Daephoros

Death, well not exactly. The closest thing to death, I believe, is loneliness. 

As a child, for most of us anyway, you’re never really alone. There’s the hovering mother who worries, the father trying to figure you out, teachers with their rules, friends with their noise, family filling in the blanks. Then, suddenly, they thin out. The friendships you spent years tending turn out to be convenient more than true, your parents are oddly relieved you’re out of the house, and there you are. Quiet. Unsupervised. Replaceable.

You pick yourself up. You swallow the feeling. You claw your way through university, then into a job, and there it is again—like a draft through a closed window. You overestimated your place in someone’s life, and you’re single again. You complain to your friends; they say “love yourself” and “the right person will come along,” but they don’t know you. They don’t even like you, not really. Not that you can blame them. You don’t like you either.

Loneliness is hard to explain, but I’ll try. Imagine one day you decide to hike alone. You pack the essentials, lace your shoes, tell yourself you’ll be fine. Halfway up, it isn’t bad at all. You even feel proud. You reach for your water and find a hole in your pack—the bottle is gone. Fine. You keep moving. Then the ground gives. Not all at once, not dramatic—just enough to trap your ankles, then your calves. Mud, sand, something that didn’t look dangerous until it decided to be. Your phone is in the bag you can’t reach. You call out and hear nothing back but trees. The panic isn’t in the sinking; it’s in the knowing that no one knows where you are. The sky is bright, the air is ordinary, and you are stuck.

Loneliness isn’t as cinematic as that, but the helplessness is right. It seeps into the seams of you. It dictates what you say yes to, what you leave early, what you pretend not to want. It bleaches joy thin. It convinces you you’re unlovable, then uses your own voice to prove it. Sometimes all you can do is wait—wait for it to lift on its own, or for sleep, or for the warm, irresponsible idea of not having to try anymore.

People say it will pass. They say connection is a choice, a skill, a practice. Maybe. On good days I repeat their lines and pretend they’re mine. On bad ones, I put my head down and do the next small thing—answer an email, wash a plate, count to sixty and start again. I am not asking for advice. I’m only telling you the weather.

Loneliness is the closest I’ve come to death that still lets you wake up the next morning and go to work. It keeps its hands clean. It smiles for photos. It sits beside you on the bus and looks like you.

What bothered me the most was how porn—and society more broadly—painted women as passive participants. Obedient sex slaves. Willing, silent, grateful. And if they weren’t silent, if they took up space, if they had needs—they were punished. Labeled as whores, sluts, used goods.

Meanwhile, the men? They were praised. Applauded for exploring their sexuality. Slapped on the back for “losing it early,” for racking up numbers like it meant something. Their desires were seen as natural, even noble, expressions of masculinity.

But the same freedom was never extended to women. Why is it that only men are allowed to be sexual creatures? Why is a woman’s virginity sacred, and her worth somehow tied to it—as if her body was a gift to be unwrapped by someone deserving? Why is a woman seen as degraded for embracing her sexuality, for wanting to be desired, or for simply existing outside the bounds of purity culture?

And even in relationships, why is sexualising a woman you love treated as disrespectful? Why does tenderness get separated from lust when it comes to women, as though the two can't coexist? Maybe that’s the deepest scar left by a patriarchal world—that a woman cannot be loved and desired in the same breath. That to want her is to devalue her.

I hate it here.

I realised something very important that day. I spent a lot of my life struggling to understand my place in life. I never had a father to guide me, to show me where I belonged as a man. I struggled to figure out what masculinity even was, if I even had it. Masculinity, in its purest sense, I believe, is the ability to secede your pride and admit that you will never be able to replicate the gentle femininity that the women in our lives provide us with. Popular culture and the media, I suppose, will have you believe that men are stronger, less emotional, and are better at making tough decisions. They are less selfish and empowered, in a sense. I realise that I have been fed nothing but lies. The strongest people in my life have always been women. The most selfless. The only people who are able to put their pride, their inherent desires aside for the people they care the most about. They sacrifice everything for us and yet, in eons of existence, we still have not realised their worth. 

I don’t think life should be romanticised. To do that feels like gaslighting yourself into believing it’s better than it is. And life isn’t supposed to be that great. Most of the time, it’s hard, unkind, relentless. It grinds you down. But every so often, there are moments—brief, fragile glimpses—that make it worth holding on. They’re rarely flashy or cinematic. More often they’re quiet. Small. Mundane. The kind of moments you almost overlook until they’re gone.

The truth is, life is mundane, and then it ends. And that’s okay.

The trick is to appreciate the rest—the fleeting things, the subtle things, especially the parts that make you you. Stop searching for answers from people who have no idea what it’s like to carry your pain. They don’t know what it feels like to look in the mirror and see something you’ve convinced yourself no one else could ever love—a body that has never been touched with tenderness, a shape that feels like a cage instead of a home.

But here’s the thing: when you least expect it, someone will see you.

Someone who, in every other universe, might never have glanced your way will find themselves drawn to you. Not for the way you look, but for the way your soul feels in their presence. For the way your mind moves, for the strange little quirks that make you who you are.

Looks fade. Bodies sag, wrinkle, and bend under the weight of years. But your soul? Your soul is what makes you unforgettable. What makes you beautiful in ways time can’t touch. 

So wrap your soul in your own being. Protect it. Love it. Carry it as if it’s the rarest thing in the world—because it is. 

I used to think mental battles were easier than physical ones. That fighting yourself was just a matter of willpower. But now I think mental warfare is worse than any war waged with bullets and bombs. Because at least in war, you know what you’re fighting for. There’s a goal. An enemy. A reason. In here—inside my head—there’s nothing but chaos. The battlefield is endless, and I’m both the soldier and the executioner.