There is a folder on my laptop called "almost."

Inside it, there are seven substack drafts, two short stories I swore I'd finish before February, a letter to someone I haven't spoken to in three years, and six drafts of the same novel I swore I'd finish by February.

It is May.

I tell myself this is discipline. That I'm waiting until the thing is ready, until it's earned its place in the world. But discipline looks like output, and output is not what's happening here. What's happening here is that I have confused the act of perfecting with the act of creating, and somewhere between those two things, I stopped moving entirely.

This is perfection paralysis. And if you're a creative person — or honestly, just a person with things to say and a fear of saying them wrong — I think you know exactly what I mean.

How It Starts (It Always Starts the Same Way)

Here's how it works, for those lucky enough to be confused by the term.

You have an idea, and it's a good one. It arrives with that tingling, electric feeling that makes you reach for a notebook, or open a new document, or text yourself a voice note at 11pm that you will listen back to in the morning and find either brilliant or completely stupid, and no in between.

The idea is alive, you are excited, and for a moment, before you've written a single word, it is perfect. Because it exists only as potential, and potential hasn't failed yet.

Then you sit down to actually make it real.

And immediately, the gap between what it is and what it should be opens up underneath you like a trapdoor.

The first sentence isn't right. The structure isn't quite landing. The tone is close but not there yet. It's reaching for something you can hear in your head but can't quite translate onto the page, so you rework the opening. You move a paragraph. You rename the document four times. You read it back to yourself and it still sounds like a rough draft, which — yes — it is, because you won't let it be anything else. You won't let it be bad enough to be fixable. You won't let it be done enough to be seen.

So you just save it and close the tab. You put it in the "almost" folder with the others and promise yourself you'll come back to it when you know how to do it better, when you have more time, when you're in the right headspace, when Mercury is no longer in retrograde, when —

Reader…you do not come back to it.

The Disguise It Wears

The cruel irony of perfection paralysis is that it masquerades itself as having standards.

And it's convincing. Deeply, unnervingly convincing. Because the people who fall hardest for it are often people who genuinely have good taste. Who can tell the difference between something mediocre and something excellent. Who care about the craft, about precision, about not adding noise to a world that is already full of it. These are not bad qualities. These are, in fact, the qualities that make someone worth reading.

But caring and finishing are not the same thing. And taste without output is just... a very refined form of silence.

There's a quote often attributed to Ira Glass — radio producer of This American Life — about what he calls the taste gap. The idea is this. When you're starting out, you have good taste. You know what good work looks like. But your own work doesn't reach that bar yet, and the gap between your taste and your ability is where most people quit. The ones who push through it, who keep making things even when those things aren't good enough yet, are the ones who eventually close the gap.

What he doesn't say, what I think about more often, is that the taste gap doesn't fully close. You just get better at tolerating it, at deciding that something being imperfect and finished is more valuable than it being theoretically perfect and invisible.

The Psychology of It (Bear With Me)

I've been thinking about why perfectionism hits creative work so hard. Because it does, compared to other kinds of work.

If you're a surgeon, you cannot put the patient back in the "almost" folder and come back when you feel ready. If you're a baker, the bread either goes in the oven or it goes in the bin. There is a built-in external pressure that creative work — especially digital, self-directed creative work — almost entirely lacks. Nobody is waiting on your Substack essay. No timer goes off. The cost of not finishing is invisible.

And so we invent an internal cost instead, and call it the standard. The bar we've set for ourselves, the imaginary editor in our heads who reads every sentence and finds it lacking.

The problem is that the imaginary editor is not actually interested in helping you make your work better. She is interested in protecting you from the discomfort of being seen and found lacking. She operates under the logic that an unpublished imperfect thing cannot be criticised, and she is correct, but she is also completely missing the point.

Because here is what she is not telling you. An unpublished work cannot be connected with either. It cannot find the person who needed to read it. It cannot teach you anything about your own voice, because you never had to commit to it. It cannot lead to the next finished thing, or build the body of work, or become the piece you look back on as the one where something clicked.

The imaginary editor is not your conscience. She is just your fear wearing a blazer.

What It Costs

I want to talk about the cost for a second, because I think we underestimate it.

We tend to frame perfection paralysis as a personal quirk. Oh, I'm such a perfectionist — said with a self-deprecating laugh, as though it's the same category of thing as being bad at replying to texts. But the accumulation of it is not nothing.

I have written — actually written, not just thought about — at least eight pieces in the last year that I believe were good. That had something to say. That I worked on with real attention and then simply buried because I couldn't get them over the line to ready. Eight pieces that would have, at minimum, given someone something to think about. At maximum, could have led somewhere — maybe a connection, or an opportunity, or a conversation I didn't know I needed.

I'll never know. Because they're in the folder.

And it's not just about the output lost. It's about the relationship you develop with your own creative instincts when you consistently override them in favour of the imaginary editor. You start to distrust yourself. The idea that arrived with that electric feeling starts arriving less and less, because some part of you has learned that arrival doesn't lead anywhere anyway. The creative muscle that produces ideas needs to be exercised all the way to completion, not just to the point of "needs more work."

Perfectionism, left unchecked, is a long con. You think you're protecting the quality of your work, but you're actually just slowly teaching yourself not to bother trying.

What To Do About It (I Think)

There is a version of this conversation that ends in ‘just ship it. Done is better than perfect. Stop overthinking.’ And I have complicated feelings about that advice, because it is not wrong, but it is also slightly beside the point.

Done is better than perfect is useful when perfectionism is purely a time-management issue. When you're polishing something that is genuinely ready and just don't want to let go. But a lot of perfection paralysis isn't that. It's a first draft that really does need another pass. It's a piece that genuinely isn't there yet but also never quite gets there because you can't stay in the discomfort of it being unfinished long enough to actually finish it.

So instead of just ship it, here is what has actually worked for me, with varying degrees of consistency:

Write to a person, not an audience. The imaginary editor appears when I'm writing for a hypothetical reader who might judge me. She largely disappears when I'm writing to a specific person I trust. My first drafts often start as messages — long and rambling and unpolished — to someone who would get it, mostly to myself. Then I clean it up. The voice that comes out when you're talking to someone you're not afraid of is usually your real voice. Start there.

Set a deadline that costs you something. Tell a person. An actual person, not your notes app. Say the words: "I'm publishing this on Thursday." Now Thursday means something. Your accountability is no longer abstract.

Separate drafting from editing, physically if possible. The imaginary editor sneaks in during drafting because you're trying to do both at once. Write badly first. Give yourself explicit permission to write a sentence that doesn't work. Some writers turn their screens off while drafting — they literally cannot see what they're writing, so they cannot edit it. I've tried this. It is unnerving and it works.

Ask yourself the better question. Perfectionism asks: is this flawless? The better question is: is this honest? Is it trying? Is it saying something real? A piece can be technically imperfect and still connect. In fact, some of the writing that has landed hardest for me, as a reader, has had a roughness to it. A sense of being caught mid-thought. It felt like a person, not a performance. That's not a flaw. That's what makes it worth reading.

Publish and then look away. The post-publish window is uniquely terrible for perfectionism. You will immediately see three things you'd change. This is normal. This is not a sign you shouldn't have published. Close the tab. Come back in 24 hours. By then you'll have some perspective, and possibly a comment from someone who says this is exactly what I needed to read today, which is, frankly, the entire point.

The Permission Slip You Didn't Ask For

Here is the thing I wish someone had said to me.

Your first draft is not a failure. It is a first draft. Every writer whose work you admire has a folder full of things that didn't work, abandoned openings, essays that went in circles for six drafts before finding their shape. The difference between them and you is not talent. It is not even discipline, really. It is that they decided that the discomfort of being imperfect in public was more useful than the comfort of being perfect in private.

You are allowed to publish something you're not completely sure about. You are allowed to send the thing and then grow past it. You are allowed to be a writer who is visibly still figuring it out, because the alternative produces exactly nothing.

The blank page is not sacred. It is just a beginning.

And beginnings, famously, are allowed to be ugly.

I'm not going to pretend I've solved my perfection paralysis, because I have not. Last week I rewrote an opening paragraph seven times and then closed the document. The week before that I spent forty minutes choosing between two adjectives, decided neither was right, and went to make an episode of a new show i’m watching and did not come back.

My "almost" folder is still there.

But this essay isn't in it.

And that's not nothing.

If you recognised yourself in any of this, I'd love to know. We can be paralysed together, which is at least more interesting than being paralysed alone.

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in case you missed it…

Before you read: put on "Fourth of July" by Sufjan Stevens (the audio attached). Let it play while you go through this. I think the words and the music were made for each other, even if they didn't know it yet.

Also — I'm sorry in advance. You may cry. I cried writing it. Some things are worth crying for.

a letter, found after

My love,

written for whenever you need it

‎By the time you read this, you will have already cried more than I ever wanted you to. You will have sat in rooms that feel wrong without me in them, and driven past places and had to look away. And reached for your phone more than once to call me. I know. I know all of that is coming for you, and I am so sorry I cannot be there to hold you through it. That is the only part of this I could not make peace with — leaving you to carry it alone.

But I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it not as a goodbye, because this is not that. This is the opposite. This is me grabbing you by the shoulders, the way I used to when you were small and spinning out, and saying: look at me. Are you looking? Good.

You are going to be okay. Maybe not right away. Maybe not for a while. But you are going to be okay, and I mean it the way I have always meant the things I said to you.

‎I need you to live your life.

‎I need you to understand what I mean by that, because this isn't like what people put on greeting cards. I don't mean seize the day and all that noise. I mean the everyday, ordinary, irreplaceable things.

Treat yourself to something expensive on a random day for no reason. Let yourself be silly. Fall in love badly and survive it, because surviving it is its own kind of gift. Call your friends at inconvenient hours. Sit outside when it's almost too cold. Let a song make you cry in the car and then drive on anyway.

I spent so much of my life thinking the big moments were what counted. The occasions, the milestones, the things worth photographing. But when I look back now, what I have is light through a kitchen window. What I have is you, small enough to fit in the crook of my arm, sleeping with your mouth open. What I have is all the ordinary weekends, all the nothing-afternoons, all the times we were simply together in a room, not doing anything worth remembering, and yet I remember every single one.

‎That is what life is made of. That is what I am made of.

Here is my confession, the one I hope had been obvious. I have loved being your mother more than anything else I have ever been. More than any version of myself I had before you. I was not always good at it. I was not always present, or soft, or wise. But I was always there, and I was always trying, and every single day of it — even the hard ones, especially the hard ones — I would have chosen again.

I would choose it now. With everything I know, with everything it cost me and everything it gave me — I would walk back into that first room, that first impossible love, without hesitation.

And that is what I want for you. Not my life — yours. Your unfiltered, unscripted, unphotographed life, with all its wrong turns and wasted years and late starts. All the things that will feel like failures and turn out to be the story. I want you to want it, even when it is hard. Especially then.

Grief will try to convince you that joy is a betrayal. That laughing too soon is wrong, that being happy again is somehow you forgetting. Don't believe it. Joy is not forgetting. Loving your life is not a betrayal of the people who loved you. It is, in fact, the only real tribute. It is the only thing I ever actually wanted from you.

‎Live so loudly and so fully that I can feel it, wherever I am. That is how you honour me. That is the whole job now.

‎There will be good days, and they will feel guilty at first, and then less so, and then they will just be good days. Let them. There will be someone who makes you laugh until you can't breathe, and there will be places you haven't been yet that will feel like coming home, and there will be a version of yourself on the other side of this grief who is softer and stranger and more honest than you have ever been. I am looking forward to meeting them. I think they will be extraordinary.

‎I think you are extraordinary. I should have said it more. I'm saying it now.

‎You came from me. You were the best thing I ever made, and that's not because you turned out the way I planned. You didn't. You turned out better, you turned out like yourself, and that is more than I could have hoped for. Loving you taught me everything I know about what it means to be alive. You were my lesson in that. You were my proof.

‎So go. Go and live your life. Let it be hard sometimes and beautiful sometimes and sometimes both at once. Stay at the party a little too late. Make mistakes. Tell people you love them before you have enough reason to. Be the one who stays.

‎I loved every year of you, even the ones you thought you were hard to love.

‎Now go make more of them.

I’ll find you in them.

‎All my love — every bit of it, always,

‎ Mum

Author’s note

If this found you in your grief — for your mother, for the version of her you never got enough of, for the things that were never said — I want you to know you are not alone in that room. So many of us are sitting in it. We just don't always say so.

You were loved. Even if it didn't last long enough. Even if it was complicated. Even if you were four years old and had no way of knowing how to hold it yet.

You were loved.

— Maq

If this piece meant something to you, share it with someone who might need it today. That's the whole point of writing — to make people feel less alone in the things they can't say out loud.

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🖤

I have a birthday coming up.

I don't know why that sentence feels like a confession.

Some people dread New Year's Eve. The countdown, the pressure, the mandatory joy of it, the constant expectation that some version of you has to be left behind. Some people dread anniversaries, graduations, the first day of something new. The moments that come pre-loaded with meaning, that arrive already telling you how you're supposed to feel about them.

I've always been one of those people.

But for me, it's birthdays.

It's hard to explain what it's like to grow up with an indifference towards your own birthday. People don't really know what to do with that. They think you're being difficult, that you're putting on some kind of act, when you're really just looking for attention. But I promise you, it was never that.

I think there's a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from days that demand you show up emotionally.

They come with a script already written. You're supposed to feel celebratory, or hopeful, or grateful, or reflective — and the feeling is supposed to arrive on time and fully formed and appropriate to the occasion. And when it doesn't, when you're standing in the middle of a moment that's supposed to mean something but you just feel hollow, or anxious, or quietly grief-stricken in a way you can't explain — there's this additional layer of shame on top of it.

Not only are you not feeling the right thing, but you're failing the moment.

And I think somewhere along the way, without realizing it, I started to believe that wanting things — wanting a day to feel special, wanting to be celebrated, wanting to feel like the fact of my being here mattered — was embarrassing. Was asking too much. Was the setup to a joke I knew I was going to be the punchline of.

But it's easier, isn't it? To not want something than to want it and be disappointed again.

Looking back now, I can see how my birthday became this yearly reckoning with everything I wasn't and everything I wanted to be. Just another reminder that another year had passed and I still felt like I was waiting for my life to start. So I learned to say I don't really care about my birthday and mean it so completely that I forgot I ever cared at all.

I got so good at not wanting that the not-wanting started to feel like a personality, like wisdom. Like I'd figured out something other people hadn't.

I hadn't. I was just afraid.

And the fear is reasonable. It makes complete sense. These big, marked moments — the ones with dates attached, the ones that show up on the calendar whether you're ready or not — they have a way of asking you where you are. How far you've come. Whether the life you're living looks anything like the one you thought you'd have by now.

For a long time, I didn't like my answer.

But nobody warns you about this part: you don't always know when you finally set something aside.

There's no ceremony. No magical moment of clarity. No line between before and after.

You just wake up one morning and realize that the weight has changed. Maybe it's not as heavy, maybe it's not as intense. Like something that used to cut you has been worn smooth by time and touch and the quiet, invisible work of continuing to exist.

You can spend decades believing something about yourself — I am someone who hates this, I am someone who doesn't need this, I am someone who will always feel this way — and then wake up one morning and realize the person you were so sure you were has quietly become someone else.

I can't tell you what changed, exactly. I wish I could give you a clean answer, a turning point, a thing you could go do yourself. But I think it's simpler than that. I think I'm just tired — tired of making myself small on the days that are supposed to belong to me, tired of being the most indifferent person in the room about my own life, tired of armor I built so carefully I forgot I was wearing it.

The things we make peace with aren't always the things we think we're making peace with. Sometimes you spend years building walls around the days and moments that hurt, telling yourself you don't need what you were never given.

And then one day, without warning, without permission, those walls start to come down.

Not because you decided to be brave, or because you did the work or read the right book or had the right conversation. But because some part of you — some part you didn't even know was paying attention — decided it was tired of bracing.

Decided it wanted to try something different.

Decided that maybe the thing you've been running from is the thing you've been running toward all along.

I'm writing this before my birthday, not after. I don't know yet if the day itself will live up to this fragile, unfamiliar feeling of anticipation. Maybe it will still be hard. Maybe I'll still feel that old ache. Maybe I'm setting myself up for the very disappointment I've spent my life trying to avoid.

But here's what I know: for the first time in my life, I want my birthday to be good. I'm allowing myself to want it.

And that wanting feels like the most radical thing I've ever done.

If you're someone who has a complicated relationship with celebrations, with milestones, with days that are supposed to mean something but never quite do — I see you. You're not difficult. You're not ungrateful. There is nothing wrong with you.

You're just someone who learned to protect yourself from disappointment by keeping your expectations low.

And maybe, if you're lucky, if you give it enough time, you might wake up one year and realize you're not bracing anymore.

You might realize you're leaning in.

You might realize that the thing you spent so long avoiding is the thing you're finally ready to hold.

I turn another year older on April 1st. The universe gave me a birthday that's literally a joke, and I spent most of my life feeling like the punchline.

But this year, I'm the one laughing.

Simply because I'm still here. Because I kept going even when I hated going. Because time kept moving and I moved with it, even when I felt stuck.

So happy birthday to me.

This time, I mean it.

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in case you missed it…

Every new year arrives with the same soft threat.

It shows up dressed as possibility, but underneath it carries a question we don’t know how to answer: Who are you going to be now?

We cross the threshold with our arms full with last year’s habits, last year’s grief, last year’s versions of ourselves we’re not sure we still want. We tell ourselves this is the moment things change. We’ll be better. Kinder. Braver. More disciplined. Less afraid. We’ll stop doing the things that hurt us. We’ll finally become the person we kept promising we were on the way to being.

And for a moment, it feels…believable.

January has that effect, I guess. Everything feels paused. The calendar resets. The mess is swept under the idea of fresh. We write lists. We make quiet vows. We tell ourselves that this year will be different, even if we don’t yet know how.

But somewhere between the intention and the living, doubt creeps in.

Because wanting to be different doesn’t erase who we were. And sometimes the hardest part of a new year isn’t deciding what to change. It’s deciding what to keep.

I don't think we talk enough about that part.

About how growth isn’t always dramatic or visible. How sometimes it looks like staying. Like choosing the same softness in a world that keeps asking you to harden. Like refusing to punish yourself for surviving the only way you knew how. Like realizing that maybe you don’t need to reinvent yourself, you just need to stop abandoning yourself every time the calendar tells you to.

There’s a strange pressure at the start of a year to become someone unrecognizable. As if the person you were last December failed simply by existing. As if restlessness alone is proof of progress.

But change doesn’t always mean erasure.

Sometimes it means learning how to sit with who you already are without flinching. Sometimes it means forgiving the version of you that didn’t know better. Sometimes it means admitting that the life you have isn’t wrong, it’s just unfinished.

And then there’s something else, the quieter realization that sneaks in when you’re not looking.

The one about time.

The way another year passing suddenly makes everything feel fragile. The way birthdays start to feel less like celebration and more like inventory. The way you notice how fast the days move now, how quickly months collapse into memory. The way you catch yourself thinking, I don’t have as much time as I thought.

It can be terrifying, that awareness. Or clarifying. Depends on how deeply you'd like to look at it.

Because once you really understand how short life is, you start questioning what you’re spending it on. Who you’re bending yourself into knots for. Which dreams you keep postponing out of fear or convenience. Which versions of yourself you’re clinging to out of habit, not truth.

“a big part of who I am is who I am not”

You start to see how much energy you’ve wasted trying to become palatable. How many moments you’ve delayed joy because it didn’t feel earned yet. How often you told yourself later as if later was guaranteed.

A new year doesn’t fix any of that. But it does offer a mirror.

And in that mirror, you might see someone tired, but still trying. Someone changed, but not finished. Someone who has lost things and learned things and loved imperfectly and survived anyway.

Maybe that’s enough.

Maybe the goal this year doesn’t have to be transformation. Maybe it can be alignment. A quieter, steadier commitment to living a life that feels honest instead of impressive. To choosing days that feel full instead of just productive. To letting yourself be a work in progress without turning that into a flaw.

You don’t have to become a brand-new person to honor the passage of time.

You can enter this year carrying the parts of yourself that still feel true. You can let go of the ones that were only armor. You can move slowly. You can move gently. You can change your mind halfway through and still call it growth.

The year doesn’t need a perfect version of you.

It just needs you, someone awake enough to notice it passing, brave enough to live inside it, and honest enough to admit that becoming is not a straight line.

So here’s to the new year 🥂

Not as a demand. Not as a deadline. But as an invitation.

To live a little closer to yourself than you did before.

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I started losing things in August.

At first, it was something small— my left earring, a hair tie, a receipt I swore I’d tucked into my pocket. Ordinary losses. Everyday forgetfulness.

But then it became… bigger.

I lost a whole afternoon once. I remember waking up at noon, sunlight spilling through the curtains, my phone buzzing with a message from my brother. I blinked once, maybe twice, and suddenly the light had shifted and the room was painted in sunset.

Six hours gone. Just like that.

I told myself I must have slept, even though I wasn’t tired, even though my sheets were still cold.

But soon after, I started losing people’s voices. My best friend called, talked for twenty minutes, laughed about something her boyfriend did— and I heard her, I did. I was even responding.

But afterward, I couldn’t remember a single thing she said. Not one. It was like my brain had forgotten to hit “save.”

I googled stress. Memory loss. Early dementia. Nothing seemed to fit. Nothing explained the hollowness I felt, the quiet spaces where sound and time should have lived.

It wasn’t until I visited my mother that I realized what was actually happening.

She was stirring stew in slow, patient circles, when she said it, almost casually.

“You’ve stopped holding onto things.”

I blinked at her. “What does that mean?”

She looked at me the way mothers do, like she was peeling back a layer I didn’t even know I had.

“Ever since that day,” she said softly. “Ever since he left, you’ve been trying so hard to feel… less. To not care so much next time.”

She set the spoon down, wiped her hands. “But cariño… when you stop feeling pain, you stop feeling everything else too.”

I wanted to tell her she was wrong. That this wasn’t emotional. That this was real, literal, happening-to-my-body real.

But then I thought about it.

The lost hours. The forgotten voices. The way my favorite sweater didn’t feel like anything when I wore it, just fabric against my skin, no comfort, no warmth.

I hadn’t been forgetting things.

I had been letting go of them before they could let go of me.

It hit hard. I was terrified of loss, so terrified that I’d learned to drop things before they had the chance to slip away.

My mother pulled me into a hug before I could react. Her arms warm and grounding. A weight. Something real.

“You don’t have to protect yourself from life,” she whispered. “Life will happen anyway. The disappearing… that you can stop.”

I cried into her shoulder. A full, ugly, shaking cry. The kind that feels like you’re finally unclenching a fist you didn’t know you’d been holding for months.

And just like that, something returned.

A sound. A sensation. The smell of her stew— rich, and warm, and familiar—slid back into my awareness like it had been waiting for permission.

I didn’t get everything back that night. I didn’t magically recover the missing hours or the lost conversations.

But when I left her house, I felt the weight of my keys in my pocket. I felt the breeze on my face. I felt the world again.

I am still learning how to hold onto things without gripping too tightly.

Still learning that letting myself care isn’t a weakness.

Still learning that loss hurts, yes. But numbness hurts more.

And every day, I lose a little less.

Every day, I choose a little more.

Life. Warmth. Presence.

Myself.

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It’s been… months. Not weeks. Months.

And honestly, I wish I could say I was off doing something glamorous, but no. I was just overthinking.

I disappeared down the rabbit hole of “should I even be doing this?” and “what if everyone forgot about me?” and “maybe I should start over, new account, new everything.” You know, the usual spiral.

I kept opening Substack, typing a line, deleting it, then convincing myself it wasn’t good enough. Meanwhile, the guilt of being gone kept growing, which made coming back even harder.

But here’s the truth: I missed this. I missed writing things that maybe no one will clap for, but someone will feel. I missed connecting with people who get the chaos of caring too much about things that don’t actually matter, and the quiet joy of writing anyway.

So yeah, consider this my soft re-entry.

I’m back. Still overthinking. But at least now I’m writing about it.

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There are conversations I’ve played in my head that never even happened. Messages I’ve typed, deleted, retyped, and still never sent. Smiles I’ve practiced in the mirror before leaving the house just to make sure I didn’t look “off.” I don’t think I ever learned how to just be. I learned how to perform instead.

It's exhausting.

I wish I was one of those people who just… show up. Who say whatever they think and don’t lose sleep over it later. Who reply to messages without overanalyzing the tone. Who laugh without wondering if it was too loud. Who don’t spiral for three hours after they make one awkward comment in a group chat.

But I’m not. I rehearse myself.

Before every text. Every voice note. Every real-life interaction. Before speaking in a room where I don’t know where I stand. Even when I’m with people I care about— especially then— I find myself scanning the moment for signs. Am I talking too much? Am I being weird? Do they still like me?

I shift and adjust, because I’m always trying to get it “right.” And the thing is, I don’t think most people even realize I’m doing it. Because it seems natural. Because I am good at being myself.

I’ve studied what parts of me people respond to. I know when to be funny, when to be deep, when to play it cool, when to ask the right questions. I know how to make people feel comfortable, how to keep a conversation going, how to seem interesting. And I don’t do it to manipulate anyone. I do it because somewhere along the line, I stopped believing that the unfiltered version of me was enough.

So I curate. I edit. I rehearse.

And then I wonder why I feel so drained all the time.

Because it’s exhausting to keep managing how you’re perceived. To hold your breath in every interaction, hoping you didn’t say too much or too little or the wrong thing altogether. It’s exhausting to always be three steps ahead in your own head, planning the next move in a game no one else is playing.

But here’s what I’ve started to realize: it’s not just about how stuck I am at overthinking or anxiety. It’s about control. It’s about fear.

I don’t always show my full self because I’m not sure I want anyone to actually know me. Not really. Because if they do— if they see the messy, flawed, insecure, too-sensitive, too-much parts of me— what if they use it against me one day? What if they leave? What if they stay, but only out of pity?

I think that’s why I rehearse. It’s not really about being liked— it’s about feeling safe. Because if I only show people a carefully edited version of me, then they can’t hurt me that deeply. They don’t know where the soft spots are. They don’t have access to the real me— the one I keep buried beneath layers of “it’s fine” and “don’t worry about it” and jokes that are just deep truths in disguise.

And yet, despite all this calculated effort to stay in control, I don’t always succeed.

Sometimes the mask cracks under pressure. Sometimes the feelings build up too loudly, too quickly, and I act without thinking. I send long, vulnerable messages I later regret. I lash out or pull away. I try to explain the ache inside me in ways that feel clumsy or too much, then spiral afterward wondering why I couldn’t just keep it together.

Sometimes it’s hard even to keep up with myself.

Because when you spend so much time holding everything in, it only takes one small thing for the dam to break. And when it breaks, it’s rarely graceful. It’s messy. It’s irrational. It’s emotionally flooded and poorly timed. And then I’m left feeling embarrassed—not just about what I said, but about the fact that I said anything at all.

But maybe that, too, is part of being human.

We want so badly to be understood, but we’re terrified of being exposed. We crave connection, but fear vulnerability. We want to be seen, but only in the lighting we’ve carefully chosen. And when we lose control, even for a second, we punish ourselves for simply feeling too much.

It’s lonely, to say the least.

And it’s not that I don’t want connection. I do. I crave closeness. I crave friendship and sisterhood and love. But the kind I crave also terrifies me. Because to let someone in fully means handing over a version of yourself that you can’t take back. And I’ve been let down before. I’ve watched people learn the deepest parts of me and then walk away like it meant nothing. Or worse— stay, and twist what I gave them into something ugly.

Even when people say they love me, I wonder— do they love me, or the version I showed them? Would they still care if they saw all the parts I keep hidden? Would they still choose me if they saw the full picture?

I want to stop. I want to show up and speak without rewriting the sentence in my head four times. I want to hit “send” and not re-read it five minutes later in panic. I want to be fully in a moment instead of stuck in the loop of how I’m coming across. I want to stop translating myself to be easier to love.

But it’s hard to unlearn something you started doing for safety.

Because deep down, I think most of us who rehearse ourselves started because, once upon a time, we were made to feel like the real us wasn’t quite right. Too loud, too quiet, too clingy, too awkward, too something. So we adjusted. We performed. And we got good at it. But at what cost?

I don’t have a perfect ending to this. I’m still figuring it out. But lately, I’ve been trying to show up messier. Blunter, sometimes. Louder, when it’s necessary. I’m trying to say what I mean without wrapping it in five disclaimers. I’m trying to speak before I edit. Exist before I filter. I don’t always get it right, but I’m trying.

And I think that counts for something.

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It’s wild how easily we forget to choose ourselves. How often we wait to be loved the way we deserve, instead of loving ourselves like that first.

We give so much. We hold space. We forgive. We stay.

And sometimes we don’t even realize how empty we’ve become, until someone forgets us, and it hurts more than it should.

This is a reminder. For me. For you. For anyone who’s tired of being the one who always shows up:

Loving yourself first isn’t selfish.

It’s necessary.

People will disappoint you, not because they always mean to, but because they’re human. They’ll forget to check in when you needed them the most. They’ll promise you the world and vanish when it's time to deliver. They’ll say forever and disappear when the fire gets too close. Sometimes they’ll betray you. Other times, it’s the smaller things: a missed moment, a careless word, a lack of effort that speaks louder than any apology ever could.

And maybe the hardest kind of disappointment is when you realize they were never capable of giving you what you kept hoping they would.

Not because they’re cruel.

But because they never knew how to show up fully, not even for themselves.

Some people only know how to take.

Some only know how to stay for the good parts.

Some carry so much of their own pain that they hand you wounds instead of love. And you, maybe you try to fix them, maybe you shrink yourself so they can feel tall, maybe you let yourself bleed just to keep them from falling apart. You think love means sacrifice. You think patience will earn you kindness in return.

But sometimes, you are only delaying the heartbreak.

So you must love yourself first.

Love yourself enough to recognize red flags without romanticizing them. Enough to walk away from half-effort, from conditional kindness, from silence where there should’ve been clarity. Love yourself enough to set boundaries without guilt and say no without explanation.

Love yourself by doing the work: healing what’s been broken, forgiving what still haunts you, and becoming the kind of person who doesn’t abandon herself when things get tough. Especially then.

Love yourself in the quiet moments too. When no one’s watching. When you’re tired of being strong and just want someone to hold you without needing to earn it. Learn to be that person for yourself. To hold your own heart with steady hands. To speak gently to yourself when everything feels heavy. To stop waiting for someone else to choose you and finally choose yourself.

Because people can be temporary. Conditional. Some are lessons, not lifelines. Some will love you in fragments, only as long as it’s easy, only as long as you don’t ask for too much.

And while connection is beautiful and necessary, it cannot be the foundation of your self-worth. That has to come from you.

Because if you don’t love yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?

If you treat your heart like it’s optional, don’t be surprised when others do too.

The way you value yourself teaches people how to value you, and it starts with what you tolerate, what you demand, and what you no longer accept all in the name of love.

So if someone forgets your worth, remind them with your absence.

And if no one shows up, stand in the mirror and remember:

You are the one constant. The beginning and the return.

So love yourself like your life depends on it, because one day, it just might.

Author's note

I used to think self-love would come naturally, like a reward for surviving all the hard things that came with life. That one day I’d just wake up whole, and all the pieces that had been chipped away would somehow find their way back into place.

But instead, I learned that self-love is a quiet decision. One you have to make over and over again, especially on the days when your mind turns against you.

There was a time when my entire sense of worth lived in other people’s hands. If someone said I was beautiful, I suddenly was. Same with ugly, and stupid, and useless and selfish and whatever new word they discovered that day.

I used to struggle deeply with endings. Friendships that faded. Relationships that didn’t last.

It always felt like something was wrong with me. Like I was the common denominator no one wanted to keep.

So I held on too tightly. Shrunk myself. Settled. Whatever it took to keep them around.

Not because I didn’t know better— God knows the overthinker in me saw it three years ago before I ever met them— but because I didn’t know how to be alone.

Correction: I didn't want to be.

Because the truth is, the mind is a dangerous place and mine was no exception. No one has ever hurt me quite like I’ve hurt myself. And honestly, my thoughts have done more damage than most people ever could.

I like to believe things are different now.

Being alone with myself is something I look forward to the most. And it's not like I don’t need people. I just finally like the person I get to come home to.

I think I’m finally at a stage in my life where no one’s company compares to my own.

I no longer sit around waiting for anyone’s approval.

I’ve realized that some people will always have a problem with me, no matter how quiet I am, how kind I try to be, or how small I make myself to fit their comfort.

And it’s my job to figure out what’s more important. Because at the end of the day, their opinion isn’t what I have to live with, mine is.

Needless to say, it's not like I'm the most confident person in the world either. I’m still learning, still unlearning, still figuring it all out.

But it’s easier now. So much easier.

And if you’re on that same path, or even just taking the first steps, you’re not alone.

You're already doing better than you think.

I'd love it if we could keep being better together. But you'd have to stick around to see how far we'd get.

xoxo,

Maq 🖤

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But I also don’t know how to stop thinking about you, so here we are.

It’s absurd, how much space you take up.

You’re in everything now.

In my good mornings. In my silences. In the parts of me I didn’t even know existed until I started measuring them by how close or far they are from you.

I’ve tried pretending this is nothing.

That the way I light up when I hear your name is just a habit. That it doesn’t ruin my day when someone wears your perfume or laughs like you or says something with that exact rhythm you use when you’re tired or letting your guard down— and it’s not really you.

I can’t keep doing this.

I see you everywhere.

And I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever stop.

I say your name in conversations that have nothing to do with you.

I look for your face in crowds that have no business containing you.

You live in my mouth, in my bones, in every room I walk into— like you’re haunting me while still very much alive.

You’re in every almost.

Every sentence I can’t finish.

Every breath I hold before I speak because I’m trying so hard not to mention you.

And I hate it. I hate that I can’t evict you from my head.

That no one else feels right anymore— not even close.

I go on dates and feel nothing.

I laugh and it feels forced.

I meet other people and spend the entire time trying to ignore how wrong it feels.

I’ve rewritten this a dozen times.

Each version less poetic than the last.

Each one trying to make this sound like a maybe.

Like maybe I’m losing my mind.

Maybe this is just a phase.

Maybe I’ll regret this.

But I won’t.

At least…I hope I don't.

Because I’ve never wanted anything the way I want this to mean something to you.

And it terrifies me— how much of myself I’ve handed over just by writing this.

I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with that.

I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do.

But if you do—

If there’s even the smallest part of you that wants this…

Then come find me.

I’m already yours.

Thank you for reading this far! That alone means more than you probably realize. Writing isn't always easy to share, but knowing that someone is out there, reading, makes it worth it. If it moved you in any way, please consider liking, leaving a comment, or leaving a tip?🙈—it means more than you know.

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this habit of shrinking my feelings down to something small enough to swallow.

Maybe it was when people started calling me sensitive.

Or too much.

Or dramatic.

Like caring deeply was a flaw I needed to apologize for.

So I stopped saying the heavy things out loud.

I didn’t tell anyone how quiet my life felt,

even when it was full.

I didn’t say that some mornings I stared at the ceiling for an hour,

waiting for a reason to get up.

I didn’t tell anyone that I missed people who weren’t good to me.

That I still wanted their approval like it would undo the damage they'd done.

Instead, I wrote it down.

In half-finished notes on my phone.

In emails I never sent.

In text messages I typed and deleted.

In sentences that ended with “never mind.”

That’s how I survived.

By pretending I didn’t feel as much as I did.

But the thing about feelings is

they don’t disappear just because you ignore them.

They sit inside you.

Pile up.

Get crowded and messy and loud.

And eventually, I realized that silence wasn’t keeping me safe.

It was keeping me small.

So I started writing again.

Not for the world. Not even for validation.

Just to see my own truth in front of me.

To hold it.

To say, “This was real. This happened. And it hurt.”

And now…this.

This space.

This post.

This strange and terrifying act of showing you something that matters to me.

Maybe you’ll understand.

Maybe you won’t.

But if you’re here,

if you’ve ever bitten your tongue so hard it bled,

if you’ve ever felt like the only person carrying a storm inside,

I hope this makes you feel a little less alone.

Because some things deserve to be said.

Even if they come out messy.

Even if no one claps.

Even if it’s just once.

So here I am, saying it.

Finally.

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