there is something complicated about being a daughter and trying to understand your father. he is supposed to be one of the first men who teaches you what safety feels like. the first man who shows you how you should expect to be spoken to, loved, protected, considered.

so what happens when the person who was supposed to teach you those things also teaches you what you never want from a man ? i think that is where some of my fear comes from. i don’t want to grow up and find myself loving someone who makes me feel the way i felt growing up. i don’t want to recognise my childhood inside my marriage.

i don’t want to call emotional distance “normal” because i watched it happen. i don’t want to become the woman who keeps making excuses for a man because she learned that loving someone means understanding them, even when they aren’t trying to understand her.

and maybe the saddest part is that sometimes i don’t even know what I am angry about.

some things i can still clearly recall. things i wish were different. things i wish i had been given.

there are some things i’ve buried so deep that i’m not sure if i’ve learned to live around them or if i’ve forgiven them.

“i hope i don’t marry someone like my father” may seem so weighty because of this. because i’m discussing more than simply men. i am referring to the potential for anything to be repeated. i’m talking about understanding one day that I made the unhealthy decision in favour of what was comfortable that i mistakenly believed becoming accustomed to something meant that it loved me.

maybe that’s what worries me the most. i won’t marry someone precisely like him, but i will grow so accustomed to some forms of love that i won’t be able to tell when I’m being mistreated. that i’ll confuse personality with inconsistency. distance for self-sufficiency. for tranquillity, silence. to love is to tolerate. that i’ll turn into the lady who says, “he’s just like that,” even though i know i’m miserable. i don’t want to dedicate my entire life to interpreting a man’s actions as justifications for staying.

when i should have picked myself, i don’t want to become my own mother. and just maybe that’s why i’m so afraid of getting married. because marriage isn’t just choosing a person. it’s about choosing the kind of life you are willing to wake up to every day. i want to be careful with that choice. i want to know the difference between what feels familiar and what actually feels safe. i want to learn that love does not have to hurt in ways i have already learned how to survive.

maybe i don’t have to figure out exactly how i feel about my father before i can decide what i want from love. maybe i can hold the love, the anger, the disappointment, the confusion and the resentment all at once.

i might say, “i’m not sure if i hate you.”

i know i don’t want to do this again, yet i still say it.

i want my connection with myself to change, regardless of how my relationship with my father develops.

i want to be the one who sees the pattern before she joins it.

long before you fall in love, they tell you that desire is insufficient. that permission comes before desire. explanation comes before freedom. "yes” is preceded by a discussion that has the potential to turn into an argument.

growing up with strict parents changes the way you date long before you ever meet someone worth loving. you learn that seeing someone isn't just about whether you're free it's about whether you're allowed to be free. every date begins with permission. every plan depends on someone else's answer.

dating becomes something you schedule around rules you didn't create. you become an expert at calculating time. if the movie ends at 8:15, you'll be home by 9. if traffic is bad, your parents will worry. if you're five minutes late, you'll spend the next hour explaining yourself. love starts feeling less spontaneous and more logistical. you begin measuring relationships in hours instead of moments.

being at home at a given hour is thought to be the most difficult aspect.

not at all.

seeing someone you care about misinterpret your limitations for a lack of effort is the worst part.

the cruelest thing about dating with strict parents isn't that love has a curfew. it’s that, after a while, you start giving your heart one too.

because your life isn't as simple as everyone else's, you start to anticipate people leaving. you worry whether they'll grow weary of hearing "i have to go home," or "my parents said no." you’ve been making an effort all along, but you're afraid they'll think you're uninterested because of your situation. perhaps that's the most challenging. it’s not the curfew per se, but rather the feeling that your love is continuously evaluated based on how much time you can provide rather than the work required to be there in the first place.

maybe that's the hardest part. not the curfew itself, but feeling like your love is constantly being measured by the time you can give instead of the effort it took just to be there in the first place.

i don’t know what it feels like to be someone’s first choice.

not the person they think about the second they wake up. not the one they run to. not the option they pick when the room is full of other choices.

instead, i know what it’s like to be considered. to be wanted for a fleeting moment or pursued when the timing is convenient. i know the exact feeling of being liked, admired, and desired only to be placed on a shelf while someone decides if i’m actually worth keeping.

people love to repeat that line: “If they wanted to, they would.” but what happens when they do want to, just… not enough?

i’ve spent so much time trying to make myself easier to choose. i tried being softer. Prettier. less emotional. more understanding, more patient. i acted as if love was a prize you earn by shrinking yourself into a version that never asks for a single thing.

the hardest part isn’t even the rejection. It’s the proximity to it. it’s being just close enough to feel what it’s like to be chosen, but never close enough for someone to actually plant their feet and stay.

it makes you question everything. Was i too much? Was i not enough? Did i show up at the wrong time? Did i ruin it by wanting certainty?

and somewhere in the middle of that spiral, you start forgetting a fundamental truth: being chosen has absolutely nothing to do with being worthy.

maybe that’s the lesson i’m still trying to internalize.

my value doesn’t plummet just because someone couldn’t see it clearly. i shouldn’t have to compete for a seat at the table in my own life. real love isn’t supposed to feel like a never-ending audition.

i don’t know what it feels like to be someone’s first choice yet. but i do know what it feels like to survive being overlooked.

and maybe one day, when someone finally chooses me without a hint of hesitation, i’ll realize the truth: i was never difficult to love. i was just waiting for someone who didn’t need convincing.

certain wounds don’t bleed loudly.

when you enter a room, they don’t make their presence known. they don’t leave scars that are obvious. they discreetly take up residence in the nooks and crannies of your existence, manifesting themselves in the people you pursue, the routines you maintain, and the evenings you spend occupied in order to avoid spending time alone with your thoughts.

i believed for a long time that healing came organically with time. the pain would eventually go away on its own if i continued to be successful, busy, and entertained.

so i filled my life with cranes in the sky.

not actual cranes, of course, but distractions.

temporary fixes. new conversations. new cities. new playlists. new crushes. new versions of myself. anything that could carry my attention away from the places inside me that still hurt.

the thing about distractions is that they work.

i mean at first,

they give you relief. they make the pain feel smaller. more distant. almost manageable.

until one day you realize the wound is still waiting for you exactly where you left it.

because pain is patient.

you can run from it, drown it out, romanticize it, bury it beneath achievements and affection, but eventually it catches up. and suddenly you understand something terrifying:

you cannot outrun what lives within you.

i think many of us mistake avoidance for healing. but healing isn’t the absence of pain. healing is the willingness to sit with it. to stop negotiating with your grief. to stop decorating your wounds with distractions and finally ask them what they’ve been trying to teach you. the hardest part is that emotional wounds rarely ask for grand gestures. they ask for honesty. they ask you to admit that you’re lonely. that you’re angry. that someone hurt you more than you’ve allowed yourself to say. that you’re still carrying a version of the past that no longer belongs in your future.

and once you stop running, something unexpected happens. the pain loses its power to chase you. not because it disappears, but because you’ve finally turned around to face it. maybe that’s what “Cranes in the Sky” is really about. the realization that there is no destination where your sadness cannot find you. no person who can heal what you refuse to acknowledge.

no distraction powerful enough to replace the work of feeling.

the cranes eventually leave the sky.

the music ends.

the people go home.

and there you are.

meeting yourself and perhaps for the first time. and the most beautiful thing is that healing begins exactly there. it’s found in finally standing still.

lately, i’ve been wondering if i actually want a relationship. or if i just like the idea of one. because there is a difference. a huge one.

the idea of having a partner is beautiful.

but lately i’ve been wondering if what i want is love, or if i simply want the reassurance that i am lovable. because those are not the same thing.

a partner is a person.

an idea is a feeling.

and feelings are much easier to carry than people.

but nobody talks about how much of that desire is sometimes tied to validation. nobody talks about the way loneliness can disguise itself as romance. nobody talks about how easy it is to mistake the need to be loved for the desire to love someone.

sometimes i wonder if i’ve romanticized being chosen so much that i’ve forgotten what choosing someone else looks like.

the more i think about it, the more i realize that maybe i don’t want a relationship as much as i want to be relieved of the burden of wondering whether i’m lovable. because there is a particular kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being alone.

the older I get, the more i realize that some of my desire for love has very little to do with romance. it has everything to do with wanting to feel significant. the more i think about it, the more i realize that maybe i don’t want a relationship as much as i want to be relieved of the burden of wondering whether i’m lovable. because there is a particular kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being alone.

the older I get, the more i realize that some of my desire for love has very little to do with romance. it has everything to do with wanting to feel significant. not important to the world. important to someone. important enough to be remembered. important enough to be missed. important enough that my absence would leave a mark.

we tell ourselves that if the right person arrives, we’ll finally feel secure. as if another human being can settle a war we’ve been fighting within ourselves for years. as if their love could silence every doubt, every insecurity, every moment we’ve spent questioning whether we’re enough. but maybe that’s why love feels so heavy sometimes. because we’re asking it to do something it was never meant to do.

maybe what i’m searching for isn’t romance at all. maybe i’m searching for relief. relief from wondering whether i matter in the same way other people matter to me.

a slow death happens when you’ve been disappointed so many times that hope starts feeling embarrassing. when you’ve carried pain for so long that it becomes your personality. when you stop expecting tenderness from the world because every soft part of you has been met with survival.

nobody notices it happening. they still see you showing up. still functioning. but they don’t see the way you’ve abandoned yourself to make life easier to survive. because sometimes life doesn’t destroy you all at once. sometimes it teaches you to disconnect from yourself little by little.

you stop saying what you really feel. you stop asking for what you need. you laugh at things that actually hurt you. you become easier to digest. smaller. less alive. you convince yourself this is maturity.

but there’s a difference between growing up and disappearing.

a lot of people are disappearing.

disappearing into productivity because being busy feels safer than being alone with their thoughts. disappearing into versions of themselves built entirely around survival. and the cruelest part is that the world often rewards this. it praises you for being “low maintenance.” for never needing help. for being strong without asking what that strength has cost you. but strength is not supposed to mean emotional starvation.

there are people carrying childhood wounds into adult bodies, still trying to earn the affection they should’ve received freely. still over explaining. still apologizing for existing. Still believing they have to suffer beautifully to deserve love. and maybe that’s why this quote hurts so deeply:

because life will try to convince you to give up on yourself long before your body ever stops breathing.

it will try to make you cynical. guarded. emotionally unreachable. too afraid to love again. too ashamed to begin again. it will make numbness feel safer than joy. but numbness is not peace.

Read that again.

numbness is not peace.

just because you no longer react doesn’t mean you’ve healed. sometimes it only means you’ve gone emotionally underwater for too long. and if you’re there right now if you’ve been moving through life feeling detached from yourself i need you to know this:

you are not weak for being affected by what hurt you.

anyone would struggle carrying what you’ve carried.

the heartbreak. the pressure. the abandonment. the constant pretending. the silent battles nobody clapped for because nobody even knew they were happening. you survived all of that. and survival deserves more respect than perfection ever will. but survival cannot be the final destination. at some point, you have to return to yourself. not the high-functioning version. not the version built entirely around being wanted. the real you. the one underneath the coping mechanisms.

underneath the performance. underneath the exhaustion. then you that still wants to laugh deeply. to trust fully. to create again. to love without fear. to stop treating rest like guilt. to stop calling yourself hard to love just because people mishandled your heart. you are allowed to come back to life. even after everything. even now. and maybe healing isn’t becoming someone new. maybe it’s grieving who you had to become in order to survive. maybe it’s finally admitting that being “the strong one” broke parts of you too.

maybe it’s learning that your worth has never depended on how much pain you can endure without collapsing. because you do not become more deserving by suffering silently. you were worthy before the world touched you. and you are still worthy now. not when you finally fix yourself. not when you become easier to love.

Now.

so please before life convinces you to harden into someone unrecognizable protect the part of you that still feels. that part is sacred.

it’s the proof that despite everything, life has not fully taken you yet.

here’s a difference between having a support system and turning your relationship into a group project.

and i think a lot of people confuse the two.

there are people who cannot experience a single argument without immediately opening the group chat.

every misunderstanding gets narrated in real time. every mistake becomes discussion material. every private moment gets dissected by people who are not emotionally mature enough to carry it carefully.

and the problem with that is your friends only know your partner through your pain.

they do not hear the quiet apologies afterward. they do not see your partner holding you during your worst moments. they do not witness the growth, the effort, the tenderness that keeps the relationship alive behind closed doors.

so while you forgive your partner, your friends don’t.

because they were never emotionally connected enough to heal from the situation with you.

that’s why some people end up in relationships where their friends secretly hate their partner more than they do.

and honestly?

sometimes your friends start planting resentment inside you without even realizing it. suddenly every issue feels bigger because now it has an audience reacting to it. what could’ve been a private conversation between two people turns into ten different opinions, projections, and personal biases.

the ability for two people to figure things out without outside noise constantly shaping the outcome. some things lose meaning once they leave the relationship. a private apology sounds weak after being retold to ten different people. a small misunderstanding becomes humiliation once it turns into entertainment during brunch conversations.

and sometimes your partner starts feeling it too the invisible audience in the relationship. the feeling that every mistake they make will immediately be discussed somewhere else. that every argument now includes people they never agreed to date. that can destroy trust quietly. because eventually your relationship no longer feels safe. it feels monitored.

i think people underestimate how important emotional boundaries are. everybody does not need access to the most vulnerable parts of your relationship. some things should stay between the two people actually building it. because once too many opinions enter a relationship, love starts struggling to breathe underneath all the noise.

your friends are not dating your partner.

you are.

i learned to confuse intensity with performance.

if it felt deep, i assumed it meant it was real. if it felt mutual, i assumed it meant it was real or how if it felt like something, i would believe it was something.

but feelings don’t always build anything. sometimes they just pass through.

and leave you holding what they couldn’t keep.

well with me, it’s always like that.

people feel me deeply.

they open up in ways they don’t usually open.

they say things they don’t normally say.

they stay close enough for me to believe that this might be different.

and i think that’s where i go wrong.

i start calling it us.

before it even learns how to exist properly.

because i don’t know how to exist halfway.

and then i get surprised when people don’t meet me there.

because i keep thinking if someone felt me this deeply, they wouldn’t just leave.

but that’s the mistake.

being felt is not the same as being chosen.

people can feel you and still not build with you. they can see you clearly and still not stay. they can be moved by you and still not make room for you in their life.

and i think that’s the part i struggle to accept.

that i can be real to someone and still not be real enough for them to keep.

it makes me question myself in quiet ways.

was i too much? too open? too available? or was i just convenient in the moments they needed something soft to land on?

i don’t always know.

what i do know is this: i keep turning emotional intensity into meaning.

i keep assuming that because something felt deep, it was meant to last.

but not everything that touches you is meant to stay with you.

some people are just passing through versions of your life they were never supposed to live in permanently.

and i think i need to stop turning temporary connections into long-term expectations.

because every time i do that, i lose something in the process.

not them. me.

i lose my peace. my clarity. my ability to see things as they are instead of what they felt like in the beginning.

i don’t think i’m hard to love.

i think i’m easy to feel and hard to stay consistent with.

because staying requires more than emotion. it requires intention. effort. choice.

and not everyone who feels you is willing to choose you every day.

so maybe the lesson isn’t to feel less.

maybe it’s to stop building permanence out of people who only ever offered presence.

maybe i don’t need to stop being deep.

maybe i just need to stop calling depth something that was never meant to stay

i found God in 2023.

or maybe… i felt like He found me.

everything about that season felt soft and certain at the same time. my prayers felt heard. my bible didn’t feel like a book, i read it like it was speaking back to me. life was moving, gently but surely, and i carried this quiet confidence that God was with me in all of it. it wasn’t perfect, but it was steady.

and then my cousin died.

there’s a kind of silence that comes after loss that no one really prepares you for. not the silence around you but the one inside you. the one that makes everything you once believed feel distant.

i prayed for him.

not casually.

not out of routine.

i prayed with hope.

with expectation.

with the kind of faith that believes God will step in at the very last momemnt and change everything.

but He didn’t.

and i don’t think i’ve been the same since.

because how do you keep speaking to a God who felt silent when you needed Him the most?

how do you open a Bible that suddenly feels like it has answers for everyone else but you?

so i stopped.

not all at once, not dramatically but slowly.

quietly.

my prayers became shorter. then they disappeared altogether. and what hurt the most is that i didn’t stop believing in God. i just didn’t understand Him anymore. i would reach for God every now and then, like revisiting a place that once felt like home but something in it changed. or maybe something in me had. because the questions didn’t go away.

they grew.

they got heavier.

they became the kind of thoughts that sit with you in the middle of the night, asking things you’re almost afraid to say out loud.

like how does God choose which prayers to answer? how is someone praying for healing and receiving it, while someone else is praying with the same faith and losing everything?

and what do i do with the people who say, “it’s part of God’s plan”, as if that sentence can hold the weight of trauma? because if i’m being honest sometimes that doesn’t comfort me.

sometimes it makes me feel worse.

like i’m supposed to accept pain without questioning it. like i’m supposed to call something “divine” that broke me.

and then there are quieter questions. the one that don’t sound angry, but ache just as much. if He died for our sins, why do i still feel so bound by mine?

why do i still struggle? still fall? still feel like i’m not enough?

and maybe the question that unsettles me the most is was it really God? the things that changed my life, the growth i experienced, the person i became was that Him working in me? or was that me reaching a point where i was tired of who i was, and finally choosing to become better?

i wish i could end this with clarity.

with answers. with something that makes it all make sense.

but i can’t.

all i know is that i’m still here

and so are the questions.