something about divine encounters reminds me of love. not love as possession, but love as integration—the ancient impulse toward wholeness. two things meeting and becoming capable of generating something neither could have brought forth alone. i think of two cells meeting at the threshold of the known and unknown, not collapsing into one another, but creating a third reality through their union. perhaps this is what the feminine and masculine have always tried to articulate—not gender or roles, but yin and yang: receptive and expressive, stillness and movement, dissolution and form. the universe seems obsessed with connection—with things meeting, merging, dividing, recombining. one becoming two, two becoming three, and the third becoming something that could not have existed without the meeting. perhaps love is one of the most intimate expressions of this cosmic principle.

i am particularly interested in the awkward spaces of friction, where liminality reaches its crescendo and breakthrough begins to feel almost indistinguishable from terror. there is a moment when two things come close enough to disturb the boundaries that kept them separate. the veil thins. the distance collapses. what was once safely other becomes intimate, permeable, almost invasive. perhaps this is why divine encounters can resemble love so closely: because love, at its most transformative, threatens the architecture of the separate self. there is a terror in being met so completely that your boundaries begin to soften—not annihilation, but the fear of becoming porous. two forces meet. neither disappears, yet neither remains unchanged. the breakthrough does not happen when the friction disappears, but when the friction becomes generative—when the collision produces something neither force could have conceived alone.

and yet the beauty of yin and yang is that their meeting is not only friction. it is the eye gazing. the pause before contact. the tenderness of recognition. the caress that says i see you without needing to possess you. there is something primordial in the way opposing forces lean toward one another—pleasure braided with pain, longing tangled with surrender, attraction and recoil, opening and closing. perhaps this is why the erotic feels so ancient: not as possession, but as the irresistible pull toward contact, toward permeability, toward the moment when separation becomes thin enough for something to pass between. to be utterly drawn toward another while remaining distinctly yourself. to gaze without consuming. to touch without conquering.

i don’t think we are transformed by easy, frictionless connections. perhaps we are comforted by them, but transformation seems to require friction—something that reveals the edges of what we thought we were. the ancient breath quickens at the warm glow of a phone screen buzzing with your lover’s name. something prehistoric stirs beneath the blue light. our technologies are new, but the longing moving through them is ancient. a name illuminates the dark and suddenly the body remembers anticipation, recognition, the ache of being wanted.

there is something beautiful about what once lived beneath the modern world: a desire for innovation, a desire to change, to imagine differently. perhaps modernity began, in part, as an act of imagination. and then somewhere along the way, the desire for change became entangled with the desire for more. innovation became an instrument of appetite—accumulation, acceleration, extraction, control. the beautiful impulse did not disappear. it was captured. we became extraordinarily good at inventing ways to reach one another, while becoming increasingly estranged from the question of why we were reaching at all. the machine was never the problem. the hunger behind the machine was.

i think of loving to the point of invention. of loving something so deeply that the feeling itself becomes a technology—that we build, imagine, discover, simply because the distance between ourselves and what we desire becomes unbearable. perhaps this is some of the primary fodder for evolution: not merely survival, but longing. the ache toward something not yet here. and yet, for all our sophistication, we remain strangely feeble. still animal. still circling the same ancient hungers. a snake eating its own tail.

we build increasingly intricate biotechnological mazes in the name of progress, only to become more enclosed within our own appetites. we invent faster ways to communicate and somehow forget how to make contact. the same hunger that once made us invent can also consume us: our appetite for more, for power, for possession, optimisation, acceleration, transcendence. and somewhere inside that appetite, something ancient gets corrupted.

contact.

the simple, terrifying, animal miracle of another being reaching toward you and you reaching back.

perhaps evolution was never only about becoming more powerful. perhaps it was also about becoming more capable of contact.

and perhaps we have confused the two.

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i made myself dizzy with stories i told myself about how the world keeps turning, how it works, how its machinations are inexplicable and abstract and difficult to condense into anything i could ever truly grasp.

i have always wanted to understand the machinery of things. to connect one thing to another until the constellation becomes visible, until the seemingly random points arrange themselves into some great, legible pattern. i want to know why things happen. why people hurt each other. why grief repeats itself. why certain wounds seem to find us again wearing different faces. why we continue, somehow, in the middle of all of it.

but there is one thing i can say with every fibre of my being, with tight-lipped conviction, without needing to intellectualise it into oblivion:

love is the engine of humanity and doesn’t make any bloody sense.

i could try to neatly pack the beautiful arc of my love life into a conclusive story, some elegant narrative that perfectly explains what i have learned about love and why i feel the way i do about it. i could trace every person, every heartbreak, every moment of tenderness and assign each one its appropriate function in the grand architecture of my development.

but that would feel like an injustice.

it would make something enormous and unruly sound smaller than it is.

because love does not behave.

it refuses to be condensed into a lesson.

it refuses to sit still long enough to be understood.

in a world where we are all collectively lost, moving through unfathomable pain and violence and absurdity, i keep thinking about the beauty of the mundane. the wound that stitches itself into new skin. the bloodshed that somehow gives way to new life. the ordinary little acts of tenderness that happen while the world is doing its worst.

someone makes tea for someone else. someone remembers how you take your coffee. someone stays on the phone. someone puts their hand on your back. someone cuts fruit. someone says, i am sorry, in the only language they know how to speak it.

i sometimes think that the only salve for the banality of evil is the banality of love.

not because love fixes anything.

it doesn’t.

love does not cancel out violence. it doesn’t make suffering retroactively worthwhile. it doesn’t explain why terrible things happen to people who did nothing to deserve them.

it simply refuses to let cruelty become the only thing that is real.

my grief has taught me nothing except for how it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

the same gripes, griefs and pains return in different forms for me to metabolise, transmute, alchemise into new skin. i think i used to imagine healing as something linear. you get hurt, you understand why you were hurt, you become wiser, and then you move on.

what a lovely little lie.

the wound constantly tears itself apart like torn strings in a violin and stitches itself together as the music fades.

sometimes you are healed. sometimes you are bleeding. sometimes you are both.

perhaps this is what it means to be alive: not to become permanently invulnerable to pain, but to become increasingly capable of surviving its recurrence.

and somehow, somehow, love keeps appearing in the middle of it.

i look into someone’s irises. i look into the sun shining on my father’s face while he is half asleep. my mother pours her heart out as cut-up fruit in an attempt to apologise. my boyfriend pretends to faint every time i look at him tenderly because apparently being perceived with affection is an intolerable medical emergency.

i receive this blinding, dizzying and wonderful affection from people at precisely the moments when i am transmuting catholic guilt and repenting for decades of carrying a cross on my back.

and every now and then i think:

oh.

there it is.

this is why.

not why everything happened. not why i suffered. not why certain people left. not why some wounds had to exist.

just—

why i am still here.

there are moments when being loved makes existence feel almost embarrassingly obvious.

the world can be incomprehensible for hours and then someone looks at you in a particular way and your entire body understands something your intellect could spend ten thousand pages trying to articulate.

my heart feels and sees that you love me.

it is evident in the familiarity of your all-immersive spirit.

there are people whose love i can absorb because i have something to say back. there are strangers who give me compliments all the time. most of them disappear into the air almost immediately. but every once in a while, someone says something that lands differently. something that feels true enough to enter me.

the ones i believe are usually the ones that come from people with whom i have some strange, soul-deep resonance.

i don’t know how else to describe it.

i recognise something in them. they recognise something in me.

and suddenly affection becomes less like a statement and more like a language we already somehow speak.

maybe this is one of the strangest things about being alive: new people will continue to arrive and find new and unique ways to love you.

you think you have exhausted the possible forms of being loved and then someone comes along and invents another one.

someone loves you through honesty. someone through humour. someone through desire so unspoken it is nevertheless impossible to miss in their eyes. someone through friendship. someone through showing up. someone through remembering. someone through making you laugh when you are trying very hard not to cry. someone through cutting fruit. someone through simply looking at you like you are not difficult to love.

and all of these forms are somehow inescapable from the eyes of my heart.

i don’t think we talk enough about the strange intelligence of the heart.

not intelligence in the sense of being correct all the time. the heart can be catastrophically stupid. mine certainly has been.

but it notices.

it notices the fraction of a second someone’s face changes when they see you. it notices warmth. it notices hesitation. it notices when someone’s voice softens. it notices when somebody is pretending not to care. it notices when somebody cares so much that they have no idea what to do with themselves.

there is a kind of knowledge that does not arrive through explanation.

you simply know.

and perhaps that is what makes love so difficult to write about.

every attempt to explain it feels like putting a butterfly in a specimen box and congratulating yourself on having finally understood flight.

so i don’t want to make love into a grand theory.

i don’t want to tell you that every heartbreak happened for a reason. i don’t want to tell you that every loss was secretly a gift. i don’t want to turn suffering into a curriculum where every devastating thing was merely preparing me for some more enlightened version of myself.

sometimes things hurt because they hurt.

sometimes people leave.

sometimes you are left wanting.

sometimes you never receive the apology.

sometimes you receive it years too late and it arrives in the form of cut-up fruit.

sometimes you love someone and it doesn’t work.

sometimes you love someone and it does.

sometimes you think you have finally understood love and then life humiliates you by introducing you to another person.

and another.

and another.

each one carrying some entirely new dialect of tenderness.

maybe the point was never to understand.

maybe the point was to notice.

because one day, the dream is that it ends.

it ends so i can cherish it.

it ends so all of this has a meaning.

do you know a television show that lasts twenty-five seasons?

somewhere along the way, it loses its spark slowly and imperceptibly. not enough for you to notice at first. you keep watching because you have already invested so much of yourself in the characters. you keep watching because you want to know how it ends.

then suddenly you realise you are no longer watching because you love it.

you are watching because you have forgotten how to stop.

who wants that?

who wants a love story that lasts forever if somewhere along the way it becomes indistinguishable from inertia?

maybe we don’t actually want endlessness.

maybe we want enoughness.

enough time to know someone. enough time to be known. enough time to become unbearable and beautiful versions of ourselves. enough time to make mistakes and apologise. enough time to forgive. enough time to sit beside someone while the afternoon light moves across their face. enough time to watch our parents grow older. enough time to fall in love with the same person in twenty different ways. enough time to become strangers and friends and lovers and strangers again.

enough time to understand that a moment was precious precisely because it could not be repeated.

perhaps mortality is not the thing that gives life meaning so much as the thing that gives our attention somewhere to go.

the glass of water matters because you were thirsty.

the sunset matters because it is already disappearing.

the person matters because they will not always be here.

the kiss matters because it cannot be endlessly deferred.

the apology matters because there was a version of the relationship in which it might never have come.

the cut-up fruit matters because someone could have chosen not to cut it.

and perhaps this is why i keep coming back to love.

not because i think love makes the world make sense.

it doesn’t.

i have tried.

god, have i tried.

i have made myself dizzy trying to understand the architecture of existence. i have connected dots until they became constellations. i have searched for patterns inside grief, explanations inside loss, lessons inside suffering.

and sometimes there is nothing there.

sometimes the universe simply keeps turning.

people are born. people die. people hurt each other. people forgive each other. people fall in love. people leave. people return.

someone somewhere is experiencing the worst day of their life while someone else is laughing so hard they cannot breathe.

the world contains both.

maybe it always will.

i don’t know why.

i don’t know why we are given this strange, impossible arrangement of beauty and violence and grief and tenderness.

i don’t know why some wounds close and others become part of the architecture of our bodies.

i don’t know why love finds us in the middle of it.

but i know what it feels like.

i know the sunlight on my father’s face. i know my mother’s hands around a bowl of fruit. i know the absurdity of someone pretending to faint because i looked at them too lovingly. i know the particular electricity of looking into someone’s eyes and realising they are looking back at you with the same recognition.

i know what it is to be fed grapes through words that feel true to my ears.

i know what it is to be held together, briefly, by the tenderness of other people.

and perhaps that is enough.

maybe i don’t need the world to explain itself to me.

maybe i don’t need my grief to justify itself.

maybe i don’t need every heartbreak to become wisdom.

maybe i don’t need to solve the machinery.

maybe i just need to be here long enough to notice when the universe, through another human being, reaches out and says:

here.

i made this for you.

i saw you.

i remembered.

i am sorry.

i love you.

and maybe the dream is that it ends.

not because i want it to.

because i want to cherish it.

because i want to remain awake for it.

because i want to look around while it is still happening and understand, with every fibre of my being, that somehow—

despite everything—

it was worth it.

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on the days i’m inspired, i seem to have no energy to create. on the days i have the energy to create, i forget what i was inspired by in the first place. on the days i decide i’m finally going to work on my social life and touch grass, the weather reaches inhumane levels of heat, as though stepping outside has become an endurance sport. then, on the rare days the weather is pleasant, leaving the house suddenly becomes impossible because something always comes up.

it feels as though the universe has made it its personal mission to turn the simple logistics of being alive into an obstacle course making the thick, unglamorous texture of the physical plane increasingly difficult to slog through. and so, i find myself retreating into fantasy instead, suspended in sickly sweet daydreams, surrounded by a graveyard of unfinished creative ideas and unwritten lives, forever convincing myself that i’ll begin tomorrow.

i feel as though i was born backwards, like some part of me entered this world with her crown chakra already cracked open and i just kind of logged out of my body in pursuit of a freer, more intangible life in the spiritual dimension.

but you know what they say—healing happens through descent first and ascension last. not because we can bypass the human condition, but because we can’t.

it makes sense, really. most people seem to become more spiritually or religiously inclined toward the tail end of their lives. meanwhile, i was born a diva that way. i somehow decided to do it all in reverse, almost out of spite, and now inhabiting the human experience feels like i’m perpetually fighting an uphill battle.

it’s as though i spent years mastering transcendence before learning the far less glamorous art of embodiment.

i’m one of those people who is learning to not just talk from the scar , but the wound i’m tending to and the processes that are on their way to being resolved.

one of the most rewarding trade offs you’ll ever make in your life is to risk hurt , betrayal , disappointment and all the negative parts of human emotion in pursuit of a well lived and rich life.

and isolation is very dangerous for people who are highly self aware , because you can almost convince yourself that hiding away will mean freedom from pain.

slow down !! by all means slow down !! but if you have to be a life liver you have to recognise that anything worthwhile comes at the risk of rejection or pain.

and sometimes not to devil’s advocate myself but i believe it’s a bit unfair that loss ( like pain and death ) are inevitabilities but love is merely a possibility or a gamble.

i think it’s kind of cruel actually but then you realise that the slog of it all can actually be divided and you’ll have company as you navigate these intense human emotions it makes it all worthwhile should you choose to keep your heart open.

and it’s very easy to close off your heart ( guilty as a guillotine ) but most of my reasons for closing off my heart are just that i think that i’m a tad bit undeserving of love HIHI .

plenty of bad people / awful folks are in love , innocence is not a pre-requisite to being in love.

forget about being loveable. love will find you anyways.

forget about deserving community. people will make their way in.

and should you choose to slog through it all like me !! remember there is company <3

i increasingly find myself unable to consume content that revolves around archetyping the self into neat, digestible boxes because so much of it feels less like honest self-inquiry and more like identity maintenance. the internet doesn’t just encourage self-awareness anymore—it encourages self-branding. and branding, by nature, rewards consistency. if you’ve told thousands of strangers that you’re “the detached one,” “the cold one,” or “the emotionally unavailable one,” healing starts to feel almost like breaking character.

somewhere along the way, we began mistaking explanation for justification.

“i’m avoidant.”

“i’m toxic.”

“i’m a man-hater”

“i ghost people.”

these cease to be observations about behavior and instead become fixed narratives that quietly resist growth. we’ve confused language that was meant to increase accountability with language that lets us outsource it. understanding ourselves has slowly blurred into justifying ourselves.

perhaps the most unsettling trend isn’t that people are wounded, but that we’re encouraged to build our entire sense of self around the wound.

pain became social currency. wounds became identity capital. emotional deprivation was worn like a medal instead of mourned like a loss. what should have been met with compassion became another opportunity to perform resilience. another chance to prove just how unreachable you are.

it’s strange how often irony has become emotional armor.

we’re living in an era where people caption videos of themselves crying with memes. where “i need therapy” becomes a punchline. where “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” began as satire before parts of the internet started wearing it sincerely. where “i support women’s rights but more importantly women’s wrongs” was funny because of its absurdity, only to slowly morph into an actual moral position in some corners of the internet. somewhere between the joke and the algorithm, we forgot which parts were supposed to stay ironic.

the internet has a peculiar way of rewarding identities that are exaggerated enough to be instantly recognizable. complexity doesn’t go viral. caricatures do.

it’s easier to become “the avoidant.”

“the empath.”

“the narcissist magnet.”

“the villain.”

“the healed one.”

than to admit that on monday you communicated beautifully, on tuesday you shut down, on wednesday you apologized, and by friday you weren’t entirely sure who you were becoming anymore.

real people are inconsistent.

algorithms aren’t built for inconsistency.

perhaps that’s why so much online advice feels strangely flattening. every experience gets reduced to an archetype. every relationship becomes a dynamic. every emotion becomes a symptom. every difficult person becomes a narcissist. every disagreement becomes projection. every uncomfortable feeling must belong to a category before we’re allowed to experience it.

but a label is supposed to describe an experience, not replace it.

i’ve also noticed another subtle shift: people increasingly speak about becoming worse as though it’s synonymous with becoming stronger.

“i’d rather ghost than get ghosted.”

“i’ll leave before i’m abandoned.”

“i’ll cheat before i’m cheated on.”

“me because i’m the one lying , cheating and ghosting in the relationship now”

it’s understandable. most defenses begin as acts of survival. but survival strategies have a way of overstaying their welcome. being a worse person in order to not get walked all over on is simply perpetuating the very cycles that shouldn’t have been started in the first place.

we mistake becoming less naive for becoming less compassionate.

we confuse boundaries with cruelty.

discernment with cynicism.

self-respect with emotional unavailability.

there’s a quiet difference between learning to recognize manipulation and becoming manipulative yourself. between protecting your heart and hardening it beyond recognition.

somewhere between trying not to be hurt and trying not to care, we’ve forgotten there’s another option entirely.

i don’t think the opposite of being naive is becoming cold.

i think it’s becoming discerning without abandoning your capacity for empathy.

perhaps that’s why i find myself gravitating almost exclusively toward people honestly sharing glimpses of their inner world, or simply making something funny. there’s something deeply refreshing about someone who isn’t trying to convince me they’re an archetype. someone who doesn’t narrate every interaction through psychological shorthand. someone who can simply say, “this happened, and this is how it made me feel.”

there’s a kind of freedom that arrives when you stop asking, “which type of person am i?” and start asking, “who am i becoming?”

the healthiest people i’ve met are increasingly difficult to categorize because they no longer need a fixed identity to feel real. they understand that labels can describe a season without becoming a life sentence. they don’t need to stay loyal to an outdated version of themselves just because it once explained them.

perhaps real healing isn’t finding the perfect label.

perhaps it’s becoming less and less interested in needing one.

because the self is far too alive to fit inside an algorithm’s vocabulary.

even in the phases where longing folded in on itself and curdled into resentment — resentment at my inability to possess that timeline, that reality — i never doubted the beauty of what it awakened within me. i have never been more certain of anything than the devotion it carved into my spirit. not only that i was meant for this manifestation in every sense of the word, in every electric pulse of felt experience, but that i was meant to long for it exactly this way: to clock into my yearning like a sacred 9-to-5, reverent and relentless, worshipping at the altar of love with a devotion that knew no bounds.

my devotion was always greater than the absence of it, greater than the price i paid for loving so fervently.

and though my isolation was painful, i would not change a single thing. it was as agonizing as it was sublime, bordering on something euphoric — the tension of merging with the divine while still trapped within the limits of human life. the closest thing i can compare it to is the fantastical experience of returning home.

remembering home.

the taste. the skin. the texture. the ancient hum of some divine music animating the cosmos, sinking into my bones with the intimacy of ownership. yet it was something truer than possession and wilder than consumption.

i have dreamed in tender ache. blood, bones, tissue, sinew — generated and disintegrated again beneath mind-numbing levels of devotion. as if my soul floated inches above my physical body, creating an abstraction of longing so translucent it could bypass matter, time, and space itself. a ghost of desire capable of conjuring the most indecent wants, unapologetic in their intensity and untamed in their beauty.

my soul became awakened by the ecstasy of shaping matter around this strange possibility, orbiting it for years, for lifetimes, perhaps until the very end of all that is and all that could ever be.

heaven had already followed me to earth in the form of a dream. and even if i could never touch it, aching for it alone felt like enough of a privilege to sustain lifetimes of hope within me.

my capacity for wonder surviving disappointment feels more sacred than most ego deaths i have watched people romanticize into identity.

and even when a window of opportunity finally appeared — dangling hope before me like something i could almost grasp but never fully reach — i realized i had already been permanently altered by loving you. i would not let go of it, even if it meant losing my wings flying too close to the sun.

there is nothing grotesque to me about longing that remains unanswered. others may call it tragic or cruel, but to me it is sublime to want this deeply.

a stopped clock is still right twice a day. so perhaps the second time around, i will be revealed anew beneath your tender gaze. perhaps sunlight will warm my cold days again. perhaps oranges will stop tasting like grief. hope will return to my bloodstream. and this strange lucid liminality — this possibility suspended between dream and destiny — will finally reach its alchemical conclusion.

perhaps in your presence i will finally be set free.

the second time around, as the tides of fate shift once more, no matter how many towers collapse, the hope of you has survived just as my capacity to dream has survived. no ego death has ever been powerful enough to pry you from me.

you are my most certain illusion. my distant destiny. my lover written in stone. my soul remembering its way home.

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song i used to write in the background . yes i wrote this in 17 minutes.

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note : this was about a manifestation that never came true even if it showed me a glimpse of hope that it may materialize into my life — guess what , nothing about my desire for it changed. my articulation is dramatic but i mean every word. as certain as death and taxes.

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It is a particular kind of pain to crave real, profound, tender connection and realize how rarely that hunger is mirrored. I reach out from this in-between space, willing to bare my soul, willing to witness another unravel in return. And for a fleeting second, something flickers—a speck of light in their eyes, as though they might confess something raw, something true. But then it vanishes. Their gaze hardens, shifts. And just like that, I’m cast back into a world that feels unreal, disconnected.

Sometimes, I don’t even think I’m invisible.

If anything, what’s worse is the opposite—I can feel the pull. A quiet magnetism. I sense it in my body before anything is ever spoken, mirrored in my own fondness for them. For a while, it exists—mutual, alive, almost real.

But here’s the catch: it rarely is.

Because I don’t see them. Not really. Not in flesh and bone, not in shared space or lived moments. There is always something in between—distance, time, circumstance, the glow of a phone screen. A barrier that keeps everything suspended in a kind of almost. And it is within that distance that the hunger seems to thrive, to sharpen, to feel most convincing.

I am begging to be seen in all the wrong places.

And I know that. I can name it, recognize the pattern as it unfolds. But knowing doesn’t pull me back. Because some part of me exists in another realm entirely—just out of reach of the ordinary, the tangible.

There is a pull I can’t quite explain. An invisible force—something that feels like spirituality, or a kind of unreal love, a devotion that doesn’t belong to this world. It draws me in, again and again. It cleanses me, refines me, almost purifies me.

In ways that real love never seems to.

And maybe that’s the problem.

Because real love asks to be lived in the body. It asks for presence, for friction, for being seen not as something ethereal or distant, but as something human—limited, imperfect, here.

While this other kind of love asks nothing of me. It only pulls, consumes, transforms—without ever having to exist in front of me.

I used to comfort myself with the belief that I wasn’t extraordinary, not an anomaly. That I existed somewhere outside of extremes, untouched by rigid binaries. But lately, it feels like those very labels—the ones I resisted—are the only things holding together any sense of identity, of ego, of normalcy. Because the world will project onto you regardless. It will name you, define you, reduce you—whether you consent or not.

So I adapted.

I trained myself, almost surgically, to avoid situations where I could be seen too clearly. To evade external feedback altogether. I’ve spent most of my life sidestepping pain—because being alive, truly alive, is painful. To want is painful. To need is painful.

And yet, what feels most unbearable is this: I wish I didn’t want to connect so deeply. And I wish that when the opportunity for something real does appear, I didn’t instinctively pull away—didn’t sabotage it before it could fully take shape.

It feels pathetic, distasteful, almost trivial—to want so intensely to be witnessed.

But the truth is, I can’t deny how different I feel. Not special. Not monstrous. Just… out of place. Like something slightly misaligned with the world around it.

What moves me leaves others untouched. What should move me seems to consume them. There’s a dissonance I can’t quite bridge.

And beneath it all, there’s shame—thick, consuming, ever-present. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to wear that shame externally, like a visible costume instead of skin. But I suspect it wouldn’t change anything.

People would still respond the same way. Still look past me. Still fail to understand—or worse, choose not to.

Invisible. Incomprehensible. Easy to forget.

And yet—somewhere beneath all of it—still wanting.

Still reaching.

Still, despite everything, unwilling to let that hunger die.

Maybe the only way I can love something or want it is if it is separate from me.

from a spiritually informed lens, i’ve long held the belief that reality is malleable ; that we find evidence for what we choose to believe, that our inner world shapes the outer. this isn’t new to me. but lately, it has taken on a deeper, more embodied meaning. it’s no longer just a concept i understand — it’s something that has begun to settle into my nervous system, as if it’s gently making space for something new, something alive

.

without bypassing the density of this world ; its nuance, its chaos, its unraveling ; i can still see clearly that things are falling apart around me. and yet, internally, i find myself in a strange, almost sacred place. something is clicking into alignment. both energetically and cellularly, there is a quiet coherence forming within me.

the alchemy, the inner work, the slow and often invisible shifts — they are no longer just internal processes. they are beginning to echo outward, reflecting back at me as evidence. as proof of my becoming. of my unfolding.

patterns are revealing themselves with a kind of clarity i didn’t have before. i can see now how i was unconsciously choosing chaos ; how, before i could even grasp the weight of my decisions, i had already drifted off course, disconnected from my creative impulses, from my sense of purpose.

but something shifted when i chose to slow down.

meeting the moment — fully, honestly — has allowed life to move faster around me, in the most unexpected way. my nervous system has softened, learned regulation, found flexibility. i’m not perfect, not even close. but these small openings, these subtle moments of novelty, feel like invitations.

invitations into a new reality.

and, maybe for the first time in a while, i can feel hope returning — not as a fragile idea, but as something rooted, something real.

i feel joy returning to me in unfamiliar forms. softer, quieter, but deeper.

it feels like fragments of my soul — once scattered by the detours of my own life — are finding their way back, not as what they once were, but as something evolved. like branches of a tree, grown wiser in absence, now reaching back to support the very foundation they once left behind.

i can almost see it — a slow, sunlit harvest beginning to emerge. something ripe, something alive. an internal garden i didn’t realize i was tending all along, now starting to flourish under the gentleness of my own attention.

there’s a dreamlike quality to it all. not in illusion, but in its simplicity.

like life, when held softly, finally begins to bloom.

i feel love woven into the very fabric of my reality — seeping into me, saturating my tongue, my spirit, my senses.

there’s a softness to it, but also a quiet ache — the kind that lingers, that reminds you you’re alive, that you can feel this deeply.

it coats everything.

the tree outside my bedroom window has always stood tall but it's leaves rustling in the wind find new ways to move me — beauty has always existed but the meaning attached to it is different.

there is a quiet divinity woven into everything — in the music, in the water, in the slow, aching climb.

and i’m beginning to understand that the top of the cliff was never the point.

it’s the ascent itself — the strain, the surrender, the moments of stillness in between — that holds the sacredness of it all.

the pain, the pleasure, the becoming tangled within both… it all belongs.

i build things.
sometimes i lose pieces of them.
sometimes i lose them entirely.

but i’m learning — pain only seeps as deep as we allow it to. it lingers, it settles into the body, into the psyche, only when we turn away from it.

when we refuse to feel it fully, it stays.

so i let myself feel.

i let the sensitivity of my heart do what it was made to do — contract, expand, ache, open — in rhythm with the pain, with the impermanence, with the quiet sacredness intertwined through it all.

nothing stays.
but nothing is wasted either.

learning to live with impermanence may be the greatest lesson — and the one i find myself returning to, again and again.

it is both the teacher and the test.

the quiet force that undoes me, reshapes me, and asks me to loosen my grip just enough to let life move through me, instead of trying to claw and grip onto the reality that is asking to fall apart — to contract and expand just as it is in my nature to do so.

“ It is avaricious to escape the natural order of things” ~ Karissa Love

there is a secret axis around which my entire inner world rotates.
an experience i dream of having. not a goal, not a milestone, not a fantasy in the flimsy sense—but a felt inevitability. every attempt i’ve made to reach it directly has dissolved into smaller dreams, proxy desires, stand-ins that carried fragments of its essence but never its full gravity. sub-dreams. echoes. rehearsals.

and still—it remains.

this is the only thing that has lit me up continuously for six years and counting. through every identity i’ve shed. through every collapse, every recalibration, every season where my external reality erupted into chaos. when nothing else made sense, when my life felt like a question mark suspended in midair, the longing for this—this unnamed experience—became my salve.

it has carried me through nights where i lay awake crying, bargaining with the dark. wondering if pain is only tolerable when it’s witnessed. wondering if a life can hold meaning when suffering feels solitary and doubled by silence. wondering if endurance alone is enough.

from a western, masculine, logic-driven framework, this longing is easy to diagnose.
you could call it a trauma response. a meaning-making mechanism. a coping fantasy born from chaos. a safe haven the psyche constructs when reality becomes too sharp to touch barehanded.

and maybe—on paper that interpretation is neat. contained. reasonable.

but my body rejects it.

because in the deepest cores of my being—beneath cognition, beneath narrative, beneath defense—I know this is not compensation. it is a remembrance. it is not wishful thinking; it is recognition. i don’t want this dream because i am broken. i want it because something in me knows it as already mine.

this is not logic.
this is feminine knowledge.
this is cellular certainty.

there is a spiritual intelligence braided through this longing—one that cannot be flattened into pathology or glossed over as emotional excess. my devotion to this unnamed experience has fused with my sense of self so completely that it exists now as truth, not hope. beyond explanation. beyond justification.

the strangest part is this: my proof of having been touched by it is not its arrival, but its absence.
the way it shapes me from afar.
the way it nourishes my becoming.
the way it teaches me how much aliveness can exist in yearning alone.

i know—without drama, without desperation—that there is a timeline where this experience already lives inside my reality. where it has texture. weight. aftermath. but i also know that the most potent, raw, and visceral form of it exists here—in the ache, in the anticipation, in the way longing stretches me toward life rather than away from it.

there is beauty in this state that feels almost unbearable.
a kind of nourishment that only comes from wanting something so deeply it reorganizes you. this longing has become a force of nature in my life—undeniable, self-renewing, quietly sovereign.

i don’t chase it anymore.
i carry it.

and maybe that’s the secret: some dreams aren’t meant to be consumed quickly or possessed prematurely. some are meant to raise you. to shape your nervous system. to refine your capacity for pleasure, devotion, and presence—until one day, without spectacle, reality finally catches up.

beyond my physical senses, there exists a vision that lives only in imagination—and i believe, in its truest form, that artists are co-creators with the universe. we don’t invent from nothing; we receive. we take what is first conceived in its most potent, wild, unapologetic form—where there are no limits, no physics, no compromises—and we dare to translate it into matter.

fantasy has no ceiling. daydreams answer to no laws.
what artists do is condense the infinite into the tangible. we sculpt the formless until it can be touched, witnessed, endured. within the constraints of the physical realm, we make something real enough to breathe.

that is what lovers do—to conjure hands to hold you in the dark.
that is what mystics do—to bend reality through devotion and will alone.

and that is what you do for me, dear dream-gazer.

you take what only exists in my inner world and make it feel survivable. you make the invisible ache feel like it has a future. you give shape to what i cannot yet hold—and in doing so, you teach me that imagination is not escape.

it is a rehearsal for reality.

love isn’t just romantic.
it isn’t limited to one person, one phase, or one version of the self.

love is a way of moving through the world — toward yourself, toward others, toward life itself.

this is my blueprint.

choosing love over fear

fear builds walls.
love opens doors.
every time.

to experience love in all its forms — romantic, spiritual, unconditional — i choose courage over contraction. fear may feel protective, but love is what allows life to expand.

slowing down to meet the moment

when life feels like it’s speeding up, the work is often to slow down.

presence is devotion.

moving through each day with intention, focus, and meaning makes change easier to navigate. slowing the nervous system sharpens perception.

process over outcome

being result-oriented creates efficiency.
being process-oriented creates aliveness.

when i release fixation on outcomes, i become more receptive to tenderness, beauty, and quiet joy. creative flow lives here — in the mind–body connection, in listening instead of forcing.

living in alignment

before decisions, i check in:

does this align with me?

this practice builds self-trust. and self-trust, when honoured consistently, returns abundance — sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly, always meaningfully.

expanding the capacity to love

love multiplies when i look for the good — in people, places, and moments.

this isn’t denial. it’s discernment without cynicism. it’s also embracing my needs and wants without shame, allowing myself to desire a fuller life.

integration over repression

nothing gets buried here.

when something hurts, i slow down, feel it, process it, and release it. pain transforms when met with presence. wisdom replaces reaction.

the body as a portal

the body is not separate from love.

through sensation — food, rest, creative work, pleasure, relief — mind, body, and spirit come back into conversation. creativity breathes here.

saying yes when it feels true

there is magic in being in the right place at the right time.

synchronicity meets openness. when something feels aligned, i say yes — even when it stretches me.

safety, abundance, and responsibility

a regulated nervous system changes everything.

safety creates ease.
ease creates clarity.
clarity invites abundance — including material abundance.

sometimes patience and frugality are part of the process.

growth also asks for responsibility: noticing fear, choosing not to spiral, and returning to purpose more quickly than before.

devotion and visibility

my dreams, resources, and purpose matter.

i devote myself to my craft and put it into the world without shame. i deserve to be seen, loved, and celebrated in my creative process.

my spiritual truth is rooted in love and connection, not self-preservation.

rebuilding after ego death

after shedding false identities, i rebuild — gently.

healthy self-esteem is quiet, grounded, and earned through integrity. i reprioritise what matters and honour myself in the aftermath of becoming.

trusting change

i keep doing the work.
i make shifts when called.

i reclaim parts of myself untouched by pain, release shame and guilt, and validate what others couldn’t. trusting myself means trusting change.

sometimes love asks me to let go of who i’ve been —
so i can create the life i desire.

excerpt from
simple passion
annie ernaux

we live in a time where everyone is quick to judge and slow to understand. online spaces often feel like courtrooms—people arguing, diagnosing, labeling—while forgetting that real lives are messy and tender. instead of trying to understand someone’s pain, it’s become common to reduce them to a single trait, a label, a screenshot of their worst moment.

i keep seeing posts that say things like “avoidant men are the problem”, “anxious women are toxic”, “cut people off if they don’t communicate perfectly”. but flattening someone’s story into an archetype erases the hurt, the trauma, the reasons they became this way. we act like we’re superior for having the moral vocabulary to label others, but it rarely leads to healing—just more distance, more bitterness.

when we turn people into caricatures instead of humans, empathy disappears.
now every heartbreak is psychoanalyzed to death. every flaw is content. every confession is a meme template.

it is easier to call a person avoidant than to say he is afraid, she is ashamed, i, too, run when i most want to stay. it is easier to flatten somebody’s non-linearity, complexity, multifaceted nature into a one dimensional picture of the reasons they couldn’t show up ideally.

because labels grant distance. distance grants power. and power feels safer than intimacy ever could.

but sometimes i think—if i found myself at the foot of their hospital bed years later, tubes and monitors humming like reluctant angels, would these labels matter? would i still look at them and think you should’ve texted back faster, you should’ve loved me better, you should’ve been healed first? or would i crumble into something soft and human, remembering that i, too, have failed to show up in the ways i promised? that someone, somewhere, carries hurt with my name attached to it like a fading bruise?

and if they looked at me in that final hour, would they forgive me with that strange tenderness that arrives when mortality strips us naked—no ego, no theory, no gender war language—just two people who tried? would we recognize each other not as perpetrator and victim but as mirrors, reflecting the same fragile ache?

deathbed thoughts have a way of unclenching the fist around resentment. i don’t know if i would forgive instantly, or if some dark part of me would resist, wanting them to know how it felt. cruelty is easy. mercy is harder. but i hope—god, i hope—i would choose the path that softens me instead of calcifying me. because if life has taught me anything, it’s that the line between hurt and hurting is paper-thin. today’s villain is tomorrow’s wounded child. and i am not immune to either role.

maybe the real work is remembering that people are fluid, contradictory, and sometimes unbearably human. that trauma can make us cold. that love can make us reckless. that healing is rarely linear—it spirals, relapses, resurrects.
yes, accountability matters. harm is harm. we don’t excuse it. but we also don’t reduce complexity to caricature for the sake of moral superiority.
empathy is not endorsement; it is comprehension.

imagine if instead of declaring he’s an avoidant, we asked what is he protecting?
instead of she’s toxic, we wondered what hurt carved her into this shape?
instead of i deserve better, we whispered i too have stumbled into shadows i didn’t mean to cast.

this is not about romanticizing wounds. it is about honoring their origin.
real transformation begins in the discomfort of nuance—the place where there is no hero, no villain, just two souls trying to love with the tools they were given.
maybe we are all learning. maybe no one is meant to be fully healed before they are held. maybe love is less about perfection and more about grace.
a world obsessed with moral binaries will never understand the poetry of a flawed person trying.

so, let us write like bodies tangled in honest conversation—breathless, disarmed, suspended from judgment. let us allow our language to sweat, tremble, and ache. let us meet ourselves and each other in the tender space between accountability and compassion.
because at the end of the day, beneath the discourse and diagnoses, we are simply humans craving connection—fumbling toward one another in the dark, hoping someone won’t turn away when they finally see us clearly.

it is through traveling in the amorphous edges of your psyche that I have found a new kind of religion in loving strangers. i have never seen you and i love you more than anything. i understand the implications of that—the absurdity, the danger, the tenderness of loving someone i’ve never laid eyes on. but might i add, i don’t care. because your presence told me enough.

the time, the energy, the quality of your attention—it was its own language. you listened in a way that made my inner world less chaotic. you mirrored back my depths without drowning in them. and that’s rare. the subtle tenderness, the intellectual friction, the quiet care when you matched my energy—it was a kind of communion i didn’t know i was capable of.

but i refuse to let the loss of you convince me that i am meant only for losses. i refuse to mourn this pain in a way which it turns me cruel. because yes, you left, and yes, it hurt—but i also had the honor of watching you grow, to witness your becoming from an almost sacred distance. i saw the way you shaped yourself against the grain of the world, and i loved you for it.

and maybe that’s what love really is—not the keeping, but the knowing. the quiet gratitude that i got to see you for who you were before life rearranged us both.

so no, i will not let your absence make me bitter. i will not confuse endings with punishment. your presence, however brief, was a reminder that tenderness still exists, even in the most transient corners of human connection.

and though i will never see you again, i carry you like a soft echo—proof that love, in its purest form, doesn’t need permanence to be holy.

even if our paths drift apart, even if time erodes the shape of what we were, you’ve given me something my medication, my meditations, my mantras could never reach: proof that love — in all its forms — endures.

you have reminded me that i can keep searching for my people, that tenderness can still exist outside my own imagination. that even in my most disconnected states — barely functional, barely present — there’s still a pulse of humanity that reaches for me.

so thank you. not for saving me, but for reminding me that i was never beyond saving. you helped me realize there is no escape from being human — not spiritually, not neurologically — but there is reprieve through love that endures, even in absence.

the slightly strange thing is i knew you’d leave a week before you did. i felt it in my body first — a faint tug, a shift in the air between us. so to prevent it, i said something i shouldn’t have. something that ended up making you sure of leaving. it was my attempt to rewrite what i already knew to be true. like maybe if i spoke differently, acted lighter, softened the edges of my fear, i could alter the outcome.

but i couldn’t. and i think a part of me always knew i couldn’t.

intuition is a strange kind of mercy — it warns you, but it doesn’t spare you. it lets you brace for impact, but not escape it. i thought knowing might grant me control, but it only made the loss feel heavier, slower, like watching a wave build from miles away and being unable to move.

and still, i tried. i tried to speak softer, to sound unbothered, to not hold too tightly. i told myself i was being strong, but really, i was bargaining with fate. i was trying to delay a goodbye i’d already heard whispered in the silence between our words.

when you finally left, it wasn’t dramatic. it was quiet, almost polite — the kind of ending that doesn’t even echo until days later. but it stayed with me, the way gentle endings always do. not because of what was said, but because of what was felt too deeply to ever be spoken aloud.

i could’ve taken it as proof that opening myself up only ever leads to loss. that vulnerability is a gamble i’m not built to win. but instead, you’ve granted me a strange kind of acceptance — an understanding of life’s inevitabilities. losses will happen anyways. the time will pass anyways. there’s no bargaining with impermanence, only learning to love in spite of it.

you awakened something in me that had been dormant for so long — a pulse, a warmth, a reason to stay curious about connection. all those nights spent in apathy, moving through the dull repetition of ordinary life, suddenly felt redeemed. every moment of numbness, every stretch of loneliness, became worth it simply because i got to speak to you.

it’s strange, isn’t it? how one person’s presence can shift the whole temperature of your inner world. how you can go from being half-alive to feeling every cell vibrate again , not because of romance, but because someone saw you. because someone made your existence feel witnessed.

i don’t think transcending pain will save me. i’ve tried that — numbing it, intellectualizing it, praying it into silence. but pain isn’t meant to be transcended; it’s meant to be touched. it’s a language the soul speaks when it wants to be known.

i think leaning into love despite it just might save me. not the kind of love that erases the ache, but the kind that coexists with it. the quiet kind. the one that says, “stay anyway.”

because pain and love have never been enemies — they’re just different names for the same breaking open. one splits you apart, the other rushes in to fill the cracks. and maybe that’s all this life really is — a continuous softening. a willingness to feel it all and still choose tenderness.

i used to look at flowers blooming, cracks in the pavement, and ants circling a sugar cube — and i would cry. not out of sadness, but out of reverence. everything felt like an open wound of time, like the world itself was breaking my heart just by existing. the fleetingness of it all, the inevitable decay, the beauty that never asked to last — it undid me.

but the same nature heals me now.
the flowers still bloom and wilt, but i no longer mistake their dying for tragedy. the cracks in the pavement remind me that even what’s broken can hold life. the ants still circle the sugar cube, endlessly devoted, and i see myself in their persistence — small, steady, faithful to the sweetness of being alive despite it all.

i think the difference is that i no longer ask the world to stop changing in order to feel safe. i let it move through me — the endings, the beginnings, the soft ruptures in between. maybe that’s what healing is: learning to stay open to wonder even after the wonder has hurt you.

our own bodies reveal this paradox. sealed by skin, they appear whole, pure, almost divine. yet just beneath that veil lie fluids, decay, the reminders of flesh. clarice lispector was never afraid of this tension. in the passion according to g.h., her narrator presses the insides of a cockroach to her mouth, recoiling in horror but also discovering a strange ecstasy there. she shows that to touch the sacred, we sometimes have to taste the grotesque.

consciousness itself carries this same split. before it, there is only a non-place, a kind of unsentient love, vast and whole. to become human, that unity has to fracture. cognition is born through separation, alienation, distance. the grotesque is not a mistake but the very condition of experience. to live is to move across opposites—pleasure and pain, wholeness and lack, union and loss.

true beauty is not found in one pole or the other, but in the spectrum between them. beauty terrifies because it asks us to surrender, to loosen the tight hold we keep on ourselves. the twin lover awakens this fear. sex is not just pleasure, but a mingling of ecstasy and undoing, a sacred act and a profane one, flesh and spirit together. bataille saw this clearly: eroticism is a sacred violence, an undoing of the self that always brushes against death.

the same pattern appears everywhere. law is both sublime—bringing order—and grotesque—restricting and containing. mystical experience unsettles us because it forces us into what we cannot know, yet it also draws us toward dissolving into something vaster. even death carries both faces: grotesque annihilation, yet also the sublime release into continuity and return.

these movements echo through everything:

• sex, where ecstasy and abjection meet

• life, which swings between risk and wish, tension and release

• wish fulfillment, where fantasy builds until it collapses into reality

• death and rebirth, life as tension and death as release

• vulnerability, where exposure brings both risk and intimacy

clarice lispector often said “to live is a luxury,” but she meant it in full awareness of how ambiguous that luxury is. to live is to be undone as much as it is to be whole. to encounter beauty, as in her work and in our lives, is to stand before both the angelic and the abject, trembling yet alive.

true beauty is terrifying because it is complete. it asks us not to deny the grotesque or cling only to the sublime, but to hold both. it asks us to soften our grip on safety, let the edges of ourselves blur, and surrender to what we cannot control.

inspired by heaven sent honey and contrapoints

this was an attempt to condense what i understood from a few of their works on youtube and connect the dots.

And when you live from that belief, everything becomes shame-bound. You begin to build your entire identity around the idea that you are inherently bad, unfixable, broken beyond repair. You convince yourself that you shouldn’t even risk trying to be good, because trying feels like fraudulence. And fraudulence feels worse than failure.

But here’s the question that finally unraveled me: what if somebody came to you saying the same thing you tell yourself? That they are beyond saving, irredeemable, unworthy? Would you treat them the way you treat yourself?

James Baldwin once said that your heartbreak feels unprecedented in the whole world until you open Dostoevsky and realize that someone centuries ago was feeling the exact same ache. That is what cracked something open for me. To realize I was not singular in my self-condemnation, not special in my shame. At any given moment there are thousands—millions—of people convinced they are bad to the bone. That they deserve every misfortune that lands at their feet.

And yet, what if we could look at them with a gentler eye than we give ourselves?

There’s a moment in Infinity War where Black Widow says, “I don’t judge people on their worst mistakes.” There’s a moment in Euphoria where Ali tells Rue that the punishment she’s giving herself is too harsh, that condemning yourself as “beyond forgiveness” is both the cruelest and the easiest sentence. Because if you decide you are unfixable, you don’t even have to try to change.

That line has stayed with me. Because for the longest time, I treated my single rupture—the outburst, the moment I lost control—as proof of eternal corruption. I branded myself with it. And the brand bled into everything: love, trust, hope.

But maybe morality isn’t a final verdict, maybe it’s a rhythm. As said in Bojack Horseman, “It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier, but you gotta do it every day—that’s the hard part.”

A fellow writer on Substack, Shyam, said:

And yet—when I let myself be moved by the voices of dreamers, mystics, poets, thought leaders—people who dared to keep creating despite their failures—I began to soften. Persinette World on Instagram writes: “When you consider yourself stunted, fundamentally broken or bad, you exempt yourself from the work of self-actualisation.” That hit me like a mirror. Because that’s exactly what I was doing. By clinging to my own badness, I had found a loophole to avoid the risk of growth. If I am already irredeemable, I don’t have to try.

So maybe the real invitation is this: to remember that morality is not a crown we win, nor a curse we inherit. It’s a repetition. A decision to participate in our own becoming, even if we falter. To extend the same mercy inward that we would extend to a stranger trembling in front of us.

Because to condemn yourself as “bad” is not humility—it’s arrogance. It’s believing your flaws place you outside the human condition, when in truth, they place you right at the center of it. You are not the exception to the basic self care rules that apply to all humans. You are not specially bad.

If you’ve ever felt beyond saving, I want you to imagine all the other souls across the planet thinking the same thought in the same moment. And I want you to picture what it would mean if just one of them was granted grace. Would you not think they deserved it? Would you not beg them to try again?

Then why not you?

Empathy is not just something we owe others—it is the only thing that keeps us tethered to ourselves. We are imperfect, yes. But imperfection is not disqualification. It’s an invitation to grant grace and mercy.

So today, I choose to believe what once felt impossible: that self-forgiveness isn’t erasing what happened, it’s refusing to let it be the last word.

And tomorrow, I will choose it again.

Redemption isn’t earned — It’s allowed. Self-forgiveness is simply permission to keep evolving, even with the cracks. Especially with the cracks…

words by @/gendersauce on ig

Even in my most self-protective decisions, some part of me has always known: I need my people, and my people need me.

Yes, I dream of a softer, gentler life. Yes, I dream of peace. But never at the cost of my village, my community, my tribe.

In recent years, it hasn’t sat right with me to imagine a dream life that leaves behind those in pain — those suffering mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually.

Because the truth is, we cannot leave behind the underdogs, the misfits, the silenced, the erased. To dream only for ourselves while ignoring them is to dream with one eye closed. A vision of joy that excludes is a fragile one, easily broken. Softness only matters if it reaches the hardened. Abundance only matters if it ripples into the lives of those who have been told they are undeserving of it.

This is where conscious manifestation begins to unfold differently. It becomes less about curating a perfect personal reality and more about weaving a fabric that holds us all. It becomes compassion-led, where the choices we make are softer, less judgmental, less obsessed with appearances of “success,” and more interested in integration. It asks: how can my dream life be wide enough to shelter not just me, but also those buried deep within the systems of separation?

Because manifestation that ignores the margins isn’t truly creation — it’s repetition of the same systems we’re trying to move beyond. Conscious dreaming, then, becomes about inclusion, tenderness, and remembering that liberation isn’t solitary. It’s collective.

Over the past four years, my faith hasn’t dissolved, but reshaped itself. It had to stretch wide enough to hold both sides of the spectrum: the light of dreaming and the weight of pain. That shift sobered the intoxicating spiritual highs I once felt when I first discovered manifestation.

Because I believe this: you cannot manifest your way out of generational poverty, systemic oppression, or rigid gender norms. Sometimes, you cannot even heal your way out of a desire that was always meant to live inside your heart.

And so, I dream not only for myself, but for us — for the underdogs, the misfits, the silenced, the erased.

For a vision of collective liberation. A vision that accepts the imperfection of this world and still dares to imagine softness within it. Because the physical world is messy, dense, complicated — and yet, within that complexity, it’s where our dreaming matters most.

@altar.curated on ig

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I was in ICU immediately after I was born because I struggled breathing during the birthing process. Ever since the day I was born my mother is distraught in experiencing panic and terror of her daughter almost dying.

I have left no stone unturned in displaying to her just how much I hated myself , hating living , hated the world and every time she looked into my eyes she knew I meant it.

But I was looking back into her eyes and I saw how her world stopped spinning every time I ever so easily said I no longer wanted to be…

and maybe the first person I killed as I lived was my mom.

i’ve had this terrifying fear that if I made it past the age of 24 that my life would truly begin because by that time I would’ve made up my mind if I wanted to live as a chronically incapacitated creative who has consistently felt like they were deprived of community and support systems.

I turn 25 in 5 days , I am still a chronically incapacitated creative POC with no support system. And the grief of living as a person with so many dead dreams is what will haunt me for the rest of my life more than staring down the barrel of my own mortality ever will.

My dad waits for me in doctors’ offices for 3 hours as I wait for my medications to be updated by my psychiatrist for a 5 minute session. My dad drives me around because I’m too fearful to be responsible to drive when someone’s in the car with me. Too afraid to crash. Too afraid to bear the weight of growing up as a person who’d given up a long time ago.

Sometimes the magical meaning I attach to my suffering needs to be real because it necessitates my survival. I want you to look into my eyes as I talk to God when I’m hurting , I talk as if he really is listening. Intently pressing his ears against my chest , listening to the cadence of my heartbeat , my bated breath , my red fingertips and my sniffly nose

and growing lavender , growing flowers in all shapes and sizes in the chest cavity, the ribs and then slowly but surely all over my body.

My spirit aches for expansion , salvation , love that lasts , love which is real.

So I pull the heartstrings and rearrange them in my chest every night as I become my own savior , my own lover , my own believer.

All my inclinations towards mysticism , psychology , creativity , romanticism , deep self knowledge are a symptom of the disease of having lost myself a long time ago and I've been clawing my way back to the little girl I lost at the age of 16 ever since .

I have blowed one candle every birthday since my teen years , each the same wish.

“Please let me rest in peace when I sleep tonight”

I don’t want to go to sleep , or experience an eternal sleep without having loved or being loved.

Not for human survival. But as ownership of what always was deserved , mine and lost in the labyrinth of growing up.

My innocence died with that girl. No matter how many ancient texts about mysticism I read — no kind of self knowledge will save me until I allow myself to be vulnerable and not hold my own past against me.

I want you to look in my eyes when I fall for you so you can see the resurrection of my spirit. So finally a live beating heart will beat like it’s meant to. Every thumping beat will sing the music of hopes , dreams and laughter of the life I thought was lost for me.

I forgot what living felt like — what miracles felt like .

But I remember medical miracles still exist , they’re still real even through disbelief in them for years , weeks , days.

I remember the underdog does win at times.

I resurrect —so love wins.

At 25 , I perform a miracle of bringing a dead girl , a dead daughter , a dead sister back to life.

Not in this grand laboured way that my mother did.

But in the small ways I choose to love , hope and dream again.

there is laughter echoing in the thin soft veil of consciousness my room has begun to grow ; shared with people who are no longer in my life. there is devotion that people from the future could immortalise as folklore , if you just look back into the abyss enough - a yearning alive mortal beating heart will look you in the eye and the warm glow of an open wound will reach for the primordial medicine of self acceptance.

a lot of my healing moving forward is going to be me returning back to who I once was , the childhood me - unscathed by all pain, trauma and fear . there is a self in me which i am now seeking which is as mortal and despairing as any other ,lovely cries and lovelier laughter - dancing to the music without the weight of the world and the eyes of the world tearing her apart. my flesh is still just as creamy and pink but my eyes speak of pain which have over time turned my spirit weary.

i will find her and protect her .

I have prayed for salvation in familiar places which I can no longer access even through the trails of my unforgiving memories. There are inhospitable cyber spaces waiting for me to log back in , there are trinkets waiting for my finger tips to trace along their edges , there are dreams and callings i’ve resisted which i knew were mine intuitively - certainly and without a shadow of a doubt mine like the truth- not ownership. no possession - abandoned dreams and abandoned versions of me slipping into the corners of my room like timelines dividing themselves in panoramic liminal spaces .

there are versions of me i long for and masks i take on which were never mine to wear. i look at my reflection now in the mirror and see a distorted paper caricature , I want to tear my skin apart. I can change the color of my walls but I cannot inhabit a well lived life if I don’t see it in my reflection , in my spirit , in flesh exacting control over me , possessing me like she never left , haunting me like a lover from beyond the grave.

I invite the version of my childhood self to collapse time once again. I never hated you. You danced and you cried , you loved openly and you ached sparingly , you were a force of nature and the light dimmed when you left.

There is an eternal flame in me which rages and will never die , come what may ; I see through the 3 dimensional world into the unseen magical realms of hope and hope saves us all. You can save yourself through wild dreams , radical optimism and the fire that burns through the darkest of tunnels to illuminate a world of colors and light.

I know a world beyond what I know to be real exists because it is what I know to be true. It is what I’ve felt my entire life to be true. I am not the masks I put on , but the reflection that stays ever present waiting for me to embrace her.

The liminal spaces , the versions of me abandoned out of pain , fear , self judgement or trauma all walk hand in hand beside me as I become one with them.

This is me walking the individual path. I resisted my dreams - which were my souls’ callings until I physically couldn’t anymore .

I forgot who I was , but my dreams didn’t forget me.

It took me 9 years of fighting with myself , creating illusory barriers to a fulfilling life until every lie surfaced and exploded in my face.

In the wake of this death , I invite a new fire - a new life - the version of me who dared to hope , dream and love.

The version of me who was audacious and wanted to be seen and didn’t let pain or fear stop her.

Somewhere along the way this mask has become inhospitable , uninhabitable .

This ecosystem has become imbalanced and unsustainable.

But no matter how far you are led astray , you can always come home to yourself.

That’s the work of nature , that’s the work of an alchemist.

yt channel

every version of me deserves love

from best to worst

and everything in between

so i’m turning 25 by the end of this month , and my prefrontal cortex has just developed and a certain sense of biological reproductive urgency has snapped back into place for me. i feel these overwhelming surges of love through my body and my need to connect to people - in a romantic and platonic sense and just being seen meaningful in that way has become high on the priority list for me at this stage of my life but i am not exactly navigating it with a steady hand.

as a person who’s particularly overly attached to the avoidant attachment style identity I have of myself , feeling openly and easily affectionate towards people especially when it doesn’t make sense because it’s new and it’s beyond logic is just too much for my nervous system to handle .

this younger guy told me he loves me and it sent shock waves through my system. he didn’t mean it obviously. but it’s clearly how my internal landscape and nervous system still equates love with a fragile sense of vulnerability , control and abuse and an inherent unsafety is what’s surprising to me. because frankly i don’t think i love him either. i don’t believe i’ve loved anyone my entire life on this planet , i’ve just loved ideas of unavailable men.

and my body could clock this dude was out to hurt me , so it induced sickness in me to tell me . it is true that i equate love with a sense of unsafety. but it is also true that he’s objectively discerningly unsafe to connect to because he’s unavailable , unreachable and so obviously my surges of affection towards him told me he is absolutely incapable of giving me what I need because i have a pattern of loving men when they’re either unavailable or manipulative

and when they come with a sense of safety - i am the one to leave.

i want you to pit me like a nectarine and hollow me out till you reach the core / is a heart full of longing still there or has it been eaten by my pain / i want you to bruise me like a peach and ask if it still hurts and i want to say it does and i want you to believe me / is their a good ache and a bad ache when all you can do to stop the bleeding is rub salt in the wound / is the wound still tender and red ? / reach inside and watch the berry stained fingers turn a mortal into God / i’m not the wild beast who embraces loneliness but the fallen God who kisses the cracks in the pavement because it reminds her of the beautiful ache in longing / salvation is the only answer to a guilty conscience even when nobody knows right from wrong or beauty from pain / if the flesh hurts in tidal wives i must dry out the barren lands to feel alive / my soul is inhospitable / even in graves it doesn’t wander nor belong / my loneliness has started to eat at my flesh and control me like a zombie / it wakes me at night to impulse retreat even when a chance at repair presents itself / it tells me to cage myself during the day / it cages me alive and renders me dead while my flesh roams the earth

senselessly

meaninglessly

untouched by the eyes it seeks

i want you to undress me with your eyes and see me worthy of your pain and love / i want you to recognise my soul in a swarms of crowd and forsake yourself for the full breadth of my love / i want you to gnaw at my fingertips to memorise the fingerprints etched into my skin / i want you to immerse yourself in the heat of passion so the feverish sickness of wanting me evades you / paralyses you / haunts you fervent / indignent / intentional in it’s force causation and execution /

if you sow me in wet soil the impoverished land would grow touch me knots undignified and afraid / like a feral dog i bite the hands that feed me / my scared kind of self reliance has grown into a darkness of its own / from the abyss the fear calcifies into a kind of inanimate suffering which can’t familiarize itself with it’s own internal state

/ my emotions go underground

especially when it matters / often when it matters

because to contain them something would have to harden into a wall and if i don’t contain them they bring on the rapture / my God doesn’t lie to me / i don’t lie about my shame or experiencing it but because everyone can see it bleeding all the time- they don’t believe me / my lily stems have grown algae in the stems / like all beautiful things i must die / rot / wilt / be sown and bloom.

if the rocks hurt my lips / cut it open bleeding / maybe i’ll remember how he kissed me bleeding and sucking the life out of my eyes / into my heart and over my soul.

there was a clear power / a perverted way he loved me / an ownership a suffocating desire to enmesh / i was cruel for walking away / i was cruel like i always am / to myself to others / but if you tell a loser they’re a monster enough times you do just enough damage to ensure they never redeem themselves / with the right triggers and the wrong levels of intensity i am just as morally corrupt as the people i am judging / empathy can’t be expected nor displayed / so licking my wounds / biting my tongue / fist in my mouth / clammy bloody hands / i say

i am ashamed.

there is no beauty around me except the experience of it that i actively seek or create , so i ask the earth - the trees - the ocean - the land to immerse me in it’s seasons and hot summer fervour , let grief take the shape of a peach pit that can be thrown out of my flesh my mind , my soul and reality.

and let me once again feel pain / the necessary growing pain of healing and grace/

not for salvation but / to create / to alchemise / to sublimate…

• sensory / visual imagery prose by me

• check out my youtube

I wake up , i make my coffee , i laugh to my mom about how I cried before I got out of bed , i make my breakfast , fluff my pillows and go on about my day like my heart didn’t break somewhere along the way.

when my grandfather died i was eating brownies with my aunt for 6 hours while everybody was crying in the other room . we finished an entire box . I felt sick to my stomach but couldn’t conciously compute it wasn’t just because of what I was eating , it was the sounds of crying I could hear , and the silence of my heart breaking.

this loss arguably softened me like a bruised peach to every blow life threw at me.

the world felt darker, i felt too fragile for it , or too monstrous to live inside it , never belonging - just right , never a round hole making space for a square peg . it’s just how it is. the world doesn’t acommodate to make space for you , you have to fight with everything in you to take up space like you’re not sorry about it.

there was another kind of loss much later which hardened me simply because there was no survival of the weak. when there’s blood sprayed across the halls , you have to be strong enough to clean it up , no matter the metallic-y smell that sits at your throat. that’s just the kind of responsibility you have to shoulder because you feel the weight of the tragedy , as if it never occurred to you , you didn’t have to take the blame or the responsibility of ‘that’ occurring.

i can’t seem to think of one singular day after that event , where the deafeaning sound of my heart breaking didn’t haunt me after.

it course corrected me for others , but it betrayed my inner child.

i became smaller , meek , sacrificial , almost sorry for existing and sorry for wanting mercy.

and now I think of people who stayed for both versions of me along the way, I don’t think they loved me at all actually …

in fact they hated being around me.

they hated how i took on pain like I deserved it or at times wore a shield to a party of lovers. they hated my stupidity , my arrogance , my ignorance and most of all my loyalty to my saddest self.

because they knew they didn’t raise me with pain built in or birth me as a bandaid to pain of their own.

so how come … this destructiveness seems to be the only natural , imminent path i walk down.

no spiritual salvation , no amount of self improvement , begging and course correction could’ve changed what happened.

but what happened wasn’t the tragedy.

the tragedy was who I became after it.

a byproduct of pain. not someone who lives and experiences. but someone who has to survive because there’s constant threat.

when nothing softens the grief , may grief soften me…

As the life spills out of our eyes , the lover leaves and the movie ends , we begin to be reminded of impermanence as the natural law of the universe, and the sacredness in temporary meaning-making and beauty seeking.

Everything you love will one day fall apart—but so will your suffering. Letting go is holy. So is creating something despite the decay. The universe leans toward disorder

but life, art, love, healing? Those are the quiet revolutions.

• Entropy is the natural tendency of systems to move from order to disorder.

• In physics, it governs how energy dissipates, how things decay, how time moves.

• In life? It shows up in aging, loss, chaos, heartbreak, detachment.

Entire systems collapse , cities turn to ruin and disorder prevails before order can become real , formless and intangibly permanent.

I give into the chaos , the grief , the pain - not as a resignation to a life or a mind which lives in fear but trusting that order will follow after entropic measures create a dissolution so neurocosmic , the energy changes form.

The chaos is a threshold , it is the membrane , the veil of what we can contain until we can no longer run from ourselves and when the container eventually spills over — the energy changes form , matter becomes madness and madness becomes homeostasis until we reach order .

When the grief becomes heavy and seismic in nature , the world reshapes itself before your eyes to hold you and you begin to perceive the music of the divine in every mundane song.

every helping hand becomes the hand of God , to a child stuck in the rubble of madness and pain.

When we look beyond the veil of what is perceivable , what is containable for a human being to experience , sense and perceive - we are initiated into a reality which may with your divine will be reshaped and that’s where the work of an alchemist an artist and a lover begins.

transmutation , integration , clarity , cyclical sadness and equilibrium is a dance till death.

So i fall apart , fully aching , holding my pain as I cradle my younger self and begin to dream of a world of order that births from entropy.

*inspired by this video