September 30th, 2025 — Entry 10 — 13 days till 22

It is widely acknowledged that time heals all wounds. We hold onto this belief as a kind of salvation, a promise that one day everything will be different. The pain will fade like smoke, love will return with ease, and despair will one day feel foreign to us. Everything will fall back into place, as though nothing ever broke.

But what if it doesn’t? What if we never actually heal?

What if life continues with pain at the centerfield, woven into everything you do? You try to suppress it, but it lingers. It’s the emptiness you feel when you’re surrounded by others. The reclusion that settles in when the room is quiet and there is nothing left to distract you. When the TV shows stop numbing the pain, and the grey skies become a permanent storm over your barren land.

All our lives, we’re expected to recover from wounds passed down through unspoken generational cycles, or from environments we never chose but were born into. And yet, somehow, we fail to recover from them and instead carry them like invisible soldiers.

They sit beneath us like a plague, threatening to dissolve our ability to live fully, to love openly. Because even when someone reaches out, when for a moment we feel softened, less alone, our hands still shake when they get too close.

I have always struggled to reconcile with the idea of healing. As much as I love life and cherish the happy moments that arrive unexpectedly, I have an unexplainable belief that I will never truly heal. That my destiny is to live half-asleep, moving through the world like a sleepwalker.

These thoughts have built a home inside me, even though I’ve tried to erase them. They appear when I try to make choices: the idea that I shouldn’t fall in love until I’m healed, or that I shouldn’t speak too much about myself for fear of what it might reveal. It’s many things. But above all, it’s the realization that my wounds are my biggest scars, constraints that hold me back no matter how much I fight them.

And yet, something shifted when I accepted them as part of me, when I began to see them less as a deadly injury and more as a birthmark. Life began to feel lighter. I started to make sense of things, to rise above the phases when sadness consumed me, when it pierced like a sharp needle and pinned me to the dark corners of myself.

Those moments made me realize that perhaps the healing I needed was never about erasure. Perhaps it was about perspective. Maybe healing isn’t about fixing the wound at all, but about carrying it differently. Maybe it is about living in spite of it.

Some aches never leave us. They integrate into our lives as companions. And healing, I’ve come to see, is many things at once.

Healing is waking to the howl of an alarm and still finding the strength to make yourself a cup of tea, just to breathe and take it all in. Healing is realizing there is a part of you that is not yet true, and rising to face life anyway.

The truth is that healing isn’t grand. It isn’t final. Our mistake is believing it must be. Healing is quieter, smaller, more fragile than that. It is living with echoes. It is loving life despite unresolved grief. It is simply the act of continuing.

And it is never linear. Some days you wake up convinced there is no silver lining, that life itself is the belly of a whale, and no amount of prayer can pull you out. Other days, you find yourself smiling through it all, swimming in the darkness of the night and the sea. Pain resurfaces, yes, but each time it does, you meet it differently.

There is a strange kind of beauty in leaving every stone unturned. So, what if you never actually heal? What if healing is not a road with a destination, but an endless journey?

What if we were never meant to heal completely, but instead to bond over our brokenness, to connect through our vulnerability, to find solace in its tenderness?

To truly heal, I think we must first refute what healing has been taught to mean. To acknowledge the slow places and the loud developments. And instead of promising yourself, I must heal first, perhaps it’s enough to say:

I will live fully. I will grow. I will love, even if I never heal

Still striving. Still almost 22,

Fatima.

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If you’ve read and resonated with any of these entries, I want to thank you, and beg you to never stop striving to heal, to never stop fighting to be free. I would love for you to continue supporting my work. Please subscribe.

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Sometimes, when I think about who I was at a certain age, it feels less like remembering and more like meeting a stranger, a version of me I once inhabited but can barely imagine. These fragments of myself feel impossible to exist in the same room at once, yet they all dwell inside me.

The tenderness of revisiting the past is that what now seems embarrassing was, at the time an expression of pure joy and resilience to survive.

When I was thirteen, I wrote a book on Wattpad that amassed hundreds of thousands of views. It’s my most sworn secret; even my closest friends don’t know the username or the book’s name. It’s not something to be ashamed of (however, reading my younger self’s earnest depictions of sadness and romance is so painfully corny, you couldn’t pay me to revisit it).

But it’s more than embarrassment. Sometimes, I struggle to recognize who that girl truly was, the one who stayed up until 4 a.m., scribbling three thousand words of barely anything, yet persisted because it was the only way she knew how to exist. The one who, without access to a device, would do anything for just an hour to update her story, her desperate act of creation.

Are all those versions of me still me, or are they merely strained facades, fragmented shadows of my own reality?

Memory is fragile, mutable. I once read that every time we remember something, we alter what we recall. Isn’t that both terrifying and beautiful? Our past selves, the ones we long to return to don’t truly exist; they are stitched together from the threads of our recollections, as ephemeral and fleeting as the wind.

Looking back is haunting. It’s like peering through frosted glass that feels impossibly cool against your fingertips, so close, right there, yet untouchable.

I think of the people-pleaser who hid her truth, embarrassed to be seen cuddled up, and the loudest girl in the room, whose laughter demanded attention. They are extended versions of me yet sometimes I feel detached from them, as if observing strangers in a museum. Despite everything, they shaped me more than I dare to admit.

Every age I reach, every day that passes reveals a different version of myself. Even in moments where I feel most authentic, I am performing, curating together a persona from fragments of someone who I’ve long lost.

Sometimes when I speak words I regret or act in ways I wouldn’t expect from myself, I feel like a fraud. Like when I offer words of consolation while battling my own anxiety and the inner voice who whispers for me to fail. It feels like feigning stability and living under false pretenses.

There is a paradox in cringing at my old selves while also cherishing them. It is like tasting the past and suddenly feeling light, as if darkness had never existed, and the only thing that mattered was a step closer to freedom. Yet the bittersweet truth remains: we can never truly inhabit those selves again, no matter how fervently we wish to.

Society teaches us that we should “find ourselves” at a certain age, yet the truth is that we are always rewriting. We are never a single, complete version of ourselves, because humans are inherently multiple.

And there is beauty in that. In this constant reinvention, we discover that we are not limited. We can be many things at once, we can be writers and poets, yet also doctors, teachers, explorers of all kinds. Life is too short to confine ourselves to one dimension when we contain multitudes.

Multiplicity is power. To embrace it is to acknowledge our flexibility, our potential. The many versions within us are like butterflies, fragile yet destined to fly, each one capable of creating magic.

Each iteration of myself is a testament to how far I’ve come, and a promise of how far I still have to go.

Be excited for the future self waiting to emerge. Maybe we are a library of archives, volumes that anyone would die to glimpse.

We are not imposters, we are archivists collecting each publication of ourselves, each one essential to the novelty and beauty of a meaningful life.

Still this version. Still almost 22,

Fatima.

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Is it just me, or does every woman carry a yearning to be seen beyond vanity, not as a trophy, but beyond that, as someone real and honest, someone who has always been more than her appearance suggests?

This feeling is not foreign to me, it has been a companion all my life. Even before I knew the word insecurity, or even understood what it meant to inhabit a body, I was already judged for it.

There was a phrase whispered to me about the way I was shaped, and even then, I was just a girl, barely forming into a woman, yet I carried the weight of that perception for awhile. Though I’ve moved past it, it’s a sentient reminder on how we inherit perceptions that do belong to us, carried like a dark voice in our head who is just waiting to reveal itself.

My relationship with my body is a rush of contradictions. It is like walking barefoot through the woods, twigs prickling my feet, yet relentlessly I can’t stop walking. My body is a bed of nails, and I wonder if, by staring long enough into the mirror, the pain might dissolve.

I have always feared how others saw me, but a new fear took root when I realized my body could be perceived in ways I could not control.

As a teenager, I felt alienated from myself, trapped in a container I could not claim. I saw glimpses of beauty, moments of pride, yet most of my young years were spent being drained by the differences between my inner self and my outer self.

I never wished to escape my body. I was just me, and for a time, that was enough. I felt pretty; I was admired, though the recognition was faint, fleeting, almost imperceptible.

Everything shifted as I grew older and my body changed. Dissociation remained, until the day I decided to reshape it. Hours of working out, tracking every macro, measuring every step, each effort felt like a rebellious acts toward a version of perfection I believed I had to attain. And when I lost the weight, I asked myself: now what?

The truth is, I still felt the same. Compliments and warmth, rather than soothing, reminded me that my body would always be the first, and sometimes only way the world would see me.

I understand now that women’s bodies exist under constant surveillance, studied under a microscope that reveals nothing essential. Social media feeds us diet culture; medical advice fires a missile. Capitalism profits from the insecurities it amplifies, selling self-doubt as a commodity. It is suffocating and isolating to conform to a life lived under scrutiny for something so profoundly out of our control.

Hormones, lifestyle, genetics are invisible forces yet it is easy for others to judge what they cannot understand or empathize with. Our very existence as women often feels like a lifelong battle just to be enough.

It is hard to simply be. To choose who we want to be, from the soul within to our body outside.

I am not here to deny that appearance matters. It does, denying that is failing to acknowledge its weight. Privilege is granted to those deemed “pretty.” But you are far more than what the world can see. You are your heart, endlessly giving; your mind, overflowing with ideas. You are irreducibly and brilliantly whole.

The world may try to strip autonomy from your body, but do not let it. You are more than flesh; more than what meets the eye. You are so much more.

Even as I write this, I am still wrestling with it. I write for you, yes, but also for me and the voice I am still learning to inhabit fully.

Still learning. Still almost 22,

Fatima.

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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September 19th, 2025 — Entry 7 — 24 days till 22

When we’re kids, we plan our lives like a script: college by 21, marriage by 23, children by 25.

Those unspoken rules dictate our lives and push us to surrender to the status quo, making us believe that time is on our side and we ought to be grateful to have something to look forward to. In a few years, everything will fall into place.

You don’t expect the script to fall apart, you don’t expect to stumble upon the lines and fail to memorize them no matter how hard you try.

I watched time pass eagerly, like a child waiting for a birthday gift. But the weather changed, flowers wilted, yet I remained the same. It hurt realizing the things I expected to achieve did not happen, and it feels as though my existence has halted, like the clock is ticking and I am simply draining away.

I didn’t think 21 would look like this, and I don’t know what to expect from 22.

Comparison is not only the thief of joy but the criminal who keeps anxiety alive. Watching peers get ahead while I feel stuck doesn’t help either. It feels like seeking truth from someone who has never known honesty, even with themselves, or falling behind when you were never truly ahead to begin with.

No one tells you that struggling with this is normal, because they don’t believe it is. They don’t tell you about the joy you steal from yourself because of the obsession to get ahead, to achieve the dream, to kiss the prince after a pond of frogs.

Instead, they tell you you’re running out of time. That certain things are meant to happen expectantly. That dreams fade and time expires. It’s a crippling truth I’ve heard too much.

These pressures have become a cage I built for myself, where I am the tyrant staring at an invisible clock every single day.

When I finished college I did not know what to expect. Up until this year, age wasn’t something I often acknowledged. It was just a reminder of the heavy weight of the word. The twenties are sold as the decade of getting it together, but I still feel undone.

It seems unforgivable and unbelievable, but life doesn’t follow a linear path, no matter who tells you otherwise. You can detour, take a different route, and still reach your destination without letting the world break you apart.

There are alternate, more rewarding ways to measure life, and they don’t have to do with numbered achievements or a bulging belly. It’s the way you can walk across a crowded room without panicking. It’s letting people trace over your beautiful words. It’s looking into the mirror and bracing yourself because you no longer pick yourself apart so easily.

Success is resilience, not just milestones.

I’ve always believed that time was my enemy because it didn’t heal my wounds and only reminded me of the things I expected from myself. But I’m learning to take it easy, to not let the deadlines wrap themselves around me.

I am not late. I am not early. I am exactly on my own time.

Still standing. Still almost 22,

Fatima.

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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The hardest part of life isn’t what happened, but what never could.

It’s a bleak reality we all partake in, endlessly imagining roads never taken. A casual decision, a fleeting hesitation, an emotional choice, whatever it maybe, we replay these scenarios, wondering which of them altered the ending to something possibly great.

Softly, or all at once, we drift into a life that isn’t ours: a parallel life where we live inside those decisions, pondering how things might have unfolded, for better or worse.

I do this so often that it consumes me. I allow myself, just for a moment, to imagine the otherwise, the otherwise college dream, the otherwise first love, the otherwise perfect day. It’s a reality that catches me midday and a mandatory thought late at night. Harmless at first, until I noticed how it deprived me of this life, how it kept me searching for answers that can never be found. Where I would rather live in the possibilities of the otherwise than accept the reality of what is.

It’s an irrevocable ache, like a ghost hovering above me, constantly reminding me of a life I will never touch, where everything feels safe, everything this life isn’t.

It’s a heavy truth that haunts me in the dark, when I envy what others have, when memories sting like bullet wounds because they remind me of what I could’ve had if only I’d bitten my tongue. Sometimes it lingers quietly; other times it strikes like thunder.

I can’t help but overanalyze the clock, looming with regrets. But no amount of regret rewinds time.

I’ve always been afraid of the idea of missing out on something. What I didn’t realize is that living inside the “could’ve been” is the thing I should have feared most. No matter how good things get, I measure them against an impossible standard. Even when everything seems alright, even perfect, the what-ifs creep in. I project perfection onto moments I will never inhabit.

It steals from me: the little moments that could have brought joy, the ordinary things I fail to savour because I’m reaching for a hypothetical elsewhere. I feel guilty for caring so much, but there is so much in life to miss, so much that tempts us into thinking what we have isn’t enough.

I can’t ignore the hold it has on me, the way it makes me want to vanish, the way I seek solace in a place that does not exist. I can do so much here, but the place I constantly imagine, the one I wrap myself in, I can never actually go to.

These made-up stories are a last resort: a blind man’s dying wish to see the light. An illusion of hope, a way to cope with the ache of absence.

And this is where it truly begins: the sense that something is missing. It becomes impossible to be fulfilled in the present because of a vacant space, a gap born of happenstance that convinces us we can fix everything with one different choice. So we romanticize the decisions we believe could have filled that hole.

What I am learning is that we fight this by living extravagantly, gratefully, truthfully, by inhabiting each moment even when it fails to deliver the exact thing we wanted. No single decision can guarantee complete happiness. To expect that is to strip life of its fullness. To live fully means to feel sadness, anger, grief, joy, all of it in their raw and honest forms.

So every time the what-could’ve-been haunts me, I take a deep breath. I remind myself that I am exactly where I am meant to be, and I owe it to myself to believe that and to live life out loud.

Still in the otherwise, sometimes. Still almost 22.

Fatima.

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Entry 5 – September 13, 2025 → 30 days until 22

There’s a catastrophic part of your life that collapses when you live for others.

I know this too well. People-pleasing feels like devotion, a life dedicated to those you care about, but the truth is, nothing erases you like it. It drowns you until you are a shell of your past self, until there’s nothing left of your essence.

At first, it seems harmless. Your heart softens because the reverberations of your loved ones keep you alive. But slowly, it grows heavier, leaving you harboring resentment for yourself and, eventually, for them. Your voice falters into nothing more than an echo of other people’s desires.

The anatomy of it is cruel because it feels like love, but it isn’t. Not when you’re constantly bending your spine under the weight of expectations. When sitting never feels restful, and standing requires the effort of carrying a load too heavy to bear.

The world is a melting pot; we are surrounded by people. Friendships make us whole, family ties root us in existence, and partners make us feel loved. We believe our lives are driven by them, and to an extent, they are. The joy born from being surrounded by loved ones defeats the loneliness of being alone.

I never doubted being loved, but I knew I wasn’t seen. Knowing I mattered to others was enough, and I clung to it. So when they made jokes I didn’t find funny, I stayed silent. When they created distance between people I cared about, I let it happen. The fear of losing them outweighed everything.

Without them, I didn’t know who I was, like morning mist waiting for the sun to burn it away, or a rainbow only visible when the light hits just right.

I couldn’t say no. Even when every fiber of my being screamed otherwise, when a lump swelled in my throat, I still couldn’t say it. No felt synonymous with endings, and endings felt too precious to risk.

The truth is, people-pleasing grows from fear: fear of rejection, fear of disappointing others, fear of everything falling apart. We so desperately want things to stay the same that we sacrifice ourselves to hold it all together.

After all, what’s a small inconvenience compared to the presence of someone who makes your world feel less gray?

But over time, it traps you in choices where you no longer recognize yourself. It sparks an identity crisis, especially when those people aren’t around anymore. You’re left asking: Who am I when I’m not being useful?

What finally made me pause was realizing how the people I bent backward for never extended the same loyalty to me. It became mentally taxing to watch myself losing pieces of who I was every day, until I was nothing but a vessel of their expectations.

Rediscovering myself was the best decision I’ve made. Living for others is dangerous, you eventually look in the mirror and don’t recognize who’s staring back.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be there for the people you love. But there has to be a fine line. Next time someone requires something of you, pause and ask: Am I saying yes because I love them, or because I’m afraid of losing them?

The people who truly love you will understand. They won’t require you to shapeshift. They’ll celebrate you in all your forms, even when it’s inconvenient. Your life is yours alone to live, and the moment you forget that, you lose sight of who you really are and what truly matters.

Still unlearning, Still almost 22,

Fatima.

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Entry 4 – September 10, 2025 → 33 days until 22

I’ve always wanted love. I’ve always dreamt of being in love. The idea of feeling it closely, deeply, touching it and lingering in its warmth-almost feels impossible. Like a reflection of a life I can see but will never belong to.

Relationships have always been my weakness; I can’t make them last.

The imagination of it is a movie reel, one I desperately want to star in, yet every time the opportunity came, I didn’t know what to do with it.

I don’t trust myself to be in something committed without falling too deep, falling apart and that is the last thing I want.

So I push it away when things get serious. I nitpick when it’s adorned in roses. The idea of being lovelorn has scared me so much that I am incapable of reciprocating affection.

Love seems cringeworthy. Almost insane. Something reserved for everyone but me.

The state of relationships in the 21st century hasn’t helped either. In fact, it only makes it easier. From shallow connections to shallow conversations.

What happened to feeling giddy when your hands touch, and even giddier when your hearts connect? What happened to late-night confessions, when the thought of growing apart felt like a lifelong sorrow?

Falling in love used to feel like a reward for leaving solitude behind. Now it feels like a punishment that widens the hole in your chest.

We once looked into each other with serendipity. Now we wait hours for a text back, looping a single word in our minds until it looses all meaning.

I can’t tell you where mine stems from but sometimes my body feels rigid, my heart like steel, because I am incapable of being in love. When affection surfaces, I want nothing more than for it to stop.

I complain about loneliness, yet there’s nowhere I’d rather be than in my own company.

I wonder if you feel this too. Does your heart race when you see him, only for months to pass and the sight of him bores you? Does your heart feel like a ticking clock, waiting for the moment it stops caring altogether?

I tell myself it’s because I believe in love in its brightest form, instead of the multicolored reality it really is. Maybe the romance books and translated shows that kept me up all night shaped me this way. Still, I can’t find a plausible explanation, because I know what love is.

To me, love is being seen beyond your flaws. Love is someone reaching into your pain and touching it, knowing it too. Love is looking across a room and realizing you are not alone. It is waking up from a twenty one year nightmare.

It’s hard to see love existing beyond the poems I write and the ballads I sing in its name.

There is a silent weight in your chest when you desire love. The way longing hollows your being because you cannot accept it. You try—but when love does its bidding, you will it away as if it never existed.

Maybe it’s fear of vulnerability. But does that even count, when I bare everything in my work? Maybe the question is simpler: do I want love, or only the idea of it?

I stray from it because I can’t understand it, and I can’t accept love as a savior. It feels like it will rob me of my power—of the control over my own story. Love feels like a battle, one I’m unwilling to fight.

It’s hard to believe it’s possible to love without losing parts of myself. The fear of being swallowed whole by another person consumes me. What if everything finally falls into place and I’m no longer the one holding it together?

The truth is: love doesn’t have to be forever. Maybe it doesn’t even have to be epic. It just has to be real. And it has to be felt.

And we can’t keep denying ourselves love just because we are scared. Fear will always exist, but that doesn’t mean love won’t. We can’t expect romantic love to vanish, or for familial love to take its place.

Human experiences aren’t always linear. To run from love is to forgo a chapter of life that we deserve to be apart of, one that will make us feel truly alive and I think that is worth everything.

Still figuring it out. Still almost 22,

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If any of this lingers with you, subscribe here.

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Entry 3 – September 7, 2025 → 36 days until 22

Would it be an exaggeration to say literature saved my life?

A whole part of me would not have survived if I did not have reading as an outlet. As a teenager, I read a lot. I read to silence my thoughts, I read to understand them, I read because I needed to voice them out.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

James Baldwin

The first books that altered my experience and defined what reading could be were John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down and Looking for Alaska. I still think about those books often because that was the first time I saw a female main character who mirrored what I felt, the overwhelming urge to escape whatever this planet was.

Books shaped my perspective. They were a window to another life, a glimpse outside my bubble of existence. I could see, even if I could not relate. With books, I could stroll the streets of Paris and find myself in a tiny room, or watch a broken-hearted immigrant leave his home with a piece of a fig tree in his suitcase.

I will never forget the feeling of reading a book and seeing myself in the characters. It was like looking at a reflection and feeling seen, feeling understood when the world told me otherwise.

At home, reading was a norm. My dad is a big reader, so it was instilled in me from a very young age. I realize now how important it is to read just to make sense of life, of it all. It’s even in the little things, like carrying a book you only read one page of every week.

It’s the romance book that makes you giddy, the thriller that races your heart, the sad fiction that makes you feel like you’re barely surviving. You can’t help but find joy in strolling through bookshops and discovering an anticipated novel, or in scrolling through a story on your phone under a blanket.

That’s why I believe it is so important to read widely, to not constrain yourself to a box, to not limit yourself when it comes to something as vital as reading.

For a while, I used to feel like I had to read “great novels,” books that impacted my life in a profound way, that gave me some kind of awakening. But I realize now it’s far from that. At the end of the day, it’s about reading something that just makes you feel human. Reading reminds you that you are not the only one stumbling through life with fear and confusion. That is its power, it makes you feel seen, like you are not the only one living life for the first time.

But the reason why I frame literature as my comrade is because I can’t talk about books without talking about writing. Writing was just as much a companion. I found a whole essence of joy while penning down my feelings. Although it didn’t necessarily mean I was confronting them, it allowed me to navigate and understand them through a whole new lens.

And yet, for awhile, I lost my love for reading. I felt like reading had failed me, like it was a chore I had to catch up to. It became so hard because life shifted into other things.

Finishing a book became hard, writing even harder. I would revisit my notes app and write a single line in months. What once made the pain numb slipped away when the words stopped healing and became only a reminder of everything I felt.

What helped me navigate that slump was, honestly, a thriller. Just a single page turner pulled me out of the biggest reading drought of my life. So when friends tell me they haven’t read in years, I always tell them to start with a genre they’ve been curious about but never had time to try. For me, that was always a good thriller.

Looking back now, my taste in books has drastically changed and so has my writing. From sappy romances to quieter fiction, my work has always been a reflection of who I am. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to let people read it, because I feel like they’re seeing me through the words. That is the curse of writing, but also its blessing: I can form something completely different, yet still have my tone and my heart woven all over it.

So I want to end this simply: read more, write more, read widely. Read books you think you won’t like, even if you drop them halfway.

That emptiness inside us cannot be justified or easily erased. But if a single line can help you feel understood, then you have found your comrade, your companion, amidst every battle and everything else.

Would it be an exaggeration to say literature saved my life? Probably not. Because in every metaphor that made me feel understood, a part of me I didn’t know existed was slowly healing.

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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September 4th, 2025 — Entry 2 — 39 days till 22

In twenty two years, I’ll probably miss the girl sitting here, writing this — and that’s the sharpest ache of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a strange emotion. It’s powerful yet delicate, familiar yet foreign. It’s difficult to navigate because it isn’t just about missing a place or a person, often it’s a quiet envy, a yearning for something else, something that we can’t quite name.

To be nostalgic is to yearn for an old experience, one that provides warmth precisely because it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s like standing on the outside looking into our own lives, just wishing we could turn back time, even for a millisecond.

But what if it isn’t about the past at all? What if what we miss is a version of ourselves that no longer exists, one that we will never get back?

I think about this often, and I believe it: every single thing we have experienced has altered our perspective and reshaped our being. A person is never the same after grief, nor can they be after heartbreak or a catastrophic loss.

Those emotions carve themselves into us, leaving behind imprints that bury the old selves we once knew. And when you’ve changed, you can’t help but wonder: do I miss the past or do I just miss me?

Sometimes I miss the carefree girl who didn’t yet know how cruel a man could be, or how easily people could leave. I miss when life felt simple, when innocence was fresh and hope abundant. When looking into the future meant walking into a room full of endless possibilities.

That’s the cruel thing about nostalgia: it hurts because it forces us to miss what we’ve already lived. You can’t help but feel barren, with nowhere to go, displaced from a home that once held everything.

And when I catch myself looking back at my old self, it feels distant. Like looking into a shadow from another life, a fading glimpse.

There’s a melancholy in realizing that growth always comes at the expense of something, usually the version of you that once felt stable, comforting. But that’s the trick of memory: it softens the past until it feels safer than it was, a false warmth that keeps us from living fully in the present.

The truth is, the girl I used to be will never return. She can guide me, but she can’t come back. Every day I shift, I change, and still my heart aches for that freedom — a freedom only I can give myself.

I think of the girl who could write a thousand words in one sitting, who journaled daily, who wandered on casual walks. I miss her. But I am not her. I am a new person who has to schedule everything, who plans months ahead only to watch things fall naturally.

It feels impossible to replicate her freedom, because every chapter of her life was still unfinished, the pen was lifted, the page wide open, waiting for a thousand dreams to be written.

Maybe that’s why sometimes I feel like I’m running out of time , like I’ve wasted too many days on things that didn’t matter. I feel sad thinking that by now I should’ve had it more together, should’ve already become someone. Maybe that’s why I can’t tell if I’m nostalgic for the days that felt simpler, or if I’m just longing for the version of me who believed time was infinite.

Time romanticizes the past. It makes us long for who we used to be. A part of me wishes I could age backwards, but deep down I know I don’t want that.

Because here’s what I do know: I can miss her, but still be grateful for me. I can carry her essence without letting her shadow consume me. She is proof of what life has been, and I am proof of what life continues to bring.

Still nostalgic. Still almost 22,

Fatima.

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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I broke into tears when the cashier got my order wrong.

This might seem like a hormonal reaction to a bad month, but that minor reaction made me realize the weight of silence—the way it quietly unfolds into our lives, lurking in as a disease that can’t stop breeding. It’s the quietness of the empty apartment you come home to. The laughter from an inside joke that reminds you you’re on the outside.

Often it sits with you quietly, shaping itself and taking on a life of its own, like an uninvited guest.

I’ve seen loneliness wear many faces but no matter how silent or unbearably loud it gets, nobody really warns you about the emptiness that comes with becoming an adult.

It’s like a crossword puzzle that refuses to solve itself, straining to come together in the gentle words of a lover, yet gaping open like a child. You believe you know so much yet it’s almost as if life is in technicolor, a language you’ve mastered but whose riddles remain hard to understand.

Solitude engulfs you when you move out but you force yourself to be okay. Days rush past faster than the wind. Deadlines stack up, failure becomes real and pressure turns into second nature.

No one tells you that you’ll have to pick yourself up, that you’ll be your only consolation in a dark room. That even the soft words of a friend can’t always reach you when you’re locked away inside yourself.

There’s a strange grief that growing older comes with. No warning, just the quiet loss of things you once loved. Old interests turn into chores, and pieces of yourself slip away until you can barely remember them.

In high school, I was an avid reader—twenty books a month, easy. Now finishing five feels like a victory. Five used to be nothing. Now it’s everything. For three years in a row, I haven’t reached my yearly goal of thirty books. This year will probably be the same. But I’ll still try. And yet, I wonder: have I outgrown the very things that used to define me?

It’s a question I can’t stop asking myself every day.

I see this revealed in relationships too. When we graduate and stop seeing each other as much, the silence between us grows louder, and all we have are old memories that have been reminisced over in too many conversations.

These circumstances force you to confront who you have become, your emotions, your company. And sometimes it feels like facing a stranger.

It means saying goodbye to the version of you who was lighter, who didn’t worry so much.

Even our bodies are markers of the change, when clothes no longer fit and style shifts. All these small instances gather, making you feel less, feel distant, a hostage to both age and loss.

The more days swing by, the more I feel like I’m standing at the edge of a mountain where the only options are the solitude of living in the past, or taking the risk of what the future could offer.

The scariest part of all this is the uncertainty. Not knowing if I love who I’m becoming. Not knowing if I’m making the right choices, or honoring the girl I used to be—the one who always wanted more, and still does.

And maybe that’s the truth: loneliness has shaped me the most, both in peaceful and fearful ways. It’s given me a personality, but also sharpened my introverted edges.

So maybe becoming is just this: letting go of pieces of yourself you aren’t sure of, without knowing what will take their place.

Still becoming. Still almost 22,

Fatima.

These are my diaries before twenty-two, ten essays written every three days of September, as I step closer to my birthday. They’re my way of coming to terms with feeling lost, scared, and realizing how quickly time is slipping through my hands. I can’t stop it; all I can do is live through it. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

Subscribe now