There was a time when I genuinely didn’t think I would make it.

I remember that night more than I wish I did. I remember how dark everything felt, how loud my thoughts were, and somehow, at the same time, how completely empty I felt. I was alone with a kind of pain I didn’t know how to explain to anyone.

I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow.

I wasn’t thinking about school, my friends, my mom, my sister, or anyone else who loved me. I wasn’t thinking about what would happen afterward. I was thinking about one thing: I want all of this to stop.

And at the time, stopping everything felt like the only solution I could understand.

That is the frightening thing about being in that kind of darkness. Your mind becomes so exhausted that you start confusing the end of your pain with the end of yourself.

I convinced myself that everyone would be better off without me.

I thought my parents would have one less person to worry about. One less person to support. One less problem to carry.

I thought my friends would eventually forget me.

I thought the world would simply continue turning, and maybe that was proof that I wasn’t important enough to stay.

Looking back, I can see how distorted that thinking was.

But I don’t want to hate the version of me who believed those things.

She wasn’t selfish.

She was hurting.

She was tired.

She didn’t know how to ask for help.

And maybe that’s what I wish I could tell her now.

You don’t have to understand how you’re going to survive the rest of your life. You only have to survive the moment you’re standing in.

I wish I could tell her that the things hurting her wouldn’t always have the same weight. That people she hadn’t met yet would eventually matter to her. That there would be ordinary mornings she would be grateful to wake up for. That there would be songs she hadn’t heard yet, places she hadn’t seen, jokes she hadn’t laughed at, photographs she hadn’t taken, conversations she hadn’t had.

There would be versions of herself she hadn’t met yet.

I almost didn’t get to meet them.

And that thought breaks my heart.

Because now, when I look back, I’m not grateful because everything magically became perfect.

It didn’t.

Life still hurts sometimes.

I still have bad days. I still get overwhelmed. I still have moments where everything feels heavier than it should.

But I’m here.

And being here means I get to experience things my younger self couldn’t imagine.

I get to grow.

I get to change my mind.

I get to become someone she wouldn’t recognize.

I get to look back at that girl and say, you were wrong about one thing.

You were not a burden.

You were not disposable.

And the world was not better without you.

If you’re reading this while you’re somewhere that feels impossibly dark, I won’t insult you by telling you to simply “be positive.” I know sometimes getting through the night is the biggest thing you can accomplish.

So tell someone.

Tell your friend. Your sibling. Your parent. A teacher. A counselor. An adult you trust.

You don’t have to explain it perfectly. You can literally say, “I’m not okay and I’m scared of what I might do.”

Let someone sit with you in it.

You deserve to see what happens next.

I am so glad I stayed long enough to find out.

I Think I’ve Been Yearning

I think what I’ve been feeling for the past few months is yearning.

Which is funny because I used to think yearning was such an internet word.

You know the kind.

A pretty girl on Pinterest looking out of a rainy window. A slowed song. A paragraph about missing someone you can’t have. A TikTok with 3 million likes saying something like “yearning is the most beautiful form of love.”

I never understood it.

I thought people were being dramatic.

I don’t anymore.

Because yearning is actually horrible.

It is loving someone from a distance and somehow still finding ways to make them feel close to you.

It is thinking about someone who isn’t thinking about you.

It is missing someone without actually having anywhere to put that missing.

IT IS EMBARRASSING.

And I hate admitting that I am yearning for someone. Especially because I don’t even know if I want them anymore.

I think I want the feeling.

That’s the worst part.

I’m chasing a high someone gave me two whole years ago.

Two years.

That sounds insane when I actually say it.

Two years ago, I was getting to know someone and everything felt so fucking new.

Every little thing meant something.

A conversation could keep me awake for hours. I could reread messages and find meanings that probably weren’t even there. I could imagine what we’d look like together, what we’d be like, what we’d do, where we’d go. I could build an entire relationship before the relationship even existed.

And maybe that’s pathetic.

Maybe it was delusional.

Maybe it was a little crazy.

But it was comforting.

I miss that.

I miss being excited to learn someone.

I miss wondering what someone’s favorite song is. What makes them laugh. What they’re like when they’re tired. What they’ll tell me when they trust me enough.

I miss the anticipation.

I miss having a person who feels like a question I desperately want the answer to.

And I’ve tried to get that feeling again.

Trust me.

I’ve tried.

I’ve talked to other people.

I’ve let people flirt with me. I’ve flirted back. I’ve tried to be interested. I’ve tried to give people a chance because I keep telling myself that maybe I’m just being stupid.

Maybe the next person will make me forget.

Maybe I’ll finally get that feeling again.

But then I don’t.

And I feel horrible because the person I’m talking to hasn’t even done anything wrong.

They’re just not that.

And I hate that.

I hate comparing a real person to a feeling that happened two years ago. Because how could they possibly win?

They’re competing with nostalgia.

They’re competing with a version of someone that lives in my head.

They’re competing with the beginning, and beginnings are unfair because you haven’t learned all the reasons you shouldn’t love someone yet.

You just get to imagine them.

You get to fill in the blanks.

And sometimes the person in your head is so much easier to love than the person standing in front of you. I think that’s what I’ve been doing. Holding onto a version of something.

Not because it was perfect.

Not because I necessarily want it back exactly the way it was.

But because of how I felt when it was happening.

I felt wanted.

I felt curious.

I felt excited.

I felt like something was beginning.

And I haven’t been able to recreate that.

So now whenever I talk to someone new, there’s this horrible little voice in my head asking,

Is this it?

Is this supposed to feel like that?

Why don’t I feel the same way?

And if I don’t, I pull away.

I don’t even mean to.

I just can’t help it.

Because suddenly I’m aware that I’m trying to make someone else give me a feeling that they never promised to give me.

And that’s exhausting.

It’s also really lonely.

Because you can be surrounded by people and still feel like you’re waiting for one specific person to make something inside you feel alive again.

And I don’t even know if that’s fair.

Maybe I shouldn’t be waiting at all.

Maybe I should stop expecting someone else to bring back a version of me that doesn’t exist anymore. But knowing that doesn’t make it easier. That’s the thing nobody tells you about letting go.

Sometimes you understand everything and still can’t let go.

You can know that something isn’t good for you.

You can know that it’s over.

You can know that you’re romanticizing it.

You can know that you’re remembering the good parts more than the bad.

And you can still miss it.

You can still wake up and think about it.

You can still wonder what would happen if things had gone differently.

You can still feel stupid for caring.

I think that’s where I am right now.

I feel stupid.

I feel sad.

I feel tired.

And, honestly, I feel embarrassed that something that happened two years ago can still have this much power over me.

I don’t want to romanticize yearning anymore. I don’t want to make it sound beautiful just because it’s painful. It’s not beautiful to constantly want something you can’t have.

It’s not beautiful to compare everyone new to someone from your past.

It’s not beautiful to keep reopening a door that probably isn’t yours anymore.

It’s just exhausting.

And maybe I don’t even miss the person.

Maybe I miss being that girl.

The girl who was excited.

The girl who could imagine a whole future from a conversation.

The girl who hadn’t learned yet that sometimes you can feel something incredibly strongly and still not get to keep it.

I think I miss her. And maybe that’s why I’ve been yearning so hard.

Because somewhere in all of this, I’m not just trying to find them again.

I’m trying to find me again.

And I don’t know how to do that yet.

I just know I’m tired of looking backwards.

Even if a part of me is still standing there.

There is a story that almost every girl knows.

Not a fun one. Not the story of your first crush or your first heartbreak. Not the story of sneaking out, staying up too late, or laughing until your stomach hurts.

The story.

The one told quietly, carefully, in pieces.

At sleepovers. In late-night voice notes. During random moments when someone says, “Wait… that happened to you too?” And suddenly everyone goes quiet because, somehow, every girl in the room understands.

Maybe it was a parent’s friend who lingered too long. A cousin who crossed a line. A boyfriend who kept pushing after “I don’t know” became silence. A trusted friend. A stranger. An older person who should have known better. Sometimes someone your age who didn’t care enough to stop.

And the horrifying part is not just that it happened.

It’s how normal it feels to say it out loud.

Why does almost every girl have the story?

Why is it so common that we talk about it like a rite of passage? Like growing up as a girl comes with invisible milestones: first period, first heartbreak, first violation.

As if somewhere in the handbook of girlhood there’s an unwritten sentence that says: this will happen to you eventually.

I recognize that boys go through it too. Yes, they do. More than people talk about. More than many people realize. Especially when teenage boys are exposed to sexual experiences with older women and are told they’re “lucky” instead of recognizing that being exposed to sexual touch before you’re ready, or without true consent, can still be abuse.

Pain does not become less real because someone laughs at it.

But there is something haunting about girlhood, the almost expectedness of violation.

The way girls swap stories and realize nobody is shocked.

Nobody even asks if.

Just when.

I think that’s what scares me the most.

How deeply normalised it has become.

How we teach girls safety before we teach boys accountability. Cover up. Don’t walk alone. Share your location. Don’t drink too much. Text me when you get home. Be safe. Don’t trust too easily.

An entire curriculum of survival.

Meanwhile, somewhere along the line, boys are often raised with a dangerous kind of emotional laziness around desire, where wanting something is treated as urgency instead of responsibility. Where masculinity can become tangled with entitlement. Where tenderness is mocked but conquest is celebrated.

And no, this is not about saying every teenage boy is dangerous.

Most aren’t.

But enough girls are hurt that something bigger is clearly broken.

Not just that it happened, but what it feels like to carry the memory of feeling powerless. People talk about assault like it only exists in the memory of what happened, but sometimes what stays with you most is how small it made you feel.

The helplessness.

The feeling of suddenly becoming painfully aware that your body no longer feels fully yours. How quickly a moment can turn into something suffocating. Your chest feels heavy. Your throat tightens around words that won’t come out. Somewhere inside you is this desperate hope: please stop. Please realize what you’re doing. Please let this end.

And sometimes fear is quieter than people imagine. It is not always screaming or fighting back. Sometimes fear sounds like silence. Sometimes it feels like freezing. Sometimes survival looks like your body going numb because feeling everything at once would be unbearable.

There is a grief in realizing how powerless you can feel in a moment you never asked for. A sadness so heavy it settles somewhere inside you. The kind that changes the way you look at yourself afterward. And maybe that is why so many girls grow up carrying confusing relationships with intimacy.

Because when something teaches you early that closeness can hurt, or that affection can come tangled with fear, it can blur things.

Trauma does strange things to people.

Sometimes it makes you terrified of touch.

Sometimes it makes you crave it.

Sometimes it makes you hyper-aware of your body. Hypersexual. Curious in ways that feel confusing, especially when you’re already a teenager, already full of hormones, questions, loneliness, wanting, wondering.

Nobody talks enough about that part.

The uncomfortable truth that sometimes being hurt can blur the lines between affection and attention.

You start wondering if being desired means being valued.

If lust is the closest thing to love.

If people wanting your body means they’ll stay.

You begin to measure closeness in intensity instead of safety.

And maybe that’s one of the saddest things trauma can steal from you: the ability to separate being wanted from being cared for.

Because if almost every girl has a story, then we are not talking about isolated incidents anymore.

We are talking about culture.

And trauma does strange things to people.

Sometimes it makes you terrified of touch.

Sometimes it makes you crave it.

Sometimes it makes you hyper-aware of your body. Hypersexual. Curious in ways that feel confusing, especially when you’re already a teenager, already full of hormones, questions, loneliness, wanting, wondering.

The uncomfortable truth that sometimes being hurt can blur the lines between affection and attention.

You start wondering if being desired means being valued. If lust is the closest thing to love. If people wanting your body means they’ll stay.

You begin to measure closeness in intensity instead of safety.

And maybe that’s one of the saddest things trauma can steal from you: the ability to separate being wanted from being cared for.

Because they are not the same thing.

Someone can want you and still harm you.

Someone can desire you and still not respect you.

Someone can touch you and never actually see you.

Love is not supposed to feel like something you have to earn with access to yourself.

And maybe healing starts with admitting something difficult:

Some things became normal that should never have been normal.

The jokes.

The stories.

The “same girl.”

The shrugging.

The silence.

Girls should not be bonded by trauma this early in life.

We deserve more stories.

Stories about becoming ourselves.

About freedom.

About friendships.

About first loves that are soft instead of scarring.

About safety so ordinary we barely notice it.

I don’t know if there’s an answer for why so many girls have the story. The fact that it’s common does not make it acceptable. And surviving something should never be confused with it being necessary.

But I think I feel isolated sometimes, in ways I choose, and sometimes in ways that quietly make me sad.

Most days are simple. I smoke alone, eat, listen to music, sleep. That’s genuinely my average day. I go out occasionally, try to keep in touch with my friends, reply to messages, pretend I’m more socially available than I actually am. I have terrible FOMO, the kind that sits in your chest when you see people outside, laughing somewhere, living. But somehow I rarely have the energy to make the effort to go out myself.

Which is funny, because last summer I did.

And wow.

Last summer felt like proof that life could actually be exciting. I was out EVERY weekend.

Hot nights, loud music, clubs filled with people definitely older than us, cheap alcohol being poured down my throat like a rite of passage. Blacking out. Greening out. Vapes that made me nauseous but somehow still ended up in my hand again. Boy drama that felt devastating for three days and funny a week later.

And the photos.

God, I love photos.

I genuinely believe no photo means it didn’t happen, just a really realistic fever dream.

I love sitting alone and scrolling through old pictures, replaying nights back to myself like tiny films. Videos too. The blurry ones where everyone’s laughing too loud, someone is singing terribly in the background, somebody says something that becomes an inside joke for months. I keep them because one day I know things will change, and I want proof that this version of life existed.

Maybe that sounds dramatic, but I really believe in taking as many photos as possible before everything fades into memory.

Because youth feels terrifyingly temporary.

The weird thing is, I love my balance.

I love staying in. I love the quiet. I love music in my ears and disappearing into my own little world. But I also want to live. I want side quests. I want random adventures and stories that sound fake when you tell them later.

I think about sneaking out sometimes, but my mom trusts me too much.

And somehow, that matters to me.

I could lie. I probably could get away with it. But we built something good, me and her. So instead, I just tell her when I’m at someone’s place, and somehow that feels enough.

I want freedom, but I think I’ve also limited myself in ways I don’t always admit. Maybe I got too comfortable in my own little world. Maybe I became too okay with staying home.

I want to say I’m niche, but that sounds unbearably corny.

Maybe I’m just seventeen.

Seventeen and deeply aware that this won’t last forever.

Because one day school ends. Then success starts mattering. People move cities. Get jobs. Fall in love with new people. Become busy. Friend groups slowly disappear without anybody meaning for them to. Everyone wants to make it, and I do too, but there’s something devastating about knowing ambition asks for sacrifice.

I love my friends.

I love us exactly like this.

Young enough for everything to feel dramatic, funny, important. Young enough for nights to feel endless. Young enough to believe life is still waiting for us.

I wish we could stay this young forever.

But I think growing up is realizing nobody does.

And maybe that’s why we take photos.

Just proof that once, for a little while, we were here.

We are contradictions dressed in irony, posting ourselves in dim lighting with cryptic captions while simultaneously begging to be understood.

Every day, atheism grows. Faith becomes more private, more questioned, more dissected. Feminism has become one of the loudest movements of our time, yet women still tear each other apart with a precision only women seem to understand. Marriage, once the ultimate milestone, now feels optional, sometimes even avoidable. Love exists, but commitment feels negotiable.

Cheating is normalized in the strangest way. Loyalty has become rare enough to be romanticized. Everyone says they hate betrayal until they are the one benefiting from dishonesty. Being deeply in love, painfully vulnerable, devoted to someone? Somehow, it became embarrassing. Humiliating, even. As though caring too much makes you naïve.

And then there’s sexuality, explored more openly than ever before. People are asking questions, learning themselves, redefining labels, refusing boxes. There’s freedom in that, but also confusion. We are the generation of “figure it out as you go.”

Politics feel less like policies and more like aesthetics sometimes. People wear opinions like outfits, trends changing with every algorithm update. We repost infographics and argue in comment sections, and somewhere in between all that noise, we genuinely care. Or at least, most of us are trying to.

The media predicts our relationships before we even have them. We have theories for attachment styles, red flags, love bombing, avoidant men, emotionally unavailable women, situationships, breadcrumbing. Somehow we know too much and too little at the same time. We are emotionally intelligent and emotionally exhausted.

And yes, there’s the drinking, the smoking, the “I’ll only go out for one drink” nights that somehow become stories your friends bring up months later. There are blurry photos, spam accounts filled with thoughts too vulnerable for the main feed, and private stories that somehow tell the truth better than real conversations.

But despite all of this, I cannot imagine myself in another generation.

Because we are self-aware.

Painfully self-aware.

I’m only 17, which feels ridiculous to say when I think about how aware I am (or woke as they say). Aware of people, patterns, loneliness, contradictions, sometimes I think we learned too much too young.

We call out generational trauma instead of swallowing it whole. We try to heal things our parents were taught to survive. We speak about anxiety, heartbreak, loneliness, identity, things previous generations sometimes buried in silence. We try to talk to our parents, even if sometimes the conversations end in slammed doors or misunderstandings.

And there is something oddly beautiful about how much we want to understand ourselves.

We overshare, but maybe because we are tired of pretending. We romanticize ordinary moments because the world feels heavy. We find community online, in comment sections, spam accounts, playlists, reposted TikToks, voice notes sent at 2 a.m. We may not always know what we’re doing, but we are trying to know ourselves.

This generation is messy.

We contradict ourselves constantly.

We preach healing while hurting each other. We want love but fear intimacy. We crave connection but hide behind screens. We judge systems while participating in them.

But maybe that’s what makes us human.

Maybe we are not lost, just aware enough to admit that we don’t have all the answers.

And somehow, in the middle of all this confusion, there is comfort in knowing we are figuring it out together.

Maybe this entire article is just me telling you to go watch Lady Bird.

People who know me always ask the same question:

“Why are you always watching Friends?”

And honestly, I never know how to answer them properly, because it’s not just a show to me. It’s difficult to explain how deeply it makes me feel without sounding dramatic. But if I had to try, I’d say this:

Friends feels like home.

I first watched it when I was 12 years old. Back then, I wasn’t popular. I didn’t have a huge friend group or exciting plans every weekend. A lot of the time, I felt lonely in ways I didn’t even know how to describe yet. Then somehow, six fictional adults sitting in a coffee shop made me feel less alone.

Yes, the show is a comedy. The jokes are stupid sometimes, and that’s exactly why I love it. It gave me somewhere safe to laugh. I could come home after a bad day, turn it on, and for twenty minutes everything felt lighter. Heartbroken? Friends. Happy? Friends. Lonely? Definitely Friends. It became part of the rhythm of my life.

What people don’t understand is that comfort shows are rarely about the plot. They’re about emotional safety. Familiarity. Knowing exactly what’s coming next when your real life feels uncertain.

My favorite character was always Chandler Bing. Maybe because underneath all the sarcasm and jokes, he was terrified. His parents’ divorce changed the way he saw love and family. He genuinely believed he would end up alone. He thought commitment wasn’t meant for him. And yet, by the end of the show, he had the family he always secretly wanted.

I think that storyline stayed with me because it taught me something important very early in life: your timing is not everyone else’s timing.

Some people find love early. Some people struggle with themselves first. Some people spend years believing they’ll never have certain things, only for life to surprise them later. Chandler’s story reminded me that fear is not fate.

And maybe that sounds silly because he’s fictional, but sometimes fictional people say the things real people can’t.

I also loved how the show made adulthood feel less terrifying. The characters didn’t have everything figured out. They made mistakes constantly. They lost jobs, got their hearts broken, moved apartments, changed careers, and embarrassed themselves every five minutes. But somehow they still found joy in each other.

When you’re younger, you think adults have a master plan. Friends quietly showed me that most people are just trying their best while eating takeout and making jokes to survive.

That comfort never left me.

Even now, I can rewatch all ten seasons over and over again and never get bored. Some scenes still make me laugh so hard I cry. Some episodes feel like old memories. And every time the theme song starts, it feels familiar in the best way possible.

So when people ask me why I keep watching Friends, the real answer is this:

Because sometimes a TV show can become a place you emotionally grew up in.

And once something makes you feel safe during lonely years of your life, you never really stop returning to it.

We Need Teenage Love Too

There’s something almost embarrassing now about admitting you want teenage love.

Not just love in the abstract, but the messy version of it. The version with late-night phone calls, sneaking out, lying to your parents about where you are, holding hands in places you’re probably not supposed to be. The version where a song suddenly becomes your song because somebody kissed you while it played.

People online act like the smartest thing you can do is avoid all of it.

“Don’t date in high school.”

“Focus on yourself.”

“Teenage relationships never last.”

“Don’t be a bird.”

The internet has turned emotional detachment into intelligence. Caring too much is “embarrassing.” Forgiving someone is “desperate.” Being heartbroken over a teenage relationship is treated like you’re immature or dramatic.

But I think teenagers need those experiences too.

Not because every relationship is healthy or permanent, but because love teaches you things nothing else can.

You learn how to communicate. You learn what it feels like to be prioritized. You learn what hurts you. You learn what kind of love makes you feel safe and what kind leaves you anxious. You learn how to apologize. How to trust. How to stop ignoring red flags because somebody is attractive. How to love someone without losing yourself completely.

And yes, sometimes you learn through heartbreak.

People joke about heartbreak being “character development,” but in a strange way, it is. Your first betrayal changes you. Your first breakup changes you. The first time somebody chooses someone else over you rewires something inside your chest.

Adults go through cheating. Adults forgive people too. Adults stay in complicated relationships all the time. Yet when teenagers experience those same emotions, everyone suddenly acts like we’re foolish for feeling deeply.

But feelings don’t become real only after turning twenty-five.

Teenagers love loudly. Recklessly. Sometimes stupidly. But honestly.

There’s also something beautiful about growing up with someone during such a confusing part of life. Two people trying to understand themselves while trying to understand each other too. Sharing playlists. Matching profile pictures. Fighting over things that seem tiny now but felt enormous then. Writing paragraphs at 2 a.m. because your emotions were too big for silence.

Even the awkwardness matters.

Especially now, when so much of our generation experiences life through screens first. Romance has become content. People perform relationships online before they even know how to exist inside one privately. Everyone suddenly talks like relationship experts after watching podcasts and TikToks about “high-value men” and “nonchalant women.”

But real teenage love isn’t polished like that.

It’s awkward. Emotional. Impulsive. It’s sitting in silence together because neither of you knows what to say yet. It’s learning someone’s favorite song and pretending you don’t suddenly love it too. It’s relating heartbreak lyrics to one specific person and feeling physically ill when they repost something shady.

And honestly? We need experiences that aren’t optimized for wisdom.

Not every teenage relationship needs to end in marriage to matter.

Some people are meant to teach you things, not stay forever. Some relationships exist so you can discover the kind of person you become when you’re loved properly. Others exist so you learn never to beg for the bare minimum again.

That’s still valuable.

I think we underestimate how important it is for young people to feel things fully before the world convinces them to suppress everything. Before vulnerability becomes something to hide behind irony and memes.

Teenagers deserve stories too.

Not just academic pressure and survival and trying to “build a future.” We deserve memories. We deserve the thrill of sneaking out. We deserve first kisses that feel cinematic for no reason. We deserve stupid fights and dramatic reconciliations and crying to songs that suddenly sound like they were written specifically for us.

Maybe one day we’ll laugh at it.

But while we’re living it, it’s real.

And real things deserve to be felt.

Realism is a Cage

That sentence sits heavy. It sounds practical, responsible… even loving. But if you listen closely, it carries something else too: quiet surrender.

I used to dream of being an actor and a writer. Not casually, VISCERALLY. I wanted the stage lights, the silence before a line lands, the feeling of holding a room with nothing but emotion and truth. I wanted to write stories so raw that people would see themselves in them and feel less alone.

But I’m African. So I adjusted.

I chose law.

And here’s the complicated part: I love it! I love the structure, the power of words, the respect it commands, the stability it promises. I didn’t just “settle”, I adapted. I found something that fits me in a world that doesn’t always make space for fragile dreams.

But not everyone finds that alternative.

Some people are still holding onto dreams that don’t translate neatly into survival. To be an actor. A baker. A painter. A florist. Dreams that don’t come with guaranteed income, especially where we come from. Dreams that feel indulgent when there are bills to pay, families to support, systems that don’t reward creativity, and governments that don’t protect opportunity.

So what happens to those people?

Do they shrink their dreams until they’re acceptable? Do they bury them entirely? Or do they carry them quietly, like something they’re almost ashamed of wanting?

My mother wanted to be an interior designer.

And I know she would have been good at it, exceptional, even. But life didn’t give her the luxury of dreaming out loud. She raised herself. Orphaned young, no safety net, no one to fund her education or soften the fall if she failed. She built a life from nothing.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand how she did it.

But I’ve never doubted her.

And maybe that’s where the tension lives, between admiration and fear. We admire their strength, their sacrifices, their realism. But we’re also afraid of becoming them in one specific way: waking up one day and realizing we never even tried to become who we imagined.

We were taught to want big things. To change the world. To lead. To become “something.”

But somewhere along the way, “something” became narrowly defined:

Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer. Accountant.

Safe. Respected. Real.

And everything else?

Risky. Embarrassing. Unrealistic.

But here’s the truth we don’t say out loud, REALISM, in our context, is often just another word for limitation shaped by circumstance.

It’s not that our dreams are impossible.

It’s that the environment makes them harder.

So we compromise.

We choose stability over passion.

Security over uncertainty.

Respectability over self-expression.

And sometimes, that’s the right choice. Survival matters. Responsibility matters. Providing for yourself and for others matters.

I wonder if the real tragedy isn’t choosing a different path.

It’s forgetting who you were before the world told you to be realistic.

Maybe it’s not about choosing between being a lawyer or being a writer.

Maybe it’s about refusing to kill one part of yourself to justify the other.

Maybe you study law and still write.

Maybe you work a stable job and still paint.

Maybe you build a life that feeds your responsibilities and your spirit, even if imperfectly.

Because the alternative?

A generation that survives beautifully… but feels quietly unfulfilled.

And I don’t think that’s the dream either.

Unlearning the Blueprint

There is a quiet rebellion happening, and it doesn’t look loud or dramatic. It looks like women choosing themselves.

“Karabo o tlo nyaloa joang o le bohlasoa tje?”

For generations, girlhood came with a script. It was handed down in kitchens, whispered in living rooms, and enforced in subtle glances from older women who had already lived it. We were taught how to fold laundry before we were taught how to fold into ourselves. We learned how to cook, clean, nurture, and anticipate the needs of a man we had not even met yet. Our value was framed around how well we could belong to someone else.

Marriage wasn’t presented as an option, it was presented as the destination.

Even our games rehearsed it. “Playing mantloane (house)” wasn’t just innocent fun; it was training. The game didn’t start without a husband. There was always a role to perform, always a dynamic to uphold. Someone had to be chosen, and someone had to be worthy of being chosen.

And worthiness was never self-defined.

It was measured. Observed. Approved.

“This one will make a good wife.”

Not: this one will make a good leader, or this one will build something powerful, or this one will live a life that feels like her own.

Just a wife.

We internalized that early. Standards were set for us before we even understood what standards meant. How to sit. How to speak. How to look. How to shrink. And perhaps most damaging of all, how to see ourselves.

Because the truth is, insecurities didn’t start online.

They started at home.

In the comparisons.

In the corrections.

In the casual comments about our bodies, our skin, our hair, our “potential.”

The internet didn’t create these insecurities, it amplified them. It gave them a louder voice, a wider audience, and a constant replay button.

And yet, despite all of this conditioning, something is shifting.

Women are starting to ask different questions.

What if I don’t want to be chosen?

What if I want to choose myself?

What if my life is not a waiting room for marriage?

Loving the fact that women are no longer prioritizing marriage is not about rejecting love. It’s about rejecting limitation.

It’s about understanding that partnership should be an addition, not a requirement. That love should not come at the cost of identity. That being “needed” is not more important than being free.

There is power in saying: I do not want to need a husband.

Not because companionship is undesirable, but because dependence has been over-romanticized. Because too many women before us were told that survival, stability, and fulfillment could only exist within marriage.

But what if fulfillment looks like something else?

What if it looks like building a life that is entirely yours?

A career that excites you.

A space that reflects you.

A sense of self that is not negotiated or diluted.

What if it looks like waking up and knowing that everything you have built is because you chose it, not because it was expected of you?

This shift is not always comfortable. It requires unlearning deeply rooted beliefs. It means disappointing people who expected you to follow the script. It means standing in your choices without constant validation.

And that can feel lonely at times.

But it is also liberating.

Because for the first time, the question is not “Will I be a good wife?”

The question is: Will I be true to myself?

And maybe that’s the real revolution.

Not abandoning marriage, but removing it from the center of our existence.

Not rejecting love, but redefining it.

Not living to be chosen, but living because we already are.

Chosen, by ourselves.

I used to think success had a schedule.

Finish school on time. Get into the right university. Follow the plan exactly as it was imagined in your head at seventeen, neat, linear, impressive. I thought if I missed a step, everything would fall apart. That there was a version of me who would get it right the first time, and that version was the one worth becoming.

My life just didn’t follow that script.

My final year didn’t go the way I planned. University didn’t work out the way I imagined. And now, I watch people I know move forward, posting campus photos, talking about lectures, building lives that look like progress. Meanwhile, I feel like I’m standing still, holding onto a dream that keeps stretching further away from me.

I want to be a lawyer. Not just any lawyer, a corporate or criminal attorney. I want the kind of life that requires discipline, presence, sharp thinking. I want to stand in rooms where decisions matter. I want to be someone who knows what they’re doing.

And if I’m being honest, that dream scares me a little.

Because I don’t always feel like the smartest person. I don’t always feel dependable. I don’t always feel like the version of me that could actually make it there.

But then there’s my mother.

She has given everything to raise me. And she looks at me like I’m already becoming someone great. She says I’m confident. She says I will make it. She says it so often that sometimes I wonder if she sees something in me that I haven’t learned how to see in myself yet.

And I want to believe her.

I want to believe that I’m not behind, I’m just on a path that doesn’t look like everyone else’s. That maybe this pause, this detour, this uncomfortable space I’m in… isn’t failure. Maybe it’s construction.

Because I still see my future.

It hasn’t disappeared. It hasn’t dimmed. It’s still there, clear and bright, like something waiting for me to catch up to it. I still imagine myself traveling the world, stepping outside of everything I’ve ever known, building a life that feels bigger than where I started.

I want to leave. I want to explore. I want to create a life that my younger self couldn’t fully understand, but always hoped for.

And yes, I want to do it for my mother.

But I’m also starting to realize I have to do it for me too.

My peers call this unemployment, where I’ve been questioning everything, who I am, what I believe, even religion. My curiosity keeps expanding, pulling me into questions I don’t always have answers to. And for a moment, I wondered if that made me distracted. If it meant I was losing focus.

But maybe it means I’m thinking.

Maybe it means I’m growing.

Because how can I want to understand the world, through law, through people, through justice, without first questioning it?

Even my family is changing. My parents are freshly divorced and that kind of shift doesn’t leave you untouched. It makes you reflect on love, stability, identity. It makes you ask harder questions.

What kind of life will i build for myself?

I Didn’t Like Him, I Wanted to be Chosen.

There’s a specific kind of confusion that comes from growing up as a girl and being told that cruelty is just affection in disguise.

In the 9th grade, he humiliated me in front of everyone. Not quietly, not subtly, loud enough for laughter to ripple across the room, sharp enough that it stayed with me long after the bell rang. I remember the heat crawling up my neck, the way I laughed it off like I was in on the joke, like it didn’t land exactly where he aimed it.

But it did.

And when I went home and told my mom, she said what so many mothers have said before, what so many girls have been taught to accept:

“He’s mean to you because he likes you.”

It’s a dangerous sentence. Not because it’s always said with bad intentions, but because of what it trains you to believe. That discomfort is chemistry. That disrespect is attention. That humiliation is just a strange dialect of desire.

So I carried that idea with me.

I started noticing him more. Not because I actually liked him, but because I thought I was supposed to decode him. To look past the way he made me feel small and search for something softer underneath it. I convinced myself that maybe there was something there. That maybe I liked him too.

But what I really liked, what I really chased, was his approval.

There’s a difference, and I didn’t know it then.

Years passed, and I grew into myself in ways that had nothing to do with him. I became more confident, more aware, more… visible. The kind of “glow up” people love to talk about as if it’s just about appearance, but it’s never just that. It’s how you carry yourself. How you stop shrinking.

And suddenly, he noticed.

Not in the loud, humiliating way he used to, but in a quieter, more deliberate way. Compliments. Looks that lingered a little too long. A shift in tone that was almost jarring. I thought this was what I wanted. But when I finally had his attention, it felt… off. Because it wasn’t kind. It wasn’t curious. It wasn’t rooted in knowing me. It was surface-level, almost transactional. The kind of attention that doesn’t see you, it just consumes you. It wasn’t about who I was; it was about how I looked now. What I represented. What he could take from it.

It felt like lust.

And maybe that’s when it finally clicked.

I never liked him.

I liked the idea of being chosen by someone who once rejected me. There’s something deeply human about wanting to rewrite a story where you were once embarrassed, overlooked, or made to feel small. To flip it. To stand in the same room and have the power shift in your favor. To hear the same voice that once laughed at you speak differently now.

But closure doesn’t always come from that reversal. Sometimes, it comes from realizing that the version of you who needed that approval doesn’t exist anymore. And more importantly, you don’t need to be chosen by someone who only learned how to see you once you became easier to want. Because the truth is, real liking, real attraction, real care, doesn’t start with humiliation. It doesn’t require decoding cruelty or earning softness. It meets you where you are, not after you’ve transformed into something more convenient.

If I could go back to that 9th grade version of myself, I wouldn’t tell her “he doesn’t like you.” That almost feels too simple.

I’d tell her this:

Even if he does, it’s not the kind of liking you should learn to accept.