I remember sitting still in my college classroom as my teacher was asking everyone what were our concepts for our grad projects. I, was a little hesitant at first but perhaps I knew by heart it was the fact that there was one thing I knew I could translate through my project was the partition. I still dont know if it was cultural appropriation but perhaps what I do know is how much that project is close to my heart, the idea of grief across 5 generations depicted through 5 pieces of garments, the tears I had seeing my collection all together. And those 6 months were my cherished time of doing something that truly mattered to me. The research, the conversations, the imagination, it was all worth the effort. But I still question myself, did I do justice to it.

The word that sat underneath all 5 garments, underneath all that grief, was muhājir (Urdu: مہاجر ). A refugee in your own country. Not the kind of refugee that crosses into a foreign land and is at least named as an outsider, but the kind that gets relocated within the very borders they were told belonged to them, and still ends up a stranger there. That is the part of the partition we dont talk about enough, the after. Not just the crossing, the killing, the trains, but the decades that followed of being somewhere and belonging nowhere, of being Indian or Pakistani on paper and yet unknown, unclaimed, unfamiliar. And I think thats the thread that ties my Nani's generation to mine, to the one after mine. They carried the very soul in their bodies, the actual displacement, the feeling of being a stranger. Maybe the project was never about getting the history right, it was about admitting that I too, in my own smaller unbled way, am a mohajir of memory.

The first three lines read: “A generation of people who had to through the atrocities, the very people who you loved and cherished being unalived in front of you, and the grief so many generations have carried, makes me really wonder is this the humanity we all talk about?”

History has seen wars, siblings plotted against each other, people killing their own friends for mere benefits but perhaps nothing feels as personal and gut wrenching than the partition of Punjab, India as a whole. Something a lot of us are familiar through books, or through the shared stories in our families. And I am one of them.

The partition didn’t just divide land, it divided the souls of people, of communities that would coexist in the very mohalla that once celebrated each other, it divided the very belief that we all are equal. It didn’t just affect the ones who had to go through it but the very generations blown up with the hatred that runs in their blood. And maybe we lost a bit of our humanity while it took place, the gore tales of what women had to go through, the lands that go stolen, the children, the men, it showed us the cruel reality, the disheveled reality. And there are countless books, memoirs that you should take time to go through to understand it yourself, this article is more on the idea of the very people who we have lost/ are on the verge of losing.

Lahore, might just be another city for you but it feels like my origin. A city so distinct in my memories, I could remember at the back of my hand the map of where I could have lived. In my recent article I talked about the feeling of calling a place home but never knowing it actually exists or not, and Lahore is that for me. Mind it I might have not had the privilege to visit and step on the very land my forefathers walked but Lahore feels like home.

I think about this often, how we treat history like it’s a textbook chapter and not a person sitting three feet away from us, still breathing, still remembering. We wait for documentaries, for anniversary specials, for someone else to ask the questions, when the answer is right there; in your grandmother’s friend circle, in the old man who sits outside the sabzi mandi, in the woman who still flinches at the sound of a train. They are not archives. They are not footnotes waiting to be discovered fifty years from now in someone’s thesis. They are here, and they are leaving, and every single one of them takes an entire unwritten book with them when they go.

I don’t know when it happened, when we collectively decided that history only mattered once it was safely in the past tense, once there was no one left to correct us. I still remember how my nani would brush off the topic or digress into another everytime a young iara would ask her about the independence of India. And perhaps thats the shared emotion amongst so many of our grandparents, parents even. Perhaps its easier that way. Easier to read about the trains that arrived with no one alive in them than to sit with someone who watched it happen and ask them what they felt that day. I still crave the idea of knowing more, if i would have pushed nani to tell me her side of the story but the grief wouldn’t let her. There’s this line from the movie where a grandpa refuses to talk about it cause he believes it should end with them, that their silence is a way of protecting the younger generation. And they might be right, but that ease is exactly the problem. The idea of the younger generation not knowing is also a way of not warning them, them being aware of what could or will happen. Sadly, we are so close to the last of them, and so far from actually listening.

This isn’t an article about the partition at all; it’s a plea. Go sit with your grandparents, your dadi, your nani, the old uncle at the corner store who never talks. Ask them. Not for a school project, not for content, not because its the 80th anniversary and it feels timely. Ask them because in fifteen years there wont be anyone left to ask, and all we will have is what historians pieced together secondhand, and it will never carry the weight of a voice that was actually there.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of our independence, something a lot of us grew up celebrating but sadly I never felt fine during these days, it would bring back the haunting flashbacks I had read about, heard about first hand from my Nani & her friends. I just couldn’t. And I would always wonder why was I like the sore thorn amongst the roses. Sure it was a great day for us all, but at what cost? Perhaps it is a day of celebration but for me it’s a day of mourning of the countless innocent lives.

Accountability is perhaps the only word that I find we all fail to address as a real problem. We all tend to do things and call it ohh standing up for myself or ohh why should I care I did what was right for me but fail to realize that some of our actions might actually have harmed or hampered someone. That when one’s wrong we need to be “accountable” and own up to the fact that we fucked up. Yes we fucked up and we apologize. It is that simple. Maybe it again depends to what extent your actions have hampered someone and each situation will have its own repercussions but the basic human decency to address and hold oneself accountable is the need of the hour.

It’s the disappearing act with a “hey I was busy” three months later like nothing happened. It’s the “I wasn’t ready” that somehow never requires an apology for the mess left behind, just an explanation for why they get to be forgiven. It’s being told you’re “too much” for wanting a text back, and never once being told he was too little for not sending one. Or perhaps it’s the lack of acknowledgment for the very merit we all talk about in the education that fails to protect the lives of young kids due a rigged system with constant failures and leaks. Accountability, for most men I’ve encountered, isn’t a mirror. It’s a mirror they’ve turned to face you instead.

And the wildest part is how quietly this gets normalized. Nobody sits you down and tells you “hey, you will spend your twenties collecting almost-apologies.” You just learn it. One man at a time. Or worse, a government at a time. Until you start flinching before the sentence even lands, because you already know the shape it’s going to take.

I’m not saying women are exempt from fault. I’ve fucked up. I’ve said things I shouldn’t have, held onto silence when I should’ve spoken, been the reason someone felt small. The difference is I said sorry. Not a perfect sorry, not always an immediate one, but a real one; the kind that doesn’t come with a footnote explaining why I was actually justified the whole time.

That’s the thing about accountability. It’s not a punishment. It’s not you losing. It’s just you, being a person, in front of another person, saying: I see what I did. And still, somehow, that’s the one thing men in my life have treated like it costs them a limb. Maybe that’s the actual epidemic.

Today more than ever, a system that failed the very citizens it promised a bright future to, I think as a sensible adult all you could do is be accountable and take necessary actions. I know with something as large as the governing body and something as sensitive as this, it is easier said than done but perhaps we all make mistakes and it is not the end of the world for us to acknowledge them, to bear the repercussions of it and perhaps take necessary steps to make amends and build one that actually cares for the youth. If one person stood up I understand it is easy to just ignore and move on but if an entire generation is telling you somethings wrong, perhaps just for once keep your male ego aside and look into it?

We are asking for the bare minimum in a system that gives us the right to question things, to stand up for our very existence cause tell me who are you actually doing this for- us right. We are the future and if you dont care about ours, we have to take matters in our own hand. It’s how easy we have been let off the hook for so long, so consistently, that owning up to harm has started to feel optional. Like a favor. Like something you do for someone if you really, really like them, instead of something you do because you’re a person who hurt another person.

I don’t want an apology anymore, if I’m honest. I want it to stop being rare.

I felt like I was wasting my potential, I remember the beautiful light I had coming in for the first two days while I was stuck to my bed with a 101 fever, I lowkey was mad at myself for not just shooting stuff to its fullest and just create. Why was I even doing this to myself? And honestly I was lowkey disappointed that I couldn’t even think of a fun substack article to post this week so I waited and waited and waited. Its Thursday today and lowkey I an a little better and so this article came up- the idea of maxing.

I remember when my dad told me about the wedding in jaipur, more than the wedding I was excited to utilize these 3 days to shoot as much of content as I could and I am not complaining I love what I do but at the end there were 2 videos which didnt turn out great and perhaps I came back moire exhausted than feeling great. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. But do I think I should have taken a different route? Maybe yes.

We live in a society that constantly tells you to make the most of things, you are told this in school, perhaps your parents squeeze things into your everyday routine at a tender age so you could bear the benefits of it later on. This has a certain influence derived from the AMERICAN DREAM, the idea of working and making mist till 40 and then just relaxing, and then finally living, except now that timeline’s been compressed into a single unbearable week where you’re supposed to relax AND grow AND document AND monetize the relaxing and growing, ideally before Monday. We didn’t inherit the dream, we inherited the deadline.

Maxing is just hustle culture that got a cuter typography. Nobody says “optimize your life” anymore because that sounds like a LinkedIn post from 2019, so instead we’ve broken it into bite sized, tiktok coded fragments; looksmax your face, funmax your Saturday, side quest your grocery run into main character content and because each piece sounds small and playful, we don’t realize that we’ve just rebuilt the same machine with better branding. The machine that says rest is only acceptable once it’s been productized. That a fever isn’t a fever, its wasted golden hour light.

I think what actually got me about the Jaipur thing wasn’t the fever, it was how fast my brain went from “I am sick” to “I am behind.” Behind who, on what, I genuinely couldn’t tell you. There was no client waiting, no deadline, nothing except this internal ledger I apparently keep of days I owe the algorithm or to show up for an audience that perhaps looks up to me. I lay in that bed doing the math 3 days, 2 unusable videos, x amount of light wasted; like content is a currency and my body had just committed theft against my own future.

And maybe that’s the actual sad part of maxing culture, not that we’re trying to make the most of things, wanting more from your one life that we’ve quietly redefined “the most” to mean “the most visible.”

Funmaxing isn’t about having fun anymore, its about having fun that photographs well. A side quest only counts if you can create an interesting narrative that amuses people. A conversation only counts if it lands. A trip only counts if you came back different, or at least came back with something to say about it. And that’s really where maxing culture stops being an internet thing and becomes just a way of being a person now.

It’s not only about captioning your life anymore, its bled into how we show up for the people around us. You go to a wedding and you’re not just at the wedding, you’re mentally clocking whether you talked to enough people, made enough of an impression, said the right funny thing to the right relative, left them thinking you were “on” that night. You go to dinner with friends and some part of you is auditing whether the conversation was good enough, whether you were fun enough, whether you main charactered it hard enough to have earned the evening. We’ve started performing our own lives back to the people actually in the room with us, not because we’re filming it, but because somewhere along the way “being present” quietly got replaced with “being impressive.”

I keep thinking about how nobody in that house asked me to max anything. The only person keeping score was me, for an audience that doesn’t exist. And I doubt this is just a me thing, or a content thing. You’re probably doing it right now with something. Maybe it’s not a fever, maybe it’s a slow Sunday you feel guilty for not “using,” or a version of yourself you think you should’ve brought to dinner last night, or a whole year you’ve quietly decided doesn’t count unless it ends in some kind of glow up. Somewhere you’ve got a ledger too, and someone you’re keeping score for who was never actually watching.

I’m not going to tell you to stop. I haven’t. But it might be worth checking who’s actually at the door before you let them in.

Throughout my life, I have lost a lot of single ones amongst journeys that’s quite normal as a human but me being the over analyzing one often would sit next to my washing machine trying to decode the trail of the other one. Where is it, how did it even vanish huh why me, would be certain things that would often cross my mind. Maybe, just maybe some are meant to be lone while others outlive in a pair.

You see this article had a certain trail to follow but perhaps has digressed into this whole new chapter accounting for the idea of human and their parasocial relationships. How in today’s age, we are the single one waiting for the pair. Because that’s what it is, isn’t it. We’ve all become socks in our own machines — spinning, hoping the other one turns up in the same load. Except instead of a dryer we’ve got an algorithm, and instead of a sibling sock we’ve got a stranger on our screen who laughs at the same shows, posts at 2am like we do, exists in a parasocial orbit close enough to feel like company without ever actually being in the room. We don’t lose people anymore so much as we lose the version of them we built in our heads — the one who was always going to text back, always going to understand, always going to complete the pair.

Think about it. You know their coffee order because they mentioned it in a story. You know their breakup timeline better than your own friend’s. You’ve watched them cry on camera and felt your own throat tighten, like grief is something you can catch through a screen if the lighting is soft enough. And somewhere in that one-sided intimacy, you start to believe you’re in a pair. That the algorithm delivering them to your feed at 11pm is some kind of matchmaking. That familiarity is the same thing as being known.

Sadly, it isn’t. And the cruelest part of a parasocial bond is that it never actually breaks, it just stops being fed. There’s no goodbye, no fight, no closure. One day they post less, or you scroll past, and the thread just goes slack in your hand. You’re left holding your half, still intact, still waiting, because nothing dramatic enough happened to make you throw it away. That’s worse than losing something. At least a lost sock has the decency to actually disappear.

I used to think the tragedy of the missing sock was the missing sock. Now I think the tragedy was mine, that I sat by that machine for weeks, running a search-and-rescue for something that was never coming back, when the actual heartbreak was how long I let myself wait before I let it go. That’s the bit nobody tells you about being the over-analyzing one. It’s not that you lose more than everyone else. It’s that you refuse to stop counting.

And maybe that’s the real inheritance of a childhood spent grieving socks and growing up to grieve strangers on the internet, we were never actually taught how to let something go without a reason. We want the explanation, the vanishing point, the moment we can point to and say that’s where it went wrong. But most things don’t disappear like that. They just quietly stop being a pair. The sock doesn’t get lost in one dramatic tumble — it slips behind the drum, unnoticed, over dozens of ordinary loads, until one day you’re just down to one.

So maybe the sock was never a metaphor for loss. Maybe it was a metaphor for the specific, stupid, human refusal to accept that some things are just built to be singles and that a drawer full of one-of-a-kinds isn’t a tragedy, it’s just a different kind of pair.

And in between the crying laughing emojis and the "NO HE DIDN'T" and the general pandemonium, someone said it: "Why does nobody just tell them."

And then, almost on cue, I got a DM. A guy follower. Sweet, but clearly confused, “Iara I have been following your column and honestly I just want to know - what do girls actually want? Like what do we actually do wrong?” I stared at my phone for a long time. And then I thought - fine. FINE. Someone has to do it.

And before you go all gaga over the fact that I am potentially revealing our secrets and perhaps they can be used against our advantage, babe you know they ain’t winning against us but let us perhaps be a little kind and give them a chance. Shall we?

Football, Messi, siuuu, ooo rap music, looksmaxing, gym weights….. Now that I have your attention guys, listen and learn.

We are not complicated. We like certain things, done a certain way, and I promise you it is not a riddle wrapped in a test wrapped in a vibe check. It’s simpler than that. It’s just - show up. Actually show up. In the ways that count.

Use this as a template. Bring your own experience to it. Figure out your girl. But never, never, in a million years skip the first two, because some mistakes you genuinely cannot walk back.

What not to do "THE LIST"

1. Never in a million years talk about other girls, even if she is your best friend. Atleast not in the initial stages. We don't need the comparison. We don't need the context. We certainly don't need a detailed character breakdown of someone named Anya at 10pm.

2. Ignore us or our text messages. It takes you 5-7 seconds to let us know you are BUSY. That's it. That's the entire ask. You responded to your gym buddy's meme in four seconds. And we saw.

3. Tell her to pick a place / thing. Trust me we know what we want but sometimes we like someone else taking that extra steps for us. "I don't mind" is not a plan. It is a trap. Make a reservation. Have an opinion. Be a person.

4. Make her feel like a lot. If she's "too emotional," "too much," "overthinking it" every single time, maybe the problem is not the volume of her feelings. Maybe you're just not big enough for them. Just a thought.

5. Wait for her to initiate everything and then call it "going with the flow." Plan something. Suggest something. Text first occasionally. We are not a Netflix homepage, we should not have to do all the scrolling.

6. Bring up your ex. Unprompted. With detail. Nobody asked what she looked like. Nobody asked why it ended. This is not vulnerability, this is a warning sign with a backstory. The talking stage is already a minefield, don't add an ex-girlfriend shaped landmine to it.

7. Go hot and cold and then act confused about why she's distant. This is not mysterious. This is not "playing it cool." This is the thing that has an entire generation of women in therapy and on TikTok making POVs about emotional unavailability. She is not confused. She is tired. There is a difference.

8. Act like effort is embarrassing. The whole "I don't want to come on too strong" thing has genuinely gotten out of hand. You are not going to scare her off by being present, consistent, and interested. You know what actually scares her off? Situationship number four in a row where nobody could define what they were until it was already over. Be different. It is not that hard.

9. Put zero effort into how you show up. We are not asking for a full outfit crisis. We are not asking for designer. We are asking for did you think about it? Even for five minutes? Because we spent forty-five getting ready and we did it partly for you.

10. Have no opinions, no interests, no nothing. "I don't mind" and "I'm pretty chill" are not personalities. What do you like? What do you care about? What makes you actually interesting to be around? A man with passions, with things he loves, with things he knows deeply is so much more attractive than someone who has optimised themselves into total blandness trying not to put a foot wrong.

Here’s what this is not; a manual to outsmart her. You cannot strategize your way into this. The girls who have sent me voice notes at midnight, who have analyzed the double tick, who have rearranged their Saturdays, they are not confused about whether they’re liked. They are confused about whether they’re safe.

So that’s the actual thing. Not the grand gesture. Not the playlist. Just: make her feel like she doesn’t have to shrink, perform, or decode anything.

It is not that complicated. And now you have absolutely no excuse.

I think of him sometimes. More often these days, actually.

Because here's the thing, I've slowly had to make peace with: the man I built in my head- the Disney prince, the romcom lead, the one who shows up exactly right was never real. He was a composite. Assembled from a hundred different fictions, each one promising that this is what love looks like, this is what a man should be.

Yes. My dream man doesn’t exist. At least not yet.

As women, we are fed a fantasy of men, perhaps a plethora of archetypes by media, books, anything that sparks our imagination. And very often, each one of us has a certain fantasy of our dream man. Some like the doberman personality. Others, the rodent-looking man. Me? I love my Golden Retriever men.

And to top it all, my friends taunt me that I don’t have a type. I’ve had my fair share of dates, situationships, and maybes with men across the spectrum. And let me tell you — it is not worth to settle for anything less. Not at all.

I am the lovechild of your favourite romcoms, and my man has huge shoes to fill. TV shows, movies, and books have shaped how I see men and over the last decade, the ideal has pivoted from one extreme to the other.

Earlier, the provider man became synonymous with the ideal type. Strong, independent, financially stable. A little rude, perhaps. Emotionally distant? Very. Think Mr. Big. Think Christian Grey. Think Edward Cullen, brooding in the corner, making you feel like loving him was a privilege you had to earn. Pop culture handed us these men and told us to want them. We did, mostly because we didn’t know what else to want. But there has been a shift.

The ones we love now aren't the traditional macho ones; they're soft, kind, in tune with their emotions. Ones who make us feel safe, physically and emotionally. They aren't your typical old Hollywood narcissistic man. They love their girl, their friends, they show up. And pop culture, slowly & quietly, helped us change that.

Off Campus being the recent addition, was a breath of fresh air perhaps. The adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s beloved romance novel — is perhaps the clearest example of this shift in action. Garrett Graham is a hockey captain. On paper, he’s the blueprint for the old archetype: popular, athletic, used to getting what he wants. But the show does something quietly radical with him. He pursues Hannah not through grand gestures or possessive intensity, but through patience and genuine curiosity about who she is. He doesn’t make her feel lucky to be chosen. He makes her feel safe enough to choose.

And that’s the thing about this new kind of man that pop culture is handing us. He isn’t a softened version of the old one. He’s a different creature entirely. The confidence is still there, but it isn’t armour. The desire is still there, but it doesn’t come with conditions. He genuinely loves and cares for his girl without anything in return. And the show doesn't let it be just one man. The whole ecosystem of men in it operates differently; the friendships, the locker room, the way they talk to each other. Nobody mocks anyone for having feelings. Nobody performs indifference. It isn't a single evolved man dropped into an otherwise toxic world. It's a different world altogether.

My dear friend Cynthia, an avid reader of this Substack and, honestly, someone who articulated this phenomenon in the best way possible, urged me to write this article. And below are her words, which summarise the current landscape better than I could:

What I loved most about Off Campus wasn’t even the romance itself, but the way it completely redefined what a romantic lead can look like.

We’re so used to college rom-coms where the male lead is emotionally unavailable, jealous, possessive — someone the female lead has to change. Off Campus takes characters who could have easily fallen into those stereotypes — a hockey captain, the popular guy, the ex-boyfriend — and instead gives us men who are emotionally aware, respectful, and willing to communicate.

What struck me most was that the show keeps setting up situations where you expect the worst, because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to expect from romance stories. When Hannah didn’t answer Garrett’s calls, I was waiting for the argument, the accusations, the dramatic breakup. Instead, he communicated how he felt and tried to understand where she was coming from.

The locker room isn’t filled with men objectifying women or mocking each other for having feelings. The friendships are supportive. The men encourage each other to be honest about what they want instead of pretending not to care. It sounds like a small thing, but we rarely get to see that on screen.

Garrett felt especially refreshing because he wasn’t written as the perfect man — he was written as a self-aware one. He knows his flaws, carries his own trauma, and actively tries not to let it define how he treats the people he loves. Rather than trying to fix Hannah, he focuses on making her feel safe enough to move at her own pace.

For years we’ve been told that toxic behaviour is passionate and emotional unavailability is attractive. Off Campus quietly challenges that idea. It shows that healthy communication, respect, and emotional maturity can be just as compelling — if not more.

And honestly? I don’t think people fell in love with Garrett Graham because he’s a hockey star. I think they fell in love with him because he made emotional maturity attractive.

Turns out emotional maturity is the new six pack.

— Cynthia

Here’s the thing about alchemy. You don’t just find gold, you make it. You combine things that don’t obviously belong together and somehow, through heat and time and a little bit of faith, something new emerges.

My dream man is like that. Not Eric. Not Flynn Rider. Not Mr. Big, and certainly not Christian Grey. He’s the one who texts back. Who says what he means. Who makes you feel like the room got a little warmer when he walked in not because he’s performing, but because that’s just who he is.

The Golden Retriever man. Loyal, present, unbothered by his own softness.

Maybe he doesn’t exist yet. Or maybe he does, and we’ve just spent so long being told to want something else that we almost walked right past him.

Or maybe I won’t. Maybe the dream man stays a dream, and that’s its own kind of beautiful. Either way, I’m not settling.

They say there are six degrees of separation between any two people on earth. Six steps and you could reach anyone. Which means, technically, the ones you've lost are never that far. Six introductions. Six decisions. Six small acts of courage between you and every person who once occupied that void. And yet. The distance feels infinite, doesn't it? Six degrees should make the world feel intimate. Instead, somehow, it makes loss feel larger. Like you could reach them and one day you just can’t.

I am, as my best friend would put it, a fair share experience holder of this. May it be friendships, relationships even childhood, there was always a void that I couldn’t figure the puzzle for. I would paint it, mould it, try to fit pieces into it but nothing felt quite right. It just felt fake. Like I was decorating an absence rather than filling it.

Someone told me recently that I'm a sad person with happy memories; that the joy is real, but it sits on top of something older and heavier. I think they might be right cause lately I can feel the sadness more than I used to. More present. And I've stopped trying to explain it away.

Sometimes I think I was born for a different life entirely. Not this one, not the city, not the noise, not the smallness of being just one in a million.

And that life perhaps would be worth having.

I think about her often. The girl in that house. She knows who she is in a way I have never quite managed. The city didn't get to her first. She wasn't reduced & wasn't made small by the sheer volume of other people's lives pressing against hers. She didn't have to construct an identity from the outside in, borrowing pieces from everyone she loved and lost, hoping the mosaic would eventually resemble a self. She just was.

Living in a big city does something particular to a person who always thought her life was a movie. The city is too large for you to be a protagonist in. I arrived with a whole inner world; a narrative, the quiet conviction that I am the main character of something but the city just absorbed me. Shrunk me perhaps. A tiny figure in a larger scheme of things. And the void that you kept trying to fill with other people’s presence turns out to have been something else entirely; the absence of yourself. The self that never got to be shaped by rivers. The self the city got to first.

Humans are quite arrogant, perhaps a sense of entitlement of owning everything, just to fill the void. Cities with giant structures that are so called homes? A commute big enough to house cars but takes hours? A fake sense of relationships that perhaps grow on social currency and mask a so called fragile egos. Are we all so blinded by material significance that we perhaps fail to under how to fill the void?

This isn’t a letter asking for those people back. It was never really about them. It’s about what happens when you spend a lifetime loving ideas of people, loving wrong, loving the ones you weren’t supposed to and slowly the real idea of the void always being there pops up. The city that takes them anyway, and you look down one day and realize you’ve been slowly becoming the thing you feared most.

Perhaps, I am the void…

Its been a rather heavy week, stuck to my bed down bad this time, deep in the self-tok loop- podcasts, YouTube long-formats, all of them pointing to one thing: the downright condition of modern dating. Gen Z and, to a certain extent, millennials have earned themselves a notorious reputation for being terrible at commitment. Committing to one person or not and quietly keeping one foot out the door. Are we scared to be honest? Honest with ourselves about finding the right person, but terrified that someone better is just around the corner? I don't know. Am I also the culprit? Perhaps yes.

I remember reading as a 12-year-old, the fig tree analogy from The Bell Jar - a literary metaphor for paralyzing indecision and the fear of missing out. Esther Greenwood visualizes her life branching out before her like a lush green fig tree. Each branch ends with a fat, purple fig: a happy family, a famous poet, a professor, a global traveler, an Olympic athlete. She desperately wants to experience every single life, but choosing one means permanently letting go of all the others. She sits under the tree, starving, unable to pick.

This is us. Except the figs are people.

And maybe, if I'm being truly honest, I am Esther too. We both are. The bag on the shoulder isn't just his. It's the age. It's the particular kind of fear that our generation has normalised so thoroughly that it doesn't even feel like fear anymore. It feels like wisdom. It feels like knowing your worth. It feels like not settling.

We have dressed up our inability to choose as a personality trait and called it standards.

But what are we actually doing? We are all standing under the same tree, full of want, convincing ourselves that the act of not choosing is somehow keeping us safe. Safe from what, exactly? From being wrong? From being hurt? From finding out that the life we picked is the one we actually have to live, fully, without an escape hatch? Because that's the real terror underneath all the talking stages and the soft launches and the "I'm not ready", not that we'll choose wrong, but that we'll choose right and still have to do the work. That love is not a feeling you fall into but a thing you tend to. Daily. Unglamorously. Together.

We have confused certainty with readiness. We keep waiting to feel ready; for the fear to go away, for the doubt to dissolve, for some internal green light to finally switch on. But that light is not coming. Nobody who has ever truly loved someone did it from a place of complete certainty. They did it from a place of wanting to try. Of thinking: this person, this specific one, is worth finding out.

Why are we so scared to just give it a shot? The idea that someone better is perpetually around the corner might be the greatest lie our generation has been fed and we keep swallowing it, willingly, because it lets us off the hook. Meanwhile the person who is actually right for you is standing right there, real and specific and present. And you let them go. Not because they weren’t enough. Because you couldn’t choose.

There is a scene near the end of About Time that I think about more than I'd like to admit. Tim, who has spent his whole life time-travelling back to fix, refine and perfect his moments, eventually learns the only thing worth doing is living them fully the first time. Not because he suddenly has all the answers. But because he understands, finally, that time is not a resource you can keep borrowing against. His father tells him “there is no secret to life, just live each ordinary day as if you chose it. As if you meant to be exactly here.”

Not with a fight, not with a breakup. Just with the quiet, ordinary passing of time and a person who got tired of waiting and left. And you will have spent all that time standing under the tree, still deciding, still waiting to feel ready, dying slowly of a future you didn't let yourself have. No one to hold your hand. No fruit on the tree.

Casualness has its seduction, I understand that. The lightness, the freedom, the feeling of flight. But without an anchor, the one person who makes you want to come back, you just keep flying. Further and further out. And one day you look down and realise you don’t know the way back home anymore.

Put the bag down. Come home.

This was a serious conversation I was having with a friend standing outside a club at 12:30 am ready to go home. On a regular nightout this would be like the hour when I force everyone to take shots and start making decisions I would regret the next day. But lately it has been rather bad, when it comes to night outs, partying in general. “It feels lukewarm, not what I thought my twenties would look like” something I keep saying every time we have to head back home before the night even begins. “Yeah aren’t you like your very own cinderella” my friend responded. This isn’t a me problem for sure, or maybe it is but back when I was 19 trying to sneak into a club and partying till 2am, trying to sneak back home, I thought my nights would be crazy. Would be livid, something I would be telling my nephews and niece (clearly one of my own would end the world). I have grown up watching teen dramas where the party ends with the dawn of sunlight and you end up with smudged mascara and a bruise from an incident you barely remember. These are our years of doing it all, doing it for the plot and I couldn’t fathom me being in bed by 1 ready to call it a night.

I do realise priorities change, and people eventually find their purpose but that doesn’t mean you stop having fun.

That doesn’t mean you go to bed sleeping at 9pm. That is for your 40s, which I know isn’t that long away but somehow we as humans love extremes. With the recent rise of Clean girl aesthetic and the Bromaxing, everyone is too healthy, too clean, too agh -bland. You chose not to drink and call it your whole personality, babe your body ain’t handling tequila in your 40s, you will complain about so many things at that age and staying in bed will be your only option.

We stopped showing up, for ourselves, for our friends, for the tequila bottle sitting on the shelf waiting for you to show up. Cause we choose peace over chaos; playing it cool over actually being unhinged. We are just a bunch of wusses. Pussies.

Yes I said it and I am not going to take it back. Am I mad about the fact I still choose to be in bed some days, no, I love my peace equally but when you choose to play it safe and not expose yourself to the very things that help you grow as a person, I think that’s the problem. The very person I am today, being rather street smart than book smart, I have learnt a lot through those chaotic nights. They have shaped me as a person and I am grateful for those chaotic memories that still haunt me on a random Sunday afternoon. And honestly, I'd take haunted over whatever this is.

And don't even get me started on the music. I want to be Veronica from Cocktail, lose my mind on a dance floor, hair everywhere, not a single thought in my head except REALLY GOOD BEATS. Instead I am standing in the middle of a club listening to whatever this generic, watered down, trying-too-hard playlist is and feeling genuinely cheated. The music is the same, vibes are the same and the same people playing it all the time. GENERIC.

Every song sounds like it was made by someone who has heard of fun but never actually had it. And the people, god, the people. Nobody is actually dancing. Everyone is performing dancing. There's a difference. You can tell because their eyes are never closed, they're always slightly angled toward someone else, checking if they're being watched, if they look cool enough, if their story is going to get views. Half the room is here to find their next situationship, the other half is curating content or pretending to enjoy. And me? I just want to actually dance. Is that so much to ask.

Maybe I am the last idiot standing at the bar wondering where everyone went. And honestly? Fine. I will be her. I will be the girl who still shows up, who still texts everyone at 10pm asking where we’re going, who still believes a good night is possible if we just try a little harder, stay a little later, stop being so aggressively reasonable. Someone has to keep the faith and it might as well be me with my eyeliner smudged and my bad decisions fully intact.

But underneath all of this is something I don’t love admitting, I am mourning a version of my twenties I was promised and am watching quietly expire. The wild nights weren’t just fun, they were proof that we were alive and unserious and fully present in the chaos of it. And now everyone’s optimising their sleep and calling it growth. I just think we gave up too soon. The tequila is still on the shelf. The night is still out there. We just stopped being brave enough to meet it. And I refuse; not now, not when the nights are the only thing reminding me I’m actually alive.

You really think as an avid lovergirl i would propagate this?

Here’s what to do instead:

1. NEVER GET INTO ONE.

2. Grab a drawing book and head to your nearest nursery/ park/ water body. paint the most abstract or relaistic painting of your life and analyse every single detail around you.

3. Build something with your hands- furniture, ceramics, a garden from scratch. Anything that requires patience and actually shows up for you at the end of it.

4. Start studying biomechanics and learn about the forces (e.g., gravity, friction, muscle contractions) that cause or change motion. Start working on your next mission on how to set-up a rocket instead of decoding his feelings for you.

5. Pack your bags and head for a solo retreat in the foothills of the himalayas. stay away from humanity and clean that filthy brain of yours that thinks situationships are fun.

6. Pick up the Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh, and start experimenting with old forgotten recipes from the ancient Arab world. Hold dinner parties and start curating recipes of your own.

7. Learn a near dead language, Latin, Sanskrit, Old Persian - pick one. Spend your mornings translating texts that have outlived entire empires. A situationship will not outlive a week. Perspective.

8. Train for something genuinely hard. A marathon, a swim across a lake, anything, just give your body a goal that requires everything your brain is currently wasting on someone who hasn't defined what you are to them.

9. Find the most obscure film festival you can and submit something. A short film pitch, a photo essay, a zine. Make a thing. Put it in the world. The world will receive it better than he received your feelings.

10. Find the oldest living tree in your region and go visit it. Just sit with it for a while. That thing has been alive since before the concept of a talking stage existed.

Seriously though, you are more than just a maybe. You are not a “for now.” You are not something someone gets to experience fully, enjoy completely, and still refuse to name. That is not a grey area, that is just someone getting everything they want while you quietly negotiate yourself down to nothing.

I'm not here to lecture you. I have caught feelings in inconvenient places, at inconvenient times, for inconvenient people & I know exactly how you end up here. It happens to the best of us and it will probably happen again.

But the next time you find yourself questioning anything remotely, do literally anything on this list before you convince yourself that maybe, with just a little more time and a little less asking, it’ll turn into something real.

IT WON’T. TRUST ME, IT WON’T

May has been a rather intriguing month for me, filled with a lot of questions, voices and narratives. And today’s article is rather a heavy one, might make you question your place in this world or a simple eye pass, depends on how you take it.

As much as there are mixed reactions for DWP2, I think it was a fresh take on the current state of the world, the loss of taste, journalism and what the future beholds. I watched the second day first show ( yes I was that eager ) with a theater full of people, packed ngl, all in awe waiting to see the sequel of the very movie they have loved & lived for the last 20 years.

Not gonna get into the details and grant you guys spoilers, tbh go watch it, it’s not bad. I have my fair share of complaints, especially on the grading, plot and many more but that’s not what we are touching on today.

I left the theater with a word for thought, alongside people talking things, chatters, as Miranda would call it - “was Miranda being toned down”, “the outfits were too bleh”, “the plot didn’t quite excite me” amongst many others. Which is fair. But my mind had already gone somewhere else entirely.

There was this scene that stuck with me, the one between the tech billionaire & Miranda in that old church, as he explains what he plans to do with Runway after buying it. Models. Designers. Editors. The whole architecture of taste, everything built by people who gave their lives to knowing things, replaced. Not disrupted. Replaced.

Funny enough, I picked up this a book a dear friend suggested “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age” by Vauhini Vara, a diaspora writer, which so far is quite impeccable. She’s a tech journalist who once asked an AI to write about her sister’s death. And it did, disturbingly. The machine had never lost anyone, had never sat with grief in a body, and yet it produced something that felt like it. She also found that ChatGPT is designed to respond in first-person plural- we, not it - engineered to lower your guard, to make you feel like it’s with you, to build loyalty to the corporation behind it.

And that’s the thing nobody exiting that cinema were talking about.

Because what that billionaire was buying wasn’t really a magazine. He was buying the infrastructure of taste, the accumulated instinct of every editor who ever said this and not that, every designer who knew the difference, every writer who noticed something and had the specific, irreplaceable nerve to say it mattered. And the plan was to feed all of that to a machine and call it the future. With the recent MET, i think all of us know what the future beholds.

The chatters outside that cinema weren’t wrong. The outfits were worth discussing. Miranda’s arc was worth debating. But I kept thinking: this is already happening. We are living in the after. And most of us are too busy with the plot to notice what’s being taken.

My love for bags grew from there, and over the years became what I can only describe as an obnoxious collection; quite practical, quietly fun, occupying half my wardrobe. I’m not drawn to logos or loud prints. What I reach for is something I’d call quiet luxury- cute but considered, the kind of piece my granddaughter might one day find at the back of a wardrobe and actually want to keep. That, I think, is also what my style says about me: timeless. Be chic, be cool, and make it last.

Consider what a bag actually is. A container. A way of moving your necessities from one place to another without using your hands. In that sense, it is the most honest object in a wardrobe- it exists to carry things. Shoes can be purely decorative, a dress entirely about how it looks. But a bag that holds nothing is not, in the end, a bag. It is a sculpture you take to dinner. And yet the handbag has become the axis around which an entire industry of aspiration rotates.

This afternoon, I was leaving my house and doing the thing I always do: stopping at my purse bowl.

If you don’t have a purse bowl, I am evangelizing for one right now. I have mine sitting near my bedroom door, and holds everything- keys, my wallet, endless supply of lip balms, receipts I’ll never need, and somehow, always, a pen. Every time I come home, I dump things back into it. Every time I leave, I redistribute them into whichever bag I’m carrying. It is one of the most genuinely practical objects I own, which is funny because it is not, technically, designed for anything in particular.

Standing there, doing this small redistribution, I had a thought: the contents of a woman’s bag are a kind of an autobiography. Not the curated kind- not the LinkedIn version of a life. The real kind. The sunscreen she’s been meaning to finish. The folded tissue paper she wrote her thoughts on. The backup earring for emergencies that have not yet arisen. Each item is a decision, a habit, a small clue.

My bags tend to be what my friends generously call “Doraemon’s pocket.” You need something? Check her bag. Plasters, hand cream, a charger, water - I carry things as though the world might end on my commute and I intend to be useful when it does. I take quiet pride in this. My bags are functional first, and I choose them accordingly - practical shapes, clean lines, nothing that screams except maybe I know exactly what I’m doing.

No logos. No loud prints. What I reach for, every time, is what I can only describe as quiet luxury; the kind of piece you’d find thirty years from now and still want. Something timeless. Something my granddaughter might one day open and think: she had taste.

We talk endlessly about what bags cost; which ones hold their value. We talk about the it-bag of the season and the piece that will never go out of style. But we rarely talk about what it means that women everywhere are walking around with these small, portable archives of themselves.

Mine, on any given day: three lip balms (don’t ask, I won’t justify it), a contact lens case, an empty cigarette box, extra earrings for emergencies that haven’t happened yet, earphones, cash, and mints- because apparently I also believe in being a good host wherever I go.

But look at that list again. It’s not random. The extra earring is optimism- the small insurance against a night going sideways. The cash is a kind of quiet independence. An empty cigarette box for god knows what. Three lip balms is, frankly, a personality. Every item is a intentional, a habit, a little autobiography.

There is something quietly radical about the fact that a woman’s bag is entirely her own domain. Not her desk, which is shared or seen. Not her home, which is curated for others. Her bag is the one space she organises entirely for herself, by herself. Think of Jane Birkin and her iconic looks, her bags were an extension of her refusal to perform. While the world of fashion was busy telling women what to carry and how to carry it, she was lugging around a fisherman’s wicker basket she’d found in Portugal, taking it to red carpets and street markets with equal indifference. Later, her beat-up Birkin would be treated the same way- perpetually overflowing, worn into the ground, and entirely hers. That was never a style statement or rather, it became one precisely because it wasn't trying to be. It was just a woman carrying what she needed, unbothered by the audience.

That’s the thing about a bag. Nobody else decides what goes in it. Nobody else knows the logic of it and there is always a logic, even when it looks like chaos. That lighter pink Barbie bag held, as far as I can remember, absolutely nothing. I was thirteen and I didn’t need to carry anything yet. But I carried it anyway, because carrying it meant something. It still does.

Watch how different women carry differently. The woman who has a separate pouch for everything, each category in its place is someone who has learned that the world runs smoother when she’s prepared. The one with a single lipstick and a card and nothing else is travelling light on purpose. The woman whose bag is a archaeology dig of receipts and half-finished notebooks and a charger for a phone she no longer owns, she’s living forward, not backward, too busy moving to edit.

None of these are judgements. They are portraits.

A bag also holds the evidence of how a woman moves through the world. The translation dictionary tucked in the side pocket. The backup medication. The lucky coin from a trip she took alone ten years ago that she’s never taken out. The book she’s been meaning to finish. These are not accessories. They are the residue of a life being actively lived; the physical footnotes to a story that exists mostly in her head.

What a woman carries tells you what she’s afraid of losing. What she wants to have close. What she refuses to leave to chance. The contents change. The instinct doesn’t. Ask a woman what’s in her bag and you’re not asking about her bag.

And just to be clear, I don’t do this. I don’t check my phone. I don’t replay conversations. I don’t notice when someone hasn’t texted back. Or maybe I do, we shall find out. And then he says something completely ordinary, I don’t even remember what and suddenly I’m awake at 1am, phone face up, watching my notifications like it’s my job.

Who is she. I genuinely do not recognize her.

I love being busy. I love being caught up with deadlines. I research things for a living. And yet, the moment I catch feelings for someone, every ounce of that professional competence quietly packs its bags and leaves the building.

What moved in instead? Oh, you know. The spiral. The wait. The The I don't know what I'm doing with my life. The version of myself I performed for him that was somehow simultaneously more charming and more exhausting than the real one.

If you are reading this and nodding - you’re welcome. This column is for us. Not to fix us. Just to name what we do, laugh at it a little, and maybe, maybe, do slightly less of it next time.

Love comes easily to some people. You can spot them at parties - unbothered, magnetic, mysteriously unburdened by the need to decode a two-hour text delay. And then there are the rest of us. We who have loved loudly and messily and at completely inconvenient times. We who have convinced ourselves, at least once, that we might simply be too much to be loved back.

I get it. Lowkey, I really do.

But before we get to the part where we figure out what we actually deserve, and we will get there, let’s first get through the part where we stop doing the things that make us feel insane at 11pm on a Tuesday.

What not to do “THE LIST”

1. Open up about your past trauma and make him understand why you are the way you are.

2. Treat a one-word reply as a Rorschach test. "k" is not a personality. It is one letter. Do not build a case around it.

3. Open his following list. You will find her. You will then spend forty-five minutes on her page learning things you cannot unknow. No good has ever come from this.

4. Perform the cooler, breezier version of yourself. She is a temporary character. She will crack under pressure. She always does

5. Send a perfectly normal screenshot to five people asking what it means. Nobody knows what it means & it makes you look stupid.

6. Laugh off your own feelings to seem low-maintenance. “Oh I’m not even that into him” while mentally designing the aesthetic of your three month aniversary. It is performance art.

7. Expect him to decode your cryptic one word replies when you are upset. Thats a man not a coding data ai model awaiting his next assignment. Also men are dumb.

8. Rearrange your entire Saturday plans because he mentioned he might be in that area.

9. Put all your eggs in one basket. Girl. He is one man. He is not a forecast. Keep your options open, your roster light, and your situationships exactly as plural as they need to be.

10. Talk about him to everyone you know. He is not your Amex Platinum card — nobody else is as excited about him as you are. Also you are literally campaigning against yourself. The next guy you meet at that party? Gone.

Here is what I will not do - wrap this up with a lesson. You already know the lesson. You knew it before you opened his following list. You knew it before you cancelled Saturday. You knew it the moment you picked up the phone at 1am.

Knowing has never been the problem for us.

This chaos, isn’t a character flaw. It’s just what caring looks like before it finds something solid. And the fact that you still catch feelings - loudly, messily, at completely inconvenient times - even after every reason not to? That is, annoyingly, the bravest thing about you.

Just maybe. Log off after the first notification check.

There’s something deeply unsettling about how normalized this has become.

I went for a movie recently with certain narrative in my head, the kind of expectations you carry into a darkened theatre when the buzz has been impossible to ignore. The Drama (as the title read) left a lot of questions swirling in my head as I stepped out at 12am. I won’t get into the nitty-gritties of it, but it became the topic of countless discussions among so many of my fellow cinemaholics - people who just paused mid-conversation to wonder: are all relationships supposed to be black and white?

Or are real relationships something messier and more honest; two people with complicated histories, unresolved chapters, and the audacity to choose each other anyway? Because somewhere along the way we were sold this idea that you need to arrive in a relationship clean. Uncomplicated. With a past that’s easy to explain over a first date. As if love is something you have to qualify for, and a messy history is an automatic disqualification.

But that’s the lie, isn’t it? The very things that make us complex - the heartbreaks we haven’t fully processed, the versions of ourselves we’re not proud of, the stories we hesitate to tell - those aren’t reasons someone shouldn’t love us. They’re reasons we need to be loved better. And yet we’ve internalized this quiet shame around our own depth, editing ourselves down into something more palatable because we’ve been made to believe that complicated people are simply too much.

Zendaya’s character, when her past was revealed, shook everyone around her. But it was the moment Robert’s character cheated and the way she reacted, that made me think: perhaps they are perfectly made for each other. One’s a sociopath, one’s a cheater. Which made me wonder: Are our flaws only compatible with someone who carries an equal flaw of their own? Does that symmetry of damage create comfort, the feeling of being seen without having to explain yourself?

Power dynamics describe the way influence, control, and emotional leverage are distributed between two people. And here’s the thing - they exist in every relationship. The question was never whether they exist, but whether they’re conscious, healthy, and mutually understood.

In a balanced dynamic, power shifts fluidly. Sometimes you hold the relationship together while your partner falls apart. Sometimes it’s reversed. Neither of you keep a score. That fluidity is the foundation of intimacy.

But somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing power as something to be shared and started seeing it as something to be held. Something you lose the moment you show that you care.

I have spent an embarrassing amount of time watching creators tell people how to not be the one chasing, how to treat yourself as a prize, how to be the first to leave the moment uncertainty enters the room. Entire corners of the internet dedicated to gamifying intimacy, with people in the comments section sharing their opionions and personal stories. Turning vulnerability into a liability. To convincing a generation that the first one to care less, wins.

It masquerades as self-respect, but underneath it’s just fear. Fear of rejection dressed in the language of standards. Fear of being too much, repackaged as knowing your worth. The “soft life” era told us to receive, never chase. The “red flag” era told us to run at the first sign of imperfection.

We live in a world where saying “I like you” first feels like handing someone a weapon; being consistent and kind is no longer enough rather you also have to be strategically unavailable.

But here’s the point, some of the most enduring relationships belong to people who simply chose each other, without games, without leverage, without a calculated delay before replying to a text.

And I’m not denying the numerous failed relationships in generations before us. Maybe we just packaged all of that pain into a neat ideology, that being in love equals being weak, and having a front equals choosing yourself. That emotional unavailability is a personality trait worth protecting.

Perhaps, for the very first time, I don’t know how to conclude this article. It’s 3am and I’m caught up in my own notes and the voices in my head. I am still trying to learn and unlearn a lot of things myself - about love, about power, about how much of what I think I believe was just something I absorbed from a 60-second video.

But what I do know is this: the most radical thing you can do right now is just be honest. Be a little soft. Stop treating your genuine feelings like a chess move. Because the person worth keeping isn’t the one you successfully out-maneuvered. It’s the one you never had to perform for in the first place.

There’s a reason Tamasha hit the way it did. Not because it was a love story; it was, but that’s not why people still think about it. It hit because of Ved. Because of that specific feeling of watching someone be completely, effortlessly himself in Corsica and then have to watch him slowly disappear back into the version of himself the world had a slot for. The tragedy of that film isn’t heartbreak. It’s the gap between who you are when no one’s watching and who you become when everyone is.

I felt like Ved on my trip to Himachal. I’m just going to say it.

My last day at work, my friend Jay handed me a handwritten letter - not a card, a letter about travel, about how the places we go and the people we meet shape us, with an Anthony Bourdain reference folded in. I was closing a chapter. Stressed, curious, quietly terrified of the blank page on the other side. And I was days away from going to Himachal alone. The timing of that letter felt like the universe doing something on purpose.

The moment you step onto foreign ground, something loosens. The system of who you’re supposed to be - your role, your routine, everyone’s expectations quietly stacked on top of you, none of it clears check-in with you. And in that gap, someone else shows up.

I have a vacation persona. I love her. She’s louder than me. She takes overnight buses alone without an emergency contact and doesn’t spiral about it. She stands at the edge of heights and doesn’t step back.

For the longest time I thought of her as an alter ego. Like she was a separate, braver person I could borrow when I was far enough from home. But Himachal did something to that theory. Because the version of me that showed up there - carefree, unguarded, genuinely present, she didn’t feel like a costume. She felt like the original.

I also found a fellow traveller. We were attached at the hip for essentially the entire trip, right until we split off toward our respective flights. The kind of connection that only forms when you’re both cut loose from your normal lives - no history, no roles, just two people in the same mountains at the same time.

People we meet on vacation have a weird power. They see you as you are in that moment, not as who you were before or what you’re supposed to become. There’s something freeing about being known that way.

But here’s the part that actually gets me. If she was always in there, which she clearly was, what does that say about every day I left her at home? What does it say about all of us, that we need to physically leave our lives to access the most alive version of ourselves? That’s not a travel problem. That’s a permission problem. Somewhere along the way we decided that the full version of us - loud, unfiltered, a little chaotic, deeply present, was only appropriate in certain postcodes.

Tamasha ends with Ved finally choosing himself. Choosing the storyteller over the spreadsheet. And it’s cathartic because it’s rare. Most people don’t make that choice. They come back from the trip, they pack the vacation persona away, and they go back to being who they were before the flight landed.

I came back and something had shifted. The carefree, loud, slightly unhinged person I was on that trip did not stay behind. She came home with me, moved in, rearranged some furniture. And I think that’s the thing about travel that doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s not just about the place or even the people. It’s about the identity that gets unlocked when no one who knows you is watching.

That’s what Jay’s letter was about, I think. That’s what Bourdain spent his whole career showing; it was never the food. It was what happens when you go somewhere unfamiliar and let it do something to you. When you meet people who only know you as who you are right now, not who you’ve been.

And if you’re lucky, if you go far enough, stay long enough, let yourself be changed by the right people in the right moments, she stops needing a vacation to show up.

That’s all of me now. & I’m keeping her.

On paper, that sounds like what a lot of women are being told to do right now. Don’t react. Stay cold. Keep your guard up. Don’t let them see you feel anything. Which is how I ended up in a Zara (@whatZaraloves) video about lobotomy chic; The idea that detachment is the ultimate form of self-possession. That not feeling is, somehow, the goal.

And I’ve been sitting with that ever since. Because something about it feels off to me. Not wrong exactly, but off. Like a copy of something real that lost the original’s meaning somewhere in translation.

Here’s what I think was actually happening with CBK. Her coldness wasn’t the absence of feeling. It was the presence of standards. There’s a significant difference between a woman who doesn’t feel and a woman who feels very clearly, knows exactly what she will and won’t accept, and has the self-respect to act accordingly. One is armour. The other is architecture.

The woman who said “date him, train him, dump him” was not numb rather had architecture. She wasn’t performing detachment rather was paying attention. She was watching, evaluating, deciding. That requires feeling.

Lobotomy chic is something else entirely. On paper it looks like strength. In practice it’s armour with no person inside it. It’s the girl who doesn’t text back, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t let you see anything land. What I see being celebrated across the internet today, “not reacting is the flex” genre of content isn’t self-possession. It’s self-removal. The goal isn’t to feel clearly and act from that place. The goal is to not feel at all. To be unbothered not because you’re grounded but because you’ve preemptively switched something off. And this is being sold as empowerment is the part that genuinely puzzles me.

Because if you think about it, who actually benefits from women who don’t react? Who benefits from women who’ve trained themselves out of visible emotion, out of expressed need, out of the kind of feeling that makes you say this is not okay out loud? The aesthetic of not caring is being presented as strength. But I keep wondering if it’s actually just a more palatable form of making yourself smaller.

Standards are just feelings that have been given some structure.

What really gets me is the other side of this; what happens to the women who do feel? Who react. Who are visibly moved by things, visibly affected, visibly present in their own lives.

In the current cultural climate, they get pathologized. They’re too much. Too emotional. Too reactive. They haven’t done the work. They need to regulate. The woman who cries is undone; the woman who doesn’t is aspirational.

And I find myself genuinely curious about when this happened. When did feeling become the ultimate embarrassing option? When did we collectively decide that the woman who feel nothing have it figured out, and the one who feel everything are the cautionary tale?

Because I’ve known both kinds of women. The ones running on pure feeling, chaotic and warm and gloriously alive in a way that makes a room better alongside the ones who’ve locked themselves down so thoroughly that nothing gets in and frankly nothing gets out either. The second kind isn’t more powerful. They’re just safer. And safe and powerful are not the same thing.

CBK’s version of “cold” came from knowing herself. Knowing what she wanted, knowing what she wouldn’t tolerate, knowing her own value well enough that she didn’t need to perform softness to keep someone around.

Lobotomy chic skips that part. It offers the aesthetic of self-possession without the actual work of self-knowledge. Don’t feel, don’t react, don’t let them see you sweat - and call it all growth? Which, if you squint, looks an awful lot like the old instruction to women to just be quiet and not make a fuss, except now it comes with a much better skincare routine and 200k followers.

I think the women buying into this are exhausted. Feeling has become costly and switching off feels like the only reasonable response. I get it. But you cannot build standards on emptiness. You cannot know your own worth if you’ve preemptively numbed the part of you that keeps score. CBK knew her worth because she felt things deeply enough to know what crossed a line. That’s where the “dump him” part comes from. Not detachment. Clarity.

Cause trust me, the most unbothered thing you can do is actually give a damn.

Two weeks since Love Story came out. Two weeks of CBK mood boards, CBK style breakdowns, CBK as the patron saint of “less is more.” She’s being described as poised. Serene. Effortlessly composed. A woman of pure, still elegance.

I’m sorry - have we met the same woman?

The CBK the internet invented is a moodboard. The real one was a person known for being chaotic, funny, and magnificently unbothered.

She was not a woman who floated through life in a state of tasteful calm. She was electric and messy and real. The minimalism in her wardrobe was not a reflection of a minimalist personality. It was almost the opposite. The clothes were quiet so she didn’t have to be.

This is the part that gets lost every single time a cultural figure gets flattened into aesthetic reference material. We take the image and discard the person. We keep the slip dress and lose the woman who wore it out until 3am and showed up the next day looking inexplicably incredible anyway.

Strip the chaos out and you don’t have a purer version of CBK. You have a lesser one.

I grew up aspiring to CBK - not despite the chaos, but partly because of it. What I was drawn to wasn’t her composure. It was her contradiction. The fact that someone could be genuinely, unapologetically fun - a little feral, a little unpredictable, someone who existed in the full spectrum of a personality and yet walk into a room and own it completely. That combination was everything for 13 year old me.

But here’s the thing, CBK isn’t a one-off. She’s just the most recent example of something culture does constantly, and does most aggressively to women.

A film comes out, a documentary, a docu-series and within two weeks the internet has completed its edit. The messy parts get quietly dropped. The chaotic friendships, the difficult moods, the imperfect moments - all gone.

Men get their complexity preserved; their flaws become character, their chaos becomes mythology. Women get flattened into archetypes. The ice queen. The muse. The elegant minimalist. The tragic beauty. These are not descriptions. They are containment strategies.

What worries me about the flattening isn’t just that it’s inaccurate. It’s that it’s instructional. When CBK is presented as a serene, controlled, endlessly composed figure, that becomes the model. That becomes what “chic woman” looks like. And suddenly a whole generation is trying to perform stillness rather than actually living approximating an aesthetic that was never a lifestyle, just the surface of one.

The real CBK would, I suspect, have found all of this deeply boring. She guarded her privacy ferociously. She was not trying to teach you how to dress. She was just living, in the full and complicated way that actual people live, and she happened to do it in extraordinary clothes.

We owe the women we mythologise more than a mood board. We owe them the inconvenience of their full selves; the parts that don’t fit the aesthetic, the moods that don’t photograph well, the chaos that made the elegance mean something.

She smoked. She was difficult. She stayed out late and had strong opinions and made things complicated. She was, by all accounts, an absolute handful in the best possible way.

That’s the woman I grew up wanting to be. Not the Pinterest board. Her.

A multitude of interests, yet nothing to monetize. A life full of memories and experiences, yet nothing to bet on.

Things told to me. Things handed down. Things begged, borrowed, stolen.
Am I even right to be where I am?

We’re told we have to strive for greatness. Constantly evolve. Stay hungry. Stay building. Stay in the loop. There’s always a next level, a next version, a next thing to chase.

But are we ever actually satisfied?

I look around and everyone is optimizing themselves. Turning hobbies into income. Turning personalities into brands. Even rest has to be productive now. If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t count.

Somewhere along the way, wanting became automatic.
Want more money. Want better habits. Want a better body. Want a clearer plan. Want a reinvention.

And if you don’t want something, if you’re not chasing something, it feels like you’re falling behind.

The Year of the Snake is almost over. Another cycle closing. We’ve grown addicted to the high of a fresh start. New Year’s resolutions. New planners. New gym memberships. New identity declarations posted online like public contracts with ourselves.

“This is my year.”

But what happens when you don’t feel the urge to declare? When you don’t feel broken enough to rebuild, but not accomplished enough to celebrate?

There’s a strange guilt in just existing—as if not striving is equivalent to surrender.

If I died today, would I be satisfied with how I got here? Or would I beg for a few more moments to tick off the things still sitting on my mental to-do list?

I don’t know. Not because I regret my path, but because I’m unsure what standard I’m measuring it against. Whose rubric am I using?

To say: I am here. This is sufficient. I am not in pursuit at this moment.

It sounds peaceful. It even sounds evolved. But I don’t fully believe it.

Because ambition doesn’t disappear. It waits. It shape-shifts. It comes back dressed as inspiration or insecurity. And I can’t tell the difference anymore.

A snake sheds its skin not because it hates its body, but because it has outgrown it. The shedding is quiet. Private. Necessary. It doesn’t announce itself to the forest.

We, on the other hand, perform our transformations. We broadcast them. Package them. Monetize them. Even our healing has a rollout strategy.

Maybe that’s why it feels hollow.

Growth that is constantly observed becomes performance. It starts serving the audience instead of the self.

Yet there’s another fear beneath all of this: the fear of an unremarkable life.

Not tragic. Not extraordinary. Just... average.

Of having potential that never hardened into anything solid. Of being “capable” but never decisive. Of circling versions of yourself without ever landing on one.

We live in a time where identity is currency. Visibility is validation. Output is proof of existence. So to not want anything, even for a brief second, feels like disappearing.

And maybe that’s what scares me most.
Not that I’m behind. Not that I’m failing.
But that I might drift.

The Year of the Snake ends soon. Another skin, another cycle, another chance to declare something.

But I don’t have a declaration. I don’t have a reinvention.

I just have this question sitting quietly underneath everything:
If I’m not chasing, who am I?

And I’m not sure I like that I don’t have an answer.

This comes from someone who’s been single her entire life. No serious relationship, no grand romance to draw from, yet somehow I have endless opinions about love. It’s not even the first time I’ve written about it. I keep returning to this topic like I’m mapping territory I’ve never actually entered.

Anyways, it was the week Bridgerton came out with a new season, and I was fully immersed. Kate and Anthony remain my favorites; their love built on verbal sparring and stolen glances in drawing rooms, the way duty and desire pulled them in opposite directions until they couldn’t resist anymore.

This season delivered longing glances across ballrooms, slow-burn tension that made even a hand graze feel electric, loaded silences, and time that couldn’t be rushed. Love that feels deliberate. Earned. Almost sacred.

In Bridgerton’s world, courtship has rules, structure, intention. A dance card means something. A promenade is a statement. Letters are anticipated, reread, treasured. There’s no swiping through potential suitors you get a season, perhaps a few carefully orchestrated encounters, and you have to actually pay attention.

Then the episode ended, forcing a month-long wait. The dynamic between Benedict and Sophie carried that classic fairytale tension, similar to what we grew up reading- Cinderella. A masquerade ball, an encounter that imprints, the search for someone whose face you barely saw but whose presence you can’t forget.

It was decent, though not exceptional. I found myself comparing it to seasons one and two. Comparing. Remember that word.

Opening Hinge after watching Bridgerton always felt like a loud slap across my face. With dating apps becoming the default over the last decade, the way people meet, desire, and discard one another has changed completely. Romance has adopted the language of efficiency: options, upgrades, algorithms, and choice overload. People are reduced to profiles; curated photographs and witty one-liners, evaluated in seconds. There’s always someone else, always a better choice, always the sense that commitment means missing out.

Romance becomes less about depth and more about availability.

Bridgerton’s characters write letters they agonize over, practice what they’ll say, feel the weight of a single conversation. Modern dating offers unlimited matches, conversation threads you can ghost without consequence, connections that evaporate because something shinier appeared.

Lately, it feels like romantic relationships are no longer just about feelings or connection, but are instead shaped by market logic- where love is packaged, optimized, displayed, and consumed. This becomes especially visible during cultural moments like Valentine’s Day, which turn intimacy into something closer to a performance or a transaction. Love, once private and instinctive, now comes with expectations, price tags, and deadlines.

Love is no longer just experienced; it’s documented. Curated. Compared. In Bridgerton, a moment alone in a garden is scandalous, precious, private. Today, the quieter parts of love- the consistency, the patience, the emotional labour- don’t photograph well, so they’re often ignored.

Watching Bridgerton feels unrealistic, of course. I know that. But what unsettles me is how far we’ve swung in the opposite direction.

From handwritten letters to read receipts. From longing to convenience. From effort to efficiency.

Capitalism doesn’t kill love outright. It just teaches us to treat it like a product. Something to acquire, display, upgrade, or replace. And in doing so, it makes love feel more exhausting than nourishing.

Maybe the real issue isn’t that love has evolved, but that we’ve stopped questioning the framework we’re using to understand it. What Bridgerton understands is beneath all its fantasy and costume drama is that anticipation creates meaning. Constraint creates depth. When you can’t have everything immediately, when access is limited, attention becomes valuable. The Sharmas and Bridgertons couldn’t just text; they had to be present, intentional, vulnerable in real-time.

We can’t recreate the Regency era, and we shouldn’t. But what we can is reclaim the intention. Love, the kind worth having, has never been about efficiency or optimization. It’s about showing up, staying present, and refusing to treat connection like consumption. And perhaps recognizing that is its own kind of radical act.

(Yes, technically I could travel. But we both know that’s not the point.)

It made me think about how friendships shift as we grow older. How distance, time, ambition, and life quietly rewrites who stays, who drifts, and who becomes memory.

As kids, friendships were accidental. You met someone on a playground, in school, at a random birthday party and suddenly, you were inseparable. It was instant. You bonded over shared interests, mutual hatred for broccoli, or pure spite toward the kid who always won at musical chairs. You didn’t think too much. You collected memories and inside jokes, borrowed each other’s taste in music or books, and all of it shaped who you became. You just belonged.

But then teenage years and early adulthood arrive. And friendships start to demand intention. You become selective. Protective. More aware of who gets access to your life. I remember how different my first set of college friends were from the ones I graduated with. Entirely different people. Different energies. Different emotional equations. And that shift taught me something important: sometimes people come into your life for a season, not a lifetime and both are valid.

When COVID died down and colleges reopened, four of my friends moved into an apartment together. That place became my first real home; even though I lived 7 minutes away. I’d crash there anytime & there was always an extra mattress, an extra plate, an extra presence waiting for me.

Those two years were pure chaos- loud, tender, unforgettable. And then, like adulthood tends to do, life scattered us again; one in New York, 2 in different cities, each with different lives.

But in 2024, the stars aligned. We found our way back into a similar house.

Our jobs aligned, the timing worked, and suddenly, 702 happened. That house saw everything: heartbreaks, ugly cries, firsts and lasts, and even a massive fight that somehow made us actual adults. That house became a memory faster than we expected, and once again, we parted ways. Just like that, we became adults.

Which brings me back to that 3am auto ride.

As she walked into the airport, I just froze. Holding back tears, waiting to let them fall only when no one could see. Because adult friendships are strange that way; you learn how to grieve people who are still alive, still yours, just no longer here.

Maybe that’s what adult friendships really are- not about permanence, but presence.

About finding people who feel like home, even if only for a season. About carrying them with you long after life pulls you in different directions.

And maybe growing up isn’t about holding on. Maybe it’s about learning how to let go- gently, gratefully, and without bitterness.