I thought adulthood was somewhere I would eventually arrive, but I’m beginning to realise I’ve been living my real life this whole time.

Which is honestly quite upsetting because nobody told me.

I had a very specific idea of what adulthood would look like. Mostly because I watched enough TV shows to develop a completely unrealistic understanding of womanhood.

I imagined adulthood somewhere between Being Mary Jane and Sex and the City, minus the horror scenes, obviously.

I thought I’d be chartering boats in Saint-Tropez, drinking Aperol Spritz in the sun and having the best orgasms of my life. I’ve never been to Saint-Tropez and I’m still waiting for the orgasms.

I’d wear heels for no reason. Men would arrive emotionally unavailable but handsome. I’d drink wine while staring thoughtfully out of a window, occasionally making an excellent point about love.

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There would be a soundtrack.

There would be a plot.

What I didn’t account for was the behind-the-scenes.

The bills. The admin. The emails that begin with “just following up.” The increasingly complicated relationship with my bank account. The realisation that when something breaks in your house, nobody magically appears to fix it.

Sometimes adulthood is standing in your kitchen at 9:47pm, eating something over the sink because washing a plate feels like a commitment you are not emotionally prepared to make.

And perhaps the most humbling part is that I thought I would know what I was doing by now.

There is so much pressure to have it figured out.

You look around and people are getting married, buying houses, having children, starting companies, moving countries, getting promotions. Everyone seems to be progressing towards something.

And even when you are genuinely happy for them, some small, deeply insecure part of you whispers:

Shouldn’t you be further along?

Further along than what?

I’m not even sure anymore.

I think I created a fictional finish line and have been quietly panicking because I can’t find it.

I thought that by this point I would know what I wanted. I would know who I was. I would understand money, relationships, career, my future.

I would become one of those women who says, “At this stage in my life, I really value…”

At this stage in my life, I really value cancelling plans.

That is about as far as I’ve got.

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For years, I thought I was waiting for my real life to begin.

I imagined a version of myself who had finally arrived.

She would be confident. Settled. Financially comfortable. In love, perhaps. Or at least emotionally stable enough to stop choosing men who require a post-match analysis.

She would have routines. She would know exactly what she wanted. She would have figured it out.

And the strange thing is, I have become so many things I once wanted to be, and somehow I’m still waiting for the feeling of having arrived.

You can get the thing and still feel like you’re waiting for something else.

You can achieve something you worked incredibly hard for and immediately start thinking about the next thing.

You can become the woman your younger self imagined and still look in the mirror wondering where she is.

Sometimes I think the problem is that I imagined my future as a feeling rather than a life.

I imagined the highlight reel.

I forgot about the Tuesday afternoons.

I imagined the apartment but not the leaking tap.

I imagined the career but not the emails.

I imagined the relationship but not the difficult conversations.

I imagined independence but not the terrifying responsibility of realising that, technically, you are now the adult in the room.

I imagined becoming myself.

I didn’t realise how much of becoming yourself would involve wondering who you actually are.

There is also a particular kind of grief that comes with getting older.

You start realising that some of the lives you imagined for yourself may never happen exactly as you pictured them.

Not because you failed.

Not because you weren’t good enough.

But because life is annoyingly indifferent to the plans you made at twenty two.

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There are versions of me I thought I would have met by now.

A woman living somewhere else. A woman with different priorities. A woman who made different choices. A woman whose life looks more like the one I accidentally created in my head.

For a long time, I interpreted the distance between who I am and who I thought I would be as evidence that I was behind.

But maybe I’m not behind.

Maybe I’m just living in a reality that doesn’t look as cinematic as the fantasy.

Because fantasy doesn’t have bad days.

Fantasy doesn’t get boring.

Fantasy doesn’t change its mind.

Fantasy doesn’t have to sit with its loneliness in the kitchen at 2 a.m.

Real life does.

Maybe that’s why adulthood feels so anticlimactic.

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There is no grand arrival. Nobody hands you a certificate and says, congratulations, you are now a fully formed woman. Here are the keys to your life. Please don’t lose them.

You just keep going.

There is no episode where everything suddenly makes sense. No final scene. No perfectly timed soundtrack telling you that you’ve finally become the woman you were supposed to be.

There is just Tuesday.

And then Wednesday.

And another decision. Another mistake. Another bill. Another person you love and lose. Another version of yourself you outgrow and leave behind.

I still catch myself waiting.

Waiting for the version of my life that finally makes everything click. The version where I wake up and suddenly understand why everything happened the way it did. Where I feel settled. Certain. Where I look around and think, Oh. This is it.

But I’m beginning to wonder what I’ve missed while waiting for my life to begin.

The ordinary moments I dismissed because they weren’t the ones I thought would matter.

The people I loved while secretly wondering what was next.

The version of myself who was already becoming someone, even while I was busy worrying that I hadn’t become enough.

Maybe adulthood isn’t about finally arriving somewhere.

Maybe it’s realising, usually much later than you’d like, that there was never anywhere else to arrive.

You were here.

You’ve been here the whole time.

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I wasn’t planning on writing about Nigerian politics.

Honestly, I was just supposed to be home for a week. Eat good food, celebrate one of my friends getting married, complain about Lagos traffic (because I’m convinced that’s a constitutional right), and then fly back to London.

But Nigeria has a funny way of making politics impossible to ignore.

Within days I’d heard debates about the cost of living, electricity, corruption, roads and, somehow, whether Nigerian youths are lazy.

Lazy?

I almost laughed.

Because if there’s one thing Nigerians are not, it’s lazy.

Nigerians haven’t survived because the system works.

They’ve survived despite it.

And that’s when it hit me.

I’m convinced everyone in Lagos is walking around undiagnosed.

Not medically.

Politically.

Emotionally.

Financially.

Existentially.

Because how are you not supposed to be stressed?

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Your salary loses value before payday. A two hour journey becomes five because traffic has become a personality trait and roads seem to dissolve every rainy season. You check whether there’s electricity before deciding when to do the laundry. You budget for fuel, rent, food, data and school fees, while somehow trying to save for a future you’re no longer convinced exists.

After a while, frustration stops being an emotion.

It becomes your resting facial expression.

And yet, somehow, Nigerians are still funny.

We’ve become world champions at turning suffering into content.

Spend five minutes on Nigerian Twitter and you’ll know exactly what I mean.

One minute everyone’s joking that eggs now require financing.

The next, someone’s made a meme about buying one tomato in instalments.

We laugh because... what else are we supposed to do?

The humour isn’t distracting us from politics.

The humour is the politics.

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A joke about tomatoes isn’t really about tomatoes.

It’s about inflation.

A joke about NEPA isn’t really about electricity.

It’s about decades of failed infrastructure.

A joke about “Japa” isn’t really about moving abroad.

It’s about millions of young people no longer believing that hard work alone is enough.

Every meme is a policy failure wearing a punchline.

One moment from my trip summed all of this up.

We’d been sitting in Lagos traffic for almost fifteen minutes.

“Oga, what’s going on?” I asked my driver.

“Mama, they’re fixing the road,” he replied.

Fair enough, I thought.

I was expecting cranes. Engineers. Machinery. A construction crew that looked... well... like a construction crew.

Instead, we crawled past three men.

One had a shovel.

One was wearing Ankara.

The third looked like he’d been recruited during his lunch break.

“Who hired them?” I asked.

“The local government.”

We both laughed.

Not because it was funny.

Because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.

Then he said something that has stayed with me ever since.

“Don’t worry, Mama. In six months they’ll repair it again.”

That one sentence explained more about governance than any policy report I’ve ever read.

As we drove away, the radio presenter started discussing reports that ₦393 billion had been allocated to streetlight projects in the federal budget.

I remember thinking, of course.

It felt like the perfect metaphor for modern Nigeria.

You’re bouncing through potholes while listening to conversations about billions being allocated to public projects.

Whether every naira is justified isn’t even the point.

The point is perception.

The point is trust.

Because if people still can’t drive on decent roads, rely on consistent electricity or access quality healthcare, they’re inevitably going to ask:

What exactly are our taxes paying for?

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Politics in Nigeria isn’t something happening behind closed doors in Abuja.

It’s the reason your business can’t open because there’s no power.

It’s the reason your Uber journey takes twice as long.

It’s the reason food prices have doubled.

Politics isn’t abstract.

It’s deeply personal.

Then there was another conversation I couldn’t escape.

The comments suggesting Nigerian youths are lazy.

Imagine my surprise when I realised they came from the First Lady herself, who encouraged graduates to consider making and selling àkàrà as a business opportunity.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with selling àkàrà.

Honest work is honest work.

But that’s not why people were offended.

People were offended because it felt like another example of leaders misunderstanding the frustration of a generation that’s already doing everything it can to survive.

Because what I saw wasn’t laziness.

I saw exhaustion.

There’s a difference.

I saw graduates applying for hundreds of jobs.

Entrepreneurs building businesses despite unreliable electricity.

Young people monetising every skill they have just to make ends meet.

People aren’t refusing to work.

They’re refusing to pretend that hard work automatically guarantees a decent life.

Here’s where I have to check myself.

Because after a week...

I left.

I boarded a flight back to London.

Millions of Nigerians don’t get to do that.

Which means it’s incredibly easy for me, from the other side, to ask, “Why don’t people stay and fight for Nigeria?”

That’s a privileged question.

Because fighting looks very different when you’re also trying to afford food, survive inflation, pay school fees and keep the lights on.

So this isn’t me pretending to have the answers.

It’s me trying to understand the questions.

Do we keep celebrating resilience?

Or do we finally admit that resilience has become a convenient substitute for accountability?

Because somewhere along the way, surviving became the national aspiration.

And I don’t think that’s something any country should accept.

Nigeria isn’t functioning because its government is extraordinary.

It’s functioning because its people are.

The question is:

How much longer should extraordinary people be expected to compensate for bad governance?

When someone asks how I’ve been, I usually say some version of “busy.” Busy is a useful word because it sounds productive. It sounds intentional. It sounds a lot better than saying, “I’m exhausted, and I’m not entirely sure why.”

The truth is that somewhere inside me, there’s a treadmill with no off switch and a timer that never resets.

Even when things are technically fine, I find myself checking in with my own life like a nervous passenger staring out of a train window.

Are we there yet?

Are we closer?

Why does the scenery still look the same?

The last year has felt like a loop. A perpetual rerun with new outfits and the same soundtrack. Different months, different goals, different plans, but somehow the same underlying feeling that I was always slightly behind. Slightly late. Slightly failing to arrive.

Every time I thought I’d reached a finish line, it quietly moved twenty feet further away.

The strange part is that nobody tells you when you’re doing too much if you’re doing it well.

From the outside, I looked fine.

I paid my bills. I showed up to work. I answered texts eventually. I remembered birthdays. I bought one of those planners that promised to change my life.

The planner, unsurprisingly, did not change my life.

A lot happened over the last eighteen months.

Friendships ended.

Not dramatically, for the most part. Some relationships don’t explode. They evaporate. One day you’re speaking every week and the next you’ve become someone who occasionally likes their insta photos.

There was also a relationship or a situationship, depending on how honest I’m being, that occupied far more space in my head than it ever did in reality.

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It arrived quickly and left softly, but still inescapably.

Which, I’ve learned, is somehow more annoying than a dramatic ending because there’s no clear thing to be angry at. No villain. No spectacular disaster. Just the slow realisation that something you hoped would become a story was actually just a chapter.

At the same time, life kept asking practical things of me.

I moved house this year.

I remember standing in empty rooms surrounded by half-packed boxes, convincing myself that changing my surroundings would somehow change my circumstances.

There was something liberating about it.

I loved the idea of leaving things behind.

Bad memories.

Bad habits.

Versions of myself that no longer fit.

I carried boxes up the stairs alone. I learned which bills were flexible and which were not. I discovered there’s a difference between what you think you can handle and what you will handle when no one else is coming.

The move gave me a fresh postcode.

It did not solve my problems.

As it turns out, emotional baggage is incredibly committed to the bit.

It follows you.

What surprised me wasn’t how hard the year was.

It was how capable I became within it.

I handled things.

Which sounds admirable until you realise that “handling things” can become its own problem.

Somewhere along the way, I started treating every difficult feeling like a task to complete.

Sad? Optimise.

Lonely? Stay busy.

Uncertain? Make a five-year plan.

I approached my emotional life the way some people approach their inboxes.

The issue is that grief doesn’t care about productivity systems.

Neither does burnout.

In the doing, I changed.

I kept thinking, If I just match the speed of my environment, I’ll be safe.

But environments don’t have a speed. They have weather.

And so I kept swapping umbrellas. Fresh plans, shinier versions of me, calendars that promised to tame the day. All the while mistaking adaptation for control, as if the right umbrella could stop the storm altogether.

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Last week, I was sitting on the pavement on Carnaby Street with a friend who is moving to Asia.

The conversation started with the usual questions.

How are you?

How’s work?

How’s everything?

And then, somehow, it became a conversation about the year we’d both had.

The losses.

The disappointments.

The things we thought would happen but didn’t.

The things that happened that we never saw coming.

At one point she looked at me with a sort of playful sorrow and said:

“I promise I’m not running.”

We both laughed.

Not because it was true.

But because it wasn’t.

She was moving halfway across the world after one of the hardest years of her life. I had spent the better part of eighteen months trying to outrun my own disappointments through productivity, planning and sheer force of will.

We were both running.

Just in different directions.

For years we’d both been chasing things.

Better jobs.

Better bodies.

More certainty.

More proof that we were doing life correctly.

And underneath all of it was the same assumption: that rest would arrive later.

That one day we’d reach some invisible checkpoint and finally be allowed to relax.

Sitting there on the pavement, watching people rush past us carrying shopping bags, takeaway coffees and their own private worries, I realised how many of us are doing the same thing.

Running.

Not always physically.

Not even consciously.

But running all the same.

Toward approval.

Toward achievement.

Away from disappointment.

Away from ourselves.

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There is something strangely comforting about discovering you’re not the only person carrying that weight.

There’s a holiness in realising you’re not uniquely broken, just uniquely honest in that moment.

I want to talk about running without turning it into a metaphor that forgives everything.

Because sometimes I really am running.

Some days I’m running from shame.

Some days I’m running toward a life that feels like mine from the inside.

Some days I’m just jogging in place because movement feels safer than stillness.

Stillness has a way of making things audible.

Lately I’ve been paying more attention to the tiny things that make a day feel manageable.

Mediation before my day starts

The friend who texts, “Are you home?” and actually waits for an answer.

The plant on my windowsill that has survived conditions no plant should reasonably survive.

Making my bed.

Booking the dentist appointment.

Saying no to plans I don’t want to attend.

None of these things would look impressive on social media. That’s probably why I trust them.

They’re real.

The older I get, the less interested I am in building a life that looks good from a distance.

I want one that feels good from the inside.

I’m still figuring out what that means.

Some days I absolutely revert back to old habits. I convince myself that if I just work harder, think faster, answer quicker and achieve more, I’ll eventually arrive at a version of life where I can finally relax.

Then I remember I’ve been telling myself that story for years.

Maybe there is no magical point where somebody hands you permission to slow down.

Maybe you have to give it to yourself.

Here’s a fact I keep learning and unlearning:

Slowness is not a synonym for failure.

Neither is rest.

Neither is changing your mind.

My friend leaves for Asia soon.

A younger version of me would have treated that as an ending.

Now it feels more like evidence that love changes shape all the time. People move. Lives expand. The thread stretches. It doesn’t necessarily break.

I think that’s true of a lot of things.

Friendships.

Dreams.

Versions of ourselves.

They don’t always disappear. Sometimes they just become something different than we expected.

So no, I don’t think I’m running anymore.

Or at least I’m trying not to.

I’m trying to notice things while they’re happening instead of treating every day like a bridge to the next one.

I’m trying to stop measuring my worth by how quickly I can get somewhere.

I’m trying to believe that being present is a worthwhile use of a life.

It’s harder than it sounds.

But today I made breakfast.

I answered a friend’s text.

I watered the plant.

For now, that feels like enough.

I sometimes wonder who I’d be without melancholy, nostalgia, yearning, overthinking, anxiety, and regret. But then I remember those are basically my internal organs at this point. Remove them and what remains? Probably someone who replies to texts in four minutes instead of spiritually preparing for them like they’re entering battle.

Maybe I’d be one of those women who wake up early and drink water before coffee. Women who own matching pyjama sets. Women who don’t stare out rainy windows as if a 2013 indie soundtrack is legally required to begin playing in the background.

But instead, I wake up every morning with a brain that immediately opens seventeen tabs at once.

One tab is anxiety.
One is regret.
Three are yearning.
And at least four are dedicated to remembering deeply insignificant things I said in 2018.

Honestly, my mind behaves less like a healthy cognitive system and more like a group chat that never sleeps.

Melancholy, specifically, follows me around like expensive perfume — soft, lingering, impossible to wash out. Dramatic without ever raising its voice. I can turn anything into something tender and devastating.

A midnight bus ride becomes a small private film. The bus glides through hollow streets, too fast for memory to catch up, the city outside smearing into watercolour streaks beneath my tired eyes. Traffic lights melt together, red, green and amber, until the whole world looks undecided. Somewhere in my headphones, White Flag by Dido plays softly, like it was written specifically for me to romanticise my own sadness on public transport. And now I’m yearning for a love I can’t even fully remember, mourning something that may never have belonged to me in the first place.

There’s something deeply ridiculous about being overcome with emotion because a stranger walked past wearing the exact perfume your aunt wore in 2009.

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Now I’m in Tesco fighting for my life beside the avocados because memory has decided today is cinema.

And nostalgia? Nostalgia is a liar. A gorgeous liar.

Nostalgia will have me missing periods of my life that were objectively awful. I’ll think:

God, I miss being nineteen.

No, I do not.

At nineteen, I was emotionally unstable, under-moisturised, and allowing men with absolutely no emotional intelligence to ruin my life.

But nostalgia edits everything with golden light. Suddenly I’m romanticising old phone chargers, posting Instagram photos with #MCM, train stations, Facebook albums titled “summer x,” sitting on bathroom counters at parties, and those giant hoop earrings I lost and still mourn like deceased relatives.

Sometimes I miss versions of myself that didn’t even properly exist. Just fragments. Girls I almost became.

That’s the real danger of yearning too. It doesn’t need facts. It survives entirely on vibes.

I yearn constantly. Quietly. Elegantly. Like a Victorian woman with tuberculosis staring at the sea.

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I yearn for cities I’ve never lived in.
For people I barely knew.
For moments that lasted six minutes.
For lives I invented after hearing one sad song while cleaning my kitchen.

Sometimes I’ll be walking home at night, streetlights glowing against wet pavement, and suddenly feel overwhelmed by this strange, beautiful ache, like I’m missing somebody from another lifetime.

Meanwhile, the reality is I probably just need a snack and eight uninterrupted hours of sleep.

Overthinking, though, is where things become genuinely unserious.

Someone replies “haha” to my message and suddenly I’m analysing the tone like I’m decoding government secrets. Was that a genuine laugh? A polite laugh? A “please stop talking” laugh? The human psyche was not built for texting.

The worst part is other people are simply living their lives while my brain is constructing conspiracy boards from punctuation.

Nobody.
Absolutely nobody.
My brain at 1:17 a.m.:
“Remember when you waved at someone who wasn’t waving at you in secondary school?”

Yes, actually. Against my will.

Anxiety also has incredible range. She’s creative. Theatrical. A born storyteller.

Anxiety loves a vague message.

Nothing sends my nervous system into cardiac arrest faster than:

“Hey”

No context.
No punctuation.
Just psychological warfare.

It’s exhausting. My nervous system behaves like we are one inconvenience away from being hunted for sport.

And regret? Regret is painfully delicate. Petty in the quietest ways.

It doesn’t always arrive carrying life-altering mistakes. Sometimes it comes dressed as conversations that never happened properly. The softer tone I should have used. The questions I should have asked before pride closed my mouth. The moments I performed indifference when I was, in truth, overflowing with care.

I think about all the times I tried so hard to seem unaffected, unbothered, cool, as though tenderness was something embarrassing to be caught carrying in public.

And then there are the opposite regrets: the people I poured oceans into who deserved barely a teaspoon of me. People I stretched myself thin for, only to realise they had the emotional depth of a waiting room chair.

There are old versions of myself I want to hug, and old versions I want to grab by the shoulders and scream at.

Girl!
Stand up!

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But honestly, if all these emotions disappeared tomorrow, who would I even be?

Probably calmer. Better hydrated. Someone who replies to texts within four minutes instead of conducting a full internal risk assessment beforehand.

But maybe I’d also be less observant. Less tender. Less capable of turning ordinary moments into meaning.

Because as exhausting as it is to feel everything this intensely, these emotions are also the reason a rainy bus ride can feel cinematic, or a stranger’s perfume can unlock an entire forgotten year of my life.

The same woman who overthinks every conversation is also the woman who feels music in her bones and memories in her throat.

Annoying?
Absolutely.

But a little beautiful too.

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Nothing is wrong.
And I’m still not happy.

That’s the part I don’t know how to explain.

My life, from the outside, looks fine. I am fine. And yet there’s a low hum underneath everything. This sense that I’m watching my own life through glass, close enough to see it, too far away to feel it.

And it feels almost shameful to admit. Ungrateful.

I was about eighteen when I first noticed it.

Not in a way that announced itself. Not in a way that made anyone worry. Just a small, almost imperceptible realisation, like looking down and realising you’ve been holding your breath for years.

Everyone around me seemed to have access to something I didn’t. Some internal thermostat set to ‘okay'. Some resting place inside themselves where they could just… be. And I kept waiting for mine to switch on. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next year. Maybe after this one thing finally falls into place.

I had moments, of course. Deep belly laughs that cracked me open. Afternoons that tasted like gold. Flashes of something so light and so free I thought, this is it, it’s finally here.

But it never stayed.

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Happiness, for me, was always a visitor. Never a resident. Something I passed through on my way to somewhere else, somewhere I never seemed to arrive.

Instead, I just kept living. Kept functioning. Carrying something I couldn’t quite name.

It shows up in small ways.

In the pause before I answer how are you? The split second where I decide which version of the truth is acceptable. In the smile I wear that isn’t fake exactly, but isn’t full either. In how I hesitate before replying to messages, even from people I love. In how everything feels slightly effortful, like I’m moving through something thicker than everyone else.

I notice it most around other people.

Sitting across from friends at dinner, laughing at the right moments, nodding along and feeling, somewhere underneath, that I’m slightly out of sync. Like there’s a version of me at the table and a version of me watching from just behind my own eyes. Wondering if anyone can tell. Or if this is what it feels like for everyone.

I smile. I contribute. I perform presence so well that no one ever questions it.

And then I go home and feel like I’ve just taken off a costume I didn’t realise I was wearing.

Nothing is wrong. That’s the whole unbearable thing.

My life, on paper, looks fine. I am fine. There’s no catastrophe. No single broken thing I can point to and say this is it.

I remember holding my university results for the first time, something I thought would finally make me feel like I’d arrived. A first-class degree in science. Something I had quietly worked towards for years.

I read it three times. Waiting for it to feel the way I thought it would.

A first-class degree. Years of quiet work. Proof, finally, that I was enough.

I smiled. Took a photo. Told the people who needed to know.

And then, nothing.

Not sadness. Not disappointment exactly. Just… absence. A hollow where the feeling was supposed to be.

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I kept waiting for it to land. For the pride to catch up with me. But instead, another thought crept in—quiet, almost casual—that I hadn’t ranked highest. Something I hadn’t even admitted I cared about until that moment.

And just like that, the achievement stopped belonging to me. It became evidence of something I’d failed at instead.

I’ve never told anyone that. How quickly the joy curdled. How I stood there holding proof of my success and felt, somehow, like I’d lost.

It’s a strange thing, carrying something you can’t name. You start to wonder if it’s even real. If you’re making it up. If everyone feels this way and just doesn’t talk about it. Or if you’re the only one who can’t seem to find the door everyone else walked through.

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And now I’m older.

The feeling hasn’t disappeared. I’ve just learned how to describe it.

The thing no one tells you about self-awareness is that it doesn’t set you free.

It just makes you a witness.

I can see everything now. Every pattern. Every defence. Every moment I start to pull away before someone has the chance to disappoint me.

I can catch it as it’s happening. The exact second I decide to become smaller. Easier. Less demanding.

I can sit there, fully aware that I’m shutting down in real time and still choose silence over the risk of being known.

I can name it. Explain it. Trace it back.

And then I do it anyway.

That’s the loneliest part. Knowing yourself this well and still not being able to change fully. Having all the insight in the world and none of the freedom.

Somewhere along the way, healing stopped being something I needed and became something I was performing.

Something I could be good or bad at.

There’s always another layer to uncover, another pattern to fix, another version of myself I haven’t reached yet. And it starts to feel suspiciously similar to the thing it promised to free me from.

I’ve turned my inner life into a project. A self to optimise.

And I am so, so tired.

Because knowing hasn’t healed me.

If anything, I've turned my inner life into an endless project. A self to fix. A soul to optimise. Healing has become another metric I'm failing at, another voice in my head whispering not there yet, keep going, you still haven't done enough.

Less like I’m living and more like I’m constantly assessing it.

And part of me wants to say: maybe this is just how some of us are built.

Maybe the ache isn’t a sign that something’s wrong. Maybe it’s just what it means to feel things deeply. To notice the gaps. To stay awake to your own life.

But I don’t fully trust that thought.

Because there’s something dangerous about deciding too quickly that this is all there is. That happiness belongs to other people. That this, persistent ache, is just a permanent trait.

I think about my eighteen-year-old self sometimes.

The one who first noticed something was off, but didn’t have the language for it yet. Who assumed it would pass. That one day she would just wake up and feel different.

I wouldn’t tell her it all works out. I don’t think that’s true.

But I would tell her this:

Don’t decide too early what your life is allowed to feel like.

Nothing is wrong.

And I’m still not happy.

But I’ve stopped waiting for the moment when it all clicks into place. Stopped believing there’s a version of me on the other side of all this work, who finally feels okay.

Maybe this is just what my life feels like. Maybe the ache is the price of staying awake.

I don’t know yet if that’s acceptance or defeat.

But I’m done pretending I’m not carrying it.

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I’ve always been suspicious of how easily some people say I love you.
The way it slips out mid-conversation, tucked between a laugh and a goodbye.
Soft. Automatic. Almost indistinguishable from habit.
Said in the same tone you’d use for “text me when you get home or drive safe.”

I don’t think they’re lying.
But I don’t think they’re carrying what I carry when I hear it.

Because for me, those words have never been light.
They don’t pass through.
They stay.
They echo.
They settle somewhere deep and refuse to leave quietly.

I didn’t grow up in a home where I love you was spoken much.
Love existed, sure, but it was something I had to decode.
It lived in acts of service, in consistency, in presence.
It was a meal left waiting, a door left unlocked, a ride given without being asked.
Affection was rationed, not performed.

So I learned love through actions, not words.
I learned to recognise love instead of hearing it.
To piece it together from what was shown instead of what was said.
It made me observant. It made me grateful.
But it also left me speechless in ways that would take years to unlearn.

When you grow up having to infer love, you grow cautious of the words that are meant to confirm it.
Because words can be withdrawn. Twisted. Forgotten.
You start to believe that love should prove itself quietly, that saying it aloud may jinx it, may expose it.
You start to believe that silence is safer.

So I learned to hold my tongue.
Especially when my heart was full,
Because I love you felt final.
Too heavy to take back.
Too vulnerable to survive being misunderstood.

I told myself love didn’t need to be spoken to be known.
That if I showed up, stayed present, remembered the small things, that would be enough.
And maybe sometimes it was.
But part of me always knew that love kept quiet is love half-lived.

I held back my words in relationships that hovered on the edge of something deeper.
Moments that were quietly asking to be named.
I stayed in almosts.
In nearlys.
In what could have beens.
And I told myself that staying silent was the noble thing to do.
That real love didn’t need to announce itself.

But silence creates distance too.
And distance, I’ve learned, is just love left unspoken.

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I met the full weight of silence the day life demanded words from me.

Someone I loved was diagnosed with something terminal.
The kind of thing that makes time fold in on itself, that makes every conversation feel like an archive.
Hospitals have a strange stillness. They turn noise into echo.
They strip you down to truth.

We reminisced about the years, the mistakes, the laughter, the near misses.
We said everything except the thing that mattered most.

The words sat in my chest like something solid.
Dense. Immovable.
Not because I didn’t feel them, but because I felt them too much.

Saying I love you in that room would’ve meant acknowledging everything it carried:
every time I hadn’t said it before, every silence that pretended to be strength,
every moment I thought there’d be another chance.

And suddenly those three words weren’t just expression.
They were history.
They were grief.
They were forgiveness in disguise.

So I stayed quiet.
I showed it instead. I did what I’d always done, held their hand, showed up, stayed late.
And maybe that meant something to them.
But the silence felt different this time.
It felt unfinished.
Like the story of us had an ending that would never quite close right.

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That’s the quiet tragedy of giving words too much weight.
You protect them so much that you never use them.
You save them for perfect moments that never arrive.
You wait until you feel certain, until the conditions are ideal and life simply doesn’t work like that.

Love doesn’t wait for certainty.
It doesn’t ask for permission.
It just asks you to be brave enough to name it while it’s here.

I don’t want I love you to feel like something I have to earn the right to say anymore.
I don’t want it to feel like a period at the end of a sentence.
Maybe it was never meant to be an ending.
Maybe it’s a beginning.

Maybe it’s allowed to be said in progress, mid-chaos, mid-doubt.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be a perfect truth, just an honest one.

Maybe love doesn’t need to carry all of history to be real.
Maybe that’s what makes it beautiful:
the courage to speak it before all the right words find their place.

I still struggle to say it.
The words don’t fall effortless from me the way they do for others.
But I’ve started asking myself: is the heaviness inherent to the words—or did I build it myself?

Did I inherit it from a childhood where love was supposed to be felt, not spoken?
From silence passed down like a family heirloom?
From a fear that once said, love might vanish into thin air?

Because if love can survive the quiet, in the way someone shows up, cooks, waits, forgives.

Then maybe it can survive being said out loud too.

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Maybe saying I love you doesn’t make it heavier.
Maybe it makes it shareable.
A weight divided instead of carried alone.

I don’t want to carry love like a secret anymore.
I want it to breathe.
To exist outside of my body, to take up space in the air between me and the people who deserve to hear it.

Even if my voice shakes.
Even if I get it wrong.
Even if it catches in my throat.

Because every unsaid I love you haunts more than the ones said too soon.

We don’t remember the times we spoke freely.
We remember the times we stayed quiet when it mattered.
We remember the silences that became regrets.

So I’m practicing.
To tell friends I love them without hesitation.
To tell family before time narrows again.
To stop waiting for perfect certainty, and choose honesty instead.

Maybe that’s how the weight lightens, not by dropping it,
but by offering to share it.

Maybe love was never supposed to live only in what we do,
or in what we imply, or what others guess.
Maybe it was meant to be spoken, clumsily, imperfectly, sincerely.

Because love isn’t about getting the words right.
It’s about daring to say them while you still can.

And if I’ve learned anything from silence, it’s this:
there is no perfect moment to say I love you.
There’s only now.
And now is always enough.

I told him I didn’t want his last name. He paused, just long enough for the air to tighten, and then he asked half joking, half not “What are you, a feminist?”

It wasn’t the question itself that unsettled me. It was how quickly something personal became something political. As if a choice about my own name, something intimate, something bound up in identity and history could only be explained as ideology.

I didn’t answer right away. Not because I didn’t have one, but because I knew whatever I said would be translated into a language I wasn’t speaking.

Because here’s the thing: I don’t want his last name. Not because I don’t love him. Not because I’m trying to prove anything. I just don’t want to stop being who I already am.

That sounds simple, but it rarely lands that way.

Taking a partner’s last name is still treated as the default, the neutral option. It’s what you do when things are going well, when you’re committed, when you’re building a life together. Not taking it becomes marked. It raises questions. It invites interpretation.

And explanations are never neutral either.

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If I say I like my name, it sounds sentimental. If I say it’s tied to my work or identity, it sounds defensive. If I say I don’t see why I should change it, it starts to sound like an argument about fairness, tradition, gender.

Suddenly, I’m not just making a choice. I’m representing something.

And I understand why. Names, especially in relationships, are never just names. They carry expectations. They tell stories about belonging and unity, about whose history continues and whose gets absorbed.

For some people, sharing a last name feels like building something together, a visible, lasting signal of being on the same team. There’s something undeniably romantic about that idea.

But I think we underestimate what it means to give something up, even when it’s voluntary.

A last name is one of the few things you carry from the beginning of your life into whatever comes next. Letting go of it isn’t just administrative. It’s existential, in a quiet, almost invisible way.

And yet we rarely talk about that side of it.

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Instead, the conversation collapses into binaries: tradition or progress, unity or independence. As if every choice has to declare allegiance to something larger.

So when he asked if I was a feminist, I felt all of that compress into a single word.

Because what would it mean if I said yes? Would that make my choice easier to understand, or harder to accept?

And if I said no, would it make the decision seem smaller? Less deliberate? As if it were just a quirk instead of something that matters?

The truth is, the label doesn’t answer the question underneath.

This isn’t about feminist ideology or making a statement about the patriarchy. It’s not about resisting commitment. It’s about wanting a relationship where both people get to remain fully themselves, rather than one person folding more completely into the other.

We’re used to certain asymmetries being invisible. We’re used to one person adjusting more, changing more, giving up more, and calling it love. When that pattern is interrupted, even gently, it can feel like something is off.

Saying “I don’t want your last name” can sound like “I don’t want to belong to you.” But that’s not what I mean.

If anything, it’s the opposite.

I want to belong with you, not to you. I want a partnership defined by choice, not inheritance. I want us to build something together that doesn’t require either of us to become less ourselves to make it work.

And maybe that brushes up against feminism, whether I intend it to or not.

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But it also feels simpler than that. Like a belief that people should be allowed to define themselves without those choices being turned into a stance or a confrontation.

When I think back to that moment, I don’t feel angry. I feel aware.

Aware of how quickly we reach for categories when we don’t understand something. Aware of how deeply ingrained certain expectations still are, even in relationships that feel modern on the surface.

If I could answer him again, I wouldn’t start with yes or no.

I would just say: I don’t want your last name, not because I’m trying to make a point, but because I already have one.

And I’d like to keep it.

But if I’m honest, that’s not the whole truth.

There’s something else underneath it. Something quieter. Something I don’t say out loud as easily.

What if I’m just scared?

It feels disloyal to admit that. Like it weakens everything I’ve said. Like it turns something principled into something fragile.

But I can’t ignore it.

I’m afraid of losing myself.

I’ve never believed that marriage is two people becoming one.

I know that’s the language we use. I know it’s meant to sound beautiful. But I’ve always felt like something gets lost in that idea.

I don’t want to become half of something.

I want to remain whole, standing next to someone else who is whole too. Two people, choosing each other.

Not merging into a single identity. Not disappearing into something shared.

Maybe that’s what I’m protecting when I say I want to keep my name.

Not just my history.

Myself.

The version of me that exists independently of anyone else. The version I still recognise when everything else is stripped away.

But maybe it’s also a shield.

Something solid I can point to instead of saying: I’m afraid of disappearing.

Maybe both things are true at once.

That names matter, deeply, personally.

And that I don’t know, with complete certainty, who I would be without mine.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether I’m a feminist.

Maybe it’s whether there’s space, in love, to remain fully myself.

Whether someone can hear that without turning it into something else.

Without reducing it to a label, or a stance, or an argument.

Just a truth.

I don’t want to lose my name.

And I don’t want to lose myself.

I’m still learning how to hold onto both, without having to choose.

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I used to think attraction was something you could see.

Something immediate. Obvious. The kind of thing that walks into a room before a person even says a word. The way you notice hands, lips and eyes. The way someone carries themselves like they’ve never questioned their place in the world, something people try to reduce to confidence, to a kind of quiet certainty.

Lust is loud like that.

It announces itself quickly. It makes decisions for you before you’ve had the chance to think them through. It convinces you that chemistry is enough, that proximity is connection, that wanting someone is the same as knowing them.

And for a while, I believed it.

I believed in the spark. In urgency. In the way desire feels like certainty.

But desire, I’ve learned, is a terrible judge of longevity.

Because your eyes can betray you.

They can convince you to stay in conversations that feel empty. To overlook the silence that stretches a little too long when there’s nothing real to say. To confuse physical closeness with emotional depth.

Your eyes can make you ignore the absence of something much quieter. Much rarer.

Intellectual intimacy.

And unlike lust, it doesn’t arrive all at once.

It builds.

Slowly. Subtly. Almost imperceptibly, until one day you realise you’ve been seen in a way that has nothing to do with how you look.

There’s a different kind of attraction in being understood.

Not just heard, but followed. Not just listened to, but engaged with. The kind where you don’t have to simplify your thoughts to be digestible. The kind where your sentences don’t trail off because you assume they won’t get it.

I think that’s what I’ve been craving without having the language for it.

To be met in my mind.

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Because there is something deeply intimate about the way someone thinks with you.

The way they challenge you without trying to win. The way they ask questions not to respond, but to understand. The way a conversation doesn’t feel like a performance, but a place you can rest.

I didn’t realise how much I was editing myself until I didn’t have to anymore.

Until I said something layered, slightly abstract, and instead of confusion, there was curiosity.

Not dismissive. Not patronising. Just interested.

“You think in layers, don’t you?”

“That’s not a surface thought… where did that come from?”

Do you know how rare that is?

To not feel like you have to translate your mind into something more palatable. To not shrink your thoughts into something easily agreed with.

With the wrong person, thinking becomes a lonely activity.

You’re together, but you’re alone in your head. You filter. You simplify. You nod along to things you don’t fully agree with because it feels easier than unpacking why you don’t.

And over time, something in you goes quiet.

Not because you have nothing to say.

But because you’ve learned it won’t land.

I think that kind of disconnection is more dangerous than we admit.

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Because it doesn’t feel like conflict. It doesn’t feel like something is wrong in an obvious way. It just feels… slightly off. Slightly unfulfilling. Like eating something that looks good but never quite satisfies your hunger.

And if the physical attraction is strong enough, you can ignore it for a while.

Your eyes will keep convincing you.

But your mind knows.

Your mind always knows.

And eventually, it gets tired of trying to stretch itself into spaces that don’t hold it.

That’s the thing about intellectual intimacy.

Once you’ve experienced it, even briefly, it becomes very hard to settle for its absence.

Because it’s not just about intelligence in the conventional sense. It’s not about degrees or vocabulary or who can reference the most obscure ideas.

It’s about alignment.

Curiosity that matches yours. Depth that meets you where you are. A willingness to explore thoughts instead of shutting them down.

It’s about how someone approaches the world.

Do they question things? Do they reflect? Do they notice details most people overlook?

Do they care about understanding, or just being right?

I’ve started to realise that this kind of compatibility is what sustains connection when everything else fluctuates.

Because looks change.

Desire ebbs and flows.

But the way someone thinks, the way they engage with you mentally.

That stays.

Or it doesn’t.

And when it doesn’t, no amount of physical attraction can compensate for the silence that settles in the living room when there’s nothing real left to say.

Because there is a very specific loneliness that comes from being desired but not understood.

From being looked at, but not seen.

From having your body admired while your mind is left unexplored.

It creates this quiet dissonance.

You start to feel like parts of you are in different relationships.

Your physical self is here. Engaged. Wanted.

But your inner world is somewhere else entirely, untouched and unshared.

I want someone who is as intrigued by the way I think as they are by the way I look.

Someone who notices the patterns in my thoughts. Who remembers the small things I say in passing and brings them back later, expanded, considered.

Someone who doesn’t just hear me, but meets me halfway in the conversation and builds something with me there.

Because conversation, at its best, is creation.

It’s not just exchanging words. It’s constructing meaning together. It’s discovering new perspectives in real time.

And when that’s missing, everything else starts to feel a little… performative.

I think that’s why lust can be so misleading.

It feels like connection because it’s intense. Because it’s immediate. Because it demands your attention.

I don’t think intellectual intimacy replaces physical attraction.

I think it sharpens it into something far more dangerous.

There’s a kind of sexual hunger that awakens when you meet someone who connects with you like this. Intellectually, deeply, and it’s almost impossible to substitute. It’s not just desire for their body, but for their mind, their attention, the way they see you. And once that’s there, nothing surface level really satisfies in the same way.

So you start looking for it everywhere.

In fleeting conversations. In almost connections. In people who almost reach you, who brush up against that depth but never quite hold it. You try to recreate it, to mimic it, to convince yourself it’s there if you look hard enough.

But shadows are never real.

They don’t rise. They don’t reveal themselves. They don’t meet you fully, no matter how much you want them to. And there’s a quiet kind of disappointment in realising you can’t imagine something into existence just because you’ve felt it once.

Because this kind of hunger isn’t just physical, it’s rooted in being understood. And once you’ve felt that, even briefly, your body starts to crave it too.

So when you find it, truly find it, you have to treat it differently.

Water it. Hold it gently. Don’t rush to consume it. Don’t reduce it to something simpler. Let it unfold. Let it deepen.

Because that kind of intimacy, the kind that lives in the mind and spills into everything else is rare.

And nothing real has ever come from chasing shadows when you’ve already seen what it looks like in the light.

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This morning I caught myself worrying about whether I should book a Pilates class. It wasn’t a serious worry. Just the small logistics of ordinary life: the class fills up quickly, the early alarm might be painful, and if I don’t book soon, I’ll probably lose my spot.

At the same time, the news was open on my phone. Another escalation in the Middle East. Missiles, retaliations, governments making statements, alliances shifting. A war widening between Israel and Iran, with the United States increasingly entangled in the conflict. Over the past year alone we’ve watched events unfold that will almost certainly be studied in history books: mass civilian casualties in Gaza, global protests over Palestine, and the expansion of a regional conflict that now threatens to reshape international politics. The scale of it is enormous.

And yet, there I was, thinking about Pilates.

And there it was: my guilt, plain and simple. Sitting in my empty apartment, watching missiles strike and governments shift on my phone, and a few minutes later using that very same device to book a Pilates class. The absurdity of it made me wince. I knew the world was breaking, and yet I carried on with my small conveniences, my routines, my choices, as if they existed in a separate universe. That dissonance, that quiet selfishness, is mine to own.

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There is something deeply disorienting about the way we live now. Never before in history have ordinary people had such immediate access to the political landscape of the entire planet. Wars that once would have felt distant now arrive directly in our hands. Images, commentary, analysis, arguments, constant and unavoidable. We are aware of things that people generations ago might never have known about at all.

But our lives are still lived on a much smaller scale. We wake up. We make coffee. We go to work. We worry about rent, friendships, exercise, deadlines, groceries. Life continues through small routines and ordinary concerns. Somewhere between those two scales, the vastness of world events and the narrowness of daily life, there is a strange moral tension. For a moment the contrast feels absurd, almost grotesque. But the longer I sit with it, the more I realise that this moment probably isn’t unusual at all. It might actually describe something fundamental about the way most of us live now.

We exist in two different worlds at once. In one world, history is moving. Wars escalate. Political alliances shift. Entire populations are displaced. Decisions made by governments today may shape the global order for decades. In the other world, we wake up, make coffee, go to work, answer messages, worry about exercise classes and weekend plans. The strange thing about modern life is that we are now aware of both worlds simultaneously.

For most of human history, that wasn’t the case. People knew what was happening in their town, their region, perhaps their country if news travelled far enough. The suffering of people thousands of miles away simply wasn’t visible. Today that distance has collapsed. Wars and humanitarian crises arrive instantly on our phones. We watch them unfold in real time. The scale of our awareness has expanded dramatically. But the scale of our concern hasn’t expanded in the same way.

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And if I’m honest, I don’t think the reason is confusion or emotional overload. The reason is much simpler. It hasn’t affected us yet. We care deeply when suffering moves close enough to touch our lives, when it threatens our safety, our economy, our families, our future. Until then, most of us continue living more or less the same way we always have. We scroll past war reports on the way to work. We absorb headlines about geopolitical crises between meetings. We read about civilian deaths and then move on to dinner plans. Not because we are monsters, but because we are human.

Our moral instincts were shaped in small communities where danger and suffering were immediate and visible. We evolved to respond strongly to threats within our own circle. Everything beyond that circle feels abstract. The internet has changed what we can see, but it hasn’t changed the structure of that instinct. So we live with a strange contradiction. We can witness global suffering in real time, but most of the time it remains distant enough that our daily routines continue uninterrupted. Life goes on. Work continues. Pilates gets booked.

Until, eventually, something moves closer. Energy prices spike. Political alliances drag our countries into conflict. Economic shocks ripple across borders. Security alerts appear in our own cities. Only then does the distant crisis become personal. Only then does it fully enter our moral universe.

There is something uncomfortable about admitting this. It reveals a kind of selfishness in the structure of human morality, a tendency to treat global suffering as background noise until it begins to reshape our own lives. But pretending otherwise might be even more dishonest. Most of us are not global moral actors making daily sacrifices for distant strangers. We are ordinary people navigating ordinary lives.

The question is, what do we do with the awareness of it? Because the internet has created a new kind of moment in human history. For the first time, billions of people can watch global events unfold in real time, even when those events are still far outside their own lives. We can see the storm long before it reaches our shore. And that awareness presents a quiet challenge.

Do we wait until events force themselves into our personal lives before we respond? Or do we try, imperfectly and inconsistently, to let distant realities shape how we think, vote, speak, and act before they reach us? I don’t have a neat answer to that question. Most days, if I’m honest, I probably fall short of the ideal. I read the news. I feel a moment of anger or sadness. Then I move on with my day.

But maybe the first step isn’t pretending we are better than we are. Maybe the first step is recognising the mirror that moments like this hold up to us. Because somewhere in the world, someone is living through a moment that will define their life, decisions being made around them that will redraw the future. And somewhere else, someone is sitting in their apartment wondering whether to book Pilates. More often than we like to admit, those two people are the same person.

And the uncomfortable truth may be this: the storm rarely feels real until the rain reaches our own roof.

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I was born into applause I did not ask for.

I was told I was exceptional before I knew what that meant.

Exceptional at school. Exceptional at helping. Exceptional at being “so mature for my age.” Exceptional at reading the room. Exceptional at not crying. Exceptional at knowing when my dad needed silence and when my mum needed softness. Exceptional at being the second mother in a house that already had one.

I wore that word like a medal.
Then I realised it was a job description.

There’s a quiet phenomenon that stretches across continents and cultures, from immigrant apartments in Dublin to crowded flats in Lagos, from suburban streets in London to high-rise balconies in Mumbai. The oldest daughter becomes the bridge. The buffer. The unpaid intern of adulthood.

It has a name: parentification.

But most of us just called it love.

We were the ones who translated the mail. Who packed the lunches. Who held the baby while finishing homework. Who learned to anticipate tension like meteorologists of mood. We were praised for being “strong,” when what we were actually being was convenient.

And it’s political, even when it’s domestic.

Because the oldest daughter doesn’t just appear in a vacuum. She’s shaped by patriarchy, by migration, by capitalism, by war, by poverty, by family secrets no one names out loud. She is the firstborn in a world that teaches girls their value lies in service and then acts surprised when she disappears inside it.

We became exceptional because someone had to.

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I don’t want to villainise our parents.

Most of them were surviving systems that were never built for softness. They were carrying their own unfinished childhoods. Many of our mothers were parentified before us. Many of our fathers were taught that providing financially was the same as being present.

We inherited their exhaustion.

And still, something in me grieves.

I grieve the girl who never got to colour outside the lines.
The teenager who mediated adult arguments.
The child who thought love had to be earned through usefulness.

There’s a particular loneliness in being the reliable one. You don’t get rescued. You don’t get asked if you’re okay. You become the family’s proof that everything turned out fine.

But “fine” is a low bar for a childhood.

What’s sad is how shared this story is.

Talk to women in Cairo, in São Paulo, in Tehran, the details change, the language changes, the food on the stove changes. But the script is eerily similar.

“You’re the eldest.”
“Set the example.”
“Your siblings look up to you.”
“Be strong for your mother.”
“Don’t stress your father.”

Translation: carry this.

And we did.

We carried siblings on hips and family expectations in our chests. We learned to overachieve not because we were ambitious, but because achievement felt like safety. If we were exceptional, maybe nothing would fall apart.

But here’s the realisation that cracked me open:

I don’t want to be exceptional anymore.

I want to be ordinary.

I want to be allowed to fail without it feeling like a threat to the entire ecosystem of my family. I want to say no without drafting a 12-point justification. I want rest that isn’t earned through burnout.

Exceptional kept me alive.
But it also kept me small.

Healing, for me, has not looked like dramatic rebellion. It looked like tiny betrayals of the old script.

Letting my siblings solve their own problems.
Allowing myself to be selfish.
Dating without trying to mother the man.

Forgiveness came slower than anger.

But it came.

Because I can hold two truths at once:
My parents did their best.
And their best hurt me.

That duality is adulthood. That’s the growth.

Sometimes I think about my future daughter.

I imagine her being loud. Taking up space. Crying dramatically over something small and being allowed to. I imagine not leaning on her emotionally just because she’s perceptive. I imagine telling her, “You don’t have to be strong for me. I am the adult. That’s my job.”

I want her childhood to be boring in the best way.
Unremarkable.
Unexceptional.

Free.

And when my future daughter looks at me, I hope she sees not a woman who carried everything

But a woman who learned how to set it down.

And to my sisters, biological and spiritual, the oldest daughters who feel 45 at 23, who are tired of being the “good one,” who confuse hyper-independence with empowerment:

You are allowed to put the weight down.

You are allowed to outgrow the role.

You are allowed to choose softness without betraying your family.

The world will try to reward you for being indispensable. It will call you a “boss,” a “fixer,” the “strong friend.” It will monetise your competence and romanticise your resilience.

But you do not exist to be exceptional.

You exist to be alive.

There is a shared grief here. A global one. A quiet sisterhood of girls who raised themselves while raising everyone else.

But there is also something else growing.

Boundaries.
Language.
Therapy bills.
Community.
Choice.

We are the first generation in many of our families to say: this stops with me.

Not with bitterness. Not with blame. But with awareness.

But there is also relief.

I don’t want to be exceptional anymore.

I want to be ordinary in the most radical sense of the word.

I want to be loved when I’m average. I want to be held when I’m overwhelmed. I want to exist without performing resilience.

I was born into applause I did not ask for.

Now, I am choosing something quieter.

I am choosing to put the performance down.

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This week, I’ve filtered every decision through one question: What would a wicked woman do?

That question has been reshaping the way I think.

I have decided that I am becoming a wicked woman.

By “wicked,” I don’t mean reckless or cruel. I mean decisive. Self-directed. Fully accountable for her own happiness. A wicked woman understands that time is not abstract or infinite, it is real, finite, and hers to use with intention.

We do not get bonus rounds. We do not replay years because we spent them people pleasing. Every day that passes is gone. Not in a poetic way. In a practical one.

Hours spent tolerating what drains you do not return. Years spent in almost-relationships do not refund themselves. Opportunities declined out of fear rarely circle back politely.

So I’ve started thinking about my life in terms of ownership.

If this is my one life, then I am the one who decides what it looks like. Not my parents. Not a partner. Not society. Not the version of me that is afraid of disappointing people.

For a long time, I confused choosing myself with being selfish.

But there is a kind of selfishness that harms, the kind that takes without regard, exploits without reflection, and leaves others carrying the cost.

And then there is another kind.

The kind that says: I will not sacrifice my long-term wellbeing for short-term approval. I will not trade my time, energy, or potential just to keep the peace. I will not hand over the steering wheel of my life because someone else is uncomfortable with my direction.

That is the kind of selfishness i’m choosing to practice.

It looks like saying no without drafting a dissertation to justify it. It looks like leaving what feels wrong instead of staying to prove endurance. It looks like prioritising my career, my health, my peace, even when someone else would prefer I didn’t.

I am learning that consideration does not require self-abandonment.

I can care without surrendering control. I can love and still leave. I can be empathetic without becoming responsible for emotions that are not mine.

Most of us were trained to be manageable. Especially as young women. We were praised for being flexible, accommodating, low-maintenance. We internalised the idea that being chosen was more important than choosing.

I don’t want to be chosen anymore.

I want to choose.

Choose the standard.
Choose the relationship.
Choose the work.
Choose the city.
Choose the pace of my life.

A wicked woman chooses.

There is something sobering about realising that no one is coming to save you. If you drift, you will end up somewhere, but not necessarily somewhere you respect.

I have drifted before. I have said yes because it was easier. I have stayed because leaving required courage. I have tolerated confusion because clarity meant confrontation.

That version of me was not weak.

She was afraid.

But fear is not a strategy.

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If I only get to do this once, I cannot build a life around avoiding discomfort. Growth is uncomfortable. Boundaries are uncomfortable. Outgrowing people is uncomfortable.

Staying small is also uncomfortable. It’s just quieter. More socially acceptable.

I mastered the art of managing other people’s comfort. I softened truths before they bruised. I shrank opinions before they unsettled the room.

As a Black woman, “good” often meant being exceptional without being alarming. It meant carrying competence lightly so no one felt the full weight of my power. I learned to dilute myself so others could swallow me whole.

But my dear, good girl no dey pay.

GOOD GIRL NO DEY PAY.

It took me years to understand the cost of that performance.

The wicked woman I am becoming understands trade-offs.

If someone is disappointed because I chose myself, that is a cost. But the cost of not choosing myself is greater. It is resentment. It is regret. It is looking back at forty and realising I lived according to someone else’s preferences.

I refuse that outcome.

Becoming a wicked woman is not about cruelty. It is about clarity. I will not play roles I did not apply for. I will not shrink to fit insecure spaces. I will not apologise for ambition, standards, or boundaries.

I will not romanticise wasted time.

Every year matters. Every decision compounds. The people I allow close will shape me. The risks I take or avoid will shape me. The standards I accept will shape me.

That is not dramatic.

It is reality.

I am young. I still have room to pivot. But youth is not endless. Seasons shift quickly. Months disappear quietly.

I will not look back and say, I wish I had taken myself more seriously.

So I am taking myself seriously now.

I am choosing the harder conversation. The higher standard. The bolder plan.

If that makes me a wicked woman, I accept it.

I am becoming a wicked woman.

And I would rather be called difficult than live a life that feels like compromise.

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There’s an intimacy in vulnerability I am trying to learn.

I am tired of standing at the edge of something beautiful and never stepping in.

I think I’m scared.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that makes for a good story. Just quietly. Practically. The kind of scared that looks like composure. The kind that smiles, nods, and changes the subject right before the conversation gets too real.

I can feel the moment when it’s coming.

He’ll ask something simple.
“What are you afraid of?”
“What hurt you the most?”
“Why do you pull away when things feel good?”

And I’ll laugh.

Not because it’s funny. But because laughter buys time. It softens the weight of the question. It keeps me safe for another thirty seconds.

I am scared of being known.

Being known means someone sees the parts I work very hard to manage. The insecurity I disguise as independence. The longing I pretend is casual. The way I replay conversations at night and wonder if I said too much. Or not enough.

I have spent most of my life being capable.

The strongish friend.
The emotionallish intelligent one.
The girl who “has it togetherish.”

And vulnerability threatens that identity.

Because what if I say, “I get anxious when I like someone”?
What if I told you “I’m scared that when you see me unfiltered and undone, you’ll walk away, that even fully known, I won’t be the one you choose”?
What if I confess, “Sometimes I feel like I’m too much and not enough at the same time”?

What happens to the strong girl then?

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I think part of my fear is that vulnerability feels irreversible. Once I say it, I can’t take it back. Once I admit I care, I lose leverage. Once I reveal the soft underbelly, I can’t pretend I wasn’t invested.

And I hate losing leverage.

Control has been my safety net.

If I don’t say too much, I can always pretend I wasn’t that attached. If I don’t show how deeply I feel, I can exit with dignity. If I keep parts of myself hidden, I never have to experience the full sting of rejection.

But I am beginning to realise something uncomfortable:

Withholding doesn’t protect me from pain. It just protects me from intimacy.

And I don’t want to live untouched.

I don’t want to be admired from a distance. I don’t want to be the girl who is “so mysterious” but never fully met. I don’t want another connection where we orbit each other carefully, both pretending we are less invested than we are.

I want to try.

Even if my voice shakes.

There was a moment recently, small enough to miss if they weren’t paying attention, where I chose differently.

We were walking side by side, the kind of closeness that feels casual but isn’t. His hand brushed mine once. Twice. Then he asked, gently, almost playfully,

“Why do you hate holding hands”

Normally, I would’ve laughed it off.
Shrugged.
Said, “I don’t know. I just do.”

I’ve always hidden behind that sentence. It’s light. Uncomplicated. It asks for no further excavation.

But this time, something in me stalled.

I paused.

And my heart started racing in a way that felt disproportionate to the question. It was just hand-holding. Just fingers intertwined. Just skin against skin.

But it has never felt like “just” anything to me.

It feels like my body is tethered to someone else’s presence in a way that my nervous system doesn’t know how to soften into.

It forces me to acknowledge you.

Not intellectually. Not romantically. Not theoretically.

Physically.

Your warmth. Your pulse. The weight of your palm. The quiet rhythm of walking in sync. There’s no pretending you’re not there. No emotional half-step. No strategic detachment.

It is closeness without distraction.

And that kind of closeness unsettles me.

So instead of laughing it off, I swallowed.

My chest felt tight. My instinct was screaming to minimise, to retreat, to keep the answer pretty and digestible. But I was tired of being pretty and digestible.

So I told him the truth.

“It makes me feel extremely vulnerable,” I said, my voice softer than I expected. “It forces me to acknowledge your presence in a way my nervous system isn’t ready to feel. I get this fight or flight high… but I can’t escape. I just feel unsettled. And I’ve never been brave enough to sit with that discomfort.”

There it was.

Not poetic. Not polished. Not dressed up in metaphor.

Just the raw wiring of me.

And it felt like stepping off a ledge without checking how far the drop was.

And do you know what happened?

Nothing catastrophic.

He didn’t recoil. He didn’t mock me. He didn’t suddenly lose interest. He just listened. And he nodded in a way that said he understood something about me now.

That moment didn’t magically cure my fear.

But it cracked something open.

I am realising that vulnerability isn’t one dramatic unveiling. It’s a series of small permissions. Small choices to stay instead of deflect. Small decisions to answer honestly instead of cleverly.

I am still scared.

I still calculate moments. I still catch myself editing my feelings into something more palatable. I still want to seem low-maintenance, easy, breezy, unfazed.

But I’m also tired of being unfazed.

I want to be moved.

There’s a tenderness in admitting that I don’t know how to do this well yet. That I am learning intimacy like a new language. Slowly. With an accent. Sometimes mispronouncing my needs.

I am learning that vulnerability doesn’t mean trauma dumping on the second date. It doesn’t mean handing over every scar as proof of depth. Not that, that was ever my problem.

Sometimes it just means saying:

“I like you.”
“That hurt.”
“I need reassurance.”
“I’m scared, but I want to try.”

For someone like me, those sentences feel radical. A betrayal to myself.

Because I was taught that needing makes you replaceable. That the less you require, the more likely someone is to stay. That coolness is attractive and intensity is dangerous.

But coolness has left me lonely, alone in the cold.

So now, I am practicing warmth.

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It feels awkward. I overthink it. I send the text and stare at my phone like it might explode. I wonder if I should’ve waited longer, said less, played it safer.

But I’m trying to believe that the right person won’t punish me for being human.

I don’t want to keep giving people polished versions of myself. I don’t want to keep walking away from almost love because I was too afraid to step into it fully.

If I am honest, I think what scares me most is not rejection.

It’s relief.

Relief that comes when I finally say the thing and realise I survived it.

Relief that makes me wonder how much connection I’ve missed because I was busy protecting myself.

There is a girl in me who still wants to hide. Who still believes that if she is perfectly composed, perfectly desirable, perfectly self contained, she will finally be safe.

But there is another girl emerging.

One who is willing to risk a little embarrassment. A little exposure. A little uncertainty.

One who understands that intimacy is not something you stumble into accidentally. It is something you build by choosing honesty over image. Presence over performance.

I am not fearless.

I am just willing.

Willing to tremble and speak anyway.
Willing to admit I care.
Willing to let someone see the parts of me that are still healing.

Maybe that is what courage actually looks like.

Not a woman who is unafraid.

But a woman who is afraid and opens her heart a little wider anyway.

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My first memories of friendship live on a playground when I was four years old, holding hands with the girl I was seated beside by alphabetical order, as if coincidence had intention all along. As if chance already understood its quiet power. One minute our palms were pressed together; the next we were crouched in the grass, braiding friendship bracelets from daisies torn up by the root, pulled from the places they’d been quietly hiding.

We were desperate to tell each other our deepest, darkest secrets, sealing them with a vow that sounded more like a threat than a promise. Pinky promise, cross your heart and hope to die. There was no fear then. No hesitation. We called each other out with the sharp certainty only children have. One huff, one chant liar, liar, pants on fire and the truth was expected to rise to the surface on its own.

Somewhere along the way, the rules changed. You don’t notice it right away. No one announces it. The rules just quietly shift. You stop calling things out so fast. You give people more grace than clarity. You tell yourself it’s maturity, that this is what growing up looks like. And maybe it is. But it also means the truth doesn’t always rise on its own anymore. Sometimes it just sits there, unspoken, until it hardens into something else. Distance, silence, or a betrayal you never thought you’d have to name.

Nobody really prepares you for how brutal female friendship breakups can be. Romantic ones get the playlists, the rituals, the permission to grieve loudly. But when a friendship fractures, the one who knows your middle name, your childhood lore, has seen you at your lowest lows and highest highs, held your hair back one too many times after neat vodka, it’s quieter. Stranger. Harder to explain. You’re grieving someone whose character you can no longer fully vouch for, someone you once trusted without reservation.

Forgiveness in these friendships doesn’t arrive like it does in movies. It’s not a clean arc wrapped in understanding or closure. It shows up messy, late, half formed. Sometimes it comes in small, accidental moments. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all. And when it doesn’t, you carry both the love and the hurt together, learning to let them exist in the same quiet room.

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The intimacy runs deep, even when it’s invisible. There are no formal vows, no anniversaries anyone else keeps track of, just the slow accumulation of knowing. Shared bathrooms at crowded parties. Voice notes sent from bed at 2 a.m. Sacred pause before laughter breaks the spell, creasing at the audacity of men. Even in the darkest moments, time feels still. A silent agreement that if the world collapses, you’ll text each other first. So when something finally breaks, it’s never just about what happened. It’s about everything that was understood without ever being said.

A lot of the damage comes from those unspoken rules. Loyalty. Discretion. Being on the same side, always. When one of those rules is violated, it can feel existential, like the ground shifted but no one announced an earthquake. How do you forgive something you never explicitly agreed on, but both believed in completely?

And then there’s history.
Soooooooo much history.

Years that quietly argue on behalf of forgiveness. We’ve been friends since… becomes both comfort and trap. The past starts negotiating with the present. Was it really that bad? Am I being too sensitive? Haven’t we survived worse? Sometimes forgiveness happens not because the hurt has healed, but because the weight of shared memory feels heavier than the pain itself.

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I won’t pretend I’ve only ever carried this wound. I’ve also been the hand that caused it. The one whose words stayed sharp when they should’ve softened. The one who chose pride over care, silence when I should’ve spoken, honesty when it arrived without kindness. And the truth is, it sits heavy. The weight of my own mistakes lingers longer than any apology. A quiet ache, a knot in the chest, the knowledge that I was capable of the same heartbreak I’ve mourned in others.

If I ask for forgiveness, for grace, for the benefit of the doubt, why do I get to decide which hearts are expendable? Which friendships are worth saving? The question lingers, because the truth is fractured: the same hands that hurt can also heal, and the same heart that’s been broken is capable of breaking others.

Women are taught softness constantly, to smooth things over, to keep the peace. So forgiveness can arrive prematurely, before anger has finished forming a sentence. You forgive, but the resentment stays lodged in the body. It leaks out sideways. Ignored calls. Polite distance. A friendship that technically survives but no longer feels safe.

Apologies matter here. The real kind. Not the slippery ones. I’m sorry you felt that way, that sound careful, but land like dismissal. Not the rehearsed therapy jargon that gestures at accountability without actually holding it. Forgiveness without responsibility is heavy work. It asks you to carry someone else’s mistakes, to do the labor of healing for a person who won’t fully see the damage they caused.

By your late twenties, you realise something unsettling: forgiveness doesn’t always mean continuation. You can forgive someone and still not trust them with your inner life. You can release the anger and still choose distance. This is the part no one romanticises. The quiet forgiveness that doesn’t come with reconciliation photos or long coffee catch-ups.

And still, there’s guilt. We’re sold the idea of unbreakable sisterhood. That strong women stick it out. That choosing yourself over a friendship is a failure of loyalty, feminism, or emotional depth. Redefining or ending a female friendship can feel like betraying the narrative, not just the person.

But sometimes forgiveness is choosing not to keep reopening a wound just to prove how evolved you are. Sometimes it’s admitting love existed, harm happened, and closeness is no longer possible in the same way. Sometimes it’s saying: I don’t hate you. I just can’t stay.

The hardest truth might be this: forgiveness isn’t always generous. Sometimes it’s self-protective. Sometimes it’s the moment you stop needing the other person to understand your pain in order to move on. Lonely. Empowering. Sad. All at once.

Female friendships shape us. They teach us how to be known. Losing one, or redefining it, leaves an echo that forgiveness doesn’t erase. It just makes it quieter. More livable.

Sometimes I wonder who forgiveness is really for. Whether it’s meant to repair the relationship, or simply quiet your nervous system enough to breathe again. Whether it’s something you owe the people who hurt you, or something you give yourself when you’re tired of carrying what happened. Maybe forgiveness isn’t about understanding or closure at all. Maybe it’s the moment you stop needing the other person to agree with your pain in order to release it.

I’m learning that forgiveness doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes in fragments. In ordinary decisions. In who you continue to protect, who you let back in, and who you stop needing clarity from. Maybe forgiveness isn’t about becoming bigger than the pain. Maybe it’s about becoming honest about what you can live with, and what you can’t.

And maybe that’s enough.

I was on the Overground to Hackney, seated right across from two girls who had unknowingly pulled me into their conversation. One of them sounded completely emptied out, her voice scraped raw, like it had been dragged up from somewhere deep in her chest. She was talking about dating men in that familiar end stage, way past frustration, past anger, arriving finally at resignation. There was no sweetness left in it. No glaze. Just a bone tired truth.

Then she said the sentence we all recognise immediately, the one that arrives like muscle memory: “I would’ve been happier if I were gay”.

It’s usually said like a joke. A throwaway line after a bad date or an argument that keeps finding you, no matter who you’re with. But it never really lands as a joke. It lands heavy. A half confession. A quiet mourning for the life that might have been easier, softer, less emotionally extractive.

There’s a cruelty in being socialised to feel deeply and then partnering with someone who cannot, or will not enter that depth with you. Not because they lack a heart, but because they’ve been taught to lock the door to it and lose the key. You start to doubt yourself. You wonder if your needs are unreasonable, if your expectations are inflated by fantasy or feminism or some imagined ideal of love. You learn to compromise in ways that feel like quiet self betrayal. You learn to accept emotional crumbs and call them meals.

This is the mental exhaustion of heterosexual love: the constant negotiation between what you feel and what you’re allowed to ask for.

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Women are raised to feel everything. To notice the change in a room before anyone speaks. To hear what’s hiding under the words. We learn early that paying attention keeps us safe, that softness is work, that care is something you perform. Emotional awareness becomes instinct. You don’t even realise you’re doing it, you’re just adjusting, remembering, holding space. This is how you learn to be loved. This is how you learn to survive.

And on the other hand

Men are often raised to feel less. To close the door before feeling heavy. To turn hurt into silence, confusion into distance, tenderness into something unspoken. So when you come to them with depth, with feelings that don’t fit into neat sentences. It can feel like offering water to someone who never learned thirst. And slowly, you begin to pour yourself out, wondering why you’re still so empty

And then we date each other.

Loving a man with no emotional depth doesn’t always look dramatic. It’s quieter than that. It looks like explaining the same feeling over and over, changing the language each time, hoping one version finally lands. It looks like shrinking your pain so it doesn’t scare him. It looks like being met with solutions when what you asked for was understanding. It looks like being told “I didn’t know it was that serious” after you’ve been bleeding in plain sight.

Over time, something erodes.

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You stop bringing certain things up. You tell yourself it’s not worth the effort, the confusion, the sighs. You become fluent in emotional self-sufficiency. Not because you want to be independent, but because dependence feels futile. You learn how to soothe yourself in rooms you share with someone else. That’s the loneliness no one talks about: being emotionally alone while technically partnered.

And still, there is desire. That’s the most disorienting part.

Sexual longing for men can be intense, grounding, magnetic. Bodies recognise each other even when hearts don’t fully meet. But when desire isn’t matched by emotional presence, it creates a strange hunger. You can be touched everywhere and still feel untouched where it matters most. You can feel wanted without feeling known. Over time, the imbalance starts to ache. Not sharply, but persistently, like thirst you keep mistaking for hunger.

This is where women begin to wonder if they’re asking for too much.

If wanting emotional attunement is unrealistic. If intimacy is supposed to be this asymmetrical. If love is just learning how to live with less than you hoped for. We learn to doubt ourselves instead of the framework we’re inside. We blame our sensitivity instead of naming emotional absence. We romanticise resilience when what we’re actually practicing is endurance.

We are often expected to be emotionally expansive but personally undemanding. Strong, but never needy. Understanding, but never requiring understanding in return. In relationships with men, we may carry not only our own emotional world but theirs too. The grief they haven’t named, the fear they don’t have language for, the softness they were taught to abandon. We become sites of emotional processing rather than partners in mutual vulnerability.

That labor is rarely reciprocated.

And yet, when women joke about wishing they were gay, it’s not really about sex. It’s about rest. About the fantasy of not having to translate yourself. Of not having to convince someone that feelings are real even when they’re inconvenient. Of being met without explanation. The joke is a coping mechanism for grief, the grief of knowing how deeply you can love and how rarely that depth is matched.

Of course, this fantasy flattens queer relationships into an emotional utopia, which they are not. Women can be cruel. Women can be avoidant. Women can fail each other too. But the longing behind the joke isn’t really about sexuality. It’s about recognition. It’s about wanting a partner who understands that emotional labor is still labor, that love is not just provision or protection but presence.

This isn’t an indictment of men as individuals, but of a system that teaches them emotional illiteracy and then pairs them with women expected to compensate for it. A system that frames emotional hunger as personal failure instead of relational neglect.

The exhaustion comes not from loving, but from loving without depth mirrored back to you.

And maybe the work, for women, is to stop calling that exhaustion normal. To stop accepting emotional crumbs as meals. To stop doubting the legitimacy of our hunger. Because wanting depth is not an overreach, it’s an instinct. And love that requires you to abandon it was never nourishment to begin with.

As the train slowed and Hackney Downs rang out over the intercom, I carried myself off the platform, watching the train slip past. She masked the sadness in her eyes with a smile, and these thoughts followed me like shadows. I never got to tell her. I hope, somehow, she finds this.

I think I’m learning how to stop loving like a Nigerian woman.

Which feels insane to say out loud, because what does that even mean? But if you grew up like I did, you know exactly what I mean.

Love in my Nigerian household was quiet to the point of erasure. My parents existed beside each other with discipline and duty. Affection was implied, never declared. Romance was practical, not poetic. I never heard I love you. Not once. Not whispered. Not softened. Not slipped between moments.

And somehow, that silence raised me.

It was only practical. I inherited their version of love, desire as something to manage, not indulge. I learned how to be impressive without being vulnerable. How to be wanted without asking. How to seem untouched.

Dating me has been… difficult.
Dating anyone who offers a love like mine, can be difficult.

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I’ve built elegant walls and called them boundaries. I tell myself that if someone stays long enough, if they try hard enough, they’ll earn access. As if love is a prize for endurance. As if yearning should be rationed. I wear nonchalance like armor, the way Nigerian women are taught to: cool, unreadable, slightly unreachable.

But the truth is simple.

I’m tired of half texts and low commitment affection. Tired of men who hover but never land. Men who like me quietly and safely, keeping their distance because it costs them nothing. I’m tired of swallowing my desire so I don’t seem too eager, too intense. After all, am I not aYoruba woman? This is how I learned to love.

I’m tired of pretending.

Because I want more.

I want loudness. I want hunger. I want to be wanted without irony.

I miss men who yearn.

ooh I miss men who YEARN.

Men who stumble over their words because the thought of losing you scares them. Men who wake up in the middle of the night and reach for you, not out of habit, but need. I miss love that is reckless enough to be embarrassing. Love that doesn’t try to be cool.

Dating now feels like walking through a gallery of muted paintings. Everything is aesthetically pleasing, emotionally distant. Everyone is polished, self-aware, allergic to risk. They offer companionship without consequence. Desire with disclaimers. Love that arrives pre-watered down.

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And I want chaos.
I want sincerity.
I want the kind of honesty that makes people uncomfortable, but delivered with love and consideration.

I’ve learned that wanting loudly is dangerous for women like me. For Black women. Nigerian women. Women whose desire is already seen as excessive, disruptive, political. We are taught to shrink our longing so we don’t scare anyone away. To be independent before we are adored. To be self-sufficient before we are soft. Strong before we can be celebrated.

But I don’t think I’ve ever been loved the way I dream of. I think I’ve only been loved by nonchalant men. Men who ration affection like it’s a resource that might run out.

And maybe I’ve been complicit.

Brainwashed into believing that needing is weakness. That yearning is a flaw. That loving the way I want; deep, spiritual, consuming is something to correct.

But I am exhausted.

Here is the paradox:
I want to be courted, but I’m told to be independent.
I want to be desired, but I’m told to be self contained.
I want to be begged, but I’m told to be unattainable.

Nonchalance is sold as maturity, but it feels like emotional starvation.

So I am unlearning. Slowly. Bravely.

I am learning that desire is not shameful. That wanting is not desperation. That yearning is not naive, it is courageous. It is rebellion. It is a refusal to live a life of emotional half-measures.

I am not interested in men who settle.
I am not interested in polite love that leaves me hollow.
I want intensity. I want devotion. I want love that wakes you up at 3 a.m. and ruins your sleep and rearranges your priorities.

Call it unrealistic. Call it dramatic.
I call it truth.

Because living without fire is a slow erosion of the soul.

I am tired, yes.
But not of love.

I am tired of pretending that loving like this is too much.

So I wait.
I ache.
and I hope.

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At exactly 6:23 p.m., I blurted out to my friend on FaceTime, “Are we losing the art of conversation?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. It came from a familiar frustration, conversations that feel like they might go somewhere but never do. Stale air filled with meaningless small talk. Overused, exaggerated words stitched clumsily into sentences that lead nowhere. Blank stares, while the words between you feel rehearsed, polished, untouchable. It’s as if everyone is performing, but nobody is actually talking.

Pseudo-intellectualism isn’t new. It’s not about ignorance; it’s about the illusion of knowing. It’s the need to sound smart without ever feeling like you have to be understood. Name-dropping theorists you’ve only skimmed, throwing in terms you don’t fully grasp, rehearsing the perfect hot take from a TikTok intellectual you watched the night before, as your brain desperately tries to store points you can reuse for your next conversation. It’s polished, yes, but it’s defensive. And when everyone is defending their intelligence, no one is really listening.

Conversations are fragile. They are delicate, almost sacred. They demand risk, the kind of risk that means being unfinished, being uncertain, being vulnerable. You have to allow yourself to stumble over your thoughts, to backtrack, to admit, “I don’t know.” But pseudo-intellectualism interrupts that rhythm. It replaces curiosity with performance. It turns exchanges into competitions: who can sound the smartest, who can land the cleverest quote, who can signal the most knowledge without ever being wrong.

It’s exhausting to watch and exhausting to participate in. I notice it most online, of course, where feeds reward the confident, the declarative, the perfectly phrased. Nuance is slow, subtle, and difficult. Certainty travels fast. Algorithms reward soundbites, not messy truths. But it’s happening in real life too. In rooms full of intellectuals, I hear the careful avoidance of saying anything too human. Instead of thinking together, we’re all trying to appear finished, polished, complete. I’m not afraid to admit that sometimes I leave conversations feeling hungry, deprived of communication and intimacy. Totally detached, intelligent enough to piece together what was discussed, but unsure whether we ever truly connected.

Language has become currency. Certain words carry status, and knowing the right combination can feel like a shield. Therapy-speak. Political jargon. Philosophical terms, drop them in the right places and suddenly you’re untouchable. But what you’re often untouchable from is intimacy. And what we lose when intimacy disappears, is the very thing that makes conversation alive.

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The conversations I miss are messy. They are slow. They allow contradiction without conflict. They give space for silence, pauses, questions that don’t have answers. They are collaborative rather than competitive. And they require courage. The courage to be unfinished, to think out loud, to let someone else enter the unformed spaces of your mind.

The culture we live in is actively hostile to that courage. There’s always risk in admitting uncertainty. “I don’t know” feels dangerous. Vulnerability in thought feels performative now, because someone is always ready to correct you, score points, or tweet your hesitation as weakness. So we hide behind abstractions. We polish our opinions until they resemble press releases. We quote, reference, and cite, but we rarely connect.

This is why I joined Substack. Somewhere along the line, I realised I wanted a space where pretense could be dropped. Where unfinished thoughts weren’t liabilities but starting points. A place where permission to be wrong isn’t just granted; it’s celebrated. Where ideas aren’t presented as finished products, but as working drafts, open to exploration, expansion, and conversation. Where a post isn’t a rehearsed TED Talk, but a beginning, not an endpoint.

Substack feels like a quiet rebellion against the culture of perfection. It’s a small counter-movement that feels quietly radical. People are craving the opposite: longform writing, thoughtful essays, work that allows you to linger, reflect, and consider. People are seeking spaces that reward depth over polish, curiosity over certainty. In these spaces, the joy of conversation, the kind that happens in margins, pauses, and responses that build rather than defend,survives.

There’s a subtle but telling test for whether a conversation has life. Is the person trying to win the exchange, or understand it? Are they responding to what was actually said, or just waiting for their turn to speak? Is there room for silence, for thought, for error? When those things are present, conversation survives. When they’re absent, all that’s left is performance.

Pseudo-intellectualism isn’t the enemy. It’s a symptom, a signal of a culture that prizes appearance over experience, performance over intimacy. And it’s easy to see why we cling to it: it feels safe. There’s comfort in rehearsing intelligence, in making yourself untouchable, in producing opinions as objects you can polish and display. But it’s also isolating. Performing separates you from others. And we are starved for connection. We are starved for real exchange.

I think of the conversations I’ve cherished, the ones that linger. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t brilliant in a way that could be tweeted or quoted. They were slow, uncertain, sometimes awkward. They involved admitting ignorance, changing your mind mid-sentence, laughing at your own thought process. They felt alive, not finished. They remind me that conversation isn’t about showing your mind, it’s about sharing it.

I’m reminded of sitting in a jazz bar in my mid-twenties, dating an atheist. That detail matters, because exploring belief, or the absence of it, requires real openness. Those conversations felt liberating. The silence after discussing social, racial, and political ideologies felt electric. I could feel my pupils dilate as thoughts raced. There was no expectation of a conclusion, no winner or loser. We walked away changed. Not because learning was the goal, but because genuine conversation makes it inevitable. It reminded me of a different kind of intimacy.

The spaces Substack creates feel like that too. It’s not about impressing anyone with a polished take. It’s about thinking alongside others. Posting drafts that feel raw, uncertain, alive. Reading responses that add, question, or contradict. Experiencing ideas as collaborative rather than performative. There’s a quiet joy in that kind of engagement, an intimacy that feels rarer and more precious in a world where so much is curated, edited, and rehearsed.

The art of conversation is fragile. It isn’t brilliance; it’s patience. It’s curiosity, courage, and empathy. It’s the willingness to remain unfinished. It’s permission to be human in a world that increasingly rewards appearing otherwise. And it isn’t dead. It’s waiting in longform essays, private chats, wandering podcasts, letters, and small circles where people are brave enough to risk imperfection.

I joined Substack to find that waiting. To find a community where thought is allowed to breathe, where ideas are drafts rather than monuments, where conversation isn’t about scoring points but about discovery. It’s a small, quiet revolution but it feels radical. And it reminds me that conversation isn’t lost.

It’s just been waiting for a space to flourish again.

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