‎I am combing my hair infront of my grandmother. You know what this means: I will hear how my hair has become shorter. How my cousin has astounding hair growth, and it is because my aunt applies flaxseed before she washes her hair, so I should do the same. Then she will continue to tell me what beautiful hair my father had when he was my age. I must have taken the hair genes from my mother’s side. My cousin is 4 years old, and frankly, who gives a shit? Maybe I should also mention one of her friends. And be like, “Remember what’s her name? Her blood pressure is so low,” and continue with, “She also doesn’t use a cane, unlike you. Maybe you should exercise; you shouldn’t sleep so much. Old ladies your age do plenty of things.”

But what would be the point? I can be mean when I am sad. I am still learning this taking the high road shit. I will admit I am not dealing with this year very well. This is not to complain but explain how things are. I am trying to break a generational cycle of constant comparison and toxicity. I will be better. My intentions of becoming a better human being are purely out of spite. So that I could look down on my relatives and show them that I am the first in my blood line to be GREAT.

‎‎It has been April for fucking forever now. Last month my other cousin told me how one of our relatives was telling her how she is getting old and that she should start dating. Our main concern should be on settling down and having a family while we are young. Coming from a man who dated his wife while he was in his thirties and she was in 11th grade is rich. ‎ My hatred for my relatives is not something I want to discuss right now. Moving on.

I want to talk about being a third wheel. Were you the third wheel in your friendships just like I was? Is that where you developed the habit of being a cuckold? It’s okay; I also hide in the closet and watch. The life of a third wheel doesn’t start with having friends that are dating. It starts with noticing interest. The boy from this class section likes your friend, and now he hovers and peacocks to get her attention; he might even go as far as coming to you and asking you for her number. And if you are just the right amount of creepy that stays in the corner and watches people, you can even understand who is interested in whom before they even realize it. What can I say? Sexual tension reeks.

Before you know it, you are included in their plans. Tagging along when they walk home when really all he wants to do is walk by his love interest’s side and slowly work up the courage to hold her hand or even ask her out. I mean, it will eventually happen, and before you know it, you become sort of the adopted child. Your friend convinces you she needs you there for moral support, and being the agreeable friend you are, you say okay. You don’t want to disappoint her. Then you are forced to listen to cheesy lines and the shitty interests of a 17-year-old (forgive me, I was emo). Of course the dates happen; that is when you should start to mentally prepare before being mentally drained. You won’t be included when they are in their honeymoon phase after the horniness of teenage love settles. The “let’s meet my best friend” date starts to happen, and from here on out you are just there.

Third wheels, you know what I’m talking about. With time everything evolves. He brings her flowers and chocolates, and he gives you a pity gift, which makes the entire situation even more awkward. Mother Earth, open your mouth and swallow me. Why did I agree to this? You always ask yourself this after you leave your house. They will even grow to resent you. “Why is she always with us? Doesn’t she have a boyfriend or someone she is interested in?” And your friend giggling simply says, “Oh, she hates people; that’s why.” Subconsciously you are cockblocking him by being there or not letting them be as intimate as they want to be. All of this because you don’t know how to say FUCK NO. That’s as far as high school relationships go. Adult relationships are much better; they want to spend as much time with each other without involving you. Now that you are an adult, everyone is supposed to have something going on for them, right? Either it is your career or a relationship, hobbies, and a social life.

I have always been that friend who is comfortable with being invisible, anything to not step out of my comfort zone, and I feel like I have always been a third wheel not only in my friends’ relationships but in my life as well. A bystander witnessing as others go out in the world and live their lives. Living vicariously through their experience. Lurking like the pathetic coward I am. I have said this multiple times. This is perhaps my way of self-flagellation. Because it was easier to watch than to risk being seen.

And now I am on my own; I don’t have to be a third wheel in anyone’s life. I am finally faced with myself and all the opportunities I didn’t take or I have yet to take. I live in my head most of the time. I feel alienated from the world; I feel like a stranger to my own body. My skin no longer fits me, and my soul is desperate for an escape out of this body.

I want to experience life, but I hate the world. I am a misanthrope, yet I somehow believe in humanity and understand the need for human connections. I don’t care about relationships. (I am too mentally unstable for that. Teehee, but I obsess over life and what it means to have a life lived and fulfilled. I just want to experience life, find inspirations, fall in love with my own potential all over again, and grow into the woman I know I can become.

And there is a sense of shame that comes with the feeling of falling behind while others move onward. It is crippling; reaching out seems to feel like too much. Even though you miss the feeling of having a conversation with someone familiar. You miss the warmth of being known; you stop yourself from reaching out. And slowly you see the connection you had starts to die because friendship or any human relationship, for that matter, is a two-way street. It will die if you do not take care of it. I have mastered the skill of standing still and pretending that I am not there. When you spend so much time standing on the sidelines, eventually people stop saving you a spot in the game.

There’s a certain kind of loneliness that comes with realizing you’ve been standing on the sidelines of your own life. Watching. Waiting. Telling yourself you’ll step in when you’re ready. When you spend enough time watching life happen to other people, it becomes easy to believe that’s your role in it. The observer. The extra. The one who stands just slightly out of frame. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel ready.

But I am starting to understand that life is not something you observe until you feel brave enough. It’s something that keeps moving with or without you. No one assigned me that role. I just got comfortable there. And comfort, as it turns out, is a very convincing trap. I don’t want to be the person who only ever almost lived. Who almost tried. Who almost became. And I don’t need to become a completely different person overnight. I don’t need a grand transformation or a perfect plan. I just need to stop standing still. To say yes a little more. To reach out even when it feels uncomfortable. To risk being seen, even if I don’t like what that looks like yet. I have spent so much time being a third wheel in other people’s lives. I think it’s time I stop being one in my own.

Wheel chairs are sexy. Put a man on it, and you have a panty dropper. Especially if you are the one who put him there. Imagine the story. Now before you judge, I believe every love story deserves a plot twist to make it a tad bit interesting so that when you are both old and gray, you will have plenty of things to laugh about together. I actually know a couple who have come to such tragedy and boy, almost have… How do I put it? A near-wheelchair experience.

The story goes that a boy meets a girl. Boy and girl fall in love and stay in a relationship for years and years. Unfortunately, the boy cheats, and the girl gets furious. A girl pays someone to have him hit with a car. A boy gets in an “accident.” He finds out who did it. After some physiotherapy and some time to reflect on his action, Boy goes back to the girl. Where are they now? Happily married for over 20-something years with two kids. Nothing shows how you love someone quite like this mind-awakening, near-paralysis experience.

But today I am not here to talk about wheel chairs. Come close; give me your ears. I promise not to stick my tongue in it like last time. I am here to talk to you about your loneliness, dear reader. How is it treating you? Is your DM still drier than your grandmother’s foot? Don’t worry, though. You are not alone. I must admit I have been feeling a little lonely, and everything seems to feel gray from where I am standing. I don’t know if it is the loss of purpose or feeling helpless that is making me feel like this. But now I am going to blame the system and yell, “Down, down, capitalism,” and write an “essay” about it even though the approach is unorthodox. The system we live in makes us lonelier each day, and some organizations profit from it. Bare with me; I have a point.

THE CORE ISSUE: “Alienation”

Loneliness didn’t start with phones. It started with how we work. In today’s world, loneliness is not a personal failure but an economic condition we are all forced to live in. And whenever I want to complain about the structure of the working class, I turn to Marx. According to Karl Marx, the worker in a capitalist system is reduced to a commodity, something to be bought, used, and replaced. The capitalist pays just enough for survival, not enough for freedom. You work, but you don’t own what you produce. You don’t belong to what you create, even though you exist. So then you go to work every day. You produce value, but the value is not yours. Your time, your entire being, is rented. (It’s okay; I felt like a cheap whore as well.) You neither have ownership nor fulfillment, and when you finally clock out and go home, what are you returning to?

Your exhausted self. And then, that is when you feel it: the loneliness that comes from the lack of connection with what you do and, therefore, yourself. Society (the system) doesn’t prioritize the workers; it uses them. In Karl Marx’s “Economics and Philosophic manuscripts of 1844,” the political economists argue that what matters is the gross product or total output of society. In simple terms, who cares if the working class struggles? Look at the economy. Marx argues that just because the GDP is growing, one must not overlook how the worker is tired, underpaid, and made to feel replaceable, and here loneliness and alienation are ignored because the system only measures success collectively, not individually.

In a capitalist world, labor is seen as a means of money-making only. Whatever you do, if it doesn’t make money, it is not valuable. One of the most important questions Karl Marx asks is,

“What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and, in this way to improve the situation of the working class or regard equality of wages (as Proudhon does) as the goal of social revolution?”

The French socialist and philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon believed that equal wages meant fairness; however, this view merely rearranges the same problem. Say wages go up, pay becomes equal, workers still sell their labour, are controlled by the system, and are alienated from what they do. Think of it like this, I get paid more, but I still hate my job, I don’t own what I produce, and I am still replaceable.

When we apply all of these ideas to today’s world, we are reduced to abstract labor: interchangeable, replaceable, and disconnected.

Does it remind you of your life story, fellow 9-5 worker? It’s okay; I cried writing this too. I am here to hold your hand.

THE IMMANENT ENEMY: Internalized Pressure

Now here is the trap we are living in. The system no longer exploits us. We do it ourselves. In “The Burnout Society,” Byung-Chul Han argues we have moved from a world of external oppression to one of internal pressure. The old world problems had too much negativity, and now in the modern day of the 21st century, too much positivity is killing us. Too much positivity with overproduction and achievement is leading us to the refractory problems of burning out, depression, and anxiety. We are becoming our oppressors, serving the new masters, convinced that we always need to do more, to be more. Unlike the old world, instead of getting attacks from external factors, our wars lie internally. We are suffering from overflow and abundance. We didn’t eliminate suffering but restructured it to limitless possibility and the pressure to always perform.

Since our so-called capitalist new world is brainwashing us to BE THE BEST WE CAN BE, is being self-driven leading us to slow suicide? Is excess positivity the silent killer in our minds, just like how cigarettes were advertised as a gun with a silencer?

We transitioned from a world of control to one where individuals self-destruct in their pursuit of success. In Focault’s world of disciplined society, we had criminals, and now in the “Yes We Can” society, we have depressed individuals. (Whoever came up with this sentence as a tagline for Obama’s campaign foresaw the future.) The old world had stricter ways of doing things. It was led by negativity and the need for “SHOULD”; there was a clear oppressor. There was a tangible enemy. But in today’s world of positivity, where everyone’s sole purpose in existence is achievement, the should is replaced by the can. The scariest part is that freedom and pressure have become the same thing. You are free to push yourself to the end of madness, and that is the trap in all of this. Living in a world where everything appears possible, yet you feel like you’re struggling with everything, leads to the emergence of many depressive individuals.

We are the hamsters on the wheels. Humans used to create, think, and act, but now we only work to live. Then, thinking was deep and reflective, but now it is performative, aimed at

achieving “what’s beneficial” or “what’s productive”; the modern human has been reduced to a laboring animal. LinkedIn is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Everyone is thinking… but only in ways that can be monetized. So what happens to meaning? It disappears.

To exacerbate the situation, we no longer have control over our attention. Every notification is engineered to be addressed by us like a needy child. Every scroll and every response is an automatic distraction. So what does this phenomenon have to do with loneliness? By constantly producing, performing, and reacting, we have become disconnected from our work, our time, and ourselves.

THE DEATH OF “US”

If alienation disconnects us from our work, and self-exploitation disconnects us from ourselves, then what disconnects us from each other? Okay, I’m tired, I hate my job, and I’m fighting myself. But at least I have people… right?”

Wrong.

According to Robert D. Putnam, we are not just lonely individually; we are collapsing socially. attending fewer community events, joining fewer organizations, seeing their friends less, and trusting each other less. We are, quite literally… BOWLING ALONE. Slowly the value of human connection is being replaced by TikTok gifters, Instagram followers, and LinkedIn connections. You think you’re choosing to scroll. You’re being trained to. In the first part of the essay, Marx points out we have no control over labour. Han points out we have no control over ourselves, and now we have no control over our attention.

We are too busy optimizing ourselves to invest in each other. We cannot even sit with ourselves. How are we supposed to sit with others?

Putam points out Leisure didn’t disappear. It just became private. And the belief that “most people can be trusted” has been declining for decades. So together we not only became lonely, but we contributed to the making of a lonely world.

ATTENTION ECONOMY ATE YOUR LIFE

Modern loneliness is not just caused by work or society but maintained by the systems that capture our attention and keep us isolated. Fine. The system is broken. Society is collapsing. But at least I have my phone. My people are there. Or are they just scrolling like me? According to Cal Newport, we didn’t just adopt technology. We surrendered to it. Our phones are slot machines; every time we hit refresh, we are pulling a lever: “Will someone like my post?” “Will I get a message?” “Is there something new?” keeping us hooked like slaves. And it comes as no surprise that we are distracted, unable to sit still. We are living in a system that profits off of that. Our insecurities and our loneliness.

This takes us to the point that we live in an age of advanced technology; it is so advanced in a way that most industries fear being replaceable and being out of business. However, technology was supposed to make our jobs easier and give us more free time so we could participate in soul-fulfilling endeavors such as creativity, art, reading, writing, etc. If machines reduce the need for labour… Why aren’t workers more free? Because the system is designed to maximize profit and not free workers.

To conclude, technology could have freed us and given us more time for connection by reducing the labor work; however, it just intensified the speed of production output, replaced workers, and deepened disconnections. A false promise through progress, while this so-called progress allows our masters to tighten our leashes around our throats.

We are not just the product but both the audience and the addicts.

THE SYSTEM THAT KNOWS YOU ARE MISERABLE AND DOESN’T CARE

At this point we know something is wrong, so why don’t we change? According to Mark Fisher, it’s because we can’t imagine how. It’s easier to imagine the collapse of the economy, the planet, and humanity itself than to imagine a different way of living. The system is something we believe in, not consciously or enthusiastically but passively. So instead of questioning the structure of our lives, we question ourselves. We inquire why things are making us miserable, never why we are not handling it better. Because now our misery is data and no longer a problem.

If earlier capitalism needed our labour and later capitalism needed our ambition, this version of it demands something as intimate as our feelings. For centuries thinkers tried to measure happiness through pulse rates, through behavior, and through money, but today the ambition has matured into something far more invasive. Your mood, your focus, your sleep, your emotional state everything can be tracked, quantified, and analyzed. Happiness is something that can be scored and not experienced.

And once happiness becomes measurable, it becomes manageable. Companies don’t ask if you are fulfilled. They ask if you’re functioning. Governments don’t ask if life feels meaningless. They ask if well-being indicators are stable. Apps don’t ask why you are sad. They ask you to log in. Accept the terms and conditions; that is our sad, lonely life.

We are living in a system that helps us cope with stress because we participate in our own demise. We download the app, track our mood, optimize our routine, and try to fix ourselves. All this occurs while the conditions that made us feel this way remain unchanged. Because once our emotions are turned into numbers, they can adjust and stabilize just enough to keep us going.

Who Profits From Your Emptiness And What To Do About It

It is not just a personal crisis and more like a business model. The same system that exhausts you is the one selling you relief. The same structures that fragment your attention are the ones profiting from every second of it. The same forces that isolate you are the ones offering connection at a price.

Big Tech thrives on your attention. They convert every scroll, every click, and every moment of boredom they intercept into profit. Your loneliness keeps you online. Your need for connection keeps you engaged. And your inability to sit still is their entire business plan.

The wellness industry steps in right after. When you are burnt out, anxious, or unable to focus, they offer solutions. Apps to calm you down. Journals to fix your thoughts. Routines to make you “better.” They don’t want you free from the system, but they need you stable enough to keep functioning inside it.

Even your workplace has caught on. “Employee happiness” is no longer about your well-being; it is about productivity. A happy worker works harder, stays longer, and complains less. Your emotions are no longer private. They are part of your performance.

And so, everywhere you turn, your inner life is being used. And yet, somehow, you are still the one who feels like you are failing. So what do you do?

You start by reclaiming what the system quietly took from you. Your attention. by becoming more selective. Not everything deserves your reaction. Not every notification deserves your time. The ability to ignore, to delay, to say no, this is no longer laziness. It is resistance.

Your time. Every moment doesn’t need to be productive. The constant pressure to turn your life into output is precisely what keeps you trapped. Doing nothing, on purpose, without guilt, is not a waste but a refusal.

Your relationships don’t need to be the fast, convenient, surface-level kind. The slow ones. The ones that take effort, time, and presence. These cannot be optimized or reduced to a message or a reaction. The ones that remind you what it feels like to actually be with someone.

And most importantly, yourself.

Let go of the version of you that is constantly improving. Listen to the version of you that exists without needing to prove anything. The one that can sit in silence without reaching for a screen. The one that can think without immediately turning those thoughts into something useful.

None of this will dismantle the system. But it will interrupt it in the very least. That’s where it starts. Because the system depends on your participation. On your attention. On your belief that this is just how life is.

The moment you hesitate and the moment you choose not to engage the way you are expected to, something small changes. It might not be in the world but in you.

I am stressed out these days. Maybe because I have been having a series of bad things happen to me and my worst fears are coming true. Which one of the old gods did I piss off? Maybe I will hunt and sacrifice a virgin in their honor.

So now my mind creates more fake scenarios and keeps me up at night if I don't flip the light switch four times, lock the door three times, and eat my nails until it bleeds. But here we are, another day at the office, where I lurk on LinkedIn for non-creepy purposes. Never thought I'd live to say this. I go through the posts and everyone and their moms is "honored" and "thrilled" these days. LinkedIn is "professional," so I come here to scrutinize, condescend, and judge.

Then I notice it is getting too loud in our open-space office, so I decide to retire to the meeting room to focus on my judging. I am seated there and for a moment I zone out. Random thoughts start to flood in.

Last week I went to a meeting with a colleague from another department. While we were in the car she started making small talk. Then she saw my screen saver. It is a painting where there is a snake on it. She was disgusted instantly. She went on to talk about how terrified she was of snakes, and the whole time I was thinking, great. Now I have to start saying hello to her because she definitely will, and I can't seem rude.

Maybe I should raise snakes when I own my own place just to keep people away. But no, I can never own a pet. I am simply not a pet person. Also it would kill my mother. She too is terrified of snakes.

Speaking of my mother, I am making a list of people who keep reminding her that I don't go to church.

"Where is your daughter? We don't see her around. Did she leave the country? We don't even see her at church anymore."

What am I going to do with the list? I don't know yet. We shall see.

And once I am back to reality I look over to the art department. The graphic designers. Those who decorate and beautify. As I'd like to personally call it, "the table of failed architects." I don't think they like me very much.

I have to pee now. I realize I have this habit of announcing when ever I have to pee to who ever is right next to me. Maybe subconsciously I am letting everyone know how well I hydrate because I am terrified of dehydration. However I am working on it. When I get to the ladies bathroom. I see who ever used it before me forgot to flush after peeing. This always pisses me off. Did this bitch grow up with a butler? What kind of nonchalance and entitlement is it to do your business and just leave it there. And I just don't flush before I pee. I judge the urine. Dehydrated bitch with her almost orange urine. At this rate your kidneys will off themselves sister. That's why she is making poor choices. I don't know who she is but here I am thinking about her spitefully.

I am not a likable person. I understand that. I am a hater and spiteful. I hate people who act like the world owes them something. I hate co-workers who do the bare minimum and expect applause. I hate so-called hard workers who pretend they are the backbone of the company and demand a raise when all they do is tarnish the work of those who deliver efficiently. I hate. I judge them for their arrogance. Acting like they know everything when they ass-kiss their way to the top. And in my judging I tell myself I am practicing becoming God like. After all, aren't I made in his image? But after an intense hating session it comes back to a deep self reflection.

The human condition is something I like to talk about. I hate arrogant people, but I have thoughts like this: since I am in a toxic relationship with God I refuse to pray or go to church. Maybe I am trying to prove to myself I don't need Him. I have had people try selling their religions to me, but what's the point of changing religions when your problem is the concept of God? I don't find the concept of God as just, ethical, and all-loving. So to jump from one denomination to another is like saying, "Maybe your God is better than mine." So I said to myself I will become my own God. I will become my own church. I will become the very thing that survives whatever hell comes my way.

You see the sheer arrogance I have. I am no better than them. There was a time when I thought I was owed something from the world. There was a time when I'd obsess over the bad things that happened consecutively and start to put pieces of them together to see if they had meaning. Or if I had attracted some bad omens. But there is no use. It will only get worse, and frankly being the misery chick is also tiring. The world is a shit place. Bad things will always happen to everyone. You just have to wait in line, and you don't know when. So you have to suck it up and move on.

The psychology of arrogance and entitlement is perhaps less mysterious than we like to pretend. It is rarely born from confidence alone. More often it grows from fear, insecurity, and the fragile need to believe that life is somehow fair.

Entitlement tells us a comforting lie: that effort should always equal reward, that virtue should guarantee safety, that the universe should behave like a moral accountant carefully balancing our suffering and our victories.

But the universe does no such thing. It is indifferent.

And when reality refuses to honor our mind contracts with it, something strange happens in it. Some people collapse into despair, convinced that they are cursed. Others inflate themselves, constructing a narrative where they are exceptional, misunderstood, or superior. Both reactions, oddly enough, come from the same wound: the inability to accept uncertainty and powerlessness.

Arrogance is often just fear wearing expensive clothing.When people act as though the world owes them something, they are not always arrogant in the traditional sense. Sometimes they are simply trying to defend themselves against chaos. If the world is fair, then suffering must mean something. If effort guarantees reward, then failure must have a clear explanation. The alternative that life is unpredictable and sometimes absurd is far more terrifying.

And so we build stories about ourselves. The hero. The victim. The misunderstood genius. The chosen one. Even the self-declared god.

But mindfulness, if practiced honestly, slowly dismantles these illusions. It forces a person to observe their thoughts without immediately believing them. To notice the anger, the entitlement, the resentment, and ask a simple question: why does my mind need this narrative so badly?

Mindfulness does not magically remove suffering. It simply reveals the machinery behind it. It shows how much of our misery is not the event itself but the story we build around it. The ego demands justice, recognition, fairness. The mind demands meaning. But reality offers neither on demand.

What it offers instead is awareness.

And perhaps that is the only common ground available to all of us: the arrogant, the bitter, the hopeful, and the exhausted. We are all trying to find our way in the chaotic world with fragile minds that desperately want order. Some of us respond with humility, others with arrogance, and many of us oscillate between the two depending on the day.

Maybe the real victory is not becoming your own god, it is simply learning to sit quietly with the uncomfortable truth that you never were one.

Meanwhile, MOMMY DEAR, I am quitting my job to focus on my mental illness. Teehee.

Today I had to get a Bajaj to get to the taxi terminal. When I got in, there was a man in uniform watching TikTok at full volume. I sat next to him and immediately started squirming and fidgeting as if I were smuggling drugs up my keister. Maybe it’s my dislike for authority figures that makes me feel unsettled.

The TikTok blasting from the man’s phone started to piss me the fuck off. But what was I going to do about it? Absolutely nothing. The last thing I want is to go missing.

Then a woman came and sat beside me. Shortly after, a man holding a baby arrived. The woman beside me exchanged seats with him. Bless her kind soul but now a man with a baby was sitting next to me, and the Bajaj doesn’t even have a door.

The Bajaj started to move, and my thoughts began to spiral.

The baby kept moving its hand. I refer to it as “it” because I couldn’t tell whether it was a girl or a boy. It had those watermelon cheeks and soft hair. What if it falls? Would it splash on the road like a tomato? Would we scream? Maybe I’d be scarred for life and get admitted to a psych ward. Finally, be among my people and call it a vacation.

I must admit, having a man with a baby sitting next to me took me down memory lane.

This other time, a man with his two kids sat next to me, and I was generous enough to hold his daughter. They were going to church. And my degenerate mind started writing a self-insert fiction of our lives together. Maybe that’s why old people don’t like me. Maybe something in them tells them their husbands would be my type.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have no intention of being a homewrecker. However, the divorced folk, the older men with gray hair? Now that is my type. The whole stepmother vibe makes me feel superior. I started wondering how he’d like his coffee. Does he cook? Does he read to his kids? Is he soft-spoken? Is he handy? Is he left-handed? (My fetishization of left-handed men is another conversation for another time.) Would he wash my hair? Would he let me use his hand as a spoon or fork? Would he maintain eye contact while I use his hand as an object? I bet Freud would have a lot to say about this.

Well, in my defense, I didn’t see a wedding ring on his finger.

We got to our stop, and as the universe would have it, we got off at the same stop. While I was getting off, I noticed his daughter’s shoe was untied, so I tied it. He thanked me and said, “God bless you.”

No, no God bless the universe.

I smiled and crossed the road while he held his kids’ hands and entered the church near our neighborhood. I guess I’m going to church every Sunday from here on out. I said to myself, “You are so charming and kind.” Once again, I felt superior.

So what I’m trying to say is, I’m sure I had a point when I started writing all of this. Yes, it started to bicker a question in me.

Why do we love feeling superior to others?

I often notice how we humans love to feel that we are better than others. Coffee drinkers think they are superior to those who prefer tea. People who drink coffee without sugar showing off to prove they are the “true” coffee lovers. Heavy metal lovers calling posers for not knowing every heavy metal band under the sun. Or others with certain music tastes accuse others of being “too mainstream”. Those with particular religious beliefs belittling other denominations. Movie fanatics roasting others for not remembering the director’s name of a film they claimed to like.

There is a social hierarchy we practice knowingly or unknowingly.

“So what’s your point, you hypocrite?” says the voice of reason.

The point is, I have been all of those people. I have been mean. I have said hateful things. I have looked down on people who held different views than mine. I have said and done terrible things. It made me feel powerful.

And I love power.

That’s why a power-hungry, cunty, slightly demonic girly could never be a true anarchist. I don’t hate hierarchy. I just want to be at the top of it.

And this isn’t unusual. Superiority is often a defense mechanism. When we feel small, uncertain, threatened, or insecure, the mind compensates. It inflates. It compares. It ranks. Social comparison theory tells us that we measure ourselves against others to locate our value. And when we’re not feeling stable internally, we reach for “downward comparison” finding someone we can place beneath us to momentarily feel above water.

It’s the emotional equivalent of climbing onto someone else’s shoulders to feel taller.

From an evolutionary perspective, hierarchy is ancient. Even animals operate within food chains and dominance structures. The wolf pack has its alphas. The primates groom and compete. The lion does not ask the antelope how it feels about being eaten. Survival historically meant knowing where you stood in the chain.

But humans complicated the chain. We don’t just compete for food and territory; we compete for morality, taste, intelligence, spirituality, and aesthetic superiority. We build invisible ladders and then judge others for standing on lower rungs we invented.

And yet,

Does any of this define who I am? Are we all just terrible?

I am not proud of it, but I have done my fair share of horrible things, especially in my teenage years. Things I don’t want to revisit. And most days, I get stuck in my head, replaying memories like a broken record just to degrade myself. To confirm my worst suspicion: that I am rotten at the core.

I spend most days trapped in my thoughts. They nag me. They accuse me. On my worst days, I am convinced I am a horrible human being. I developed compulsions to balance them out. Rituals( don't worry the non-satanic kind) just to quiet the anxiety. I repeat things in my head. I do things “just right.” I bargain with my own mind as if it were a deity demanding sacrifice.

Obsessive thoughts are cruel like that. They blur the line between thinking and being. They whisper, “If you thought it, you are it.”

But that is not true.

The idea that we are our thoughts is deeply flawed. Thoughts arise uninvited. They are mental events, not moral verdicts. Cognitive psychology calls them intrusive thoughts: unwanted, automatic, often disturbing ideas that appear without consent. They do not reflect character. They reflect the mind’s ability to generate possibilities.

The brain is a storyteller. Not every story is a confession.

The good-versus-evil dichotomy is seductive because it is simple. It allows us to sort people into clean boxes. Saints here. Sinners there. But humans are not chess pieces. We are contradictions. We are capable of cruelty and compassion in the same lifetime, sometimes in the same hour.

Morality is not the absence of dark thoughts. It is the choices we make despite them.

To be human is to stand somewhere between impulse and restraint. Between desire and discipline. Between ego and empathy. Every day we choose which voice to feed. The one that says “I am above you” or the one that says “I am accountable.”

Are we all capable of terrible things? Yes.

Are we defined by our worst thoughts? No.

We are defined by what we repeatedly choose. By whether we apologize. By whether we repair it. By whether we try again tomorrow.

Asking for forgiveness whether from God, from others, or from ourselves is an act of humility. And humility is the antidote to superiority. It is admitting, “I am flawed, but I am willing.”

Self-forgiveness does not mean excusing harm. It means acknowledging it without chaining yourself to it forever. Growth requires remorse, but it also requires mercy.

The truth is, we are not purely good. We are not purely evil. We are complex creatures with fragile egos, ancient instincts, and modern anxieties riding in doorless Bajajs, hating on babies and having promiscuous thoughts about left-handed men.

We are humans. And being human means we will mess up. We will compare. We will spiral. We will feel superior and then feel ashamed for feeling superior.

But if we are aware, if we are trying, if we are choosing better today than we did yesterday then that is character.

Not the thoughts but the choices!

And maybe that is enough.

PS: please don't read this and use it as an excuse to be an asshole.

With all my love,

Ashtray.

Being born and raised in Ethiopia, my mother taught me the art of showing very little. Especially when it comes to personal life. Privacy is more than an etiquette. There was a time when knowing what the inside of someone’s house looked like required an invitation, intimacy, or at the very least, trust. Now, I know the layout of strangers’ bedrooms. I know their morning routines, their eating habits, the contents of their closets. And if you pay too much attention if you’re just curious enough, you can know even more.

I watched. I learned. I conformed.

I lived vicariously through the lives of strangers online because I was too afraid to sit with my own. It was easier to observe than to participate, easier to consume than to confront. Somewhere between restraint and exposure, between being taught to hide and being encouraged to share everything, I became both the watcher and the willing audience quietly complicit in a culture that rewards oversharing and glorifies attention.

Over the years, showing more and sharing more online has quietly morphed into a form of validation for those who post and a strange kind of attachment style for those who watch. A neat little ecosystem of people who love being seen and people who love seeing. An environment of mutual hunger. Almost parastic dare I add. Which inevitably made me wonder: is social media feeding my voyeuristic kink, or did it just give them a very convenient home?

The Socially Acceptable Kink: Watching Without Being Seen

I scroll through someone else’s life like I am skimming through a photo album. A breakup announcement. A crying selfie. A hospital wristband. A soft launch of someone’s porn career. I know these people only through fragments yet I know their grief, their bodies, their homes, their private milestones. I consume all of it anonymously, without interruption or someone there to tell me, “Stop you are prying. And I am being generous when I say that.” Under statement of the year I know. Then I lock my phone and go on with my day.

Social media has made this normal. It is no longer just acceptable, but expected. We share everything, and everyone else watches. No one asks what this constant exchange of exposure and consumption is doing to us.

Attention, before it became digital, was intimate. It came from proximity: a parent listening, a lover noticing, a friend staying. To be given attention meant being acknowledged as real and present. Psychologically, attention has always been tied to safety and worth. Being seen properly seen tells us we exist beyond ourselves.

But social media flattened attention. It detached it from relationships and redistributed it to crowds. Attention is no longer something offered with care; it’s something extracted, accumulated, measured. Likes replace listening. Views replace understanding. What once soothed now stimulates.

In this environment, sharing becomes performative. We no longer live moments and later reflect on them; we document them for an imagined audience. Experiences feel unfinished unless they’re posted. And emotions feel illegitimate unless they’re witnessed. Even vulnerability is aesthetic and stylish.

This is often dismissed as attention-seeking, a term used with moral superiority, as if the desire to be noticed is somehow shameful. But attention-seeking is not the problem. It is human. The problem is what attention has been replaced with. We are no longer seeking connection; we are seeking visibility.

Connection demands reciprocity. Visibility does not.

The Hunger to Be Seen: Where Attention Nurtures and Where It Corrupts

Needing attention is not a flaw. It is developmental. From infancy, attention is how we learn we exist. A baby cries, someone comes. The brain makes a simple association: I signal, I am answered, I am safe. Attention regulates the nervous system before language ever does. It teaches us that the world is responsive, that we matter within it.

Psychologically, attention is tied to attachment. When caregivers consistently notice us our emotions, our needs, our presence the brain wires itself around security. Dopamine rewards the feeling of being acknowledged. Oxytocin reinforces bonding. The self forms not in isolation, but through being reflected back by others. To be seen is to be confirmed.

But attention has a tipping point.

When attention becomes inconsistent, conditional, or exaggerated, the brain adapts differently. Instead of learning I am valued, it learns I must perform to be valued. Validation doesn’t become nourishment but a chase. This is where attention moves from healthy regulation to psychological dependence.

How does social Media play in to this?

Social media exploits this fault line perfectly.

Platforms deliver attention in bursts likes, views, comments on unpredictable schedules. From a neurological perspective, this mirrors gambling. The brain’s reward system lights up not because attention is guaranteed, but because it might arrive. Dopamine spikes don’t respond to satisfaction; they respond to anticipation. The uncertainty keeps us hooked.

Over time, the brain begins to associate visibility with worth. Attention stops being feedback and becomes proof of existence. Silence feels like rejection. Low engagement feels personal. The absence of attention is interpreted not as neutrality, but as failure.

This affects development even in adults.

Emotionally, people begin to externalize self-worth. Feelings are no longer processed internally or relationally but outsourced to an audience. Sadness isn’t fully real unless it’s witnessed. Joy doesn’t land unless it’s applauded. Identity becomes performative, shaped less by lived experience and more by what gets recognized.

Cognitively, attention-seeking narrows behavior. The brain learns what is rewarded and discards what is quiet. Nuance fades. Extremes sharpen. Pain becomes content. Intimacy becomes exposure. Instead of asking, What do I feel? the question becomes, What will be seen?

So where do we draw the line?

The line is crossed when attention stops supporting development and starts replacing it. When visibility substitutes for connection. When being watched feels safer than being known. When sharing becomes compulsive rather than communicative. When the brain no longer rests in the knowledge of self, but waits to be activated by response.

Attention is meant to stabilize us, not stimulate us endlessly. It is meant to root identity, not fragment it across screens.

Social media didn’t create our need for attention it interrupted its natural rhythm. It took something slow, relational, and mutual, and sped it up, quantified it, and made it public. In doing so, it blurred the boundary between being seen and being consumed.

And once attention becomes currency instead of care, both the giver and the receiver lose something essential: the ability to be present without performing, and to witness without extracting.

But this only explains one half of the equation. The other half, the more comfortable half, is voyeurism. For every person sharing, there are hundreds watching. We scroll through it all without ever entering the room. This watching is passive, frictionless, consequence-free.

Voyeurism used to be taboo because it implied intrusion. Social media made it somewhat okay. Now watching is framed as support, awareness, engagement. We tell ourselves that liking a post is participation, that witnessing pain is solidarity. But often, it’s just consumption. There is a particular comfort in watching others live while remaining untouched. Their drama entertains us.

Platforms build their empire on this dynamic. Algorithms reward what provokes reaction: beauty, outrage, trauma, confession. The more emotionally charged the content, the wider its reach. Attention becomes a currency, and emotional exposure becomes a strategy. People learn, quickly, what gets rewarded. Pain performs well. Extremes travel faster than nuance. Quiet lives are disregarded.

In this economy, both the sharer and the watcher are being trained. The sharer learns how much of themselves to give away to remain visible. The watcher learns how to consume endlessly without responsibility. Both mistake stimulation for connection.

The psychological consequences are uneven but widespread.

For those who share, attention becomes addictive. Worth begins to fluctuate with engagement. Silence feels like erasure and privacy dissolves, because it no longer feels valuable. When attention fades as it always does it leaves behind anxiety, resentment, and the unsettling question of whether anything exists if it isn’t observed.

For those who watch, something else erodes: sensitivity. Constant exposure to other people’s lives breeds comparison, detachment, and emotional fatigue. We become fluent in other people’s pain while increasingly distant from our own. Awareness replaces action. Witnessing replaces intimacy. And everyone is too busy with their performance.

This raises an ethical questions. When does sharing become self-extraction? Can consent exist when audiences are invisible and infinite? What does it mean to know so much about people we will never help, touch, or remember? Are we building community or just feeding an appetite?

Social media did not invent attention-seeking or voyeurism. It simply gave them a stage, a metric, and a profit model. It turned human longing into data and called it connection.

The problem isn’t that people share too much. It’s that we’ve normalized watching without caring, seeing without staying, knowing without holding. We scroll, feel briefly moved, then move on. Someone else’s life closes behind us like a tab.

And somewhere between the need to be seen and the desire to watch, we’ve confused visibility for intimacy and accepted it as enough.

I have been awfully bored lately. To the point I started feeling like I was losing my cause, a reason to get out of bed. So naturally I try to entertain myself with normal girl stuff such as taxidermy, watching surgery videos to relax and unwind, and studying fertility cults and cannibalism. Trolling guys with Oedipus complexes online (you can tell I was a bully once upon a time). Out perving pervs (and boy do they get furious when you make them squirm). Just the simple feminine things. And now I am here to have a little chitty chat with you, dear reader. I can never get bored of you. Mama is here with some loving and penetration of your mind with good thoughts.

I have been binge-watching Supernatural to refresh my memory. And I have been putting off watching the last season for six years now.

People don’t believe me when I say Supernatural is very funny, but it is. It has been holding the fort of my sanity while my world felt like it was on fire. The voices kept screaming louder, but supernatural kept the walls from cracking. And so I kept myself busy and distracted. Sexualizing the Winchesters. Oh, and I mean the father, the sons, and, of course, the holy awkward angel Castiel (I know your mind is in the gutter, and I know what you thought I’d say, you blasphemous wench).

This show is about family. Despite the monsters, demons, and peculiar things they hunt, it is about family values and the love of two brothers against the world. We have Sammy, the black sheep of the family. The one who wanted out from the get-go. He was a prelaw student at Stanford when it all began. He wanted a “normal” life. And then there is Dean, the oldest, a loyal soldier who’d always die for his brother. There is Cass the angel, who is figuring his way around earth while fighting battles with the Winchesters. These characters are far from perfect; they mess up, but they fight until the end and show up for one another. Oh, and who can forget Bobby with his “ijits” and “balls” Crowley, king of hell. There are many episodes I watched one too many times, but Season Five’s last episode, I hold it dear to my heart. It will always be special to me.

But all good things must come to an end, so it came to season 15. The last episode. Castiel’s goodbye felt like a stab to the gut. LITERALLY! Talk about the power of good writing. And then came Dean. When he said, “It has always been you and me. I love you so much. My baby brother...” I was done for. I sobbed and bawled my eyes out. So this is what heartbreak feels like. You have to understand I have never cried watching a movie or a show in my entire life. But this last episode has me crying and heaving. I had to tell my mother. And since we watched a few seasons on Dubai One back when I was a kid, she knows them, and her first question was, “Why, and what’s going to happen to Sam?” I have to share this heartbreak; it felt like too much for me. (This is why I should never obsess over things and have parasocial attachments.) I have to take one too many deep breaths to remind myself that it was just a show. It felt like all of a sudden I was becoming human. What are all these emotions? I tried to blame my shedding uterus and my fluctuating hormones. How dare they kill Dean?

I kept replaying it over and over again. It felt like a needle prick on my finger, but I was the one who kept the needle jamming it in my own finger until it penetrated my flesh deeper and deeper.

And then I started thinking about the burden of being an older child. That’s why Dean Winchester hits where it hurts. Dean wasn’t perfect. He was messy. Angry. Self-destructive in ways that made sense if you were really watching. He drank too much, pushed people away, and lashed out when the weight became unbearable. He carried resentment like a second spine toward his father, toward the life he never chose, and toward God himself. And still he stayed.

Always looking out for Sammy. Always stepping in front of the danger first. Always choosing to bleed so someone else wouldn’t have to. The way he said “Sammy” soft and sharp at the same time wasn’t just affection. It was obligation and love tangled together. I’ll carry it. I always will.

Dean was self-sacrificial to the point of erasure. He didn’t just protect; he disappeared inside that role. His wants were optional. His pain was negotiable. He paid a price for his family.

The thing about being an older child is nothing prepares you for it. No one ever sits you down and says, "Congratulations, you’re now the third parent.” It just… happens. Between slammed doors, ignored conversations, and unanswered phone calls. Between a father who is absent physically, emotionally, or violently present in all the wrong ways and a mother who is tired in a way sleep can’t fix.

You learn responsibility before you learn your ABCs. You learn to read moods the way other kids learn cartoons. You learn that love sometimes looks like endurance.

The weight comes early. And it doesn’t just stay; it digs in. Little do you know it is a shackle around your ankles for the rest of your life.

You become the unpaid therapist before you understand what therapy even is. You hold your mother while she unravels, absorb your father’s damage, and lie to your siblings with hope-shaped words. It will be okay. I’ve got you. You raise your parents with a patience that should never be demanded from a child. But no one talks enough about what this does to you.

Because carrying that much weight doesn’t just make you strong; it makes you angry and resentful. And this is a lifetime buildup that attacks you at a certain point in your life.

Resentment builds in the places you were told to be grateful. You resent the parents you had to parent. You resent the siblings who got to be children while you stood guard. You resent yourself for feeling this way, because you love them, and love is supposed to be selfless, right? So you swallow it. You become reliable. You become “the strong one.” And strength becomes a cage.

Be that as it may, I have come to realize that this burden doesn’t belong only to firstborns.

There are middle children who became invisible and responsible at the same time.

Last-borns who stepped into the role because absence demanded it. Children who became “the man of the house” because someone had to. A child who wore the pants around the house because a childhood was not something they could have. They grew up to fast beyond their age. This is for all of those who had a rough start in life and were forced to make the shoe fit. Those who never had the chance to be children.

They cooked instead of played. Mediated instead of dreamed. They learned to be useful before they learned to be free. They loved their families so hard it turned into resentment and then into guilt for resenting at all. No one claps for that kind of sacrifice. No one mourns the childhoods lost in silence.

So this is for them. For the Deans of real life. Flawed. Angry. Loving. Always there. For those who stayed, it was because leaving felt impossible.

This is a tribute. To the burden-bearers. To the quiet heroes. To those who survived childhood by becoming adults too soon. You were never meant to carry it alone. And it was never supposed to cost you this much.

And as a farewell, I shall listen to the song one more time. I can’t promise I won’t cry again.

Yes. I’m back. The jester from the looney bin. The heretic with a pen. The woman you weren’t expecting but somehow knew would crawl back eventually. How have you been, my loyal subjects? Did you miss me? Don’t answer that I’m lying to myself already.

My disappearance must have seemed odd. Still lying. I told different versions of the story, of course. I said I was in rehab. A polite lie. A socially acceptable collapse. But we both know I am far too narcissistic to be dependent on anything other than my own reflection. I also said I was abducted by aliens. That one might actually be true. Depends on how flexible your definition of “alien” is.

I have also said I was lost in the woods dancing around a fire with the spirits of the trees. But the truth is less cinematic and more dangerous. What can I say? I am a drama queen. For you, I will come clean. I was practicing my Latin and accidentally summoned something ancient. A demon, maybe. Or a forgotten god with an impeccable sense of humor. It took a liking to me. We traveled through dimensions psychological, spiritual, chemical hard to tell. And now I’m back. Vacation is over. Reality has resumed. Or whatever this is.

I’ve been a good girl. Painfully good. I devoted myself to routine the way a Catholic nun clings to her vows during temptation. I tracked patterns. Monitored thoughts. Behaved. I did all the things you’re supposed to do so your brain doesn’t snap like a dry twig. So my mental health won’t go oppsie daisy on me. I processed. I reflected. I soul-searched. I thought about God because apparently that’s what you do when you’re trying not to fall apart.

And yet, I haven’t felt like myself. Which raises the uncomfortable question: what exactly is myself?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about immortality. A lot. They say the closest thing humans get to it is procreation. Continuity. Flesh copying itself like a desperate backup file. Strangely enough, I don’t fantasize about motherhood. I fantasize about being a grandmother. The nana, the abuelita who smells like biscuits and feeds children until love becomes excess, is dying to get out.

But let’s not kid ourselves; that won’t be happening anytime soon. I have a better chance of building a cult. That feels more achievable.

So I write.

Where am I going with this? I have no idea. Which is precisely the point. Writing without direction until the incoherent becomes intentional. Until nonsense starts to confess truths it didn’t mean to reveal. Don’t you find that more honest than certainty? I am kinky like that. Risk makes things fun, no?

My thoughts right now exist somewhere between Morse code and the sermon of a paranoid schizophrenic with religious psychosis. I am aware of this. That awareness does not save me. It only narrates the fall.

While I was gone, my god complex returned stronger and on a larger scale. The desire to be worshipped makes my skin tingle. The desire to be believed makes my pulse quicken. And before you judge me, understand this: to write is to play God.

You create worlds. You breathe life into characters. You decide who suffers, who survives, who is forgiven, and who is abandoned. You etch thoughts into people’s minds without their consent. You linger and haunt. You resurrect yourself every time someone reads your words.

Maybe that’s how the Bible started. A writer who mistook authorship for divinity.

My favorite books from the Bible are Job and Revelation. Job, because it is the cruelest joke ever written: a man tortured not for his sins, but for God’s ego. Revelation, because it reads like a psychotic break, as prophecy. Symbolism stacked on hallucination. Violence marketed as salvation. And we call this holy.

I often wonder: how did God come to be? Did He choose this role? Or was He trapped into omnipotence the way some people are trapped into parenthood? What if being eternal wasn’t a gift but a sentence? What is a God if not a delusion that got institutional backing?

We crave order, so we invent an all-seeing being to supervise the chaos. Something to watch us. Something to care about us. Something that assures us this suffering has administrative oversight. But what if it doesn’t? What if God is indifferent? Or worse, absent?

What if the Devil was simply the first free thinker?

They call him evil for questioning. For dissent. For refusing to kneel. Funny how curiosity is rebellion when it threatens authority. Funny how doubt becomes sin the moment it asks the wrong questions. I have been called a witch, a satanist due to my inquisitive nature and insatiable appetite for knowledge. Bite me.

To think freely is to risk damnation. To obey is to be safe. That’s not faith; that’s a hostage situation.

And here’s the paradox: I do believe in God, yet I am a skeptic, and I can’t stop talking to him, but I don’t deem him just and kind. I reject divinity, yet I crave it. I mock worship, yet I want an audience. I criticize religious psychosis while indulging in my own carefully pioneered madness.

Yes, I know I’m contradicting myself. This is my world. I make the rules. I break them too.

I call myself a writer, but I don’t know what the hell that means. Hell, I’m barely a person. Maybe I’m just a vessel for questions with no interest in answers. Maybe this is a confession disguised as satire. Or satire disguised as a cry for help. Or neither.

And then there is the Church. It is not the idea of faith I have a problem with no; faith is harmless when it stays feral. I’m talking about religious organizations, those well-dressed factories of certainty. Institutions that took mystery and domesticated it. Gave it rules. Hierarchies. Dress codes. Donation boxes. HR departments.

Religion stopped being about God the moment it realized God could be franchised. “This is the right religion because of so-and-so; anyone who says otherwise shall burn in hell for eternity.”

There is nothing more dangerous than a lunatic who believes he is on a divine mission. History agrees with me. Blood agrees with me. Graves agrees with me. Give a madman a god, and suddenly his delusions have moral clearance. Suddenly murder becomes obedience. Control becomes love. Silence becomes holiness.

The scariest thing isn’t insanity; it’s sanctified insanity. A psychosis that has been blessed, tax-exempt, and defended by scripture.

Religious organizations don’t cure madness. They validate it. They hand it a microphone and call it prophecy. They give it followers and call it leadership. And when the damage is done, they wash their hands and say, “God works in mysterious ways.”

No men do. Violent, frightened, power-hungry men who realized that God is the perfect alibi.

If God exists, religious institutions have done an excellent job impersonating him while silencing his voice. They preach humility from golden thrones. They speak of suffering as virtue, as if pain were a subscription fee for heaven. They tell the starving to be patient, the abused to forgive, and the dying to wait.

And people listen. Because certainty is comforting. Even when it’s lethal.

Which brings me back to suffering. Life, as advertised, is a scam. You arrive screaming, spend decades pretending you understand what’s happening, and leave quietly if you’re lucky. They tell you suffering has meaning. That it builds character. That it’s part of a divine plan.

But whose plan requires this much collateral damage?

Children get cancer. Good people rot in obscurity. Monsters build empires. And we are told to kneel and be grateful for the experience. To call this grace. To call this love.

Sometimes I want to ask God if he’s listening, if he’s real, if he isn’t just a character we refuse to retire. Was this really the best you could do? And then the most obscene thought of all creeps in. It is a line I read on the internet:

“Is this the life I kicked my mother’s womb for?”

Tell me, was this the grand design? Was the miracle worth the maintenance? Was consciousness a gift or a cruel prank masquerading as purpose?

They say suffering makes life meaningful. I say it makes it suspicious. I say it raises questions no sermon can disinfect. And maybe that’s why doubt is treated like a disease, because once you start questioning the pain, the whole structure starts to crack.

I don’t understand God. I don’t trust those who claim they do. And I am deeply wary of anyone who says they were chosen. Because if history has taught us anything, it’s this: God doesn’t need to exist for people to kill in his name. And that should terrify you more than hell ever could.

Maybe this is just what happens when you stare too long at God and realize He might be staring back or not there at all.

And that thought? That’s the one that should scare you.

The child, held back by two adults, was screaming and wriggling. And I, the professional, kept pushing and pushing, unfazed and deaf to his screams. I just kept saying, “በደንብ ያዙት.”

I have been avoiding talking about what is happening in my head. I have been procrastinating, denying, and burying everything that has been boiling beneath my skin. But my mind is stubborn; it finds ways to remind me.

“Hey, remember this? You didn’t deal with it.”

“Hey, remember that? Well, now your heart is taking the hit.”

Now when I close my eyes, all I see is this pus-filled infection inside of me taking control, and I am too afraid to touch it. Blood and getting my hands dirty has never been a problem. I have never been that empathetic, yet I cling to suffering as if it has sentimental value.

Where are those tough hands that didn’t shake, suffocated by surgical gloves? Perhaps it’s the masochist in me that keeps lingering in the places that hurt, in the corners of my mind that haunt me. I listen to the pain instead of finding a remedy for it. And on my laziest days, I bury it in a vault where I can access it on days I want to hurt myself.

Now here I am, somewhere between feeling everything and nothing. Each year I grow older, not wiser, and my faith shrinks. This year I grew older, and I cried for four days. I cried in a restaurant. I cried on a bus. I cried in a bathroom. I cried at night. I couldn’t stop myself.

Where is that strong woman who rarely cried? Is this what it feels like to be on the edge of insanity?

I no longer pray, but my mouth still says, “I will keep you in my prayers.” God has become a habit I can’t get rid of rather than an entity I once worshipped, a deity I once held close to my heart. Mother, don’t be disappointed, but I no longer care for your God. I neither want to hear nor speak of Him.

Most of my writing used to stem from a place of inspiration. That inspiration usually came from boredom or pain. I used to be so bored, and that would lead me into inspiration, into productivity, and I would always end up proud of it. But now I write from a place of rage. On some days, hatred.

And rage is a funny thing.

You hold it inside you; it boils like a volcano waiting for its time to explode. And the world doesn’t help. As if you are paying for a cosmic crime, everything pushes you. Rage is like a disease spreading from within, infecting everything you once held good.

You let it out, and still it hurts. Its remnants burn your lungs like smoke and your stomach like acid and spread a stabbing pain through your bones. It impregnates itself with grudges and breeds hatred and grief that are gut-wrenching, cancerous, and crippling.

You look up and pray for the Old Testament God to show His wrath. You pray for His vengeance to take revenge on all those who have wronged you, who have pushed you. Slowly, you become a person you truly detest, one who keeps score, one who takes joy in others’ suffering.

You call them every name in the book. You feel your sanity and bright laughter withering slowly.

Are you happy now?

Who are you becoming? I… I don’t know. But I don’t like it. I feel hatred run its course through my veins. I feel it take over me like possession.

You catch yourself thinking, Why do they have it easy? Are they more deserving than I am? Am I the bad person here? Am I suffering like this because, deep down, my heart is evil? You catch yourself saying, “እሰይ ይበላቸዋ።” as your humane side slips away. Is that envy? Great. I am slowly working my way through all seven deadly sins.

But hey, at least I am honest. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not. I don’t pretend to say things I don’t mean. I address my twisted thoughts, no matter how dark they get. And that has got to be a virtue in some way.

My heart wounded and pus-filled feels like a barren land where hope comes to die. My scars are not a place for flowers to grow but for poison to leak through.

What does it mean to be alive? I don’t know yet, but I am still breathing. What does it mean to feel human? I don’t know yet. What does it mean to find peace? What does it mean to have faith? What does it mean to find salvation?

I FUCKING DON’T KNOW.

I don’t want to know God. I am done finding peace with Him.

What does it mean to succeed and live a fulfilled life? I don’t know. What does it mean to be a writer? Where is my voice? What kind of writer am I? I don’t know yet. But the paper is my loyal friend.

So this, this is my version of draining the pus.

Poverty is often dressed up as a lesson. A character arc. A humble beginning that will one day make sense. We like to believe it builds grit, strengthens morals, and produces gratitude. We turn suffering into symbolism because it is easier than admitting how ugly it really is. But poverty is not poetic. It is not noble. It is not a rite of passage. Poverty is violent in ways that don’t bleed visibly; well, sometimes it does.

It is not the absence of money alone; it is the presence of constant fear.

The rich romanticize poverty because they have learned to look away from it. Films show candlelit dinners in empty kitchens. Quotes praise “simple living.” Motivational speeches insist that struggle is a blessing in disguise. And somewhere beneath all of that is an old, cruel refrain: Let the rich dine and the poor weep. Not always spoken aloud, but lived, enforced, and normalized.

The truth is far less inspiring.

Poverty is waking up already tired. It is doing math before buying the things one needs. It is knowing that one mistake, one illness, one broken appliance, or one bad week can undo everything. It is the humiliation of standing in lines, explaining yourself, and proving your worthiness to survive. It is hunger that doesn’t always feel like hunger but like dizziness, irritability, and shame. It is pretending you are not cold, not scared, and not angry.

It is a struggle one can spend an entire lifetime trying to escape. All of this while living in a world where the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. People give their intellect, their strength, and every fiber of their being just to make ends meet, only to be told, “Just believe in yourself.”

Those born into generational wealth preach, “You just haven’t worked hard enough,” while the streets overflow with the homeless and the helpless. Wars rage on, again and again, and the collateral damage is always the same: the poor.

People don’t talk about how poverty eats at your mind. How it shrinks your world. When survival becomes the priority, imagination becomes a luxury. Long-term planning feels fictional when the present is unstable. Poverty doesn’t just limit options; it trains you to stop expecting them. It rewires the brain around scarcity, stress, and hypervigilance. This is not weakness. It is adaptation. And it is exhausting.

Psychologically, poverty breeds a quiet rage. A sense of failure that does not belong to the individual but is placed there anyway. It creates shame so deep that people begin to police themselves. You learn not to ask. Not to dream too loudly. Not to complain, because you’re told others have it worse. And so suffering becomes competitive, quiet, and internalized.

Politically, poverty is not accidental. It is managed. Maintained. Justified through language like “hard work,” “merit,” and “personal responsibility.” Systems are designed to reward accumulation while punishing need. Capitalism, in its most unchecked form, depends on inequality to function on cheap labor, disposable lives, and the constant threat of falling behind. The damage it causes is often hidden under productivity charts and economic growth, swept neatly under the rug while people starve quietly beneath it.

This is not an attack on individuals who have wealth. It is a call-out of a system that requires deprivation to sustain excess. A system where abundance exists alongside hunger and calls that balance “normal.” A system that praises resilience instead of preventing suffering. A system that thrives on war and genocide.

And perhaps the most obscene part of poverty is this: mothers watching their children grow thin. Fathers swallowing pride. Parents skipping meals so their children can eat, still not enough. They beg and weep. Once again, “LET THE RICH DINE AND THE POOR WEEP.” Elders are on the streets begging for scraps when they should be resting, enjoying the few years they have on this earth. Surrounded by peace and laughter. Yet here they are, shelterless, their dignity stripped from their bodies. The grace that comes with old age dissolved. This is the world we live in. A world that functions by stepping on the helpless.

No metaphor can soften that. No lesson justifies it. No future success story redeems a child who went to bed hungry.

Poverty is not character-building. It is character-eroding. Any strength that emerges from it comes despite the conditions, not because of them. To say otherwise is to glorify harm.

And yet despite all of this, I remain an optimist.

No, I am not a naive one or a blind one. But a stubborn one.

I believe we can imagine a better world. A world where survival is not a privilege. Where cruelty is not policy. Where hunger is not collateral damage. A world where poor mothers do not weep in silence while others dine without noticing. A world that values human dignity over profit, care over greed, and life over accumulation.

Poverty is disgusting. And the fact that we have learned to tolerate it is even more so. I hope to see the day when there is no saying like “የድሃ ስሙ ብዙ ነው.” A sentence spoken so casually, yet loaded with cruelty. As if poverty itself is a crime that invites insult. As if the poor deserve to be stripped of dignity, renamed, reshaped, and blamed again and again.

The poor are always the first victims: of systems, of wars, of silence. They are trampled by those who abuse power and used by those who cloak exploitation in the language of philanthropy. Hands that give with cameras watching, hearts that never truly see. Charity that feeds egos more than it feeds people.

There are those who preach God loudly, quoting scripture with clean hands, while turning a blind eye to the injustice unfolding at their feet. Saints in name, divided by ethnicity and religion in practice. They speak of love, yet ration compassion. They draw invisible lines around humanity and decide who is worthy of it.

In this world, your suffering is only acknowledged if you have wealth to your name. Your humanity is validated by your bank account. Without it, you are reduced to a statistic, a burden, a lesson.

I long for a world where no one is diminished by their poverty. Where dignity is not conditional. Where we no longer normalize cruelty with proverbs and call it wisdom.

I hope for a world that does better. For everyone.


NB: This video was one of my inspirations.

Most men avoid romance movies the way they avoid long emotional conversations: some politely,  some defensively, most with both added with a practiced joke. “Chick flick,” they say, as if tenderness were gendered, as if longing were a cosmetic product marketed to women.

Rom-coms are dismissed as unrealistic, period dramas as slow, and love stories as exaggerated fantasies that have nothing to do with “real life.”But maybe that’s exactly why men should watch them. It's not to cry and not to change who they are. But to learn a thing or two.

Romance movies aren’t manuals on how to survive heartbreak; they’re studies of attention. Of noticing. Of effort. A man bringing flowers in a film isn’t doing it because the woman will die without roses. She won’t. The point is not survival. The point is recognition.

It’s the quiet message: I thought of you when you weren’t in the room. Biologically, humans are wired to seek signals of care and safety. Gestures, small, intentional ones trigger oxytocin, the hormone of bonding. Flowers, letters, waiting in the rain these are not clichés; they are symbols that tell the nervous system, you matter here.

Period dramas, especially, should be mandatory viewing. And no it's not for the corsets or the accents, but for the yearning. The kind of longing that doesn’t rush in to sexual intercourse, but that simmers under restraint.

These men wait. They look. They hold back. They write letters they may never send. In a world obsessed with intimacy followed by quick gratification, love declared too early or not at all yearning has become a lost language. Yet biologically, anticipation intensifies attachment. Desire grows in absence.

Romance films understand this instinctively, even when we pretend they don’t.Romance also teaches effort. I am not talking about the grand, performative gestures, but consistent intention. Making someone feel special isn’t about money or theatrics; it’s about curiosity. Asking questions and actually listening to the answers. Remembering details. Showing up when it’s inconvenient.

Films exaggerate this not to deceive us, but to make the invisible visible. In real life, effort is quieter, but it’s no less powerful.

This isn’t about turning men into fictional heroes or scripting their emotions. It’s about expanding emotional vocabulary. Romance movies explore vulnerability without apology.

They show that strength and softness are not opposites. That protection doesn’t always look like dominance; sometimes it looks like presence. Sometimes it looks like choosing, again and again.

This is not an accusation. It’s an invitation. A peculiar observation that maybe, just maybe, the stories men avoid are holding lessons they were never taught. Not about how to love perfectly but how to love consciously. And that, biologically, philosophically, and humanly, might be the most masculine thing of all.

The Lie of the “Dysfunctional Family”

The stigma surrounding single mothers is often disguised as concern for children, for culture, and for morality. But this concern is selective. It appears loudly when a woman raises a child alone and goes eerily silent when a man leaves the home he helped create. This contradiction is not accidental. It is structural.

Nuclear family: A mother, a father, and children. Now if this structure is disrupted, the discomfort is very loud. It does not sit right with society.

At its core, the discomfort with single motherhood is not about family values. It is about walking over women, over narratives, and over how responsibility is distributed. A society that insists a family must look a certain way is not protecting children; it is protecting an image.

In many societies, including ours, a “functional family” is defined by appearance rather than substance. A father must be present, even if emotionally absent, violent, or neglectful. A mother must be present, endlessly patient, endlessly responsible, and endlessly blamed. And above all, there must be silence: silence about harm, silence about abandonment, and silence about who truly bears the consequences when things fall apart.

A woman has to bear whatever burden and whatever comes her way so that society doesn’t complain. But don’t you know what domestic violence does to a child? Do you know what neglect and financial struggle do to this so-called family that every backward-thinking individual thinks is worth protecting? Why is it so easy to shift blame and hide the real problem under the rug? Like family secrets that chip away at the sanity of all those who are burdened to hide them.

የቤተሰብ ገመና ነው is easier to swallow than he hits his wife and children. He is a drunk and a cheater who is failing his responsibilities not only as a father but also as a human being. He is a bad person who acts like a saint for the outside world while his eyes dance around his daughter’s shirt and his hands roam free under his daughter’s skirt. Because it’s easier to victim-blame rather than accepting the truth.

A single mother disrupts this arrangement. Her existence makes visible what society would rather hide: that men leave, that marriages fail, that women survive without permission, and that families do not always collapse when fathers disappear. This visibility is threatening. And when something threatens a social order, it is punished.

So instead of questioning why men leave, society questions the woman who stayed.

The Double Burden: Labor and Judgment

Single motherhood carries two burdens, and society ensures that neither goes unacknowledged.

The first is practical. Financial instability, emotional exhaustion, and the weight of making every decision alone are not abstract challenges; they are daily realities. Single mothers perform unpaid labor at scale, filling roles that would otherwise be distributed: provider, nurturer, disciplinarian, and emotional anchor. The system benefits from this labor while refusing to support it.

The second burden is cultural, and it is far more insidious.

Single mothers are not treated as individuals navigating complex circumstances; they are treated as moral evidence. Their lives are read symbolically. Their struggles are turned into warnings. They are judged more harshly than the men who left them, interrogated endlessly with questions that sound curious but function as accusations: What did you do wrong? Why couldn’t you keep the family together?

Notice what is missing from this interrogation: the man.

Absent fathers are rarely scrutinized with the same intensity. Their absence is normalized, explained away, and softened by excuses of economic pressure, incompatibility, and personal failure framed as misfortune. Fatherhood, somehow, becomes conditional. Motherhood does not.

And then society performs its most dishonest trick: it labels single-mother households as “unfunctional,” while ignoring families that meet the structural requirement but fail every moral one; homes where fear replaces safety, silence replaces love, and children grow up unseen but technically “intact.”

Culture’s Refusal to Evolve

In Ethiopian culture, family is sacred. But sacredness has been confused with rigidity.

Reality has changed. Divorce exists. Migration fractures households. Economic pressure reshapes gender roles and expectations. Yet the cultural script has not adapted. Instead, it tightens its grip on women, demanding they absorb change without acknowledgment.

Single mothers are expected to raise exceptional children under exceptional pressure. They must be morally flawless, emotionally restrained, endlessly grateful, and socially discreet. If they struggle, it is taken as proof that the family structure is defective. If they succeed, it is treated as an exception, never enough to challenge the rule.

The same culture that condemns single motherhood also condemns women who remarry. A woman seeking partnership again is framed as careless, selfish, or unstable, while men who remarry after abandoning families are rarely asked who they left behind. A woman’s second chance is scrutinized. A man’s disappearance is forgiven.

This imbalance is not accidental. It is how patriarchal systems preserve authority: by holding women responsible for outcomes they do not fully control, while excusing men from consequences they directly cause.

The Myth of the “Damaged Child”

Perhaps the most violent accusation leveled against single-mother households is the claim that children raised in them are inherently disadvantaged, emotionally broken, morally unstable, or destined for failure.

This idea is not supported by evidence. It is supported by fear.

Children are not damaged by the absence of a parent. They are damaged by neglect, instability, violence, and emotional abandonment. Conditions that exist abundantly in so-called “complete” families. To argue otherwise is to confuse presence with care and structure with safety.

What this myth truly does is justify social neglect. If children from single-mother households are presumed doomed, then society is absolved of responsibility. Schools don’t need to support them. Systems don’t need to adapt. Men don’t need to be held accountable.

Failure becomes inevitable instead of engineered.

Where Accountability Disappears

The most telling question is not why single mothers are scrutinized, but why men are not.

Why is a woman blamed for “breaking” a family she continued to hold together, while a man who leaves is framed as having made a personal choice? Why is responsibility gendered? Why is care mandatory for women and optional for men?

When men leave, the damage is framed as emotional. When women stay, the burden becomes moral.

This selective accountability allows men to exit families without lasting social consequence, while women carry the reputational, economic, and emotional cost indefinitely. Society calls this balance. It is not. It is convenience.

Redefining Family, Finally

A family is not defined by symmetry. It is defined by care, stability, safety, love, and accountability. Many single-mother households provide all of these, often under harsher conditions and with fewer resources than their two-parent counterparts.

Calling these families “unfunctional” is not an observation. It is a refusal: a refusal to question male absence, a refusal to support women materially, and a refusal to update cultural definitions that no longer reflect reality.

Single mothers are not evidence of societal failure. They are evidence of what happens when women are forced to adapt while systems refuse to evolve.

And if a culture collapses the moment a woman stands alone while forgiving the men who caused the collapse, then the problem was never the family.

It was the values that protected power over responsibility.

For every woman who has been through hell in the name of maintaining her marriage. For every woman who has endured violence and abuse that is domesticated and silenced. For the woman who chose herself, who walked out of an unhappy marriage and reclaimed her life. To those who were walked on, spat on, and underestimated. To those who endured, persisted, and raised their children with unwavering care. To those who never lost hope, who faced despair with resilience, and who rose anyway.

I write this proudly, as a የሴት ልጅ, and I dedicate it to the heroines who took on the responsibilities of being both mother and father.

This is for you. This is your recognition. Your courage is a legacy.

I probably have butchered what she said, but this is her point. What makes this statement shocking and deeply disappointing is that it came from an educated woman. A political science graduate. Mind you who still claims to be going to school. What is education if not the ability to think critically, to challenge, to change? And yet here she was, dismissing the very power she claimed to possess. Mocking the wounds of all those who never had the chance.

Her words should feel outdated by now. She didn’t say “less educated.” She didn’t say “educated differently.” She didn’t say “educated with limits.” She said no formal education at all.

What’s even more disturbing isn’t just the statement itself; it’s how familiar it sounded. How easily it slipped into conversation. How the interviewer nodded, smiled, and asked the next rage bait question he could think of on the spot, and then it was brushed off as “just an opinion.” Ideas like this don’t survive because they are logical; they survive because society keeps making room for them. And we need to talk about why.

The Contradiction We Live With

Women have always been central to society’s survival. They raise children, manage households, carry emotional labor, preserve culture, and often hold families together with little recognition. We trust women with life itself, with nurturing minds, shaping values, and sustaining communities.

But when it comes to formal education, the kind that sharpens thinking, expands choice, and builds independence, suddenly, that trust disappears.

It’s a strange contradiction: society relies heavily on women’s intelligence but resists acknowledging it. We celebrate women’s sacrifices but fear their autonomy. We want them capable, but not too capable. Helpful, but not powerful. Society doesn’t want a woman who says no.

What People Really Mean When They Say “Women Shouldn’t Be Educated”

This belief is rarely about education itself. It’s about control.

Education gives women language: to name injustice, to ask questions, and to imagine alternatives. It offers financial independence, delayed dependence, and the ability to choose differently. An educated woman is harder to silence, harder to scare, and harder to confine.

That’s the real fear. An educated woman is a rebellion that can make a difference. She is a fearsome warrior that can stand for herself and others.

The issue is not that education will make women “forget tradition,” but that it will make them question why tradition so often benefits everyone except them.

Education as a Privilege, Not a Right

In many rural homes, educating girls is still treated as optional. A luxury. A risk. If resources are limited, the boy goes to school. If responsibilities increase, the girl stays home. If marriage appears, education quietly disappears.

We call it practicality. Culture. Reality.

But we never ask whether educating boys is practical. We never question the return on investment for male ambition. We never question when a man is placed in a leadership position. But a girl has to go through scrutiny and constantly has to prove herself. Only girls are taught that learning must justify itself. She has to remind society that she is capable. She is worthy. She is human.

The deprivation does not stop at education. It extends to food. Girls are underfed from a very young age, their nourishment determined not by need but by worth. They are fed last, fed least, and measured by the labor they provide rather than the care they deserve. This chronic malnutrition weakens the body over time, including the pelvic floor. Combined with early and repeated childbirth, heavy physical labor, and overwhelming responsibility, it often leads to the prolapse of pelvic organs, a preventable condition born not of biology, but of neglect

The Cost of Silence

Educated women often pay a social price. They are deemed intimidating, difficult, or “too much.” They are told to soften their opinions, lower their voices, or hide their intelligence to stay acceptable.

But every time brilliance is dimmed, every time ambition is silenced, the cost isn’t just personal; it’s collective. When women shrink themselves to fit the comfort of others, we all lose. Progress stalls. Innovation slows. Ideas die before they can grow.

The tragedy isn’t just lost potential; it’s the habit of censoring ourselves, the fear of outgrowing the spaces that raised us, and the weight of silenced voices dragging everyone backward.

Education Is Not Rebellion

Education does not erase culture. It does not strip women of values or femininity. It doesn’t make them disrespectful or disobedient. It makes them aware. And awareness is only dangerous to systems that depend on silence and obedience.

Denying women education doesn’t protect society; it weakens it. Dictatorships know that an uneducated population is easier to manipulate. Silence and ignorance become tools of power. When women are denied knowledge, their voices, choices, and influence are constrained, and societies remain compliant and easier to dominate. Education is freedom; withholding it is oppression. And anyone who thinks otherwise is a tyrant!

Educated women contribute to stronger economies, healthier families, and more informed communities. They raise children who question and think. They build systems that last. When women learn, everyone benefits. The idea that educating women threatens society collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

What it actually threatens is stagnation.

When Women Become the Messengers of the System

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is that these ideas aren’t always enforced by men. Sometimes they’re passed down by women: mothers, aunts, and elders who learned to survive within limitations and mistake survival for wisdom.

This isn’t betrayal but inheritance.

However, survival strategies should not be mistaken for universal truths. Just because a woman endured without education doesn’t mean future generations must do the same.

There is a quiet, dangerous kind of anti-woman sentiment that comes not from men, but from women who have learned to resent their own gender. You know the type of woman I am talking about. She is the type to say “ለምን ወታ አሰራም ታዲያ?” when she hears a house wife is getting abused and is finiancially struggling.She is the type to also comment on a woman’s ambition saying “It’s too unnecessary.” or “against a certain belief in a religious context.”

These are women who police other women harshly, who measure worth through obedience, sacrifice, and suffering because they were taught that pain is virtue. They pass judgment easily on wanting more out of life than being domesticated, on independence, and on choice. It’s not because they are cruel, but because they are conditioned. Brainwashed by systems that reward compliance and punish defiance, they mistake survival for truth and limitation for morality. In hating other women for demanding more, they reveal the deepest tragedy: a learned hatred of themselves for daring to imagine they deserve it too.

What Are We Really Protecting?

When someone says women should not be educated, the question isn’t why women should learn: that’s already answered. The real question is, what are we trying to preserve by keeping women uninformed?

Because a society that fears educated women isn’t protecting tradition. It’s protecting imbalance. Education is not the enemy. Ignorance is not a virtue. And silence is not stability. A society that educates its women does not lose control; it gains direction. And it’s long overdue.

So, I write this for the girl who never knew she had the right to a classroom. For the child bride whose dreams were quietly taken and replaced with vows she never chose. For the mother who endured violence because motherhood was the only form of survival she was allowed. I write for the sister who was silenced and deemed insolent the moment she spoke her truth. For the women were taught that obedience was safer than honesty. For those who were never given the language to say no or the permission to mean it. This is for every woman whose voice was never heard, whose choices were never hers, and who was never told that her life, her body, and her future were rights, not privileges!!

I feel like a fraud. Like my own words have started speaking a language I barely recognize. I drag myself through the day so I can fall asleep at night, not for rest, but for escape. And still, I fail miserably. As much as I want to write something beautiful or meaningful, all that comes out is my misery dressed in sentences.

Some days I convince myself God has favorites, and I’m not on the list. I tell myself He doesn’t care about this messy world, or at least not about the parts that involve me. And it gets harder to hope only certain people can afford it. And in my darkest sarcasm, I think, “Maybe God creates some people to suffer so others can say, ‘Thank God I’m not like her.’”

I close my eyes and fight these thoughts, but they never leave. They hum. They scratch. They repeat.

“Pss. PSS. Wake up.”
My mind whispers like a petty ghost.
And my body, tired and unwilling but obedient, complies.

Then the worrying starts like a broken record:

Did I turn off the stove? What if the house burns down? I should’ve checked again. Why didn’t I do more at work today? Why did I interrupt that conversation? What am I forgetting? If I cleaned more... if I organized better... if I tried harder... maybe I wouldn’t feel like such a disaster. Why am I like this? Why am I such a terrible person?

Yesterday I sat in front of a child, an adorable, spoiled gremlin who kept kicking my feet. When I finally told her to stop, she stuck her tongue out at me. And for one dark second, I wanted to bitch-slap her back into her mother’s womb. Of course I didn’t. Society frowns upon that sort of thing.

Later, a cleaning staff member snapped at me because I walked on a wet floor. I was exhausted and barely conscious, and she muttered something as I passed. I turned back and asked, “Sorry, did you say something? ”

“You won’t even apologize,” she snapped. “You see I’m cleaning, and you just walk.”

What I wanted to say was: Be angry at your life, not me.
What I said was: Sorry. ” I was tired. I didn’t notice.

And then because the universe loves comedy, in a brainstorming meeting, a colleague I don’t particularly like spoke, and I had to physically stop myself from yelling, “That is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” Doesn’t it hurt to be this clueless? Common sense can’t be THAT rare.

The intrusive thoughts never stop. Maybe if I had counted my steps before leaving the house, today would have gone better. Maybe if I washed my hands until they burned, I could rinse the negativity off. Maybe if I repeated a random word over and over, the chaos would settle. Maybe if I were kinder, more perfect, and more controlled, bad things wouldn’t happen to the people I love.

My mind spirals and threatens:

What if something happens to your brother? To your mother? To your friends? What if someone makes a bad decision and you could have prevented it?

And in the background:
Remember that time someone told a sad story and you secretly rolled your eyes? Look at you judging others while drowning in your own drama. Hypocrite. Apparently the only weight or value a pain has is when it is yours alone.

It’s exhausting.

So I do the only thing I know how to do: I pick up my pen like a sword and bleed everything onto the page. This is the only way I know how to fight

And somewhere in that mess, a truth reminds me of itself:

You are not your thoughts.

It took me a long, uncomfortable, clawing journey to understand that.
You are not the violent fantasies, the what-ifs, the guilt, the spiraling, or the fear.

You’re the part of you that chose kindness anyway.

You’re the version of yourself who told that child to stop calmly.
The one who apologized when you were tired and misunderstood.
The one who disagreed respectfully at work instead of exploding.
That whether you see it or not, is growth.

You didn’t let the worst parts of your mind control your actions.

So why refuse yourself the same compassion you extend to others?

No one is sunshine every day. No one wakes up endlessly optimistic, grateful, and soft. Sometimes the mind is a haunted house, and sometimes the thoughts are wild, strange, and unkind.

But they are not you.
And you don’t have to believe them.

We can’t always be kind to others, and especially not to ourselves.
But we can try. And sometimes, trying is enough.

And at the end we have to remind ourselves to say, “Grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.”

In elementary school all you could care about were grades, being mean, and maybe talking about the movies you watch. You have no idea what an existential crisis is. Then high school came. Everyone and everything started to change. It took a while for you to realize what was happening. Bodies, minds, interests...etc., were not what they once were. After some time of shock and confusion, you make peace with it. We are all supposed to change. Amidst all this you learn something about yourself, that you don’t adapt to change quickly. So then what now?

You focus on surviving high school. You plan your major and which university, only to realize later on in life that it doesn’t work like that and there is something fundamentally broken in you that you refused to acknowledge. However, what you don’t deal with will always find a way to catch on. You suffer from that for a while and deal with it nonetheless, but what now?

You are being shipped to a country you have never been to before. Now you’ll have a sense of the real world. You hear people talk about being finally responsible and all alone as if you hadn’t been dealing with that your entire life. Frustration comes, you lose people, you lose parts of yourself, and you will experience a new type of pain and loss as much as the next person. And Teeda, you are a semi-adult, more emotionally unstable yet still trying. So you pat yourself on the back and say, “Let’s go finish this degree before it finishes me.”

Congrats, You now have a degree but have no plans to work with it. Maybe that’s why you cried so much on your graduation day. You were saying goodbyeto it. So then, you return home with the plan of sleeping for two months because you are just so tired. Welcome back; you unpack your stuff and sleep. Only to wake up in the middle of the night to ask yourself, What now?

You spend the entire night contemplating. I am no longer a student, so what do I do with myself? The obvious answer here is employment. Yes, of course. Let’s go get this job then. You start to scroll with no clue what kind of job it will be. And once again, Teeda, you see an opportunity, and you apply while sitting in a cafe in between conversations with your best friend. And before you know it, you have an interview.

You go to your interview nervous and with sweaty palms. You have a mild panic attack after it for saying, “To define is to limit.” When you were asked to describe yourself. And then you get a phone call. Here we go 9-5. Wow, what an achievement! It’s been a week since graduation, and you are already employed. But what now?

You do your best. You get your first salary. You buy your mom a little gift and your little brother a small little treat. Look at you making your adult money. Stable job, stable income. But this can’t be it. What now?

You start to look for better jobs and better titles. In your search you will start to wonder, maybe I am not good enough; I just got lucky. Am I fucking this up? Are they tolerating me, or am I actually getting better at what I do? You cry in the bathroom and have panic attacks before every brief and weekly meeting. Feel like an imposter who is good at pretending to be a master of something. But you get through it. You tell yourself it is all in your head and you didn’t die. Before you know it, you are going to interviews. Choosing better options even though you are scared. There you go, you are growing.

And then the offer letter comes. You leave this job for a better one. Better title, better income. But you realize you have more personal responsibilities and people who depend on you. So why would you just settle for this? Be grateful, but you still need to push yourself and not get comfortable. You need to build yourself a beautiful life you deserve.

A second degree starts to sound appealing. You start to think of a new career path for yourself. Where do I go from here? Which path do I follow? How do I end up doing something I actually care about?

But you remind yourself, patience. You have come so far despite feeling broken. Despite being unkind and condescending towards yourself. You showed up, and you tried. What now?

You will still keep trying. Still keep fighting for the life you want because that is who you are. You will practice being more grateful for what you have. You will learn. You will get disappointed, get rejected, cry, complain, curse the heavens, struggle to get out of bed, feel lost, and feel like you are drowning. But you will move past it. You will never stop asking yourself, “What now?”

Your relatives commented on your growth as though your body were a public announcement. “You’ve become a young lady now,” they’d say, their tone laced with both pride and warning. And then there was that one relative, the one you were told to “keep away from,” who suddenly started looking at you differently. The boys at school now hugged the girls a little tighter, their hands lingering a little too long. Your favorite t-shirts stopped fitting like they used to. And one afternoon, while you were walking with a friend, a grown man thought it was his right to touch you. He decided your body is public property. You don’t even understand what just happened, but you know something irreversible has occurred.

And you know you weren’t raised in a society where things like these weren’t discussed openly. Before you understood what womanhood was, you understood what groping was. That’s when it hit you. You were no longer a little girl. Congratulations, you now have breasts, and the world will treat you differently for it. You’ve entered womanhood, the phase where your body stops belonging to you.

Society calls it growing up. But it’s not just the hormones, the acne, or the physical discomfort that define girlhood; it’s the sudden realization that your body has been politicized, sexualized, and moralized before you even understand what any of those words mean.

From that moment, girlhood becomes a performance of caution. You learn to walk with your arms folded, to wear baggy clothes, and to cross the street when men linger too long. You learn to smile politely when elders make comments about your body, to shrink yourself so you’re not “asking for it.” You’ll inherit an entire lifetime of shame. You’ll learn silence, too, because you grew up in a place where things like this aren’t spoken about, not to mothers, not to teachers, not even to friends. You’re taught that modesty is your armor, but no one tells you why you need armor at all.

And so begins the quiet war inside you between the innocence of who you were and the shame society wants you to carry. You’re told to be graceful but not too bold, confident but not provocative, and proud but not loud. Smart but not threatening. Pretty but not intimidating. You’re taught that your worth lies somewhere between how untouched and how desirable you appear, an impossible balance that no one can maintain.

You see, girlhood isn’t just a biological transition. It’s a social awakening, a cruel education. You begin to realize that the world does not simply see you as a child growing into herself; it sees you as a body first, a person second. And that realization births both fear and disgust.

From a psychological perspective, this is where the fracture begins. The self splits. You start viewing yourself not as you are, but as the world sees you, a phenomenon called the “internalized gaze.” Every step, every gesture becomes a performance for invisible judges. From a sociological view, you’re entering a system designed not to protect but to regulate, one that shames young girls for growing, then blames them for the attention they never asked for. And philosophically, it reveals something darker about society’s soul: that we fear female power so deeply we condition women to feel guilty for simply existing in their own skin.

You start to believe your body is a mistake that needs to be corrected or hidden. The very parts of you that signal growth feel like punishment. You begin to slouch not just physically but emotionally under the weight of expectations, fear, and unsolicited attention.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

What we need, as a society, is a new language for womanhood, one rooted not in shame but in respect. We must unlearn the idea that a girl’s body is a public conversation. Parents, teachers, and communities need to talk openly about puberty, consent, and boundaries not as taboo subjects, but as essential lessons. Education must include emotional and social awareness, teaching boys not just biology but empathy that a girl’s body is not a signal or an invitation but a part of who she is.

We shouldn’t be teaching girls to carry the weight of shame for the wrongs done to them. Yet somehow, that’s exactly what society does trains them to internalize guilt for being seen, noticed, or violated. I’ve seen it in myself and in quiet conversations with other women. You see a man urinating on the street, exposed without a flicker of embarrassment, and he still has the audacity to yell at you, “Don’t you dare turn to look at me,” as if your eyes are the offense, not his actions. When a girl is groped, she’s the one who feels dirty, humiliated, and small. The irony is painful; the shame that should belong to the man is handed over to the woman like an unwanted inheritance. However, had he possessed even a fragment of decency or a functioning moral compass, there would be no act to feel ashamed of in the first place. It’s time we stopped confusing victimhood with guilt and started teaching shame to find its rightful owner.

We need to build systems that protect, not police. Safe spaces in schools, mentorship programs, and stronger laws that address harassment with the seriousness it deserves. We need media that portrays girlhood not as an awkward waiting room before womanhood but as a stage of strength, discovery, and beauty.

But above all, we need to stop teaching girls to be ashamed of themselves. We need to stop telling them to “be careful” and start telling men to “be decent.” We need to stop congratulating girls for being “ladylike” and start celebrating them for being alive, curious, and unapologetic.

Because the truth is there is nothing wrong with the way a girl’s body grows. What’s wrong is how the world responds to it.

Girlhood is not a sin to outgrow; it’s a season of becoming, one that deserves tenderness, protection, and understanding. The day society realizes that, perhaps we can finally stop making young girls apologize for becoming women.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved her. I respected her. But love doesn’t always come with liking. She wasn’t the person I ran to when I cried, nor the one I wanted to share secrets with. She was sharp, strict, and distant, the kind of woman who could turn silence into punishment. I used to think she never saw me, not really. She was always quick to judge, quicker to disapprove. And I, in turn, learned how to hide the parts of me she wouldn’t accept.

You see, love, I’ve learned, doesn’t always come dressed as softness. Sometimes it comes wrapped in silence, in sharp words, in the absence of warmth.

She loved through discipline. Through the hard “no,” the disappointed sigh, and the look that said, “You should’ve known better.” And even as a child, I felt misunderstood, too emotional, too stubborn, too loud, and too much. She had a way of making me feel like a stranger in my own home, and I had a way of making her feel like she was failing as a mother.

There were years-long, suffocating years of quiet resentment. I’ll admit it now: I’ve whispered “What a bitch” under my breath more than once. She wasn’t innocent either; her words could cut through me like glass. Some of the things she said still echo in my chest, long after she’s forgotten them.

People say things like “My mother is my life,” as if it’s the natural order of things. As if loving your mother is instinctive, effortless. But no one talks about when it isn’t. When love and resentment share the same room. When you wake up hating her tone but craving her approval. Sometimes, loving your mother feels like loving a beautiful storm from afar but impossible to live through without getting drenched.

There were nights I wished she hadn’t had me. Not because I wanted to die, but because I wanted her to be free; free from the burden of raising a daughter she couldn’t understand. And in my darkest moments, I would whisper curses into my pillow, saying it wasn’t my fault that I was born. In her eyes, I could never do anything right. Every sigh, every frown, every look of disappointment became a mirror I hated seeing myself in. My smallest flaws became evidence, and my silence became rebellion. She spoke in criticisms, and I responded in distance. For years, we existed like that, two women carrying a shared wound, pretending it wasn’t bleeding.

But time, that cruel, patient teacher, softened us. I grew older and somewhere between the chaos of becoming an adult and the quiet of realizing how lonely that can be, I started to see her differently. Not as “mother.” Just… as a person.

With each passing year, we began to talk. Really talk. And that’s when I met her, not the mother, but the girl she once was. A woman who once was a girl: scared, fragile, and unseen. A girl who grew up in a house where no one asked her what she wanted. A girl who learned early that crying doesn’t fix anything. Who carried her pain so quietly it became her mother tongue.

A shy, quiet girl who grew up in a broken home. A girl who never learned how to ask for help. Who carried her pain like an heirloom, passing it down without meaning to.

I saw her for who she truly was: a woman who became a mother before she became herself. My mother had me when she was barely a woman herself. A woman who raised a daughter with no guidebook, no gentle example, and no map. And she gave up her youth to raise me, carrying the weight of a world she never had time to understand. She didn’t know how to raise a child, especially one who felt too much. She didn’t know how to comfort me, because no one ever comforted her. She didn’t know that silence can hurt more than anger. She wasn’t heartless; she was hurting. She wasn’t cruel; she was surviving.

My mother doesn’t talk much. She cries a lot and forgives in silence. Her love isn’t loud; it’s the kind that shows up in meals cooked, clothes folded, and prayers whispered when she thinks no one’s listening. And for a long time, I mistook her silence for indifference, when really, it was exhaustion.

The more I listened, the more I realized: she did the best she could with the tools she had. She couldn’t understand my private battles. How could she? She had been fighting her own for decades. She wasn’t weak; she was tired. She wasn’t cold; she was guarded. The older I get, the more I see the reflection of her strength in my stubbornness, her softness in my guilt, and her faith in my doubt. We are not opposites; we are echoes. She did not give me a perfect childhood, but she gave me something harder: endurance. She taught me how to keep going when I don’t know how to. She gave me what she never had: a chance to choose.

My mother and I still disagree on most things. I don’t share her tendency to forgive or her Christian values. She doesn’t understand my silences or my love for the bizarre. But somewhere between her prayers and my rebellion, we found a bridge built not from forgiveness, but from understanding.

My mother’s love was never perfect. It was flawed, tangled, and sometimes painful. But it was real. And it taught me everything I needed to know about patience, resilience, and forgiveness. Even when I couldn’t stand her, I was learning from her. Even when I thought she broke me, she was shaping me.

I still don’t share her faith or her way of seeing the world. We argue, we misunderstand, and sometimes we fall back into our old patterns. But she is, in every sense, the reason I became who I am. She gave me a spine when I only wanted wings. She taught me kindness when life was cruel. I am the woman I am because of her. Because of the silence, I learned to read. Because of the strength I inherited without asking. Because of the love I misunderstood and then finally recognized. I still can’t say I liked her as a child. But now, as an adult, I see her, really see her, and I love her in ways words will never be enough for.

My mother and I look like siblings. I pride myself on weighing more than her. For that and other reasons, no one really believes I am her daughter. She is petite and a little taller than I. She wears my clothes but none of hers really fit me. We go on walks and have heart-to-heart conversations. I have become the sister, the best friend she never had.

For that, and for everything she didn’t know she gave me, I am forever grateful.

Today I write here as an educated human who still has a lot to learn, as a confident, eloquent, and soft-spoken woman with a choice because of the woman who loved me fiercely, imperfectly, and completely.

We humans are complicated creatures; layered, wounded, and constantly learning how to love with hands that have never stopped trembling. To fit ourselves into the narrow dichotomy of good or evil, right or wrong, saint or sinner, is an injustice to the truth of being alive. We are all both the wound and the healer, the one who hurts and the one who tries to make it right. My mother was. I am too. Somewhere between the shouting and the silence, we learned that understanding one another isn’t about taking sides; it’s about choosing softness. Extending an olive branch when pride burns our tongues. Practicing kindness even when it feels undeserved. Speaking when silence no longer heals, and listening when words fail. Because love, especially between mothers and daughters, was never meant to be perfect. It was meant to be human. And somewhere in that fragile, beautiful imperfection, there is room for gratitude. Gratitude for the lessons born out of pain, for the love that survived misunderstanding, and for the woman who taught me, however imperfectly, what it means to stay.

Don’t worry, I’ve heard worse. It wasn’t even the first time someone decided to diagnose my personality as a public health threat. I’ve heard “ግጣምሽ ፈረደበት,” “ቆመሽ ነው ምቀሪው”, and my personal favorite, “ልብሽ ድንጋይ ነው.” The list goes on, as if emotional resilience is a crime punishable by gossip.

I’m not looking for a husband. I don’t wake up wondering who’s going to hold my hand under the moonlight or whisper sweet nothings in my ear. My pillow has heard no such prayers. Yet, society looks at unmarried/undating women with a kind of concerned curiosity as if my singlehood is a slow-burning emergency waiting to be fixed.

There’s an obsession here with timing, with this idea of “ልጅ በልጅነት”, before your body becomes a museum of missed opportunities. And if you dare to deviate, if you decide that maybe your early twenties are for self-discovery, or your thirties for building something other than a family, you’re labeled too much or too late.

Some women marry and have kids early. Some a little later. And others never do at all. All of it is perfectly fine because it’s their choice. Whatever path a woman takes, as long as it brings her peace, joy, and a sense of fulfillment, it’s valid. We don’t all bloom at the same time, and we’re not meant to. So why must we turn another woman’s timeline into a topic of gossip? Let her live, love, and choose without commentary or comparison.

We fetishize the image of the young mother as soft-spoken, sacrificial, and endlessly nurturing and quietly look down on the woman who chooses a different path. Because apparently, a woman’s worth still hangs somewhere between her wedding ring and her womb.

But maybe, just maybe, some of us are not designed for the kind of love that requires shrinking. Some of us are meant to build, to question, to stay inconveniently unbothered. Some of us will never see marriage as an achievement, but as a choice one among many.

So people can call me cold, difficult, unyielding, or whatever fits the day’s narrative. I’ll take it. Because truthfully, finding a husband is the least of my concerns. I’m too busy finding myself, over and over again, in a world that keeps trying to convince me I’m lost.

Yours truly,

My Disagreeable Self

A mosquito lands on my arm. I don’t move. It drinks from me greedily, without shame. Then another joins; two small monsters feasting on what I’ve become. I watch them still. Let them drink. Let them have the poison. But when I smash them, the blood that spills is not small; it is dense, dark, and old, as if it belonged to someone else.

Someone like my father.

Gin and smoke. That was his perfume. His breath was always a confession, his hands always a sermon. The night always began with silence and ended with something breaking: plates, glass, my mother’s voice.

The clock on the wall ticked too loudly then. Tick, tick, tick like a reminder that even time was afraid of him but dared to move anyway. When he slept, it was the sleep of gods and devils: heavy, guiltless. And the house would breathe again, trembling but alive.

I think I inherited his anger. It coils in my blood, dormant until provoked. Sometimes I feel it in my throat, like swallowed glass. I clench my fists, and I see him there in my bones, in the way my jaw sets, in the fire I hide behind polite silence.

Forgive me if it is unchristian of me, but I cannot forgive a man who stole my childhood and pawned it for his rage. He taught me that love comes with bruises, and I’ve been unlearning that ever since.

I don’t trust men. I don’t even trust their shadows. I hold my breath when they enter the room, like their presence takes up more air than they deserve. I’m offended when they say they like me; it feels like contamination.

Once, a man rubbed my hair softly, as if affection could be innocent, and I smiled politely while inside I counted seconds until I could wash him out. Another time, a man tried to comfort me; I snapped at him so sharply that even I flinched. But I couldn’t stand the way his eyes tried to understand me as if I were some tender thing that needed saving.

Sometimes I think my hate is my inheritance. And I fear that by trying so hard not to become my father, I am only becoming a quieter version of him. I speak softly, but my thoughts scream. My hands don’t break things, but I do with words, with silence, with distance. I was so desperate not to be him that I forgot he lives in me.

The mosquitoes are gone now, but their stains remain on the page. Two small splashes of blood. I stare at them.

What was I trying to write about again?

Maybe forgiveness. Maybe the smell of gin.

Maybe how even blood can carry memory.

Perhaps I was never trying to write at all. I was only trying to find a way out of him.

This is what it means to be haunted not by ghosts, but by echoes. By all the versions of life that existed for a moment, then slipped away before I could say goodbye. And still, I write.

Because sometimes, the only way to make peace with what haunts you…is to let it speak.

A hug begins long before arms ever meet. It starts in the silent gravity between two bodies, the pull of a tide neither can name, only feel. Eyes soften. Shoulders lean forward. Hands hover in the air for a heartbeat, unsure but aching. This is the language of yearning, spoken without words, written in the subtle electricity of skin waiting for skin.

Then, closeness. He gathers her in, not grabbing but gathering, like folding a fragile letter. His palms settle against the small of her back, fingers mapping quiet circles, learning the shape of her warmth. He draws her nearer until their chests align, breaths brushing against each other, soft clouds rising and falling in sync.

Her hair is near his face now. He leans in, almost shyly, and inhales. It smells like rain caught in cotton, like something both familiar and brand new. That scent, her scent pulls his memory somewhere softer.

His hands move slowly, not to claim but to trace: the slope of her spine beneath fabric, the outline of her shoulder blade, the tremor of her ribs when she exhales. Each stroke is a wordless sentence: I feel you. Stay here.

She melts against him, and the hug becomes its own world. Skin warms. Muscles loosen. Heartbeats begin their slow negotiation toward a shared rhythm. In that small universe, their bodies converse in whispers: her fingertips grazing the back of his neck, his thumb drawing gentle arcs near her waist.

Arms folding around each other like bridges, like wings closing over something precious. Chests align and breathe together, one rhythm answering another. There’s a warmth that isn’t just body heat but a kind of unspoken permission: You’re safe here. You’re wanted here.

In that moment, the hug is more than a touch. It’s a full-body conversation. The palm pressed against a back says, I’m here. Melt into me. The fingers curling slightly at the shoulder say, Don’t leave yet. The cheek brushing against hair says, I know you.

The chemistry is microscopic but monumental heartbeats adjusting their tempo, breath slowing to mirror the other’s. Muscles unclench. The nervous system exhales. It’s two nervous systems braiding themselves into a temporary sanctuary.

A good hug suspends time. You melt, not disappearing, but becoming something softer, fluid, shared. It’s where yearning transforms into contact, where longing turns tactile. A hug is an art of surrender: the loosening of guardrails, the small bravery of leaning in.

And when it ends, it leaves a trace and an echo on your skin, a ghost of warmth under your ribs. The absence feels almost as alive as the touch itself, like the aftertaste of a favorite song. This is the anatomy of a hug and yearning: not just arms and bodies, but the quiet miracle of being held, even for a moment, in a world that rarely stops to hold you back.