Why Tell a Story?
The strange comfort of realizing our pain is not unique, our emotions are not failures, and none of us were ever meant to carry life entirely alone.
Blog - On Life & Culture
Too Smart to Care, Still Caring Anyway
An honest reflection on comparison, attachment, and the tiny modern gestures we sometimes mistake for proof of worth.
To Be Perceived Correctly
I fear being perceived as one-dimensional. Emotional in the shallow sense. Like all this inner life I carry could be reduced to whether or not someone loves me.
Today I Start Again
A personal essay about burnout, identity, and the tiny acts that help us begin again.
On Being Unchosen (and Other Things I Didn't Expect at 22)
There’s a certain tackiness that clings to you once you’ve been left behind. Not chosen. Not carried forward. Just…set down in the middle of a story that keeps moving without you.
I can’t tell where it comes from, the feeling of becoming part of someone’s past while they feel very present in mine.
Why does it feel like fear?
Like something in me shuts down before I even have the language for it. Suddenly I’m everywhere and nowhere at once, aware of my own thoughts but unable to settle inside them.
Maybe that’s what endings do. Or maybe this one isn’t even an ending. Who am I to know at 22 what anything is supposed to mean? At 15, I had it all figured out. Funny now.
You’re gone, and I still don’t understand why you didn’t take the hurt with you.
In the quiet moments, I replay everything, the closeness, the softness, the smells, the sounds, the almosts. The “I should have,” “I could have,” “I didn’t.” And then I wonder where I am in all of it.
Why am I alone in this version of the story?
In those first few moments, I told myself it was necessary. That distance had a purpose. That we just needed time to become something better, or clearer, or more certain. I tried to make meaning out of uncertainty, turning intuition and timing and signs into something that felt like direction. Sometimes it felt like delusion.
It was easier when I was always moving. Always distracted. Always becoming.
But stillness is where everything catches up to you.
That’s when it hit: with love comes pain. It’s like they made a deal and none of us were invited to negotiate. And in the aftermath, you start noticing the places in you that feel different now, rearranged, rewired, quieter.
There’s a fear in that. Not just of what’s next, but of what’s already changed. Which version of ourself did you have to let go of just to survive the ending?
And still… somewhere beneath it all, it almost starts to make sense. Not fully. Not cleanly.
But for now, it's close enough.
I can’t tell where it comes from, the feeling of becoming part of someone’s past while they feel very present in mine.
Why does it feel like fear?
Like something in me shuts down before I even have the language for it. Suddenly I’m everywhere and nowhere at once, aware of my own thoughts but unable to settle inside them.
Maybe that’s what endings do. Or maybe this one isn’t even an ending. Who am I to know at 22 what anything is supposed to mean? At 15, I had it all figured out. Funny now.
You’re gone, and I still don’t understand why you didn’t take the hurt with you.
In the quiet moments, I replay everything, the closeness, the softness, the smells, the sounds, the almosts. The “I should have,” “I could have,” “I didn’t.” And then I wonder where I am in all of it.
Why am I alone in this version of the story?
In those first few moments, I told myself it was necessary. That distance had a purpose. That we just needed time to become something better, or clearer, or more certain. I tried to make meaning out of uncertainty, turning intuition and timing and signs into something that felt like direction. Sometimes it felt like delusion.
It was easier when I was always moving. Always distracted. Always becoming.
But stillness is where everything catches up to you.
That’s when it hit: with love comes pain. It’s like they made a deal and none of us were invited to negotiate. And in the aftermath, you start noticing the places in you that feel different now, rearranged, rewired, quieter.
There’s a fear in that. Not just of what’s next, but of what’s already changed. Which version of ourself did you have to let go of just to survive the ending?
And still… somewhere beneath it all, it almost starts to make sense. Not fully. Not cleanly.
But for now, it's close enough.
