Because I believe so deeply that what’s meant to be will always find its way to you, maybe I’ve never really fought hard enough for anyone or anything.

Because why must you fight for something that’s meant for you?

Or maybe the few times I did fight for someone or something, only for it not to work out, the heartbreak was so unbearable that somewhere along the way, I decided I could never put myself through that again. Maybe it became easier to believe that the things meant for me would stay, and the things that left simply weren’t mine to keep.

And that’s exactly how I see this. I don’t know where it’s going, or what it will eventually become, but somehow, you make even the uncertainty of it beautiful. With every touch, every look, every little gesture, you make me feel how deeply you feel for me. There are things you never have to say because I see them in your eyes and feel them in the way you hold me. And so, even though there is something heartbreakingly uncertain about us, being loved by you makes all of it feel strangely whole. It makes whatever this is, however long I get to have it, feel entirely worthwhile.

I’ve had relationships with far more certainty and commitment, and yet no one has ever come close to loving me the way you do. It’s the kind of love I spent so much of my life dreaming about but never quite believed existed until I found it in you. You’ve somehow made my solitude dull, when being alone was something I once genuinely enjoyed. You’ve made your absence feel lonely, when I used to think my own company was more than enough. Now, every moment spent away from you feels like it’s missing something. Like there is a version of life before you, and then there is this one, where everything feels a little fuller simply because you exist in it. I’ve found love in you. I’ve found hope in you. And somewhere along the way, I think I found my whole world in your arms.

He’s loved me more than anyone has ever loved me in my whole life, and maybe that’s precisely why it makes me so sad.

Part of it is that somewhere inside me, I still don’t feel like I deserve it. I often fail to understand why he would feel this way about me, why he would choose to be this patient with me, this gentle, this caring. And sometimes, when I can’t make sense of it, I find myself wondering if perhaps this is simply who he is. Maybe he loves everyone this way. Maybe there is nothing particularly special about me at all. Maybe I’m taking something that comes naturally to him and making it mean more because I’ve never experienced it before.

But then there are all the ways he has loved me that feel impossible to dismiss. He has loved me through my mood swings, through the difficult moments, through versions of me I struggle to love myself. He has been patient when I expected frustration, gentle when I expected distance, and present when some part of me was already preparing to be left alone. And through all of it, he has made me feel more loved than anyone ever has in my entire life.

The strange thing is, he has never actually told me he loves me. At least not in those words, not in that way. And yet, this is the most loved I have ever felt.

Maybe that’s what makes it so damn sad. To finally experience the kind of love I spent my whole life wondering about, to finally know what it feels like to be cared for so deeply that I don’t have to question whether it is there, and still not know what I get to do with all of it. To have something feel so much like love without ever being able to call it mine.

Maybe some of the greatest love we experience in our lives doesn’t arrive with the certainty we thought love was supposed to have. Maybe sometimes it simply arrives, holds your hand, loves you in every way that matters, and leaves you wondering how something that makes you this happy can also make you this sad.

I read your message and locked my phone away. Then I picked it up again, opened it, and read it a second time. Then a third. Then a fourth. Each time, I seemed to find a different emotion waiting for me. First, there was anger. Then sadness. Then disappointment. Eventually, all of those feelings settled into something quieter and heavier. Defeat.

At first, I assumed it was closure. I thought it was your way of saying, I’m sorry, but I can’t be what you need me to be.The strange thing is, I think I had already made peace with that possibility long before your message arrived. I had spent enough nights wrestling with reality to understand that some people come into your life only to leave before they become what you hoped they would. Hearing you finally say it out loud would have hurt, but it would have at least made sense.

A part of me even wanted to thank you for being honest. There was a small part of me that appreciated finally being given the truth instead of another question to carry around. But gratitude felt impossible. I could not bring myself to applaud the smallest act of kindness after enduring so many moments that had felt careless. Honesty should not feel extraordinary. It should not feel like a gift. It should be the bare minimum. So while I appreciated it, I could not celebrate it.

Then the phone rang.

It was you.

And despite everything, I answered without hesitation.

The conversation felt familiar in a way that almost annoyed me. It was so easy to slip back into it, so easy to forget all the reasons I had spent days trying to let you go. My heart immediately softened. It loved wherever the conversation seemed to be heading. It loved the ease of it, the familiarity of your voice, the possibility that maybe things were not as final as I had convinced myself they were. But while my heart was leaning into the conversation, my mind was resisting every step of the way.

I could not ignore what had happened. I could not pretend that you could disappear when it suited you and reappear when you felt ready. I could not keep making room for someone who seemed unsure whether they wanted to stay. There comes a point where understanding someone starts looking a lot like abandoning yourself, and I was dangerously close to that line.

What bothered me most was when you said you knew I could never hate you. The certainty of it irritated me more than I expected. I hated how confident you sounded, as though my forgiveness was guaranteed. As though no matter what happened, no matter how many times I was disappointed, I would always find a way to understand you. It felt unfair that you could be so sure of something that I myself was still trying to figure out.

Why couldn’t I hate you?

I had every reason to.

I could make a list if I wanted to. I could point to every moment that hurt, every unanswered question, every time I felt forgotten. I could revisit the waiting, the confusion, the feeling of being suspended between hope and reality. If I truly wanted to hate you, there was enough material there to build a convincing argument.

But the truth is, I didn’t hate you.

What I hated was myself.

I hated what I had become over you. I hated how much power I had given a situation that should have been so simple. I hated how much of my peace I sacrificed trying to understand someone who seemed unwilling or unable to explain himself. Most of all, I hated the lengths I went to in order to forget you. The distractions. The rationalizations. The bargaining. The desperate attempts to convince myself I did not care when I clearly did.

For days, I walked around believing I meant nothing to you. I told myself that if I mattered, things would be different. If I mattered, you would show up. If I mattered, I would not be left guessing. Every silence became evidence. Every absence became proof. Every disappointment reinforced the story I was beginning to tell myself.

And yet, somewhere beneath all of that, my heart refused to cooperate.

No matter how hard I tried to convince myself otherwise, there was always a small voice whispering that you cared. I dismissed it constantly. I told myself it was delusion. I told myself it was wishful thinking. I told myself it was simply my heart trying to ease its own pain. But it persisted anyway, quietly insisting on seeing something good in you even when I was trying my hardest not to.

So I waited.

I waited for messages. I waited for explanations. I waited for effort. I waited for some sign that the connection I felt had not existed entirely inside my own head. I kept waiting for someone who, from my perspective, simply was not showing up.

And after a while, I started feeling foolish.

I would catch myself checking my phone and immediately feel embarrassed. I would replay conversations and wonder what exactly I was searching for. I would sit with my own disappointment and think, What are you doing? Why are you still doing this?

That may be the hardest thing to forgive. Not what you did, but what your absence convinced me to think about myself. The way I started measuring my worth against your willingness to show up. The way I allowed your inconsistency to become a reflection of my value. The way I slowly began questioning things about myself that had nothing to do with me at all.

And after all of that, after the waiting and the confusion, after all the nights spent trying to make sense of things that made no sense, after all the moments I spent feeling unwanted, unseen, and insignificant, you simply get to say you’re sorry?

You simply get to arrive with an apology after I have already carried the weight of everything that made the apology necessary.

I think that is what hurt the most. Not the apology itself, because I genuinely believe you meant it. Not even the fact that you were sorry. What hurt was realizing that while you were apologizing for a wound, I had already lived through it. I had already spent days bleeding from it. I had already questioned myself because of it.

By the time the apology arrived, the damage had already done its work.

There are some pains in life you convince yourself you have outgrown. Certain heartbreaks, certain humiliations, certain emotional collapses you swear will never find their way back to you once you become older, wiser, more self-aware. You tell yourself that experience alone should have made you immune to this kind of unraveling. That at this age, after everything you have already survived, you would know better. You would choose better. You would protect yourself better.

And yet somehow, here I am.

I never imagined I would have to sit with feelings like this again, let alone write about them. It feels almost absurd to admit it out loud, because a part of me genuinely believed this chapter of my life had closed years ago. Not like this. Not with this intensity. Not with this familiar ache that quietly settles into your chest and turns even ordinary moments heavy. It simply was not supposed to happen again.

But it did.

There are moments where it feels as though my entire world has tilted slightly off its axis. Not in the catastrophic, life-destroying way it once did years ago, perhaps because time has made me stronger, or maybe because experience has taught me how to survive pain without completely falling apart. But even then, there is something deeply humiliating about discovering that you can still be wounded this way. That you can still care this deeply. That despite all your caution, all your self-awareness, all the walls you carefully built over the years, another person can still reach into the softest parts of you and leave you questioning everything.

What makes it worse is that none of it feels entirely irrational. I wish I could dismiss it as insecurity or overthinking, something imagined and exaggerated by fear. But there are facts. Fragments of truth I cannot unsee, details I cannot comfortably explain away no matter how desperately I try to. And so I find myself suspended between denial and acceptance, between wanting to protect my peace and wanting to hold onto the version of reality that hurts less.

It is an exhausting place to exist in.

Still, I am trying very hard not to punish myself for being human. Because despite everything, despite how embarrassing vulnerability can feel when things do not unfold the way you hoped, there is nothing inherently shameful about caring deeply. There is nothing pathetic about wanting something wholeheartedly and pursuing it with sincerity. We live in a world that often glorifies emotional detachment as strength, as though loving carefully is somehow wiser than loving honestly. But I do not believe that anymore.

To feel deeply is not weakness. To try, despite the risk of disappointment, is not foolishness. To place your heart into something and hope for tenderness in return is one of the most human things a person can do.

And perhaps that is what I am trying to remind myself now: that even if this leaves bruises, even if it unsettles me, even if it forces me to confront parts of myself I thought I had long mastered, it still does not make me weak for having cared.

You want to know pain?

I will tell you about pain.

For a long time I was getting more and more frustrated every day, living in a constant state of uncertainty. Waiting for the floor to fall through at any minute. It felt like walking on a tightrope when my balance was already awful.

I was fighting for my life.

But I knew I loved him. I knew I loved him enough to put myself through it. And somewhere in the back of my mind I believed that if I could survive the mess we were in, we would eventually reach a happier place together. A calmer place. A place where everything would finally make sense.

I thought that would be our forever.

So I pushed myself to be strong. I told myself to be patient. Even when I knew I was betraying myself in the process, I believed it would be worth it. I believed he would eventually love me enough to make up for everything I had endured.

I was so certain about my love.

The only thing I was never certain about was whether he would choose me.

Until the very last minute, I did not know.

He prolonged the uncertainty. He delayed decisions. He let the tension stretch day after day while I carried emotions that were heavier than anything I had ever carried before.

Eventually, like any human being pushed to the edge, I imploded.

And the worst part was that I imploded alone.

I was isolated even in my collapse. I was not loved in that moment. I received very little compassion. When I think about it now, it still hurts. I remember feeling like I was being buried underground, like sand was being thrown over me while I was still breathing beneath it.

I felt lower than low.

I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.

For two days after that moment, I sank deeper into myself. I tried to stay afloat, but it felt inevitable that I would drown.

And in that darkness, instead of being lifted up, I was given even more pain.

You know the phrase about kicking someone when they are already down? Even that does not fully describe the hell I experienced.

Eventually I stopped fighting.

I needed escape. I needed relief. I needed anything other than the unbearable feeling sitting in my chest.

Anything but that.

So at 3:40 in the morning, on the 25th of November 2024, I did something I had sworn I would never do again. Something I had not done in over a decade. Something I had always been too afraid to repeat.

But that night the pain was greater than fear.

And I bled.

I watched myself bleed. I watched the pain sink into my body and, for a moment, I allowed myself to become numb.

I did not think it through. I was not in a place where thinking was possible. I just needed to escape the awful way he had made me feel. His abusive words were still ringing in my ears. I was still in disbelief that after all the love I had given him, this was how I was being repaid.

And then suddenly it was too late.

Blood stained the pages that should have been filled with ink. A strange, dark aesthetic formed in front of me. My pain had created its own visual memory.

A tragic snapshot of the moment.

But the thing is, it did not stop.

I thought it would stop. It did not.

That was when panic set in.

What do I do now? Who do I call?

And the truth was that I had no one.

I certainly could not call the person whose words had pushed me so far into that darkness.

So, terrified, I pulled myself together and went to the emergency room alone.

I had to. I did not have a choice.

Calling a cab and walking into that hospital was one of the most humiliating moments of my life. I felt helpless. I felt ashamed.

Why did I do this? How did I let myself fall so far down?

Had I not promised myself years ago that I would never return to that place?

Had I not promised my younger self that we would do better?

Oh God. I am so sorry.

I walked into the ER and showed them my wounds.

I was not prepared for the look in their eyes. The pity. The sadness. The concern. I was trying so hard to appear strong despite the obvious state I was in.

They treated me quickly and with care.

They asked about my mental health history. I told them the truth. That I was already on SSRIs. That I had both a psychologist and a psychiatrist. That I was trying to do the right things to stay well.

For the first time in a long time, doctors did not disappoint me. For the first time it felt like someone understood that pain can exist even when you are trying your best.

But it did not change the reality.

I needed eight stitches.

Eight stitches for one moment of collapse.

I left the hospital around six in the morning. They were hesitant to send me home alone, but they did.

He knew what had happened.

But he could not come.

Instead he was angry.

He eventually came to see me that evening, around seven o’clock. The compassion felt half hearted. And in that moment I realized something devastating.

Even my life felt like it carried very little value.

What made everything worse was what followed. Somehow rumors began spreading. I was taunted for what I had done. I was accused of doing it for attention, as if pain like that could ever be a performance.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

But who would know?

Who would ever truly know what I felt that night? What it took for a person who had fought so hard to stay strong to finally collapse?

The truth is that no one can love you enough to save you from yourself if you are the one choosing to drink poison.

And that realization was its own kind of pain.

Living through that moment. Hiding my scars for months. Trying to love myself again after feeling betrayed by my own hands.

Time has a strange way of softening memories. One day I will forget exactly how it felt to be sitting on that floor.

But the body remembers.

The body remembers everything.

It remembers the pain. It remembers the moment you broke. And it remembers the moment you chose to survive.

And strangely, when I look back now, I do not only see weakness.

I see strength.

Because if I had not stopped where I did that night, I might have done something even worse.

And the fact that I stopped there tells me something important.

Even in the darkest moment of my life, some part of me still chose to live.

[From the Diaries]

The way this year started, I should’ve known not to hope for anything more.

It started with this feeling: a tight knot in my chest, nerves pulling at each other, my body showing all the signs of discomfort. A never-ending anticipation of things going from wrong to worse. A constant cycle of terrible and utterly disheartening surprises.

That was the start of this year.

It’s September now. My heart is in a bigger mess than it used to be. The pain is the same, but I’m sabotaging myself more. Maybe I just got tired of being good.

When I felt this way at the end of last year, that’s when life nearly collapsed. I had someone with me who would love and comfort me. But for reasons I will never understand, none of that seemed comforting.

I’m a fully grown adult who has managed every crisis I’ve ever come across on my own, and believe me, there have been quite a few. But this time, for some reason, it felt heavier. Like I could no longer pick myself up off the floor. This time it felt like me against the world.

And in all my adult years, I did something I had never done before. I called my little brother for help. I asked him to come because I wasn’t feeling well. I hoped that if I talked to him, I would feel a little better.

I think it helped. But it didn’t take away the sorrow.

This year was always meant to be shitty. It’s my fault for believing it would be different.

I will tell you this though: being knocked down when you’ve been nothing but good hurts your soul. But when you start to feel like maybe you did something to deserve it, it attacks your mind instead of your soul.

Both are personal hells.

And I don’t know which one I would choose if I had the option. Probably the one that rids me of any guilt, because these days guilt has become my poison.

[From the Diaries, July 2025]

Healing

I’d like to believe I’m healing. With a lot of missteps here and there, I still think I’m on the right path. I’m self-aware. I know my wounds. I know where it hurts, and for the most part I know why it hurts too.

But healing brought me something I wasn’t prepared for: the loss of feeling.

I don’t love people blindly anymore. I don’t hold on to people who don’t treat me the way I deserve. And that’s a big change for me, because I used to be the complete opposite.

I used to be the “love me, choose me” kind of girl. But the truth is, most of the time I was also the girl who stayed even when I wasn’t chosen. I was too understanding. Too forgiving. I gave people the space to play with my feelings without expecting any accountability from them.

I used to feel everything intensely. Now I feel almost nothing.

I’m not in love anymore. I’m not even in love with the idea of being in love. And honestly, I don’t even know what love means to me right now.

This relationship showed me some of the best and worst parts of myself. That’s what relationships do. Even when they don’t work out, they teach you something.

At first it showed me how big my heart is. How unconditional my love can be. How forgiving, nurturing, caring, and trusting I can be.

But eventually there comes a moment when you realize what’s really going on. And when that realization hits, everything shifts. It might feel like it’s too late, but in reality it’s the moment things finally become clear.

And then another part of me shows up. The part I’ve always known existed.

The cold part.

Once I switch off emotionally, I really switch off. To the point where it might look like I was never in love at all.

But I was.

And that’s what makes this strange. Because even though I’ve detached now, a part of me still wants to feel those things again.

I want to be in love again one day, but this time with someone who treats me right. I want to feel excited about someone. I want butterflies again. I want that childish happiness and that slightly crazy infatuation that comes with liking someone deeply.

Because the absence of all of that just feels empty.

[From the Diaries]

I don’t usually talk about how bad it gets.

There’s too much shame around it. The kind of things people don’t really understand. When something doesn’t look normal, people immediately react with discomfort. Icky. Ew. What’s wrong with you?

But for me, it’s just, reality.

Some days I can’t even begin to explain how it feels inside my own mind. I think deep down I know when a low is coming. It’s like something in my gut senses it before the rest of me does. But the timing is never convenient, never when life pauses and says, okay, now you can fall apart. So I ignore it as much as I can.

And because I’m able to keep functioning through it, it gets labeled something neat and clinical: functional depression.

Functional. As if that word somehow makes it manageable.

Because from the outside it looks like I’m choosing when to let it take over. Like it happens on my terms. But the truth is, it only looks that way because I fight it until I can’t anymore.

I’ve been in bed for over twenty-four hours.

Yesterday I forced myself to go for a run because the ugly voices in my head were getting louder. I started feeling heavy in my body, fat in my mind, exhausted in a way sleep doesn’t fix. I thought maybe movement would quiet it. Maybe a workout would shake something loose.

Instead, it made everything worse.

I’m not paralyzed, but I feel mentally handicapped. Like my brain is wrapped in fog and every simple task requires a level of effort I don’t have.

And then there are the relationships around you. The weight of them.

Lucky for me, there’s really only one that matters right now. The one I have with my boyfriend.

But even that feels broken some days. Damaged in ways I don’t even know how to begin repairing.

But then there he was.

When I get into these states, when my mind refuses to cooperate with the world, I stop trying to analyze it. I used to ask why. I used to try to solve it. Now I just let it wash over me and wait for it to pass, hoping that eventually I’ll come back to myself. Hoping the energy returns. The will to exist normally again.

On a TikTok live. With a woman he knows exactly how I feel about.

There had been rumors about them before. The thought of them together already made my stomach turn. And a few weeks ago I had found out that he had texted her from one of his fake accounts. His explanation was that he heard her grandfather had passed away, so he thought of messaging her.

“Helloooo,” he wrote. At 06:04 in the morning.

Does that make sense?

I wanted it to. I really did. I wanted to believe the explanation because believing it would have been easier than accepting what it actually looked like.

But it didn’t make sense.

And my mental state, my inability to function sometimes, is not an excuse for someone to take advantage of that vulnerability.

The person I’m supposed to be with should understand me. Especially the flawed parts. Because they are part of me.

But that wasn’t even half of what I discovered.

At one point I realized he had saved his ex’s number under his sister’s name. Clever. Calculated. And another girl’s number saved under a friend’s name, just so I wouldn’t suspect anything.

The level of intention behind that kind of deception is its own kind of cruelty.

So when I saw the TikTok live, something inside me snapped.

How dare you?

But what shocked me the most was that he was more angry at me for reacting. As if my anger was the problem. As if he couldn’t understand how that would look, how disrespectful it was, especially when we were supposedly trying to rebuild trust.

You say you want to fix things. And then you go and do something like that.

I don’t even have the words for the exhaustion that follows something like this.

I was already mentally drained.

And now, somehow, I’m expected to carry this too.

[From the Diaries]

So deeply uninterested.

Nothing feels exciting. Nothing feels new. There’s nothing I wake up looking forward to.

I feel alive when I look back at certain roads I’ve taken. But I don’t actually want to walk them again. The nostalgia feels electric. The reality probably wouldn’t.

It’s been this way for a while.

I try to put myself out there. I really do. But there’s this strange empathy that holds me back. A softness. A knowing that I’m not fully available. I reason with myself, tell myself it’s okay, tell myself healing isn’t linear. But I just can’t do it yet.

My therapist once asked me something that stayed with me. He asked if, with every relationship that ends, I feel like I lose a part of myself. Like a part of me dies with them.

I had never thought of it like that.

But I told him every breakup leaves me as a different version of myself. Some versions stronger. Some versions smaller. Some empowered. Some feeling less.

The only connection I’ve felt lately was one that promised permanency almost instantly. The minute I responded, it felt solid. And because it felt so easy, I thought it wouldn’t be so hard to feel that way again.

But it is.

Nothing sparks. Nothing shines. Nothing ignites that reckless fire in my soul.

And that’s why I keep looking back.

The most alive I’ve ever felt were the times I was doing something I probably shouldn’t have been doing.

I remember setting a time and waiting. Wondering if they’d show up. Wondering if they’d be early. Or late. Or not come at all.

One of them always showed up on time. The other barely did, and when he did, he was always late.

Maybe they’ll always be my favorite mistakes.

They were similar in the way they made me feel. But one reciprocated it more. It felt mutual. Like we were both burning at the same temperature. There was no escaping it.

June 2019.

A time I sometimes wish I could relive.

From a distance it feels perfect. Cinematic. Glowing. But it wasn’t. It was complicated. It was wrong in ways that should have made me ashamed. But I wasn’t ashamed.

Because I wasn’t demanding anything. I wasn’t pushing for more. I was just existing in it. Going with the flow. Letting it be what it was.

And he made me feel alive again.

That’s the dangerous part.

I’m starting to realize I might have a type. Smart. Corporate. A little reserved. Slightly intense. The quiet kind who surprises you with how deeply they think.

Short. Slim. Controlled.

Age doesn’t matter.

What matters is how they make me feel.

And right now, nothing does.