Haya Siddiqui

These moments feel uncomfortable initially, but something interesting happens: your body starts telling you before your brain does that peace exists where performance used to live. Each time you choose authenticity over accommodation, you're rewiring your stress responses. The nervous system learns that social disapproval isn't existential threat.

Real heroism is not found in the headlines but is only the result of minutes, hours, weeks, and years of exercising a careful and judicious sincerity, often with no one there to see or applaud. This really important kind of freedom involves discipline, doing what is difficult, being obedient to that still, small voice inside your head that knows... See more

True insight often arrives as disruption, not confirmation.

“The work of the aspirant,” Callard writes, “is often marked by some resistance to doing that work.”

But! There is something deeply comforting in reading all the doubts and difficulties that a “real” writer like Proust must have experienced in his youth. For the aspirant, there’s nothing more comforting than realizing you are not alone in trying. You’re not alone in trying to find a subject, trying to develop the discipline, trying to turn your... See more

People argue they use social media to keep in touch with family and friends. Luckily, there is something called email and the telephone. It is only in two-way mediums, where we must contend with the reality of another person, that real relationship forms and grows. Passive one-way consumption of someone’s life only creates the illusion of... See more

You develop an internal algorithm that constantly calculates: What version of myself will be most palatable here? How can I package this truth so it doesn't threaten anyone's comfort?

“Research as leisure activity.”