitting your work itself is completely free.

The reason for this is simple. The Open Letters and Postcards by Hasif have always been free to readers. Even with an audience of more than 160,000+ subscribers across both publications, I’ve chosen to keep the writing accessible instead of moving behind a paywall.

Recently, I also brought an editor on board to help review submissions and assist with editorial work. The feature fee helps support editing, publication design, and the time that goes into maintaining the quality of this space.

Once the payment is completed, we’ll coordinate with you through email to finalize the title, thumbnail, and posting date.

Your essay will be published in The Open Letters (40,000+ readers) and can also be cross-posted to your own Substack so it reaches your existing audience.

Your publication will also be recommended for a week, helping new readers discover your writing and often bringing in new subscribers.

Why Submit Here

The Open Letters exist for writers who want to say something real.

Not everything needs to sound academic to be meaningful. Sometimes, the most powerful essays are simply honest reflections about life, relationships, or personal experiences that many people quietly relate to.

If you’ve written something that feels important to you, I’d genuinely love to read it.

For any questions about submissions, timelines, or formatting, you can always reach me at hasifnewsletter@gmail.com.

Looking forward to reading your work.

~Hasif

One of the first submissions I ever received for The Open Letters was from Kelsey Clarke. Her piece was called The Eternal Act of Almost, and I still remember reading it and feeling how clear her voice already was. There was something in her writing that stayed with me, honest, sharp, and deeply human in a way that made you stop and sit with it. Since then, watching her writing find more and more people has been beautiful to witness. It reminds me why I keep opening submissions every month. Sometimes the right piece finds you before the rest of the world finds it.

People say every age has its own beauty, and I believe them. Even then, there is something about sixteen that refuses to leave me alone. It was the age when everything felt close enough to touch. Every weekend looked endless. Every conversation had room to wander for hours. Every plan sounded possible, even if it made no sense. I walked around believing there would always be another afternoon waiting for me, another summer, another school day, another chance to say the things I forgot to say.

I miss how ordinary everything was. Back then I was waiting for bigger things to happen. I wanted freedom, adulthood, money, independence. I counted the years until I could leave school and begin a life that looked important. I had no idea I was already living inside the chapter I would spend years trying to revisit. Sixteen never sees itself as the best part. It looked too normal to be precious. It was only after it disappeared that I realized how much it had been carrying.

I miss the walk home after school more than I miss any vacation I have ever taken. Those walks held conversations that never had a destination. We talked about teachers we disliked, movies we wanted to watch, people we secretly admired, dreams that changed every week, and problems that felt enormous at the time. We believed the world was waiting for us. Looking back now, I wish I had stayed on those roads a little longer. I wish I had looked around instead of rushing home. Those streets are still there, yet they belong to another version of time that refuses to return.

I miss my friends before life became something we had to schedule. Back then we only needed one message. Sometimes we did not even need that. We already knew where everyone would be. Someone would knock on the gate. Someone would wait outside. Someone would shout my name from across the street. We never wondered if people were too busy. We only wondered who would reach first. It feels strange that the people who once knew every detail of my day now live inside birthdays, old photographs, and chats that begin with, “We should meet soon.”

There are memories that make no sense to anyone else, yet they carry the whole weight of that year. The desk where I carved my initials. The classroom fan that made the same sound every afternoon. The corner shop where we spent coins on snacks that somehow tasted better than anything expensive I eat now. The notebook with handwriting that changed every month. The race to finish homework before sunset so the evening still belonged to us. These things were tiny when they happened. They have become enormous inside my memory.

I even miss the worries I carried at sixteen. I thought exams would decide my future. I thought one embarrassing moment would follow me forever. I thought heartbreak meant life had reached its hardest point. I smile at those fears now, yet I never laugh at them. They were real to the person I was. I want to hug that kid instead of correcting them. They were trying to understand a world that looked much bigger than it actually was.

There is something beautiful about how little we knew. We believed friendships would stay exactly as they were. We believed our parents would always wait for us at home. We believed every festival would feel the same every year. We believed the people sitting beside us in class would always be one phone call away. Nobody told us that life keeps moving even when we ask it to stay. Nobody warned us that one ordinary Friday could quietly become the last Friday everyone would ever spend together.

Sometimes I wonder if I would do anything differently if I could return. I always think the answer would be huge. I imagine changing mistakes, making smarter choices, speaking with more confidence. Then I realize I would probably spend the entire year doing something much simpler. I would pay attention. I would stop waiting for life to begin. I would stop treating every ordinary day like a bridge to somewhere else. I would sit with my friends for another hour even after the conversation had ended. I would let my parents tell the same stories again without pretending I had somewhere more important to be. I would memorize the faces around me before time quietly rearranged all of them.

The hardest part about growing older is realizing that memories keep changing while the people inside them keep growing. We become strangers to the younger versions of ourselves. I look at photographs from sixteen and I recognize the face, yet I cannot fully become that person again. I remember what happened that day, though I cannot remember exactly how the air felt or what everyone sounded like when they laughed. Time keeps the biggest moments and quietly steals the little details. Somehow those little details are the ones I miss the most.

I wish someone had told me that one day I would miss being bored. I used to complain when there was nothing to do. Now I search for afternoons that ask nothing from me. Back then the clock moved too slowly for my liking. Now weeks disappear before I notice they have begun. Sixteen had space. Space to think, to waste time, to wander without a destination, to sit on a terrace watching the evening arrive without feeling guilty for doing absolutely nothing.

I miss coming home and throwing my school bag into a corner as if tomorrow would always look exactly the same. I miss hearing my family in different rooms while I pretended to study. I miss believing everyone would remain exactly where they were forever. Age teaches us many things, though it also introduces us to distance. People move away. Houses change owners. Schools repaint their walls. Favorite teachers retire. The places remain on the map, yet they no longer recognize the people who once filled them with life.

There is a strange grief that comes with missing a version of yourself who still exists inside you. I do not miss sixteen only for the people or the places. I miss the person I was before I learned how quickly life changes. There was a lightness in the way I looked toward tomorrow. I believed happiness would always wait around the corner. I believed goodbyes were temporary. I believed time had endless patience.

Maybe growing older is learning to carry every age with you. Sixteen never truly disappeared. It still lives inside the songs I replay, the roads I glance at from a car window, the scent of old textbooks, the excitement I feel whenever rain arrives during summer, and the sudden urge to message an old friend even if we have nothing important to say. It appears in pieces, reminding me that the years we think we have outgrown are still quietly building the people we become.

I know I cannot be sixteen again. Even if someone offered me the chance, I could never return as the same person. I would carry too much knowledge, too many endings, too many lessons. Maybe that is why memories are meant to stay memories. They are places we visit, never places we live in again. Even then, there are evenings when I close my eyes and picture that younger version of myself walking home with a backpack that felt heavier than it really was, laughing over something that would never matter again, believing tomorrow had all the time in the world. I hope that kid never realizes how deeply they will be missed. I hope they keep walking without looking back. I will do enough looking back for both of us.

If this essay reminded you of a version of yourself you’ve been missing, thank you for staying until the very end. Writing pieces like this takes time, thought, and a little piece of my heart each time. If you’d like to support my work and help me keep writing essays that feel like home, you can buy me a coffee. Your support means more than you know.

Buy me a coffee.

Before you go...

If this essay stayed with you, I think you’ll enjoy Sixteen Candles (1984). It isn’t the same story, though it carries the same feeling of growing up before you realize you’re already leaving a part of yourself behind. If you’re in the mood for something that feels nostalgic, a little messy, and full of the small moments that end up meaning everything, I’d recommend giving it a watch.

Reach out: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

Tonight, I caught myself wishing for something that doesn’t make any sense.

I wish there were another me.

It’s not about having someone to split my responsibilities with or live another version of my life. I don’t need someone to attend meetings for me or answer emails while I disappear for a while. That’s not the kind of “another me” I mean.

I mean someone who arrives already knowing.

Someone who doesn’t need an introduction to my heart.

It’s late as I write this. The room is quiet in the particular way it only becomes after everyone else has gone to sleep. My desk is cluttered with things I promised myself I’d put away tomorrow. A half-empty glass of water sits beside me. The light from the lamp only reaches the edges of this notebook, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. Somehow, this is always the hour when my thoughts stop behaving like thoughts and start behaving like people waiting outside my door.

They knock.

One after another.

I let them in.

And somewhere between all of them, this strange wish appeared.

I wish there were another me sitting across this table. Someone who is just here to listen without making me translate myself first.

I’ve realized something about emotions that I don’t think I’ve ever admitted out loud.

The hardest part isn’t feeling them.

The hardest part is explaining them.

Every feeling arrives carrying a suitcase full of context. Before I can tell someone that a sentence hurt me, I have to explain who said it. Then I have to explain who that person is. Then why their opinion matters more than I’d like to admit. Then I have to go back months, sometimes years, because pain is rarely born on the same day it’s felt. It has a history. It collects evidence. It asks to be understood from the beginning.

By the time I’ve unpacked all of that…

The feeling itself has already gone quiet.

Sometimes I don’t even know if people misunderstand me because they’re incapable of understanding… Or because I get tired halfway through explaining.

There are moments when I stop talking in the middle of a sentence, smile instead, and say, “It’s okay.” Because the explanation suddenly feels heavier than the sadness.

I think that’s why the idea of another me feels so comforting.

I imagine looking up from this notebook and finding someone who already knows why certain names change my voice. Someone who remembers conversations without me repeating them. Someone who doesn’t ask, “What happened?” because they were already there when it did.

Just…

“Oh.”

“I know.”

I think those two words would heal something in me. It’s not because they’d fix my problems. But because they would spare me from turning every emotion into a presentation.

Sometimes it feels like my heart has to prepare a slideshow before anyone is allowed to enter.

And I wonder how many feelings I’ve abandoned simply because I couldn’t bear explaining them one more time.

The strange thing is that I’ve spent so long convincing myself I don’t need anyone.

I like being alone.

I enjoy my own company.

Silence has never frightened me.

There are days when I disappear into my own thoughts so completely that hours pass without me noticing.

So why am I sitting here writing page after page about wishing someone existed?

Maybe because solitude and understanding have never been the same thing.

Being alone has never hurt me.

Being untranslated does.

Maybe that’s the real loneliness no one talks about.

The absence of effortless understanding..

Of course, I know this person can’t exist.

Even another version of me wouldn’t truly be me.

If we lived different days, we’d become different people.

That’s all it takes for two lives to begin drifting apart.

Maybe if another me really did sit across from me tonight, we’d spend the first hour arguing over who changed.

Maybe we’d realize we don’t understand each other as perfectly as we imagined.

Maybe we’d have to explain ourselves too.

And somehow…

That thought makes me a little sad.

Because it means the place I’m trying to return to has never existed.

I’m homesick for a person who was never real.

Still, I like imagining them.

I imagine sliding a cup of tea across the table.

They wouldn’t ask me why I’ve been quiet lately.

They’d already know.

They wouldn’t tell me everything happens for a reason.

They wouldn’t search for advice.

They’d simply nod.

Out of recognition.....

There’s something incredibly beautiful about being recognized.

As if someone looked at the tangled mess inside you and quietly said,

“Yes.

That looks exactly like you.”

Maybe that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

Just one place where I could arrive exactly as I am, before the explanations begin.

Until then, I suppose I’ll keep doing this.

I’ll keep coming back to this little desk after the day has finished unfolding. I’ll keep letting the room fall silent enough for my thoughts to gather around me. I’ll keep writing to someone who isn’t there, hoping that somewhere between these pages, my words can stop explaining and simply exist.

Maybe that’s the closest I’ll ever come to meeting another me.

And maybe…

for tonight…

that’s enough.

Writing these essays has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. If you’d like to support the work and help me continue creating pieces like this,

you can buy me a coffee.

Every contribution helps me keep this space alive and gives me more time to keep showing up here week after week. Either way, I’m grateful you’re reading.

Reach out: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

I also wrote a little book called “For All the Wrong Reasons.”

It’s about a girl who moves to a small autumn town called Maplewood… only to find herself falling for her roommate’s boyfriend. It’s a story about wanting someone you probably shouldn’t, and all the messiness that follows.

If you’re a member of Hasif’s Porchlight Club ($3/month), you can read it for free.

Alternatively, you can purchase it separately for $5.

Join the club here or
Buy the book here

I think we spend too much time trying to know people and too little time trying to understand them. Those two things sound similar, but they couldn’t be more different. Knowing someone is easy. You learn where they work, what they studied, what food they like, the songs they keep replaying, the places they dream of visiting. Understanding someone is something else entirely. It’s trying to answer a question that most people never even ask: What kind of life created this person? Because nobody wakes up one morning and becomes who they are. Every opinion, every habit, every insecurity, every dream has been shaped by hundreds of moments that nobody else got to witness. And I think that’s why people fascinate me. Every person is carrying a world that the rest of us only get tiny glimpses of.

The best analogy I can think of is this. Imagine standing outside an old cathedral. From the outside, you can admire the walls, the windows, the towers, and maybe even take a few pictures before walking away. But if that’s all you do, you’ve completely missed the point of the building. The real beauty isn’t only in what you can see from the street. It’s in the echoes inside, the light that falls through stained glass at a certain hour, the worn-out steps that thousands of people climbed before you, and the quiet corners where stories have been sitting for decades. People are exactly like that. Most of us only admire the outside of each other. We rarely step inside. And even when we do, we leave before we’ve understood why the place was built the way it was.

I’ve noticed that every person has certain rooms they keep returning to, even if they don’t realize it. Spend enough time with someone and you’ll hear the same ideas appearing in different conversations. One day they’re talking about ambition, another day they’re talking about freedom, and somehow those two conversations are secretly about the same thing. Someone else keeps bringing up loyalty, respect, or feeling left behind. At first it sounds like they’re just sharing opinions, but after a while you realize they’re actually describing themselves. People don’t repeat things because they have nothing new to say. They repeat the things that have left the deepest marks on them. The heart has a strange habit of revisiting places it hasn’t completely understood yet.

I also think people reveal themselves through what they notice. Put ten people in the same room and every one of them will walk away remembering something different. One notices how beautiful the lighting was. Another notices that someone looked lonely. Someone else remembers the conversation, while another remembers the silence between conversations. Isn’t that interesting? The world stays the same, yet every person walks away with a completely different version of it. That’s because we don’t just see reality. We see reality through the architecture we’ve built inside ourselves. The things that catch our attention often say more about us than the things we’re actually looking at.

One mistake I used to make was judging people too quickly. I’d see someone being distant and assume they didn’t care. I’d meet someone who talked too much and assume they loved attention. But the older I get, the less confidence I have in first impressions. Distance can be someone’s way of feeling safe. Constant talking can be another person’s way of avoiding silence because silence reminds them of something they’d rather not revisit. Even confidence can sometimes be fear wearing better clothes. The more people I meet, the more I realize that behavior is often just the final chapter of a story I haven’t read yet. Judging someone after seeing only the ending is a bit like reviewing a movie after watching the last ten minutes.

Time changes everything. I don’t think people reveal themselves because they eventually decide to be honest. I think they reveal themselves because life slowly introduces you to different versions of them. You meet the version that celebrates, the version that grieves, the version that fails, the version that falls in love, and the version that has absolutely no idea what they’re doing. None of those versions are fake. They’re all real. They’re simply different rooms inside the same person. That’s why I find it impossible to describe someone with a single word. Nobody is just confident, or shy, or kind, or difficult. Human beings are far too complicated to fit inside adjectives.

Maybe that’s also why listening has become so much more interesting to me than asking questions. Most people listen for information. I like listening for patterns. I listen for the stories people tell more than once, the memories that still make their voice change, the dreams they casually mention before quickly moving on as if they never said them. Those little moments tell me far more than carefully prepared answers ever could. It’s almost as if every person keeps accidentally dropping pieces of a map without realizing it. If you’re patient enough, those pieces eventually begin to fit together.

What fascinates me most is that two people can experience the exact same event and walk away carrying two completely different worlds inside them. One person goes through heartbreak and becomes afraid of love. Another goes through heartbreak and learns to love more honestly. One person grows up with very little and becomes endlessly grateful. Another grows up with very little and spends their whole life feeling that something is missing. The event isn’t always what shapes us. Sometimes it’s the meaning we give to the event that quietly redraws the blueprint of who we become. That’s why understanding someone requires more curiosity than certainty. The moment you think you’ve figured someone out is usually the moment you’ve stopped seeing them.

I don’t think it’s possible to fully understand another human being, and maybe that’s a good thing. There should always be rooms we haven’t walked into yet, conversations we haven’t had, and parts of someone’s story that unfold only when life decides it’s time. Maybe knowing someone isn’t about reaching the end of the map. Maybe it’s about never losing the desire to keep exploring it. Because every person you meet is carrying an invisible architecture built from ordinary days that somehow became unforgettable, from words they still remember years later, from people who stayed, people who left, and from countless quiet moments that slowly taught them how to see the world. And if you ever get the privilege of being invited into that inner world, don’t rush through it looking for answers. Walk slowly. Pay attention to the details. Sometimes the smallest corner explains the entire building.

Writing these essays has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. If you’d like to support the work and help me continue creating pieces like this,

you can buy me a coffee.

Every contribution helps me keep this space alive and gives me more time to keep showing up here week after week. Either way, I’m grateful you’re reading.

Reach out: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

I also wrote a little book called “For All the Wrong Reasons.”

It’s about a girl who moves to a small autumn town called Maplewood… only to find herself falling for her roommate’s boyfriend. It’s a story about wanting someone you probably shouldn’t, and all the messiness that follows.

If you’re a member of Hasif’s Porchlight Club ($3/month), you can read it for free.

Alternatively, you can purchase it separately for $5.

Join the club here or

Buy the book here

I think one of the greatest scams ever sold to human beings is the idea that everyone is supposed to be normal.

Who decided that?

Was there a meeting? Did all eight billion people gather somewhere and vote on what counts as acceptable behavior? Did someone take attendance?

Because from where I’m standing, “normal” seems to change every five minutes.

In school, being obsessed with books is weird. A few years later, people call you intelect or performative. Talking to yourself is weird until someone calls it self-reflection. Spending hours on a hobby is weird until you become good at it, and then everybody suddenly thinks it’s impressive.

The rules keep moving.

That is why I think more people should just be the weird fish.

Imagine a giant ocean filled with fish. Most of them swim in the same direction. Same speed. Same route. Same everything.

Then there is one fish.

This fish swims a little differently. Maybe it takes a strange path. Maybe it likes exploring places the others ignore. Maybe it asks questions instead of following the crowd.

The other fish stare.

“Why are you going that way?”

“Why are you doing that?”

“That’s not how fish usually swim.”

Meanwhile, the weird fish is just trying to enjoy its life.

I feel like many of us spend years trying to avoid becoming that fish.

We edit ourselves constantly.

We hide interests.

We pretend to like things which we don’t.

We laugh at jokes we don’t find funny.

We agree with opinions we don’t actually believe.

All because we are terrified somebody might think we’re strange.

Which is funny because everybody is strange.

Every single person.

Some people memorize football statistics from ten years ago. Some people watch the same movie twenty times. Some people have conversations with fictional characters in their heads while showering.

Human beings are walking collections of odd habits.

The difference is that some people hide theirs better.

I used to think confidence meant becoming someone that everybody liked.

Now I think confidence is realizing that somebody will always find you weird anyway.

You could become the most polished, careful, socially approved version of yourself and somebody would still have a problem.

You like reading? Weird.

You don’t like reading? Weird.

You talk too much? Weird.

You are quiet? Also weird.

At some point you realize you’re playing a game that cannot be won.

That realization is strangely freeing.

The weird fish understands something the others don’t.

The ocean is too big to spend your whole life worrying about who is watching you swim.

Most people are busy thinking about themselves.

That embarrassing thing you said three weeks ago?

Nobody remembers.

That awkward moment at a party?

Gone.

That time you waved back at someone who wasn’t waving at you?

A tragedy for approximately twelve seconds.

Then everyone returned to worrying about their own lives.

We often imagine ourselves standing under a giant spotlight.

In reality, everybody else thinks they’re standing under the spotlight too.

Nobody is paying as much attention as we think.

There is another reason I like the weird fish.

The interesting things in life usually come from people who are willing to look a little ridiculous.

Someone looked at a skateboard and thought, “What if I stood on this and rolled downhill?”

Someone looked at a camera and thought, “What if I pointed this at myself and talked?”

Someone looked at coffee and decided one cup wasn’t enough.

Human progress owes a lot to people who ignored the urge to blend in.

Every hobby, invention, story, song, business, and idea began with someone doing something that probably looked odd at first.

The crowd usually laughs before it understands.

That doesn’t mean every unusual idea is genius.

Sometimes a weird idea is just a weird idea.

But at least it’s yours.

There is something sad about reaching the end of your life and realizing you spent most of it performing for an audience that wasn’t even paying attention.

Imagine becoming an expert at being somebody else.

Imagine earning a gold medal in pretending.

Imagine perfecting a version of yourself that never actually existed.

That sounds exhausting. Right?

I think many people are carrying around versions of themselves that were created for other people.

The version that parents wanted.

The version that classmates approved of.

The version that social media rewarded.

After a while, it becomes difficult to tell where those versions end and where you begin.

The weird fish has an advantage.

It spends less energy performing.

It doesn’t need to remember which mask belongs in which room.

It just swims.

There is peace in that.

A lot of people assume acceptance comes first and authenticity comes second.

I think it’s usually the opposite.

You become yourself first.

Then the right people find you.

The internet proves this every day.

No matter how specific your interest is, there are probably thousands of people who share it.

People collect vintage maps.

People build miniature cities.

People spend weekends identifying birds.

People write essays about fish analogies. (Guilty)

Somewhere out there, another person is excited about the exact thing you thought made you strange.

The world is much bigger than we imagine.

You don’t need approval from everybody.

You just need a few people who understand your particular flavor of weird.

That is enough.

And honestly, weird is often a compliment disguised as criticism.

When someone calls you weird, what they’re usually saying is that you don’t fit into the category they expected.

That’s not always a problem.

Sometimes it means you’re paying attention to your own life instead of following a script.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of the word normal.

Normal according to who?

Normal compared to what?

Normal for which person?

The moment you look closely, the whole concept starts falling apart.

Maybe the goal was never to be normal.

Maybe the goal was simply to be honest.

To enjoy what you enjoy.

To care about what you care about.

To build a life that actually feels like yours.

That sounds much more interesting than winning a competition nobody remembers entering.

So yes, be the weird fish.

Take the strange route.

Ask the question.

Wear the thing.

Make the thing.

Love the thing.

Enjoy the thing.

The ocean is already full of fish trying very hard to look identical.

One more copy won’t change anything.

A fish that swims in its own direction might discover parts of the ocean nobody else gets to see.

And if somebody thinks that’s weird?

Who cares.

Writing these essays has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. If you’d like to support the work and help me continue creating pieces like this,

you can buy me a coffee.

Every contribution helps me keep this space alive and gives me more time to keep showing up here week after week. Either way, I’m grateful you’re reading.

Reach out: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

I also wrote a little book called “For All the Wrong Reasons.”

It’s about a girl who moves to a small autumn town called Maplewood… only to find herself falling for her roommate’s boyfriend. It’s a story about wanting someone you probably shouldn’t, and all the messiness that follows.

If you’re a member of Hasif’s Porchlight Club ($3/month), you can read it for free.
Alternatively, you can purchase it separately for $5.

Join the club here or
Buy the book here

I was lying on my bed doing absolutely nothing. My phone was next to me, the fan was making that same sound it has probably been making for months, and I was scrolling through old photos because apparently that is a form of self-destruction I enjoy participating in. I kept going further and further back until I found photos of versions of myself that don’t even feel like me anymore. Different haircuts. Different clothes. Different dreams. Different worries.

The weird thing about old photos is that you remember things you weren’t supposed to remember. You see a picture and suddenly you’re back in that exact moment. You remember what you wanted. You remember what you thought your life was going to look like. You remember the things you were waiting for. Looking at those photos felt like meeting old roommates I used to share a body with. Every version of me wanted something. One version wanted to leave. One version wanted to stay. One version wanted love. One version wanted attention. One version wanted freedom even though idk from what. One version just wanted somebody to understand him. And for some reason I felt sad thinking about all of them because every single version of me spent so much time feeling guilty for wanting more from life.

I think that’s something people don’t talk about enough. The guilt. Everybody talks about being thankful or having gratitude or appreciating what you already have. Those things matter, obviously. Yet somewhere along the way people started acting like gratitude and desire cannot exist in the same room. As if wanting better things for yourself automatically means you hate your current life. As if looking toward the future means you’re disrespecting the present. I have never understood that. Thats why I never talk aboht this out often. I mean I can be thankful for where I am and still want a different tomorrow. I can appreciate the people in my life and still wish for relationships that feel much more deeper. I can love my city and still dream about another one. I can be grateful for what I have while admitting there are things I still hope to find. Those feelings don’t fight each other. They sit beside each other every day. I don’t understand why people don’t get that orelse they feel the same way and they are not just admitting out loud? maybe.

When I was younger, I genuinely thought there would come a point where I would finally feel satisfied and stop wanting things. I thought there would be some magical finish line. Some moment where I would wake up, look around, and think, yes, this is it. This is exactly how I imagined everything. That moment never came. Every time I reached something I once wanted, life introduced another horizon. Another possibility. Another version of myself waiting somewhere in the distance. For a long time I thought that meant something was wrong with me. I thought I was asking for too much. I thought I should just be happy with whatever was already in front of me. Looking back, I think I wasted years arguing with my own heart. My heart kept pointing toward things it wanted and my brain kept responding with a list of reasons why wanting them was selfish.

The saddest part is that I wasn’t even dreaming about impossible things. Most of the things I wanted were painfully ordinary. I wanted friendships that didn’t feel one-sided. I wanted conversations that lasted until midnight. I wanted work that made me excited to wake up. I wanted a room that felt like mine. I wanted to travel. I wanted somebody to choose me without hesitation. I wanted memories I would still smile about years later. I wanted to become somebody I was proud of. Yet even with simple desires like those, I always felt like I needed to justify them. As if I was standing in front of an invisible committee asking permission to want a better life. Looking back now, that feels ridiculous. Nobody was stopping me except me.

Sometimes I wonder how many people spend their entire lives waiting for permission. Waiting for permission to leave. Waiting for permission to start over. Waiting for permission to chase something that excites them. Waiting for permission to want more than survival. I think about that a lot because I see it everywhere. I see people staying in places they have already outgrown. I see people pretending they don’t care about things they care about deeply. I see people shrinking their dreams until they become small enough to carry comfortably. Then one day they wake up and realize years have passed. The life they kept postponing is still waiting for them, except now there is less time.

That’s what I keep coming back to lately. Time. Every year of my life feels shorter than the one before it. Summers disappear faster. Birthdays arrive sooner. People leave unexpectedly. Entire chapters end before I fully understand that they began. There are nights when I look around and realize that the things I spent years looking forward to are now memories. That thought breaks my heart every single time. Life moves whether I participate in it or not. The clock doesn’t care if I’m scared. The calendar doesn’t care if I’m ready. Tomorrow arrives anyway.

So if I’m being honest, I don’t think wanting better things for yourself is the problem. I think the real tragedy is convincing yourself you don’t deserve them. I think the real tragedy is spending years apologizing for your own hopes. I think the real tragedy is looking at the life you secretly want and deciding you’re asking for too much.

Because every version of me that I saw in those old photos wanted something. Every version was reaching toward something. Every version believed there was a beautiful future waiting somewhere ahead. Tonight, looking at all of them, I realized none of those versions deserved guilt. They deserved encouragement. They deserved somebody to tell them that wanting more from life wasn’t selfish. It was human. And maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to tell myself all along.

You are allowed to want better things for yourself. A better life. Better days. Better friendships. Better love. Better memories. Better opportunities. Better mornings. Better dreams. You are allowed to look at your future and hope it holds something beautiful. You are allowed to become attached to that hope. You are allowed to chase it. And if there is one thing I wish every older version of me knew sooner, it is that wanting a beautiful life was never something that needed forgiveness.

Also Inspo for this came from a: reel

Writing these essays has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. If you’d like to support the work and help me continue creating pieces like this,

you can buy me a coffee.

Every contribution helps me keep this space alive and gives me more time to keep showing up here week after week. Either way, I’m grateful you’re reading.

Reach out: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

I also wrote a little book called “For All the Wrong Reasons.”

It’s about a girl who moves to a small autumn town called Maplewood… only to find herself falling for her roommate’s boyfriend. It’s a story about wanting someone you probably shouldn’t, and all the messiness that follows.

If you’re a member of Hasif’s Porchlight Club ($3/month), you can read it for free.

Alternatively, you can purchase it separately for $5.

Join the club here or
Buy the book here

It’s Friday night and I’m sitting on the floor because my bed feels too big for one person right now. The lamp in the corner is the only thing on, throwing that warm yellow light across my room that always makes everything look softer than it actually is. My phone is somewhere behind me. I know it is. It buzzed a few minutes ago and I didn’t turn around to check because I already know how this works. If it’s someone I care about, they’ll want something. If it’s someone I don’t care about, they’ll want something too. Funny how that works. There is a half-finished drink next to me and a pile of clothes on the chair that has become more of a storage unit than a chair. I keep looking around my room like it might suddenly reveal something important to me. Some answer. Some clue. Some reason why I keep ending up here, sitting alone with my own thoughts while everyone else seems to be out there living inside scenes from movies.

The thing about always doing things alone is that nobody notices when it starts happening. People act like independence arrives with a speech and fireworks like a end of movie scene where the main character finally decided to become stronger. Mine arrived through a hundred small moments. Through unanswered messages. Through cancelled plans. Through sitting with things I couldn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want to sound pathetic. Through teaching myself how to stop expecting people to show up. Somewhere along the way I became the person who figures it out. The person who handles it. The person who doesn’t need much. People seem to love that version of me. They admire it. They trust it. They point at it like it’s some beautiful quality. What they don’t understand is that I didn’t build this version of myself because I wanted to. I built it because nobody was coming.

I think that’s the part that hurts. Everyone talks about the outcome but nobody talks about the process. They see a person who can survive on their own and think that’s impressive. They don’t see all the nights that created him They don’t see the messages typed and deleted. They don’t see the moments where something wonderful happened and there wasn’t anyone I wanted to call. They don’t see the moments where something terrible happened and there wasn’t anyone I wanted to call then either. There is a certain kind of loneliness that changes your brain. After a while you stop reaching for people. After a while your first instinct becomes silence. After a while you sit with every feeling by yourself because that’s what you’re used to doing.

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to be someone’s first thought. Not their second thought or their convenient thought. Their first thought! The person they immediately want to tell things to. The person they look for in a crowded room. The person they can’t wait to get home to. I spend so much of my life watching people choose each other. Friends choosing friends. Lovers choosing lovers. Families choosing families. Everyone reaching toward someone while I stand there pretending I don’t care because caring feels embarrassing at my age. I know I should have outgrown this feeling by now. I know wanting people isn’t supposed to feel like admitting defeat. Yet here I am, sitting on the floor at midnight, wishing somebody would think of me before I have to remind them that I exist.

The worst part is that I look fine. That’s always the worst part. I still laugh at jokes. I still answer texts. I still show up. I still make plans. I still ask people how they’re doing and listen to the answers. I still remember birthdays. I still remember tiny details people tell me once and forget they ever said. I still give pieces of myself away like they’re endless. Then I come home and sit in rooms like this one and wonder why nobody ever seems curious about what’s happening inside my head. People know my favourite songs. People know my coffee order. People know the version of me that exists in daylight. Very few people know the version that appears after midnight when the room gets quiet and all the distractions leave.

I keep thinking about how easy it is for people to love someone who asks for nothing. That version of me has always been popular. The understanding one. The patient one. The low-maintenance one. The one who says “it’s okay” before anyone even apologises. The one who never wants too much. The one who never needs too much. Somewhere along the way I became so good at being easy to keep around that people forgot I was a person and started treating me like a place. Somewhere they could visit whenever they felt lonely. Somewhere they could leave whenever they felt better. Somewhere that would still be there when they came back.

There are nights when I stare at my ceiling and wonder how many people would notice if I disappeared for a while. A week. A month. Long enough for my absence to become visible. Long enough for somebody to pause and think, where did he go? Then I feel guilty for even thinking like that because there are people who care about me. I know there are. The problem has never been whether people care. The problem is that caring and choosing are two different things. Caring and staying are two different things. Caring and seeing are two different things. People care about sunsets too. They still leave when the sun goes down.

I think I have spent years convincing myself that needing people is some kind of weakness. It sounds better to say I enjoy being alone. It sounds better to say I prefer my own company. It sounds better to joke about it. Everything sounds better than admitting that sometimes I want someone to sit beside me and make the world feel smaller. Sometimes I want someone to notice when I’m pulling away instead of waiting for me to explain it. Sometimes I want somebody to knock on the door of my life and stay long enough to learn where everything is.

Right now it’s getting late. The drink next to me is warm. The room is quieter than before. My phone hasn’t buzzed again. Somewhere outside there are cars passing and people laughing and entire lives unfolding. Somewhere people are being loved in ways that look effortless. Somewhere somebody is hearing the words they needed to hear. Somewhere somebody is being chosen.

I am here.

Still here.

In the same room. Under the same light. With the same thoughts I always end up having whenever the week finally slows down and there is nothing left to distract me from myself.

Of course I can do it alone.

I always do.

I’ll get up tomorrow. I’ll answer messages. I’ll make plans. I’ll carry my own bags. I’ll solve my own problems. I’ll make myself laugh. I’ll make myself feel better. I’ll continue being the person everyone expects me to be because that’s what I’ve always done.

I just wish that for once, before I figured everything out on my own, somebody would have looked at me and said, you don’t have to.

I think that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

Just one moment where I didn’t have to be the person holding everything together.

Just one moment where somebody reached for me before I reached for myself….

Writing these essays has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. If you’d like to support the work and help me continue creating pieces like this,

you can buy me a coffee.

Every contribution helps me keep this space alive and gives me more time to keep showing up here week after week. Either way, I’m grateful you’re reading.

Reach out: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

I also wrote a little book called “For All the Wrong Reasons.”

It’s about a girl who moves to a small autumn town called Maplewood… only to find herself falling for her roommate’s boyfriend. It’s a story about wanting someone you probably shouldn’t, and all the messiness that follows.

If you’re a member of Hasif’s Porchlight Club ($3/month), you can read it for free.
Alternatively, you can purchase it separately for $5.

Join the club here or
Buy the book here

postcards by hasif

Submit your Essays & Stories

Hello Fifi’s…

Read more

3 months ago · 57 likes · 6 comments · hasif 💌

Every time I think about that sentence, I feel like arguing with it. Then I feel like defending it. Then I feel like arguing with my defense. That’s the problem. I don’t think this fear comes from one place. I think it comes from a hundred different places that keep talking over each other. One part of me wants belonging so badly that it hurts. Another part of me feels suffocated the moment belonging starts becoming real. One part of me wants somebody to understand me. Another part is terrified of being understood incorrectly. One part wants to be seen. Another part wants to hide forever. I spend so much time moving between those feelings that I don’t even know where I stand anymore.

The older I get, the more I realize belonging sounds beautiful until I imagine what it actually requires. Belonging means somebody has an idea of who you are. Belonging means somebody starts building a version of you inside their head. Belonging means they think they know you. That thought alone makes me uncomfortable. Because what if they’re wrong? What if they understand only ten percent of me and spend years believing they’ve seen the whole picture? What if they mistake my silence for wisdom when it’s actually confusion? What if they mistake my confidence for certainty when I’m questioning everything? What if they mistake my writing for clarity when most of it comes from me trying to figure myself out in real time? The thought of becoming somebody else’s fixed idea feels terrifying when I still feel unfinished to myself.

I don’t think people talk enough about how strange it is to be in your twenties. Everyone keeps asking who you are while you’re still trying to figure it out yourself. Every year I feel different from the person I was before. Things I once cared about feel distant. Things I once hated suddenly make sense. Entire beliefs disappear. New interests appear out of nowhere. Some days I feel like a collection of temporary versions trying to act like a permanent person. So when somebody wants to belong to me or wants me to belong to them, a part of me immediately wonders which version they’re talking about. The version of me right now? The version from six months ago? The version I’ll become next year? I barely know who is showing up each morning. How am I supposed to hand that uncertainty to somebody else?

I think part of it comes from the fact that I don’t know who I am half the time. That sounds ridiculous because I write so much about myself. Thousands of words. Hundreds of essays. Endless reflections. Yet most of those words are me trying to figure myself out while writing them. People read an essay and assume certainty. They assume I’ve reached some conclusion. Meanwhile I am sitting there questioning the same thing again three days later. One year I believe something with my entire heart. The next year I can barely recognize the person who wrote it. I change constantly. My interests change. My priorities change. My opinions change. Entire versions of me disappear without warning. So whenever somebody starts seeing me in a certain way, I immediately wonder how long that version of me will even exist.

There is something terrifying about becoming a fixed character in somebody else’s story. The moment people think they know you, they start filling in the blanks themselves. They start creating explanations. They start building an identity around you. Suddenly you’re the funny one. The emotional one. The quiet one. The writer. The overthinker. The ambitious one. The dreamer. The reliable one. Everybody creates their own version. Then one day you do something that doesn’t fit the version they built and you can almost feel the confusion. You can almost feel them trying to fit you back inside the box they made. That’s the thing that scares me. I don’t want to become somebody’s simplified understanding. I don’t want to spend my life being translated into smaller pieces just so I become easier to understand.

I think people underestimate how exhausting it is to be perceived. Every person who knows you carries around a different version of you. None of them are wrong. None of them are complete either. Sometimes I feel like I am split across dozens of people, each carrying a different fragment. Then somebody says they know me and I want to ask which version they’re talking about.

I don’t feel stable enough to belong to anybody because I don’t feel stable enough to belong to myself. That sounds sadder than I mean it to sound. It isn’t self-hatred. It isn’t even insecurity. It’s just confusion.

The confusing part is that I spend so much time wanting people. I don’t think anyone who knows me would be surprised to hear that. I write because I want to connect. I share things because I want somebody on the other side of the screen to read a sentence and think, “thank God, I thought I was the only one.” I try to pay attention to people. I remember things about them. I care more than I admit. Yet whenever I start imagining a life where I truly belong somewhere, where there is no exit sign above the door and no distance left to hide behind, I feel this strange resistance growing inside me. It feels like standing in the ocean and wanting the wave to reach me while also wanting it to stop a few inches before it does.

I think I like the idea of people more than the reality of them sometimes. The idea asks for nothing. The reality asks for space. The reality asks for time. The reality asks for consistency. The reality keeps showing up every day. That’s what nobody tells you. Belonging isn’t built from grand moments. It is built from ordinary Tuesdays and forgotten conversations and showing up when there is nothing interesting to say. A part of me craves that. A part of me wants something so familiar that it stops feeling fragile. Then another part of me starts feeling restless. Restless at the thought of becoming predictable. Restless at the thought of being expected somewhere. Restless at the thought of somebody noticing when I’m gone.

I hate how contradictory that sounds. I hate reading those words back and recognizing myself in them. There are nights when all I want is somebody who knows me well enough to call me without warning. Somebody who feels so familiar that conversation becomes unnecessary. Somebody who feels woven into my life rather than placed beside it. Then there are nights when the exact same thought makes me uncomfortable. The idea of somebody having that much access to me. The idea of somebody knowing where to find me emotionally. The idea of becoming reachable. I don’t know why that scares me. I just know it does.

The truth is that I want connection in a way that embarrasses me. I want people. I want shared histories. I want inside jokes that survive for years. I want the comfort of being remembered. I want the feeling of reaching for somebody and finding them there. I want all of that. Yet whenever I admit it, another voice immediately appears and asks what happens after I get it. What happens when wanting turns into having. What happens when longing turns into reality. What happens when belonging stops being an idea and starts becoming a commitment.

I think what scares me most is the possibility that belonging requires a leap I keep trying to replace with thinking. I keep trying to understand my way into certainty. I keep trying to solve something that isn’t a puzzle. I keep trying to stand outside the experience and analyze it before participating in it. Yet some things only reveal themselves after you step inside them. Some things remain confusing until the very moment you stop demanding clarity from them.

That’s the part I keep resisting.

I keep waiting to feel ready.

I keep waiting to feel sure.

I keep waiting to feel settled.

Meanwhile the yearning never leaves.

It follows me everywhere.

It appears in random conversations.

It appears in the messages I reread.

It appears in the people I remember longer than I should.

It appears in every essay I write about connection while pretending the essay is about something else.

The yearning stays.

The fear stays too.

And every day they sit beside each other inside me, neither one winning, neither one leaving, both of them asking for something I still don’t know how to give.

Writing these essays has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. If you’d like to support the work and help me continue creating pieces like this,

you can buy me a coffee.

Every contribution helps me keep this space alive and gives me more time to keep showing up here week after week. Either way, I’m grateful you’re reading.

I also wrote a little book called “For All the Wrong Reasons.”

It’s about a girl who moves to a small autumn town called Maplewood… only to find herself falling for her roommate’s boyfriend. It’s a story about wanting someone you probably shouldn’t, and all the messiness that follows.

If you’re a member of Hasif’s Porchlight Club ($3/month), you can read it for free.

Alternatively, you can purchase it separately for $5.

Join the club here or
Buy the book here

postcards by hasif

Submit your Essays & Stories

Hello Fifi’s…

Read more

3 months ago · 30 likes · 4 comments · hasif 💌

I know a lot of people who are newer to Postcards by Hasif probably don’t fully know how these collaborations work, so before anything else, let me quickly explain.

Every month, I open a handful of collaboration spots where readers and writers from this community get the opportunity to write alongside me.

The process is fairly simple.

A writer begins by sharing an essay about a topic that matters to them. It could be a personal experience, a reflection, an observation, a memory, a question they can’t stop thinking about, or an idea they want to explore more deeply.

After reading their essay, I write a response.

I engage with their ideas, connect them to my own experiences, challenge certain perspectives, expand on others, and continue the conversation from my side.

The final piece becomes one shared essay containing two voices, two perspectives, and one larger conversation.

And honestly, these collaborations have become one of my favorite parts of Postcards by Hasif.

Every month, I get the opportunity to read perspectives that are completely different from my own. Different lives, different experiences, different ways of looking at the same feeling. And every single time, I’m reminded of how much depth people carry within them that rarely gets spoken about openly.

That’s why I’m excited to say that submissions are now officially open for August collaborations.

As always, I’ll be selecting 4–5 writers throughout the month to collaborate with.

Each selected writer will submit a 500–600 word essay, and I’ll follow it with a response of around 500 words. Together, the final piece becomes a collaborative essay that reads like a thoughtful dialogue between two people exploring the same idea from different angles. And it will be published in Postcards by Hasif.

Topics You Can Explore

Here are some themes you can write about if you’d like inspiration:

1. The Loneliness of Becoming Someone New

2. Why Some People Only Exist in Certain Versions of Us

3. The Quiet Panic of Time Moving Too Fast

4. The Human Need to Leave Something Behind

5. The Strange Intimacy of Being Remembered Incorrectly

6. Growing Older While Still Feeling Emotionally Young

7. The Things We Pretend Don’t Hurt Us

8. The Invisible Pressure to Have a Beautiful Life

9. The Emotional Weight of “Maybe”

10. Why Closure Rarely Feels Like Closure

11. The People We Become Around Different People

12. Missing Places More Than People

13. The Fear of Wasting Your Potential

14. The Soft Ache of Almost Relationships

15. Learning to Live Without Constant Validation

16. The Versions of Ourselves We Abandon to Survive

17. The Emotional Aftermath of Being Too Self-Aware

18. Why We Romanticize the Past Even When It Hurt

19. The Quiet Grief of Realizing Nobody Fully Knows You

20. The Exhaustion of Always Trying to Be Better

21. The Strange Art of Starting Over

22. The Fear of Becoming Replaceable

23. The Comfort of Imaginary Futures

24. Why We Keep Revisiting Old Conversations in Our Heads

25. The Emotional Distance Between Online and Real Life

26. The Feeling of Watching Your Life Instead of Living It

27. How Silence Changes Between Two People

28. The Hidden Loneliness of Independence

29. The Unspoken Competition Between People Online

30. The Desire to Disappear Without Actually Leaving

31. The Strange Ways We Try to Earn Love

32. The Fear That You’ve Already Met the Best Days of Your Life

33. Becoming Difficult to Reach Emotionally

34. The Tiny Lies We Tell Ourselves to Keep Going

35. The Quiet Embarrassment of Caring Too Much

36. The People Who Changed Us Without Realizing It

37. Why Certain Songs Feel Like Entire Time Periods

38. The Emotional Side Effects of Constant Self-Improvement

39. Learning to Sit With an Unfinished Life

40. The Strange Sadness of Outgrowing Your Dreams

41. The Comfort of Being Around People Who Expect Nothing From You

42. Why We Archive Our Lives Online

43. The Feeling of Being Emotionally Homesick

44. The Unnoticed Moments That End Up Defining Us

45. The Pressure to Turn Your Life Into Something Meaningful

46. Missing Who You Were Before the World Hardened You

47. The Quiet Fear That Everyone Else Understands Life Better Than You

48. The Emotional Impact of Living Through Screens

49. Why Some Goodbyes Never Fully Happen

50. The Relief of No Longer Needing to Prove Yourself

51. The Way Certain People Make Time Feel Different

52. The Loneliness Hidden Inside Productivity

53. How People Slowly Become Strangers

54. The Desire to Be Chosen Without Asking

55. The Quiet Shift From Dreaming to Surviving

56. The Feeling of Carrying Too Many Versions of Yourself

57. The Emotional Attachment We Form With Temporary Things

58. The Internal Conflict Between Wanting Attention and Wanting to Hide

59. The Strange Comfort of Knowing Nothing Lasts Forever

60. Learning to Accept That Some Questions Never Get Answered

You also don’t have to limit yourself to this list.

If you already have a personal essay, reflection, memoir-style piece, or story you’ve written that explores something meaningful to you, you’re welcome to submit that as well. Some of the best collaborations we’ve published came from people simply writing honestly about something they couldn’t stop thinking about.

And I think that honesty is what matters most here.

How the Collaboration Works

You’ll write a 500–600 word essay on a topic of your choice. It can be personal, reflective, analytical, observational, narrative, emotional, or anything in between. There is no “correct” style.

You do not need to arrive at a perfect conclusion. Sometimes the most meaningful essays are simply explorations of a feeling or question.

After reading your essay, I’ll write a response where I engage with your ideas and continue the conversation through my own perspective and experiences.

The Final Piece

Your essay will appear first, followed by my response, creating a collaborative essay of 1100+ words that feels more like a conversation than a traditional article.

Submission Details

Submissions are currently open for August.

You can submit your essay anytime during June and July, but earlier submissions naturally have a better chance of being selected since there are only a limited number of collaboration spots available.

You’re also welcome to submit older essays you’ve already written, as long as they fit the reflective tone of Postcards by Hasif.

If your essay gets selected, I’ll personally reach out through email to confirm the collaboration and discuss scheduling, titles, thumbnails, and publication dates.

Submission Guidelines

• Original writing only

• Essay length should be around 500–600 words

• Please send your submission as a Google Doc, Microsoft Word document, or PDF

• Avoid pasting the full essay directly into the email body

• Use a simple font such as Arial or Times New Roman, size 12

• Include your name and your Substack publication at the top of the document

• You may also include a short optional bio at the end

Send your essay to: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

Subject line: Co-Author Submission

In the email body include: [Chosen Topic] – [Your Name]

You’re also welcome to include links to your Substack or social media.

If Your Essay Is Selected

You’ll receive a confirmation email & payment link.

A $50 feature fee will be required only if your essay is selected. Entry to submit your essay is completely free.

Before you jump in, I just want to say something important. I know when I introduce something like this, it can feel a bit transactional. But please don’t take it the wrong way. Postcards by Hasif will always remain free to read. I have no intention of turning it into a paid publication, and I never will. Every piece I write, your submissions, my reflections, and my essays will always be accessible to anyone who wants to read them. I also don’t want to bring in brands, sponsorships, or ads. This space is not about marketing, it isn’t about influencer culture, and it certainly isn’t about monetizing in a way that compromises the essence of what this publication stands for. This is about creating a genuine community of thinkers and writers, exploring topics that matter, sharing perspectives, and giving both you and me a chance to engage meaningfully with readers. The $50 fee isn’t about making a profit; it’s a small way to ensure this collaboration is valued and taken seriously while also helping me maintain the publication sustainably. Postcards by Hasif will always be my voice, my vision, my space. This collaboration is simply a way to bring in other voices I respect, share ideas, and build something together without compromising what this place stands for.

Once payment is completed, we’ll coordinate with you via email to finalize the title, thumbnail, and posting dates.

Your essay will be published in Postcards by Hasif (135,000+ readers).

Exposure to 135,000+ readers: Your voice will reach a large, engaged audience that values thoughtful, reflective writing.

Recommendation of Your Substack: As part of the collaboration, I will recommend your Substack publication for a week. This means followers will see “Postcards by Hasif recommends {Your Publication Name},” increasing traffic to your page.

Collaborative Content: This is more than just a guest post. You’re collaborating with me in a meaningful way, creating a written conversation that will resonate with readers.

What You’ll Receive

• Publication on Postcards by Hasif

• Exposure to 130,000+ readers

• A collaborative essay featuring my written response

• A one-week recommendation of your Substack publication

Your publication will appear as:

“Postcards by Hasif recommends [Your Publication Name]”

which helps introduce your writing to new readers within the community.

I’ve genuinely loved reading the perspectives so many of you have shared through these collaborations over the past few months. Every essay has brought a completely different lens to feelings and experiences we often carry quietly without talking about openly.

If you’ve been thinking about submitting something, August is now open.

I’m looking forward to reading your work.