𝑪𝒉𝒆𝒓

Manifesting sells itself as spirituality but it's really just self-belief with better marketing. The whole system runs on one assumption nobody questions: that you already know what's good for you. Pick the outcome, visualize it in detail, feel like it's already yours, and apparently that's enough to make reality comply.

Except you don't know that. None of us can see far enough down the road to know if the job, the person, the opportunity we're begging for is actually good for us or just good-looking right now. Plenty of people got exactly what they manifested and it wrecked them. Plenty of people lost something they cried over and later realized it was the best thing that never happened to them. That's not a coincidence, that's just how limited human judgment actually is.

And it's not just off spiritually, but also psychologically. The more you rehearse a specific outcome and "feel" it into being, the more selectively you start seeing everything else. You stop noticing the red flags, the mismatch, the version of reality that doesn't fit the story you decided on. That's not intuition, that's just confirmation bias wearing a crystal necklace.

The real damage isn't the visualizing, it's what happens to prayer once you start doing it. Instead of turning to God and admitting "O Allah, I do not know whether this is right for me. You are All-Knowing, so decree for me what is best." people start turning inward and repeating affirmations to themselves instead, convincing themselves rather than asking Him. The energy that should go into dua gets rerouted into self-persuasion. Same hope, completely different direction, and most people don't even notice it happened.

None of this means don't want things or don't work for them. Ikhtiar is not optional, you still show up and put in the effort fully. The difference is what happens after that. Manifesting keeps you holding the pen, deciding how the story ends. Dua hands the pen to the only One who can actually see the whole page. You do your part, and then you actually let go—not pretend to let go while still gripping the outcome with both hands.

I need to feel the stitches close the wound

I need to feel all the broken pieces find their place

Because if the evidence isn't clear enough

I can't prove I'm not one knife away from murder

I can't prove leaving her behind was right

So leave me at the shore, alone with the tide

I'll count the waves until I reach 17

And realise it's far from fair

But she carried me this far

And I know where she ended

I know where I begin

And that has to be enough

Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Idiot.

Delusion might give you comfort in the moment, but it creates a growing gap between you and reality and you're the one who has to live inside that gap. Over time, keeping the illusion alive demands more and more energy. Eventually you start losing touch with your actual life, and something inside you begins to feel hollow.

The philosopher Sartre had a similar intuition. He called this kind of self-deception "bad faith" and thought it was one of the more corrosive things a person could do to themselves, because it's a betrayal of your own freedom and clarity.

The moment you realize how much disrespect you tolerated in the name of love. Bending boundaries, excusing wounds, repainting red flags as misunderstandings, all because losing them scared you more than losing yourself. What you called patience and devotion was actually self-abandonment. Every swallowed boundary keeps score and eventually, the bill comes due.

It's not about having four walls or a roof to block out the sun and rain. Home has always been the place where I could return broken and still be accepted. Where I would be seen, heard, and desired by someone. Where my weary bones might at last rest without feeling guilty.

I had that once.

Now every step toward it feels like walking into colder air. The rooms are getting to know me less and less. The warmth has thinned and is now passing through my fingers like smoke. Someone once told me, "Come to me when you need anything." So I came. He wasn't there. Maybe because what I needed wasn't anything. It was him. For the sound of his breathing, for the space between his arms. And I guess that wasn't part of the offer.

That is the question I read on the internet at 3 AM, the same one I've asked myself and led me to the conclusion that writing isn't really about choosing to forget or to remember. It does something stranger. It takes what you felt or experienced and turns it into language. That's the whole point.

Before you write, the feeling lives inside you messy, heavy, without any clear shape. But the moment you find words for it, you pull it out of yourself and give it form on the page. You give it edges. And once it has edges, you can step back, look at it, and even set it aside. That's why writing to forget and writing to remember are basically the same. Both are attempts to take the experience from inside and put it somewhere else. The page becomes a container for what you can no longer hold.

My real question is "What do you need this experience to become?"

A wound that finally has a name?
A person you're not ready to let go of?
Or a part of yourself you're trying to understand?

Some days I wake up and I'm so sure—sure that staying was the wrong call, sure that I deserve better, sure that this whole thing has been slowly hollowing me out from the inside. Then something shifts, I don't know what, maybe the way you said my name or just the memory of how it feels when things are good between us, and all that certainty just vanishes. Suddenly second guessing everything, wondering if I'm just being dramatic and blowing it out of proportion.

That's the part that's killing me. Not even you—it's that I can't trust my own mind anymore.

Because I know. I know I shouldn't be treated this way. That part is crystal clear to me, it really is. But love just comes rushing back like it didn't get the memo, like it never heard a single thing I told myself in the mirror at 2 AM. And it's not some small, fragile love either. It's the kind that makes leaving feel almost impossible, like trying to picture a color that doesn't exist.

I want to be there for you. I still do. And you still care about me, I know that too. But that's almost what makes it worse. Because how am I supposed to hold both truths at the same time? That you love me, and that there's still someone else living rent free in your head?

I can forget things, or at least, I can let time slowly bury them. But forgetting and forgiving are two completely different things, and I think people confuse the two more than they realize. I've tried. I've sat with it and told myself "just let it go, move on, be the bigger person" but no matter how hard I try, there's this stubborn little voice in my head that keeps asking "why should you forgive someone who betrayed you, who hurt you without even thinking twice about it?" And honestly? I don't have a good answer for that.

Sometimes people come back and say sorry. And I say "it's okay" because what else are you supposed to say in that moment? You're standing there, they're looking at you, and the word just comes out. But the moment it does, there's this strange discomfort that settles in my chest, like something's off. Like I just said something that wasn't true.

I think that's what it is—when you force forgiveness before you actually feel it, it's basically just a polite lie. My mouth moves, the word leaves, but my heart knows better.

All of the moments you had before All the hearts that fell apart were just that string unraveling, only to tie us and bring you to me. Funny how I believe a single red string of fate was tying us together.

All those late night you cried alone The years you spent searching in all the wrong faces The loves that unraveled and left you in pieces None of it was loss.

Our meeting was no accident. That I think it was already written in our story From the moment we were born, we were already given to each other.

Nobody tells you that being in love can be warm and heavy at the same time, but that kind of warm doesn't comfort you, it just reminds you of everything you afraid to lose.

Some mornings I wake up and there's this little ache right in my chest, like my heart's already bracing for the day he might not be here anymore. I'm so in love with him it scares me. I know it the way you know a song without remembering when you first heard it. But loving someone this much makes you aware of how much you have to lose. Before him, losing someone was just a concept. Now it has a face, a laugh, a way of saying my name that I catch myself replaying in my head.

People see me and they ask why I look so far away, "You're in love, arent you?" as if it's all supposed to be sunshine and butterflies. Like it should be enough to keep the sadness out. I just smile and nod. Yeah, I am. Because I can't explain that the love and the sadness live in the same place now. They don't fight—they just hold each other, right behind my ribs, and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.