Words that hit deep

Realising that your past self was sincere, and that sincerity still wasn’t enough is uniquely destabilising. It dismantles the comforting narrative that failure only happens when we don’t try. Sometimes you try. Sometimes you try intelligently. Sometimes you even try bravely. And still, the year ends before you are ready.

What I am talking about here is pre-New Year anxiety, which is quieter, sharper, and harder to outsource. It’s the anxiety of unfinished business, unlived selves, unresolved desires that did not politely expire just because you were busy.

You are meant to celebrate time passing at the exact moment you become most aware of how little of it you have actually inhabited.

You feel it as a low-grade agitation. A tightening. A peculiar restlessness that is not quite regret and not quite ambition, but some irritating hybrid that keeps you awake at night while being useless during the day. People call it end-of-year reflection to make it sound like a spa treatment. It isn’t. It’s an audit. And like most audits, it... See more

Which brings me to the central confusion, people lump confidence and self-esteem together because they’ve been conditioned to believe both are psychological trophies to be earned through suffering, introspection, accomplishment, or a well-timed rebrand.

But confidence is an action; self-esteem is an element.

Confidence moves. Self-esteem exists.

Conf... See more

Still, there’s a dangerous comfort in being chosen. It feels easier. It spares you the loneliness of self-definition. Someone else does the selecting, and you just step into the role. That’s why so many people stay in half-alive relationships or misaligned jobs.... inertia, not ignorance. Being chosen relieves you of the burden of choosing. It... See more

Choice, untethered from devotion, breeds its own emptiness.

Love cannot be negotiated in the language of scarcity. But by the time I understood that, I was already fluent in the dialect of deficit, the one where you apologise for being “too much”, lower your expectations, smile at crumbs, and call it compromise. It’s the language women learn when love is rationed, when approval is currency, when affection... See more

Because once you are chosen, you exist. You are real enough to register in someone else’s hierarchy. To be chosen is to temporarily stop doubting that you matter. To be loved, however, demands that you risk existing without performance, and that’s much harder.