Somewhere along the way, we decided that not caring is a personality trait. We’ve gotten so good at caring quietly.

Liking the story instead of texting the person. Thinking about someone instead of telling them. Missing someone and calling it “giving space.” We’ve turned caring into something we do in the privacy of our own heads, where it’s safe, where it can’t be rejected, where nobody has to know it happened unless it works out.

But what if we just... cared out loud?

What if, instead of the slow fade and the delayed reply and the performance of being unbothered, we just said the thing? “I miss you.” “That hurt me.” “I’m proud of you.” “I’ve been thinking about you all day and I don’t know why I didn’t just say so.” Out loud. In real time. Where the other person can actually hear it, instead of having to guess it from how long we take to answer.

Somebody, somewhere, made indifference look like confidence, and now half of us are performing a version of ourselves that doesn’t feel anything too loudly, just so we don’t look desperate. We’d rather be misunderstood than seen wanting something.

And I get where it comes from. A lot of us have been the person who showed up; for the 2 a.m. breakdowns, the breakups, the family stuff, the bad news nobody else wanted to sit with and then found out, when our own worst moment came, that nobody showed up for us the same way. That kind of disappointment rearranges you. So you build a wall, call it “boundaries,” and tell yourself that the next time you won’t be the one who cares more. You’ll be the one who’s unbothered. Untouchable. Chill.

I understand it. I just don’t think it’s worth it.

Because here’s the thing; there are billions of people on this planet, and not one of them is going to love you, or show up for you, or text you back the exact same way the last person did. Some will disappoint you. Some won’t. That’s not a reason to stop being a person who feels things out loud; it’s just life, doing what life does. We’re not here to get through it unscathed. We’re here to feel the whole mess of it; the love, the heartbreak, the drama, the betrayals, the laughter that comes right after, because that’s genuinely what we’re made for.

So can we stop pretending that emotional distance is a personality upgrade?

Nonchalance isn’t mysterious. It’s not power. Most of the time, it’s just fear wearing a nicer outfit. It’s easier to shrug than to say “I missed you.” It’s easier to leave someone on read than to say “I didn’t know what to say, but I saw your message and I care.” It’s easier to act like nothing bothers you than to say “that actually hurt me.”

Be chalant instead. Tell people you love them before you’ve decided it’s the “right time.” Tell them you’re proud of them, out loud, even if it feels a little embarrassing. Text back like it’s not a competition. If someone did something that hurt you, say that; not to punish them, but because pretending you’re fine is its own quiet kind of lying, to them and to yourself.

Show people you care while you still have the chance to. Don’t perform indifference and call it self-respect. Real self-respect is being able to say “I care about this” and still be okay if it doesn’t come back the same way.

Closing yourself off doesn’t protect you. It just delays the loneliness a little, and makes it heavier when it finally catches up.

So this is me saying it plainly: be the one who reaches out first. Be the one who says the honest thing instead of the cool thing. Be too much, sometimes. Let people know they mattered to you while they’re still around to hear it. Be yourself so that people looking for you find you.

Nonchalance was never cool. It was just easier to fake than courage.

xoxo,
Ruucha <

3

I keep thinking about how easy it used to be.

You liked someone’s dress, so you sat next to them. Someone lent you their eraser, and just like that, you were friends. No backstory required, no vetting process, no mental script rehearsed three times before you said hello. As kids, we didn’t evaluate people before deciding whether they were “worth” the risk of talking to. We just talked to them.

Now I watch myself do the opposite. I sit in a coffee shop, alone, and instead of glancing up at the person reading next to me, I reach for my phone. Not because I’m busy. Because it’s easier than the version of the interaction that plays out in my head; the one where I say something and it lands wrong, or worse, doesn’t land at all.

Somewhere along the way, we started keeping score

I don’t think we lose the ability to make friends easily as we grow up. I think we lose the willingness to be unguarded about it. Kids don’t run a cost-benefit analysis before offering someone their crayons. Adults do; even if we don’t call it that. We think: what if they’re busy, what if that’s weird, what if they think I’m too much. We’ve quietly assigned a social cost to every interaction with a stranger, and most days, we decide it’s cheaper to just not.

Some of that is just self-consciousness accumulating with age. Kids haven’t yet learned to imagine how they look from the outside. Adults have spent years learning exactly that and it has made us cautious in a way that borders on self-protective. We’re not scared of the other person, not really. We’re scared of being seen trying, and having it not work.

The friendships we don’t notice we’re missing

There’s a quieter piece to this too. As kids, friendship didn’t require initiative, it required proximity. You were friends with whoever sat next to you, whoever was on your street, whoever showed up every day at the same lunch table. The friendship-making happened to you, over and over, just by being present in the same room as other kids, day after day.

Adult life removes almost all of that built-in repetition. We don’t have assigned seats anymore. We don’t see the same thirty people every day for years. If a friendship is going to happen, we have to actually build the proximity ourselves; show up somewhere repeatedly, start the conversation, follow up. That’s a lot more effort than an eraser exchange, and effort is exactly the thing shyness and self-protection talk us out of.

What I keep coming back to

I don’t think the answer is to force myself to talk to every stranger at a coffee shop. That’s not really how we made friends as kids either; it was never effortful. It was just unguarded.

Maybe the more honest question isn’t “how do I make friends as an adult,” but “when did I start deciding that strangers are a risk instead of a possibility.” Somewhere between the eraser and the phone screen, I started protecting myself from people I hadn’t even met yet.

I’m not sure I have a tidy fix for that. But I’ve started noticing the moment it happens; the small decision to look down instead of up, and just naming that seems like it’s already worth something.

Having said that I would like to know if any of you is in Berlin and would love to just meet up or go to a park just to colour something or maybe even have a ice-cream, do ping me in the DMs. You can just send me a message as well if you are not here.

XOXO,
Ruucha <3

There’s a quiet kind of magic we often overlook: no matter how badly things fall apart, we always get the chance to begin again.

Not once. Not twice. As many times as it takes.

When you really think about it, it’s almost absurd. The thing you built your whole identity around can disappear overnight a relationship, a job, a dream, a version of yourself you were certain would last forever; and somehow the next morning, the option is still sitting there, quietly waiting for you: start again. Nobody revokes it. Nobody asks you to earn another chance first. It’s simply there, the way sunrise is there, the way gravity is there, completely indifferent to yesterday.

We don’t usually notice this because we’re too busy grieving whatever didn’t work out. We’re replaying conversations, wondering what we could have done differently, trying to make sense of something that already belongs to the past. But if you zoom out far enough, starting over might be one of the most extraordinary features of being alive. Every single person who has ever existed has eventually reached a moment where the life they imagined stopped matching the life they were living. And yet the possibility of beginning again remained.

Fresh starts rarely look dramatic

We tend to imagine starting over as something cinematic. A new city. A new career. A completely reinvented version of ourselves who suddenly wakes up with perfect habits and unwavering confidence.

But life doesn’t usually work like that. Most of the time fresh starts are almost invisible. They’re hidden inside ordinary Tuesdays.

They’re choosing to go for the walk you skipped yesterday or in replying to the message you’ve been overthinking for three weeks. They’re applying for the opportunity you’ve already convinced yourself you won’t get and maybe even in deciding that today doesn’t have to look exactly like yesterday.

The funny thing is, these opportunities appear constantly. Every morning gives us another blank page, every conversation lets us become a slightly different version of ourselves, every hour quietly asks the same question: Who do you want to be next?

Yet most of these moments pass unnoticed because we assume the story has already been written.

I’m not disciplined. I’m not creative. I’m just bad at this.

We repeat these sentences until they start sounding like facts, when really they’re just conclusions drawn from old versions of ourselves. Life keeps handing us unwritten pages. We’re usually the ones insisting they’ve already been filled.

You’re not beginning from nothing

Starting again doesn’t mean erasing everything that came before. You’re not back at the beginning. This time when you begin again it is with experience.

You know more than you did last time. You understand yourself in ways you couldn’t have before. You’ve learned what breaks you, what heals you, what matters enough to keep fighting for, and what you’re finally ready to let go of.

None of that is wasted. The version of you who starts again after disappointment isn’t weaker because they’ve failed. They’re stronger because they’ve survived.

There’s a quiet confidence that only comes from realising the thing you were most afraid of happened; and somehow, you kept living anyway. That realisation changes you.

Not into someone fearless, but into someone who knows that if life asks them to begin again, they can.

So, start again.

The habit you’ve been meaning to rebuild or it’s the dream you quietly abandoned because the first version didn’t work out. Maybe it’s reaching out to someone after months of silence, or admitting that the life you’ve been trying so hard to hold together no longer fits.

Whatever it is, don’t wait for the perfect moment.

Don’t wait until Monday. Or January. Or until you become the version of yourself you think deserves another chance. You already have one. You always did.

Starting again isn’t a reward reserved for people who got everything right. It’s one of the few gifts life gives us without asking for anything in return. And maybe that’s the most beautiful part.

No matter how many times life asks us to begin again, it never runs out of beginnings.

XOXO

Ruucha ❤️

Nobody tells you that moving abroad feels less like a chapter change and more like becoming a first draft again.

You arrive with your name, your history, your sense of humour — but none of the context that made those things land. You have to learn everything from the beginning. Not just the language or the commute, but the smaller, stranger things: which supermarket has the good bread, which street feels safe at night, which coffee shop will become your coffee shop, the one you’ll need on the hard days.

You’re not just unpacking boxes. You’re rebuil

ding a whole interior world.

The loneliness of it is particular. It’s not the loneliness of being alone; it’s the loneliness of being surrounded by people who don’t know your story yet. You’ve left behind the friends who remember the version of you before you had to explain yourself. The ones who knew your laugh without being told it was a laugh.

Finding that again takes time. Real time. Not a few weeks of effort time; but months of slowly accumulating shared moments with new people, until one day something clicks and you realise, oh. this person might become someone important to me.

And yes, you might only have two or three people who truly know you back home. That is not a failure. That’s just what deep friendship actually looks like. The goal isn’t to replicate that overnight. The goal is to stay open long enough for it to find you again.

Here’s the thing people back home don’t see: the life you’re building is already full of invisible labour.

They see the photos: a weekend market, a new neighbourhood, a plate of something you’d never eaten before. They think you’re just travelling. They don’t see what came before the photo: the weeks of figuring out how to pay a utility bill in a system you don’t understand, the grocery run that took forty minutes because you couldn’t read half the labels, the evening you sat on your floor and quietly fell apart because everything was unfamiliar and no one was coming over to help.

They don’t see that roaming around is often the only medicine available. That when you don’t have a sofa to collapse onto at a friend’s house, you walk. You walk to find yourself. You walk because motion is its own form of coping when you haven’t built stillness yet.

Let them think what they want. You know what this costs.

it is okay to —

Make mistakes and learn from them slowly, not all at once. Nobody arrives knowing how everything works. You are allowed to get it wrong, ask again, and figure it out in your own time.

Ask for help. From a neighbour, a stranger, a new colleague you’ve only spoken to twice. People often want to help. You letting them isn’t weakness — it’s how connection begins.

Make new friends, even though you have people back home who hold a piece of your soul. New friendships don’t replace old ones. They expand what you’re capable of carrying.

Share parts of yourself with people you’ve only just met. You don’t need years of history to have a real conversation. Sometimes a stranger is exactly who you need.

Say no. To plans, to people, to pressure. Protecting your energy when everything costs more than usual is not antisocial. It’s survival.

Miss home desperately and still know you made the right choice. Both things can be true, at the same time, in the same body. You don’t have to resolve that contradiction to keep going.

Moving abroad is an act of radical self-belief. You decided, somewhere deep in yourself, that you were worth the risk of starting over. That you were curious enough about who you might become to leave behind who you already were.

That’s not nothing. That’s enormous.

I’m writing this from somewhere new. I’ve just moved, and I’m still in the middle of all of this; still learning the streets, still figuring out my routines, still finding the version of myself that belongs here. Some days I feel brave. Some days I just feel far away.

But slowly - very slowly, I’m starting to settle. Not into a place, not yet. Into myself. Into who I might become when I stop trying to be who I was.

If you’re in this too, I hope this finds you on a good day. And if it’s not a good day, that’s okay. You’re still building something. It doesn’t have to look finished yet.

with love from somewhere I’m still learning to call home 🏡

Ruucha❤️

Not in the way movies warn you about. Not in dramatic fallouts or rain-soaked reunions. I mean the quieter, unglamorous kind of ugly. The version of you that snaps over something small. The one that goes cold when it should go soft. The one that tests, pushes, pulls away, as if searching for the exact moment the other person will finally say, enough.

We save our worst selves for the people we love most. And for a long time, I thought that was something to be ashamed of.

I believe there’s a theory that the people we feel safest with become the place where we fall apart. And falling apart isn’t graceful.

Sometimes it looks like picking a fight at 11pm over nothing. Sometimes it’s silence that stretches for days. Sometimes it’s saying something cruel and watching their face; not out of spite, but out of a quiet, terrified curiosity:

Are you still here? Are you still choosing me, even now?

That’s what we’re really doing when we show our worst. We’re running a test we never consciously agreed to. We’re asking: Can you love me through this? Can you see the mess beneath who I try to be, and still stay?

It’s irrational. And deeply human.

The people who truly love us aren’t the ones who never see us at our worst. They’re the ones who see it and don’t leave.

Not because they ignore it. Not because they excuse it. But because they understand that loving someone fully includes the parts that haven’t healed yet. The parts still learning how to ask for what they need without breaking everything in the process.

Forgiveness in love isn’t loud. It’s quiet. It’s the person who gives you space without making you feel abandoned. Who reaches for you when you don’t know how to ask. Who doesn’t keep score. Who meets your walls with patience instead of building their own.

The one who comes back not despite knowing you, but because of it.

Those people are rare. And when you find one, you understand: this is what home feels like.

Home isn’t always a place, this is what we have all heard about often. Sometimes it’s a person who has seen the worst version of you and still reaches for your hand.

Being known like that doesn’t fix you. It doesn’t erase your rough edges. But it makes them survivable. It makes you want to be better; not out of fear of being left, but out of care for the person who chose to stay.

There is a quiet kind of peace in being fully seen. Not the curated version of yourself, but the anxious, difficult, contradictory whole of you; and having someone look at all of it and say, without words, I’m not going anywhere.

No performance can replicate that.

So here’s what I’ve come to believe:

Love isn’t measured by how perfect we are for each other. It’s measured by how willing we are to stay through the imperfection.

The people who are truly for you won’t love you only in your light. They will find you in your dark, sit beside you, and wait. They won’t ask you to be easy. Only that you keep trying.

And maybe that’s all we can offer each other; not perfection, but persistence. Not a flawless version of ourselves, but the decision to keep showing up, again and again, for the person who chose us.

That’s not just love. That’s home.

XOXO,

Ruucha❤

️

On the surface, there were the usual reasons: the connection, the comfort, the feeling of being at ease in a way I hadn’t quite felt before. But underneath all of that was something I couldn’t name for a long time. Something quieter. Something older.

It took me a while to realise it wasn’t really about who they were as a person standing in front of me. It was about who they were to the child I used to be.

We talk about love like it’s about the present. About two adults meeting, choosing each other, and building something. And yes, it is that. But it is also something much older and more tender than we usually admit.

We are drawn to people who do for us what we always needed someone to do.

The child who was never truly listened to falls for someone who remembers everything they say. The child who was surrounded by unpredictability finds peace in someone steady, someone whose mood doesn’t send them into survival mode. The child who was made to feel like a burden finally exhales in the presence of someone who makes them feel like a gift.

We don’t choose this consciously. The inner child doesn’t send a memo. But they are always in the room when we meet someone new, quietly measuring, is it safe here? Will this person hurt me the way I’ve been hurt before? Or will they finally give me what I’ve been waiting for?

I think this is why love can feel so overwhelming when it’s right. It isn’t just that I like this person. It’s more like this person is giving me something I have been hungry for my entire life. That’s not a small thing to feel. Of course, it undoes you.

And I think this is also why heartbreak can feel so disproportionate to the length of the relationship. Because you’re not just losing a person, you’re losing the feeling of finally being held. You’re losing the thing the child in you had been waiting for. That’s a grief with very deep roots.

I’ve been sitting with this idea for a while now, and the question I keep returning to is this: what did your inner child need that you still look for in the people you love?

Not what do you want in a partner as an adult, the checklist stuff. But what did the child need? What was missing? What were you waiting for someone to say or do or be?

Because I think when we can name that, we start to understand ourselves in relationships so much better. We stop being confused about why we’re drawn to certain people. We stop being hard on ourselves for loving who we love. We start to see our patterns not as flaws, but as a child’s very understandable attempt to get what they always deserved.

I’m not saying love is just therapy in disguise. I’m not saying we should outsource our healing entirely to another person; that’s a weight no one should have to carry alone.

But I do believe that one of the most profound things a partner can offer you isn’t grand gestures or perfect compatibility. It’s something quieter. It’s the feeling that the version of you who still isn’t sure they’re enough, the uncertain, younger, less polished version, is welcome here too.

That the door isn’t just open for the adult you’ve worked so hard to become.

That it’s open for all of you. Even the parts you’ve been hiding since you were small.

That, to me, is what love- real love; actually looks like.

Let me know your thoughts on this!!

XOXO,
Ruucha.

People have often told me that unless and until I communicate what I feel, unless I say out loud what’s going on inside my head, they won’t be able to help me.

What nobody ever wondered was this: maybe I didn’t communicate because I already knew they wouldn’t comprehend it.

It took me a long time to arrive at this thought. Not because it was complicated, but because it was uncomfortable. The kind of realization that quietly rearranges how you understand your silences.

Yesterday, while riding back home with a friend, I finally said it out loud. I told her that I don’t need people to fix me or advise me or even respond perfectly. I just need someone to understand what I mean when I say something. Because in the end, comprehension is the key.

In friendships. In relationships. In families.

If someone doesn’t understand what you’re trying to say, what is the point of communicating at all?

We often talk about communication as if speaking is the hardest part. As if putting words together is the final step. But speaking is easy compared to being understood. Words can be heard and still miss their destination entirely.

How am I supposed to tell you why I’m writing this if you don’t understand the depth of it?

How am I supposed to tell you what song I love, what book stayed with me long after I finished it, why certain lyrics feel like they were written from my own chest, if you only hear the surface and never the feeling underneath?

How do I explain why I go silent after noticing the slightest shift in your behavior? Why I feel deeply, instinctively, sometimes painfully when you can’t even comprehend the language of depth?

Some of us don’t go quiet because we have nothing to say. We go quiet because we’ve learned, over time, that explaining ourselves repeatedly to people who don’t try to understand is more exhausting than silence.

There’s a loneliness in being articulate but misunderstood. In having emotions that run deep in a world that prefers things simple. In knowing that if you fully opened your mouth, you’d still be met with confusion or worse, dismissal.

This isn’t about expecting everyone to feel the way you do. It’s about wanting someone to pause long enough to try to understand why you feel the way you do.

Because communication without comprehension is just noise. And being heard without being understood feels exactly like being invisible.

Maybe what we’re all really asking for isn’t better conversations, but deeper listening.

Let me know if you have gone through this🫠

-for those who feel more than they can explain

Ruucha✨

When love starts, it’s simple and clear. We’re drawn to someone for who they are. But somewhere down the line, we start adding demands & expect more. We try to change small habits, keep score of who does what, or worry if we’re being loved “enough.” Sometimes we hide what we feel, maybe from fear of not being understood, or to avoid conflict, thinking silence is easier than honesty. But this silent buildup only makes things heavier.

A big eye-opener for me was realizing that everyone shows care in their own way. For some, a gentle word means the world; for others, it’s showing up or small gestures. When we expect love to look exactly like it does in our own mind, we might overlook the tenderness woven into someone else’s actions. Their expressions of love aren’t getting smaller; they’re just different.

In a long-distance relationship, all the clutter falls away. Suddenly, there’s no daily presence, no casual touch. All you have is your words and intent, whatever you put into a message or a call. Communication becomes everything. If something is left unsaid, there’s nowhere for it to go but into our doubts.

What’s made the biggest difference for people I know in long-distance relationships is learning to communicate all the little things, not just the big issues. It’s also about learning to trust not just the other person, but your own sense of security.

The more I reflect on all these stories, the clearer it seems: the core of uncomplicated love is self-security. When you feel content and secure in yourself, your mind doesn’t leap to the worst conclusions or need constant reassurance. It’s easier to speak honestly, accept that your partner loves differently, and weather misunderstandings with patience, not panic.

We can let love breathe when we stop trapping it under expectations, fears, and silence. The more we accept ourselves, and the more we communicate that acceptance to those we love, the simpler things become, just as they were in the beginning.

This is just what I’ve been reflecting on lately, and I’m curious if it resonates with you too. Do you find yourself overcomplicating things, or have you discovered ways to keep your connections simpler and more authentic? I’d genuinely love to hear your stories and experiences in the comments below.❤️

Welcome to Living Essentially - a space I’ve created to slow down, reflect, and reconnect with what truly matters.

Lately, I’ve questioned the pace of everything around me - the constant rush, the noise, the pressure to do more and be more. Somewhere in that chaos, I started feeling disconnected from myself from my body, health, and peace.

So I began shifting, gently.
Morning walks without my phone.
Evenings spent journaling instead of scrolling.
Choosing meals that nourish me instead of numb me.
Clearing space in my home, and in my head.

These small shifts began to ground me. I realised I didn’t want a life full of things - I wanted a life full of meaning.

That’s what Living Essentially is about.
It’s not perfection. It’s not minimalism in the Pinterest sense.
It’s presence. Awareness. Wholeness.

In this space, I’ll share reflections on:

• What it means to live with intention, even in tiny ways

• How I’m navigating health, rest, and simplicity

• Rituals that help me feel calm and rooted

If any part of you has been craving a slower, softer way of being — I hope this feels like a breath of fresh air.

I’m so glad you’re here.
See you in two weeks,

Rucha | 🌱 Living Essentially