When I think about love, I think about an emotion that’s so difficult to conceal, one you can’t afford to be timid about. It is a joyfully overwhelming feeling that feels like an inflated ballon; one you hold so delicately so it doesn’t burst.

It’s freeing too, because it makes you feel safe enough to be limitless. You want people to know you love them, you want them to feel it in boundless measure, so they are sure of it, so they don’t mistake your feelings for something fickle. You are not selfish with it or restrictive about it. You simply give it away to the person you love, freely.

And this is why I think it’s impossible, or should I say deeply unusual, when people say they are in love, but they don’t show it eagerly and profusely. I believe the degree of love should be equal to the manifestation of it.

We have attached so much shame and cynicism to being eager in expressing love. We think that the pace or visibility of love determines its credibility. We forget that not every eager show of affection is love bombing and not every slow burn is genuine love.

We have become so hesitant in telling people we love them. We think that giving them so little would make them want us more. We have become so calculative, and of all things to be calculative about, we’ve chosen our expression of love.

We have made love this act of give and take that has led to everybody taking and nobody giving.

Everyone is so lonely, so sad, so afraid. Everyone is playing a game of who should text first? Who should say I love youfirst? So many questions starting with “Who?” in a situation that involves only two people.

We have lost so much agency in love. We have become this group of people who outsource the expression of their love to fear.

Everyday, we have to fight to stay alive, to stay happy, to want to live to see another day. Why have we made the one thing that is meant to set us free so difficult and calculative? Why have we made the one thing that makes the world a whole lot less lonely this thing we are so ashamed to express? Why have we brought fear into the one emotion that’s meant to make us brave?

We all want to yearn and be yearned for, but we don’t want to show it. We forget that love without action is simply fiction.

How can you say you’re in love if we don’t see it?

A stream of consciousness

I sometimes fantasize about being a nepo baby who travels a lot and has four art degrees from Paris and New York City, purely out of passion than of necessity. I think it must be so cool to live a life so insulated from the woes of the world and be so dedicated to having whimsical interests for no particular reason. It might sound a little unserious, but I find an easy, stressless, uncomplicated life quite romantic, where the first thing people say on a call when they’re on the phone with me is, “Which country are you now?”

It is such a huge disservice to our existence when we only accept the good and try to isolate ourselves from the not-so-interesting parts of life. A necessary part of living is failing sometimes, and I fear that in the dire bid to not fail, a lot of people have become sore losers. There is nothing shameful about failing. What is actually so heartbreaking is always wanting to win because you cannot handle low moments and your only resort is to break down when things don’t go your way. It is in fact okay to not win all the time.

We need to tell our friends and family the truth more often. Being truthful is different from being blunt or whatever word people use to excuse their rudeness. We should all get accustomed to advising your friends when you feel they need a change or when we feel that certain things are not allowing them to become improved versions of themselves. Be kind while at it, but never refrain from being honest. Why are we friends if we can’t act as each other’s mirror?

At some point, we need to revisit ethical arranged marriages. What exactly is this dating pool? Clearly we need the matchmakers back.

Learning is such a humbling experience because the first step to actually learning is understanding you don’t know anything in the grand scheme of things. And it’s not from a condescending point of view towards oneself but rather a deep acceptance of the fact that the more we know, the more we’ll realize we don’t know, and that’s the beauty of learning.

We should do things just for the sake of doing them. Not every creative pursuit needs to have a productive end goal. We’re losing so much whimsy because we’re so pressed on making everything unattainably perfect and it’s ruining our views of life. Our constant desire for productivity has convinced us that we’re only as good as the next goal we’re chasing.

It’s so incredible how you read a book or watch a film and realize you’re not alone in how you’re feeling and that there are not so many unique experiences. I think it’s also so calming because it assures you that some people have felt the way you’re feeling right now in the past, others currently feel that way, and some others will certainly feel that same way in the future. You can always be assured that you’re never alone, and that whatever you’re anxious about will pass.

I saw a TikTok video recently where the creator said she never reacts to passive aggression because that’s not how she sees herself. I’ve had this thought running through my mind for a bit, but seeing that helped me put my thoughts to words. You’re only as good and amazing as you think you are. You’re only as respected as you think you are. Other people may have opinions about you, but in the grand scheme of your life, those opinions, including the credibility of them, do not matter unless you make them matter.

This year, I started having nightmares during my luteal phase. I only noticed the pattern a couple of months ago. At first, I could not believe it was possible, until I searched and I saw. It made me wonder if this was a new symptom or if it was just something I didn’t notice long before because it would have been hard for me to believe there was something else my hormones were capable of. It’s the same way I wondered why I started having ovulation pains years ago, until I realized it’s not new. We were just not told or taught. Pre-menstrual symptoms were not researched enough for them to become worthy of note or for awareness to be created about them.

In secondary school, when Biology teachers talked about the female reproductive system, they started and stopped at the vagina and the egg, about how when a sperm and an egg fertilized, they form a fetus. The only other prominent thing I remember being taught in Biology class was that a woman’s menstrual cycle lasted 28 days, so imagine my shock when I had my period 26 days after the previous cycle started and when I also found out that a cycle could be 21 to 35 days, and some women don’t even get their periods for months.

Lessons about the menstrual cycle did not encompass the excruciating pain of menstruation or how to manage symptoms your hormones challenge you with. I guess they thought it was too shameful to talk about, that it might bore the boys or make the class awkward. Maybe they thought that the sound of blood might scare the class or even the teachers.

The only other thing they taught us about menstruation was that when you start menstruating, your chances of getting pregnant is largely increased because “you’re a woman now.” Even as a 10–12 year old, you’re a woman now. So don’t let a boy touch you.

When I was a teenager, I remember having such severe pains during my period. It was so bad that every time I was on my period, I’d retch endlessly and end up in the hospital. One time, during those hospital visits, the doctor prescribed a pregnancy test. I had not had sex before, but in that moment, I felt maybe I had gotten pregnant without my own knowledge, maybe in my dreams, or maybe the boy who touched my hand during class the week before had gotten me pregnant in the process. The pregnancy test came back negative and every time I think about that moment, I wonder why the doctor’s first bright, shiny idea was to test a teenage girl who was on her period for pregnancy, even before prescribing painkillers to her so the pain can just stop.

I did not know period pains could be managed until I was 13. Before then, I would let the pain consume me to show my strength and hoped that it wouldn’t unalive me before I had to do it again the next month. One day at school, I was in so much pain that it felt like there was a ringing in my head. I had to hurry to the sick bay and when I got there, the nurse gave me a painkiller and I could not believe how immediate it worked and how easily the pain went away. I felt like I had discovered a treasure. And I also felt betrayed. I had been wallowing in pain since I started menstruating, I had been clinically accused of being pregnant while wallowing in said pain, and all this could have been avoided with one pill? One pill?

If I had known that was not where the betrayal would end, I would have braced myself for more. I would have braced myself for the time when people started proclaiming to the world that painkillers were harmful to women and that it could affect their reproductive system, without researching why or recommending “safe” ways for them to be relieved of pain. I think that was when I realized that women are not encouraged to stop using the pill because society surprisingly cares for them, but because it takes away from the strength and resilience society identifies them with. If your pain is taken away from you, how else would we call you strong?

I felt betrayed once again when I went to the hospital countless times because I did not understand what was going on with my stomach or why it felt like my entire body hated me. I went to the hospital and when I explained what was happening, the doctor did a search on his phone and concluded on a piece of paper that I had irritable bowel syndrome without explaining what it was. But having a name for it, albeit wrong and misdiagnosed, made me feel like I wasn’t mad. Like there was a name for what was wrong with me.

The heavy antibiotics he prescribed did nothing. In fact, I got so ill from them, I had to stop. You know why? Because I didn’t have irritable bowel syndrome. I now realize that maybe that’s the game they play with women. Let’s give them a name to explain their condition so they can feel better instead of actually finding out what might be wrong, so they can actually be better.

I felt betrayed again when I had really bad acne and went to a gynecologist and he diagnosed me with polycystic ovarian syndrome. Another name to describe a condition they did not understand and clearly did not want to understand. They didn’t even tell me how to consistently manage it. They give you a name that has related symptoms to yours, or a name that popped up first after a Google search. I only found out recently that I do not have PCOS, but every time I had bad acne as a teenager, I told myself it was because I had PCOS. It wasn’t like I didn’t doubt it, it just made me feel better to know my symptoms belonged somewhere, even though it was the wrong place.

Recently, PCOS was changed to PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome). A broader and more extensive diagnosis that encompasses the activity of hormones and metabolism relating to the reproductive system. It doesn’t change the fact that it took us this long to get here, and to some extent it makes me wonder if this is good or if it is just convenient, if it is just a way to have a broader diagnosis for these symptoms. Like they’re saying, we can’t find out what is wrong with you, but we can rename this and conceptualize it to suit you.

After each hospital visit, you are left wondering if your diagnosis was carefully done or if your case was treated like an inconvenience that needed an immediate, related name. As a woman, your condition is given so many names, diagnoses are not accurate and timely enough, and there is a lackadaisical approach to conditions unique to you.

Like it is not bad enough, there is a habit of tying your gynecological conditions to a hypothetical husband, to a marriage that needs to happen immediately, to you bearing kids. It is almost like you exist for everyone but yourself.

A woman is diagnosed of uterine fibroids and the doctor’s immediate advice is for her to get married immediately and have children, before recommending surgery. Why is your first recommendation to save a woman from further discomfort and pain a sperm and a baby? Why is it that the effective method of removing fibroids, which is surgery, is not prescribed first? You have severe period pains? Get married and have a baby. You have fibroids? Get married and have a baby. You have a cold? Get married and have a baby.

You look at the many ways society keeps betraying you as a woman, you look at the shame that has been attached to speaking about your reproductive system. You have a great look at the halfhearted manner diagnoses are made, and the ridiculous solutions and pieces of advice given, and then you realize that it is all propaganda. You going to the hospital multiple times in search of answers and seemingly never finding it, the dire back and forth between you and the gynecologist, the new symptoms you keep having but can’t explain why, everything is happening without a clear solution or study because the more you know about your body as a woman, the more dangerous you are. It is almost like the world imagines that if you find out you can live your life without pain, you would not recognize the role you are meant to perform in society anymore: the role of a woman who is always wondering, but never knows.

Why does a woman have to go to the gynecologist multiple times throughout her lifetime before getting a diagnosis that is sufficient enough to make her better? Why has science and technology evolved so much to the extent where we are at the cusp of having flying cars, but gynecological conditions are not well researched? Why are school curricula not expansive enough to teach girls about these conditions and help them feel like they are not crazy or mad, like their entire body is not going to swallow them whole in pain? Why are girls not taught ways to manage their symptoms, but rather are taught to not let a boy impregnate them or to let a man impregnate them, depending on what time of their lives they are advised? Why are women treated like second-class citizens, like their conditions are not real and their physiological and psychological healths do not matter?

The answer is simple. We are not men.

I remember the first time we met.

I remember because you asked me so many questions and I was not sure how to react to a stranger being so curious about me. It wasn’t in an intrusive way, but in a way that showed you wanted to know, a way that showed you loved knowing.

I remember because you were smoking a joint and you asked me if I wanted to take a puff. I said no, but you didn’t ask further questions like, “Why?” “Don’t you smoke?” You simply said nothing, and took another puff.

I remember because you stared at me like you were rediscovering life through my eyes and learning all about the world anew. You never lost your gaze on me. It wasn’t intimidating or weird, it just felt like you wanted it to be known to me that I wasn’t alone, that you were there, that you were fully focused on me, that you could see me.

I’m not sure it was love at first sight, but I was fascinated, and fascination is a close second to love. It wasn’t the limerence of having a crush, it was something more, something tangible.

I didn’t want to imagine what knowing you would feel like, I didn’t want to make up stories and build a character in my head. I wanted to experience you for myself. I wanted to get to know you. I wanted to know what type of music you listened to, if you thought Frank Ocean was overrated or not, and then question your taste if you thought he was. I wanted to know what paintings you had in your home, what colors you hated, what films you loved. I wanted to know if you thought City of God was a brilliant film. I also hoped you hadn’t seen it yet because I wanted to be your first introduction to it. I wanted to know what your thoughts were about astrology, if you believed in it, what your star sign was, while hoping and praying to God you weren’t a scorpio because I am, and two divas in a relationship is a recipe for madness.

There I was outside this building with a rave going on inside, staring and looking into the eyes of a stranger who wouldn’t stop staring and looking into my own eyes. I was giggling as you talked about things I could not hear because it was too loud, and it felt like I was in a scene from The Worst Person In The World. I remember nothing else existed in that moment, nothing else could matter.

“Christian,” you finally said, speaking into my ears. “But you can call me Chris. My friends call me Chris.”
“Oh, so I’m your friend now?”
“Yeah I mean, you’ve been pretending to listen to me for some time now.”
“That’s not true. I’ve been hearing you alright.” I was being sarcastic.
You laughed. I could not hear what your laughter sounded like and I painfully cursed whoever the DJ playing inside was.

“So what’s your name?” You asked.
“Eyimofe.”
“I love the sound of that. Do your friends call you Mofe? You know, like the Mavo song?”
I giggled. It was a lame joke, but I giggled still.
“No. Everyone calls me Eyimofe, or at least I make sure they do. It commands the full use of the tongue.”
“What does it mean?” you asked, still staring at me.
“It means This is what I desire. It’s like saying this is what I want or I long for this. Like of all the things in the world, this is what I want.”
“That’s profound.”
“Yea, my parents did their big one.”

You were quiet for a second.
“So if I fall in love with you, or should I say when I fall in love with you and want to be with you, all I need to say is Eyimofe?” You smiled, taking a puff.
I would have found your question ridiculous if it wasn’t so brilliant, if the words were not coming from those pretty lips of yours, those lips I wanted so badly to taste the weed off of. So I smiled.
“When? You sound pretty sure.”
“Yes. When.”
“You want to fall in love with me?”
“Do you think it’s a bad idea?”
“What if I don’t want to fall in love with you?”
“You don’t want to fall in love with me?”
It felt like a dance.
“I don’t even know you.”
“We can work on that. You know my name is Chris. See? We’re getting there,” you said, while blowing a smoke.
You were funny. It made me come to the conclusion that I wanted to kiss you.

You lighted your joint again.
“You have pretty lips,” I said, looking at your lips, making it so obvious. I was pretty much getting a secondhand high, otherwise, why would I make my intention to kiss you so obvious?
“But you don’t want to fall in love with me?”
I guess we were still on this. “What does that have to do with your lips?”
“They’re a part of me, aren’t they?”
“I mean, they’re on the surface. Not you you.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Pretty sure you kiss people without falling in love with them,” I said.
Gosh, what was I doing?
“Well, this time is different. I’ve turned a new leaf.”
We both laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. You know, that ridiculousness between two people who are obviously attracted to each other, but dance around the fact because they know what they want to happen would happen anyway?

I couldn’t really hear the music anymore. I could only hear you clearly now. We were either speaking too loudly or whatever energy there was between us was drowning out the noise.

“So are you here alone?” You asked.
“Actually, no. I came here with my friends, who happen to be a couple, and I’m pretty sure they’ve forgotten I exist.”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure they have,” you said. “If you leave right now, they wouldn’t even notice.”
“For real. I’d get a text in the morning saying, Where did you go? We were looking for you all night.”
I can hear your laughter now too. Clearly. And if I were to describe it, I’d say it sounded like I wanted to hear it forever.
“Mind you, they weren’t looking for you.”
“They were not,” I affirmed.
Talking to you was easy.
“What about you? Here with friends?”
“Sure. You’re my friend.”
I giggled. “Are you always like this?”
“Charming and funny?”
“No. Annoying.”
“Oh, I’m annoying now? My plan must be working.”
“Your plan to make me fall in love with you?”
“Exactly,” you responded. “Or for you to allow me fall in love with you.”
“You’re insane, you know that?”
“I’m aware.”

At that point, I realized you were done smoking your joint. It was even more obvious because your hands were no longer performing an act. They were just bare. It felt like you didn’t know what to do with them.
Your right hand akimbo, you told me, “I want to keep talking.”
“I want that too.”
“So I’m packed out there,” you said, pointing to the left. “Bad decision, by the way. Not sure why I drove here,” you continued. “Anyway, I’m packed out there, and I need a smoke, so I need to go to my car because my joint’s in there. Would you like to come with?”
All that explanation to get me to go with you.
“Would you kiss me?”
You smiled. Not sure if you were taken aback or impressed.
“Yes, I will kiss you,” you assured. “What else do you want?”
“Anything?” I asked.
“Yes. Anything.”
“A scalp rub.”
“A scalp rub?” You chuckled.
“Yes. A scalp rub.”
“Well, not sure I can give you that in my car. You know the logistics of giving a scalp rub? Not exactly sure it’s feasible in a vehicle.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Except you want to go to my place?”
To your place? I wasn’t sure how we got to this part (I’m lying), but I loved it. I also wanted it because why else would I have asked for a scalp rub? Who asks for a scalp rub from someone they only just met?
“Depends on the type of music you play at your place.”
“Zaylevelten?”
My surprise was a little glaring on my face.
“I’m kidding,” you giggled. “He’s a vibe though. I’ll play whatever you want.”
“But I want to know your kind of music.”
“Well, you’ll have to come home with me to find out.”
“But I don’t even know you.”
“Well, you know my name is Chris, that’s one thing. You know you’re about to find out I give good scalp rubs, that’s another thing. And I think I’m a pretty good kisser, if you ask me or my third girlfriend.”
“Why the third?”
“It was when I started getting good at it.”
I laughed.
Your left hand was stretched out now, gesturing for me to take it, so I took it. You led me to where your car was, and you were right. You should not have driven there. The lot was packed.

You started your car, and then the speakers burst with the words, Poolside convo about your summer last night…
You did not think Frank Ocean was overrated. Great.

“What’s your star sign?” I asked, with a soft prayer in my heart.
“Aries,” you said, staring at me. You were amused. It sounded like you didn’t absolutely believe in astrology, but you were curious about it either way. The suddenness of my question seemed to thrill you.
“We can work with that.”
“What about you?”
“I’m a scorpio.”
“October or November?”
“October.”
“Oh, thank God.”
We both laughed, then you started reversing the car.

All my life, I’ve had to be so put together, and at some point, I started to view love the same way. As this thing that required me to be overly organized, as something that required me to be fully formed. I thought that love needed a method to truly be love, like it needed to be a system: very expected, very traditional. I’m older and I realize that I want my love, in every form, to feel like joyfully running around in a meadow. I don’t want to be so conscientious about love. I don’t want to perform for my loved ones, or show up a certain way to feel like a worthy recipient of their love. I want to just be in love.

I think our generation has made love feel so rehearsed. Friends want to do certain things or go certain places because they’ve seen people do same online. Romantic lovers do, say, and act in ways they see couples act on TikTok. We are all performing for a crowd. We have invited people into our love stories and made them judges of how credible our love is. We have, in so many ways, made love a thing that needs to be performed to be taken seriously. And so we in turn, treat it as such and treat ourselves as such. We expect so much from our friends and lovers, not by our own standards, but by a set of superficial standards we’ve seen displayed on the internet. Love has become a rehearsal rather than a manifestation of how we feel about the other person. Love has become an entertainment we put up for others, rather than an enjoyment for ourselves.

We perform friendship so much that it makes us so selfish. We judge our friends and their actions at the expense of their already large lives and the events surrounding them. We have now become a generation that looks forward to birthdays because we expect epistles and gifts from our friends, and we fault them for not meeting up to this expectation. We have made the enjoyment of our birthdays heavily dependent on the length of our friends’ well wishes and the gravity of their gifts. When did birthdays become less about reflecting on our lives and more about how others treat it?

When I newly moved into my apartment, my mother visited. I was so focused on making everything so perfect for her, that I almost forgot to soak myself in the love that was around me. I kept mentioning how I hadn’t gotten my curtains and sofa yet, and how I wished she came when I had fully furnished the apartment, so she’d be more comfortable. I don’t think I had ever seen my mother so shocked when she stopped me and asked, “Am I a stranger to you? Simi, am I not your mother?” Her questions came from a place of deep concern because she wondered why I wanted everything to be so perfect for her, why I didn’t recognize that her seeing me and my apartment at the unfinished state it was in is the exact point of love. She has bore witness to my existence right from my very birth until now, aware of my imperfections, my quirks, and beauty in spite of it all, why did I feel like the only way she deserved to see me was in my idea of perfection? When did my idea of love become about showing up finished rather than frolicking in being undone and letting someone else be a witness to that because they love me?

The problem with our idea of love and its expression is that we think we are only deserving of love when we’re finished. And that is why we are so lonely. We don’t let others in, we don’t let them see us. We expect that when we reach a certain point or level, we would be more worthy of receiving love. And that’s the problem, because we would never be finished. We would never attain the level of perfection we seek because it doesn’t exist. When we have what we feel would make us complete, we would find that there is something else we feel would make us complete. And on and on we go in a cycle of trying to figure things out before we receive and show love, and our inability to do so leads to loneliness and isolation.

How can we ever be truly loved if we don’t show people what parts of us require loving? Is there any point to love if we’re not imperfect? Love only exists when there are parts of us that are insufficient. If you’re only shown affection when you are good and perfect, you are not truly loved, and if you only show affection to others when they are good and perfect, you don’t love them.

If we cannot come into love joyful and barefoot, stripped of all the care in the world, with the decision to have the time of our lives and be so worn out because of all the fun we’d have, we do not intend to truly love. If we do not wake up everyday appreciating the mundanity and messiness that love offers all at once, we do not truly understand the purpose of love.

Love is not a performance. We already perform at work, we perform in new environments, we observe and do a sweep of new places we find ourselves in. We strategize and plan at work, we politick and schmooze, we pretend. Why do we bring this attitude into our homes too? Why do we make love feel like work? Of all the places to pretend, why do we choose to do it with people who have seen us at our worst? People who love us despite, in spite of, regardless, above all else.

The entire purpose of being in love is to have fun, to be joyful, to be gloriously messy. Let us stop pretending, let us have fun.

When I was a child, I fell asleep on the sofa a lot, especially on Sunday evenings.

After a few hours of playing with my siblings, I’d climb into the sofa and fall asleep out of exhaustion. When I woke up the next morning, I’d find myself in bed. They never woke me up to walk to my room, they never teased me the next day about falling asleep on the sofa again, instead, they carried me delicately, to ensure my sleep wasn’t disturbed.

Thinking about it now, it felt like they wanted it to feel magical, like a magic trick that was bound to manifest every time.

I never knew who got me into bed or if they took turns carrying me, but I know that every time I woke up, I was in bed.

I think that is what true love is.

It is the firm assurance that you will always be taken care of. It is the assurance that you are safe, that you are thought of, that you are deeply considered to the point where life is made easier for you. It is the steadfast act of making sure you never feel like an inconvenience. It is the assurance that every time you fall asleep on the sofa, you’ll wake up in bed.

I love waking up one morning and realizing what used to hurt so much no longer exists in my consciousness.

I love when I call my loved ones and I’m met with joy.

I love the thrill of locking eyes with a hot stranger, and we don’t have a conversation or do anything about it. Just a long stare that creates a tension that only exists in the moment.

I love going out with friends and getting tipsy with them. Every joke sounds funnier and life feels extra good. We dance, laugh, and savor the bliss of being loved.

I love the thrill and relief of catching something just before it passes. Catching the train just before it leaves, catching a meeting just before it begins. It feels like an assurance that it’s meant to be, against all odds.

I love when I have a really good meal and I become extra thankful for life.

I love having a crush. It feels rather juvenile and almost like you’re losing your mind every time you see them, but gosh, it’s so exciting!

I love when I meet someone so many times that it feels like the universe is making sure our paths keep crossing. It’s like a crossover episode, like our stories are written in ways that make it necessary for us to keep meeting.

I love the feeling of being right about something. When my intuition is validated, I feel like I’m very much in sync with my life, like I care enough about my world to have a feel for it.

I love the sound of rain. I love cuddling when it rains, I love sleeping when it rains. I love how the world becomes still when it rains.

I love when people want to see me as much as I want to see them, when they love me as much as I love them. The only thing better than loving is being loved in return. The beauty of reciprocity.

I love when someone I like is curious about me.

I love when I meet an old friend and we have a great, lengthy conversation about everything that has happened since we last met.

I love when the water is the right temperature when I shower. Just warm enough, just perfect.

I love doing great work and watching how positively it impacts people.

I love kissing. A long, passionate kiss with someone you’re so attracted to will heal you.

I love when I discover an artist and find out their discography is a gem.

I love when I post something on my story and someone I fancy likes it.

I love when I complete a task even when I’m feeling lazy or not feeling my best. It makes me really proud.

I love when my loved ones tell me they’re proud of me.

I love hearing my mother laugh with so much joy.

I love when I meet someone and know that they’re going to be in my life for a long time.

I love when the sunset pours through my apartment’s windows and everywhere looks and feels golden.

I love delicious cocktails. I love when it’s so sweet that it’s difficult to track when it gets me tipsy.

I love watching a good film, it renews my hope in the world.

I love when I finally end a vicious cycle that kept me stuck.

I love when joy returns and I feel like myself again. Life gets consistently and permanently good.

There is a sort of stagnancy that overthinking forces you to be in. It leaves you in a still position, burdened by fear. It’s kind of like you’re in a box, but your mind is running in a thousand circles. You dwell so much on everything, including the insignificant things, especially the insignificant things. Your mind forces them to mean something, to will them into something they are not.

The quickest way to recognize a person who grew up without the pressure to have it all figured out on their own is by how seamlessly they navigate life without being overly calculating or anxious about every decision. You can see how free they are to speak and act in public without thinking they might say or do something wrong. They move through life without the burden of caring for society’s opinion on the life they choose to live. You can tell they had a lot of emotional support growing up and do not overthink every single little detail. I find that enviable because I didn’t grow up being that person.

As a child, I wanted to do everything right to make everyone else’s lives more convenient. I wanted to do great at school because I could, and also because I wanted to give everyone one less reason to worry. I wanted things to be perfect and so I made this a need. I wanted to have a perfect score, wanted to be a perfect daughter, wanted things to go as I’d planned them in my head. I wanted life to follow the pattern I had set for it. I had created a system that worked and made me feel safe, so I committed to it. So you can imagine my unpleasant surprise when I realized that life was anything but a system.

I thought I was building a sustainable life where my expectations became reality, but instead, I was setting myself up for countless incidents of emotional dysregulation. When things didn’t go my way, I thought it was the end of the world. When I didn’t get a perfect score, I thought I was a failure, when a relationship came to an end, I thought I was unlovable. By becoming safe in a pattern that only worked as a child because it was unthreatened by the realities of life, I had unknowingly trained myself to think in the extreme negatives whenever life did not go as planned.

So I developed a sort of safety in overanalyzing every decision and thought. I imagined that the solution to not being surprised by life was to think and plan long and hard enough to the point where I could not be taken aback by results. And boy, was I taken aback. The only thing overthinking did was steal time. My over-analyzation developed into an uncertainty that kept eating away at my ability to make decisions. Sometimes, I think about the things I could have done with the hours spent being consumed by my thoughts. For example, if I had recovered earlier from disruptions, I would have had a lot more time to accommodate joy, to embrace the beauty of trying again, to look up and see the sky.

I found myself overthinking every detail. And I tried to convince myself that I was only being thorough, whereas I was anxiously sacrificing time to escape reality. It became a vicious cycle.

Spend so much time preparing to make a decision → be uncertain about it → eventually make the decision → feel bad about it if it doesn’t go as expected.

A thousand circles bouncing around in the box I had created in my mind.

That is the thing about spending so much time in your head. You begin to have a distorted view of reality or none at all. You build a world that only exists in your head, you take insignificant emotions and give them names. It is like christening a pain that never existed just because you enjoy the ceremony of naming things.

I later realized that overthinking is not as productive as I envisioned it to be. It was merely a coping mechanism, a false attempt to outsmart life, to guess its next step, to beat it at its own game, at the expense of my sanity. I also realized how cowardly it was. If my solution to surviving the real world is to build a world of my own in my head, so I can run away from facing life head-on, that is not bravery.

You don’t realize how much overthinking has stolen from you until you let yourself exist in a world that is not controlled by you. When I became tired of my need to control life and its outcomes, that was the moment I began to let life happen for me. I began to feel lighter, to breathe steadily, to not approach every decision as detrimental, to feel free. I no longer found safety in the turmoil of uncertainty and unhealthy expectations. I no longer demanded more from myself than I could possibly provide. I stopped wanting to play the role of God and simply surrendered myself to His plans.

And although I still overthink sometimes, and life gets so hard sometimes that I can’t feel my face, I am more grounded in the reality that my life is good. And because I now spend less time in my head, I am able to see all the love and support around me. I am able to see how reality truly is — not underestimating or overestimating its severity, just how it is. And every time I find myself overthinking, I try to open my eyes to all that exists outside of my mind, including and especially the love around me that is so real that I can touch it. This makes it easier to pause, to look around, to reflect, to give myself grace, to stop.

Stopping yourself from overthinking is not something that happens on a whim; it takes effort and patience. When you constantly remind yourself of how unproductive and burdening overthinking is, and how much life and time it steals from you, you find the idea of being unburdened and free more appealing.

There is a world outside your mind waiting for you to experience it. Free yourself from the mental exhaustion of your own making.

The lack of intentionality in talking stages these days is giving me a headache. Imagine getting to know somebody and your primary mission is to exhaust them with incessant boring, unproductive questions like “Wyd?” or “How was your night?” Do you really want to know what I’m doing? Well, if you must know, I’m here wondering why I’m letting you waste my time. Want to know how I spent my night? At dinner, with someone who actually wants to get to know me.

It’s kind of crazy how people have decided to apply low effort or none at all into talking stages, considering it’s probably the best time to put their best foot forward. A good number of talking stages do not lead to relationships (thankfully), but it is important for them to be productive either way. You have a month to impress me, and you think I’d let you ask me irrelevant, lackluster questions every single day? Immediately no.

When we were teenagers, it was okay to ask unproductive questions constantly because there was not much that could be done but be curious and speak words of affirmation. But we’re adults now, with jobs, commitments, and responsibilities, and it is so important to not treat people like their time is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

And conversations don’t always have to be on the phone. There is a world existing outside of your mobile device. You should want to get to know people over dinner, or over a cup of coffee. This is not the 1970s or the 80s when it was the norm to be pen pals with someone you’re getting to know. In this century, you’re surrounded with a million and one restaurants, cafés, and third spaces with the primary aim of being bedrocks to conversations. Maybe we should utilize them.

And someone might say, “They don’t just like you enough to be interesting.” Really? You can only have interesting conversations with people you ‘like’? It’s almost as if you consider your ‘like’ a trophy that gifts people the exlusion from being bored to death. Or maybe it’s a tired excuse to distract from the fact that you might be genuinely uninteresting. Or maybe it’s an effort to make people feel unlovable or not special enough for you to be curious about them, ask more productive questions, and follow up with action. Just maybe.

Talking stages deserve effort. Not because you want them to end in relationships, but because we need to be more respectful of people’s time. We need to demand more from people if they’re not putting in enough effort, because making them feel like it’s okay to waste your time only leads to a relationship of convenience — if you decide to be with them. It’s between this and letting them go, which is pretty much a valid option.

And I think a lot of people, especially women, think they need to endure unproductive talking stages because they feel it’s a step in the journey to being in a relationship. What they don’t know is that a talking stage is not even a part of that journey. Instead, it is what you do before you decide to go on it; so you have to treat it that exact way. Like if this talking stage is not impressive enough, I don’t have to entertain the thought of going on this journey with this person. It’s really that simple.

A talking stage is the point where you test for compatibility and intentionality. And I think because we’ve blurred the lines so much with sex and faux commitment due to constant chatter, we assume the purpose of a talking stage is beyond being a test. And this could also be an alternative explanation to why some people treat talking stages with such low effort. They think if you entertain their lackluster yaps long enough, you accept their unspoken invitation to be in a situationship. At the end of the day, you only entertain what you enjoy.

Let’s go back to treating talking stages as a test. Let’s become more creative and intentional with our conversations. Let’s not entertain what we don’t enjoy. If you do not see yourself being in a relationship where you’re asked “Wyd?” morning, afternoon, and night, why are you in a talking stage where the same horrific scenario is happening?

There are so many wrong, selfish reasons why people have children. Some people want them simply because they’ve always wanted to have kids, others because they think it is the next item to cross off on their bucket list or because they think it would save their failing relationship. Some will tell you they want to have kids because their parents had them or their friends are having kids, because it is the natural thing to do. Some others, because they hope that having kids would make them less lonely and they’d have someone to take care of them when they grow old. Suddenly, the responsibility of companionship and care falls on an unborn child.

As a result of these selfish reasons, it is unsurprising when people have such high, unhealthy expectations of their children from a very young age. You see people dealing with kids with a sheer lack of patience, with zero attention and intentionality. They provide for them with an expectation of receiving something in return, like their responsibility to their children rests solely on them providing a return on investment. And when they don’t or can’t, they treat them as useless. It is why they group children as good or bad, because it is easier to blame how they are or how they turn out on an automatic classification they’ve made up in their heads and society has enabled, rather than seeing it as a result of how they brought them up or didn’t.

It is our responsibility as humans to care for the ones we love, and it is also basic human decency to care for our elderly. I am not of the opinion that we don’t owe people anything. We owe them empathy, we owe them effort, we owe them care. But it is quite upsetting when the sole purpose of people having children is to have a care giver in their old age, to have children who will be forever indebted to them. It is reducing the purpose of creating life to having someone owe you for life. If you view having kids as an exchange or as something you do for future reward, maybe you shouldn’t have kids… yet.

It is your obligation to take care of the life you willingly created. You are not doing a child a favor or a solid for being responsible for them, you are simply being accountable for an outcome you planned. It is why it is so shocking when parents say things like, “After all I’ve done for you,” when they’re angry at their kids or when they do not meet the expectations they set for them, because they anticipate great behavior as a reward for taking care of them. The moment you start viewing raising kids as a necessary responsibility rather than a means to an end is the moment you become one step closer to being ready to have them.

There are also parents who are unable to treat children as human beings with feelings and emotions. Some parents never treat their children as adults even when they are early and late into their twenties and beyond. It reflects in their manner of communication, the way they refer to their children, how lightly and trivially their feelings are considered. Unlike some people would hate to believe, even from a very young age, children are humans too. They are not pets, toys, or figurines to decorate your house or keep it full. They are human beings, just like you, and you cannot have them with the purpose of achieving your dreams of companionship.

If you don’t see having kids as creating a human being that you have the privilege to love, a human being whose life exists outside of yours, you may need to reassess your decision to have them. Having kids is not a trend or a prerequisite to a complete life, it is a duty you don’t necessarily have to embark on if you feel you are not capable or healed enough to do. And that is okay, that is selfless even.

You should have children when you are mentally prepared to do so, not because you feel you are old enough, or because it’s the next thing to do now that you’re married. You should have them when you have healed your trauma and let go of your baggage, because it is only then that you can raise a child without passing your generational trauma unto them. You need to be emotionally intelligent enough to have children, because there is a whirlwind of emotions when it comes to raising them.

It is why some parents are always angry, why they have such little patience, why they bring the annoyance from the outside world into their homes because they are unable to compartmentalize and manage their emotions. It is why their kids cannot stand too close to them or breathe too loudly around them without being treated like an irritant, insulted or abused. It is why children who have been brought up in fear and trained to walk on eggshells around their primary contacts become adults with low self esteem, chronic people pleasers gravitating towards a small life.

Every action and every word directly impacts a child’s life forever. You are not expected to be perfect to have children, but you are expected to be ready. You are expected to have a deep, selfless interest in being responsible. It is foolish to think you would know it all when it comes to raising children, but it helps when you want to do it for the right reasons. When you approach raising children from a selfless perspective, you become a dependable parent that raises independent, confident children.

We know it is your first time doing life, as people always say when referring to deeply flawed parents, but that is not an excuse to ruin somebody else’s life, especially someone who did not ask to be here. It is also their first time doing life, so it is your responsibility to unlearn your trauma so you don’t traumatize them, so they have a great head start in life. Let us save children from bearing the consequences of the selfishness of adults.