Aarya Timilsina

No one ever warned me of the very real danger of self-erasure, hanging your self worth on attracting a man, tolerating mistreatment in relationships, or hanging your financial well-being on a man not leaving you.

Instead I was encouraged to erase more, more and more of myself. Praise followed every part of myself I made disappear. Good, go harder-... See more

I strongly believe you don’t have to move to the countryside, be isolated, or delete social media and start over to live a slow life. Of course, if this makes you happy, do it! But the real essence of slowing down is about practicing those (not so) small things that make you feel alive.

Sometimes I long for a world that I doubt ever existed. Where rushing wasn’t necessary, where not everything was transactional. I picture it in hazy sepia tones, something imagined framed as a memory - a place where people moved slower not out of leisure but out of a kind of unspoken respect for the day itself. Where life wasn’t measured in... See more

because when you grow up with emotionally immature or dysregulated parents, love becomes conditional on your usefulness. and so you do exactly that, you become useful, become good. you learn to co-regulate people who never learned to regulate themselves. and in doing so, you start abandoning yourself without even realising it.

What I need, now and forever, is to be the person who loves and cares for myself most reliably. I’ve always known that my parents love me, my friends love me. But I also knew that I was the only one who understood myself fully—I was the only person who knew my own dreams, secrets, failings, all the dark spots and all the cracks of light. I... See more