It is exhausting to become too acquainted with your own healing. From knowing the language of endings too well to being able to identify the precise stage of grief you are in, the wound that has been touched, the pattern that has resurfaced, the lesson you are supposedly meant to learn. At some point, I want to stop learning lessons. I want my life to become more than an endless curriculum in surviving what has happened to me.

I don’t want every chapter of my life to be titled by an injury. What he did to me. What she taught me. What I lost. What broke me. How I healed. Who I became afterwards. There is something seductive about the narrative of recovery. We love a before and after. We love the girl who was broken becoming self-possessed, the girl who was abandoned learning to choose herself, the girl who was lost finding her way home. But the girl is tired and her soul has become wrung so thin by grief.

I want to wake up and reach for the coffee before I reach for the meaning of my dreams. I want to wake up one morning without the obligation to examine myself, not "How am I doing?" Not "Have I finally moved on?" Not “Why did that affect me so much?" Just: "What shall I do today?"

And then I want to stub my toe on the bed frame and let it be nothing but a sore toe and not a metaphor for my inability to move forward. To live without constantly turning inward. To let an experience be an experience rather than evidence. To let a person leave without making their departure the beginning of an archaeological excavation into your psyche. To let something hurt without deciding that the hurt must become a philosophy.

Because there is so much more to me than what I have endured. I am not only the things I have recovered from. I am also what I have loved, what I have wondered about, what I have made, what I have believed, what I have laughed at, what I have prayed for, what I have yet to see.

And perhaps the same is true for you.

Who would you be if there were nothing left to recover from? If no one were coming to apologise, if the past could not be rewritten, if you no longer needed your suffering to explain who you became? Would you know what to do with yourself then?

What would you want if you weren’t choosing in reaction to what hurt you? What would you pursue if you weren’t trying to prove that you had survived? What parts of yourself have been waiting, patiently, beneath all that introspection, for you to become interested in them simply because they are yours?

Perhaps that is the more frightening question: if your life stopped being about becoming whole again, what would you finally allow it to be about?

I think I am beginning to understand that healing was never supposed to be the destination.

Perhaps it was only supposed to return me to myself.

And once I am there, I want to live.

Not naïveté. Not the foolishness of believing people are incapable of betrayal or abandonment. I know now, perhaps too intimately, that human beings can wound each other with frightening ease. Affection can evaporate. Promises can rot. People can look directly at your tenderness and still mishandle it.

And yet, despite this knowledge, I have decided I will continue to love with my whole heart.

Not because I believe love guarantees permanence or devotion protects me from grief. I know it will not.

But because I have begun to understand something about mortality: one day, I will be gone, and none of this will follow me underground except the shape of the life I lived.

When I am six feet under, my caution will not comfort me.

The hours I spent withholding affection to preserve my ego will not matter. The performances of indifference. The strategic distance. The carefully rationed vulnerability designed to make me appear untouchable. None of it will accompany me into death.

I would like to believe that I love deeply. Generously. Though perhaps even that hope contains a little vanity. We all like to imagine ourselves as the hero of our own moral story.

And I think there is something profoundly sacred about trying anyway.

We live in a culture that often treats emotional detachment as sophistication. The less you care, the more power you seem to possess. To love openly is considered dangerous; to need people is embarrassing; to grieve deeply is interpreted as weakness. Everyone wants to appear unaffected. Untouched. Impossible to wound.

But what a tragedy it is to move through life never fully entering it.

To love only halfway because you are afraid of mourning later is like refusing to watch the ocean because storms exist. Pain is not evidence that love failed. Sometimes it is simply the mark left behind by something that mattered.

I no longer want to experience life from behind protective glass.

I want to feel the full texture of loving people while they are here. I want to laugh too loudly at dinner tables. I want to remember tiny details about the people I adore. I want to speak affection while there is still time for it to be heard. I want to risk humiliation for sincerity. I want my life to accuse me of being too tender rather than too guarded.

And yes, I will cry.

I will cry because every beautiful thing eventually confronts us with its fragility. Because attachment inevitably creates the possibility of loss. Because to love another human being is to silently accept that one day either they leave you or the earth takes one of you first.

But grief is not a sign that loving was a mistake.

Grief is love with nowhere to go.

There are people who survive heartbreak by shrinking themselves afterward. They become economical with affection. They speak of self-protection as though the highest achievement of human existence is avoiding emotional injury.

I understand why. Truly, I do.

But I cannot help wondering whether some forms of self-protection are merely slow spiritual starvation.

What if the point of life is not to emerge from it unbroken? What if the point is to have lived so fully that your heart bears evidence of participation? Evidence that you entered the arena of human connection instead of merely studying it from a distance?

I think often about how many people move through this world profoundly unloved. Not romantically unloved alone, but existentially unloved. Unseen. Unchosen. Unheld. There are people carrying entire childhoods of emotional famine inside them. People who have forgotten what warmth feels like because life has only taught them survival.

If I can leave even a small interruption in that loneliness, not so my existence means something, but so theirs, for one afternoon, weighs less. I tell myself this is for them. I am not entirely sure.

So I will love extravagantly.

I will love my friends in the way one tends to gardens. I will love family even through the complicated archaeology of hurt. I will love future children with the terrifying fullness that only mothers understand. I will love lovers honestly, even when honesty exposes me. I will love people past the point where cynicism says I should stop.

Not because they will always deserve it perfectly.

Not because I will never be hurt.

But because I refuse to let the inevitability of death make me smaller before it arrives.

One day my body will disappear into the earth. The world will continue with its ordinary rhythms. Morning trains will still arrive. Strangers will still fall in love. Rain will still strike windows in the middle of the night. History will continue its indifferent march.

And somewhere, perhaps years later, someone may say, She loved me well.

Or perhaps no one will say it at all, and the loving will have already finished its work, the way sunlight finishes its work on a leaf, whether or not the leaf remembers being warmed.

But even as I imagine this, I know it wouldn't be enough. Because the heart can be seen and still not be known. Anyone could walk into that room and see it, this wet, stubborn thing, still going, still trying, and they'd know it exists. They'd know I have one. They'd know it beats. But they wouldn't know what made it beat faster. They wouldn't know what it's been holding onto all these years. They wouldn't know why it's so tired. And that's the part I actually want seen, the part that doesn't show up on the surface of a beating organ. The part that lives beneath the pulse.

What nobody tells you is that loneliness also creates shame, especially when your life looks relatively normal from the outside. You start thinking: why am I feeling this way when I have so much to be grateful for? Why does my chest still ache after conversations? Why do I still feel untouched by the world?

Gratitude and loneliness can coexist. A person can love God, love their ambitions, love the people around them, and still feel this devastating emotional absence sitting quietly inside them.

Sometimes it isn’t loud. It doesn’t announce itself as despair. It’s quieter than that. It sits in the background of things, like a second layer of air no one else can see. You laugh when you are supposed to laugh. You respond when you are spoken to. You move through your days.

And still, something in you remains elsewhere.

It often arrives in the most ordinary moments: walking through the city and feeling your own body pass through others like a ghost, shoulders brushing, eyes meeting, nothing touching. Sitting in a room full of conversation, your throat moving when it’s supposed to, your face arranging itself into the right shapes, and still feeling like no one has quite reached the place where you actually live inside yourself. Your hands resting on your knees. Your breath shallow. Your heartbeat the only thing in the room that sounds like yours.

And then the shame begins to form around because it feels unexplainable in the presence of a life that looks intact. You start to mistrust your own emotional reality. You begin negotiating with yourself: perhaps I am asking for too much, perhaps I should be more grateful, perhaps this feeling disqualifies me from gratitude altogether. You swallow it down. You feel it settle in your throat, in your chest, in the space behind your ribs where no one can see. But it doesn’t leave. It simply becomes quieter, more disciplined, more internal.

There are moments when it feels like distance from yourself rather than from others. As though you are observing your own life happening at a slight remove, unable to fully inhabit it and unable to fully leave it. You become both the person living and the person watching, and neither of them can quite comfort the other. You feel it in your limbs, the strange heaviness of moving through a day that doesn’t belong to you. The way your hand hovers over a doorknob before you turn it. The way your own name sounds foreign when someone says it.

And still, life continues its normal shapes. Plans are made. Conversations happen. From the outside, nothing is incorrect. Your body shows up where it’s supposed to. Your mouth says the right things. It is only inside that something remains unheld. Only inside that your chest feels like a room with no furniture, walls that echo when you speak, a space where nothing has been placed to receive you. And still you return to yourself each night like a letter that was never opened, intact, unread, exactly as you left it.

So for now, I live with this ache. I carry it into bookstores, into late nights, into prayers, into half-written drafts and conversations and silent walks home. I carry it in my shoulders, in my jaw, in the way I hold my own hands when I'm walking alone. And I beg, like a bug crawling on a slippery wall, that one day I will look back at this version of myself, this painfully lonely girl, with tenderness instead of grief.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking, you have no idea who I am now. You once knew me so intimately and now you do not know the things I reach for when I’m sad, the books that changed me this year, the way I have started speaking slower, softer. You do not know that I no longer dream about a corporate job the way I used to. Somewhere along the line, I started wanting a quieter kind of life. A hallway filled with framed love letters and passages from books I could not survive without.

And it hurts sometimes because there was a version of my future that belonged to both of us. Every time we spoke about “one day,” you existed somewhere inside that sentence. Now when I think about my future, it has been rewritten in your absence.

I think friendship breakups carry a grief people underestimate because nobody teaches you how to mourn someone still alive. There is no funeral for the people who slowly become strangers to you. Just random moments, song, a season, an ordinary Tuesday where you realise they would not recognise the person you are becoming. Or worse, that they are frozen holding a version of you that no longer exists.

nobody teaches us how to grieve the people who knew the dead versions of us.

And I wonder about them too. I wonder what small things have changed in their life while I was busy grieving mine. What new phrases they use now. What dreams they quietly let go of. Whether they still walk fast when they’re anxious. Whether they still laugh the same way. Whether there are moments where they see something beautiful and instinctively think to tell me before remembering they can’t.

Maybe that is what loving people does. Even after they leave, part of you continues updating the file in your mind. You keep wondering who they are becoming without you there to witness it.

There is something unbearably intimate about being known during one chapter of your life and then never again. About someone carrying an outdated version of you forever. Because the truth is I am no longer the girl you knew. I have changed in places you would not even think to look.

And maybe you have too.

I have been sitting with that question for longer than I can honestly account for. It arrived as a vertigo, one of those sentences that surfaces from somewhere below thinking and refuses to be argued away. It keeps returning. And the more I turn it over, the more I suspect it is not really a question about comparison at all. It is a question about the self. About whether there is a fixed version of me standing somewhere, complete, available to be measured against anything.

I used to believe there was. That there was a true self a finished form and that straying too far from it meant a kind of betrayal. The fear wasn’t of change exactly. It was of dissolution. Of waking one day to find I had become unrecognisable, even to myself but I have come to understand something different, something I can only say in the language that arrived for it: The shape of my love today might not be the colour of my love tomorrow.

That sentence is a compass now. It means I am allowed to change. It means my loving is not a fixed performance but a weather system a shifting of light. Some days it is a fierce, protective red. Other days, a quiet, listening blue. There have been seasons of grey that I would not have survived if I had believed they were permanent. They were not. The palette is infinite because I am alive.

Let me tell you about the Wallace Collection.

It is a quiet, opulent treasure box in London, and somewhere within it hangs a painting of the witches from Macbeth. I have been there perhaps twenty-one times. On the first visit, I studied the central figures the theatricality of their prophecy, the drama of what they were foretelling. By the tenth visit, I believed I knew it. I had settled into the painting the way you settle into a chair that has memorised your shape.

But on the eleventh visit, something else happened. I noticed a detail I had never seen perhaps the curl of a witch’s lip, a shadow in the background that changed the temperature of the entire scene. The painting I thought I knew suddenly held a room I had never entered. And then, walking away still slightly rearranged, I found an entirely different painting that made me stop and hold my own breath. One I had walked past ten times before. Suddenly, it was the only thing in the room that mattered.

I stood there and understood something: the eleventh visit is not the eleventh encounter with the same paintings. It is the first encounter between those paintings and the version of me who exists on that particular day.

Heraclitus observed that no one steps into the same river twice. What often goes unmentioned is the second half of that truth, that the river is not the only thing changing. So is the one entering it. My melancholy had sharpened certain sensitivities I didn’t know I was developing. My longings had been quietly directing my gaze for years. The shadow I finally noticed in that painting had always been there. I simply hadn’t lived enough, yet, to need it.

This is the thing about attention: it doesn’t sit still. It moves like weather across a landscape that is always partly familiar and always partly unknown. And it changes what it touches without ever fully explaining itself. A phrase in a novel wounds differently at thirty than it did at twenty. The same evening light on a familiar street can, on one particular Tuesday, appear as something you have never witnessed before. This is not distraction or inconstancy. It is the texture of being a soul in time.

The world does not run out of things to love. We only grow eyes to see them.

Marcel Proust wrote that the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. I used to read that as consolation, something to tell yourself when you couldn’t afford to go anywhere. Now I understand it as something rarer: a description of what it means to survive. To come through difficulty and find that the difficulty has not diminished you, but altered the quality of your seeing. The losses I carry and I do carry them, I am not pretending otherwise; have not made the world smaller. They have made certain corners of it luminous in a way they wouldn’t otherwise be.

There is a grief inside this that I want to name without letting it swallow the rest. Every time I become someone new, the version of me who saw the world in the old way is gone. She doesn’t get to see what I see now. She is not retrievable. There is something quiet and irreversible in each becoming, a small door that closes even as a larger one opens. I have learned to grieve those closed doors rather than pretending they don’t exist. The pretending never worked anyway.

My past is not a locked room I am trying to escape. It is the foundation I stand upon to see the view. And the view, right now, is astounding.

Notice I didn’t say the yearning has disappeared. I said it has stopped stopping me. There is a difference that matters enormously. Many people imagine that fulfilment is what remains when longing is gone. But some of the richest lives I have encountered in literature, in history, in the occasional extraordinary person are lived by those who continue to yearn while remaining fully attentive to the present. They do not postpone wonder until everything is resolved. They let today be complete in itself without pretending tomorrow doesn’t exist.

That is what I am learning. Not to want less, but to be more entirely here while I want.

So no, I am not afraid of becoming someone new. I am afraid of staying someone I no longer recognise as alive.

Let the colour shift. Let the shape of my love tomorrow be something I cannot yet name. I want to keep returning to the same paintings until I finally see the one thing I was always meant to see. I want to keep finding out with something between terror and gratitude what colour my love will be next.

And if someone asks me how my life compares to another’s, I will have to be honest: I don’t entirely know which self is doing the comparing, or which painting she is standing in front of today, or what she has recently lived through that has sharpened her eye. I only know she is looking. And that the looking is changing her.

Some lives appear to me as if they are lit from within. Not necessarily easier or happier, but steadier in their light. There is a coherence to them that feels almost environmental, like standing in a place where the air itself is alive. And then there are other lives that arrive as fragments, or shadows, or distant noise, and I realise how quickly my mind begins to fill in the gaps, to turn absence into narrative. I cannot always tell where observation ends and imagination begins.

And I think I have often mistaken that moment of perception for desire. I have seen lives I thought were beautiful, lives that for a flicker seemed almost inhabitable, as though I could step into them and become someone slightly more resolved. But that feeling never quite holds. It dissolves as quickly as it arrives, leaving behind something more certain: a recognition of distance.

You can admire someone’s beauty, talent, freedom, or success. But to truly have their life would not be to receive those things it would be to surrender the way you see them. To give up the particular architecture of your soul: the specific arrangement of memories, wounds, curiosities, loves, griefs, obsessions, and small private acts of tenderness that have slowly become the way you meet the world.

And perhaps that is too high a price.

Because then comes the question that refuses to leave once it arrives.

If I were someone else, if I had their smooth path, their different pain, their particular inheritance of light and shadow would I still be able to love the way that I do? Would I still be able to bring a soul like mine to the table? Not a better soul, not a purer one, but this one. This specific, hand-stitched, grief-soaked, joy-cracked soul.

I think of the parts of me that ache for strangers I will never meet. Would that other person, in that other life, have been able to feel the weight of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not merely as history but as a wound in the family of being human? Would they have wept for the victims because the empathy in their chest has a door that swings open without permission? Would they have cried for Maryam and Laila in A Thousand Splendid Suns would those tears have risen, unbidden and true, for two fictional girls living under a Kabul sky built only of words? I don’t know. But I know I did. And that capacity was not an accident. It was forged in everything that has happened to me.

So perhaps, I want to stay right here, in this intricate, unpredictable, full-to-the-brim architecture of today, I want to keep handing you this soul—the only one I have— and let it be enough.

Sometimes you stand under your fig tree without realising that is where you are. You think about all the lives you could still live. Japan in cherry-blossom season. A degree you once wanted enough to tell people about. A book that’s followed you from house to house, still unread. Cities you almost moved to. Loves you almost stayed with. So many almosts they begin to feel like a second life running quietly beside the one you’re actually living.

No one tells you how strange abundance can be, how having too many possible lives can freeze you just as much as having none. So you leave the figs where they are. You tell yourself you’re waiting for clarity. For courage. For the right season. And sometimes you truly are. Sometimes you’re just afraid of the grief that comes with choosing.

And figs don’t rot loudly. They soften quietly while you’re still dreaming about them. While you’re planning. While you’re saying next year, after this, when things settle. One day you notice that a fig you once touched every day in your mind no longer aches the way it used to. That’s how you learn that possibility is seasonal.

Not enough time for one life doesn’t arrive as panic. It arrives slowly. In the way certain dreams stop knocking. In the way your “someday” becomes vague. In the way you realise that time has been choosing for you while you were trying not to choose at all.

And still, you keep beginning. Again and again. There’s something brave in that. Also something circular. You are very gentle with your own unfinishedness. You allow yourself to stay nearly there for a long time.

What terrifies you is not that you will fail at what you choose. It is that you will never fully choose at all. That you will remain a woman of beautiful interiors and uninhabited days. That you will be rich in imagination and poor in evidence.

The fig tree does not punish you by refusing you fruit. It punishes you by letting everything remain possible until possibility itself begins to decay. Perhaps, the real grief isn’t choosing the wrong fig. Maybe it is standing there so long trying to protect every version of yourself that you never fully become any of them.

So you stand beneath the branches, holding all these futures softly, now knowing that you will not be able to carry them all forever.

And maybe, one ordinary day, you reach up and choose one.

Not the perfect one.

Not the safest one.

Just one that is still warm with life.

And you let the others be grieved instead of preserved.

Not because you’re finally certain. But because you have learned that waiting, too, is a kind of ending.

Cannibalism, in its symbolic form, is not about dominance. It is about the refusal of otherness.

Freud called it oral fixation. Poets called it obsession. Mystics named it union. I call it what it is: the terror of difference dressed up as desire. To eat another is to abolish the boundary between self and beloved, to make the foreign intimate by force. To be entirely within one as two of you is far too many. It is the most obscene fantasy of union because it seeks not closeness, but the eradication of space itself. No more longing across a table. No more yearning across time. No more skin as barricades. Only incorporation. And once you have devoured and been devoured, there is no exit that does not tear flesh.

So, I want you to learn.

I want you to learn, the way bone learns cold, that what was taken cannot be chewed into something harmless. I want you to feel as if your bones are breaking all at once, reconstructing themselves out of instinct, only to fracture again just one centimeter above the last rupture, so that even healing becomes a rehearsal of injury. So you understand in the body, what the mind keeps bargaining with; what is chewed is never neutralized. What is consumed does not return as softness.

I hope you learn the exact weight by the way its absence rearranges your posture. I hope missing does not arrive as a wave, dramatic and mercifully brief, but as a constant negotiation with damage, a life lived around a hollow that keeps insisting on being felt. I hope the days pretend to be survivable at first. I hope they offer themselves like soft fruit and then split open on your gums. I hope you keep trying to chew out of muscle memory, stubborn with appetite, grinding time against a mouth that can no longer take shape. I hope you feel each tooth being taken one after the other, slow, ceremonial, the nerve screaming longer than the touch that removes it, so that even anticipation becomes a kind of torture. I hope habit betrays you. The reflex to smile against exposed bone. The reflex to reach with an empty mouth. The reflex to answer as if something still answers back. I hope you discover that absence is not an event but a condition, a daily bartering with pain that never renegotiates its terms. I hope your life begins to curve around the hollow, the way the tongue curves around a ruin it cannot stop mapping.

I hope the pain is not singular. I hope it multiplies. In the skin first, a constant raw awareness of having no edges left. Then the heart, not as metaphor but as weight, as pressure that makes each beat feel like a small cut. I hope it fogs the brain, dull and blinding at once, so thought itself becomes exhausting. I hope it drops into the legs so standing feels undeserved, and coils through the stomach so even hunger becomes nausea. I hope it gathers behind your eyes as traumatising cluster headaches that make light feel punitive and darkness feel loud. I hope your body becomes an atlas of where I am not, every region marked by a different kind of ache.

I hope night is where it sharpens. I hope sleep keeps offering you counterfeit versions of what is gone, tender replicas that dissolve the moment you wake, so you must lose me again every morning. I hope your dreams undo you with mercy and your waking punishes you for believing in it. I hope you find my absence in the gap between breaths, in the way your chest stutters as if it almost remembers how to be held. I hope you grow terrified of the exact second your consciousness returns, because that is when the truth rehearses its entrance. Not as a scream. As a fact. Clean. Final. Unarguable.

Because once you have been eaten, you cannot escape.

~ with love, your blood and flesh

We like to believe that love is instinctive. That it arrives uninvited, unplanned, untrained. But most of us are schooled into it early, quietly, through observation and small injuries. We learn that affection is an economy before we ever learn it is a surrender. We give with timing. We withhold with purpose. We learn when to speak and when to starve the air of our feelings. Even in the most tender bonds, a shadow of strategy settles like dust.

We do not call it calculation. We soften it with kinder names. Respect. Boundaries. Self-preservation. But the truth is that we are taught to love like diplomats, fluent in half-truths and careful delays. To meet a new person is to enter a game of decoding; what they want, what they really mean and how much of myself is safe to offer.

And sometimes, in the exhaustion of all this decoding, I think of the letter attributed to Kafka, the one that may not even be his, but feels truer than many things that are:

“Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.”

It is the perfect, impossible fantasy, the only set of conditions that would silence the machinery. The world's end as the necessary permission for love's beginning.

But the world does not end. It continues. And so we return to accepting that sweetness requires choreography. The timing of a message. The restraint in a confession. The performance of indifference when the heart is anything but. Almost every relationship in my life has felt like a form of diplomacy. Beneath the affection, beneath the softness, there is always the faint machinery of negotiation, quietly turning.

It happens so subtly that we scarcely notice when love becomes contractual. When someone says I love you, we do not receive it as a revelation. We receive it as a document awaiting signature. The words lean forward, asking for their reflection. If they are not echoed, the silence feels like a small rupture and when someone says I miss you we dismantle the sentence and interrogate it for motive. A kindness arrives and we wonder what it will cost later. We respond not only to what is given, but also to the imagined debts trailing behind it.

Suspicion becomes our native posture. We love with one eye open. We offer ourselves in measured portions. Love becomes a series of quiet calculations dressed in the fragile costume of spontaneity.

And yet, my longing for love cannot outrun my loyalty to myself.

So, I ask the questions that sit heavy in my chest:

Have I ever loved without negotiation?

Has anyone ever loved me without calculation?

Everyone is trying to indoctrinate you because attention is power, and power is currency. To shape how you think is to shape how you spend, vote, desire, obey, and consent. No one is neutral because neutrality does not scale, and nothing that scales is innocent. Institutions dress persuasion as education. Corporations dress it as care. Movements dress it as salvation. Even language itself has become a battleground where words arrive pre-loaded with instruction before you ever touch the idea beneath them.

Control no longer announces itself through force; it arrives through framing. It does not need to silence you, when it can teach you what to say. And, so narratives are built the way empires once built roads: so that no matter where you travel, you are still moving in the direction someone else designed. What unsettles me is not that this is happening; power has always sought to reproduce itself, but how intimate it has become. It reaches us through algorithms that learn our fears, through moral scripts that flatter our identities, through facts that arrive already edited for emotional obedience. Indoctrination no longer feels like oppression. It feels like belonging. Propaganda is no longer loud banners, chants, obvious villains. Today it is soft. It speaks in the language of wellness, justice, identity, empowerment, science, safety, representation. It does not command you; it cares for you. It does not threaten you; it protects you from thinking differently. It does not silence you; it teaches you acceptable thoughts so that you are always on the right side of history. I learned this long before I had the language for it.

My history teacher once said that history is simply the point of view of the historian, and at the time it sounded like a clever academic caveat, the kind you nod at and move past. I did not yet understand that it would one day become the lens through which almost everything would fracture. I began to see the same tilt everywhere in novels that claimed universality, in essays that disguised ideology as moral clarity, and later, even in research papers I approached through skincare and clinical studies, naïvely hoping science would be the last clean refuge. But funding shapes outcomes. Language cushions bias. Conclusions lean, quietly and obediently, toward whoever pays for the data. What arrived first as curiosity hardened into vigilance. What began as discernment turned into exhaustion. I stopped reading to be carried. I started reading to defend myself.

What exhausts me is not that the world is persuasive, but that it so casually assumes my availability for capture, as if my inner life were public property and my doubt a weakness to be exploited. I am tired of being addressed not as a thinking being in dialogue, but as territory to be softened, angled, and claimed. There is something deeply violating in being constantly treated as a site for influence rather than as a mind with borders. The world wants not only your labour, your money, your obedience, but your interpretation of reality itself.

There is a quote I love, though I can never remember it exactly, about how the only way to live a thousand lives is through books. I know this to be true because I have lived so many. I have been people I will never meet, loved inside worlds that never existed, learned the textures of grief, devotion, exile, and wonder through language that was never mine. Books gave me emotional educations I could not have earned in one lifetime. And yet, knowing this only sharpens the grief of what reading has become for me now. I still crave that multiplicity, that resurrection of becoming someone else for a few hours but I cannot lower my guard without fear. I want to disappear into a voice without being claimed by it. I want to be moved without being moulded. I love books, and yet I meet them like a border I no longer fully trust myself to cross.

And so, I remain suspended between suspicion and longing, between the instinct to defend and the ache to be undone by beauty again. I am angry at what has been done to my reading, to my trust, to my earliest forms of intimacy with language. I am angry that I must now negotiate where I once wandered freely.

It happens often, you know. I’ll be walking home, somewhere between the rhythm of my footsteps and the stillness of the evening, and I’ll start to drift. The other day it happened again, I was walking home after dinner. I’d gone back to a restaurant I’d been to before, and I had a good time, the kind that makes you quietly grateful to be alive. And as I walked, memories began to surface, one after another, uninvited but tender. The street became a reel, and the past unfolded before me like a music video I hadn’t meant to watch. There I was, walking home in another year, another coat, another version of myself. There I was, in love. There I was, healing. There I was, laughing like I used to.

I think about it often;  how I am not one person but many. I am a mosaic of everyone I have ever met, every place I have ever loved, every book I have ever read and every version of myself that ever existed. I am made of glances that lingered, words that stayed, laughter that slipped between the cracks of time. I am a collection of unfinished stories and soft beginnings. A thousand borrowed gestures, and a thousand forgotten kindnesses. The world has passed through me and left colour everywhere.

Sometimes it happens in fragments. I walked past Santander bikes and laughed to myself, remembering the day I was convinced to ride one and failed miserably, laughing so hard I could barely breathe. And just like that, I remembered someone who made me laugh the same way three summers ago the same breathless, honest sound. Then I pass a townhouse and remembered sitting once at the steps of one just like it, daydreaming about a life that never quite arrived. Every time I see tulips, I remember that early morning at the tulip garden, the sky still pale, the air still heavy with dew and the way awe bloomed in me like something sacred. And that’s how it always happens for me: one small thing, and a whole world returns.

I never really get over anything; not places, not people, not moments. They stay with me, under my skin, like the hum of a song long after it ends. Sometimes I think it’s tragic, this inability to move on. But mostly, I think it’s romantic. Because to remember so vividly is a kind of love, a loyalty to the past, a refusal to let beauty die just because time has passed.

Maybe that’s what I was made for; to remember. To feel things twice, once when they happen, and again when they return. To love so fully that even after the ending, the echo remains tender. My life plays like a montage sometimes, looping moments that no one else remembers. But I don’t mind. To me, they’re proof that I’ve lived that I’ve been moved, undone, remade.

We like to believe we are self-made, that we are the authors of our becoming. But maybe we are more like editors piecing together fragments of others; the kindness of a stranger, the confidence borrowed from a friend, the mannerisms unconsciously mimicked from someone we loved too much. I sometimes wonder if any part of us is ever purely our own, or if we are all simply accumulations living anthologies of everyone who has ever touched us, carrying pieces of people who no longer remember leaving them behind.

I keep asking: what does it mean to truly change one’s life? I know the language of it; I can perform the rhetoric of transformation so convincingly I almost believe it. But when the performance ends, I am left with the same compulsions, the same cowardice, the same quiet hunger for what I swore I would abandon. And I wonder if I am not, in some way, committed to my own hypocrisy. Perhaps, I do not actually want change perhaps; I only want the drama of desiring it, the intoxication of longing for another self without ever enduring the violence of becoming her.

My transformation feels costly in ways I can never admit. It demands that I betray the version of myself I have kept alive for years, even when she became unbearable. It demands that I kill her off, bury her and abandon her excuses. But I cling to her still, because she is familiar, because she is mine, because I do not know how to live without the comfort of my own ruin.

Sometimes I fear that I prefer the ferocity of wanting to the quiet temper of having because I only ever feel in extremes; steady warmth feels like anesthetic. The ache is the only thing that sustains me, it is private, absolute, and therefore mine. Love always asks for pieces I’m not willing to give.

Somewhere between longing and belonging, I secretly know that I don’t just tolerate the wreckage, I worship it. There is a part of me that feeds on collapse, that craves the sharp edges of longing more than the soft weight of love. To be steady, to be soothed, to be satisfied it feels like a slow death. But to yearn, to ache until it hollows me out that feels like truth.

In my diary last November I wrote: “You yearn so much, you have become one with your yearning. You cannot identify your heart without your yearning.” I return to those words often, because they name the rot and the devotion in me at once. I don’t want the cure; I want the fever. I don’t want the arrival; I want the ruin on the way there. And maybe this is my secret loyalty: that I would rather burn in the wreckage than live in the dull mercy of being saved.

When I was eighteen, I started having dreams that felt less like sleep and more like warnings stitched into the night. In them, I was twenty-five, still tethered to university. The life I had imagined for myself had dissolved. Nothing had been built, nothing stirred; I had slipped into a neutral existence, unremarkable, irrelevant and indifferent. The panic would rise like smoke in my chest, curling into my throat, making it hard to breathe. I would wake trembling, skin damp, heart hammering, as if my body had already begun mourning the life I had not yet lived. Twenty minutes later, sometimes longer, I would lie there, listening to the quiet house, the echo of that dream pressing against my ribs, reminding me that time moves, relentless and indifferent, with or without me.

It is, I think, the echo of a very old anxiety in philosophy and literature. Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations warned himself daily against the squandering of time, urging that one must live as though each hour were the last. When I read him, I feel almost accused; his words press against me like those dreams, demanding to know why I hesitate, why I allow the hours to slip unmarked. And when I turn to T.S. Eliot, with his weary confession of having “measured out life with coffee spoons,” I see my own fear given shape: the dread of a life frittered away in trivialities, each day insignificant until the whole sum is indistinguishable from nothing. These voices reach across centuries, and in them I recognise myself not as an inheritor of greatness, but as one trembling at the threshold of erasure. What I fear most is not death, but the possibility that I will never cross into what might be called a life of consequence.

I remember the last day of my GCSE extension classes. My history teacher’s parting words were “you are the shining star the world is in need of, the world is yearning for your voice” it echoes the phrase history remembers doers, not dreamers which has always haunted me. I am terrified of living a life where I only dreamed. I want so much for myself and everyone around me seems to expect the same that I will become, that I will rise into something remarkable. There are people waiting for me to become so I can save them. My becoming is not just for me, it is a debt I owe to those who believe in me and those who depend on me.

At last, I cannot tell if these fears are prophecy or illusion, if I am standing at the edge of brilliance or already halfway into erasure. Perhaps this trembling is itself the proof that I am alive, or perhaps it is only the sound of time grinding me down. I do not know. I only know that the question stalks me, even in sleep: will I become, or will I only dream of becoming?

Sometimes I wonder who I will be two minutes before I leave the earth. Will I be the person who spent her life clawing after more, still restless even as the clock runs out? Or will I have quieted the animal in my chest long enough to know what it means to be at peace? I fear I will die as I have lived aching, yearning, unsatisfied, suspended between all that I became and all that I never touched. Perhaps that is the cruelest truth: not that life ends, but that even in its final breath I may still be reaching, still asking, still undone by the possibility of what else there could have been.

I realised it at an early age: the intensity of my wanting carried me to the edge of destruction, and I felt no remorse. As a little girl, I poured everything into my diary; the help I never knew I needed. Page after page, I drafted elaborate plans on how to get what I wanted, how fiercely I wanted it, how unbearably I felt it. Sometimes those pages dripped with malice, and when I returned to them, I would shudder and think: this is not good, not this, not that. Even then, it was a war between the creature that devoured without hesitation and the conscience that tried, weakly, to pull me back.

I am a double-edged sword, that would stab anyone who comes close, even myself. It is a truth I have carried, a lens through which I have always understood myself: as a force capable of ruin.

As I grew, my diaries changed, becoming dated entries and time-stamped reflections, rituals of witnessing myself. They did not erase the monster, but they tamed its size, gave its shadow a contour, and allowed me to walk alongside it rather than be consumed. Writing became both a confession and a mirror, a leash on the force I carried within me. Through ink and paper, I began to see that power, in its rawest form, is neither good nor evil; it is only waiting for direction.

In my search for direction, I found Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë. My immediate thought was: how can one be so inherently good without having to fight for it? There was power in her gentleness, a resilience in her virtue that captivated me. It is a book I return to a few times every year, drawn back to that same wonder; her goodness, so effortless, so unyielding, that it feels almost unreal against the backdrop of a world where I have always had to wrestle for mine. Her example became a silent benchmark, a reminder that the path I struggle to walk is not the only one, but it is the one I must carve for myself.

I have always lived in extremes. I either feel so deeply it consumes me, or I feel nothing at all. Rarely is there a middle ground. This intensity makes me capable of an immense tenderness, the kind that can absorb a friend's grief until it settles like a stone in my own chest, but it also makes me capable of a cruelty just as deep. Self-mastery, for me, has never been gentle. It is a violent discipline, a constant dragging of myself toward restraint, toward something better. And still, I fail more often than I succeed.

And yet, beneath every attempt at self-mastery, there is a shadow of fear. If I were ever to lose hold of the internal violence I have known all my life, who would I become? Would I still be worthy of love, of admiration, of myself? Would the depth I have cultivated, the very intensity that defines me erode into something hollow and unrecognizable? What would I then have to offer to anyone? These questions linger like a cold wind through the corridors of my mind.

I have loved, and I have lost. And, perhaps because something is fleeting does not mean it is insignificant. Some loves are unforgettable precisely because they do not stay, yet I cannot accept this truth with my whole chest. I tell myself nothing is meant to last, that impermanence is what gives life its wings… and in the same breath I ache for forever. Even when I preach that we are born alone and will ultimately die alone, I still cannot rid myself of this aching need for someone. Why must I hunger like this? Why is solitude never quite enough to quiet the animal in my chest? I tell myself to make a home inside my own body, but some nights I still feel like a house with all the lights on, waiting for someone to come inside. “The folly of demanding an ocean to behave like a stone”

Curiously, there are friendships that we have dreamed in, the kind where we mapped out our futures together over late-night laughter and half-serious promises: you’ll be my bridesmaid, our children will grow up as siblings, we’ll clap for each other in the front row of every success. It was not just about companionship; it was about intertwining destinies. And yet life, with its sharp turns and quiet driftings, sometimes pulls those very people away just before the dream comes true. You will achieve what you once imagined together, but the room will feel strangely hollow, because the person who helped you build the vision isn’t there to witness its fruition. In that absence, the triumph glimmers less brightly, as though some part of its meaning was never meant to be experienced alone, but we accept it, because such is the impermanence of life. Perhaps this is the curse and the beauty of being alive: to be stitched together by a longing so primal it predates logic, and to carry a heart that keeps reaching out even when the mind insists it should know better. It is to know love has an expiration date and still choose, foolishly, to indulge. But whatever the outcome, and despite the ache, we can still say with certainty: love lived here.

This time, I have loved to the height my soul can reach. And perhaps next time like Elizabeth Barrett Browning I will love to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, “when feeling out of sight” for the ends of Being and ideal Grace. To the level of every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candlelight; as freely as men strive for Right, as purely as they turn from Praise with the passion once put to use in my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. With a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life even if it only lasts for as long as I live.

London on a Friday night is not for the faint of heart. The city pulses with a raw, unyielding energy, a symphony of art, poetry, and music swirling in the damp air. It's a place where the streets themselves seem to breathe, alive with voices, dreams that refuse to sleep. And I was to go to dinner.

I wanted a red dress that felt like fever; something that matched the way London burns beneath my skin. I searched for days. In the end, I settled for a polyester dress; a fabric I loathe, but desire makes beggars of all of us. And it did not feel good, but I looked great, and it would have made him happy. I got a facial. I think sometimes I want to be adored more than I want to be understood.

The Uber was expensive, a black tomb crawling through the city's congested veins. Twenty-five minutes into the drive, the map claimed we were still twenty minutes away. A suffocating weight of disappointment pressed down on me; the fragile architecture of the evening was crumbling. Frustrated, I gave up, got out, and descended into the roar of Green Park station.

It was rammed and packed with a familiar suffocation. By the time we rattled towards Waterloo, I had managed to clinch a handhold on a pole near the seats. Two men were sitting there. One met my tired gaze and, without a word, stood up so I could sit and suddenly we were speaking about the rummaging night and where I was going all dressed up. The one who remained seated noticed a lipstick stain on my bag. He got out his water bottle, put water on the corner of his own shirt, and cleaned it. "We can't let lipstick stain the bag," he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. I was already over an hour late, but in that moment, things slowed down. London can be so kind when you least expect it.

Dinner was at Oblix. I ordered the pasta with lobster; the food was forgettable, swallowed by my nerves and the weight of lateness. The energy around the table was awkward, fractured by my delay and my unease.

Yet, as plates emptied and the evening waned, the atmosphere shifted. Conversation opened like colour running through water. The energy flowed in all directions, like watching paint move across a canvas, colours you don't think should go together somehow blending into something beautiful. That night, for those few stolen hours, I had no doubt. I was loved.

London does that. She breaks you and then she brushes the stain off your bag. Makes you feel like the only woman alive, then devours you whole before morning.