Essays on memory, identity, and the unspoken parts of being human.
I posted the same photo on three platforms yesterday. LinkedIn caption: “Grateful for this amazing team and the work we’re accomplishing together. #Leadership #Growth” Instagram caption: “Squad goals Twitter: I didn’t post it at all. Wrong audience. Wrong tone. Wrong version of me. Three platforms. Three different people. All supposedly me. My wife noticed I
I tell strangers on Reddit about my depression while pretending to my family that everything’s fine. Last night, posted three paragraphs about feeling empty, purposeless, like I was watching my own life from outside. Got supportive comments from usernames I’d never recognize again. This morning, Happy asked how I was. “Fine,” I said. Smiled. Made
My teenage tweets haunt my adult job interviews. The HR manager pulled up my Twitter from 2009. Edgy jokes I’d made at seventeen. Political takes that seemed profound then but mortify me now. Casual language I’d never use today. “Can you explain these?” she asked. How do you explain being seventeen? Being stupid? Being the
Inside vs Outside I know my anxiety intimately but only see others’ achievements. Scrolling through Instagram at midnight, comparing my 3 AM panic attacks to their vacation photos. My imposter syndrome to their promotion posts. My crushing self-doubt to their perfect family portraits in golden light. Fundamentally unfair competition. My unfiltered internal reality versus their
I understood calculus only when Arash asked me to explain it. Fifteen years after passing the exam, supposedly mastering the material, I finally comprehended what derivatives actually meant. Not the formulas—those I’d memorized. But the concept itself. Something alchemical happens in transformation from student to teacher. Arash was twelve, struggling with pre-calculus. “Baba, what’s a
The meeting ended with unanimous nodding. None of us understood the proposal. I walked out with my colleagues, all wearing the same expression—vaguely confident, professionally engaged. The performance of comprehension while drowning in confusion. Back at my desk, I stared at my notes. They made no sense. Technical jargon, acronyms I didn’t recognize, references to
I tried to remember my mother’s voice yesterday. I couldn’t. This scared me more than anything has scared me in years. She died three years ago. I remember her face clearly. Her hands. The way she walked. But her voice? It slips away like water through fingers. I reach for it. It’s not there. This
“We learned in school that we’re made from stars. Is that true?” he asked. Yes, I said. My son looked at his hand. We are made of stars and still we don’t know.
We think we want love, and we do, but we also fear it with equal intensity. Being loved dismantles every excuse we’ve constructed for our self-protection. Love forces us to confront the possibility that we might actually be worthy.
But inside this moment, Karim felt completely, impossibly alone. Not lonely because his family was absent. Lonely because he was awake and conscious.
I was holding on so tightly I was crushing what I was trying to protect. True love is not about keeping someone—it’s about loving them enough to let them choose you freely, repeatedly, without coercion.
We perform our best selves for people who barely know us, while our worst selves emerge around those who know us completely. The people who love us most become the testing ground for our pain because unconsciously, we know they’ll still be there afterward.
“These words found the feelings I couldn’t name.”
“Like finding letters I wrote to myself but never sent.”
“Writing that makes you stop and remember what it means to be alive.”
Curated insights, thoughtfully delivered. No clutter.
