She Was Sea

I wasn’t entirely okay growing up. I had issues, more than I knew how to carry at that age, and there was so much I was quietly struggling with. There were times when my mind went to terrible places, when I thought about doing all sorts of horrible things just to make everything inside me stop hurting.

And then I grew up. None of my troubles really went away. If anything, they grew with me, becoming heavier and more complicated as life did. And sometimes, my mind still went to those same dark places. Except now, there was something that stopped me. Him. I just couldn’t do that to him. I couldn’t leave him behind in a world where I had done something like that. I couldn’t bear the thought of what it would do to him, because I knew he still needed me. And somehow, knowing that became reason enough to stay.

But somewhere along the way, life turned itself around. He stopped needing me, and I started needing him more. And every time I did, he was barely there.

Even then, I don’t know, I think some part of me always believed things would eventually be okay. That no matter how distant we became or how much changed between us, there were certain things we could never become to each other. There were certain ways he could never hurt me.

But to have felt the amount of pain I have felt because of him, through the things he has done and, sometimes, through all the things he chose not to do, has broken something in me I don’t quite know how to explain. Because this was the person who, without even knowing it, once gave me a reason to stay alive.

And now I find myself wondering why I fought so hard to stay at all.

We often ask, what is it that draws you to someone? Is it their looks, or is it their personality? It seems like such a simple question, yet I’ve never found it to have a simple answer.

You know what I think? Neither.

I think it’s how they make me feel. It’s not their looks, and it’s not even their personality on its own. It’s the way my heart feels in their presence. The quiet sense of safety, the excitement, the peace, the way they make the world soften around me. In the end, I don’t think we fall in love with faces or personalities. I think we fall in love with the feeling of who we become when we’re beside them.

Growing up is hard.

Whenever I think about what life has been like growing up, Wild World by Cat Stevens is the song that always finds its way back to me. I used to listen to it endlessly throughout my adolescent years, long before I understood why it made my chest ache. Looking back now, I think I was mourning something I couldn’t yet put into words.

The older I get, the more I realise I never loved that song because it was about someone leaving.

I loved it because I wished someone had loved me enough to say those words to me.

To tell me that it was a wild world. To tell me it would be hard to get by just upon a smile. To remind me to take care of myself because there would be people who wouldn’t. To look at me the way the song does, as someone still so young, still worth protecting.

Instead, I learnt all of those things on my own.

Growing up is hard because no one prepares you for the day your heart breaks at the hands of the people you loved most unconditionally. As children, we believe there will always be someone standing between us and the world. Someone who will make sure we get home safely, who will notice when we’re hurting, who will protect us simply because that’s what love does.

I always believed there would be at least one person who would keep my heart safe.

Life had other plans.

Every man I have ever loved has broken my heart in one way or another. But the heartbreak that stayed with me wasn’t the kind that arrived through romance. It came much earlier than that. It came from realising that the people I believed would always protect me were just people too. Fallible. Distracted. Human. And sometimes, painfully absent when I needed them most.

I think that’s why Wild World still makes me cry.

Because somewhere inside me there is still a little girl who wanted someone to see the world before she did. Someone to tell her to be careful. Someone to remind her that smiling wouldn’t always be enough. Someone to remember that she was, above everything else, just a child.

We spend so much of our lives believing we’re meant to outgrow that child. I don’t think we ever do. I think we simply learn to become the person we needed back then.

And maybe that’s all growing up really is.

I miss you, to the point of wanting to tell you every single time I do. But then I stop myself, because eventually I’d grow tired of saying it, and I’d worry you’d grow tired of hearing it.

The trouble is, I miss you is only three words. Three small words carrying a longing that never really leaves, lingering quietly until I can hold you again. They are hopelessly inadequate for everything they are meant to contain.

Because when I say I miss you, I don’t just mean that I wish you were here.

I mean I miss reaching for your hand without thinking. I miss your voice woven into the ordinary moments of my day. I miss the comfort of knowing that somewhere nearby, you exist within arm’s reach. I miss the way time slows down when I’m with you, the way the world becomes gentler, quieter, softer.

“I miss you” is simply the closest language has ever come to describing the unbearable distance between where I am and where I wish I could be.

And perhaps that’s why I never say it as often as I feel it. Because what lives inside those three words is far greater than they will ever be able to hold.

How am I meant to bear the truth that your lips are no longer there whenever I miss them? That your hands are no longer tracing the length of my back or finding my neck with quiet kisses when I turn away.

That I no longer fall asleep in your arms, my fingers laced through yours, simply because nowhere else have I ever felt so safe.

How do I silence this relentless yearning? This ache, this craving, this wanting that seems to live in every corner of me.

How do I forget the way your eyes held mine, as though I were a mystery waiting to be discovered, while you explored every hidden part of me and left me undone, again and again, by the sheer force of what I felt?

How do I wake each morning without the warmth of your body beside mine? How do I reach for you, only to meet an empty space, and learn to accept that this is my reality again?

How do I return to a life where you’re not here, when every atom in my body now carries the memory of you, and my very existence has become an ode to your touch?

Oh, the withdrawals of coming home from a perfect dream. A dream where I was loved in the very way I had always imagined love would feel.

It was 5 am, and we were standing on the balcony. He had me cornered against the edge. Above us, the sky was that beautiful electric blue that only exists just before sunrise. The kind that still gives you enough time to get lost in the night before the morning finds you. I can guarantee his view was glorious. Mine was him, being the sweetest he’d ever been.

Then he leaned in and said, “Do you know the first time I saw you? I had no idea who you were. You walked right past me.”

I laughed. And strangely enough, somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I remember that exact moment.

I vaguely remember hearing someone say, “You look really beautiful,” as I walked past them. I never turned around. I just kept walking. But from the corner of my eye, I must have caught a glimpse of a man whose face I would never remember.

Then he took my hand and tapped it against his chest to the rhythm of his heartbeat.

Da. Da. Da. Da.

“This,” he said, “is how your heart normally beats.”

Then he sped it up.

“Dadadadada.”

“And that’s what happened when I saw you.”

He said that in that moment, he forgot the world for a second and everything around him stood still.

It was the way he tried to put into words what he’d felt in a fleeting moment, not knowing whether we’d ever actually meet.

It was adorable.

Then he told me that from that moment on, he did everything he could to find out who I was.

To my hopelessly romantic ears, it sounded like something straight out of a movie.

The rest of dawn was history.

I would’ve fallen for him right then and there if I weren’t just a little more self-aware. But even my self-aware heart isn’t immune to reckless romance every now and then.

So I let it consume me.

Oh, but what made me sad was something so silly.

Her.

It had to be her. Or maybe that’s just where I’m destined to ache.

She had everything I didn’t. Your loyalty (I say that for dramatic effect because, let’s be real, you eventually cheated on her too). Your love. Your commitment. The life you built. The one I had once hoped you’d build with me.

She had everything I never did with you, and everything I never would.

I guess that’s why the single teardrop fell. It wasn’t just for what I lost. It was for everything I never got to have with you, and everything she did.

And I know I shouldn’t let it make me feel like I wasn’t enough. Believe me, I know that isn’t true. But God, there’s a nerve somewhere in my heart that still pinches whenever I think about it.

Why couldn’t it have been me?

But what can I say? Crying in a Benz is still better than crying alone in my room, where, back then, everything felt like utter doom.

It was like playing with fire.

I felt alive for the first time in a long time, like the parts of me that had been in deep hibernation had finally awakened with a sense of excitement and borderline limerence.

I couldn’t explain it anymore. My life was utter chaos, but the good kind. I had no sense of rest. One thing after another, busy had become a state of being rather than something that described my day. It never really ended. I was always moving, always getting ready, one event after the next, one recording after another. Girl truly was booked and busy.

And somehow, amidst all that chaos, in the middle of the rut I had quietly grown comfortable in, there I was.

Excited to play with fire.

I miss being able to write for leisure. There are always too many reports to write or too many scripts to learn and prepare for, pulling me away from the kind of reading and writing I once did simply because I loved it.

Sometimes, somewhere in between all of that, I miss myself.

I miss making time to do nothing. To have nothing to look forward to. To simply exist and get lost in my thoughts without tomorrow’s schedule or the day after hanging over me.

Life has been hectic. Although I’m deeply grateful, it sometimes makes me wonder whether I’m leaving parts of myself behind in the chaos of it all. And by chaos, I mean my work. I genuinely love what I do. The opportunities that brought me here are things I’ll always be grateful for. Yet, on some days, I find myself missing the girl who was probably nothing in the eyes of the world. The girl no one remembered, whose face no one recognised, whose name no one knew.

Just the other day, something a friend said stayed with me. I was in the middle of my own little crisis, replaying something I had said. It wasn’t something I truly meant, but it was something I had genuinely felt in that moment. I knew those feelings were unfair, and my reaction caught even me off guard. It may have disappointed the people who witnessed it. I felt awful about it, but I had no excuse. It simply happened.

I’ve been in regular therapy for years, and only a few months ago my therapist started spacing our sessions further apart, once a month, sometimes once every two months. That was a good thing. It meant I had made enough progress that I no longer needed weekly sessions. It felt like a personal milestone, a quiet badge of honour for all the work I’d put into healing.

But healing doesn’t erase your wounds. Every now and then, they still peek through, showing their scars.

That’s what happened. My friend said, “Well, they should know you’re not a fully okay person.” She didn’t mean it cruelly. What she meant was that the people close to me should know there are things I still struggle with. Hearing her say that also made me realise she’d quietly understood that about me all along. Maybe it even allowed her to extend me a little more grace. But there has never been any enabling, and that’s something I’m careful about too.

I remember something my therapist told me during one of our last sessions. I was caught in a moral tug-of-war, questioning whether what I was doing was right. It felt wrong, yet I was enjoying it. At the same time, the part of me that’s constantly wondering whether I’m a good person kept tormenting me for enjoying it at all. And yet I didn’t stop. Truthfully, much of the situation was out of my hands. All I could really do was sit back and let the universe unfold things as they were meant to.

After listening to me spiral for a while, he simply looked at me and said, “You spend too much time wondering whether you’re a good person.”

That sentence has stayed with me.

Maybe that’s a wound much older than I realise. One that came from spending so much of my life believing I was a bad person, even during the times I wasn’t. Maybe that’s why every mistake feels like evidence, every moral dilemma feels like a verdict, and every imperfect reaction sends me searching for proof that I’ve failed some invisible test of goodness.

Perhaps healing isn’t becoming someone who never questions themselves. Perhaps it’s learning that being a good person isn’t measured by never making mistakes, but by what you choose to do after you’ve made them.

What that whole dilemma reminded me of is that we’re all flawed. As much as I want to be, I’m not perfect either. But the thing is, the people who truly love you will see those flaws and still remember who you are beneath them. It also reminded me that no matter how healed I become, there will probably always be this chaotically woven thread within me that occasionally pulls on the wrong strings. I’m constantly torn.

Maybe that’s what healing really is. Not becoming someone who no longer struggles, but someone who recognises when they’re being pulled toward old patterns.

There was a time when everything I felt was either euphoria or complete devastation. There was no middle ground. Every emotion arrived at full volume, and it was exhausting. It took years of work to find somewhere in between, a place where I’m no longer constantly standing at either edge.

When I first started therapy around five years ago, I had one condition: I didn’t want to know my diagnosis. I was terrified that if I knew what it was, I’d use it to justify my behaviour. I worried I’d begin excusing every unhealthy reaction instead of taking responsibility for it. I didn’t trust myself enough not to become an eternal victim of my childhood, of the environment that left me vulnerable, gullible, and constantly searching for safety. Eventually, I was told that I have Borderline Personality Disorder, and that much of my emotional dysregulation stemmed from it.

Oddly enough, knowing didn’t make me feel broken. It made me feel understood.

It meant there wasn’t something inexplicably wrong with me. There was a reason. There was a name. There was something I could learn about instead of fear. Understanding it helped me understand myself. It gave me language for things I’d spent years trying to explain, and it gave me healthier, more structured ways of regulating emotions that had once completely consumed me.

But even now, it isn’t an excuse. Whatever is wrong with you should never become permission to hurt other people. That’s what accountability is for.

It’s there so we can recognise our patterns, own our mistakes, apologise when we need to, and continue doing the work. And even if some parts of us can never be fully fixed, we owe it to the people around us to make sure we don’t bleed our pain onto those who least deserve it.