Words that hit deep

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

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

you’re not supposed to miss your suffering, but sometimes you do. you remember the clarity that comes when everything hurts and nothing is trivial. and then you compare that version to the one who goes to therapy. who says no sometimes. and you feel oddly disloyal.

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

We are, as philosopher Byung-Chul Han observed, no longer the exploited but the self-exploiting, both the obedient worker and the relentless boss in the same exhausted body. The whip has been digitised. There’s no factory bell, no overseer, no visible authority to rebel against; just the noiseless tyranny of our own ambition humming at the back of... See more

We don’t know what to do with people who are both happy and smart. We assume they must be hiding something. That they haven’t thought deeply enough. That their analysis is undercooked. Emotional intelligence is measured by one’s capacity to dissect pain, not hold pleasure.

There’s a peculiar arrogance in busyness, a moral superiority wrapped in martyrdom. It’s the mute pride of the perpetually in-demand, the smug glow of the over-scheduled. “I wish I had time to read”, says the busy person, as if reading were a decadent pastime for trust-fund poets rather than a basic act of mental hygiene. “I just don’t have time... See more

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.