female rebel.

I’m begging you not to see my act as cowardice or weakness. Those who know me, wether since my early teenage years or early adulthood know that I have been a fierce fighter. Although I carried a very sensitive heart, I was a hell of a fighter and had an amazing soul.

I mourned what I could have been, but getting there does not interest me anymore for my soul has grown weary.

To those that loved me the most, I am sorry for letting you down. Please do not perceive my act as selfishness, you out of everyone else know that I tried- through the suffering- but I cannot anymore.

I have been having endless battles but in this round, I am defeated.

I could have been a journalist, an artist, a better daughter, a better friend. However, my inner demons always gripped me by the neck.

I left but I hope that what we shared would remain. I hope that you would remember me as a laughter during a breakdown, an umbrella on a rainy day, a breeze of air on a suffocating hot summer afternoon.

To my dearest B & H,

There is a strange kind of grief that comes from loving someone for who they could be.

Not who they are.
Not what they do.
But the person you believe is somewhere inside them, waiting to emerge.

I loved a man like that.

He gave promises the way the sky gives clouds; constantly, effortlessly, beautifully shaped. I believed in them the way you believe in rain when the clouds gather. I believed in his potential, in the version of him that could love deeply, reflect honestly, grow bravely. I believed that if I stayed patient enough, gentle enough, understanding enough, that version of him would finally arrive.

But potential is a mirage.
And you cannot live off a mirage.

The truth I slowly learned is that he did not want a partner who challenged him. He wanted admiration without friction, devotion without questions, love that never asked him to confront himself. And I was never built to love like that. I asked questions. I held mirrors. I believed that love meant growth.

To him, it meant resistance.

I don’t think he is a bad person. That would almost make things simpler. He is, in many ways, a victim of the world that shaped him, of the ideas he absorbed, of the armor he learned to wear long before I ever met him. Some people learn that love is control. Some learn that vulnerability is weakness. Some learn that being challenged feels like being attacked.

And when those beliefs harden, they become a prison.

But loving someone who lives inside that prison slowly becomes a prison of your own.

So I reshaped myself.
Quietly at first.
Then constantly.

I softened my words. I minimized my needs. I edited my reactions. I convinced myself that if I could just become easier, calmer, more accommodating, more understanding, then maybe I would finally be loved the way I was trying to love.

But the more I reshaped myself, the less of me remained.

Until one day there was nothing left to hold me together.

I broke. Not metaphorically, not poetically. I broke in the most literal way a human being can break. I shattered into pieces so small I could not recognize myself in them anymore.

They took me away, somewhere love is not supposed to take you.

For days everything around me was white: the walls, the lights, the sheets, the silence. A place meant to be calm, sterile, empty. But inside my mind there was only darkness. A hollow so deep it felt bottomless. A pit where my sense of self had once lived.

I remember thinking: How did I disappear so completely?

The answer, I now understand, is simple and terrifying at the same time.

You disappear when you love someone more than you protect yourself.

But I am here now.

Not healed. Not whole. Not even certain of who I am yet.

But I am here.

And slowly, piece by piece, I am finding fragments of the girl I used to be. The one who spoke freely. The one who trusted her instincts. The one who believed love did not require constant self-erasure.

This time, I am rebuilding somewhere he cannot reach.

Not out of anger.
Not out of revenge.

But because the only way to survive loving someone like that…
is to learn how to come back to yourself.

She was taught to postpone her grief, to reschedule it, to toss it under the forced fake smile and tuned voice pitch. Her grief was inconvenient, invalid, too dramatic, too extreme.

She who was fated by the blessing- and the curse of feeling; too much it overwhelms, too deep it cuts, could not condition herself by the expectation of being graceful. Enraged she began to recall her authenticity, unfiltered she started to exist and found again, she wanted to hold space.

Doomed to feel one thing and its opposite, to be forever- or at least for as many tomorrows she decides to wake up- torn in the betweens. Between the highs and lows, lays the deceitful shadow of stability. Stability that is scarcely stable, shaking, brittle and very thin. Easily disrupted, as simply as a snoozed alarm on a what was supposed to be an early morning, a surprising call for which the script was not made, a smile met by a smirk, or a long-time-lost will to live that was found, then lost again.

The grief we postpone comes to grip us, we can hardly speak from the lump in our throat, the grip is too tight we cannot breathe, we cannot speak, you can only see on us an empty stare that reflects the awe of what we feel, or of what we wish we could feel.

While typing on your silly email on the keyboard, you stop. You realize you don’t want to be here, you don’t belong, you are too raw, too fragile to be behind that screen, too unreliable to be a friend, too scarred and damaged to be a lover, too tired to be-at all.

You can suddenly feel your shoulders and ribs folding in together mimicking your heart- folding in on itself.

What is to belong? And where to belong? Is it where performance is not required? Is it when the cracks in your soul are a see-through yet you can truly be seen through? Is it where the heart is mended and the jaw is unclenched and your back is relaxed? She wonders in a way as she will never know.

She is not interested to know as she will not hang around longer for the answer to reveal itself. A passager she is, a wanderess she has always been.

Poetry in tragedy, romanticism from the house of despair is what she writes as she is laying, a noisy fan in the background and a kaleidoscope of emotions within that vessel- so called body of hers.

Beauty in sadness, is how she was hexed. To only find refuge in writing, only when she is uncertain about a tomorrow the words fall out, uncalled for, unthought of.

The final act of love is to swallow, the final act of feeling is sinking, but sinking where if you weren’t found floating to begin with?

The final act of life is death, and between the dualities we find the spiral, the symbol of life, of constantly becoming.

There comes a point when silence is no longer a surrender, but a sanctuary.

When protecting one’s peace means walking away , not out of bitterness, but out of necessity.

Some people learn, slowly and painfully, that loyalty can be a trap. That pleasing others, especially at the cost of the self, isn’t love, it’s survival in disguise. For years, the pattern might look like self-erasure. Putting others first. Making oneself smaller, quieter, softer, until there’s almost nothing left.

But then something shifts.

It starts quietly.

A refusal. A boundary. A pause.

The decision is not always loud. Sometimes, it’s as gentle as choosing not to explain anymore. As firm as deciding not to return to a place where one’s truth is constantly dismissed.

This kind of reclamation isn’t always dramatic. But it’s radical.

It means recognizing when love begins to look like control.

When protection begins to feel like suffocation.

When affection is no longer aligned with growth.

And for those who carry the weight of inherited wounds, those who’ve watched cycles repeat across generations, choosing peace becomes a legacy in itself. A quiet rebellion. A promise to end what was never meant to be passed on.

They may not speak of it directly.

There’s no need to name names.

The story, after all, isn’t about who failed to understand,

but about the ones who finally did.