Notes On Love- Letter 11

Empathy is a strange word.

We praise it.

We aspire to wrap ourselves in it. We wear it like a badge of honor, a proof that we are virtuous .

But what does it truly mean?

At its core, empathy is the ability to step into someone’s reality and feel with them. It is the discipline of quieting your own ego long enough to stay and say, I see you.

You enter their world with a careful lens. You soften your reactions. You choose understanding over accusation. When enveloped in empathy, your impulses slow. Judgment loosens its grip. You rise just enough above the moment to see the full landscape, the fear beneath the anger, the grief beneath the silence.

You become fluent in emotions that are not yours. And somehow, that fluency feels natural.

For most, it comes easily, like second nature. You justify the cold shoulder. You explain the silent treatment. It hurts everywhere, it hurts too much, and yet you defend their bad days. You tell yourself over and over that they are hurting, even as it slowly kills you. Even as you fall apart trying to understand their language.

You recognize them. But when it is you, the story changes. The tone grows harsh. Compassion becomes interrogation. Your pain turns into judgment, and your feelings are rewritten into flaws.

Suddenly your exhaustion becomes laziness, your sadness is ingratitude and your longing is weakness.

This is empathy’s cruel contradiction and its strange paradox.

A trait so beautiful becomes distorted when it only flows into only one direction.

Empathy feels almost impossible to misuse, yet it has two edges. If you cannot lean on one, you collapse into the other.

It allows you to intellectualize the feelings of others, to humanize them, to forgive them. But when those same emotions rise in you, you moralize them. You scrutinize your own pain. You judge your own desire. You call what is natural in you a flaw.

You reproach yourself in ways you could never do to others.

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Somewhere along the way, you learned that you would only be held, loved if you were understanding. That being the easy going friend meant you wouldn’t be replaced.

So you chose everyone else.

I have sacrificed myself for hands that could never hold me. I stayed small to preserve peace. I ignored my intuition. I swallowed instincts that whispered this hurts because I believed empathy was my shield, that if I endured enough, I would not lose anyone.

But empathy is not protection when it excludes you.

Instead, it becomes your executioner.

I held myself to standards I would never impose on another human being.

Where I called myself ungrateful for wanting more,
I called others ambitious.

Where I saw weakness in my own hope,
I admired courage in theirs.

Where I believed I was “too sensitive,”
I told others their emotions were valid.

I called it compassion.

But I was never compassionate with myself.

The truth is uncomfortable but sometimes empathy is not only kindness. Sometimes it is fear. Fear that if you need too much, you will be left. Fear that if you stop understanding everyone else, no one will understand you.

So you become the stable one.

And quietly, you become the loneliest one.

Because when you sit in a room full of people you have comforted, you still feel unknown, because you have never allowed your own pain to be felt.

Empathy was never meant to bypass you.

It was never meant to be a weapon against yourself.

The turning point is not abandoning empathy. It is reclaiming it. It is allowing imperfection and disappointment without cross-examining it.

Sit with your mistakes without immediately building a case against yourself. Listen to your emotions without labeling them flaws. Let understanding be a compass, not a courtroom.

You do not lack compassion.

You lack permission to extend it to yourself .

You have empathy for everyone.

It is time you believe you deserve it too.

With Love Always,

Fatima.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Notes On Love- Letter 10

Some relationships don’t end.
They thin out.

Slowly, unjustly.

There is a reason we perceive death as the most violent act. It is weakening to watch our soul slip slowly from our bodies, knowing we cannot save it. Likewise, it is unjust to watch a relationship falter. Long conversations turn into one-word answers. Soulmates become strangers, and the person who once knew everything now walks around knowing barely anything, yet somehow knowing it all at once.

Days turn into months. Months fade into years. And you realise you haven’t spoken for a very long time. The frost has melted, but the sun never came. All the love you once held for each other quietly decayed.

Nothing dramatic happened, and that’s the tragedy of it.

I have failed at loving because I have allowed discomfort to govern me. I let it slit my throat, and I called it drifting apart.

My voice is like a cloud when I need it most. It gathers, heavy and grey, and refuses to rain. Hard conversations feel like an ocean I am told is safe, but I still cannot convince myself dip my feet into.

Avoidance never arrives alone. Drifting apart never just comes; it is built, ignited. It follows something small. An argument, a slight or a big one, a sentence that landed wrong, a tone that bruises more than it should.

I believed that if enough days passed, we would forget the words. But some words are violent when spoken in anger. They carve themselves into you. They become things you cannot repeat without reopening something fragile.

I couldn’t repeat them, so I stayed quiet.
Despite the countless times the words were on the tip of my tongue, I stayed meek.

Sooner than I imagined, our relationship became unfamiliar. And I found myself mourning someone who had not left, but was leaving right in front of me.

Looking back, I was not brave. But I was also not trusting. To say that hurt me is an act of trust. It binds you to someone. It requires you to believe they will not punish your honesty or weaponise your softness, that they will stay.

If a relationship cannot hold those words, what exactly is it holding?

We avoid people because we are afraid that confrontation will make us unlovable.

But avoidance is not terrorising, and it kills closeness without spectacle.

The moment you can look at someone and know you can argue, correct, confess, and they will not retreat, that is communion. That is your person.

The relationships that survive uncomfortable conversations are the ones worth the mess.

The people who stay through honesty are the ones who stay.

If you love them, speak.
If you are hurt, say it.
If you want them to remain, risk it.

Don’t avoid them.

With Love Always,

Fatima

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Notes On Love- Letter 9

A common thing people often say is “Be your own soulmate” and I have always found that insensitive.

It isn’t specifically cruel or brash but it is dismissive, like a slammed door in the face. It carries an expectation that you should tend to your fears alone. That you should dress your own wounds with plastered hands, and give yourself warmth from your cold feet.

They are not comforting lullabies. They are condescending tones in their softness because they scorn you for needing, and they frame longing as a flaw. They treat desire for companionship as a weakness fallen into rather than a truth to honor.

When I hear them, and I hear them often. I feel like I am being told that I must be enough for myself in every way and I must make do with whatever I gain, without ever reaching a leap of faith of something or someone beyond me.

It’s catastrophic. It’s unfair.

But beneath that overcorrection lies a truth I have come to realize: no love is substitute for another.

You can have the devotion of family, be so deeply, eternally, unconditionally loved and still feel an overwhelming ache bring you to your knees. Because deep down, you still want someone you can call on a whim, someone to tell every dilemma to before you have even organized your thoughts.

You relish at the thought of whispering to another soul sweet nothings. Someone who is not obliged to love you, but does, freely, willingly, without falling or hesitation.

Likewise, you can have the eternal affection of that lover, his hand resting in your palm, his hoarse voice softened by care, and still feel something missing.

What is missing is the coax of a friend. Because romantic love is not the same as the affiliating understanding of a true friend who listens without possession. A friend who knows your depth. Who recognizes your presence without the weight of expectation.

The tree of love doesn’t collapse into one form because its branches, multiplies and meets in different ways.

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bell hooks wrote that love is a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility. By that definition, love demands relationship. It demands perspective. It demands the presence of another consciousness.

It does not thrive in isolation.

We need these branches from the different loves in our life. They grow different. They may arrive unexpectedly. But when they are healthy, they feel expansive.

All the different loves in our lives transcends one another. To expect one to carry the weight of all is foolish. It is a failed design. It brews quiet chaos. It turns affection into pressure and longing into shame. It leads to a river where the soul will find no rest.

I have always known this. But deep down, I did not want it to be true. I believed, with all in me, that my self confidence was airtight. It would hold me, but my soul needs a hand. Souls require companionship. It needs witnesses.

The world thrives on that. Maybe that is why love is the centerfold of the universe. Everything we do, we do it to be just loved a little more.

We attain success for the love of recognition.
We cultivate confidence for the love of ourselves.
We pursue happiness for the love of a future we hope more than anything will ground us safely.

But there is more. There has always been more. And it does not only need to come from us.

The most gracious thing about love is that it comes from places we could never build alone. It arrives in quick happenstance. It softens what self-sufficiency hardens. It fills spaces we did not know required another presence.

Self-love steadies you. It teaches you what you deserve. It protects you from accepting less.

But it was never meant to replace being seen.
It was never meant to replace being chosen.
It was never meant to replace being held.

No love replaces another.

They exist side by side.
They nourish different parts of us.
And we are allowed to want them all.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Notes on Love-Letter 8

The solitude that arrives after something profound happens is particular. It is a bee sting, the pain fades but the ink remains, and the skin doesn’t forget.

I felt it when I did something dissonant and had no one to call, or I suddenly became very grateful and I couldn’t implore anyone. It is a magnitude of things but it is the distance of missing someone that paved a way and there was no knife to cut through it.

My friendships that were once lifelines have turned into references and the memories we bring up in passing. Our inside jokes are preserved left overs, they have lost their warmth. We talk about who we were more than who we are because we have barely anything in common anymore. The loneliness bridges even deeper when a conversation is shared and you hear “I thought I told you” but you hadn’t spoken in months.

It was then I realized that the distance had lodged itself in so much vastness that we didn’t exist in each other’s reality anymore.

It’s the bitter sweetness of growing up.

You become accustomed to your own orbit. Your own journey of truth. You turn into the low maintenance friend, the one who checks up once a month and calls it love. You become the one remembered but forgotten. No longer known. No longer revered.

We repeat the myth like our scripture. “We don’t need to talk to stay close” “We don’t need to speak every day to know we care, sometimes knowing you exist is enough”

I want to believe that. I want to believe it is enough but I don’t, not when I am drowning and begging for the story change. For time to do its bidding. I want the change, without knowing what change I need. I yearn for our high school closeness, when intimacy was excessive, unremarkable, unrestrained, when it was every day.

Our world revolts against it, but I want to grow tired of someone. I want to be sick of someone. I want the kind of friendship where we repeat stories.

Sometimes, often, I ask loved ones things they have told me before, because I want to hear them repeat it, like I want to relive the excitement or even just hear the certainty in their tones.

I miss that and I want that because if I don’t have that, what constitutes our closeness?

Low maintenance relationships are adorned in maturity. Independence. Respect. But it doesn’t hold when you are unraveling. It doesn’t notice when your voice breaks. It doesn’t ask twice.

There is loneliness in looking at a friend’s photo and feeling like you’re standing outside their life. You could call. Of course you could, but you do not feel entitled to.

And that is cost of growth, standing on the outside of every single relationship until you surrender to a looming threat.

The contrast is rabid but could change if you become the friend who tries. You call when it’s inconvenient. You ask them to repeat the story, again and again, just to see the sparkle in their eyes when they tell it. Because the companionship that sets souls on fire is not low maintenance, it is deliberate presence.

Life will always get in the way. But we choose to protect our closeness, we fight for it.

I no longer want absence mistaken for maturity.
I no longer want distance renamed as strength.

I want the relationships that are intertwined.

I want to be so woven into someone’s life that we grow tired of each other. That we get sick of each other to the point we ignore phone calls, just to call back not seconds later.

Because to me, that is the most intimate act.

And I am no longer afraid to want it.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

Notes On Love- Letter 7

I have been crueler to myself than anyone has ever been to me. The inner voice in my head is my enemy but it is also a companion. So I hold on to it, I heed it’s warnings and judgement, not in anger, or discipline, but in habits. That is how this pit was built. In fear and confusion. Now it is so deep, that I cannot climb out, even on my hands and knees.

I often realize that life is different when you hate yourself. It moves faster, like the clock is spinning and you are constantly trying so hard to catch up with it. The inner voice that calls you to loathing surrenders you to a slow death. You are living in atonement, begging for mercy, constantly.

All the words that kept you up at night. Once spoken by a teacher, a parent, a friend, are recycled in the dark. In the same language but by a different voice.

You repeat those phrases like doctrine. You shame yourself in silence. You tell yourself you are undeserving, until the air grows stale and you almost believe it, those unruly words are despicable until they suffocate you into becoming someone else.

But you aren’t someone else, you are still you. You are only someone you can’t stand to be.

I would sit with myself and I would want to escape my own company. I measured my worth against approval and conditional love, calling it reflection when it was really punishment. I told myself I was rewriting my story but regret only wrote me further away from myself, carving my soul with the marker of distance. Every comparison felt like it had reason because I justified its existence.

The pit of self loathing is dark, and it is trained. No one falls into it by accident. I learned it slowly. When I was taught to shrink away from interests, from the joy that grounded me, the things that made me feel most alive. I learned to introduce myself through apology and I have never been able to forget that. I learned to assume others saw me exactly as I fear I am. I learned to brace for loss instead of reaching for closeness. Now the pit feels familiar. Its gravel. Its dirt. It’s quiet wrath.

Self-loathing is not something I can simply outrun, it stays clenched between my fists. I sit with its regret, confront it, catalogue every part of myself I want to repair. Too often, I confuse accountability with cruelty, atonement with self-condemnation.

But I want to turn the gravel outwards.

I want to sit with the regret until it numbs me.

Sit with the regret, sit with the anger, the anger that shaped me, the hatred that made me cry into dust.

Self-loathing begins the first time you are criticized.

But I believe that when you sit with the fear, when you listen to the taunting voice, and focus on its tone so intently, it can drown out the potential buried deep inside.

And still, you crawl out of it, even on your bare knees.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Notes On Love- Letter 6

I have never struggled with words, only with saying them when someone else is listening.

In my head, where the world doesn’t exist, I am articulate, persuasive and precise. My thoughts are layered and alive, sentences that evoke meaning and emotion, sentences that form themselves even faster than I ever write them down.

Often, I force myself to scribble them in their incorrect grammar and illegible text. But when I try to speak them out loud, they collapse. They turn to stone and harden my spirit. What once felt expansive and profound becomes small. What felt interesting turns dull.

I hate that feeling— when so much sits on the tip of your tongue, when your mind is crowded with meaning and memories, and what finally comes out sounds like nothing.

Not small but nothing. Because, it is grain compared to the sandstorm of thoughts that dust my mind. I often feel like I have something profound to add, something worth saying but then I fail to say it. There is an urge in me to be incredibly well spoken within me and it comes from love. Love for the life I want to live. Love for the stories I want to tell. But every time, I cannot speak, it feels like I dim that love a little more.

This— this— this is costing me pieces of my life. It is thrashing me to a smaller existence and I refuse to accept that. That is why I speak more on social media. Why I go to book clubs and force myself to talk. Even when the disappointment comes afterward. Even when my voice shakes while I explain why a book mattered to me. Even when defending my thoughts feels like standing unarmed in public. Because staying silent is costing more than the gut wrenching experience of speaking.

Courage, for me, sounds like a shaking voice.

Arguing is worse. Debate feels like fire on my skin. Every time I get close, I burn. It feels like the flames erase me and the smoke carries my voice away. I avoid it because conflict feels like it will cost me all I know, but straying from it is costing me my voice. And I still don’t know which loss is greater.

I used to believe that good speakers were born this way. A part of me still believes that but I also now see a lot of it comes from practice, from pretending. I see myself making strides. Slowly. I want to build a house for uncomfortable conversations. I want to relish in the moment instead of escaping it. I want to speak without contemplating, without waiting. I want to speak before the perfect sentence forms.

The pave is not graceful. It promises awkwardness and exposure but practice is also the only road where silence and sound can cross.

When I imagine myself five years from now, I see someone who takes up space. Someone who speaks in rooms she once thought she did not belong in. Someone whose voice arrives before apology does.

You do not become that person by waiting for fear to disappear.

You become her by going through it.

Do it scared.
Do it anyway.
Say it before it disappears.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Notes On Love- Letter 6

The epitome of life has always been to loved and be loved in return. The world crowns it as utmost perfection, the one thing we are expected to strive for even knowing fully that love is special because of its rarity. I once believed true love didn’t exist, a part of me still does, and the reason for that is because I fear the one thing that makes real, being truly seen.

I read somewhere that to be loved is like feeling the sun from both sides. And I think, how often, all the love I’ve ever felt was scorching. The sun wasn’t shining, it was trapping me with its heat. The sweat trickled me and the stench eat me up alive, I wanted to move on but I couldn’t because it felt like gnashing at rotten fruit. Despite it’s filth, when hungry, you would relish in its bitterness.

It’s easy to love, easy to bask in warmth. But it’s another thing entirely to feel loved, to agree to be loved.

Vulnerability has always made me run. To be vulnerable is to show someone yourself, to reveal your flaws knowing they could turn around and tear apart all you’ve built. The pressure, the constant reminder that love could end as quickly as it begins—this is reason enough to hide.

And so, I have. I’ve never truly allowed myself to be seen. And because of that, I have barely known love. The love I’ve felt has only ever scratched the surface. It’s blind, expecting fragments to fill a whole. A love like that is better left in isolation than expected to nourish.

It’s love that is yelled into an empty expanse, love that exists but never touches the one being loved, because I didn’t exist there.

Being seen is the penalty for being loved. To truly be, you have to wear yourself down. You have to fight the parts of yourself that hide, that cower in shadows. As long as you hide, as long as you live in the rage of hiding, you will never be free. And you will never be loved.

But that is the incomprehensible paradox: to be loved is to exist fully, to step into the sun even when it burns. To be seen is not weakness, it is courage. And maybe, maybe, it is only then that love finds you in return.

I don’t believe in truly being seen, I think a part of us will always hide because we are ashamed of our flaws, but being seen isn’t about perfection. It’s about existing fully, trusting someone will stay long enough to notice the things that make you meek, to notice the depth beyond the surface. Love only finds those willing to reveal themselves, and that is its penalty.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Letter 6

There are some things that, no matter how hard we try, we never forget.

They sink into us like cold sleet on a winter day, like fingers stiff with frostbite, unable to move, unable to let go. The things we never get over are often disguised as ordinary losses, faded relationships: friendships that ended without any closure, people we outgrew but still miss in quiet moments. These things are not loud enough to ruin us but sharp enough to stay.

Apologies sit stained at the tip of our tongue. We bite them back until we taste blood, but never gather the courage to say them out loud.

I tell myself that closure is rare, and I try to learn how to live without it. Still, a part of me remains standing on that pavement of despair, waiting for an extended arm that never arrives.

I replay the unfinished goodbyes. The almosts. The potential that never learned to exist. The confident child I couldn’t become. The dream I still hold onto long after it abandoned me.

Some scars do not fade; they simply learn how to breathe with us.

The things I never got over are neither big nor small, because memory chooses strangely. Some moments are blurred, almost erased, beyond recognition, yet the feelings remain exact. And I wonder whether “moving on” is a myth we tell each other to survive, because some days I forget everything and cannot understand why it mattered so much. Other days, it is all I can think about.

I don’t believe we get over anything. I believe we learn to live around it.

We grow our lives wide enough to hold the ache. We lean against it when we are tired. We tend to its garden. But we never fully leave the house we still dream about, the version of ourselves. The selves that stayed behind. The selves one that could not survive. Some scars are not meant to disappear; they are meant to be carried.

There are things we never get over because, in the end, they become part of who we are.

Love always,

Fatima

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Notes on Love - Letter 5

Poetry doesn’t just happen. It begins with attention. It begins with the silent understanding that nothing in this world is what it first appears to be. Poetry is sacred because it’s about perception. Every stanza of it reflects the ways we shift when we slow down, and we love it because it is ours— our gaze writes every line.

The world is an array of colours. It is never just black and white. It is contrast layered over contrast, feeling held beside feeling.

I was never able to see that. I only learned this when I stopped staring and started noticing. When I slowed down enough to hear the morning birds, and the shadows that rest effortlessly on the floor.

Some seasons carry days that feel colourless. We go through life on standby, waiting for something to happen, for the big thing that will make our world extraordinary. We watch the grey skies that mean both nothing and everything at once, praying for a change in time.

I have lived through those days. I have covered myself in the rooms that felt like voids and afternoons that lacked sunlight. I’ve held on to the inner winter even when there was nothing left to grip. You know those days, you memorise their craft, and you memorise the clock, but time passes, and nothing lands.

In the season of starless nights, I unwillingly held on to one thing. Hope. I held on to what I always found strange and fragile. I ridiculed it, but the moment I turned soft for survival, hope turned out to be the poem itself. It is the line that keeps going past the page when the stanza feels finished. It is the compass that declines to offer directions and the anchor that refuses to loosen.

Hope is never gentle, at least not in the way we think. It wounds you with longing and steadies you with direction in the same breath. It can make you courageous or painfully tender, sometimes both at once.

Hope saves, but it also asks something of you. Because hope is a form of love, and love demands attention.

When you begin to pay attention, your days change shape. You become steadier. Less shaken by every passing glance. You start to build rituals. Casual, repeatable acts, things like going on walks and notes on margins begin to repeat themselves, and when they turn into routines, they find their rhythm, and the rhythm becomes meaning.

You start to realise that you are not waiting to live, because you are already living in the early versions of your dreams. In unfinished drafts and misunderstood scribbles. And no matter how it looks, it is beautiful to live inside potential, rather than postponement.

There is literature hidden under our pillows and scripture tucked beneath our desks, but we only find it when we learn to see beauty in the basic mundanity of our lives. The small things are not epic. They are the core. Our lives depend on noticing them.

Because in hindsight, it is the ordinary days that become sacred and extraordinary.

Not the announcements. Not the milestones. But the afternoons and the repeated gestures.

Frame your days like a film reel. Take more photographs, even of simple things. Write fragments down. Bake slowly. Sit by a window. Try something new without needing it to become impressive. Even rest has purpose: lying in bed, wrapped in warmth, watching a good film, letting your mind breathe.

Some of my happiest seasons looked unremarkable from the outside. They were built from good days, not big ones.

The poems in our lives are not hidden; they are quiet. They appear when we live truthfully enough to notice them.

Tonight, notice one small moment and keep it. Write it down. That is where the poetry begins.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Notes on Love - Letter 4

The law of attraction states that when you meet someone for the first time, your energies collide with each other.

It’s a tale as old as time. Two people meet, and the chemistry is evident. They both feel treasured. Wanted, needed even. Those receding moments after their encounter feel electric, intimate, almost sacred. It’s recognition beyond reason, something that just happens by fate, and that’s what makes it even more special. It’s a gift everyone deserves, but not everyone gets to experience.

The thin line between self-perception and the law of attraction is a fragile one. Our insecurities shape our desires more than we like to admit. I often wonder the scale of low self-worth, and its ability to feed the longing to feel both wanted and unwanted romantically. It’s messy. It’s something that hurts. It’s a feeling that is stamped on our mind like postage, but we barely confront it, almost like our guts can’t fathom looking at its face, that any moment it would spill all it eats.

We yearn for someone to stare at us and instantly think, “You are the most beautiful thing that has ever been created”, but we also need to be seen beyond the surface. We want to be heard and thought of as intelligent minds and pure hearts. We want to be acknowledged beyond vanity because we know we are more than that. And this is where the question comes: Do I have to be pretty to be loved? To be held, to be cherished? Do I have to be all those things to be admired from across the room, like I’m the only one present?

Attraction is a double-edged sword. It is as violating as it is pure. There is beauty in the sentient realisation that someone is looking at you. It is the most intimate act. Everyone is looking at you and seeing something different, a different novel by a brand new author. Perhaps that is why we say, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But when your self-worth is dim, it’s easy to assume that all they see is inadequacy, all the things you are afraid of, and all the parts of you that are hidden.

Yet the truth is liberating. You do not have to be conventionally attractive to be loved. A person who only values you for your looks is not someone to be bothered with; they only offer conditional love, and that is not love. It is possession. Real attraction honours the hand you cover when you laugh. It cares about your ticks and your selflessness. It allows you to exist fully without feeling caged beneath anyone’s gaze.

The world tries to convince us that appearances define worth, and it partly succeeds by amplifying a system where beauty is currency. But the law of attraction works differently; real attraction responds to authenticity. Do you have to be pretty loved? Absolutely not, because true love is what we should aim for, and you attract that when you steer clear of what the world expects from you and become your genuine self.

Being seen is not about being possessed. It’s about recognition, connecting, feeling wanted, while remaining whole, and that is the love we inherently deserve.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

Notes on Love - Letter 3

We grew up in the same shattered building called a house. We called it our home. We preserved the same memory. And yet, some children carry these memories of being young differently. Some are changed forever, while others are unscathed.

A violative presence stood over our childhood. It guarded our hearts and dictated where we were not allowed to go. Within its home, we learned the same silence. We lived in it. We forced ourselves to stay within its bounds.

I stayed there.

In some ways, I am still there. But, you ran, and somehow the silence followed me home but not you.

Growing older is a landscape of contrasts, light and shadows are intertwined, side by side. There is joy, laughter, sand play dates that seemed infinite. And there are nights when words slip through the walls and lodge permanently in memory, the uncanny moments replay over and over again, like clockwork. Those memories never pass. They stay, as a reminder and as a taunt.

No childhood is experienced the same way twice. No sibling has the same childhood. No daughter has the same mother.. The same home can create entirely different worlds inside two minds. The exact canvas ought to be painted across childhood, but everyone’s experience will differ. The ‘same’ childhood is a myth, siblings in the same house hold on to completely different memories.

When I was younger, I used to go through this pasture of aches and terrors. In this pasture, I was forced to wake up and go to a birthday party I didn’t want. I hated being around others, and I often felt that seep into me like a wound. I spoke to my sister about it, and she remembers the situation entirely differently. For her it was bright and green. She loved it. She loved being on the outside. She admired the united front the house presented. It wasn’t tears and sadness for her, but an anchor.

We lived the same day but carry completely different memories. How do some children survive seemingly unscathed while others carry on the weight for life?

Our brains cling onto something — a haven that will eventually becomes a guidepost. To survive, one child becomes an achiever while another becomes invisible, one is careful while another becomes what they fear the most. Small things, tiny spectacles can change outcomes more than we ever admit.

But what if our personalities are just survival tactics that overstay their welcome?

Those wounds are palpable. A minor sting can bring the past rushing back, like walking through that childhood pasture again. Fear feels immediate. Our body always remembers even if we ache to forget.

What if it doesn’t fully end? What if life sometimes becomes a repetition of what seems cured? What if witnessing someone who appears stable create a pool of envy that asks us to drown in comparison?

That envy is not cruel but confused. It has a life of its own. But maybe being “unscathed” is not something to celebrate or resent. It’s in between. Maybe it simply marks a different route through the same pasture.

Progress is uneven and healing is personal. Children leave the same childhood carrying maps entirely different from one another, and neither of that is wrong.

Have you ever wondered what shaped your own childhood resilience?

I believe this: We are not shaped only by what happened to us, but by what we reached for when it did.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Notes on Love - Letter 2

Before love learned how to hurt, it learned to be holy. It was something that I handled gently, because it was sacred.

The first love I ever met wore morning glory and sunlight. It soaked in affection that was so pure, it quieted the guilt circling the chest. That familiar guilt- the one that made me feel like I was never enough, never believed that I had enough to offer to give, and to still see him stay. But by quick happenstance, love arrived suddenly. It was a fragile bond that caught me by surprise, like it was so fated and so incredibly precious that it had to be forever.

That girl who loved was different from the girl who came prior. That girl loved wholly, with every unguarded, freighted part of her heart. She loved despite clenched fists and a hitched breath. She believed heartbreak belonged to other people, and she let herself memorize his mannerisms like scripture—the pause before he spoke, the tenderness, the tenderness when he pat or on her back with his calloused hands, his hands that were soft when they held her, and his laughter that bent at the end. She loved, and bathed in affection , never believing she would become love lorn.

Our intimacy was so rigid that it seemed capable of saving a saint from temptation.

It was in those moments that we lived fully, because we never believed in goodbye. True love before loss never expects its ending. It never predicts a decline or a crash. Because somewhere, somehow, we had wrapped ourselves in the warmth of denial, not realizing it’s thin crack of certainty.

When goodbye arrives, time stalls, but memory does not. It loops endlessly as if recalling the gestures, tones and unfinished sentences will alter the last conversation. It takes time. Days. Then longer days. You release unexpressed apologies and the words that never found its meaning. You move forward.

But not entirely.

A version of you will remain seated across that table, sipping the last cup of tea. Still stuck, still watching him leave. You reprimand the purity of your love, and realize its perfection existed only in your eyes.

When we love for the first time, we love with stars in our eyes, because there is so much faith that is tight around the ribs like armor. After starvation, even ordinary fruit tastes divine. You cannot imagine sweetness turning bitter. You cannot imagine abundance becoming something rotten, something you are entailed to refuse.

There are a thousand ways people leave heartbreak. Some leave quietly, keeping a sealed room in their heart and the key hidden in their pocket. They tend to it with private tenderness and occasionally, shame. Some leave in flames. Some leave in silence so complete it resembles indifference. But no matter how you walk away, a question never stops echoing.

How did something that once breathed life into us become only a cadaver, a shadow where air was lucid and warmth used to live?

We often sit with these questions and watch them turn into regrets but love before loss is not naive, it is credence. It is not an abomination but true faith given freely without calculation. Nothing about is wasted. Not the purity. Not the softness. Not the hunger. Even if it was brief and instant, it was true while it lived. And in reality, however brief, it is marked and no absence or memory can erase its impact. Somewhere within us, that tenderness still exists, untouched and unaltered by endings.

With, love always,

Fatima.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. To the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

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Notes on Love - Letter 1

We all had that aunt who seemed to have it all together.

The one who wore unique outfits that resembled her personality, with the brightest smile etched on her face and an effortless laugh, followed. She arrived at gatherings as a film reel, a trailer of adulthood. She was magnificent, interesting, alive. She was who we imagined becoming. Solid proof that life after adolescence would finally open into something cinematic.

When we were young, we believed our twenties would arrive like a montage, loud music erupting, doors opening, with a promise of relationships that were immersive, rigid and full of purpose.

That promise kept us going; it was what we held on to through the complications of becoming.

But slowly, that changed; it wasn’t didactic but instant. The age we desperately anticipated ran clarity from our hearts and faded all our excitement, because what once felt like a montage is really just a bleak waiting room. We sit with our ticket clutched between our palms, watching other people get called forward, and silently wondering when it will be our turn to become the “cool aunt.”

I always believed my twenties would be my best years. It was the movies and the reflection that everyone older seemed happier. I now realise I was fooled because here I am, barely two years in, and I’m barely grasping the ropes. I’m unable to learn how to hold my best years together without falling apart.

It was so easy to dream about its purpose, but it’s much harder to wake up and build through it.

My twenties, so far, are full of cancelled plans and quiet afternoons. It’s restlessness and forcefully embracing solitude. I’m learning how to walk through emotions without witnesses. I’m navigating the reality that I will need a shoulder, and I will find none available.

Sometimes, it feels like watching my own life through glass. I’m slightly behind it but slightly outside it. I feel close enough to breathe within it, but suffocated that all I dream of is running because I’m unsure if I’m living it the way I was meant to.

There is no straight path, just detours and delays. It’s not roaring, it’s constantly recalculating, wondering when the numbers will hit an accurate target.

No one tells you that one of the reasons for your lonely twenties is noticing how agape life feels. Friendships don’t explode; they drift. Conversations shrink into shared memories because nothing new overlaps anymore. You quickly learn that proximity was never the same as connection and that history is not testament to forever.

The roaring twenties, we were sold, the parties, the music, the constant joy, those were built on companionship. But real twenties often unfold in solitude. Not emptiness, but quiet solitude. It is a decade where you meet people, lose people, and slowly, unexpectedly, meet yourself.

It’s rehearsing for interviews that don’t call back. It’s comparing timelines you know you shouldn’t measure yourself against. It’s watching invisible clocks tick and pretending you’re not listening. It’s reinventing yourself in small, uncelebrated ways.

Not roaring through it but recalculating slowly.

Here’s the part I’m willing to tolerate, understand, and wait through.

Maybe this isn’t a failure. Maybe it’s formation. Maybe your twenties are the decade you discover who you are without an audience. When the room is quiet enough to hear your own thoughts, where you stop performing adulthood and live with it, live with the regret and the shame, all at once, at the same time.

I don’t want to outrun this solitude. I want to sit inside it and understand its shape. I want to learn its corners and edges. I want to understand what it’s trying to teach me. I want it to remind me that I am here, unfinished, becoming, alive, with more to live for ahead than to run from.

With love, always,

Fatima.

These are my Notes on Love, a February letter series, written every two days of the month. It is addressed to the versions of ourselves we carry, the selves we’ve outgrown, the lessons we’re learning to unlearn, and the many ways we make room for love in our lives. If any of this lingers with you, please subscribe.

Subscribe now