The other night, I found myself doing what I always promise I’ll stop doing. I was lying in bed, far too late, phone balanced against my pillow, scrolling through videos that somehow always seem to find me when the rest of the world has gone quiet.

One after another, they all seemed to be saying the same thing.

Nothing matters.

The universe is billions of years old. We are microscopic. One day the sun will swallow the Earth, every civilization will disappear, every photograph will fade, every name will eventually be forgotten. We are temporary accidents on a floating rock, assigning meaning to a life that has none.

The comments fascinated me even more than the videos themselves.

“This is actually so comforting.”

“Once you realize nothing matters, you stop caring what people think.”

“We’re literally just atoms. Relax.”

I sat there longer than I should have, reading hundreds of strangers reassuring one another that existence is ultimately empty. Not tragically empty. Just objectively so.

And for a moment, I almost believed them.

I don’t think those thoughts are unusual. In fact, I think they’re almost inevitable. Anyone who has spent enough time reading philosophy, staring at the stars, grieving someone they loved, or simply lying awake at two in the morning has probably arrived at the same questions. Who am I? Why am I here? Does any of this actually matter? There comes a point where you zoom out so far that your own life begins to disappear into the scale of everything else. Against billions of years, one human lifetime feels impossibly brief. Against an infinite universe, one person seems impossibly small.

I understand why so many people stop there.

What I don’t understand is why we’ve decided that this is the most intelligent place to stop.

Somewhere along the way, cynicism acquired a reputation for wisdom. We’ve built a culture that quietly equates detachment with intelligence, as though the deepest person in the room is the one who has convinced themselves that love is merely chemistry, hope is merely delusion, beauty is merely evolution, and meaning is merely something frightened people invented to make themselves feel better. We’ve become so afraid of sounding naive that we’ve started treating wonder as though it’s intellectually embarrassing.

I don’t think it is.

I think we’ve mistaken uncertainty for evidence.

There is a quiet leap in logic that happens in these conversations, and I don’t think we notice it anymore. We begin with a perfectly reasonable observation: we don’t know why we’re here. Then, almost without realizing it, we replace that uncertainty with a conclusion. We decide that because we cannot prove life has inherent meaning, it therefore has none.

But those are not the same statement.

“I don’t know” has somehow become “I know that there is nothing.”

I’ve never understood why that second sentence is considered the more rational one.

The older I get, the less interested I become in certainty. It seems to me that human beings have always been reaching for answers larger than themselves. We built religions. We wrote philosophy. We painted cave walls. We composed symphonies. We mapped the stars. We fell in love. We created laws. We wrote poems. Not because any of these things solved existence, but because they were our way of participating in it.

Sometimes I think we’ve become so obsessed with explaining life that we’ve forgotten to experience it.

After I put my phone down that night, I walked into my kitchen to to fill my unreasonably large water bottle. The apartment was quiet. My cat followed me because he assumes every time I stand up, it must somehow involve him. I remember looking out the window while the tap was running and thinking how strange it is that this ordinary little moment would have been completely invisible from the perspective of the universe.

And yet it didn’t feel invisible.

It felt like my life.

I think that’s the part we lose when we reduce everything to statistics and timescales. Yes, a sunset is only light scattering through the atmosphere. A song is only vibrating air. A love letter is only ink pressed into paper. Grief is electrical activity in the brain. None of those statements are false.

They are simply incomplete.

There is a difference between explaining something and exhausting its meaning.

Science can tell me why my heart races when I see someone I love. It cannot tell me what it feels like to miss them after they’re gone. Astronomy can explain how stars are formed. It cannot explain why generations of people have looked up at the same sky searching for comfort. Biology can describe consciousness in astonishing detail, but it still cannot fully account for the extraordinary fact that the universe somehow produced beings capable of wondering why they exist at all.

To me, that isn’t evidence against meaning.

It’s evidence that reality is larger than my ability to define it.

I don’t need the universe to hand me a neatly written purpose before I’m willing to believe that my life matters. I don’t need history to remember my name in order to think my existence has weight. Maybe my footsteps really are making way for someone who will come after me. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe the greatest thing I’ll ever do is become a small kindness in someone else’s memory, a conversation they return to years later, a person who made them feel understood on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.

Why should that be considered insignificant simply because it won’t appear in a history book?

I’ve started wondering if we’ve been asking the wrong question all along.

Instead of asking whether life comes preloaded with meaning, maybe we should ask what kind of people we become while searching for it.

Because I have met people who believe the universe is meaningless and still choose extraordinary kindness. I have met people with absolute certainty who leave devastation wherever they go. Meaning has never struck me as something you uncover hidden beneath the floorboards of existence. It seems much closer to something you practice.

It lives in paying attention.

In calling your parents.

In planting trees whose shade you’ll never sit beneath.

In reading books that rearrange your understanding of the world.

In making dinner for someone who had a difficult day.

In choosing gentleness when bitterness would be easier.

In falling in love despite knowing that everything, eventually, ends.

I still don’t know why we’re here.

I still have nights where I lie awake wondering whether my life is building toward something larger than I can currently imagine, whether every strange coincidence is just that, whether the feeling I’ve carried since I was young, that my footsteps are somehow leading somewhere I cannot yet see, is intuition or simply hope wearing a convincing disguise.

I suspect I’ll spend the rest of my life asking those questions.

But I’ve stopped believing that the absence of an answer is evidence of emptiness.

Maybe mystery was never something to solve.

Maybe it was something to protect.

Because if this life has taught me anything, it’s that the world has always been far more beautiful than my ability to explain it. And I can’t help but think that the people who have convinced themselves that nothing matters have made one very small, very human mistake.

They looked at a universe that refused to explain itself and assumed it had nothing left to say.

I look at that same silence, and I hear an invitation to keep listening.

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It is the oldest story imaginable. The restless girl with too much feeling in her body packs up her life and heads somewhere bigger, convinced that reinvention is geographical. Convinced that healing can be measured in kilometres. You see versions of her everywhere, in literature and film. She stares out bus windows dramatically. She develops expensive taste in coffee. She learns words like “transience” and “identity” and suddenly begins referring to her hometown with a strange mixture of affection and anthropological distance.

And despite every instinct I possess to resist becoming a stereotype, I fear in a way, I have become her.

The thing is though, I did not leave only because I was ambitious. I left because I was overwhelmed by the enormity of my own adolescence there. My teenage years felt simultaneously cinematic and catastrophic, which I know sounds dramatic until I remember that drama was simply the natural climate of being young where I came from. There were endless drives down back roads at midnight and parties hidden in fields and abandoned houses that smelled like cigarettes and damp wood and “trouble” as our parents would say. There were teenagers sitting on rooftops believing themselves invincible. There were parking lots and dirt roads and half-broken friendships and music loud enough to make you temporarily forget yourself. The kind of nights that feel mythological afterward, all blurry at the edges from cheap alcohol and youth and the certainty that real life had not started yet.

And some of it truly was beautiful.

That is the difficult part to explain.

Because when people hear “small town,” they tend to imagine either idyllic simplicity or complete despair, when in reality it was both tenderness and destruction existing side by side constantly. It was laughter so intense your stomach hurt and also the low-grade feeling that something terrible could happen at any moment. It was freedom tangled together with danger so tightly that, at the time, I could no longer distinguish between the two.

There are parts of my adolescence I still carry quietly inside my body. Not in obvious ways. More like echoes. Certain kinds of anger still make me freeze. Certain silences still feel loaded. Sometimes I think girlhood teaches you how to become alert before it teaches you almost anything else. Especially the kind of girlhood where love occasionally arrived hand in hand with fear.

I do not always know what to do with the fact that some of the worst moments of my life occurred alongside some of the most beautiful skies I have ever seen.

When I moved seven hours away to the Big city at eighteen, I thought I was escaping all of that. Not only the genuinely frightening parts of my past, but the heaviness of constantly being witnessed by people who remembered every version of me. The wild child. The reckless girl. The girl surviving one terrible thing after another while pretending she was having fun. In a small town, people remember your history before you even enter the room. I wanted anonymity in the way starving people want food. I wanted to walk into spaces where nobody knew me before that exact moment.

And the city gave me that.

The people I love here know me after the storm. They know me as the girl posting long nostalgic essays onto the internet at two in the morning, writing about womanhood and memory and homesickness and whatever else is haunting me that week. They know the girl wandering around Little Italy with books and whatever other nick nacks shoved into her enormously large purse and too many thoughts in her head. They know someone people describe as mature or level-headed, which still startles me every time I hear it, because somewhere inside me there is still a younger version clawing her way through chaos with shaking hands.

Maybe that composure comes from the past. Maybe surviving certain things forces a strange steadiness into you whether you ask for it or not.

But there is something deeply intimate about being known without first being pitied. About introducing yourself before your history can do it for you. The people here met me after the bleeding had mostly stopped. They met me as someone softer. Thoughtful, maybe. Self-aware in ways I was not before. They did not meet the girl actively drowning inside her own life. And sometimes I wonder if that is why this city feels so important to me. It witnessed my reconstruction instead of my destruction.

And yet, the cruelest part about leaving your hometown is realizing that escape does not sever your attachment to a place nearly as cleanly as you imagined it would.

Because the town I ran from is also the town where my mother and father still move through their ordinary beautiful rituals. It is where my grandfather still plays songs on his hold guitar down at the legion with the same timing and cadence that once made me roll my eyes as a teenager and now makes me feel devastatingly sentimental. It is where my grandmother’s kitchen still feels suspended outside of time entirely, as though nothing truly terrible could happen there so long as the light above the stove is still on. It is where my younger brother returns between semesters, still tethered to home in a way I no longer fully am.

Sometimes I envy him for that.

This year he moved away too, to his own university town, but he still goes back constantly. Summers. Weekends. Holidays. There is still a continuity between who he was there and who he is becoming now. I wonder if he notices the drift happening yet, or if home still feels permanent to him in the way it once felt permanent to me. Maybe it still does.

For the first few years after moving, I went home obsessively. Every weekend at first, as though I was terrified the place would disappear without me there to witness it. Then once a month. Then holidays. Then every few months. And now I blink and realize Christmas was the last time I slept in my childhood bedroom and it is already May.

The progression happened so quietly I barely noticed it.

I think that is what adulthood actually is. Not some dramatic transformation, but a series of subtle detachments occurring so slowly you only recognize them in hindsight. One day your hometown is the centre of your universe and the next it is a place you visit with a duffel bag instead of a bedroom. One day you know every detail of everybody’s lives and the next you hear updates secondhand through family phone calls. People get engaged. People move away. Somebody’s younger sibling suddenly has a baby. Somebody you once loved becomes almost impossible to picture clearly anymore.

The town continues without you.

And somehow, impossibly, you continue without it too.

That realization has always made me feel vaguely ill.

Because technically, my life is here now. This city knows me in practical, tangible ways. I know which cafés stay open the latest when I cannot sleep and need somewhere to write. I know which streets in Ottawa feel beautiful after midnight and which ones feel lonely. I know how the air smells in Little Italy during the summer when restaurant doors are left open and music spills out onto the patios. I know where to buy flowers when someone I love is heartbroken. I know which bookstore feels safest to disappear inside when my thoughts become too loud.

My adulthood exists here now in undeniable ways.

My friends exist here too, and I love them with a depth I did not know I was capable of years ago. Sometimes I look around at them sitting in one of our homes, wine glasses on the table and music playing softly while somebody laughs such an infectious laugh it is impossible not to smile, and I feel this overwhelming gratitude for the life I almost never had. There are moments where the city feels less like a place I escaped to and more like a place that gently rebuilt me.

And still, whenever life becomes too overwhelming, my mind returns immediately to the countryside.

Not even necessarily to specific memories. More like sensations. Open skies. Gravel beneath shoes. The smell of rain mixing with dirt in the summer. The eerie silence of rural roads at night. The particular melancholy of driving aimlessly past fields while some devastating song plays through blown-out car speakers. There is a loneliness to small towns that I think becomes beautiful only once you leave them.

Back then, I wanted so badly to become someone else.

I thought intelligence lived in cities. Sophistication. Art. Meaning. I thought if I could just get far enough away from the girl I had been, I would finally become untouchable somehow. But now I think the girl I was back there deserves more tenderness than I once gave her. She was doing the best she could inside circumstances far too heavy for someone so young. She survived things quietly. She romanticized everything because sometimes romanticizing your own life is the closest thing to survival you can find.

And maybe that is why I still write about my hometown so often.

Not because I necessarily want to go back permanently, and not because I believe small towns are inherently better or purer or more meaningful than cities. I do not. There are parts of that place that wounded me deeply. There are memories there I still struggle to hold directly in my hands. But there is also something sacred about where your life first began taking shape. Something impossible to replicate elsewhere.

I think people underestimate how much of adulthood is simply learning how to carry contradictory truths simultaneously.

I can love this city fiercely while still aching for the countryside sometimes. I can know leaving saved me while still mourning what was lost in the process. I can acknowledge the violence threaded through my adolescence while still feeling nostalgic for the music and fields and abandoned houses and all the strange messy beauty tangled inside those years too.

None of it cancels the other out.

And maybe that ache I carry is not homesickness at all. Maybe it is simply the consequence of having lived many lives inside one lifetime already. The small-town girl I once was still exists somewhere within me, driving down back roads at midnight believing escape would solve everything. The woman I am now exists too, walking through Ottawa with grocery bags in her hands and whole friendships and routines and dreams built carefully around her.

For a long time, I believed leaving home meant choosing one version of myself over the other. The past or the future. The countryside or the city. Survival or softness. But I think growing up is realizing that no matter how far you run, you carry every former version of yourself with you anyway.

My hometown still lives inside me. In the way I romanticize open skies. In the way I crave quiet when life becomes too loud. In the way I still ache for roads I once swore I would never drive down again.

And perhaps the strangest part of all of this is that the girl who spent so much of her adolescence trying desperately to escape is now the same woman sitting in a city apartment, seven hours away, writing love letters to the place she once thought she had to survive.

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For a long time I believed there was a clear moral geography to the world, that certain people simply lived on the other side of some invisible border that separated the living from the escaping. You existed there, always half-vanished, always moving with that peculiar restlessness of someone who is already negotiating with oblivion. When I think back on those years, what I remember most vividly is not the substances themselves but the vacancy they produced in you, the way your eyes sometimes looked as though the light behind them had quietly migrated somewhere I could not follow.

You used to say it made things quiet.

At the time I thought you meant the world around you. The noise of the night, the chatter of other people, the small relentless chaos of being young and alive. I didn’t realize you were speaking about the interior weather of your own mind, about the ceaseless monologue that inhabits the skull and narrates a person’s existence with such cruelty that silence begins to feel like salvation.

Back then I interpreted your descent as a kind of moral failure, an act of selfish demolition. Addiction, as I understood it then, looked like cruelty. It looked like the evenings when your voice turned sharp enough to lacerate whatever tenderness had once lived between us. It looked like the lies, the vanishing acts, the strange and chilling moment when you could be standing inches from me and yet feel impossibly distant, as if your consciousness had already slipped into another room and locked the door behind it.

It was ugly. There was nothing poetic about it. No tragic glamour, no romantic ruin. Only exhaustion and the slow erosion of trust, the suffocating realization that the person in front of you was dissolving into something you could neither rescue nor recognize.

For years I carried that understanding with an almost moral certainty. You were the cautionary example, the dark anecdote I told myself about the dangers of self-destruction. The narrative was simple. You had chosen annihilation. I had not.

Time, however, has an unsettling habit of complicating our most comfortable convictions.

Somewhere in my early twenties, during a season when the world felt unusually heavy and the quiet hours of the night stretched into something almost geological in their length, I found myself confronted with the same small and dangerous curiosity that must have once visited you. It did not arrive dramatically. There was no theatrical moment of collapse. It appeared instead as a question, almost philosophical in its tone.

What does it feel like to silence the mind?

Anyone who has lived long enough inside their own thoughts understands the seduction of that question. The mind can be a merciless place. It narrates every failure, replays every humiliation, interrogates every flaw with the obsessive patience of an inquisitor who has nowhere else to be. Some nights the interior noise grows so loud that the idea of quiet begins to feel less like indulgence and more like mercy.

And so, one evening, curiosity crossed the threshold.

What startled me was not the sensation itself but the sudden and terrible clarity that followed it. For a brief and flickering interval, the relentless commentary of my mind receded. The sharp edges of thought dulled. The constant interrogation ceased its pacing. The world did not become euphoric or ecstatic. It simply became quieter.

And in that quiet, something unnerving unfolded.

Recognition.

Not forgiveness. Not sympathy in the sentimental sense. Something far more unsettling.

Understanding.

I understood the gravitational pull of relief. I understood how the promise of silence could gradually reorganize a life, how the human mind, once introduced to the possibility of escape, might begin to orbit that escape with increasing desperation. The attraction was not pleasure. Pleasure is too frivolous a word for it. What it offered was reprieve, the temporary suspension of a consciousness that had grown unbearable to inhabit.

In that moment the story I had told myself about you began to fracture. You were no longer simply the villain of the narrative, no longer the incomprehensible architect of your own ruin. You were a person who had discovered a door that led away from the unbearable interior noise of existence, and once you had opened it, you could not stop returning.

That realization did not absolve you. It did not retroactively soften the harm you inflicted or the nights that remain etched into my memory with a clarity I would gladly surrender. Understanding is not redemption. It is merely the recognition of how perilously human another person’s darkness can be.

The most frightening part was not the experience itself but the proximity of it. For a fleeting instant I could see how easily that same door might become a permanent passage, how the quiet might begin to feel indispensable, how a life could gradually reorganize itself around the pursuit of silence.

I saw the architecture of your disappearance.

And then, with a kind of quiet terror, I stepped away from it.

You continued walking.

Perhaps that is the only true difference between us. Not virtue, not moral superiority, but timing. I encountered the abyss briefly enough to recognize its hunger before it learned my name.

You did not.

There comes a point when paying attention stops being optional and becomes an ethical obligation. Not because it is fashionable or provocative, but because disengagement has consequences whether we recognise them or not. We like to believe that stepping back makes us neutral, that silence is a kind of moral pause. But neutrality in an unequal world does not sit evenly. It leans quietly and reliably toward those who already hold power.

Being “not political” is often seen as emotional maturity, balance, or self-preservation. In truth, it usually indicates closeness to safety. Politics feels distant when it doesn’t directly control your body, family, access to healthcare, or your right to exist without suspicion or surveillance. It seems theoretical when you trust that the systems around you are meant to protect you. For many, that trust has never been there.

I live in Canada, and living as a white person means I move through the world with a degree of safety that is not universally shared, even when it goes unnoticed. That awareness does not absolve me; it implicates me. Recognizing privilege is not about guilt or performance. It is about responsibility. Once you understand that your ability to disengage is itself shaped by power, choosing silence stops feeling neutral and becomes avoidance.

This is not saviourism. I am not interested in speaking over anyone, translating other people’s suffering into my own moral credibility, or positioning myself as an authority on experiences that are not mine. I am deeply wary of the white saviour narrative because it recenters whiteness under the guise of empathy. What I believe in instead is refusing the comfort of ignorance. Listening more than I speak. Amplifying rather than replacing. Using access where access exists, and knowing when it is not my place to lead.

There is a difference between centring yourself and refusing to look away.

There is a poem by Martin Niemöller that has stayed with me for years. Written after the Holocaust, it traces a quiet moral collapse. How persecution advances not in a single catastrophic moment, but through a series of increasingly normalized decisions. It begins with “First they came for the Communists” and moves through group after group, each time met with silence because the speaker does not belong to the one being targeted.

By the end of the poem, there is no spectacle. No redemption. Only the realization that when violence finally arrives at the speaker’s door, there is no one left to speak.

What makes the poem endure is not its historical distance, but its accuracy. It names a pattern we are still repeating. The belief that injustice can be compartmentalized, tolerated, or postponed. That attention can wait. That there will be time to care later, once it becomes undeniable.

This is how harm becomes procedural. This is how cruelty learns to wear neutral language. This is how violence hides behind words like policy, enforcement, and national interest.

When people say everything feels political now, they are right. Everything feels political because everything is. Bodies are political. Borders are political. Disability is political. Gender is political. Indigeneity is political. Reproductive autonomy is political. Whose pain is believed, whose grief is dismissed, whose safety is conditional. These are decisions made deliberately, enforced structurally, and defended loudly.

Look at who is required to justify their existence.

Immigrants are framed as threats rather than neighbours, as numbers rather than people. Entire families live under constant fear of removal, detention, or disappearance. Not because they have done harm, but because they exist in the “wrong category”. In the United States, agencies like ICE operate through paperwork, raids, and compliance, turning human lives into logistical problems to be solved. Children are held in detention. Parents vanish into custody. Communities learn to live quietly, to avoid attention, to treat visibility as danger.

And this is all framed as normal. Necessary. Lawful.

That normalization is what terrifies me.

Trans and queer people are forced into constant public debate, their bodies and identities dissected by people who will never know them. Their healthcare is politicized. Their safety is conditional. Disabled people are expected to navigate systems that were never built with them in mind, fighting endlessly for accommodations that should have been baseline. Indigenous peoples are told to reconcile with histories that are ongoing, while their land, lives, and sovereignty continue to be treated as expendable.

And then there is Palestine.

Executions. Bombardment. Starvation. Entire populations are punished collectively, their deaths explained away with language so clinical it barely sounds human. Civilians killed and reframed as statistics. Children are named only after they are gone. The world watches violence it would never tolerate if it were framed differently, narrated differently, or happening to people who looked more like me.

And still, people say nothing.

Or worse, they explain it. They contextualize it until it disappears. They insist on neutrality while bodies are buried.

If you are not angry about this, I do not understand how.

Are you not infuriated when you see people who have done no harm detained, legislated against, erased, and murdered every single day? Are you not enraged by how easily violence becomes acceptable when it is dressed up as security, order, or policy. I am angry. I am devastated. I am furious. And I refuse to believe that anger, in moments like this, is a moral failure.

There is a version of calm that is not peace, but surrender.

I cannot look at what is happening in the United States and pretend it exists in isolation. I cannot watch migration criminalized, trans lives targeted, reproductive autonomy stripped away, and call that anything other than state violence. I cannot watch people be executed, detained, or disappeared and tell myself that distance makes it less urgent.

Distance does not equal immunity. Geography has never been a guarantee. History does not respect borders nearly as much as we pretend it does.

Posting, sharing, and learning are not radical acts. They are the bare minimum of participation. Education is power, not because it elevates you above others, but because it gives you memory, context, and the ability to recognize patterns before they calcify into inevitability.

I do not share because I think I have the perfect analysis or the final word. I share because silence feels like collaboration. Because apathy is not neutral, it is active. Because if you have access, safety, and a voice, and you choose not to use it, that choice is not innocent.

So yes, I will keep posting. I will keep reading. I will keep unlearning and naming and refusing to look away. Not because it makes me exceptional, but because pretending nothing is at stake has never protected anyone.

Neutrality has always been a privilege.

And I am done pretending it is harmless.

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Every so often, someone online complains that rock scenes, indie subcultures, or “alt spaces” have become “too political,” begging musicians to “stick to the music” and “leave politics out of it.” The complaint always feels strangely disconnected from reality, as if politics were some invasive species corrupting an otherwise pure art form. It ignores the most basic truth about guitar music, underground culture, and rock as a living tradition. This music was never meant to behave.

It was never meant to obey, to be agreeable, or to reinforce whatever structures already run the world. Rock and its alternative offshoots were not born from contentment. They were born from questioning power, interrogating systems, and refusing to quietly accept whatever version of reality people were told to live inside. That is not a modern development. That has always been the point.

Think about the artists people supposedly wish would stay neutral.
System of a Down did not build their legacy on silence. Their entire catalogue is soaked in rage at genocide denial, state violence, war profiteering, corruption, and the machinery of empire. Their music does not politely hint at injustice. It tears into it, loudly and unapologetically. That is not personal angst. That is cultural, historical, and explicitly political rebellion.

Radiohead did not become one of the most influential bands in modern music by writing shallow escapism. They built their sound around paranoia, surveillance, capitalism’s suffocating reach, the alienation of digital life, and the quiet brutality of systems that treat human beings as disposable. Albums like OK Computer and Hail to the Thief are not simply mood pieces. They are warnings. They are critiques. They are documentation of what it feels like to live inside late capitalism and still try to remain human.

Alice in Chains did not simply write about sadness. They wrote about addiction, state neglect, the cost of war, and the way society chews people up and discards them. Evanescence did not just write about emotion. They consistently confronted control, oppression, religious rigidity, and the fight to reclaim one’s voice. The Smashing Pumpkins captured the exhaustion of living inside systems that feel endless and dehumanizing. Metric have spent years critiquing commodification, gender politics, media manipulation, and cultural decay. Fontaines D.C. confront nationalism, class, identity, and the myths that nations rely on to disguise their fractures.

None of this is apolitical.
None of this is neutral.

This is not simply music for misfits. It is music that refuses obedience.

It resists sanitized narratives. It calls out exploitation, hypocrisy, nationalism, corporate control, and cultural rot. It rejects the idea that art should be pleasant, polite, or convenient. And it does so not accidentally, but because rock in all its variations has always fundamentally aligned itself not with power, but against it.

This is rebellion as an art form.

Not rebellion as costume.
Not rebellion as aesthetic.
Rebellion as accusation.
Rebellion as witness.
Rebellion as refusal.

And that matters.

When people insist that artists should stop making it political, what they are really saying is very simple. Stop challenging anything. Stop criticizing systems I benefit from. Stop reminding me that music can hold accountability.

They want rebellion to feel stylish, not consequential. They want anger that feels cool, not anger that asks them to think. They want distortion without disruption.

But rock music has never been interested in being harmless. From the beginning, it has been a language of opposition. Opposition to conformity, to silence, to authoritarianism, and to cultural complacency. Whether the target is the state, capitalism, nationalism, patriarchy, religious power, or the quiet violence woven into everyday life, rock has always spoken from the side of those who push back.

Not because every artist declares a manifesto.
But because the genre itself is hostile to obedience.

When a song challenges power, questions narratives, or refuses to be digestible, it is doing something deeply political simply by existing. When communities gather around this music, they are not only listening. They are forming cultural resistance. They are building spaces that reject the idea that culture must always be controlled from above. They are creating places where people think critically, question loudly, feel deeply, and refuse to flatten themselves into something manageable.

So when critics demand that politics be removed, they are not asking for art to return to purity. They are asking it to return to submission. They are asking musicians to blunt their edges, quiet their critiques, and pretend that the world is somehow separate from the art created inside it.

Rock and alternative music have always refused that. They refuse now. They will refuse tomorrow.

Because this has never only been sound. It has always been resistance.
A refusal to flatter authority.
A refusal to sanitize truth.
A refusal to pretend that power deserves silence.

This music belongs not to obedience, but to rebellion.

And rebellion is political.
It always has been.
It always will be.

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There is always a moment every few months when Sylvia Plath’s fig tree finds its way back into the bloodstream of the internet. It resurfaces on TikTok stitched over soft music or in Instagram captions posted by girls who feel too much and are trying to articulate something unbearably human about choice. And because the trend is cycling again, I find myself returning to the original passage from The Bell Jar, the one where Esther imagines her life as a fig tree. Each fig represents a different future. One is a brilliant career, another is a great love, another is adventure, another is motherhood, another is artistry, another is self discovery. The tree is heavy with possibility. She wants all of it, she wants every version of herself, but she is too afraid to choose. So she waits too long. One by one, the figs shrivel and fall at her feet until she is left starving under the weight of the lives she never allowed herself to reach for.

I used to read that passage and feel something inside me contract, like a quiet, familiar grief. I understood the fear so intimately that it almost felt like someone had written it for me specifically, years before I was born. Yet I am older now, even if only by the subtle emotional ways time matures you, and I am beginning to understand the fig tree in a way I never could when I first encountered it. Back then I thought the point of the metaphor was to choose wisely. Now I see myself differently inside it, not as the starving girl beneath the branches but as something larger and steadier. I am not meant to sit on the ground mourning the figs I did not reach in time. I am the whole tree. The branches, the roots, the seasons, the figs that ripen and fall and return again. All of it belongs to me.

For most of my life, I believed I had to pick one identity and wear it faithfully. I thought life was a narrowing, a tightening, a slow necessary discipline toward a single path. When I began pursuing law, it felt like selecting the fig that represented stability and purpose, the fig that said I had chosen something respectable and future facing. And I do love it. I am pursuing law out of passion, out of a desire to understand the world and shape it, out of a hope that I can stand in the places where justice fails and use my voice in ways that matter. But choosing law often felt like quietly silencing the other parts of me. The girl who writes for hours. The girl who loves literature with a physical ache. The artistic self that does not exist for practicality but for expression and wonder.

Sometimes I imagine the version of myself ten years from now, the one who has a law degree framed on her wall and a life that is structured and steady. I imagine her looking back and remembering that once I read books like they were oxygen. Once I wrote because I had to, because something in me needed to name what I felt. That thought unsettles me, not because I fear the life I am building, but because I refuse to become someone who forgets her own creative pulse. I cannot lose the girl who finds meaning in words. I cannot lose the writer in me simply because the world rewards the logical path more visibly than the artistic one.

There is a quiet philosophical truth I keep returning to. The idea that choice does not need to be a site of mourning. Maybe we only suffer when we imagine our figs as mutually exclusive, when we believe that tasting one life means abandoning the others. But a tree does not feel guilt for the fruit it bears one season and not the next. A tree is not diminished by the variety of its branches. It expands. It circles through growth and quiet and growth again. Maybe I am allowed to do the same. Maybe my life is not a corridor that narrows as I walk down it but a field that widens as I move forward. Maybe the real tragedy is not in choosing the wrong fig but in believing that I was only ever meant to choose one.

The more I study, the more I live, the more I feel myself shifting into a new kind of understanding. I do not want to starve under the weight of possibility. I want to nourish it. I want to be the person who writes essays at midnight after spending the day reading case law. I want to be the person who knows how to hold structure in one hand and creativity in the other without letting either hand close. I want to be someone who refuses to abandon her passions just because adulthood threatens to turn them into luxuries instead of necessities. Writing is not optional for me. Reading is not a pastime. They are the ways I make sense of myself. They are how I stay awake inside my own life.

So I am trying to be deliberate. I am trying to let myself inhabit every branch of who I am. The law student. The writer. The girl who loves books enough to cry over them. The young woman who believes that her mind is a landscape with room for analysis and imagination, for discipline and softness, for intellect and art. I am trying to see myself as someone whose possibilities do not cancel each other out but strengthen each other. My love for writing makes me a better thinker. My legal mind sharpens the way I observe the world. My artistic impulses keep me alive to nuance, emotion, and human complexity. None of it is wasted. None of it is contradictory.

Maybe this is what it means to grow older with intention. To refuse to let your figs rot not out of fear but out of love for the person you are becoming. To realize that you were never the passive character in Plath’s metaphor. You were always something more expansive. Something capable of bearing more than one version of a meaningful life.

I am not choosing between my passions anymore. I am weaving them together. I am learning to trust that I am allowed to be more than one thing. I am allowed to be the tree that holds all of it. And maybe that is the most freeing realization of all. I do not need to chase every fig at once or mourn the ones that fall. I only need to stay rooted in myself, to keep growing, to keep reaching toward the light in whatever form it arrives.

I am the whole tree. And I am learning, finally, that nothing in me needs to be sacrificed in order for something else to thrive.

There is a certain tension humming beneath the skin of young adults today, a low and constant vibration threaded through the ordinary hours of life. It rises in the way people drift toward music as if breath depends on it, in the way strangers gather beneath fluorescent lights until the room becomes a single pulse, in the quiet hours spent staring into the blue glow of a screen searching for something steady enough to hold the mind still. These moments are not careless. They are not signs of immaturity. They are quiet gestures toward softness, small attempts to locate a place where the world stops pressing so hard against the ribs.

From the outside, escape appears as movement without meaning. Observers see only the drifting, the reaching, the running. They label it distraction or indulgence. They mistake the outward motion for apathy. What they do not see is how heavy the air feels for people who grew up inside a constant stream of information, where disaster seeped into childhood like background static and threats appeared long before the mind had developed language for fear. Many grew up with the internet as a mirror before identity had even formed. Awareness became a reflex long before it became a choice.

Over time, the nervous system learns to brace for impact even in stillness. Even in safety. Even in silence. A jaw clenches without permission. A breath catches at the top of the lungs. The body remains slightly tightened, slightly prepared, slightly overwhelmed. It is no wonder that people begin seeking ways to feel weightless again. The dance floor becomes a language for emotions too large for speech. New hobbies become tiny lifelines thrown across an unpredictable sea. Fiction turns into refuge, a place where the rules are clearer and the consequences softer. Some find comfort in physical exertion, others in substances, others in the soothing repetition of music that steadies the pulse. Every version looks different, but the intention beneath them is the same. A pause. A breath. A brief moment where life becomes bearable.

There is also the matter of obsession. The phases that take over the mind with startling conviction. A book becomes a world that eclipses every other thought. A movie becomes a lens through which reality is briefly rewritten. Partying becomes identity. Drinking becomes ritual. Writing becomes oxygen. Education becomes something close to a fever, a pursuit so intense it feels like salvation. These fixations arrive with devotion and leave without ceremony, each one shaping a different version of the self.

It is impossible not to wonder whether these attachments are genuine expressions of character, or whether they are coping mechanisms dressed as passion. A person can love something truly and still use it to hold the world at arm’s length. A hobby can be both joy and refuge. A fixation can be curiosity and avoidance layered together until neither can be untangled. Sometimes these phases silence thoughts that would surface too painfully. Sometimes they offer clarity that real life refuses to give. And sometimes they are real life. The mind gravitates toward what feels meaningful, toward what feels alive, toward what feels like oxygen. Perhaps these obsessions are not departures from the self at all, but maps leading toward it. Perhaps this is how people keep themselves intact.

Calling these tendencies avoidance misses their deepest truth. Sensitivity without rest becomes erosion. Constant stimulation carves thin cracks through the mind until even the smallest moment feels overwhelming. When the world becomes relentless, slipping into something gentler is not weakness. It is preservation. It is the instinct to protect what remains tender before it frays beyond recognition. Stepping away is not an abandonment of life but a way to sustain it.

There is a particular emotional sharpness in people today. Feelings arrive without buffer or filter. Headlines land like personal wounds. Danger can be sensed even in silence. Empathy becomes both illumination and burden. In this landscape, escape is not indulgence. It is necessity. A release valve. A secret doorway built into the mind so it does not collapse under its own care.

A club is not a room full of noise. For some, it is the closest thing to quiet they will ever find. A video game is not childish. It is an alternate reality where clarity exists and the world feels navigable for once. Music is not background. It is sanctuary. It is the room the mind enters to remember that beauty still exists, even when the world forgets to offer proof. Hobbies are not frivolous. They are small acts of gentleness in a world that often forgets how to be gentle.

To escape is not to disappear. Most people return to themselves eventually, steadier, fuller, more capable of facing what once threatened to undo them. In this way, escapism becomes its own form of resilience. A quiet survival strategy in a world that demands too much, too quickly, too often. People do not escape because they are lost. They escape because they are trying, in the only ways they know, to remain whole.

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There is a point on the drive back to my hometown when something in my body changes. It happens near the county line, right where the highway begins to narrow and the landscape stops feeling like scenery and starts feeling like memory. I love my family. I love where I grew up. I love the way the sky stretches wider there than anywhere else I have lived since. And still, every single time, something in me tightens, as if I am preparing to meet a version of myself I am no longer able to fully hold. It took me years to admit that the feeling is a type of grief. Not grief for a person, but for the selves that once belonged entirely to that place and will never belong in the same way again.

I grew up just outside a small town where life moved slowly and predictably, paced by seasons, school years, and the changing personalities of the geese on the local soccer fields. The town did not simply shape me. It narrated me. People knew the stories that came before me, the family that made me, the reputations of everyone who shared a last name with me. There is a kind of safety in that, a warm and specific recognition. There is also a kind of containment. When you are known too well, it becomes difficult to imagine who you might be if the landscape stopped reinforcing its idea of you.

So I left. Seven hours away, to a big city that I told everyone was temporary, a place to get an education and then move on from. That explanation was true, but it was not complete. I left because I wanted to understand the size of my life when it was not measured against the one road that led everywhere and nowhere. I left because I wondered what might happen if I existed in a place where no one recognized my face in the grocery store, where my history did not arrive before I did. I wanted to find out who I might become if I was not defined by the boundaries of a map I had memorized since childhood.

In the beginning, I went home constantly, loading my car every few weeks to make the long drive back. It felt like I owed the town a promise that I would not forget it. By my second year away, the trips became monthly. By my third, they became occasional. And now, in my fourth year, I mostly go home for the holidays. There was no conscious decision to shift that rhythm. Something simply changed without telling me when it happened. That, I am learning, is how adulthood often arrives. Not through ceremony, but through quiet, subtle distance.

Environmental psychology uses the term “place attachment” to describe the emotional bonds people form with meaningful locations. It helps explain why certain roads feel like veins or why certain familiar skylines soften the inside of the chest. But place attachment also rises and falls. Attachments change shape. We outgrow landscapes the way we outgrow clothing we once adored, and yet the fabric still carries our scent. This is the tension I feel when I cross back into the town that raised me. The land remembers me, but it remembers a version of me I am no longer able to inhabit without a kind of ache.

Sometimes, when I return home and scroll through social media, I see the lives of people who never left. They are raising children, working steady jobs, attending the same fairs and parades and bonfires we grew up with. Some look impossibly rooted, like they have found a peace I am still searching for. I am happy for them, and I mean that sincerely. But I also feel something that is harder to say out loud. I mourn for them, or perhaps I mourn for the possibilities they might never reach for. I remember believing the whole world was contained in that town, and I did not realize how small my imagination had become until I left and stepped into a life that stretched in every direction. It is not that their lives are wrong or incomplete. It is that part of me wishes everyone could feel what it is like to become unknown in a new place, to reinvent the story they tell about themselves, to choose a life that is not simply inherited by proximity. And yet, there are days when I envy them. There is a steadiness in staying. A loyalty to the soil that raised you. A courage in building a life without running. I do not know if I left because I was brave or because I was restless. I am still deciding.

When the holidays arrive, the return feels different. The world slows down. My childhood bedroom waits exactly as I left it, as if every object has been holding its breath until I walk through the door. The mugs in the kitchen are the same. The boots by the door are the same. Time exists differently there, like a snow globe where nothing moves unless someone shakes it. I love it and I ache for it and I outgrew it. All of these truths live alongside one another.

Somewhere in the years I have spent seven hours away, the big city became mine. I buy groceries there. I keep books on shelves there. I have loved deeply there, and I have stood in parking lots feeling like my heart had been emptied. I have learned what loneliness feels like in a place where no one knows my past. I have discovered what belonging feels like in a community I chose rather than inherited. The city did not replace my hometown. It simply joined it, expanding my definition of home.

I used to think home was a single location, a conclusion, a final resting point for identity. Now I think home is a geography of selves layered over time. The child the town knew. The teenager who dreamed of leaving. The adult who left and began again. The version of me who lives seven hours away and is still learning how to hold everything she has been and everything she is becoming.

I still get a sick feeling when I cross the county line. I have stopped trying to cure it. I think the feeling is a language. It says I loved that place. It says I still do. It says I will never fully stop belonging there, even if I no longer live the life that might have unfolded had I stayed. It says part of me is still there, and part of me is still here, and part of me is still somewhere in between, driving a familiar road toward a world that keeps expanding.

By the time I grew up, the internet was no longer a library but a habitat, a place I woke up inside rather than a place I visited. When I open my phone in the morning, before thought has fully assembled itself, before memory has returned to name and narrative, their is a machine already waiting, ready to remind me who I am. I do not search for information. It is delivered to me like a room service tray, curated not by intention but by pattern. Even half-asleep, my phone knows which fears are most effective, which arguments I will stop to read, which kinds of affirmation settle into the shape of my self-doubt or self-praise.

I scroll. I scroll because I am curious, and because I am bored, and because there is a small, humming thread of compulsion woven into the gesture. My thumb moves before my mind does. There are mornings when I have not yet spoken out loud, and yet, a hundred voices have already spoken into me, ideas arriving faster than I can decide whether they are worthy of entry. There are days when I look up, realizing I have consumed twenty opinions and produced none. There are nights I fall asleep with a phone in my hand like a rosary for a faith I do not remember choosing.

People often talk about the dangers of misinformation, and they are right to. But the deeper shift is not only what we learn online, but how we learn to learn. The internet, as it exists today, has rewritten the architecture of attention, and with it, the architecture of belief. The algorithm is not just a delivery system; it is a teacher. It teaches without transparency, without an articulated curriculum, without the burden of truth. It teaches in a voice that sounds eerily like our own internal monologue, offering a steady stream of thoughts we mistakenly credit to ourselves.

It is easy to imagine that we are still the ones making sense of the internet, but increasingly, it is making sense of us. That may be why certain phrases feel so sharp and devastating when we encounter them. When I first heard someone say that the internet is a solipsism machine, something in me recognized the truth before I fully understood it. Solipsism is the philosophical position that only one’s own mind is real, and other minds cannot be known. Online, it becomes less a theory and more an atmosphere. If I am always at the center of the feed, I begin to believe I am always at the center of reality. If I never see the world as others see it, I begin to believe they are not seeing the world at all. When every feed is personalized, every person becomes a world unto themselves, and other people become NPCs (non-playable characters) in a narrative authored by our preferences.

The algorithm makes it feel natural to assume that the truth is what returns to us most often. It is easy, then, to take repetition for evidence, familiarity for accuracy, emotional resonance for proof. If something appears in my feed repeatedly, it begins to feel not like content, but like confirmation. It is not surprising that conspiracy theories thrive here, but the most dangerous conspiracies are not necessarily political. The most dangerous are existential: only I am real. Only I am capable of understanding. Only I am in possession of the truth.

The result is that shared reality begins to collapse. We can live in the same city, vote in the same elections, breathe the same air, and yet inhabit entirely different worlds. We believe we are informed, but we are informed privately, individually, according to data points we cannot see and did not consent to. We are given information, but not context; claims, but not epistemology; content, but not community. Something crucial is missing, and we feel it without knowing how to name it.

And yet, despite all of this, I know in my bones that the internet is not only a distortion field. It is also, undeniably, a source of knowledge I would not have found otherwise. I have learned more about feminist legal history, Indigenous sovereignty, generational trauma, attachment theory, and political structures online than I ever did in the institutions supposedly designed to teach me. For many people of my generation, the internet was the first place we saw language for what we survived. It was the first place we encountered ideas we did not yet know we needed. It was the first time we could connect with others who carried the same scars, the same desires, the same questions.

So it is not that the internet cannot teach. It is not even that the internet teaches poorly. It is that it teaches accidentally, without hierarchy, without discernment, without a practice of doubt. A classroom, at its best, teaches not only information but methodology. It teaches how to think, not what to think. It teaches the value of revision, humility, contradiction. The internet does something different. It offers knowledge without process, certainty without inquiry, vocabulary without responsibility.

There are people who speak of digital spaces as if they are inherently shallow, and there are people who speak of them as if they are inherently liberatory. I do not believe either position is sufficient. The truth is more complicated, and complexity is something the algorithm does not reward. But the truth lives there nonetheless: the internet is both a library and a labyrinth. It can illuminate, and it can distort. It can introduce us to ideas that change our lives, and it can convince us that we understand subjects we have only glimpsed.

The sentence that returns to me most often is one that feels both embarrassing and necessary to admit: we are fluent in discourse, but starving for verification. We know how to talk, but not how to substantiate. We know how to react, but not how to revise. We know how to defend our beliefs, but not how to examine them. That is not a failure of character. It is a failure of infrastructure.

The problem is not that information is abundant. It is that understanding is optional, and many of us have never been taught how to choose it.

I sometimes wonder whether the deepest threat of the modern internet lies not in misinformation itself, but in the solitude of consuming it. Knowledge has never been a purely private endeavor. Libraries were public for a reason. Universities, for all their flaws, rely on peer review for a reason. Even stories passed between generations need a listener to survive. Knowledge requires a community, not only to validate it, but to complicate it. Left alone with our thoughts, we can justify almost anything; left alone with our feed, we can believe that we were never meant to be questioned. The tragedy is not only that false ideas circulate, but that they circulate without friction, without the gentle abrasion of another mind saying, I’m not sure that’s true, can we check? What happens when there is no one left to ask that question?

The internet offers connection, or the performance of it, but often not the accountability that true connection demands. Without accountability, a thought becomes a conviction, a suspicion becomes a doctrine, a coincidence becomes a revelation. And because the digital world so easily collapses the distinction between sincerity and performance, it becomes harder to know whether we are learning something or simply adopting a posture of having learned. We absorb language that signals intelligence and curiosity without putting it into practice. We speak about systems without recognizing our participation in them. We perform social consciousness without imagining the people whose lives are bound to the theories we recite. It becomes possible to mistake a well-curated identity for a formed moral self, and the algorithm, always watching, rewards us for it.

The most vivid example of this is the slow disappearance of long-form reading from many people’s lives. There are subjects we cannot learn in fragments. There are histories that do not reveal themselves to those who refuse duration. There are truths that must be earned through immersion, reflection, and discomfort. Reading a book is not merely about information; it is about the change that occurs when we surrender our attention long enough to be changed. If we have lost that capacity, it is not our fault entirely. It is difficult to cultivate intellectual patience in an environment calibrated to erode it. But if we do not fight for depth, we will lose it completely, and with it, we will lose the capacity to understand not only the world, but one another.

People sometimes say that the world feels less real than it once did. I do not think this is accidental. When our knowledge is not rooted in shared experience, when our information does not reference a shared reality, the world dissolves into interpretation. If I cannot assume that you and I are living in the same factual universe, then every conversation becomes a translation, or worse, a negotiation of delusion. If I cannot trust that you believe the earth is warming because you saw the storms too, or that you believe violence is real because you have held someone shaking in your arms, then we are not having a conversation. We are speaking through walls that only one of us recognizes as walls. What does democracy become when people no longer agree on the existence of the world they are deciding how to govern?

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that a society of pure transparency becomes a society where nothing can be shared because nothing can be protected. I think the algorithm pushes us toward that condition. It tells us that everything we think can be turned outward, that every interior impulse should be made legible, aesthetic, consumable. It strips away the sacredness of private thought and turns every idea into a commodity, every emotion into a potential performance. And yet, paradoxically, we remain alone with those ideas. The performance does not grant communion; it only replicates loneliness in a more palatable form. What is this solitude we carry in public? What does it do to a generation to have so many witnesses and so few participants in their inner lives?

I believe that the internet still contains the possibility of a library, though not the one we were promised. It is a library that requires discipline. It demands critical thinking and epistemic humility. It demands the willingness to say, I don’t know enough about this yet, even when the speed of discourse urges us to speak before we think. Most importantly, it demands community, people who help us read, who remind us to verify, who expand our interpretations, who refuse to let us retreat into the certainty of our curated knowledge. We need people who can sit with us in the discomfort of realizing that we might be wrong, because when we lose the ability to be wrong, we lose the ability to learn at all.

There is a sentence that has stayed with me, and though I have adapted it in different ways, its core feels increasingly urgent: you cannot coordinate a future with people you believe are fictional. If we continue down this path, each of us enclosed in our personalized cosmology, we may reach a point where no common language exists, not because language disappeared, but because it became too specific to be shared. Reality cannot survive that fragmentation. Neither can solidarity.

And yet I am not hopeless. Technology does not determine destiny. A tool is not a fate. We can choose how we enter the digital world and how we leave it. We can pause before we share. We can read beyond the caption. We can look up the source before we repeat what we saw. We can resist the temptation to perform understanding and instead pursue it. We can build communities around study, reflection, and verification. We can remember that knowledge is not a solitary achievement but a shared inheritance.

But to do that, we must be willing to confront the seduction of the algorithm, the way it flatters us into believing that our private universe is the entire sky. We must be willing to ask whether the ideas we carry belong to us or were installed without our noticing. We must be willing to say that personalization, when left unchecked, becomes a trap. The internet did not just personalize information; it personalized identity, and if we are not careful, we will mistake predictability for authenticity.

Sometimes I imagine what it would feel like to wake up and not be known by my phone. To open my screen and see something I did not expect, something that contradicts me, something that confuses me, something that sends me searching for answers outside the device. Surprise might be the beginning of learning again. And I think about what it means that so many people go years without encountering a worldview that interrupts their own. If the world cannot interrupt us, can it still change us?

I don’t want a self that is merely a reflection of what I have clicked on before. I want a self with edges, shadows, contradictions, and growth. I want a mind that is not immediately converted into data. I want knowledge that moves through me and then out into the world, where it can do more than confirm who I already was.

If we are to learn anything here, it might be this: the algorithm can suggest, but it cannot decide. And if we let it decide, it will not choose truth. It will choose whatever keeps us scrolling.

It strikes me that the most meaningful learning I have ever experienced did not happen in isolation, not truly. Even when I discovered ideas alone, it was in conversation with someone, even if that someone was a writer I would never meet. Books have always been a form of community. Marginalia is a kind of reply. To learn, in any profound way, is to enter into a lineage of thought. But the algorithm encourages something closer to amnesia. It presents information as if it were newly created, disconnected from history, authorship, or method. We lose the sense that ideas have genealogies, that they were forged in struggle, debate, collaboration. We lose the sense that truth is iterative.

This is part of why reading books matters, and why people mourn the decline of attention not because they are nostalgic, but because something essential to human understanding may be at stake. There are forms of knowledge that cannot be shortened. There are questions that cannot be answered quickly. There are ideas that cannot be held in the mind without silence. There are arguments that demand more from us than agreement; they require transformation. Without long-form reading, we are left with information that cannot metabolize into wisdom.

Still, I do not believe that we should abandon digital spaces in order to recover depth. We just have to refuse to let speed guide our thinking. We have to protect the parts of ourselves that require slowness. When we approach the internet as a library rather than a marketplace, something changes. We begin to ask better questions. We begin to search with intent rather than consume by reflex. We begin to gather knowledge not as decoration but as sustenance.

But to imagine the internet as a library again, we must rebuild something we have neglected: the social conditions that allow knowledge to become collective. We need circles of study, forums of genuine inquiry, friendships built on curiosity rather than performance. Knowledge wants to be shared, but more importantly, it wants to be tested. It wants to be put in contact with lived experience. It wants to be carried back into the physical world, into the places where decisions are made, where harm occurs, where healing is possible. What good is a theory of justice that never makes it to the street? What good is information about the climate if it does not change how we inhabit the earth? What good is language for our pain if we do not use it to change how we love each other?

If we do not leave the screen, the screen will become the only world we know. And a world made entirely of reflection cannot sustain us. We require friction: the startling, sometimes painful realization that other people are real. That they have interior lives we cannot see. That they are not included in our personal algorithmic astrology. If personalization collapses our sense of the collective, then community must be our resistance.

It is tempting, especially for those who love ideas, to think that understanding is enough. But knowledge is only what we do with it. Sometimes the most radical thing a person can do is simply to ask, how can what I learn here help me build something outside of here? The internet may offer us the spark, but we must be the ones to carry the flame.

If there is hope, I think it lives there, in the refusal to learn only for ourselves, in the insistence that understanding must return to the world that shaped the need for it. The climate will not be rescued by well-articulated online discourse. Inequality will not be undone by well-curated digital identities. Our communities will not be healed because we have mastered the language of healing. We will have to do the work. We will have to touch the world again.

Still, I believe that many of us want to. I believe that despite the exhaustion and the noise, something in us still wants to know in a way that leads to action. Something in us still reaches for the kind of truth that expands rather than contracts our understanding. Something in us is not satisfied with being predictable, with being a pattern that a machine can calculate. Something in us pushes back against the shrinking of the imagination.

And so I return to the quiet conviction that has shaped this entire reflection: the internet did not just personalize information; it personalized identity. But identity is not a static artifact. It is a moving, changing practice, and we have the right to reclaim it. We can become unpredictable again. We can become surprising. We can become learners instead of algorithms wearing human names.

Maybe that begins with a single choice made in the smallest hours of the morning. I wake up. I reach for my phone. Before I open it, I ask myself, not as a performance, but as a promise, what if I am wrong about something I believe? What might I learn if I allow myself to be interrupted? What world might I glimpse if I refuse to be flattered into certainty? What if I let the algorithm suggest, but not decide?

It will not be easy. The design is against us. But learning has always been an act of resistance against the forces that prefer us unthinking. Perhaps the question is no longer whether the internet can educate us, but whether we can become the kind of people who seek truth even when a machine offers us a more comforting story.

I do not want a self I did not choose. I do not want opinions that were manufactured for me. I do not want to be a collage of impulses refined for maximum engagement. I want a mind that is not only mine, but ours, in the sense that it belongs to the human story we are continuously writing together, imperfectly, courageously, in conversation across time. That story requires all of us. It requires a shared world. It requires the possibility that we might be changed by one another.

If we can protect that possibility, even here, even now, then maybe the library was not lost after all. Maybe it was only waiting for us to remember how to enter.

We’re told to “be ourselves,” but the truth is that self-expression is only rewarded when it’s convenient. Society encourages individuality, but only if it photographs well. Authenticity has turned into a product we can buy, post about, and sell back to each other. It’s no longer something we live; it’s something we perform. And the more we perform it, the harder it becomes to tell what’s real.

The internet promised us originality and gave us templates. Every difference became a category, every subculture a marketing opportunity. Even rebellion has been branded. There’s an approved look for being unconventional now, the kind of “weird” that still gets engagement. What once meant freedom now feels like strategy.

You see it most clearly in how people connect. Dating, friendship, even casual conversation, everything starts to feel like PR work. We show our best angles, emotionally and physically. We talk about vulnerability in the exact same tone influencers do when they say they’re “being honest.” Everyone wants to seem genuine, but no one wants to risk being uncomfortable. We’ve made sincerity awkward.

Earnestness, real, unfiltered caring, feels almost taboo now. We treat enthusiasm like a weakness, as if showing interest will make us less interesting. We act detached because it’s safer. Detachment protects us from rejection, but it also distances us from life. We confuse being calm with being wise, when sometimes it’s just fear in quieter clothing.

Every so often, I find spaces where that fear doesn’t exist. Queer spaces, especially, feel like oxygen. There’s a lightness there, a collective relief in not having to apologize for existing. People wear what they want, talk how they want, dance like they’re actually in their bodies. It’s not rebellion. It’s honesty. It’s what happens when no one’s pretending that confidence means indifference.

Outside those rooms, the choreography comes back. We edit ourselves mid-sentence. We filter our tone so it doesn’t sound too strong. We act calm even when we’re not. It’s not vanity; it’s survival. We live in an age where being watched has become the default, and being witnessed honestly feels like exposure.

After a while, I realized I’d built a version of myself that was technically fine, pleasant, polite, normal. The blonde-brunette kind of normal that never startled anyone, that fit in every group chat, every classroom, every first impression. It was efficient. It was also hollow. I’d been mistaking neutrality for stability.

And then, one day, I dyed my hair red again. Not for the shock value or the aesthetic but for the ability to look in the mirror and think, oh, there I am. It wasn’t about reinvention. It was about recognition. It felt like remembering something I’d been quietly missing. The colour looked too bold under certain light, too loud for some outfits, but I didn’t care. It felt like my face finally matched my insides again.

It’s not really about hair. It’s about permission. The permission to stop being palatable, to take up visual space, to wear something that feels right even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else. It reminded me that blending in had never been the goal, it had just been the default.

Maybe weirdness isn’t about being different at all. Maybe it’s just the result of being honest before the world has caught up. The people I admire most aren’t weird because they’re trying to be. They’re weird because they’re specific. They say what they actually mean. They dress for themselves. They talk about things they care about without stopping halfway to apologize. They don’t lower their volume just because the room is quiet.

That’s what I’ve started calling integrity, not moral perfection, but a kind of structural wholeness. The ability to stay yourself even when everyone else bends toward approval. It’s rare, and it’s magnetic. You can feel it in people who move through the world without constant self-surveillance. They aren’t performing openness; they just are.

We’ve learned to mistake irony for intelligence because it’s easier than sincerity. But irony doesn’t move anything forward. It just shields us from the vulnerability that real thought requires. It’s easier to roll your eyes than to risk sounding naive, but all creativity, love, and understanding start from that same naive place, the willingness to care before it’s proven cool.

The older I get, the more I realize that the goal was never to seem effortless. Effort means you’re alive. Caring means you’re paying attention. The people who make life interesting aren’t the ones who play it cool, they’re the ones who refuse to flatten themselves.

So yes, my hair is red again. It stains my towels and clashes with my clothes and probably needs better upkeep than I’m willing to give it. But it reminds me that I don’t need to be neutral. I just need to be accurate. It’s a small rebellion, but it’s mine.

Bring back the weirdos. The people who care, who ask questions, who love things out loud. The ones who make others feel safe enough to be specific. The ones who remind you that normal isn’t the same as real. The world doesn’t need more ‘‘cool people’’. It needs people who show up as themselves and stay that way, even when nobody claps for it.

P.S.

If this essay resonated with you, share it with someone who’s been trying to remember who they are beneath all the noise.

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Thank you for reading Soph’s Digital Diary. I write about culture, identity, and the small ways we try to come back to ourselves.

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(Here’s to being specific.)

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I’ve been in love a handful of times. Some reckless, some painful, some sweet in the way only young love can be. And for a long time, I believed the best parts of love lived in the other person, in the way they looked at me, in the way they made me laugh, in the way their presence made an ordinary moment feel like something bigger.

But the older I get, the more I see it differently.

Because when I look back, the light in those memories wasn’t something they handed me. It was something I built.

It was my laughter spilling across a late night.

It was my patience softening the edges of conflict.

It was my effort that turned ordinary into memorable.

It was my ability to create warmth out of almost nothing.

And that realization changes everything: when a relationship ends, I don’t actually lose the good. Because the good was never theirs to give.

All the love I thought was theirs was mine all along.

I know this because I’ve been alone before. Truly alone. I remember mornings where the day began in silence, and it was enough. I remember walking across the city with music in my ears, the cold stinging my face, and feeling alive without anyone’s hand in mine. I remember evenings spent writing, filling notebooks with thoughts that no one else would ever see, and realizing that just because they weren’t witnessed didn’t mean they weren’t real.

Once you’ve known that kind of contentment, you never forget it. You can always return to it.

And that’s why, when my most recent relationship ended a few days ago, I didn’t collapse. Six months isn’t forever, but it isn’t nothing either. It was, in many ways, one of the healthiest relationships I’ve had. There was trust. There was communication. There wasn’t suffocation, no constant demand to perform closeness. For once, I felt space to breathe.

But then, space became absence. What started as independence began to feel like distance. Days passed without presence. Conversations felt thinner, emptier.

So I spoke up. I asked for more, more time, more presence, more of the simple gestures that tether love to real life. And the answer was no. Not right now.

And here’s the difference between who I was and who I am: I didn’t hear that as rejection of me. I heard it for what it was. Their truth, their limit. Not mine.

For the first time, instead of accepting their rejection of what I need and staying within someone else's boundaries, I had the ability to choose myself.

Yes, it hurt. Endings always do. I let myself cry. I let myself grieve. But underneath the ache, I felt something I’d never felt before: pride. Pride that I asked for what I needed. Pride that I didn’t make myself smaller to fit into someone else’s capacity. Pride that I didn’t confuse someone else’s “no” with a reason to believe I wasn’t worthy of “yes.”

Because the truth is, the best of what we shared was the communication, the joy, the little sparks of intimacy. Those things weren’t handed to me. They were created by me. And if I could create them once, I can create them again.

That’s the piece no one tells you when you’re young and heartbroken: you don’t lose the good when you lose the person. You only lose the illusion that the good was theirs.

The good was always you.

I see that now in the life I’m building. In the friendships that keep me alive, the way my roommates and I pack into the kitchen, laughing over boiling pasta, making an ordinary night feel like a celebration. In the way we curl up on the couch half-asleep, watching movies and stupid YouTube videos. In the city itself, with its crowded buses, its coffee shops, its noise, its quiet. In the mornings, when I make coffee and stand at the window, sunlight pours in knowing the day belongs to me.

That’s love, too. Love that doesn’t walk out the door. Love that stays.

Do I still crave romance? Absolutely. I still believe in it, still want it fiercely. I want the kind of love that feels like balance, not burden. Presence, not absence. The kind that arrives already whole, not something I have to build piece by piece with my own hands.

But until then, I know I’m okay. More than okay. I’m full. Because I’ve been alone before, and I was content. And now, I know I can be again.

And the next time love comes, I’ll meet it whole. I’ll meet it steady. I’ll meet it knowing the truth that has changed everything for me:

All the love I thought was theirs was mine all along.

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I’ve never understood the people who proudly say they’re “not political.” To me, that’s like boasting about refusing to read the weather forecast while standing in the middle of a storm. It’s not neutrality, it’s privilege. And privilege is often invisible to the people who have it. The only reason someone can afford to be “apolitical” is because the systems in place work just fine for them. It’s a comfortable position to hold if you’ve never had to fight for the right to be seen, heard, or safe.

I’ve had people say to me, “You’re a middle-class white woman. You have everything you need to succeed. Why are you so dramatic about all this?” As if empathy has prerequisites. As if caring about injustice requires it to knock directly on your own door.

I understand the phrase “ignorance is bliss” because I’ve seen how much easier life seems for people who coast through it with their heads down, refusing to engage with anything that might disrupt their comfort. I’ve seen classmates, bright, capable people, change the subject any time something uncomfortable came up in lectures. I’ve heard peers shrug off conversations about systemic inequality with “Well, that’s just how it is.” There’s a certain lightness to their days that I can’t help but notice. They go to class, grab a coffee, scroll Instagram, and never once feel the sharp sting of moral urgency. But to me, that isn’t bliss, it’s willful blindness. And once you’ve opened your eyes, you can’t close them again without a kind of moral decay.

I’m Canadian, and I think that comes with its own brand of denial. There’s this smug cultural myth that the ugliest problems; racism, police brutality, voter suppression, the erosion of reproductive rights, are “American issues.” We pat ourselves on the back for being polite, for being “better,” for having universal healthcare. Meanwhile, Indigenous communities still don’t have clean drinking water. Hate crimes are rising. Our political landscape is inching toward the same polarization we claim to be above. And yet, I’ve been in conversations where people genuinely believed systemic racism doesn’t exist here. That’s how deep the denial runs, it’s not just ignorance, it’s a carefully maintained illusion.

I’m in university right now, studying law with a double minor in political science and women and gender studies. Every semester, I’m reminded of how much the legal system is shaped by who writes the laws and who they were written to serve. In my first-year law class, a professor asked us to consider whether Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms truly protects everyone equally. I remember looking around the room as students hesitated, clearly uncomfortable, before someone finally admitted, “Well, it depends on who you are.” That’s when it hit me, our rights might be universal on paper, but the lived reality is entirely different.

More often than not, I find that people on the extremist side of politics are simply uneducated or, maybe more accurately, unwilling to be educated. It’s not that they’ve never been exposed to other perspectives. It’s that they’ve chosen to seal themselves off, curating a worldview that never has to be challenged. Social media algorithms make it worse; your feed shows you what you already believe, and over time, your beliefs stop being ideas you hold and start becoming the only possible truth you can imagine. The death of critical thinking isn’t coming, it’s already here.

But I’ve also seen the same issue in progressive spaces. Echo chambers don’t discriminate by political affiliation. People repost infographics without fact-checking. They parrot slogans without understanding the history behind them. They believe that liking the “right” posts is the same thing as building a better world. Once, in a seminar, a student confidently referenced a statistic they’d seen online about gender-based violence in Canada and it turned out to be completely fabricated. No one had questioned it because it fit the narrative we all wanted to believe.

This is why intersectionality matters so much. Without it, activism becomes shallow, a checklist rather than a practice. I can’t call myself a feminist if my feminism doesn’t include trans women. I can’t say I believe in equality if I ignore how race, class, disability, sexuality, and other factors shape the way oppression is experienced. Fighting for equity means fighting for everyone’s equity, not just the causes that personally inconvenience you.

The problem is, once you care about one thing, you start caring about everything. I lie awake at night thinking about climate change, about women in countries where speaking their minds is punishable by death, about refugees turned away at borders, about political leaders treating human rights like negotiable policy points. I don’t know how to live a life where I’m aware of all this and don’t care. And yet, sometimes, I envy the people who can wake up, go to work, watch a sitcom, and go to bed without feeling the weight of it all pressing down on their chest.

I’ve been told more than once that I’m “too sensitive” or that I “care too much.” And maybe I do. My brain is rarely quiet. I scroll through the news and feel my heart rate spike. I study for my classes and think about how abstract concepts on a syllabus translate into very real suffering for people in the world right now. I want to fix things, and yet half the time I have no idea where to start. The enormity of the problems we face makes any single action feel inadequate but doing nothing feels unbearable.

One afternoon, after a particularly draining women and gender studies lecture about the exploitation of garment workers, I found myself walking past a store display of trendy, fast-fashion clothes. I stood there for a few minutes, staring at the price tags, thinking about the hands that had stitched those seams for wages that wouldn’t buy a coffee here. People walked by without a second glance, and I remember feeling this strange, dizzying split, part of me wanted to grab them and say, Don’t you see? Don’t you care? and another part just wanted to step inside and lose myself in something mindless, even for a moment. That’s the thing about caring, it’s exhausting, and sometimes the temptation to look away is almost overwhelming.

There’s a very fine line between morals and politics now. In 2025, to care about human dignity is to take a side. To say “everyone deserves to live free from violence and discrimination” will, somehow, be branded as a political statement. But if that’s the case, then I’m fine being political. Because if silence is the default, I want to be loud. If comfort comes at the cost of someone else’s humanity, I want to be uncomfortable. And if equity sounds radical to you, I want to know why, because that tells me everything about where your baseline is, and whether it’s worth keeping.

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So where does that leave me?

Some days, it leaves me exhausted. There are moments where my chest feels tight and I have to remind myself that I am one person, that I cannot dismantle centuries of oppression before lunch. But it also leaves me with a responsibility. If I know things are wrong, I can’t unknow them. If I’ve learned about injustice, I can’t pretend I haven’t. My only option is to move forward, even if my steps are small.

Change doesn’t always come from grand gestures. It comes from conversations that make people uncomfortable in the best possible way. It comes from asking questions that force someone to think beyond their algorithm. It comes from refusing to stay silent, even when speaking up feels like a drop in the ocean.

I may never see the world I want in my lifetime. But that doesn’t mean the fight isn’t worth it. If the only thing I accomplish is making someone else question the idea that fairness is radical, then I’ve done something. And that’s enough to keep me going.

P.S. I know this is heavy but I hope it makes you think. If it resonates, share it with someone who still believes staying “apolitical” is a neutral choice.

I say this not to mock it. I say it because I, too, have posted moody pictures of books I hadn’t quite finished. I’ve written captions that hinted at ideas I was still in the process of understanding. I have romanticized my own intellect, curated it even. Because in a world that often feels chaotic and directionless, there is comfort in appearing like someone who knows things. There is power in being perceived as thoughtful. But the danger comes when the performance overshadows the process, when we stop becoming thoughtful, and start just looking the part.

This is the heart of false intellectualism: it is not simply ignorance, and it is not simply vanity. It is the illusion of understanding without the labor of learning.

Social media has created a new genre of intellect, one that is optimized for visibility, not depth. We are flooded daily with videos explaining Marxism in under thirty seconds, with neatly designed carousels outlining centuries of philosophy in ten slides or less. These fragments of thought can be beautiful and inspiring. They can spark curiosity. But increasingly, they replace curiosity. They allow us to feel as though we’ve learned something, when in reality we’ve only glanced at the surface.

This curated form of knowledge isn’t just shallow, it’s fragile. Because it’s not built on inquiry or complexity. It’s built on aesthetics and certainty. And certainty, when unexamined, becomes blind belief.

What scares me most is how easily people absorb beliefs through osmosis. One video. One dinner table conversation. One confident TikTok voice declaring something as fact and suddenly, it’s locked in. The opinion becomes their own, not because they weighed it, tested it, or even truly understood it, but because it felt familiar enough, emotional enough, or aesthetic enough to be accepted as truth.

We don’t live in a time that encourages people to say, “I don’t know.” We live in a time that rewards certainty, alignment, and ideological consistency. We are more concerned with signaling that we are correct than we are with asking whether we’re right.

I’ve seen people form their entire worldview based on who they follow, not what they’ve studied. I’ve seen peers recite talking points they heard from a podcast without ever researching the context. I’ve watched people shut down opposing views not because they’re offensive or harmful, but simply because they sound different. And I’ve seen this happen across all ideologies, all belief systems, all corners of the internet. It’s not a left or right problem. It’s a critical thinking problem.

Critical thinking is uncomfortable. It requires us to question ourselves. It requires us to resist the urge to agree with the first person who speaks confidently. It demands that we step outside of the TikTok echo chamber and into the messy, often disorienting realm of real thought.

I want to be clear, I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to go get a PhD in order to have valid opinions. That’s not what this is about. This isn’t an essay about gatekeeping education or mocking people who learn from unconventional sources. It’s about engagement. It’s about making sure we don’t confuse access to information with understanding of it.

The algorithm doesn’t want you to think deeply. It wants you to stay engaged. And the quickest way to keep people engaged is to feed them things they already agree with. Things that validate them. Things that confirm their fears, their hopes, their worldview. It’s psychological comfort food.

And the more we consume it, the more we lose the capacity for intellectual humility.

Humility is what allows us to say, “Maybe I don’t have all the answers.” It’s what lets us consider the other side without immediately vilifying it. It’s what opens us up to ideas that feel foreign or even offensive, not to accept them blindly, but to understand where they come from, how they’re formed, and why they hold power.

Without humility, We adopt fixed mindsets that leave no room for complexity. Defensive. Rigid. We cling to our opinions not because we’ve examined them, but because we’re afraid of what it means to let them go.

And that’s the thing, real learning is not linear. It’s full of contradictions, dead ends, crumpled notes in the margins. It requires grace, patience, and a willingness to say: I used to believe this, but I don’t anymore.

Personally, I’ve changed my mind on so many things. Not because I was forced to, but because I made the decision to keep asking. I’ve been proven wrong. I’ve realized I was biased. I’ve read books that shook my foundation and had conversations that made me realize how little I knew.

I still have a long way to go.

But I don’t want to be someone who performs intelligence while secretly being too scared to think for myself. I don’t want to cling to beliefs just because they’re trendy or politically “correct.” I want to engage with the world thoughtfully, imperfectly, and honestly. I want to earn my opinions, not inherit them.

I want to read slowly. Question generously. Think critically. And yes, maybe still post a photo of my annotated novel next to a matcha latte, but not as a performance. As a reflection of the work I’m actually doing.

I don’t think we need to stop romanticizing intellect. In fact, I think it’s beautiful to romanticize it. Light the candles. Make the playlists. Turn your learning into art. But don’t stop there. Don’t confuse the aesthetic for the essence.

Read the hard books, even if you don’t understand every word. Listen to people you disagree with. Watch a video that challenges you. Take time with your thoughts. Be slow to anger and quick to curiosity. Stay open. Stay human.

Because intellect, at its best, is not a costume. It’s a commitment.

And I’d rather be someone who is learning out loud, fumbling, questioning and revising, than someone who performs intelligence without ever thinking for herself.

P.S. If you’ve ever changed your mind, admitted you were wrong, or realized you were parroting someone else’s opinion without fully understanding it, that’s not failure. That’s growth.

She is quieter than I really am, more agreeable than I ever wanted to be, endlessly available, endlessly understanding. She is the girl who cancels plans without hesitation if he asks to see her. She answers texts immediately, even when she is busy. She shapes her interests to mirror his, molds her routines around his, and gradually folds herself so neatly into the contours of his life that she forgets what her own once looked like.

I know her well.

For most of my adolescence and early adulthood, I believed that this version of me was proof of how deeply I could love. I thought that self-sacrifice was the foundation of a real relationship, that devotion was measured by how much of myself I could give away. I convinced myself that being chosen, being loved, was worth more than being whole.

And every relationship ended the same way.

The breakup would come, sometimes abrupt and brutal, other times slow and inevitable and I would be left with the same hollow truth: I hadn’t just lost a boyfriend. I had lost myself.

“There is a specific grief in realizing that the life you have been living has not really been yours.”

It is this grief that led me to the sentence I can’t stop repeating to myself: I want to be a girl with a boyfriend. Not a girlfriend.

At first, it felt like wordplay, catchy, almost trivial. But over time, it became something else entirely. It became a manifesto, a way of naming the kind of life I want to build for myself, and the way I want to exist inside love.

Because a girl with a boyfriend is a whole person first. She has a life that belongs to her. One that love can complement but never consume. She is already complete and chooses to share that completeness with someone else.

A girlfriend, at least the way I have always been one, collapses into the relationship. She blurs at the edges until her identity is defined entirely by “we.”

The Pattern of Losing Myself

When I look back at my past relationships, I can see exactly how easy it was to disappear without realizing it.

I remember the nights I turned down plans with my friends because my boyfriend at the time had trust issues and would worry if I went out without him. At the time, it didn’t feel like a big deal. It felt like the “mature” thing to do, the way you compromise in relationships. But small decisions like that, repeated enough times, became an unspoken rule: my social life revolved around what would make him comfortable.

I remember how I slowly stopped reading as much. Reading had always been my escape, my joy, the thing that made me feel most like myself. But every spare moment started to feel like something I owed to him, time I should be spending with him, talking to him, reassuring him. It wasn’t that he told me not to read; it was that I believed, without thinking about it, that prioritizing my own joy made me less devoted.

I remember the subtle ways I adjusted my choices, what I wore, how I acted, even the way I spoke because it felt safer to be the version of me that would never be “too much.”

Each moment felt small, but together they formed a pattern: the slow erasure of my independence.

Why Women Are Taught to Disappear in Love

It makes sense why I became this version of myself.

From the time we are young, girls are taught that love is the ultimate goal. Every story we grow up on, books, movies, fairy tales all end the same way: she gets the boy, and that is the victory.

“Happily ever after” has always been synonymous with marriage, never with a fulfilled life on her own terms.

We are told implicitly and explicitly, that being loved is the ultimate measure of our worth. We see it in the movies that celebrate the grand romantic gesture as the defining climax of a woman’s story. We see it in the way women are praised for patience, forgiveness, and loyalty, no matter how much it costs them.

Men are given a different script. They are told to chase ambitions, to build careers, to create lives that are independent of anyone else. Love, for them, is an addition not the centerpiece.

Women, meanwhile, are rewarded for what we give up. We glorify the girlfriend who sacrifices, forgives, and fixes. We romanticize the woman who stays no matter how much it costs her. And we call it devotion.

“I didn’t just internalize these messages, I perfected them.”

The Work of Unlearning

Unlearning this has been messy and uncomfortable.

It feels unnatural, like retraining a reflex that has been ingrained for years. Even now, in a relationship that feels stable and healthy, I can feel the old habits tugging at me. The impulse to overgive, to explain myself, to bend into whatever shape feels easiest to love.

But this time, I notice it happening.

That awareness feels like standing outside myself, watching the moment I’m about to shrink, and whispering, “No. Not this time.”

Unlearning has meant catching myself in real time, recognizing when I’m about to cancel plans for no reason other than wanting to be available, noticing when I’m shaping my decisions around what someone else might want, realizing when my own needs have quietly slid to the bottom of the list.

It has meant making the harder choice: saying no, keeping my boundaries, letting my life be full even when it doesn’t revolve around someone else.

Redefining Love and Selfhood

What I’ve learned is that being a girl with a boyfriend is not passive. It is a conscious, deliberate way of existing inside love.

It looks like building a life that is already whole, full of friendships that are mine alone, passions that belong entirely to me, and ambitions that are not shaped by anyone else’s approval.

It looks like keeping plans even when it would be easier to cancel them.

It looks like making decisions about my education, my career, and my future without reshaping them to fit around someone else.

It looks like holding on to the things that make me who I am: reading, writing, learning, without feeling guilty for prioritizing them.

It is refusing to see love as an accomplishment that validates me.

Because love that requires disappearance is not love, it is survival.

What It Means to Be a Girl With a Boyfriend

I’ve begun to imagine what it looks like to truly be a girl with a boyfriend.

It looks like calling my friends first when something good happens, not because I don’t love him, but because my friendships matter just as much.

It looks like setting aside time to write, to read, to think deeply, even when there are other things I could be doing.

It looks like continuing to dream for myself, about my future career, my ambitions, the person I want to become, without feeling like those dreams have to fit neatly into someone else’s.

It looks like knowing that love is better when it fits into a life you’ve already chosen for yourself, not when it becomes the life itself.

Conclusion

For the first time in my life, I finally understand that real love should never be the thing that defines me. It should be the thing that fits into a life I’ve already built.

So yes, I want to be a girl with a boyfriend.

Not a girlfriend.

Because I refuse to trade my wholeness for love ever again.

P.S.

Every woman I know has, at some point, given away pieces of herself for love. Writing this felt like reclaiming mine and promising not to lose them again.

Soph’s Digital Diary is where I write about love, feminism, identity, and the messy process of growing up. If you like essays that feel like late-night conversations with a friend: funny, thoughtful, and deeply honest. Subscribe to get new posts straight to your inbox.

Not just men who say they yearn. Not the ones who sprinkle “emotional availability” into conversation like it’s seasoning. Not the ones who cry on your bedroom floor and call it vulnerability but still disappear the next week when things get too real. I’m talking about real yearning. The kind that simmers. The kind that waits. The kind that stays.

I miss the fictional men who ache. Who look at women like they’ve just seen God. I miss Noah standing in the rain, building a damn house because he said he would. I miss Teddy, desperate and fumbling and raw, choking out “I have loved you ever since I’ve known you” with a trembling chin and a voice that cracks like glass. I miss the Dead Poets Society boys, writing poems to the moon and quoting Thoreau under candlelight because love and art and friendship meant something to them.

I want to live in a world where that kind of feeling isn’t embarrassing. Where men can look at someone and say, “I would die for you,” and mean it and not follow it up with, “But I’m not ready for a relationship.”

Because I’ve known the men who cry. I’ve known the men who say all the right things. The ones who talk about healing and therapy and feeling deeply, but use that language like armor. Like a trick mirror. It reflects back everything you want, while still letting them slip through the cracks unaccountable. Because sometimes, being emotionally articulate is just another costume. And that kind of costume cuts deeper. Because you believed it. And it almost felt like safety.

That’s not yearning. That’s manipulation with a better vocabulary.

Real yearning isn’t curated. It isn’t performative or aesthetic or strategically timed to land in your DMs at 11:47 p.m. on a Thursday. It’s awkward. It’s tender. It’s vulnerable in a way that’s not always self-aware. It’s Mr. Darcy barely holding it together. It’s a voicemail you listen to on loop. It’s a page from someone’s notebook where they wrote your name over and over and over again because they didn’t know how else to hold you.

It’s not always poetic. But it’s real.

I see my friends swiping through dating apps, half-laughing and half-cringing at the same beige bios. “Looking for something chill.” “Emotionally intelligent but also not a simp.” “Just here for a good time (unless you’re the one, lol).” We have reached a point where dating is more branding than bonding. Where vulnerability is seen as weakness, and wanting something serious is “doing too much.” Everyone is playing chicken with their feelings. Everyone is scared to go first.

We’re all walking around like we’re unbothered. But we’re bothered. Deeply.
And I think social media made us that way.

Because somewhere along the line, yearning became cringe. Caring became desperate. And now we live in a world where everything has to be posted, positioned, performed. Your love has to be photogenic. Your softness has to be shareable. Your heartbreak has to be marketable. We romanticize nostalgia now, not people. We post Pinterest quotes about 19th-century love stories while ghosting each other in the group chat.

We say we want a love like the movies, but we act like we’re auditioning for the coldest character in the film.

And it’s not just that love has become digital, it’s that the image of what it means to be a man in love has been completely warped. We are watching a generation of boys grow up in the age of TikTok alpha males and red pill echo chambers and podcast bros who equate dominance with dignity. And they are listening. They are learning that to be a man is to win, not to feel. To conquer, not connect. That wanting someone makes you weak. That softness is shameful. That yearning is something to mock.

And so they turn to coldness. Because coldness, at least, can’t be humiliated.

But that’s not masculinity. That’s fear wearing a leather jacket.

These men are not strong. They are terrified. Of being seen. Of being rejected. Of being real.

And I don’t say this from a place of superiority, I say it with grief. I say it because I want better for them. For us. Because I know those boys were children once, too. Children who maybe cried too easily or hugged too long or wrote cringey poems or said “I love you” too soon. And someone told them that made them weak. And someone laughed. And something inside them went quiet.

So now, they follow Andrew Tate. Or Jordan Peterson. Or whoever’s trending this week. They convince themselves that numbness is nobility. That girls only want the bad guy. That feelings are something you outgrow.

But I want to scream: you were never supposed to outgrow yearning.

You were supposed to grow into it.

You were supposed to learn how to love harder, not hide deeper. You were supposed to find someone who made you want to say everything you were afraid of saying. And then say it anyway.

Bring back men who ache.

Bring back the man who watches her walk away and doesn't say, “Whatever,” but says, “God, I hope she comes back.” Bring back the handwritten letters. The slow dances in kitchens. The guitar pick with her name etched into the back. The novels written from memories of her face.

Bring back the men who mean it. Who cry at the table. Who ask about your childhood. Who remember how you take your tea. Who sit with their feelings, not because it makes them look good, but because they know feeling is what makes them human.

Not the kind of “soft boy” who uses therapy-speak to excuse his selfishness. Not the kind of guy who calls you “baby” while texting three other girls. Not the kind who posts sad-boy thirst traps and calls it healing.

I’m done with the performance.
I want presence.

And maybe that sounds naïve. Maybe yearning is too much for this world. Maybe we’re too late. Maybe we’re too tired. But I don’t care.

Because I have felt what it’s like to be half-loved. To be adored in public and dismissed in private. To be someone’s everything one night and their nothing the next. To be told I was special by someone who said the same thing to three other girls. And it gutted me.

I don’t want a man who knows how to say the right things. I want a man who feels them. Who shows them. Who lives them.

I want a man who writes poems, even if they suck. Who waits outside a concert with a sweater he brought because he thought I’d get cold. Who remembers the name of my cat. Who shows up, not because I asked him to, but because of course he would.

Because real yearning isn’t loud. It’s not curated. It’s not cool. It’s quiet. It’s loyal. It’s there.

So bring back men who yearn.
Bring back the poetry.
Bring back the trembling hands and the waiting in the rain.
Bring back the boys who read Neruda.
Bring back the ones who leave notes in books and songs in voicemails and love in everything they touch.

Not because it’s cinematic.
But because it’s real.
Because love should be something we feel, not something we pose.
Because real yearning doesn’t perform.
It endures.

P.S.
If you’ve ever wanted someone to want you the way Noah wanted Allie or the way Teddy wanted Jo or the way Neil just wanted to feel, this is for you. You deserve someone who doesn’t just say they care, but aches to prove it. Who doesn’t ghost, doesn’t perform, doesn’t pretend. Who stays.

Every person I’ve ever met. Every version of myself I’ve ever been. Every room I’ve ever sat in. Every song that once meant something. Every street I’ve walked down on my way to becoming someone I no longer am. I miss things so easily, so frequently, that sometimes it feels like I spend more time mourning my life than living it.

And the worst part is that even when the past wasn’t particularly kind to me, I still want it back.

I’m constantly romanticizing things I once wanted to leave. Not because they were objectively beautiful, but because they were mine. Because I lived through them. Because they’re over now. Because memory has a funny way of applying a soft filter to pain.

There’s a term for this kind of backward-facing gaze: nostalgia. But the way it lives inside me feels less like a passing emotion and more like a second language. I speak it fluently. I dwell in it unconsciously. It governs how I organize my thoughts, how I process time. I look forward with intention—but I look back with longing.

I am always looking back.

Sometimes I wonder if this is just the condition of being human: we remember more tenderly than we lived. Or maybe it's the condition of being me. I don’t know whether this sensitivity is innate or learned. All I know is that my memory has a heartbeat. That when I recall an old routine or an old friend or an old feeling, I don’t just remember it, I relive it. Embodied memory. Sensory recall. A smell, a song, a phrase, and suddenly I’m there again. Not always happy. But always aching.

There’s a strange psychological safety in longing. Nostalgia offers certainty. A clear narrative arc. Even the most chaotic experiences feel softer once they’ve been catalogued into memory. I’ve started to realize that my obsession with the past isn’t really about the past, it’s about control. I can’t pause time in the moment, so I try to make it immortal in retrospect. I try to preserve everything I’ve ever loved, even if I didn’t recognize it as love at the time.

That’s the most dangerous thing about nostalgia, it makes you think you were happier than you were. It makes you forget the stress, the discomfort, the days you wished away. And maybe that’s its function. Maybe the brain edits the past as a survival strategy, to keep us moving forward. But when you're someone like me, someone who attaches meaning to everything, nostalgia doesn’t feel like a gentle tug. It feels like a gravitational pull.

I remember the texture of my childhood blankets. The way my bedroom looked at night when only the hallway light was on. The chipped paint on the windowsill I used to lean against while daydreaming. I remember it all with a weird intensity, as if forgetting would be a betrayal.

And it’s not just the things I miss, it’s the versions of myself who lived inside those moments. The girl who thought she could become anything. The one who wore ridiculous outfits just because they made her feel powerful. The one who believed in magic without irony. I miss her even though I know I wouldn’t want to be her again. That’s the complexity of self-memory: we grieve identities we no longer want, simply because we once did.

I even miss the things I swore I hated at the time. The awkward in-between years. The friendships that drifted. The routines that felt boring. The high school classes I zoned out in. I miss them because they were a part of my becoming. Because even dissatisfaction, in retrospect, feels sacred. There’s a holiness to anything that once held a version of me.

And then there’s the media. The books, the songs, the movies. I’ve come to realize I don’t return to them because I want to revisit the content, I return to them because I want to revisit who I was when they meant something. Nostalgia has turned my bookshelf into a shrine. Certain songs feel like emotional time machines. It’s not just about remembering, it’s about re-entering.

Even places ache. Cities I visited briefly. Cafés I sat in once. Bedrooms I outgrew. I attach feeling to architecture. I assign significance to street corners. It’s ridiculous, maybe, but it’s also deeply human. I don’t want to live in the past, but I don’t want to let it go either.

The more I talk to people about this, the more I realize we’re all mourning something. Not in a dramatic, tragic way, but in a quiet, continuous one. We miss the versions of ourselves we didn’t even know were temporary. We miss the way life used to feel before we became aware of how fragile it all is.

Maybe this is just what happens when you’re finally old enough to recognize impermanence. You start to notice that things end. That people drift. That rooms change. That even joy isn’t sustainable. And you begin to archive your life like a curator of your own museum, terrified of forgetting what mattered, terrified of losing the evidence that it did.

I used to think nostalgia made me weak. That living in the past was a failure of presence. But I’ve started to realize it can also be a form of reverence. An act of devotion. A way of saying: I was here. This mattered. I don’t want to forget.

So no I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing everything.

But maybe that’s not something I need to fix. Maybe the ache is proof that I was paying attention. That I was alive and feeling things deeply. That I didn’t float through life numb. Maybe nostalgia is the tax we pay for having fully been.

And maybe that’s why I write. Not just to make sense of the present, but to preserve the past. To keep my memories from dissolving. To honor all the selves I’ve been, all the lives I’ve lived inside this one life.

I’m not afraid of moving forward. I’m just sentimental about the trail I’ve left behind. And honestly, I don’t think that’s such a bad way to be.

After all, who are we, if not a collection of everything we’ve ever missed?

P.S. I used to think this tendency to look back meant I was weak. But maybe it just means I felt things deeply and that’s something I want to keep doing. Let me know in the comments what you still miss, or what memory you’ll never let go of. I’d love to hear.

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“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.” — The Secret History

I was seventeen when I first read The Secret History, and I swear it rewired my brain. Suddenly, I wanted my life to look like a Donna Tartt novel: tweed blazers from Value Village, strong coffee in chipped mugs, pretentious late-night conversations about Camus and Plato.

It felt like a world where books mattered. Where intellect was currency. Where friendship was intense, obsessive, and poetic.

Even now, in university, I still catch myself playing the part. I’ll sit in a coffee shop with my laptop, oat latte in hand, pretending my paper on legal theory is secretly the start of something profound. I thrift clothes that feel like they belong to someone living a much more romantic academic life than mine. I walk across campus in the fall, leaves crunching underfoot, earbuds in, listening to Lana Del Rey like I’m the main character in a tragic collegiate novel.

And that, I think, is the exact trap of dark academia.

Because these stories: The Secret History, If We Were Villains, Bunny, Dead Poets Society, aren’t just about beauty and intellect. They’re about obsession. Moral rot. Betrayal. Suicide. Murder.

We know this. And yet, we can’t get enough.

The Allure of Dark Academia

Dark academia has an intoxicating formula.

The Secret History gave us its blueprint: an elite group of students, obsessed with classics, art, and ideas, who kill a man in the Vermont woods and cover it up.

If We Were Villains is the Shakespearean twin to Tartt’s novel. A tight-knit acting troupe where jealousy, love, and ambition boil over until a body drops.

Mona Awad’s Bunny satirizes this aesthetic entirely, following a lonely MFA student who falls in with a cult-like group of girls who quite literally kill in the name of art.

Even Dead Poets Society, perhaps the most hopeful of the bunch, ends with tragedy.

These stories share the same DNA: elite campuses, beautiful settings, characters who believe they’re destined for greatness, and friendships so consuming they border on destructive. They glamorize a kind of life where meaning is found in art, poetry, intellect and nothing is too much.

And that is deeply appealing in our world of constant distraction, endless scrolling, and shallow validation. Dark academia promises depth.

“Beauty is terror” What We Forget

But the beauty of these stories hides something darker.

Richard Papen, the narrator of The Secret History, admits:

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

From the start, we know this story will end in obsession and ruin. And yet, the book has been aestheticized into Tumblr quotes and Pinterest mood boards, divorced from its warnings about elitism, morality, and unchecked ambition.

In If We Were Villains, Oliver says of his tragic group of friends:

“We were always one step from ruin. That’s what made it so exhilarating.”

The thrill of teetering on the edge, that’s what we romanticize. But the book makes clear: that thrill destroys them.

Even Dead Poets Society warns us about romanticization without reality. Mr. Keating says,

“Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

It’s beautiful. It’s moving. And yet the story still ends with Neil’s death, a reminder that passion and art cannot exist without the weight of real-world consequences.

Why We Romanticize It Anyway

I don’t think dark academia’s popularity is just about pretty libraries and fall aesthetics.

It’s about longing.

We crave intensity in a world that feels increasingly empty. We want to believe that life could be like The Secret History, that our friendships could be all-consuming, our art revolutionary, our intellect meaningful.

And for young women especially, the aesthetic has power. It’s intellectual, sharp, ambitious. It is a rejection of the airheaded stereotypes society still imposes on us. Walking into a coffee shop with a battered copy of Franny and Zooey feels like a small act of rebellion, of self-definition.

But we also love dark academia because it feels dangerous. The forbidden thrill of ambition, of obsession, of living for something bigger, even when it destroys us.

False Intellectualism & The Performance of Smarts

Here’s the thing: real intellectualism is rarely glamorous. It’s messy. It’s frustrating. It’s staying up until 2 a.m. rewriting the same essay paragraph because you can’t get your argument right. It’s reading things you don’t understand the first time or even the third.

But the version of academia that TikTok and Pinterest sell us is more about looking smart than actually doing the work.

It’s why so many people buy The Secret History and post it on their shelf without ever reading past the first fifty pages. It’s why quotes like “Beauty is terror” are ripped from their context to sound edgy on mood boards. It’s why you see more photo dumps of oat lattes and annotated books than actual discussions about what those books mean.

There’s this strange cultural obsession with the performance of intellect, the idea that carrying a copy of Camus or Plath somehow makes you deep.

But the characters in these books are perfect examples of false intellectualism themselves. The students in The Secret History don’t study because they love learning, they study because knowledge gives them power. They don’t use classics to expand the world, they use it as a tool to separate themselves from it.

It’s elitism dressed up as intelligence.

And that’s why this aesthetic can get dangerous. We romanticize a world that values being seen as brilliant more than actually understanding or creating anything meaningful.

The Problem with Forgetting the Darkness

The trouble is, dark academia is not actually a world of liberated intellectualism. It’s a world of exclusion.

The Secret History makes this painfully clear. The group’s brilliance is inseparable from its elitism, class privilege, and eventual moral collapse.

As Bunny himself says before his death:

“You never had to do anything. You could’ve walked away.”

But they didn’t.

My Complicated Love Letter to Dark Academia

Even knowing all this, I still romanticize it.

I still sit in the library pretending I’m part of some intellectual elite. I still buy coats that make me look like I belong on the set of Dead Poets Society.

But I try to remember what these stories are really about: the danger of obsession, the hollow allure of superiority, and the cost of mistaking brilliance for virtue.

Maybe the version of dark academia worth loving is the one where we value art, learning, and connection, without idolizing destruction, suffering, or elitism.

Because I don’t actually want to be Richard Papen.

I just want to keep caring deeply, even if it makes me cringe.

P.S.

I’ll still sit in coffee shops pretending my life is a Donna Tartt novel. But I’m also reminding myself that beauty doesn’t have to be toxic to be meaningful. Maybe real brilliance is choosing depth without destruction.

Every time I post about feminism, especially when I dare to do so without sugar-coating it, I get the same tired responses. The comments, the eye-rolls, the “devil’s advocate” arguments from guys who think they’re being thoughtful but are really just centering their own comfort. I hear “not all men” more than I hear “how can I help?” And I hear, over and over again, that feminism today has “gone too far.”

They tell me feminism now is just about “man-hating.” That it used to be about equality, but now? Now it's just angry girls screaming online. I’ve even heard some women say this too. And I get it. I do. Some of the content circulating under the label of feminism is aggressive, misinformed, or just painfully shallow. But that’s not what I stand for. And it’s not what real feminism is.

Let's get this out of the way: I don’t hate men. I hate the silence of the “good ones.”

I know good men. I was raised by one. I date one. Some of my best friends are men. They are kind, emotionally available, thoughtful, and generous. They’ve held me when I cried, they’ve listened without interrupting, they’ve told their friends to shut up when they made comments about my body. I love good men.

But I don’t love how few of them speak up.
I don’t love how many of them get uncomfortable when I talk about rape culture.
I don’t love how quiet the room gets when I bring up power dynamics, gender-based violence, or even just everyday sexism.

Being a “good man” privately while remaining passive publicly isn’t a badge of honour. It’s neutrality. And neutrality does not protect women, it protects the system.

If you’re silent in rooms where women aren’t present, you’re not part of the solution. You’re just another bystander.

“Not All Men” Is a Distraction And a Dangerous One

No, it’s not all men. But it is all women.
All women have felt unsafe.
All women have been objectified, talked over, followed, dismissed, interrupted, disbelieved, or threatened.

And yes that includes the women in your life. Your girlfriend. Your mom. Your sister. Your friend.

“Not all men” is technically true, but it’s also deeply unhelpful. It derails the conversation. It takes a conversation about women’s collective trauma and makes it about men’s individual reputations. It turns a call for change into a call for validation.

If you’re not part of the problem, why are you so offended when we talk about it?

You might not be the man who follows someone home, but have you ever laughed when your friend made a degrading joke? Stayed silent when someone crossed a line? Brushed off a woman’s discomfort as “dramatic”? Defended a guy’s behavior with “he’s just like that”?

Intentions are not the same as impact.

The Misunderstood Side of Feminism And Where I Don’t Stand

Here’s something not all feminists are willing to say out loud:
There is a growing strain of misandry online disguised as feminism.
There are some women who speak in absolutes. Who say “all men are trash” and mean it. Who push generalizations as gospel. And who have turned legitimate anger into a weird kind of superiority complex.

And to that, I say: no. That’s not feminism. That’s projection. That’s pain that hasn’t been healed, trauma that hasn’t been processed, and a desire to feel powerful in a world that has made us small for so long.

I’m not here to reverse the hierarchy, I’m here to dismantle it.

Feminism is not about flipping the script so women become the oppressors. It’s about tearing the script up completely. It's not about hating men. It's about refusing to excuse harm from anyone and refusing to stay silent just because it makes someone uncomfortable.

I hate that feminism has been watered down or warped by people who don’t actually understand it. Because when men hear that version, the one that’s all rage and no nuance, they write off the whole movement. And that hurts the rest of us. The ones still fighting for real equity. The ones still trying to explain that feminism is about more than viral TikToks and edgy captions.

“We’re Past This” In What World?

Some people genuinely believe we’re past all this. That we don’t need feminism anymore. That women have equal rights, equal pay, equal treatment. That we’ve won.

I’d love to live in that world. But we don’t.
We live in this one:

• In Canada, a woman is killed by her intimate partner every six days.

• In the U.S., over 1 in 4 women experience severe domestic violence in their lifetime.

• The World Health Organization calls violence against women a global health crisis.

• Women are still underpaid, especially if they’re racialized, disabled, or transgender.

• Femicide, the killing of women simply because they’re women, is rising worldwide.

• Reproductive rights are still under threat, and bodily autonomy remains a political battleground.

• Girls are sexualized before they can even spell the word.

• Women are punished socially, professionally, and legally for expressing anger or anything, really, besides softness.

So no, we’re not past this. We’re just getting better at hiding it. Dressing it up. Branding it with palatable feminism and filtered hashtags. But the rot is still there.

Feminism Helps Men, Too

The worst part is: feminism isn’t just for women. It never was.

Feminism is what allows men to cry.
To go to therapy.
To parent without shame.
To heal from abuse.
To love gently.
To be believed when they speak about pain.
To be more than what patriarchy tells them to be.

You think feminism is the enemy? No.
The enemy is the version of masculinity that taught you love is weakness, silence is strength, and empathy is emasculating.

What I Want From Men (And From Women, Too)

I don’t want your performative posts.
I don’t want you to call yourself an ally because your playlist includes Billie Eilish and you don’t catcall women.

I want you to hold your friends accountable.
I want you to listen to women without getting defensive.
I want you to believe us when we say something happened, even if it’s uncomfortable.

And if you're a woman who uses feminism as a tool for revenge, superiority, or personal branding, I want better from you too.

Feminism is about healing the wound. Not flipping the blade.

To the Men Who’ve Felt Attacked

If you've ever read a feminist post and thought, “I don’t do that, so why am I being blamed?” please hear me.

You're not being blamed. You're being invited.
Invited to unlearn.
To support.
To grow.
To lead from a place of love instead of dominance.
To say, “I want to be better, even if I haven’t gotten it all wrong.”

No one is asking you to feel guilty for being a man. But if you feel uncomfortable when you hear women talk about their experiences, sit with that. Ask why.

Your discomfort is not oppression. It’s an opportunity.

Final Thoughts

I don’t write essays like this because it’s fun. I write them because I’m tired. Because I'm scared. Because I'm angry. And because I'm hopeful.

Yes, hopeful.

Because I’ve seen people change. I’ve seen men step up. I’ve seen boys apologize and mean it. I’ve seen conversations that used to end in shouting now end in understanding.

But I’ve also seen silence. Defensiveness. Dismissal. And I’m not okay with that anymore.

So no, it’s not all men.
But it is all women.
And until that changes, I won’t stop writing.

P.S.
You don’t have to be perfect to be part of the solution. You just have to care. Loudly.

For me, music has always been a compass. A translator. A mirror.
I’ve never been great at expressing exactly what I feel when I’m in it, but certain songs have done it for me. Cracked open emotions I didn’t even know had names. Some songs live with me for a season. Some live with me forever.

Let Down by Radiohead is one of the forever ones.

And yes, I know. I know how it sounds.
A Radiohead essay in the big year 2025? Groundbreaking.
But seriously and unironically, I love them. Sue me.

I’m not here to be edgy or mysterious or perform sadness.
I’m here because this song and specifically this one, has lived in my bones ever since I first heard it.
It doesn’t remind me of heartbreak or depression. It reminds me of transition. Of being in that liminal space between who I was and who I’m trying to become.

It’s a song about evolution. Slow, quiet, and maybe a little sad, but necessary.
And I guess that’s why I’m writing about it. Why I’m analyzing it.
Why I’m planning to get a tattoo of one of its lyrics — “One day I will grow wings” — with a pair of wings surrounding it, as if the idea of becoming something more deserves its own shrine.

“Transport, motorways and tramlines / starting and then stopping / taking off and landing / the emptiest of feelings.”

That line has always reminded me of the in-between. Of watching life happen from the window seat.
The stretch of time where you’re moving but not quite arriving. Where you know things are changing, but they haven’t fully taken shape yet. It’s the emotion of existing mid-transformation — and not knowing what you’re transforming into.

That’s what Let Down captures for me.
Not sadness, but surrender. Not despair, but stillness. The kind of stillness that makes space for something new.

And then there’s that line:

“One day I am gonna grow wings.”

It’s so soft. Almost throwaway. But it hits like a truth I’ve always believed but never said out loud.

I want that tattooed on me not because I’m waiting for an escape, but because I believe in my own becoming. In the slow, patient growth that no one else sees. In the idea that someday, I’ll step into the version of me I’ve always felt whispering beneath the surface.

This lyric isn’t about flying away, it’s about becoming light enough to lift off.

Radiohead doesn’t hand you meanings. They build moods. They trust you to meet them halfway.
And Let Down lives in the exact emotional limbo where I’ve spent most of my life, not broken, not healed, just becoming.

“Crushed like a bug in the ground.”

Even that line, it doesn’t feel fatalistic to me.
It feels real. There are days where I do feel flattened by expectation, identity, growing up, whatever. But that’s not the ending. Because this song never gives you an ending. It just keeps going. Gently. Softly. Like change does.

“One day I am gonna grow wings.”

There’s no explosion. No cinematic climax.
Just a quiet hope. A future self, waiting in the wings (literally).
And for some reason, that small kind of hope is the kind I trust the most.

I’m not the same person I was when I first heard this song.
But I think that’s the point.
Music, like life, reshapes itself around who you are in the moment.
And Let Down has changed meaning for me more times than I can count.

That’s why I’m writing this.
That’s why I want the tattoo.
Not because it’s trendy or poetic or deep but because this song has held me through every version of myself I’ve ever tried to grow out of.

And maybe, one day, I will grow wings.

💌 P.S.

Some songs don’t just get stuck in your head, they become part of your DNA. This one did. If you have one of those, I’d love to hear about it too!

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Something about her, the way she moved through the world, sharp and detached and heartbreakingly self-aware, hit me so hard it almost felt like a violation.
Like someone had taken all the parts of me I was trying to intellectualize and make sense of, and turned them into a character who spoke directly to camera, straight through the fourth wall, and into my chest.

Fleabag wasn’t another manic pixie, cute-and-clumsy, aesthetically depressed TV girl.
She was real. Messy. Morally grey. Sometimes mean. Sometimes numb. Constantly trying to distract herself from the grief, shame, and loneliness she hadn’t figured out how to carry.

And God, did I relate to that.
The quiet ache of wanting to be better while simultaneously sabotaging yourself. The search for something, anything, that could make you feel whole, even if just for a second. The jokes that come too quickly. The sex that doesn't mean anything. The feeling of being too much and not enough at the same time.

“I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning.”
“I want someone to tell me what to eat, what to like, what to hate... what to believe in.”
“I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”

That monologue in the confessional scene broke something in me.
Because haven’t we all, at some point, silently begged for someone to just give us the blueprint? To tell us we’re doing okay or at least tell us what to do next so we don’t mess it up again?

Fleabag never got that clarity. Neither do we.
But somehow, in the chaos of her trying and failing and trying again, I felt seen. Not in a soft-focus, romanticized kind of way. In a raw, honest, you are not alone in this exact feeling kind of way.

But this piece isn’t just about being seen, it’s about the brilliance of the show itself.

Fleabag isn’t just a character study; it’s a masterclass in how to write womanhood without flattening it. It’s grief, shame, sex, humor, loneliness, rage, all tangled together, unapologetically. Phoebe Waller-Bridge didn’t try to make Fleabag likable. She made her true. And that, to me, is infinitely more powerful.

The fourth wall breaks, for example. They’re not just stylistic flair.
They’re survival. Fleabag uses them the same way we use sarcasm or memes or dissociation a momentary escape from the unbearable. She jokes to the audience when she’s uncomfortable. She looks at us to distract from what she’s feeling. And the second someone notices, when the Priest sees her doing it, it feels intimate. Exposed. Sacred. Because isn't that what we all want? For someone to notice the things we do when we think no one’s watching?

Even the subtle symbolism. The fox following the Priest became its own metaphor for longing, for chasing things that don’t make sense but still feel vital.
I’ve had those foxes too. That lingering sense that something is always about to find you. Something unresolved. Something unfinished. Something that wants you to pay attention.

And then, there’s that line. The one that everyone clings to, not because it’s hopeful, but because it’s real:

“It’ll pass.”

When the Priest says it, he’s talking about desire. But it applies to everything.
The heartbreak. The numbness. The guilt. The unbearable lightness of being alive.
It’ll pass. Not in a grand, cinematic way. But slowly. Quietly. And maybe that’s enough.

But there’s another quote, one that doesn’t get as much attention, but that stuck with me even more.
It’s when her father says:

“I think you know how to love better than any of us. That’s why you find it all so painful.”

That line knocked the wind out of me.
Because it reframes everything not as weakness, but as depth. Her intensity, her brokenness, her endless reaching for connection, it’s not proof that she’s unlovable. It’s proof that she’s wired to love deeply. To feel fully. And maybe that’s why it hurts so much because most people don’t meet you at that depth. They stay on the surface. But Fleabag? She’s drowning in it.

There are only two seasons of Fleabag, but it says more in 12 episodes than most shows say in five years.
It doesn’t give you closure. It gives you recognition.
And in a world that constantly demands neatness and healing arcs, I think there’s something revolutionary about that.

Fleabag didn’t save me.
But she made me feel understood. And sometimes, that’s even more powerful.

💌 P.S.

I think we all have that character. The one who cracked something open. The one who made you feel seen in the exact moment you didn’t know how to ask for it. This was mine.