And then comes something that almost feels like grief, regret, and sadness all at once. Something stirs within you, and you realize that there are some paths you should never have taken.

Except, when you’re already there, it’s rarely one big decision that got you there. It was probably the little choices. The ones that seemed insignificant at the time. The extra day you waited. The thing you kept putting off. The decision you made because it was easier. The opportunity you ignored. The moment you chose comfort over discomfort, again and again, until somehow those tiny choices compounded and you found yourself standing somewhere you never intended to be.

And perhaps that is the most unsettling part of it: realizing that you did not suddenly arrive here.

You walked here.

Slowly.

Choice, I think, is the most absurd of all the constants we have in life.

We like our tragedies grand. Or maybe that’s because that’s what we’ve been taught they look like. So we go on to believe that major life shifts require dramatic architecture— a door slammed shut, a bridge burned, perhaps raised voices, or a single catastrophic declaration. It flatters our ego to think that if we went off course, it took a monumental error to throw us.

The reality is far more banal.

It is the micro-calculus of comfort. It is choosing the path of least resistance on a Tuesday afternoon because you were tired. It is telling yourself “just for now,” knowing “now” is an elastic concept that stretches into months. It is the insidious compound interest of small postponements. You don’t jump off a cliff into an unrecognizable life; you take a single step off the paved road to check your shoe, keep walking parallel to the path, and look up five years later to find the road is three miles to your left and hidden by thick brush.

You don’t suddenly find yourself somewhere unfamiliar. You spend months walking slightly away from where you thought you were going.

But why are we so harsh on ourselves for choosing badly when we couldn’t see the destination?

We cannot even fully blame ourselves when we are continuously told to “choose wisely,” as if wisdom is a lens you can wipe clean on your sleeve and peer through to see five years down the line.

A choice is rarely called wise while it is being made. We call it wise after it works, reckless after it doesn’t, and somehow forget that the person making it had no access to either conclusion. What if the choice that looks reckless eventually saves you? What if the safe choice eventually ruins something? What if both choices contain consequences? What exactly makes one choice “right” before the consequences reveal themselves?

The truth is every choice is executed in the dark, under the weight of incomplete information. All we have is the mind that contains a million spirals of what ifs and alternate possibilities. All we can do is choose a direction with the limited view we have, and then live with the fact that we could never see the entire road from where we were standing.

I think that itself is such a grand joke of human agency. The grandest even.

We have agency over choice, but not over consequence.

Maybe we confuse agency with control.

Agency means I can choose. Control would mean I can guarantee what that choice produces. The first belongs to me. The second never completely has.

I chose this. But I did not choose everything that happened because of it.

A choice is a starting point, not a contract with the universe. You can choose to take a particular road, but you cannot choose who you will meet on it, what will happen along the way, or what the road will look like six months later. You can influence what comes next, sometimes significantly, but influence is not control. There are too many variables outside of us for it to be otherwise.

We often look at the consequences of a decision and trace them backward until we find ourselves at the moment we made the choice, as though everything that followed was contained inside that single decision. But it wasn’t. There were other people. Circumstances. Timing. Chance. Things we could not have known were coming. The choice was ours. The entire chain reaction was not.

My choice may have been the beginning of the chain, but it was never the entire chain.

If we can only judge whether a choice was good after we know its consequences, what does it actually mean to make the “right” choice?

One that seems to have the best outcome? One that is fulfilling? The safest bet? Or just something you have control of?

Perhaps a “right” choice isn’t necessarily the one that produces the best outcome. Maybe it’s the one that made the most sense to the person making it with what they knew then.

But even that definition feels unstable. What does “made the most sense” actually mean? Is it the choice that was most rational? The one that aligned with your values? The one that protected you? The one you could live with? Because sometimes the most reasonable choice still produces a terrible outcome. Sometimes the brave choice looks foolish in retrospect. Sometimes the choice you made for yourself hurts someone else.

Maybe there is no universal “right” choice waiting to be discovered. Maybe there are only choices we make with varying degrees of information, intention, courage, fear, and uncertainty.

You possess the freedom to pick your direction, but almost no power to dictate where the road actually leads. You can make the most calculated, well-intentioned decision available to you and still end up stranded in a ditch. Conversely, you can make a reckless, unthinking blunder on a random Thursday and accidentally stumble into a door that alters your entire trajectory.

If all we have underneath every choice is hope that we’re choosing correctly, then how much of the choice is really ours? How much of our decisions are actually deliberate, and how much are shaped by things we never consciously selected?

Our upbringing. Our fears. Our experiences. The things we’ve been taught to value. The version of ourselves that exists on that particular day. Even the information available to us. We like to imagine that choice begins with a completely free mind standing before two doors, but perhaps we arrive at those doors already carrying a thousand invisible influences. Maybe agency isn’t the absence of influence. Maybe it’s what we manage to do within it.

And when we’ve reached our abyss, hindsight joins us to look at the path we had no idea we passed.

You see, hindsight is a cruel little bastard because it plays tricks with light. When you look backward, the path looks straight, illuminated, and impossibly obvious. You can point to the exact fork where you strayed. You can see the warning signs you supposedly ignored, the red flags fluttering in the breeze. When you remember the moments you said “later,” the opportunities you should have pursued, the conversations you should have had, the ways you could have reasoned differently, hindsight turns every hesitation into evidence. Looking back, the chain of cause and effect seems so clean that you begin to mistake past confusion for sheer stupidity.

But you didn’t live it in reverse.

When you were standing at that fork, there were no signs. The red flags looked like ordinary scenery. You were operating with the fatigue, the emotional weather, and the limited maturity of that exact moment.

Of course the person you are now can see what the person you were then couldn’t. That’s what growth does. But growth creates a strange cruelty: the wiser you become, the more foolish your former self can look.

And maybe that is why hindsight is so dangerous.

The many options you thought you had didn’t exist then. Everything seems so perfectly orchestrated, and you begin to believe you must have orchestrated your own demise.

Because hindsight erases the noise, the pressure, and the fog you were standing in, leaving behind only the outcome—and then asking you why you couldn’t see what was obvious all along.

We are taught that the process matters as much as, if not more than, the outcome. Yet when the outcome is painful, how quickly we forget the process that produced it—the uncertainty, the effort, the information we had, the person we were at the time. We look at where we ended up and use it as evidence that we must have chosen badly.

But regardless, we still have to take responsibility. And that is where the real trap lies: confusing accountability with self-punishment.

If my choices brought me here, am I responsible? Of course. To deny that is to pretend I was dragged through my own life as a bystander. But there is a quiet, dangerous line between taking responsibility and turning your past into a whipping post.

Accountability asks: What did I do, what did it cost, and what do I do now? Self-punishment asks: How long can I make myself suffer for not knowing then what I know today?

And underneath all of that, responsibility does not require omniscience. You can admit: “I made the wrong choice.” without having to conclude: “I was stupid for making it.” Those aren’t the same statements. Responsibility only requires that you are willing to look honestly at what you did once you know more.

It is fundamentally unfair to drag a past version of yourself into a courtroom where only present-day evidence is allowed. You cannot demand that the version of you from five years ago have the armor and foresight of the person you are now.

Forgiveness isn’t pretending the wrong turn was actually a good decision; it is accepting that you were human, flawed, and operating with the tools you had at the time. And although that might not seem possible underneath all the guilt and regret you feel, it’s the most honest thing.

Perhaps the deepest trap of looking back isn’t even the location you’ve landed in—it’s the phantom universe you compare it to.

How do you actually know the alternative would’ve been better? And if we’re being honest, you don’t. You know what happened on this road. You don’t know what would’ve happened on the other one.

Maybe you would’ve succeeded.

Maybe you would’ve failed differently.

Maybe you would’ve lost something else.

Maybe you’d have become someone you wouldn’t recognize.

We tend to assume that if we hadn’t made this mistake, we would be residing in a frictionless paradise where every potential was realized. Maybe you don’t imagine an entirely perfect life. Maybe you only imagine having the person you lost, the career you didn’t pursue, the version of yourself you think you could have become. And because you only know the losses of the life you actually lived, the alternative feels strangely clean. Every choice, even the seemingly perfect one, carries an unseen debt.

You do not trade a bad path for a flawless one; you trade one set of complications for another.

We don’t just mourn the choice we made. We mourn the life we imagine would have existed if we hadn’t made it.

And the strange thing about that imaginary life is that it is almost always edited. We give it the success we wanted, the relationships we hoped for, the opportunities we think we missed. We rarely imagine the version where that choice created a different kind of failure, a different heartbreak, a different regret. We compare the life we actually lived—with all its complications—to an alternate life that exists only in its highlight reel.

So then if every road contains consequences we cannot see, what makes one road the wrong one simply because we don’t like where it led?

And still reality remains. You cannot un-walk the miles. You cannot retroactive-engineer a cleaner history.

The absurdity of choice doesn’t vanish just because you realize it’s there. Tomorrow, you will still have to make decisions with incomplete data, flawed logic, and an imperfect view of the horizon. You can understand your choices without pretending they were brilliant, and you can forgive yourself without erasing their cost.

Perhaps there is a quiet liberation in dropping the illusion that you were ever in total control of where you would end up. The next choice you make doesn’t need to carry the burden of redeeming every single mistake that came before it. It just needs to be a step.

Without justifying how you got there. Without you rewriting the journey into a neat, redemptive arc where “everything happened for a reason” just to make the pain feel purposeful for your coming of age script.

The road behind you is fixed. The map ahead isn’t. And perhaps that is all choice has ever really been: not the ability to know where the road ends, but the willingness to take another step without knowing.

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Love,

Rhoda.

Every time you complete a revolution round the sun, whether you celebrate it or not, you climb up a ladder.

That is the grand design, isn’t it?

We are sold this beautifully packaged, highly cinematic coming-of-age narrative where human development is a neat, linear progression of milestones. In the scripts we are given, the protagonist usually has one central, digestible problem to solve per season. You have the identity crisis at eighteen, you navigate a shifting friendship dynamic, resolve the plot, dust yourself off, and move on to the next stage fully equipped.

But the phrase growing pains is a scam. Singularizing it implies an orderly, sequential process. The thesis we are actually forced to live out is much messier: growing up isn’t a linear ladder; it’s a multi-car pileup.

You don’t get to finish processing one crisis before three more pull up in the driveway. The universe demands you multi-task your agony.

Real life doesn’t have a director to budget the drama. The school crisis, the identity crisis, and the relationship crisis don’t wait in a polite queue; they all happen on a random Tuesday at 3:00 PM.

You are expected to sit at a desk and mentally conquer a mountain of dense, unforgiving academic material, while simultaneously trying to figure out what kind of human being you are even trying to become, while simultaneously realizing that the people you used to align with perfectly are suddenly drifting into different orbits. You are drowning in three different oceans at once, but you’re still expected to look presentable on dry land.

This pileup happens because we aren’t actually growing up uniformly. We are a collection of different ages trapped in a single skin.

Consider the friction between your chronological, emotional, and professional ages. Chronologically, you might be nineteen—an age still technically coddled by the law in many parts of the world. Yet professionally, you are thrust into rooms where you must perform with the clinical, unblinking precision of a thirty-year-old because the stakes don’t care about your birth certificate. Then, emotionally, a single text message or a sudden bout of vulnerability can reduce you to a confused twelve-year-old. We experience a constant internal chafing because different parts of our psyche develop at wildly different speeds. You are constantly over-developed in one room and painfully raw in the next.

But this abstract friction becomes a claustrophobic reality when dropped into a Nigerian landscape. Here, the societal expectation isn’t just that you grow; it’s that you emerge fully formed, without a single seam showing, long before you’ve finished cooking.

There is a unique pressure reserved for this environment—a silent, heavy cultural contract that demands you juggle a dozen distinct futures at the exact same time. You must have the bulletproof career path mapped out while balancing a relentless academic load that leaves no room for error. Simultaneously, you are expected to maintain an active spiritual life, anchor yourself as a reliable pillar of family contribution, design a pristine personal brand, and quietly draft the good wife blueprint—all by a certain arbitrary age, and all without a whisper of complaint.

You find yourself typing out essays on a hanging phone, frantically editing layouts for a startup or a creative project, while the dark shadow of professional exams looms over your week.

Or the news announces another abduction case two states away while NEPA takes the light and the water pressure drops simultaneously.

You are forced to navigate the deeply fluid, chaotic waters of self-discovery while trapped inside a rigid social mold that only rewards rigid conformity. The environment treats you like a finished product while you are still actively bleeding on the factory floor.

When you are in the thick of this, older people love to dismiss your existential dread as just growing pains. It’s a patronizing linguistic trick. Calling it a singular pain implies it is temporary, natural, and ultimately harmless—like the dull ache in your shins when you hit a physical growth spurt. It suggests that once the growth is done, the pain vanishes, leaving the architecture intact.

But some growth hurts so badly it feels like structural damage.

When you are forced to brutally re-evaluate your boundaries, dismantle inherited belief systems, or mourn the loss of versions of yourself you thought would last forever, that isn’t a minor ache. It alters your entire foundation. It leaves cracks in the load-bearing walls. Calling it a simple growing pain minimizes the sheer amount of emotional masonry required to keep yourself standing while the walls are being knocked down and rebuilt around you.

Underlying all of this is a deep, ambient anxiety: the expectation of a destination.

We carry a subconscious belief that if we can just survive this specific pileup—if we can just pass this next hurdle, hit this next milestone, or scale this next wall—we will finally be cooked. We think there is a magical plateau waiting for us where the dust settles, the crises end, and we can finally look in the mirror and say, “Ah, I have arrived.”

Accepting that growing pains are fundamentally plural means swallowing a harder, colder truth: there is no final form. The timeline is an illusion, and the pressure to be fully baked by a certain milestone is a trap. You will never be completely finished, because life in this space will never stop demanding that you expand.

Holding the shattered pieces of yourself together while everything is in motion isn’t a failure to grow—it is the exact definition of it.

But do not mistake survival for peace. The pileup doesn’t clear away just because you’ve learned how to navigate the wreckage. Survival is the development. But it means carrying the structural damage into the next room, and the next crisis, and the one after that.

The cracks don’t disappear. They just become load-bearing.

Love,

Rhoda.

We are taught that human connection is organic—a spontaneous combustion of shared values and mutual warmth. It’s a beautiful lie. In the modern social marketplace, charisma is no longer a personality trait; it’s an asset class. And just like real estate, some people are born into prime property, while others are left trying to flip a fixer-upper.

Think of the most charming person you know. The one who glides through rooms, collects opportunities they barely applied for, and gets away with infractions that would get anyone else canceled. They are the ultimate mutual friend, the centerpiece of every room. We call it main character energy or a vibe, as if we are all willingly playing extras in their scripted story. But if we strip away the romance, what we’re actually looking at is superior market positioning.

We don’t consume people anymore; we consume our perception of them.

In a hyper-visible world, human interaction has been commercialized. Charisma isn’t a mystical gift; it’s a high-performing marketing campaign that creates an unfair social hierarchy.

We often mistake branding for mere likability, but they operate on entirely different economic principles. A purely likable person is operating on unstable currency; they have to constantly perform good deeds and maintain a flawless record to keep their status. The moment they slip, they are replaced. Likability earns approval. Branding earns forgiveness. A branded person, however, doesn’t need to be perfect—they just need to be consistent.

Their music taste, their reading list, their specific cadence of speech, and their aesthetic choices are meticulously curated until they cease to be a person and become a concept. Once that narrative is established, the audience begins to rationalize their flaws. If a well-branded person is rude, the public praises their edgy, unapologetic authenticity. If an unbranded person is rude, they are just a jerk. We forgive the toxic traits of the beautifully curated because their chaos looks good on a mood board. Clean typography and a cohesive color palette buy a staggering amount of moral absolution.

Think of branding the way you think of Apple. When Apple removes the headphone jack, it becomes innovation. When an unbranded company does it, it becomes an inconvenience. When a well-branded human behaves badly, it’s not a character flaw—it’s boundaries or intense passion. They have built narrative immunity. We invest in the arc of their story rather than the reality of who they are.

We grow up believing in a neat, mathematical universe where input equals output. Hard work yields success; kindness yields love. We debate whether life is a game of pure luck or pure meritocracy, treating them as mutually exclusive explanations. But in reality, charisma acts as a multiplier that disrupts the entire equation.

I mean, competence plus charisma equals stardom, while competence minus charisma often equals invisibility.

Because charisma is unequally distributed, it creates an unfair economic divide where the vibes of the presenter matter far more than the substance of the work. It is the ultimate economic cheat code: it allows you to sell the promise of substance before you’ve even delivered a product.

But branding doesn’t just reshape forgiveness; it reshapes opportunity. And once opportunity becomes tied to presentation, the pressure spreads beyond influencers and celebrities.

I used to believe that navigating the world was a matter of objective merit—that if you performed well, the social ledger would naturally balance itself out. But watching the mechanics of modern rooms disabused me of that notion quickly. I have watched people with half the technical capability but double the aesthetic advantage effortlessly capture opportunities, while quieter, more substantial minds fade into the background. The work was identical. The packaging was not. And the room chose the packaging every time.

And this logic does not stop at personal relationships or professional spaces—it has become cultural infrastructure.

Consider the entertainment industry, where the It Girl factor has become a mandatory performance metric. Someone like your favorite pop star succeeds not just because of the music, but because charisma itself has become a highly shareable product.

We have commodified existence to the point where talent is merely a foot in the door; the rest of your day must be spent feeding the content monster. It’s no longer enough to be a brilliant writer, a deft surgeon, or a gifted musician—you must also design an accompanying lifestyle that strangers want to consume.

The dark side of this economy is that now, every industry demands a brand. We are trapped in an era where artists, writers, and professionals are treated as though they owe us a personality. The cultural mandate forces everyone to play the role of an influencer, regardless of whether they have anything meaningful to say outside of their primary craft. We have created a monster where we demand intimacy from strangers, failing to realize that not everyone is built to be a public commodity. Not everyone can—or should—be Cardi B. Some people should be allowed to just do their fucking jobs.

And that is the tax levied on people who refuse to play the branding game, or simply don’t know how. They pay a literal and social penalty. They have to work twice as hard to be noticed in corporate spaces, creative spheres, and even dating markets.

The unbranded person enters every room having to earn what the branded person inherited at the door. They must demonstrate competence before they are granted attention, while the branded person receives attention before they have demonstrated anything at all. The sequence is reversed — and in a world that moves at the speed of first impressions, reversed sequences often become permanent disadvantages.

An unbranded life is expensive.

You pay for it in the currency of having to explain yourself over and over again.

The tragedy of the vibe economy isn’t just that it’s unfair. It’s that it has convinced the unbranded that their invisibility is their fault. That if they were just more interesting, more consistent, more aesthetic — the room would finally turn toward them.

But the room was never going to turn. The room was built for someone else.

And somewhere in the exhausting work of proving yourself to spaces that already decided, something gets lost. Not the brand. You never had one. What gets lost is the belief that you were worth knowing without one.

Love,

Rhoda.

There is a sad epiphany when you realize that you failed at something, and a subtle pat on the back that comes almost immediately when you realize you were so close. You almost did it. Almost achieved it. We’d like to say we gave it a try, to blame it all on life—that maybe we just weren’t right for each other, or for the timing itself. But deep down we know that’s a lie, even if it kisses the pain better.

It is the most frustrating word in the human language. “Never” is absolute; it gives you the cold closure of a slammed door. “Always” is a promise. But “almost” is just a dangling thread. It’s an open loop that refuses to let you heal because it tricks you into believing the door is still ajar.

Because the honest truth is, a near miss might comfort you when you’re chasing a prize or an audition. But when it comes to a person, that subtle pat on the back feels less like comfort and more like a cruel joke. In love, being close doesn’t mean you almost won; it just means you stood close enough to watch yourself lose.

We understand normal rejection. We encounter it every day. You don’t get the job because you lacked a specific skill. You move on from a potential partner because the values don’t align or the chemistry is dead on arrival. That makes sense. It fits into the logical boxes of life. But how do you process a rejection where nothing was wrong? How do you accept a “no” when everything about the person was exactly what you were looking for, but the circumstances simply refused to cooperate?

If I had known that you wanted me the way I wanted you, things would be different. If we had just dropped our pride, risked the rejection, and spoken the truth instead of hiding behind clever text messages and guarded glances. Then maybe we wouldn’t be two worlds apart right now, nursing our respective regrets in separate rooms, but right here in each other’s arms. We almost knew what love might have become. We tasted the edge of it. But a sip doesn’t quench a drought.

And we can deny it as much as we want, wrapping our heartbreak in logical explanations and rehearsed shrugs for anyone who asks. But a performance only works if the audience believes it, and performances have expiry dates. Eventually, the daytime distractions disappear, the world quiets down, and the armor splinters. You aren’t fooling anyone; they see it in the way your eyes linger on an empty seat, or how your voice drops an octave when your indifference fails you.

People love to look at your ruins and call it “redirection,” telling you the universe is just guiding you toward a better path. But redirection feels like an insult when the destination you wanted was standing right in front of you, holding your hand, only for the clock to run out. It is hard to care about a map when you’re still bleeding on the road.

Almost is never enough. It leaves you suspended, so close to being in love but entirely starved of it. The most agonizing part isn’t that it was a one-sided tragedy; it’s the quiet realization that the feelings were entirely mutual, just terribly mismanaged. In a way, this is so much worse than unrequited love. If someone doesn’t love you back, the boundary lines are clear. But bad timing? Bad timing is a third party you never invited into the room. It’s the agony of knowing the puzzle pieces match perfectly, but the table they are sitting on is currently on fire.

But maybe blaming the clock is just the final performance. We call it bad timing because it is easier to resent the universe than it is to admit we simply lacked the courage to try. It hurts less to claim the stars were crossed than to face the fact that we chose safety over each other. We treat timing like a thief in the night, when really, we were the ones who stood by and watched the match catch fire.

Instead, we are reduced to digital ghosts. We look at a green online dot next to a name and wonder if they are staring at ours too, both of us paralyzed by the very silence that created the distance in the first place. We are close enough to text, yet impossibly far from touch.

So we play a silent game of chicken where the first one to break the silence loses, trading a lifetime of touch for the quiet masochism of a screen. We consume the curated fragments of each other’s lives through updates and stories, close enough to see the view from their window but entirely locked out of the room.

So you sit in the dark and bargain with the universe, building an alternate reality out of “what-ifs.” You rewrite the script of the day everything fell apart—deleting the hesitation, undoing the turning of backs—believing that there you’d get the unfiltered, fully realized version of us. But we do not have the privilege of a multiverse. The sun always rises on the world we actually live in, not the one we desperately wish for in the dark. And when the light hits the floorboards, the fantasy dissolves, leaving only the cold reality of an empty room.

Perhaps that is why almost survives for so long: possibility does not just linger; it improves itself in memory. The version of us I build in the dark is only flawless because it is a ghost. Our imagination is a flawless director, but it is a terrible prophet; it scripts the poetry and leaves out the friction. Our fantasy of them doesn’t have to survive the boredom of routine, the weight of flaws, or the slow decay of time. Reality never stood a chance against a masterpiece we custom-built in our own heads.

And so when the daydream clears, you realize you aren’t just grieving the loss of them; you are grieving the loss of potential. You are mourning the version of yourself that got to be happy, the version that didn’t have to carry the weight of “what if.” You are burying a future that died before it even had a chance to be born.

Because at the end of the day, you can’t build a home on a foundation of nearly. You can’t hold a person with almost. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking near-miss, but almost is never enough.

Love,

Rhoda.

Usually, an enzyme is defined by its active site — a specific, hollowed-out geometry meant to cradle only its corresponding substrate. A biological destiny, of sorts. But allosteric regulation introduces a quiet tyranny. The inhibitor doesn’t challenge the center directly; it attaches itself to a distant, peripheral site. Yet the moment it binds, a conformational wave ripples through the protein’s entire architecture. The active site twists. The enzyme remains intact, still humming with metabolic potential — but its original purpose is locked out.

This is the mechanics of parental extension.

The Nigerian parent rarely attacks your autonomy face-to-face. Instead, they bind to your periphery with the silent weight of sacrifice and unvocalized debt. You don’t break. You simply undergo a structural shift. Your entire life alters its configuration to catalyze the dreams they failed to achieve, while your own authentic desires drift uselessly in the background.

When a child is born in Nigeria, it arrives as a vessel of hope. Hope of a second chance; hope that amid your losses, someone can pick up the baton and continue the race you abandoned to build a home.

In a system like Nigeria, binding never announces itself. It arrives as love first. Then subtle expectations that reach for milestones they could not attain.

It is the father who works three jobs so you can afford a school on the island, the mother who deferred her own education so she could have you, the parents who survived circumstances the child will never fully understand. The debt is real before it is weaponized. Children become investments. Sow a seed, reap an adult—a spiritualized Ponzi scheme where the child is the payout.

To understand the inhibitor, you have to understand the solution it operates in. The Nigerian parent is not an architect of malice; they are casualties of an unstable medium. In a country that offers its citizens no social security, no medical cushions, and no structural safety nets, the family unit is forced to become its own mini-state. The parent’s anxiety is survival itself. They look at a brutal economy and realize that their children are the only variable they can influence.

Parental extension, then, becomes a desperate defense mechanism. They truncate your geometry not because they hate your shape, but because they are terrified that your unique shape cannot withstand the acidity of the environment. They need you to be legible to the system — stable, durable, high-earning — because if you fail, the whole family collapses into the vacuum. The weaponization of debt is born from the trauma of scarcity.

And then this debt mutates into obligation until it fuses with love, and you cannot tell when one begins or the other ends. The specific language of Nigerian parenting performs love while installing expectation:

“I didn’t suffer for you to waste your life.”

“After everything we did for you.”

“You are our investment.”

“Can’t you be a good child and consider your parents?”

“I can’t have a child that would disgrace me!”

These words get absorbed into the household atmosphere, making you wonder where you begin and where they end. Since they’re doing so much for you in a system that barely does anything for them, the least you can do is bind to their expectations. It happens so subtly, without you ever being asked to consent to it.

The binding happens at the periphery. A comment about career here — you can either be a doctor, nurse, lawyer, or an engineer, the rest are jokes for going abroad. A silence about your interests there, if at all you do discover them. The slow accumulation of signals about which version of you is acceptable and which version requires explanation.

So the arts student is redirected to medicine for stability. The child whose friendships are monitored for class and status. The daughter whose ambitions are constantly measured against marriageability: “Is that how you’d behave in your husband’s house?” The son whose softness is treated as a malfunction, because men, after all, cannot be crying if they are to be protectors.

You don’t notice the conformational shift while it’s happening. You only notice the shape you’ve become.

Once the structural shift is initiated, the child’s development branches. While it is easy to categorize the results into neat compliance or total rebellion, human kinetics are messier. Most children spend their lives oscillating between the two, operating in ugly middle zones—rebelling professionally but complying romantically, or holding ideological independence while remaining financially bound.

Yet, the two extreme ends of the spectrum reveal the true cost of the shift.

The first pathway is constitutive compliance. This is the child who never stops centering the parent; the allosteric site and the active site permanently fuse. They choose partners their parents would smile at, buy houses that validate their father’s labor, and curate a life that is a moving monument to parental sacrifice. The deep tragedy of this path is that they perform autonomy while being entirely hollowed out. They are functional, but they are a ghost operating a machine. They only realize they wanted a different life when the parent dies, suddenly discovering that the regulator is gone but they have completely forgotten how to move without the weight of the hand on their shoulder.

The second pathway is the rebel, labeled the black sheep. If a protein refuses the template of the regulator, it is treated as an anomaly to be degraded. The rebel chooses to denature rather than comply, fighting the inhibition face-to-face. But rebellion in a Nigerian home is expensive; it requires you to accept the label of “ingrate.” The family structure launches an aggressive defensive response, trying to shame them into conformity. The rebel gains distance from the regulator, but not immunity from the binding.

Whether complying or oscillating, the most insidious part is that the enzyme still works.

You perform at the level expected of you and sometimes beyond it. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. The high achiever who cannot answer the question, “What do you actually want?” is deemed perfectly fine.

Until they aren’t.

The problem begins in the quiet moments of genuine freedom. It arrives sharply at twenty-three or twenty-five, sitting in an apartment away from home, with the actual ability to choose a hobby, a partner, or a meal—and feeling panic instead of joy. Wanting freely feels like a crime when you were raised to be a function.

There is a particular kind of paralysis that comes from this. Not laziness. Not ingratitude. The paralysis of someone whose desires were so consistently overridden that desire itself became suspect. If you are just an extension of your parents, you learn to want in secret or not at all. And when you reach your late twenties, you realize you’ve been excellent at someone else’s life.

Some people spend years confusing the conformation they were given for their actual shape.

Some never stop.

Can the enzyme recover its original conformation?

Can allosteric regulation be reversed?

In biochemistry, sometimes the answer is yes. Conformational changes can be temporary if the regulator is removed early enough. But extended, chronic regulation changes the protein more permanently. If a structural bond is held under tension for long enough, the shape sets.

Therapy names the inhibitor. Distance creates spatial clearance. Deliberate unlearning attempts to force the active site back into its native state. But the honest, clinical answer is that you cannot fully recover the enzyme that existed before the binding. There is no biological time machine.

You cannot un-absorb the kitchen comments.

You cannot un-hear the financial math of your existence.

You cannot become the person you would have been if you had been raised in a vacuum.

Healing, then, is not a return; it is an adaptation. The configuration you were forced into — the hyper-capability, the intense legibility, the sharp discipline required to be their trophy — is now woven into your actual fiber. The tragedy and the asset live in the same tissue.

The question is not whether you can become who you would have been without the binding. The question is who you can become now — from the shape you actually have.

Yet somewhere in its altered architecture, the ghost of the original geometry remains — the quiet, unreachable hollow where something specific was always supposed to fit, still empty, still carrying the outline of the person you were before the regulation began.

Love,

Rhoda.

That somewhere between wishing them well and meaning it, we hold a scoreboard in one hand, and a quiet ache with the other.

There is a certain kind of grief that comes with losing someone. It doesn’t matter whether it ended well or badly; the ache is the same.

You find yourself sorting through memories, painfully aware that their next romance will likely be a déjà vu of yours—just with better lighting and bonus scenes. They have learned from you. They are going to get better.

It stems from a dark selfishness we all possess but rarely admit to. Sometimes, our minds won’t even let us whisper it, so our bodies do the aching for us.

It is not that we are evil. We do not want them to fail. We want them happy, just not happier. We want them to find someone great, just not greater. We want them to move on, but we want a small part of them to stay anchored to what we had. We want to know that we mattered, even if they no longer matter to us.

And somewhere behind it all, we wonder: if we are so past it, why do we care?

Perhaps, subtly, we just want validation that we were enough. That even if we didn’t get forever, we were the most important highlight of their story. That perhaps, even more subtly, a part of them almost regrets letting us go.

Perhaps it is because, as a culture, we have always been far more obsessed with the performance of romance than the quiet reality of love. And by that same math, we have become deeply obsessed with the performance of heartbreak. It is not that the pain isn’t real—it is a big deal. But we have a habit of treating a broken heart like a social milestone or a misery to announce, rather than what it actually is: an inevitable, almost routine part of the human condition.

Because we treat it like a milestone, we treat it like a competition. We enter the market of heartbreak.

We live in a culture obsessed with metrics, and unfortunately, we apply the same math to misery. We treat a breakup like a market crash, instantly calculating who lost more equity, who is recovering faster, and who took the worse hit to their value. When we look at an ex moving on, we aren’t just looking at two people being happy; we are looking at a ledger. We track the timeline.

“Did they wait long enough?” “Is the new person a step up or a lateral move?”

This commodification is why the scene we’ve seen before—even participated in—hurts so acutely. We hate the idea that the emotional labor we invested—the late-night arguments, the lessons on how to communicate, the staying with them at their lowest, the unpacking of their childhood trauma—became a free startup capital for someone else to profit from. We were the beta test; someone else gets the seamless, glitch-free launch and might proceed to give it five stars.

And because the market feels rigged when we are left behind, we immediately begin to rewrite the history of our own investment. We play the victim, not out of malice, but out of self-preservation. We tell our friends,

“They never really loved me anyway,” or “It was all a lie from the start.” We downplay the entire relationship because admitting that it was real, that they did love us, and that they still decided we weren’t worth staying for—that is an economic collapse the mind refuses to accept. It is easier to declare the currency counterfeit than to admit we are suddenly bankrupt.

But if we are being completely honest with ourselves—the kind of honesty that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth—we only hate this game when we are losing it. When we are the ones holding the cards, we play it flawlessly.

Think of the people who love us whom we cannot love back. The ones whose text messages sit unanswered for hours, not because we are busy, but because we like knowing they are waiting. We know we cannot meet them where they are. We know we don’t want to build a future with them. Yet, instead of letting them go cleanly, we feed them crumbs. We do the whole hot-and-cold dance—a sudden burst of warmth followed by weeks of freezing detachment.

Why? Because being desired is an addictive drug, and they are our supplier. We don’t want the responsibility of their heart, but we absolutely refuse to surrender the validation of their hunger. We like the way we look in their eyes. It proves that our ego is consistent: whether we are sobbing over an ex who found someone “happier,” or leading someone else on just to feel adored, we are doing the exact same thing. We are using other human beings as mirrors to prove that we matter. We dread the day our ex stops looking back at us, and we dread the day our admirers finally look away.

This brings us to the core of the ache—the part we cover up with pretty words like closure and healing. Strip away the social media comparison, strip away the fragile ego, and you are left with the terrifying anatomy of grief.

When we lose someone, true, unselfish love would dictate that we want them to find peace. We should want their heavy hearts to lighten. But grief is rarely unselfish; it is violent, possessive, and terrified of obscurity. The trauma of being left doesn’t activate our capacity for benevolence; it activates our survival instinct.

We don’t actually want them to be completely okay without us. We want to leave an un-erasable scar. We want to be a permanent haunting in the house of their mind. We want a specific song on the radio to make them pull over, a specific street corner to make their chest tighten, a specific phrase to taste like ash in their mouth even ten years from now.

This is the dark revelation underneath the sorrow: our desperate need to have mattered completely overrides our capacity to wish them well. We would rather they carry a lingering, lifelong ache for us than find absolute peace in our absence.

Because if they are at peace, it means the wound healed. And if the wound healed, it means we are forgettable. We are fighting less against the loss of the person, and more against the existential dread of becoming a footnote in a story where we thought we were the main character.

So we return to that quiet, ugly prayer: please don’t be happier.

It is not an act of evil. It is just the small, fragile cry of a human being trying to freeze time. Standing in the wreckage of what used to be, looking across the fence at their new, well-lit life, and quietly begging the universe to let the light we gave them be the brightest they will ever see.

We don’t want them to fail. We just want them to remember the dark.

Because the dark could be us.

Love,

Rhoda.

Funny, yes. But also strangely revealing. I mean this is all so familiar isn’t it?

Luxury has always depended on distance. The moment something once exclusive becomes accessible, its value as a status symbol begins to collapse. What was once aspirational becomes ordinary, and the wealthy move on to something harder to reach.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, oversized designer logos were the clearest proof of taste and wealth. Today, they often signal the opposite — imitation, overconsumption, or what the internet would simply call “trying too hard.” Quiet luxury replaced loud branding not because minimalism suddenly became morally superior, but because exclusivity needed a new language.

The pattern repeats itself throughout history. Pale skin once represented privilege because it meant you did not work under the sun. Then global travel became more accessible, and tans began to symbolize leisure instead. Now even tans can be artificially replicated with spray treatments and beauty products, so again the game has changed.

Food delivery was once a luxury convenience. Now it is ordinary enough for exhausted university students ordering dinner at 1 a.m. So exclusivity evolves again. Private chefs, reservation-only dining rooms, invite-only experiences.

In fact, the game has twisted so far that while we attempt to buy their ease, they have begun to buy our struggle. The ultra-wealthy wear artificially distressed sneakers that cost thousands. They curate workwear aesthetics and vacation in places that were once purely survival economies, treating the texture of labor and scarcity as a weekend costume. A worn leather jacket that signals bohemian freedom on a trust fund is just a jacket on someone who actually needs it. For them, grit is a style choice. For us, wealth is a safety strategy. The imitation runs in both directions — we just never had the luxury of making it look intentional.

The cycle never ends. Once the masses can participate, the elite redefine the game.

As a result, one might think the masses are simply late to the game. But perhaps the game itself is designed to keep moving. The moment imitation becomes possible, the standards change. What was once considered tasteful suddenly becomes “tacky,” “overdone,” or “basic.” Not necessarily because it lost beauty, but because too many people gained access to it. Exclusivity, after all, only works when others are excluded.

There is something quietly absurd about aspiring to a world you have never actually entered. To perform a history you were never part of. The old money family carries their wealth with all its history — the guilt, the inheritance, the specific accumulation of it across generations. The person who assembles the aesthetic carries only the surface. And surfaces, however well assembled, have no depth to them. You can wear the costume but you cannot wear the context.

External markers of a class can be replicated, but the internal formation cannot be purchased. Class reproduces itself through time, exposure, and absorption. It is in the dinner table conversation where Monaco is mentioned the way others mention a neighborhood—casually, as context, not as achievement. It is in the freedom to experiment with taste, to start a startup that will probably fail, because being wrong has never cost them anything real. It is in the way they occupy space without apologizing for it: the unhurried handshake, the chair pulled out slowly, the voice that doesn’t rise at the end of sentences as if asking permission to be heard. They speak about their futures without the anxious hedging of “I want to” or “I’m hoping to”, but simply “I’m going to”—as if the door was always already open and the only question was timing. They ask the right questions as though no other questions ever existed. They move through rooms without announcing themselves because they were never taught to announce themselves; they were simply always already inside. And of course, they have the upper hand.

And not just the upper hand. They have the names. The endless foundations. The prep schools which then progress into Ivy Leagues. The gallery at seven because your parents were on the board. The summer somewhere that wasn’t a vacation but just where you went.

Their generational guilt is neatly packaged into these foundations and gallery wings. They enjoy the ultimate luxury of being patrons of the very causes that highlight the inequalities keeping them at the top. They own the system, and then they get to inherit the virtue of critiquing it.

And beneath all of it, something quieter is happening. The way taste gets absorbed before you’re old enough to understand what’s being absorbed. The difference between someone who learned to appreciate art and someone who grew up inside it.

External imitation can approximate the surface. It cannot replicate the ease. And the ease is actually what’s being sold. What’s being aspired to. Not the bag. The way the bag is carried.

So even on the day the game stops moving — even if the target holds still for once — we still wouldn’t fully arrive. Because what separates us was never only the object. And yet we keep running anyway.

So if we realise that isn’t what causes our separation, why do we keep running toward something designed to stay ahead of us? Why do we try to be a part of a class of people whose history we know nothing of, but could only perform?

Because even if you eventually acquire the money, you cannot retroactively buy the time. It takes generations to settle wealth into that specific type of carelessness.

It is a privilege that allows them to adopt clean, conscious veganism without ever having to look at the exploited fields that fed it. They can wear the flawless luxury wig without ever wondering whose autonomy was traded away to harvest the hair. They can purchase handwoven textiles as luxury objects without ever meeting the woman whose entire year of labor funded three days of their holiday. They can dedicate themselves to slow living and intentional consumption without ever acknowledging that slowness has always been a luxury — that the people who made their slow life possible never had the option to move at that pace. And they can spend a gap year volunteering in a country they would never actually choose to live in, collecting the aesthetic of sacrifice without ever bearing its weight. Their privilege is a buffer. It ensures they can consume the beautifully finished product without ever touching the friction of its production.

Because to enter that room without inheriting that ease, you are forced to become a translator. You have to translate your accent, your history, and your defense mechanisms into something palatable for people who have never had to translate a single day of their lives. The true cost of admission isn’t the price of the wardrobe—it’s the silence required to keep it on.

You notice it in small, almost invisible ways. The way some people hesitate before speaking in certain rooms while others assume the floor is already theirs. The way some people rehearse the email three times, checking the tone, softening the language, making sure it doesn’t sound like too much — while others fire off two lines without a second thought and receive the same respect. Some people enter elite spaces trying not to embarrass themselves. Others enter already assuming they belong. The difference is not intelligence. It is not effort. It is the weight — or the absence — of having ever been made to feel like your presence required justification.

We were never chasing the object; we were chasing what the object was supposed to say about us. Legitimacy. Belonging.

The aspiration was never really about the thing itself—it was about the version of yourself that a Birkin is supposed to synthesize. A version of yourself that is finally enough. The person who casually travels without saving for a year. The person who can try and fail without worrying about a safety net because they benefit from the system rather than trying to beat it. It is the fulfillment of a desperate promise: that if you can just get close enough to the aesthetic, you will be seen differently, you will be treated differently, and the distance between you and the room that was never built for us will finally close.

And then the harder question comes — who taught us that their approval was the one worth having? Who decided that the standard of worthiness was set by the people who built the walls in the first place?

To fit into these spaces, we are asked to erase our own history—our survival mechanisms, our specific traumas, and our hard-won triumphs—just to perform a history we were never part of.

There is a profound exhaustion in chasing legitimacy from spaces that will always redefine what is legitimate the moment you arrive.

So maybe the cruelest thing about aspiration is not that it moves the target. It’s that it convinces you the target was ever meant for you to reach.

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Love,

Rhoda.

Everyone knows what’s chic and what’s not. Everyone knows so much about fashion ever since seeing The Devil Wears Prada 2 in the Cinema nearest to them. Everyone has such good taste — which is why all the new startups have the same identity, the same story, the same brand, the same rollout, the same campaigns. What in the Déjà vu is that?

It is ironic that the very thing we insist is priceless has become one of the most aggressively marketed commodities on the internet. We call it taste. The algorithm calls it content.

Everyone is curated now. Everyone is chic. Everyone quotes Virginia Woolf and annotates Maya Angelou. Everyone listens to obscure artists with 3,000 monthly listeners as if underground music were a competitive sport. Everyone owns a “signature” perfume, a carefully assembled Pinterest personality, a niche café order, a capsule wardrobe, a soft-life playlist, a hyper-specific aesthetic with a name that did not exist three weeks ago.

It started with rarity. Or rather with the irony of it. The things we call rare are now the things most aggressively marketed. Luxury no longer belongs to rarity. Rarity itself has become mass produced.

Every brand is now “elevated.” Every product is an experience. Every lifestyle is a performance of intentionality. Even identity now arrives pre-packaged: zodiac-sign makeup, “clean girl” skincare, “old money” fashion, “coquette” femininity, “dark academia” intelligence. The internet no longer asks who you are. It asks which category you resemble most.

This pre-packaging has created a culture that requires permission. We no longer ask ourselves “Do I enjoy this?” but rather “Is this approved?” We seek algorithmic validation before we allow ourselves to be moved.

As a result, our preferences have no lore anymore. No accidental discovery. No embarrassing phase. No winding path into obsession.

We curate our lives to resemble literature because our actual lives often feel emotionally vacant. Aesthetics, once tied to genuine artistic philosophy and sensibility, have slowly collapsed into performance — masks worn to simulate depth, individuality, refinement. If anyone even remembers what those words originally meant.

The worst part is that most people do not even choose these masks themselves. The algorithm chooses first. It tells us what is beautiful, what is tasteful, what is desirable, what is embarrassing, what is “cringe,” what kind of person we should become. Somewhere along the way, personal discovery was replaced with digital suggestion.

Your playlists, your fashion taste, your bookshelf, even your personality traits often feel less like genuine preference and more like highly successful recommendations.

You do not discover yourself anymore. You assemble yourself.

Because we are all fed by the same algorithmic trough, we not only consume the same identities — we become them. Identical inputs yield identical outputs. The same aesthetic references produce the same aesthetic personalities. We are not assembling ourselves from different materials. We are assembling ourselves from the same handful of approved templates, convinced we are being original because we chose slightly different configurations of the same parts.

The modern internet has transformed culture into performance. Art is no longer consumed solely for emotional or intellectual transformation, but increasingly for presentation. Books are displayed before they are understood. Films are referenced before they are fully watched. Music becomes less about resonance and more about signaling.

People no longer simply enjoy things privately; they build identities around being perceived as the type of person who would enjoy those things publicly.

A photograph of a half-read Dostoevsky novel beside a cup of coffee can now communicate sophistication faster than genuine engagement ever could. Quoting Sylvia Plath online often earns more social capital than sincerely grappling with her work. Culture has become aesthetic shorthand.

Intelligence itself has become stylized.

Melancholy is romanticized because sadness photographs beautifully under dim lighting and grain filters. Femininity is branded into aesthetics. Masculinity is packaged into archetypes. Even emotional depth now comes with visual references and Spotify playlists attached to it.

Art once existed to disturb, challenge, liberate, and transform people. Now it is increasingly flattened into decoration for online identities.

Culture is no longer merely experienced.

It is displayed.

Algorithms do not encourage individuality; they encourage recognizability.

The average person now encounters identity the same way they encounter products: through recommendation systems.

One scroll through social media offers endless templates for existence. The “clean girl.” The “coquette.” The “mob wife.” The “soft life” woman. The “old money” aesthetic. Your favorite artist is often less a discovery than a socially approved answer.

Entire personalities are reduced into digestible visual formulas that can be purchased, replicated, and performed.

People are no longer becoming themselves naturally. They are selecting from catalogs.

The algorithm tells people what sophistication looks like, what beauty should resemble, what interests are acceptable, what opinions are embarrassing, what aesthetics are currently valuable, what is chic and what is not. Most importantly, it rewards conformity while disguising itself as self-expression.

This conformity is enforced by a brutal, all-or-nothing digital panopticon. The terror of being labeled “cringe” has paralyzed genuine human experimentation. We no longer allow ourselves a grace period to be awkward or weird in private. Instead, we either ruthlessly suppress our organic eccentricities to fit an approved template, or we swing to the opposite extreme—over-romanticizing and branding our weirdness into a performance. You cannot just be a person who enjoys a strange hobby anymore; you must become the definitive online avatar for it. And even if you did enjoy something absurd, it’s still for the aesthetic of it.

This creates the illusion of individuality while producing sameness on a massive scale.

We have turned the simple act of existing into an unpaid administrative job. We are the creative directors, marketing managers, and PR agents of our own lives—all for an audience that is too busy managing their own brands to actually notice ours.

Even rebellion has become predictable. The rejection of curated identity is now itself a curated identity. The person who performs indifference to trends does so through a recognizable set of signals — the ostentatiously cracked phone screen, the unbranded tote bag, the deliberately unglamorous thrift store find posted without a filter. Anti-aesthetics have aesthetics. Opting out has a uniform. Even the refusal to perform has become a performance, just with better lighting and a more self-aware caption.

The internet industrialized identity by turning selfhood into a trend cycle. Beneath all of this lies a system that profits immensely from manufactured identity.

The uncomfortable truth is that the market actively despises genuine, independent taste. A person with highly specific, slow-cooked taste is dangerous to a corporation because they cannot be easily predicted, categorized, or sold to. Capitalism requires predictable consumers. By replacing organic taste with algorithmic suggestions, industries can manufacture both the identity and the product to satisfy it, turning human individuality into a highly efficient supply chain.

This efficiency relies on a toxic binary: everything must either be hyper-mainstream, or it is considered a failure. We have lost the capacity to appreciate the sub-section. Capitalism doesn’t actually benefit from a real niche because true niches don’t scale; they cannot be mass-monetized. Therefore, the internet convinces us that if art doesn’t appeal to the entire world, it has failed to pass a message.

But not being mainstream is not equivalent to failure. Art is meant to live in pockets. Everyone cannot be a part of every room. Not every artist needs the monocultural grip of SZA; some are meant to cultivate the intimate, specific resonance of H.E.R. Yet, the modern digital economy demands total saturation. If your weirdness or your specific sound cannot be packaged for the masses, the algorithm starves it of oxygen, punishing the artist for refusing to flatten themselves for the crowd.

As a result, entire industries now exist to reassure consumers that they are distinctive individuals while selling them the exact same forms of distinction as everyone else.

Subcultures once formed naturally through shared experiences, geography, politics, and community. They possessed mystery and intimacy. Now they are absorbed, repackaged, and commercialized almost instantly. The moment an aesthetic gains traction online, brands transform it into a marketing opportunity.

Nothing remains underground for long anymore.

The internet consumes subcultures faster than they can fully form.

Perhaps the greatest loss is not originality itself, but the slow process through which people once discovered who they were.

Taste once developed gradually. It was shaped by accidents, geography, messy friendships, physical environments, libraries, conversations, heartbreak, boredom, and time. It was an accumulation of lived experience, meaning it was inherently free—it required living, not spending. Now, the internet has conflated taste with purchasing power. But buying the aesthetic of a well-read intellectual or a minimalist traveler does not give you their perspective. True taste cannot be downloaded or bought in a capsule wardrobe; it requires the one thing the internet refuses to grant us: time to wander.

Now algorithms predict desire before desire even fully forms.

Streaming platforms recommend what to watch next. Online stores predict personal style. Music apps generate personalities from listening habits. Entire identities are anticipated before individuals have the chance to stumble into themselves naturally.

Nothing develops slowly anymore. Not even identity.

The internet has optimized discovery so aggressively that curiosity itself feels compressed. People no longer wander toward interests unpredictably; they are guided efficiently toward algorithmically approved versions of themselves.

Mystery has become inconvenient.

Even selfhood now operates at the speed of consumption.

And somewhere in that speed, the self gets lost.

Perhaps genuine taste still exists, but it likely develops far away from performance. Away from constant visibility. Away from the pressure to transform every interest into content and every emotion into branding.

Perhaps real taste requires privacy.

Perhaps individuality can only emerge when no audience is present to reward it.

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Love,

Rhoda.

I finished watching Dying for Sex—a show about a woman with terminal cancer who spends her remaining time finally living. Well, having sex. Same thing.

And what stayed with me most was not Molly dying.

It was her best friend, Nikki.

Because throughout the show, especially by episode six, I could not stop thinking about the fact that although Molly was the one with stage four breast cancer that had spread to her bones, another person was slowly dying too. Not physically. But in quieter ways. More invisible ways.

Nikki’s life slowly stopped belonging to her.

When Molly decided she wanted to spend whatever time she had left finally experiencing pleasure, freedom, sex, intimacy, and a version of life she had denied herself for decades, Nikki became the structure holding that freedom together. Molly could go out and search for herself because Nikki stayed behind to make sure everything else did not collapse.

And that kind of love is beautiful. But it is also consuming.

The show does something I rarely see portrayed honestly when it comes to caregiving and terminal illness. It shows how the people surrounding the dying often begin to disappear too.

Not because they resent the person they love. Not because they regret helping them. But because slowly, almost without realizing it, their entire existence becomes organized around someone else’s survival, fear, appointments, emotions, routines, and needs.

Nikki lost her job.

Her relationship began to collapse because she could not allow herself to be cared for while she was busy caring for Molly. Even when her boyfriend tried to support her, or her sister saw the cracks, there was almost no room left in her life for softness, vulnerability, or herself. And I do not think it was simply stubbornness. I think accepting help would have forced Nikki to confront just how badly she herself was coping. Forced her to put words to her exhaustion. Forced her to admit that perhaps she was drowning, and would have to stop helping Molly stay on shore.

As long as she stayed useful, functional, needed, she did not have to fully sit inside the helplessness of watching someone she loved die.

So instead, she kept moving.

And some of the saddest moments in the show are not dramatic breakdowns. They are the smaller humiliations of caregiving. Nikki sitting in hallways while Molly disappeared into rooms with strangers. Nikki waiting outside doors. Nikki constantly existing in the background of someone else’s becoming.

That corridor imagery stayed with me because it almost becomes symbolic of her entire role in the show. Waiting. Holding things together. Existing on the sidelines while trying not to fall apart herself.

And what makes it even sadder is that Nikki becomes almost invisible partly because she is good at caregiving. Everyone relies on her competence so much that very few people truly stop to ask whether she is okay.

I think part of what makes caregiving so isolating is that competence often disguises suffering. The more functional someone appears, the less permission they have to break down. She becomes emotional scaffolding. Stable enough for everyone else to lean on, while quietly collapsing in private.

Then episode six completely broke me.

The Christmas hospital scene felt like Nikki trying desperately to preserve joy in a situation already collapsing. She brought dresses. Decorations. Energy. She tried to make sterility feel human. Tried to make dying feel less lonely. Less clinical.

And then Molly leaves.

Not necessarily out of cruelty, but out of desperation. Out of wanting to feel alive for even a few more hours through sex and escape and distraction. And when she tells Nikki that she never asked her to lose her entire life for her, the show finally says aloud the tension that had been quietly growing underneath their friendship the whole time.

Because Nikki was losing her life.

Not all at once. But piece by piece.

And when Nikki says “Molly, stop,” on the bed later, it does not just sound like frustration. It sounds like exhaustion. Like grief arriving before death does. Like someone realizing they are disappearing inside their love for another person.

Even as Molly was fading, Nikki’s primary instinct was to protect her from the weight of what it was costing. She didn’t want Molly to spend her remaining days worrying about leaving her behind. So she maintained the structure. She sat by the bed and played puzzles—performing the quiet, ordinary rhythms of life while carrying a catastrophic weight. It felt less like caregiving and more like Nikki was already actively mourning. Her living had become an act of bereavement before the heart had even stopped beating.

And perhaps this dynamic is not unique to terminal illness at all. We see it constantly in the cultural archetype of the overburdened eldest daughter—the one everyone puts on a pedestal because she has the perfect grades, the perfect emotional restraint, the perfect capability. Everyone admires her strength, but that praise is a trap. It demands her continuous compliance and self-suppression. She maintains the flawless list, keeps the family gravity steady, and protects everyone else from friction, all while her own girlhood is being subtly erased in the background. She is celebrated for being functional, but rarely allowed to just be human.

Sometimes devotion requires such continuous self-abandonment that by the end, the caregiver no longer knows where they begin outside the person they were trying to save.

By episode six, Nikki no longer feels like someone waiting for grief. She feels like someone already living inside it.

And I think what makes her character so devastating is that her losses are the kind society barely recognizes. After all, Molly is the one dying. Molly is the patient. Molly is the tragedy.

So eventually Nikki is expected to recover. But what makes her grief so devastating is that she loses not only Molly, but the version of herself built around loving her.

And I think that is why the final scenes feel so painfully empty.

Not just because Molly is gone, but because Nikki suddenly has nowhere to place all the care, attention, worry, devotion and emotional energy that had consumed her life for so long. Caregiving had become routine. Purpose. Exhaustion. Companionship. Intimacy. Identity.

Then suddenly there is silence.

But the muscle memory of devotion doesn’t just disappear when the caregiving ends. You still think in terms of “we” long after you have become an “I.” You still reach for your phone to text updates to a number that no longer answers. When your entire day has been organized around another person’s survival, rest itself begins to feel like a betrayal—or worse, like discomfort. Being needed becomes its own kind of addiction, and the sobriety of sudden freedom is terrifying.

That is what makes grief feel so disorienting sometimes. Not just sadness, but identity collapse. When someone spends so long loving, protecting, organizing, worrying and surviving beside another person, their sense of self becomes relational. So when that person dies, a part of them loses context too.

One of the saddest moments for me is when Nikki watches two older women talking together and becomes emotional because you immediately understand what she is seeing. That was supposed to be them someday. Growing older together. Existing casually in each other’s lives. Becoming ordinary old women with years of history between them.

Molly’s death did not just take Molly away.

It took the future Nikki had unconsciously imagined beside her.

Maybe that is the cruelest thing grief steals. Not just people, but imagined futures. Entire versions of ourselves we only existed beside.

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Love,

Rhoda.

We call it independence. We call it hustle. We call it self-made.

But what if it’s just loneliness with better branding?

There’s the 22-year-old designer who is also the creative director, the tailor, the photographer, the editor, the stylist, and the social media manager. We have romanticized the aesthetic of isolation—the solo founder in a dark room with a MacBook, grinding until 3 a.m. We’ve made “I don’t need anyone” a badge of honor, when it’s a recipe for burnout.

We are trying to be the whole machine. And we wonder why nothing feels groundbreaking anymore.

We’ve been sold a myth: that real art comes from one person. One lightning strike of genius in a silent room. But that has never been true. Picasso had Braque. The Beatles had George Martin. Future has Metro Boomin. Drake has his songwriters. Beyoncé has a 200-person team.

Somewhere along the line, we confused authorship for ownership. We believe that if we don’t do it all ourselves, it’s not pure. But when you work in a vacuum, you fall into the echo chamber effect. You only have one library to pull from—your own brain. Without the friction of another mind, you aren’t creating; you’re just recycling your own biases. Real art isn’t born in isolation; it is an edit of the world around you.

We have this obsession with creating from scratch, as if we’ve all become Nara Smith—making the flour, the butter, and the salt just to prove we can—believing that the most authentic art is born in a vacuum.

We’ve turned doing it all into the ultimate flex, a peak-level privilege disguised as hard work. But this performance of labor creates a dangerous ego. It convinces us that because we can do everything, we don’t need anyone. We start to believe that self-sufficiency is the same as excellence, when really, it’s just a high-end way of staying small.

But nothing is truly original —it is only personal. To create is not to invent from nothing; it is to find yourself in what already exists and rearrange it until it carries your pulse. When we try to be original by cutting ourselves off from influence, we don’t become more creative—we just become more isolated. We trade the rich history of human expression for the thin walls of our own ego.

Genres did not exist on their own. They crossed, bled into each other, and birthed something new.

Even the greats we reference in almost everything did not create from scratch. They created their own symphonies out of the influences, styles, and histories they found themselves inside. And then they had a lot of help. They were just a very important part of the machine, the most visible.

But when you are the whole machine, the machine can only be as big as you. You spend 80% of your energy on things you are average at, and only 20% on what you are exceptional at. You settle for good enough in five areas instead of being world-class in one. This is why we have so much production but so much mediocrity. Then we wonder why we’re not the best, just always enough for now. Why our work is usually forgettable.

We optimized ourselves into creative redundancy, learning how to do everything except disappear into one thing deeply enough to transform it.

Your art becomes a reflection of you, not a conversation with the world. It becomes a monologue. A monologue, no matter how beautiful, eventually gets tired. Even film needs lighting, color, score, and editing to make the monologue believable.

We say we want control, but what we really want is protection.

Collaboration is terrifying because it requires vulnerability. You have to let someone see the ugly version of your work before it’s polished. It’s easier to work alone because you can hide your mistakes. We fear being misunderstood, and we fear losing credit.

But protection is not the same as creation. The ego, when left unchecked, becomes a cage. We call it protecting the vision, but it’s usually just protecting our pride.

This isolation has birthed a secondary pandemic: the death of the critique. Because the lone creator is the whole machine— the writer, the face, the brand—the art becomes inseparable from the person. We’ve become so fragile that we view a critique of the work as an ad hominem attack on our existence.

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I’ve had moments where I’ve spent hours—maybe days—perfecting a specific method of doing something. A way of organizing my notes, a way of structuring a scene, a way of building a workflow. I’d convince myself that my way was the most thorough, the most authentic, the most me.

Then, someone walks in and casually suggests a tiny tweak. A shortcut. A different perspective. And my first instinct isn’t thank you. Though of course, I’d still say it. It’s a sharp, hot flash of annoyance. It’s a sting in the chest.

It hurts because they’re right. Their way is better. But because I’ve tied my identity to being the sole architect of my process, their suggestion feels like a demolition of my competence. I’d rather struggle my way than succeed your way. We cling to our inefficient monologues because at least they belong to us. We’d rather be ‘mid’ on our own terms than exceptional through someone else’s eyes.

We call it standardizing our process, but it’s really just building a fortress where no one can tell us we missed a spot.

If I say the work lacks depth, you hear that you are shallow. So, we stop giving honest feedback. We trade truth for vibes. We’ve collectively agreed to be okay with everything being mid because we think the mere effort of creating is enough to earn praise. We’ve settled for glossy surfaces—art that looks good on a 6-inch screen but has no bones, no weight, and no longevity. We’ve settled for revivals and remixes. But art that isn’t critiqued cannot get better. Without the fire of a second opinion, the work stays raw; it never becomes steel.

More people have access to creating art now than at any other point in history. Social media. Cameras. Tools.

The irony is that the tools were supposed to set us free. Canva, AI, CapCut—you can do everything on a laptop now. But accessible creation is not the same as good creation. After all, we now have templates to even make the accessibility easier. And now we suffer from a template pandemic. Because we use solo tools and one-click solutions, our art has started to look identical. We’ve traded the messiness of human collaboration for the cleanliness of a preset. The tools gave us power, but they took away the community. They made collaboration optional, and in doing so, they made the work predictable.

The tragedy of the lone creator is that we aren’t actually alone; we’ve just replaced human collaborators with an algorithm. A human partner—a real editor, a co-writer, a stylist—is designed to challenge you. They say, “This is boring,” or “You’ve done this before.” They push you toward revelation.

The algorithm does the opposite. It rewards repetition. It doesn’t want you to be groundbreaking, it wants you to be consistent. It’s a feedback loop that mistakes engagement for excellence. When we create in isolation, we stop listening to the soul of the work and start listening to the metrics. We aren’t building a legacy, we’re just feeding a machine that will forget us by tomorrow.

The algorithm doesn’t want you to innovate; it wants you to reference. And because we all consume the same trends, use the same templates, and create through the same platforms, our work begins to collapse into itself. We mistake a well-curated mood board for vision. We mistake familiarity for originality. The result is a culture producing endless content but very little revelation.

For many of us, especially in spaces like Nigeria, the Lone Creator isn’t an ego trip—it’s a defensive crouch. We work alone because the infrastructure for collaboration is broken. There are no reliable guilds, no functional unions, and often, no budget to hire the team you actually need. You do everything yourself because if you don’t, the project dies on your hard drive. We are forced into individualism by a system that doesn’t offer a safety net. We are self-made because we had no other choice, but we must be careful not to mistake this survival tactic for a creative ideal.

This leads to the ultimate trap: Survival doesn’t leave room for experimentation.

When you are a one-person factory, you can’t afford to fail. You start making safe art—things you know will sell, things the algorithm likes, things that pay the rent. Building requires the luxury of focus, surviving on the other hand requires the exhaustion of multitasking. This great stagnation in culture—where we have millions of content creators but almost no new classics—is the direct result of creators who are too tired to take risks.

Collaboration is not dilution; it is multiplication.

Your idea plus my idea does not equal two ideas. It creates a third idea—something neither of us could have birthed alone.

It is in the friction, the tension, and the disagreement that something truly new is born.

The future of art isn’t solo. It’s communal. Let go of being the whole machine. Let the work be bigger than you. Because the most groundbreaking art has never come from one person—it comes from one person brave enough to let others in.

The loneliest thing you can do as a creator is refuse to be changed by someone else.

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Love,

Rhoda.

We are learning, slowly, to mistake repetition for meaning.

There is a quiet obsession threading through everything lately.

It slips into conversations about 2016 like it was some lost golden age. It lingers in pre-colonial discourse, in the constant revivals, in Y2K aesthetics resurrected for the second time, in endless reboots no one asked for but everyone still watches. It is subtle, almost harmless at first glance. Familiar, even comforting. And it all folds into one word: nostalgia.

Nostalgia, on its own, is not the problem. It is human to remember fondly, to revisit, to hold on. But something about it now feels… excessive. Almost structural. As though the present cannot exist without leaning on what came before it.

We are no longer just remembering the past—we are recreating it, recycling it, rehearsing it. And somewhere in that repetition, it begins to blur: when does inspiration become imitation? when does memory become escape?

Because if everything we create is a return, a reference, a revival— then what does that say about the world we are currently living in?

Is it that we no longer have enough to sustain us here? Or have we simply convinced ourselves that “then” was better— carefully editing out its flaws, until it begins to look like something close to heaven?

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You know that feeling when you’re scrolling and suddenly land on an old video—maybe using a song from 2016, or maybe even earlier—and for a moment, everything feels lighter than it does now.

The comments are always the same.

“Take me back.”

“Life was so much better then.”

“We didn’t know we were in the good old days.”

And maybe you pause a little longer than you intended to. Not because the video is extraordinary—but because it feels like something is missing now that used to be there.

The slightly grainy quality, the way the colours feel warmer than they probably were, the comments scrolling faster than you can read them—

Nostalgia was never meant to be constant. It was something that arrived quietly—uninvited, but not unwelcome. A song, a smell, a place you hadn’t thought about in years. It belonged to moments, not entire eras.

It did not ask us to stay. It only asked us to remember.

There was a kind of honesty to it then. The past was not perfect, and we knew that. Nostalgia softened the edges, but it did not rewrite the entire story. It allowed us to revisit, not to rebuild.

And most importantly, it coexisted with the present. It did not compete with it.

But now, it feels different.

The past no longer visits us—we recreate it.

Entire aesthetics are revived and repackaged, decades condensed into trends.

Even time itself starts to feel rearranged.

People who never lived through certain eras now participate in them as if they had, reconstructing a version of history that feels familiar without ever being experienced.

And it is not accidental. The systems around us reward it.

Familiarity performs better than uncertainty. A recreated sound is easier to consume than an unfamiliar one. A reboot carries less risk than an original story. The past has become not just accessible, but profitable.

So we return to it. Again and again.

Not because we have to—but because it works. Because the present asks more of us than the past ever will.

And in doing so, the past becomes a habit.

But even that isn’t the full picture. This is not about watching an old film and appreciating it for what it was. It is not about revisiting music, or fashion, or moments that genuinely meant something. That kind of return is reflective—it acknowledges time, it respects distance.

What feels different now is not the act of remembering, but the way we linger.

There is a difference between engaging with the past and attempting to inhabit it. Between influence and dependence. Between allowing something to inform you and allowing it to define what you are able to create.

Because nostalgia, at its healthiest, moves. It passes through you, not around you.

But when it becomes something we remain inside of—when it starts to shape what we expect the present to feel like—that is when it begins to shift into something else entirely.

Into repetition.

And repetition, over time, begins to feel like stability.

Not every return to the past is a step backward. Some are intentional, even necessary. There is value in preservation, in study, in understanding what came before. Art does not exist in isolation, and it never has.

But there is a subtle difference between drawing from the past and defaulting to it.

One expands possibility. The other quietly limits it.

And the line between the two is not always obvious—but it becomes clearer in repetition. In how often we look back before we look forward. In how quickly the familiar is chosen over the unfamiliar.

It is not the presence of nostalgia that is concerning. It is its dominance.

Somewhere in that repetition, nostalgia begins to shift.

It stops being about remembering what was, and starts becoming a way to avoid what is. The past is edited, refined, stripped of its complications until it resembles something almost ideal. Not accurate—but comforting.

Think about the way we remember certain periods of our lives. I mean — secondary school, for instance. Worse if it was a boarding school.It often returns as laughter, as friendships, as small moments that feel almost cinematic in hindsight.

But it rarely returns with the full picture.

Not the stress. Not the uncertainty. Not the parts that felt unbearable while we were still inside them.

Memory does not lie—but it does simplify.

And over time, that simplification starts to feel like truth.

And the more we engage with that version of the past, the more the present begins to feel insufficient in comparison.

Because the present is unfinished. Unpredictable. Imperfect in ways we cannot control.

The past, on the other hand, is already complete. We can shape it however we like.

So we do.

We shape the past until it feels easier to live in than the present ever could.

And slowly, without realizing it, we begin to live in reference to something that no longer exists.

It would be easy to say that originality has disappeared. But that is not entirely true.

New ideas still exist. They always will.

What has changed is the environment in which they have to survive.

Creating something new requires risk—of failure, of rejection, of being misunderstood. Recreating something familiar does not. It comes with recognition already built in, a kind of cultural safety net.

So the line begins to blur.

It is easier to recreate than to risk.

You see it in the way trends move now. A sound becomes popular—not because it is new, but because it reminds people of something they already loved. A style resurfaces, almost unchanged, and suddenly it feels relevant again.

Even originality is often introduced through familiarity—something new, but not too new. Different, but still recognizable.

And the more this happens, the more unfamiliar things start to feel… harder to accept.

And it brings up a quieter question:

When exactly does inspiration become dependence? When does homage become hesitation?

Maybe part of the problem is that we’ve misunderstood what it means to create in the first place.

Art has never been built entirely from nothing. It has always been shaped by what came before it. Genres evolve, not appear. What we call new is often a reconfiguration of what already exists—rearranged, reinterpreted, made specific to a different moment.

R&B did not emerge in isolation. It carries traces of jazz, of gospel, of everything that preceded it. Not as imitation, but as transformation.

And maybe that is where the distinction lies. We are not failing to create—we are failing to transform.

Because working from what exists is not the problem. In many ways, it is where the most compelling art comes from—where different influences meet, where something familiar is reshaped into something that feels distinctly personal.

The issue is not that we are referencing the past.

It is that we are often stopping at the surface of it.

There is a difference between understanding an influence and replicating its appearance. Between knowing what something meant and simply reproducing how it looked or sounded.

And when that distinction collapses, creation begins to feel less like expression and more like repetition.

Which raises a quieter question.

If we are so committed to reviving what has already been— what are we leaving behind for what comes next?

If the present is always filtered through the past, it never fully becomes its own.

By obsessively recycling what has already been, we are quietly borrowing from a future that hasn’t had the chance to fully form.

If our present is just a curated museum of then, we leave the next generation with nothing but a loop. We are handing them an empty room filled with their parents’ clothes, expecting them to find a soul in the fabric. By refusing to create our own markers, we are accruing a cultural debt that the future will have to pay. We are consuming the newness that was meant for them, leaving them to inherit a world where everything has already been said, already been worn, and already been liked.

Will the future look back at this moment and find something of its own to hold onto?

Or will it inherit a loop—one that keeps returning to the same points, the same references, the same versions of what we have already decided was worth remembering?

We are not lacking creativity. We are just not moving in its direction.

But we are also surrounded by systems that reward repetition more than invention.

And over time, ease has a way of shaping culture.

Of course, this isn’t happening in isolation. It never does.

We live in a time where nothing truly disappears. Every moment is documented, archived, replayed. The past is no longer distant—it is constantly within reach. A version of it is always available, always accessible, always ready to be revisited.

In the past, nostalgia required a funeral. Something had to end for us to miss it; distance was the tax we paid for memory. But today, the past never actually dies—it just stays online. 2016 isn’t a memory, it’s a tab we keep open in the background of our lives. We aren’t so much remembering the past as we are haunting it, like ghosts refusing to leave a house simply because the lights are still on. When the past is always live, we never have to learn how to say goodbye.

At the same time, the present feels increasingly unstable. It is too loud, too documented, and too fast. We live in a state of constant surveillance—not just by systems, but by each other—where every mistake is archived and every moment is hyper-analyzed before it has even finished happening. In that noise, the past is the only place left that feels quiet. It is the only place where the ending is already known, and therefore, the only place where we can finally stop looking over our shoulders.

Economically, socially, even personally—certainty is rare. And when the present feels uncertain, the past begins to look safer than it actually was.

There is also the question of identity. When everything feels fluid, undefined, in progress, the past offers something structured. Ready-made aesthetics, ready-made narratives, ready-made versions of self.

It is easier to step into something that already exists than to build something from nothing.

So we retrace instead of move forward. Because looking ahead requires a kind of uncertainty we are not always willing to sit with.

Not just because we want to—but because it gives us something the present often cannot: a sense of clarity.

And I am not outside of this. I re-enter it too easily.

There is also another layer to this—one that is less comfortable to admit.

A lot of what we call nostalgia is tied, very closely, to youth.

To versions of ourselves that felt lighter, freer, more certain. And over time, those versions become reference points. Not just for memory, but for value.

We begin to quietly associate “better” with “younger.”

Not consciously, not always—but consistently.

And so looking back is not just about the past—it is about returning to a version of ourselves that felt easier to exist as.

In that sense, nostalgia can start to resemble something else.

Not just longing—but a quiet resistance to aging. A subtle belief that what lies ahead cannot compete with what has already passed.

Which makes the present feel like a decline, instead of a continuation.

Maybe the past hasn’t become more beautiful.

Maybe we’ve just become less willing to sit with the present.

Maybe this is where it becomes uncomfortable.

You can see this in the way entire eras are being reconstructed—not just appreciated, but almost insisted upon. The return to analog, for instance, is no longer just aesthetic. It is treated as something purer, more authentic, inherently better than what exists now.

And while there is truth in the appeal—slowness, tangibility, limitation—there is also exaggeration.

Because those eras were not as seamless as we remember them to be. They came with their own frustrations, their own constraints, their own imperfections that are often edited out in hindsight.

But nostalgia does not preserve inconvenience. It preserves feeling.

So what we end up chasing is not the past as it was—but the past as it feels now, from a distance.

And that distance is doing more work than we admit.

Because this isn’t really about trends, or media, or even nostalgia on its own.

It is about reluctance. Not loud, not obvious—but persistent enough to shape how we move through time.

Growing up—culturally, creatively, even individually—requires moving into uncertainty. It requires letting go of what is familiar without knowing exactly what replaces it.

Nostalgia interrupts that process.

It allows us to stay just a little longer. To revisit, to repeat, to remain in a space that feels known. Not permanently, but often enough that moving forward begins to feel less urgent.

There’s a subtle comfort in revisiting things you already understand. Rewatching, replaying, returning. Not because there’s nothing new to experience—but because the familiar asks less of you.

It doesn’t require adjustment.

It doesn’t require uncertainty.

It lets you stay exactly where you are.

And maybe that’s the point.

Not that we cannot grow.

But that we have found a way to delay it. And in that delay, we keep re-entering.

So the question is not whether nostalgia is good or bad. It never has been.

The question is what happens when it stops being something we return to—and becomes something we remain inside of.

When every new thing is shaped by something old,

and every moment is measured against one that has already passed—

the present is no longer experienced on its own terms, but measured against a version of the past we have already perfected.

At some point, remembering stops being reflection.

And starts becoming replacement.

And if we keep reaching for what has already been—

we may not notice when we stop leaving room for anything else at all.

We are so busy haunting our own history that we are crowding out the living.

If we don’t learn to let the past stay dead, the future becomes a ghost before it even has the chance to be born.

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Love,

Rhoda.

Who are you?

Who am I?

Who are we?

Three words. One question. One that surfaces everywhere—across contexts, across versions, across every attempt at defining ourselves.

We are constantly asked who we are. And we answer.

Our names, our age, where we come from, what we like, who we love, what we do. Forms ask it. Institutions require it. Relationships reinforce it. We offer the slate we’ve been filling since birth—line by line, detail by detail.

And yet, even after all that, we are asked again: Who are you?

It is strange how nothing ever seems to suffice. No amount of information, no carefully constructed introduction, no accumulation of facts ever fully answers the question. Instead, we are told to go further. To look inward. To find something deeper—an “inner self” untouched by roles, labels, or expectation.

But what does that even mean?

Because every time we think we have found it—some stable, coherent version of ourselves—something shifts. Life interrupts. Context changes. We contradict what we thought was fixed. And just like that, we are returned to the beginning.

The pursuit starts again.

We are told this search will bring clarity. Peace. A sense of wholeness. That somewhere beneath everything we’ve been given, there is a version of us that is real, consistent, and entirely our own.

And yet, the same world that asks us to find ourselves is the one that fragments us—assigning roles, shaping desires, rewriting identities faster than we can stabilize them.

So what exactly are we supposed to find?

And what does it mean if the self we are searching for refuses to stay still?

What we rarely question is how early we begin to learn the correct answers.

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Not necessarily the truthful ones—but the ones that make sense. The ones that are legible. The ones that can be understood quickly, categorized easily, and accepted without resistance.

From a young age, identity becomes something we are taught to present. Not just to express, but to organize. To make coherent. To make consistent. We learn, consciously or not, that it is easier to be one thing at a time than many things at once.

So we simplify ourselves.

There are moments when you catch yourself adjusting without thinking.

The way your voice changes depending on who is listening. The way your expression shifts mid-conversation—not because you decided to perform, but because something in you already understood the room before you did.

And you don’t recognize it as performance in real time. Only later, when you replay it in your mind, does it become visible: how easily you become slightly different versions of yourself without ever formally choosing to.

We choose the answers that fit the space we are in. The version of ourselves that requires the least explanation. And over time, those choices begin to solidify—not because they are entirely true, but because they are repeatedly performed.

You can see it everywhere.

On social media, where identity becomes something curated—filtered, arranged, edited into something cohesive. A version of the self that makes sense visually, aesthetically, narratively. And yet, it rarely holds in real life. The people who seem perfectly aligned online often feel misaligned in reality. Even the relationships we admire from a distance—those we assume are effortless, compatible, certain—sometimes barely hold when removed from the performance.

And still, we participate.

We adjust how we speak, how we dress, how we carry ourselves depending on the room. We are told that what we wear introduces us before we speak. That presence is something constructed. That perception can be managed.

So we enter different spaces differently.

In one room, you are composed. In another, you are relaxed. In one, you are the “smart one.” In another, the “strong one.” The “mature one.” The one people rely on. And in each case, the role holds—not because it is entirely false, but because it is consistently expected.

Even authority notices the shift, but misunderstands it.

You are told you act differently at school than you do at home. That you are somehow deceptive. As though consistency across environments is the natural state, and adaptation is a kind of dishonesty.

But different environments do not reveal different selves.

They require different performances.

You are not the same person with your friends as you are in a classroom. Not the same in silence as you are when observed. Not the same in private as you are when you are being understood.

And yet, all of these versions are expected to collapse into one answer.

One self.

One definition.

Something stable enough to be named.

And when that collapse fails—when we cannot reduce ourselves into something stable, something easily named—we reach for something else.

We begin to substitute identity with fragments.

Because uncertainty is uncomfortable, even the smallest definition begins to feel like relief.

A hobby. An interest. An aesthetic.

Something small, but definable.

Something we can point to and say: this is me.

So we become our preferences. Our habits. Our curated identities.

We move through versions of ourselves the way we move through phases—softly, then completely.

From one aesthetic to another. One label to the next. Each one offering a temporary sense of clarity. A brief illusion of coherence.

Not because any one of them fully captures us—but because having something feels better than having nothing.

Because we have been taught that we must be able to answer the question.

Even if the answer is incomplete.

Even if it is temporary.

Even if it is only a fragment pretending to be whole.

Somewhere along the way, we are introduced to an idea that feels profound but is rarely examined: that we must “find ourselves.”

It sounds like a promise. Like clarity is waiting somewhere ahead, just beyond confusion. Like there is a version of you—fully formed, fully certain—waiting to be discovered.

But no one explains what exactly you are supposed to find.

Is it a personality? A purpose? A fixed identity? A final version of yourself that no longer changes?

Because everything we know about being human suggests otherwise.

Because if identity is already shaped by context—by environment, by expectation, by the roles we are placed into—then what exactly exists outside of all that?

A version untouched by influence? Unaffected by experience?

Or just an idea we were taught to believe in?

You have already been multiple versions of yourself. You have believed things you no longer believe. Wanted things you no longer want. Outgrown identities that once felt permanent.

And you will do it again.

Even now, there are parts of you that fit easily into certain spaces—and parts that do not.

So what does it mean to “find” something that shifts depending on where you stand?

Perhaps the problem is not that we fail at finding ourselves—but that we were given a task that assumes something stable exists to be found.

Even introspection, the very tool we are told will lead us to ourselves, is not untouched by this distortion. Because the moment you begin to observe yourself, you begin to shape what you see. You filter, you interpret, you make meaning. What feels like discovery can just as easily become another form of construction—another version of yourself, refined and rearranged until it makes sense. And so even in solitude, even in reflection, the question remains: are you uncovering who you are, or quietly rewriting it?

What if the discomfort we feel is not confusion, but contradiction?

Because the truth is, we are not singular.

We are layered. Contextual. Inconsistent.

You can be certain in one moment and uncertain in the next. Soft in one space and guarded in another. You can hold opposing desires at the same time and mean both of them.

And yet, we are taught to see this as a flaw.

To resolve it. To choose. To become one thing clearly and completely.

But what if that expectation is the real distortion?

What if the pressure to be one version of yourself at all times is what makes you feel fragmented in the first place?

Because there is no single version of you that exists outside of context. There is no fixed self untouched by experience, unaffected by environment, immune to change.

There are only iterations.

And the more you try to compress them into one, the more something feels… off.

We perform these roles so well that we eventually forget where the costume ends and the skin begins. We don’t just act for others; we start acting for ourselves, convinced that if we stop, the whole structure will collapse.

It becomes even more visible when the roles we perform begin to harden into life choices. When who you are expected to be starts shaping what you allow yourself to want. Careers chosen not only from desire, but from identity—what makes sense, what aligns, what is believable coming from you. And somewhere in that process, the line between what you chose and what was chosen for you becomes difficult to trace.

At some point, the question begins to shift.

Not because it has been answered—but because it stops making sense in the way it once did.

The idea of a single, stable self starts to feel less like a truth and more like a convenient illusion. Something clean. Something easy to present. Something easier for the world to understand.

But not necessarily something real.

Because if the self is always changing—shaped by time, experience, relationships, and context—then it is not something you arrive at.

It is something you move through.

Something you construct, often unconsciously. Something that is constantly being revised, interrupted, expanded, and undone.

Not a discovery.

A process.

So the question remains.

Who are you?

But now, it feels different.

Less like something that demands a fixed answer. Less like something you are supposed to resolve once and for all.

More like something that shifts depending on when it is asked, where it is asked, and who is asking.

And maybe that is not a failure.

Maybe the self was never something to be found in the first place.

Maybe it was always something that refuses to stay still.

And maybe the discomfort was never in not knowing.

Maybe it was in believing that we were supposed to know in the first place.

Because if the self is not singular, not stable, not waiting to be found—

then the question was never meant to have one answer.

Not for you.

Not for me.

Not for us.

So the question still remains.

Who are you—when no label fits long enough to hold you?

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Love,

Rhoda.

I watched Blink Twice a couple of months ago, and among its many haunting phrases, one that refused to leave my mind was: “Forgetting is a gift.” What made it worse was the sinister context. Slater forced the women to forget after each cycle of assault, operating on the logic that it was easier to forget than to do the heavy work of forgiving. By erasing their memories, he didn’t just grant them “peace”; he weaponized amnesia to avoid accountability and maintain absolute control.

But that idea doesn’t stay confined to fiction. We say it all the time, in quieter, more acceptable ways—we wish we could forget heartbreak, embarrassment, grief, the versions of ourselves we’d rather outgrow. We treat forgetting like mercy, like a soft escape hatch from pain. But what if it isn’t?

This brings me to a deeper question: is forgetting really a gift if it bypasses the slow, uncomfortable process of healing? If the peace it offers comes at the cost of truth—of memory, of identity, of accountability? If our experiences—no matter how painful—shape who we are, then forgetting doesn’t just erase the trauma; it erases the person we’ve fought to become. The resilience, the lessons, the quiet strength built in survival—gone, as though they never existed.

So what remains of us without our memories? A lighter version, perhaps—but also a thinner one. Is “peace” even real if it’s built on erasure rather than understanding? And if we lose our memories, do we lose our identity… or simply rewrite it into something easier to live with…or something we no longer recognize—and if so, is that peace, or just a quieter kind of loss?

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The desire to forget is not irrational—it is deeply human. Memory is not neutral; it carries weight. It replays what we wish had ended, lingers where we would rather move on, and resurfaces at moments we least expect. To remember is to feel again, and not always gently. So when we speak of forgetting, we are not chasing emptiness—we are chasing relief. A version of ourselves unburdened by what we’ve lost, what we regret, or what we survived. In that sense, forgetting begins to look like mercy—not because it is good, but because it interrupts repetition, the quiet exhaustion of carrying the same pain again and again.

There was a time I wished I could forget something specific—not because it defined me, not because it was unbearable, but because it stayed—lingered longer than I wanted it to. Not loudly, not dramatically, just quietly present in ways that made moving on feel incomplete. And for a while, I thought that if I could erase it, everything else in me would finally feel arranged—less noisy, less unresolved. That I would feel lighter, more certain—less interrupted by what had already happened.

We don’t always forget because it heals us—we forget because remembering would force us to confront things we are not yet ready to take responsibility for.

But not all forgetting is the same. There is a difference between the natural fading of memory—the quiet, gradual softening that comes with time—and the deliberate erasure of it. One is a form of healing; the other is avoidance dressed as mercy. Natural forgetting allows us to loosen our grip on pain without denying that it existed. Forced forgetting, on the other hand, demands that we pretend it never did. It is not a closing of the wound, but a covering of it—a mask placed over something still unresolved.

We are often told to “forgive and forget,” as though the two are inseparable, as though forgetting is the natural conclusion of forgiveness. But the order matters more than we admit. Because forgiveness requires memory. You cannot forgive what you do not remember. And if forgetting comes first, then what follows is not forgiveness, but erasure. It replaces understanding with disappearance.

Healing is not passive—it demands confrontation. It is not the absence of memory, but the process of sitting with what happened, understanding it, and deciding, consciously, what to do with it. Forgetting skips that process entirely. It removes the pain without resolving it, offering relief without clarity. And without clarity, there is no real closure—only distance.

This is why the peace offered by forgetting is not as clean as it appears. It is quieter, yes—but it is also thinner. It removes the feeling without addressing what caused it, creating a kind of calm that is built on absence rather than understanding. What is left behind is not healing, but a gap—one where meaning should have been. It is a silence that looks like peace but functions like absence.

And in that gap, something subtle happens: the story changes. Without memory, there is no tension, no confrontation, no reckoning. Only a softened version of events that asks nothing of us—and demands even less from those who caused the harm.

This is where forgetting becomes more than personal—it becomes dangerous. Because the same logic that promises relief to the one who forgets also protects the one who is remembered. To erase the memory of harm is, in some ways, to erase the harm itself—not in reality, but in consequence.

Accountability depends on memory. It relies on the ability to name what happened, to hold it in place long enough for it to mean something. Without that, there is nothing to answer for. No weight, no record, no interruption of the cycle. What happened simply dissolves, leaving behind a version of the world where everything appears intact, even when it is not. And what cannot be remembered cannot be challenged.

A gift that robs you of that power—the ability to remember, to name, to confront—is not a gift. It is a quiet form of theft.

But even when forgetting is chosen, not forced, the cost does not disappear—it only shifts. Because memory is not just a record of pain; it is a record of becoming. The moments we wish to erase are often the same ones that shaped our boundaries, our instincts, our understanding of ourselves and the world. Sometimes the very thing we want to forget is the thing that quietly taught us what we will never tolerate again.

Our scars—both physical and invisible—are not just reminders of what happened; they are evidence of how we survived it. To forget them is not simply to lighten the load—it is to loosen the structure built around them. The lessons fade, the clarity softens, and what remains is a version of ourselves that feels easier to carry, but harder to trust. Not because it is false, but because it is incomplete.

Without memory, we do not evolve—we repeat.

In Blink Twice, the moment Frida regains her memory is not the moment she breaks—it is the moment she becomes dangerous. Memory does not weaken her; it restores her agency. It allows her to see, to name, to act. Without it, she is controlled. With it, she becomes a threat.

And perhaps that is what makes forgetting so appealing—and so dangerous. Because it does not just remove pain; it removes power.

If we are reshaped not by truth, but by what we choose to erase, then forgetting is not freedom—it is authorship without honesty.

Perhaps the real question is not whether forgetting is a gift, but what it costs us to accept it as one. Because while forgetting may offer relief, it asks for something in return—our memory, our clarity, our ability to hold what happened in its full weight. And maybe healing was never meant to come from erasure, but from learning how to carry what remains without letting it consume us.

Memory is a burden, yes—but it is also where our power begins. It is what allows us to learn, to resist, to hold others accountable, and to become something more than what happened to us.

So perhaps the gift was never in forgetting the past—but in having the courage to remember it, and still move forward.

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Love,

Rhoda.

Everyone wants to be loved. Almost everyone wants to love.

We grow up believing that if we do everything right, there is someone—somewhere—made specifically for us. A soulmate. Singular. Certain. Permanent.

And everyone before them? Just phases. Temporary chapters. Necessary detours on the way to something that is supposed to last.

We are taught not only that soulmates exist, but that they must be romantic. That every other connection—friendship, timing, almosts—are placeholders. Lesser. Incomplete. Waiting rooms before the real thing arrives.

And in those waiting rooms, we are terrified of wasting time. We think that if a relationship doesn’t end in a lifetime of staying, then the years spent were a loss. We treat time like a currency we only get a return on if we reach the finish line.

But love isn’t an investment—it’s an environment. You didn’t lose those years. You lived them.

But what if we’ve been wrong?

What if some people don’t have one person meant to stay forever?

What if soulmates exist—but they don’t last?

And if they don’t last… were they ever less real?

If something ends, does it become meaningless?

Or are we just uncomfortable with the idea that something can be true and still not be permanent?

Because permanence has become our proof.

We measure love by its ability to stay, not by its ability to exist.

I used to believe that staying was proof—that if something ended, it must have failed.

We romanticize endurance. “For better or worse.” “Till death do us part.” We praise the ones who remain, who choose to stay, who fight to keep something alive—even when it no longer resembles what it once was.

But we rarely question what is lost in the process of staying.

We rarely ask what version of a person had to disappear just to make that permanence possible.

Sometimes, what we call loyalty is just quiet self-abandonment.

Maybe forever isn’t always devotion.

Maybe sometimes, it’s fear.

Fear of starting again. Fear of emptiness. Fear that nothing else will ever feel the same.

So we hold on—not because something is still right, but because ending it would mean admitting that forever was never guaranteed.

And that terrifies us.

Because if forever is uncertain, then what isn’t?

Every “I love you.”

Every promise.

Every certainty we’ve ever clung to.

But maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Maybe the question was never “Will this last forever?”

Maybe it should have been “Was this real while it existed?”

Because something doesn’t have to last forever to be true.

A moment can be real.

A connection can be real.

A person can be exactly what you needed—and still not be meant to stay.

Not everything is a stepping stone.

Not everything is a lesson disguised as loss.

Some things are just… experiences. Complete in themselves, even if they end.

But acknowledging that something is complete doesn’t make the ending hurt any less.

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We struggle because we confuse necessary with painless. We think that if we accept something wasn’t meant to stay, we shouldn’t grieve its departure. But you can be grateful for the impact and still be devastated by the absence.

Admitting that a connection has served its purpose doesn’t mean it wasn’t deep; it just means it’s finished.

The grief is not a sign that you were wrong to let go—it is simply the final tribute to how much it mattered while it was there.

And maybe that’s what we struggle to accept.

That love is not always linear.

That people are not always permanent.

That meaning does not expire just because something does.

So maybe soulmates are not the people who stay forever.

Maybe they are the people who meet you exactly where you are, change you in ways you cannot undo, and leave you different—even if they leave.

Maybe soulmates end because they are catalysts, not anchors. They aren’t meant to hold you in place; they are meant to set you in motion.

And maybe forever was never about time.

Maybe forever was never ours to hold, only ours to experience.

Maybe forever is just the part of you that remains—long after they’re gone. Not about them staying. Only about what stayed with you.

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Love,

Rhoda.

The world is not a road where we simply pass each other by—it is a web. Every movement pulls on something, someone. Nothing we do exists in isolation. Our actions ripple outward, touching people we know, people we love, and even people we will never meet.

And if that is true, then it raises an uncomfortable expectation: that we should always consider others when we act.

But that expectation comes with a cost.

Because if every choice affects someone, then every choice also disappoints someone. And in that sense, is it even possible to live without being selfish?

We often define selfishness in simple terms: to care only about oneself. To take without giving. To choose yourself at the expense of others. And naturally, the opposite is praised—selflessness, the ability to put others first.

We praise the person who stays, but we rarely consider what parts of them had to disappear to make staying possible.

But this binary feels too clean for something so deeply human.

Because selfishness is not a fixed state. It is a spectrum.

At one end, there is survival—the instinct to protect yourself, your peace, your identity. At the other end, there is sacrifice—the willingness to give parts of yourself away for others. And most of us exist somewhere in between, constantly shifting depending on circumstance.

Yet even that is not entirely honest.

Because even our most selfless acts are rarely free of self-interest. We help because it feels right. Because it aligns with who we believe we are. Because it eases guilt, builds connection, feeds identity, or gives us meaning. Even sacrifice, in its purest form, often carries a quiet return.

So then, what do we truly mean when we call someone selfish?

Is it the act itself—or the cost it places on others?

A few months ago, I watched His & Hers. In it, a woman leaves her husband after the death of their child. Not because she didn’t love him, and not because she didn’t care—but because he kept telling her that everything would eventually be okay.

And she did not want everything to be okay.

Her grief was the last thread connecting her to her daughter. To heal, to “move on,” felt like losing her all over again. So she left—not out of indifference, but because staying would have required her to become someone she could not bear to be.

It didn’t feel dramatic. It just… made sense.

To some, that decision is selfish. She abandoned her husband in a shared loss. She left him to grieve alone. She created another absence in a house already filled with it.

But staying would not have been neutral either.

Staying would have meant forcing herself into a version of healing she did not believe in. It would have meant suppressing her own experience of grief to accommodate someone else’s. It would have meant choosing him in a way that required her to slowly lose herself.

So which is selfish?

Leaving—and hurting him?

Or staying—and betraying herself?

There is a particular weight in being the recipient of a sacrifice you didn’t ask for. It turns a gift into something closer to a debt—one that binds you, whether you wanted the bond or not.

We like to believe that selfishness is obvious. That it can be clearly identified and avoided. But the truth is far less comforting.

Sometimes, every available choice is selfish to someone.

In a world where we are all interconnected, there is no action that exists without consequence. No decision that does not shift weight onto someone else. What we call “selflessness” is often just a redistribution of cost—a decision about who carries the burden this time. A decision where someone still pays, just not you.

And perhaps the real question is not whether we are being selfish, but who we are choosing to be selfish toward.

Others?

Or ourselves?

Because there is something quietly unreasonable in expecting people to always choose others at their own expense. To always absorb the cost. To always be the one who bends.

And yet, there is also something uncomfortable about choosing yourself, knowing fully that someone else will feel the absence of that choice.

So we exist in tension.

Between care and self-preservation. Between responsibility and autonomy. Between the desire to be good, and the reality of being human.

If we never choose ourselves, eventually there is nothing left of us to give. In that sense, perhaps selfishness is not the opposite of love, but what allows it to last.

Maybe the goal is not to eliminate selfishness—that would be impossible.

Maybe the goal is to become aware of it. To recognize that every choice carries a cost, and to take responsibility for where that cost falls.

Not blindly choosing ourselves.

Not blindly abandoning others.

Not performatively choosing others.

But choosing, consciously, and accepting what that choice means.

Because in the end, selfishness is not always a failure of character.

Sometimes, it is simply the price of being a person in a world where every thread is connected.

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Love,

Rhoda.

Some people grow up believing they can want anything.

Others grow up learning that wanting itself requires permission.

Not everyone grows up with the freedom to want things.

For some people, wanting is easy. They speak about their dreams without hesitation, reach for things without apologizing for it, assume that if they desire something strongly enough, they can simply try for it.

But for others, wanting has always felt heavier. More complicated. Almost like something that must be earned.

There is a strange vulnerability in admitting that you want something. Not casually, not in passing, but deeply—the kind of wanting that sits quietly in your chest and refuses to leave. Saying it out loud can feel almost embarrassing—as though you are revealing too much of yourself. Because the moment you admit you want something—to be loved, to win, to build a certain life, to chase an idea that feels bigger than you—you expose yourself to the possibility that it may never happen.

And yet, that discomfort is not universal.

There is a particular kind of embarrassment that comes with wanting something badly. It isn’t the embarrassment of failure, but the embarrassment of exposure. To want something is to reveal what matters to you. It is to admit that you care enough to risk disappointment.

Dreams sound different once they are spoken aloud. Suddenly they can be judged, dismissed, or simply treated as unrealistic. Wanting something deeply—love, success, recognition, a certain life—can make a person feel naïve, even childish. So many people learn to soften their desires before anyone else can.

But embarrassment is not the only reason people hesitate to want things. For many, the hesitation begins much earlier.

Some people grow up believing wanting is natural.

Others grow up believing wanting is something you should apologize for.

Some people grow up learning that wanting requires consideration. Before asking for something, you think about whether it is necessary, whether it is affordable, whether it will burden someone else. You learn to notice the quiet calculations happening around you—the sacrifices your parents make, the responsibilities that appear earlier than expected, the understanding that not all starting points are equal.

In environments like that, wanting stops being simple.

It becomes something that must be measured.

Over time, this awareness shapes the way a person moves through the world. You learn to be understanding. You learn to adjust. You learn to say that anything is fine.

Slowly, wanting becomes something you swallow. Not dramatically, not all at once, but quietly and consistently. You become the person who doesn’t ask for much. The one who accepts what is given. The one who prides themselves on being easy, grateful, reasonable.

And after a while, it becomes difficult to tell whether you truly want less—or if you have simply learned not to ask.

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Sometimes, it shows up in small, almost forgettable moments.

I remember a small argument with a friend once. Nothing dramatic—just one of those ordinary disagreements that should have passed quickly.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the argument itself. It was how quickly I became aware of my tone, how immediately I felt the need to soften it, to explain it, to make sure I wasn’t being too much.

And I remember thinking, almost instinctively, this shouldn’t become a big deal.

Not because it wasn’t frustrating.

But because I had learned, long before that moment, how to make myself smaller in situations like that.

Some of us learned early how to read a room before we ever learned how to ask for what we wanted.

Of course I’m the low-maintenance friend.

I don’t need constant communication—or at least that’s what I tell people. I’ve learned to handle my own problems quietly. I’ve learned how to act fine when I’m not. I’ve learned how to accept things that don’t always feel fair, because reacting to everything was never really an option.

When you grow up learning to swallow your wants, it becomes second nature to swallow other things too.

Of course I’m the calm one. The understanding one. The one who avoids conflict and says it’s fine, even when it isn’t. I’ve learned how to be alone so well that people assume I prefer it that way.

But sometimes I wonder if that’s the real story.

Because when you spend years adjusting yourself around other people, it becomes difficult to ask for the same grace you give so easily. I watch how easily other people express frustration, how freely they react, how naturally they expect to be understood.

And I give it to them—again and again.

I absorb oceans of mistakes. I forgive quickly. I explain things away. I make room for everyone else’s feelings.

And yet, when it comes to my own wants—my own frustrations, my own quiet disappointments—I hesitate.

Not because I don’t feel those things.

But because somewhere along the way, I learned that wanting too much, reacting too strongly, needing too openly might make me difficult to keep.

So I stay reasonable. Understanding. Easy.

And after a while, people stop realizing that this version of you was something you learned—not something you were born to be.

What looks like calm is often just practice—not asking for too much.

And that’s when it becomes clear that wanting is not just about courage.

Sometimes, it is about permission.

Some people grow up believing that if they want something, they can try for it.

Others grow up learning that every desire must first be measured—against responsibility, practicality, and circumstance.

And that difference quietly shapes what they allow themselves to imagine.

When wanting becomes something you constantly restrain, it begins to shape more than just your choices. It shapes your imagination.

Some people dream first and figure out the limits later.

Others learn the limits before they ever begin dreaming.

Ambition softens. Dreams are adjusted before they even have the chance to fully form.

You learn to accept what arrives rather than reaching for what you once imagined—not because you lack the ability to dream, but because wanting too much began to feel irresponsible.

And so restraint begins to look like maturity.

But something interesting happens when a person who has spent years suppressing their desires begins to question that habit.

The act of wanting again can feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable.

It can feel selfish at first. Reckless, even. As though you are asking for more than you should. But slowly, wanting becomes something else entirely: a way of reclaiming parts of yourself that had been quiet for too long.

Sometimes learning how to want again is not about suddenly dreaming bigger.

It is about allowing yourself, perhaps for the first time, to dream without immediately shrinking the idea.

Perhaps the conversation around ambition assumes that everyone begins from the same place—that wanting something badly is simply a matter of courage.

But for many people, the story begins earlier than that.

It begins in environments where understanding came before desire, where practicality came before imagination, where wanting something required careful thought rather than easy confidence.

In that sense, the ability to want things freely is not as simple as it appears.

Sometimes it is something people must learn slowly, long after childhood—long after they first learned how to live without asking for too much.

Because for some of us, the most radical thing we can do is not just to achieve our dreams.

It is to admit, without hesitation, that we want them at all.

So perhaps the real privilege is not success.

It is the freedom to want something without immediately shrinking the desire.

To imagine a life without first measuring whether it is reasonable. To hope without apology.

Not everyone grows up with that freedom.

Some of us have to learn it slowly, years later—after spending so much of our lives being understanding, reasonable, grateful.

After learning how to live without asking for too much.

Wanting is not just courage.

Sometimes, it is something you have to grow into.

And learning to want again is its own quiet rebellion.

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Love,

Rhoda.

I told myself I would write at least five essays this month. It was a consistency goal I set for myself at the beginning of the year. It sounded reasonable when I set it—structured, disciplined, the kind of goal that feels productive even before it’s achieved. I mean I was able to do it—January, February, even March. But now it’s April 22, and my note app pages are still empty in all the ways that matter. I open my notes app more times than I actually write in it. Most days I just sit there, type a title, stare at it for a few seconds, then delete everything like it offended me.

If it’s not empty it’s just an introduction and a title. Not because I have nothing to say, but because I seem unable to say it the way I know I can.

It’s a strange kind of frustration—to hold a thought so clearly in your mind, to feel its shape, its rhythm, even its weight, and then watch it collapse the moment you try to translate it into words. What exists internally feels complete, almost effortless. But on paper, it becomes fragmented, misplaced, or worse—ordinary. As though something essential is lost in the process, like trying to recreate a melody you can hear perfectly, but cannot quite play. It’s like having a sentence fully formed in your head, but the moment you try to write it, your hands slow down as if they don’t trust what your brain already knows.

We call this writer’s block, as though it were an absence—of ideas, of discipline, of creativity. But what if it isn’t absence at all? What if it’s excess—too much thought, too many angles, too many versions of the same idea competing to exist at once? What if the problem isn’t that there is nothing to write, but that there is too much to say, and no single way feels right enough to begin?

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I am, unfortunately, both opinionated and prone to overthinking. I think about anything, everything, nothing —in excess. So the difficulty is not in thinking, but in choosing.

Every idea arrives with multiple versions of itself: different tones, different directions, different ways it could unfold. And instead of writing one, I find myself holding all of them at once, unwilling to commit to a version that feels incomplete. I sometimes rewrite the first sentence ten different ways, not because any of them are wrong, but because I can imagine a slightly better version every time I stop.

I don’t want to engage in circular repetition. I do not want to write something dense just to sound intelligent while saying something ordinary.

So I pause, adjust, rethink, and start again—before anything has even been written. It becomes less about expression and more about precision, about trying to get it exactly right before it exists at all. And in that attempt, nothing moves. Sometimes I even stop writing completely and just sit there, staring at the cursor blinking like it’s waiting for me to become someone more decisive. The page remains empty, not because there is nothing to say, but because no single way of saying it feels sufficient. And stacking ideas makes it worse, doesn’t it? So settling for something merely sufficient—something safer—begins to feel like the better option.

And that makes me wonder: why is there so much tension in translating thoughts into words?

Maybe that is the real tension: not between writing and not writing, but between thought and language itself. Because thoughts are not linear—they don’t arrive in neat sentences or structured paragraphs. Yet when I try to explain them to someone, they come out too small, too neat, almost like a shadow of what I actually meant. They exist all at once, layered and complete in a way that language cannot fully replicate.

The moment we begin to write, we are already simplifying, already losing something in translation. What felt complex becomes reduced, what felt precise becomes approximate. The metaphors aren’t enough. Even our stylistic choices begin to feel insufficient. And that feels ordinary again. It creates a strange kind of grief—the loss of a version that never fully existed, but felt complete in the mind.

It makes you subtly compare it to the last powerful piece you read and wonder if the superpower you thought you had was just a fantasy. Sometimes I wonder if I just like the idea of being a writer more than I like actually writing.

And perhaps writer’s block is not just frustration, but resistance—the quiet refusal to accept a version of an idea that feels smaller than what it was in the mind.

But that resistance, however understandable, comes at a cost. Because in waiting for the perfect articulation, we delay expression entirely. The need for the right words, the right structure, the right timing begins to outweigh the act of writing itself. It creates a kind of stillness that feels justified in the moment—like care, like intention—but slowly turns into avoidance. Not of writing, but of imperfection. And so the thought remains intact, untouched and ideal, while the page stays empty, unable to hold even an imperfect version of it.

So the thought never fully becomes yours—but it doesn’t quite exist either.

Maybe the problem is not that writing fails to capture thought perfectly, but that we expect it to. That we treat language as though it should mirror the mind exactly, when it was never designed to do so.

Writing is not a perfect translation—it is an interpretation, an attempt, a narrowing of something vast into something shareable. And perhaps the gap between what we mean and what we say is not a flaw to eliminate, but a condition to work within.

That music we imagine, or hear from a mile away, is barely ours if we do not make it.

The words that could change us—or someone else—do not exist until we attempt to translate them.

So maybe writer’s block is not the absence of words, but the fear of losing something in the act of finding them. The hesitation before beginning, the instinct to wait until it feels right enough.

And even now, I’m not sure this version is the right one—but it’s the one that exists.

But if writing is always a form of translation, then something will always be lost. We will always grieve what is lost in translation. The question is whether that loss is a reason to remain silent, or simply the cost of being understood at all. And if the grief is inevitable, then perhaps it is not a sign to stop, but proof that something worth saying is still trying to exist.

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Love,

Rhoda.

My friend texted me about a guy. A guy I had been teasing her about for weeks. And apparently, she was unraveling in my messages.

She liked him. Really liked him. But she didn’t want a relationship. Not for the usual reasons you might think—heartbreak, disappointment, past patterns—though she listed them all, like a checklist she had memorized. She even tried to make him see the risks, to preemptively justify keeping him at a distance. Classic avoidant attachment symptoms.

I kept asking her, what’s the worst that could happen?

And every single time, her response was the same—she already knew how it would end.

And deep down, we both knew the truth.

Those weren’t the real reasons.

They were excuses. Distractions. A quiet smokescreen for something harder to admit.

For someone you like so much, why do we overthink something so small—and push them away anyway?

She said, if they became strangers again, he would know too much about her.

And that’s when it hit me—

She wasn’t afraid of heartbreak.

She wasn’t afraid of vulnerability.

She was afraid of herself.

We like to think our fears are about others. That if we let someone in, they might hurt us, leave us, betray the trust we haven’t fully given yet.

And yes, sometimes that’s true.

But more often, the danger isn’t external—it’s internal.

We’re scared of what we’ll see when we let someone close. Scared of the raw, unfiltered version of ourselves reflected in their eyes. Scared that the parts we try to hide—our impulsive desire, our intense need to be seen, our messiness, our chaos—might be too much, too loud, too human.

We are scared of realizing how much we want.

So we push. We pull. We create rules and exceptions, excuses and walls.

We call it caution. We call it being careful. We call it discernment.

But it is really self-preservation against ourselves.

I watched my friend weave a web of what-ifs and maybe-nots, thinking she was protecting her heart.

Protecting it from what exactly?

Hurt? Pain? Loss?

We like to believe that if we are prepared enough—if we think ahead, anticipate the ending, build emotional escape routes—we can avoid being broken.

But she wasn’t protecting herself from him.

She was protecting herself from her own reflection.

From the version of herself that would care deeply. That would feel fully. That might lose control of the carefully arranged distance she had built or crack open all the neatly stacked pieces of her identity.

We all do this.

We tell ourselves, I’m not ready, it’s too soon, I can’t risk it.

But the truth is simpler—scarier, more unsettling.

We are afraid of ourselves.

Afraid of what it means to care. To want. To hope. To trust.

Of what might surface when the mask slips and we are left with nothing but our own depth.

And it is not weakness. It is not failure.

It is human.

Every “I don’t want to” hides a quieter truth:

I am terrified of what I might become if I let myself.

Every wall we build is a silent confession—we do not trust the shape of our own hearts.

We are strangers to ourselves.

And we fear that if we truly meet who we are, we might not like what we see.

Or worse—

we might like it too much.

And it will demand more from us than we are ready to give.

So perhaps the question isn’t why do we push people away?

Perhaps the question is who are we when we let ourselves feel?

We fear heartbreak. We fear loss. We fear disappointment.

But most of all—

we fear intimacy with our own depth.

The unspoken, unexamined, trembling parts of ourselves we keep just out of reach.

And maybe, just maybe, the moment we acknowledge that fear is the moment we stop running.

And we might finally begin.

So then I ask again—

what exactly are we afraid of?

Love?

Uncertainty?

Intimacy?

Or is it this—

that if we let ourselves feel fully,

we will no longer recognize the person we become?

Because to be known by someone else is one thing.

But to be known by yourself—

without distraction, without distance—

is a different kind of exposure.

And maybe that is the real fear.

Not that someone will break us.

But that we might finally see

how much of ourselves

we have been hiding from.

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Love,

Rhoda.

For everything that exists—every life, every creation—there comes a time to not exist. A time to end. A time to expire.

But how do we know when that time comes? How do we know who the death angel will visit next?

We humans have a complicated relationship with death. Sometimes we beg it to leave us, so we can cling to life a little longer. Sometimes we beg it to take us, so we can finally find peace. And very rarely—rarely—we are truly at peace with either choice.

I do not see the death angel as a thief. It is not a predator, nor cruel. I imagine it walking among us, quietly, almost unnoticed. It speaks in silences, waits in corners, and claims only what belongs. It is not bound by gender, not by form—it is fluid, present, and patient.

Yet even knowing this, the question lingers: who is next? If our days are numbered, and our purpose incomplete, how can we ever know when life has truly reached its fullness?

I felt this presence most clearly two days ago. I was at a funeral. It wasn’t just a moment; it was a series of days—from the opening of the mourning house to the nights of songs, and eventually, the funeral itself. Throughout the program, you could see how much this man was loved. But even in the middle of that crowd, the “quiet walker” felt visible. Something kept lurking in my mind: who was next?

In the last couple of months, death has felt frequent. Friends’ parents, neighbors, passersby—all gone. People you expect to die. People you do not. People who just seemed to exist.

But death barely ever announces itself. Besides, even when it does, it still doesn’t leave us at peace.

Who loves being sentenced?

We speak about death as though it is distant, but we live beside it every day. Some mornings, we pray for more time—stretching our plans into futures we assume we will reach. Other nights, we lie awake and wish for an end to the noise, the weight, the endless becoming.

We fear death when life feels full. We desire it when life feels heavy.

And sometimes, many times, it doesn’t even come for us, but for our loved ones. And even then, it still takes something from us. We are not even aware of what they wish; we do not know what they ask. Yet, we still find it rather selfish that we do not give death permission, so we call them a thief.

In between, we wait—like clocks ticking in rooms we pretend not to hear. We get obsessed with when, how, why. We try to prepare and prepare. But regardless of our obsession with time, we remain blind.

We often imagine death as something that arrives—sudden, violent, interrupting. But what if it never arrives? What if it has always been here?

Not lurking—but lingering. Not stealing—but waiting.

Sitting beside us in hospital rooms.

Standing quietly at celebrations.

Watching as we make promises we assume we have time to keep.

It does not rush us.

It does not argue.

It simply stays.

But we do not see them.

But how?

If they are ever-present, how could we miss something so significant?

Perhaps because we do not look.

Perhaps because we do not listen.

Or perhaps because we are too busy with everything else to notice what has always been by our side.

We like to believe life has a measurable end—that there is a point where we have done enough, loved enough, become enough.

But enough for who?

Is a life complete because it was long? Or because it was felt deeply?

We speak of purpose as though it is a destination, something to arrive at before we are allowed to leave. But what if purpose is not something we finish—only something we participate in?

So we cope.

We fill our days with noise, with plans, with distractions that make time feel slower than it is. We avoid the silence where the awareness might settle.

Some of us pretend death is far away.

Others think about it so often it becomes background noise.

We build lives that feel urgent, important—not always because they are, but because we need them to be.

Because to sit still is to remember:

something is always walking beside us.

Perhaps the angel was never meant to frighten us. Perhaps it was only ever meant to remind us—that time is not something we own, only something we move through.

And so it walks with us.

Quiet. Patient. Unseen.

Until one day, without urgency, without warning—it simply stops.

And this time, we are the ones who must follow. We are the ones to listen.

Because death does not steal. It simply takes what belongs to it.

It was never chasing us.

We were always the ones walking toward it.

After all, we were promised both—life, and its ending.

And in time, we must answer to each.

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Love,

Rhoda

There’s a reason why your opinions belong to just you. Not because they don’t matter, but because they aren’t as stable as they appear.

Somewhere between having a thought and posting it, a psychological shift occurs: the perspective stops being a viewpoint and starts becoming an identity.

Once an opinion is fused with the self, disagreement is no longer received as a discussion; it is felt as a personal attack.

Times without number, I have had debates with people on art, film, music and books.

For me, what I consume shapes my perspective so deeply that it starts to feel personal. I often find myself arguing that what has meaning to me—what makes me feel—should override the technicalities of the medium.

But in those moments of heated defense, I realized something: I wasn’t just defending a movie or a chapter. I was defending my own taste as if it were my character. If you didn’t like what I liked, it felt like you didn’t like me.

While the internet did not create this human tendency, it has amplified it through constant performance. Suddenly, everyone has a platform and a voice that can reach thousands.

With this access comes an overflow of opinion, often delivered with the confidence of objective fact. We are no longer just thinking; we are constantly performing what we think for an invisible audience.

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At its core, an opinion is supposed to be flexible—shaped by experience, limited by perspective, and meant to evolve. However, in online spaces, opinions tend to harden.

Psychologists call this identity-protective cognition—the tendency to reject anything that threatens how we see ourselves.

The moment we “post” or defend a stance publicly, it stops being something we have and starts becoming something we are.

Because identity does not like to be questioned, disagreement rarely feels neutral. It is not received as “I see this differently,” but as “you are wrong.”

When a belief is tethered to the ego, being wrong feels less like a correction and more like a public exposure of inadequacy.

Consequently, we defend our positions not because we are certain of their truth, but because we are invested in our own self-image.

The structure of modern social media exacerbates this collapse of critical thinking. We consume ideas quickly, react instantly, and move on without reflection.

Algorithms further reinforce these “identity-opinions” by validating us with like-minded content, removing the pressure to think deeply.

In this environment, we start to see nuance as a contradiction and disagreement as a sign of disrespect. Instead of refining our thoughts through debate, we simply reinforce our existing walls.

However, it is important to acknowledge that not all opinions should be held “lightly.”

There is a significant difference between a preference for a specific policy and a core ethical conviction regarding human rights or justice.

In these cases, internalizing an “opinion” as a moral identity is what allows for social progress and courage.

The danger is not in having strong convictions, but in failing to distinguish between a functional fact and a personal perspective.

When we confuse the two, we stop questioning ourselves and start expecting the entire world to mirror our internal reality.

An opinion should ideally be something you can examine, question, or even let go of—not something you must protect at all costs.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped treating opinions like perspectives and started treating them like armor. This is why disagreement feels so loud today; it isn’t that we are thinking more, but that we are defending more.

If we are to move forward, we must learn to hold our perspectives with a looser grip.

After all, the most vital question isn’t whether your opinion is right, but rather: If your opinions disappeared tomorrow, who would you still be?

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Love,

Rhoda.