The Art of Adjusting

Last month, I started watching Totally Spies as part of learning a language.

There’s this language learning technique called the movie method. Its where you watch a show with English subtitles first to understand the story then rewatch it without subtitles or with the subtitles of your target language. You write down the words or phrases you recognize or the ones that felt important or interesting then add it in Anki as custom cards. It’s surprisingly fun.

Somewhere between memorizing vocabulary and following the plot, I found myself paying attention to something else. If you’ve never watched Totally Spies, it’s about three teenage girls who are constantly interrupted by a giant machine that literally yanks them out of whatever they’re doing because the world needs saving. One minute they’re shopping and the next they’re hanging upside down over lava, accidentally pressing the wrong gadget, getting captured, escaping, getting captured again, and somehow still making it home to relax at the end of the day. Everything always goes wrong but somehow… everything works out.

Of course it’s unrealistic. It’s a cartoon. The villains always lose and the girls never seem permanently traumatized by anything that happens to them. I kept noticing the same thing every episode: they never spend very long panicking because they adapt. They simply make a new plan instead of stopping to mourn the old one.

And I thought, that must be a nice skill to have.

Whenever life starts feeling overwhelming, when my plans unravel halfway through the week or something changes before I’ve had the chance to mentally prepare, I like to pretend I’m one of the girls from that show. Somehow that tiny mental shift helps me snap back into problem-solving mode instead of panic mode. By convincing myself I’m on some ridiculous secret mission, my brain stops asking, “Why is everything going wrong?” and starts asking, “Okay… what’s Plan B? What’s the new mission?”

As an adult, I’ve realized that life has absolutely no respect for your schedule. It rarely waits for you to finish one thing before handing you another. There’s work, your social life, your health, hobbies, books waiting on your shelf, languages you want to learn, about fifty other interests competing for your attention, and dreams that tap you on the shoulder every now and then, asking if you’ve made time for them yet. They don’t take turns.

That’s probably why I’ve become so attached to my little systems: Google Calendar, Google Reminders, Grit, a digital journal, and a paper to-do list. They’re less about productivity and more about giving my brain somewhere safe to put things so it doesn’t have to carry everything at once. Having a system really matters if you don’t want your thoughts turning into complete chaos.

Aside from that, having a daily routine gives me something to return to when life starts feeling messy. Without it, it’s easy to lose track of everything, jump between tasks, and end the day wondering what you actually accomplished.

With that said, your system doesn’t always need to be perfect. I had the mistake of being a perfectionist. The moment I missed one task or skipped one habit, I felt like I’d already failed. Then I’d procrastinate, lose all my momentum, and eventually abandon the very routines I’d spent so much time building.

These days I try to remember that small progress still counts. Some days are simply heavier than others. You won’t finish everything.

Speaking of feeling heavy, I’ve also become fascinated by the idea of transmuting difficult emotions into something else. Stress, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, negative thoughts—or maybe something someone said that lingers in your chest a little longer than it should. Instead of letting those feelings consume you, maybe they can become fuel. Not for revenge, of course, but for creating, learning, improving, or simply taking the next small step forward. It’s not about pretending those feelings don’t exist but about giving them a better purpose. There’s something comforting about believing that something painful can become something beautiful.

Lately, I’ve started thinking adaptability might be one of the most underrated skills a person can have. When plans suddenly change, when something goes wrong or when you have to think on your feet all of a sudden, it sounds like an amazing skill to have the ability to adjust in real time instead of adjusting after you’ve had time to make new schedules and rewrite your routines right. Its like a superpower that can be applied to alot of things. I don’t know how people become like that yet.

Anyway. I started watching Totally Spies to learn a language. Instead, it accidentally gave me a new skill to aspire to have.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some very important internet research to do now. Oh, to become the kind of person who can quietly handle whatever life throws at you without falling apart. Sounds like a dream.

Wearing Clothes that Intimidate

Here is a thing I know about myself: I do not like being approached by strangers. It’s not that I dislike people. I just prefer a comfortable amount of distance between myself and everyone else when I go out. A small invisible fence, if you will. I am, structurally, not built for small talk.

Umbrellas are underrated introvert technology. People usually avoid walking under the same umbrella with a stranger. If someone does try to share your umbrella, congratulations. You’ve encountered an extrovert of unusual power.

The other day, I went to the mall wearing something very casual. It was the kind of outfit I probably would have worn in high school, back when skinny jeans and fitted tops were a thing. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, but for some reason I felt strangely exposed.

People seemed to be looking at me. Now, there are two possible explanations for this. The first is that nobody was actually looking at me and I was experiencing a mild introvert-induced hallucination. The second is an evidence that I am, deep down, a little narcissistic, that I think I really do look like a certain P-pop artist, which three separate people have told me over the years. Three people is not enough evidence for a scientific conclusion, but it is enough evidence for me to occasionally stare into the mirror and think, “Do I?” The answer remains unclear.

Whatever the reason, I suddenly became hyper-aware of everyone around me. The guards looked suspicious of me like I just shoplifted or something. I was browsing through a store when a saleslady approached me. I told her I was just looking. An ordinary interaction. Yet afterward, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was watching me as I walked around. Five minutes later I had somehow convinced myself that she was secretly monitoring my movements through an invisible earpiece and reporting them back to headquarters. It was awkward. Then my brain decided she was judging my outfit.

That’s when a realization crossed my mind about clothes. Clothes are more powerful than we think. They’re like signals. Some outfits make you look approachable, some make you look confident, some make you look like you have somewhere important to be and some make people think twice before interrupting you.

So I’ve been wondering what exactly does the “unapproachable” outfit looks like. An outfit that says, please do not perceive me unless absolutely necessary. Or maybe one that says, I’m a little strange, and honestly you probably don’t want to start a conversation with me. Or even better: I’m so intimidatingly indie and aloof that approaching me feels like a social risk.

Either way, I’ve started thinking of fashion less as self-expression and more as a form of personal boundaries. Fashion as a weapon. Or at the very least, fashion as a “Do Not Disturb” sign.

Since we are talking about fashion, I’d like to talk about planning an outfit before going out. When going out, putting together an outfit, adding a few pieces of jewelry with it and taking extra time to get ready makes going out feel more exciting. It turns simple things like running an errand, attending a family gathering, even going to school into something a little more intentional. You become excited to leave the house, not because of where you’re going, but because you enjoy being the person who’s going there after all that outfit planning.

Another thing that I love to do before I go out is assigning a perfume to a specific trip. When you wear one fragrance while traveling somewhere new, and anywhere else, you smell it again long after and immediately be transported back to that street, that conversation, that train ride to a version of yourself that only existed in that place and time. Perfume might be the closest thing we have to time travel.

Back to the main topic, an example of someone whose fashion style I find genuinely intimidating is Frida Kahlo.

I’ve listened to podcasts about her life before, and I recently watched a video essay about her again. Every time I learn more about her story, I’m struck by how tragic it was.

Her last diary entry was – “I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.” 

What I especially find disturbing from the video essay that I watched about her is what happened after her death. A woman spends her life suffering physically and emotionally, creates extraordinary art from that suffering, and then decades later her image becomes a commercial product, a totebag, a keychain, a marketing tool and something to sell as merchandise. Its seems disrespectful.

There’s something unsettling about watching capitalism turn a person’s pain into an aesthetic. Sometimes I wonder whether Frida would have laughed at the absurdity of it all, or hated it as much as I do. I think the same thing happens today, with people making content about public figures even while they’re still alive just to gain views. Someone’s crisis and breakdowns gets turned into content, as if they aren’t real people but products to exploit. I hate that. I think it’s one of the worst things we’ve normalized.

Wisdom Of Kindness

“Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa paroroonan.”
— Jose Rizal

Because its almost Philippine Independence day, I thought I’d share a quote by Jose Rizal. In english the quote is translated as “He who does not look back to where he came from will never reach his destination.” His whole life’s work was about making Filipinos aware of their identity, history and dignity. People who don’t know their history can be controlled and manipulated more easily.

This quote feels especially relevant today, with so much misinformation online trying to rewrite history, turn good people into villains, and praise those who caused harm.I could write an entire post about that, but that’s not really what this is about. On a personal level this quote means that you can’t really know where you’re going (you’re lost) if you don’t understand your past or the lessons from your past. That’s why reflection is important, you can’t grow as a person without learning from your past.

Since this year started, I’ve had this recurring thought about the connection between intelligence and kindness but it gets complicated the deeper I look at it. Intelligence doesn’t guarantee kindness and kindness doesn’t require intelligence. But I can’t shake the feeling that there’s some kind of connection between them.

Its not easy to be kind. We’re all carrying something. Stress, frustrations, disappointments, grief, worries and the like. I think there’s something wise about being able to separate your own suffering from how you treat others and choosing not to pass the hurt along. When you start considering perspectives beyond your own, you also start thinking about consequences. You begin to question actions that might hurt others. You see how much of a person’s story is hidden from view. And once you see that complexity, cruelty becomes harder to justify. Maybe intelligence isn’t the word I’ve been looking for all this time. Maybe what I mean is wisdom.

I used to think wisdom naturally came with age. Now I’m not so sure because as I get older I start to notice that just because someone has lived longer doesn’t mean they’ve learned from life. They may repeat the same patterns for years, avoid self-reflection and blame everyone except themselves. They age physically, but their mindset stays stuck. Maturity is about how willing you are to take responsibility, to reflect, to regulate your emotions, and to see beyond your own ego. A lot of people never get there.

Wisdom isn’t just about age, or knowledge. It’s the willingness to examine your own beliefs, question your assumptions, and remain open to the possibility that you might be wrong. Its the kind of intelligence that understands life, the one that sees nuance, consequences, emotions, and systems.

Once you truly understand how complicated people are. How much of their lives you can’t see, how many battles they’re carrying, it becomes harder to reduce them to something simple. Harder to judge them too quickly. Harder to hurt them without thinking and that starts to look like kindness.

In the end, maybe the real measure of a “grown” mind isn’t how much it knows…but how it understands. It isn’t the one that is most certain. It’s the one that can stay soft without becoming naive. The one that can disagree without dehumanizing and the one that can hold boundaries without losing empathy.

Something Rang at the End of My Meditation

Have you ever heard a bell at the end of your meditation?

It happened to me today. I was meditating on this sound and I was confused because I can’t remember adding a chime sound when making it.

For context, I made my own meditation sound using BandLab and another app that generates white noise. I was very intentional about it. I didn’t want to just mix sounds randomly, I wanted to understand it. The layers, the purpose, how it affects the mind, all of that. I’m very sure there’s no bell chime in it. I’ve added the sound below if you’re interested:

I was meditating the way I usually do, cross-legged, back straight but not stiff, hands wherever they feel comfortable. Sometimes on my knees, sometimes palms up, sometimes down, sometimes I put them together. Sometimes I do that thing where your index finger and thumb touch, but honestly I don’t overthink it. I think the real rule when meditating is to just be comfortable.

Halfway through the meditation, I started seeing colors with my eyes closed. I saw a small purple blob that is kind of expanding. Then replaced by these gray waves, then blue, then green. At some point it was like green and yellow mixed together, and it kind of looked like leaves or flowers. Then I saw something that looked like a white rose… or like a rose shape, with a faint green glow around it. I feel like I’m succumbing to something just like I’m about to sleep but I’m awake.

And then as the sound I know was ending, that’s when I heard the bell. Just one clear chime. Once the 15 min meditation sound ended I opened my eyes.

I looked it up. Turns out, it’s more common than I expected. Some people call it a “zen signal,” but it’s basically an auditory hallucination. As your brain transitions from deep relaxation back to active awareness, it can occasionally misinterpret internal neural signals as a sharp external sound like a bell or chime. This is generally considered harmless. It’s actually seen as a sign that you’ve reached a very deep level of focus, specifically what’s known as the hypnagogic state. It is the brief window where you are not quite awake anymore but you haven’t fully drifted off into a dream state yet. Your mind is still somewhat concious while your body is entering deep relaxation.

So I’m going to take that bell chime as a milestone in my meditation journey. Its like my brain dinged me like a microwave lol. A proof that my meditation is working to change my brain chemistry. After that meditation, I feel refreshed, which seems to be a good sign.

We’re Living in Cognitive Collapse

I remember when I was sitting in history class 15 years ago, reading about wars and people starting wars, or killing innocent people, or getting others killed for what? For honor? ego? legacy? For something they probably wouldn’t even live long enough to see? I judged them. I thought it was stupid. Why would anyone choose violence or step into something that could destroy so many lives instead of just staying home and protecting their peace, their family, and their life? There must be better things to do than violence. Like I don’t know… maybe start a bakery, learn pottery, get really into gardening, painting, reading books? Literally anything feels better than war.

To me, it all felt like something that belonged in the past. I believed that now, in modern times, we knew better. I thought back then, people made choices based on misunderstanding because they lacked enough information or had limited communication. Wars, in my mind, were the result of confusion, misinterpretation, and not fully understanding each other.

And I thought at that time that things were different. That with better technology, faster communication, and more access to information, it should be easier for people to understand each other. Easier to explain, to clarify, and to avoid conflict before it turns into something worse.

But now I’m seeing something else. With the rise of social media and AI, information became faster and more chaotic. The world didn’t just change, it accelerated, and humans didn’t evolve at the same pace as the tools we created. What AI and technology in general did is make everything faster, cheaper, and more scalable. That also means that bad intentions scale faster too. Before, a malicious person could lie to 10 people but now they can lie to 10 million with better grammar, fake images, fake videos, and confidence.

I used to think misinformation was just about wrong facts, but now I see it’s also about too much information, too many voices, too many versions of the “truth” competing at once. It looked like we are living in a world where everyone is talking at the same time and you’re just supposed to know what to believe. Instead of making life simpler, it just adds more pressure, because we’re constantly asked to process more than our minds were ever built to hold. When everything feels urgent, your brain stops slowing down enough to actually question anything. The real battle is clarity vs confusion and right now, confusion is winning because people are overwhelmed.

I think the real issue is not that technology is bad, but that it has amplified bad intentions, and humans are feeling overwhelmed. Because now, it’s not just about whether something is true or false anymore. It’s about having the mental space to even figure that out.

And it’s not only fake news. There are also new kinds of scams that move through the same system of speed and trust. Love scams, investment scams, fake job offers, phishing links, impersonation accounts, and messages that look like they come from banks, friends, or even government agencies. The forms keep changing, but the pattern is the same: urgency, emotion, and pressure to act without thinking.

A simple way to start recognizing scams is to notice the emotional pattern first, not just the content. If something is rushing you, if it’s making you feel fear, excitement, urgency, or attachment too quickly, that’s usually the first warning sign. Real opportunities and real people rarely demand instant decisions.

So what do we do with all of this?

I don’t think the answer is to “go back” or to erase AI or technology. That doesn’t really feel possible anyway because technology doesn’t reverse, it can only evolve and honestly, it wouldn’t fix the deeper issue. Instead, I think it’s about rebuilding something inside all this noise.

For fake news, don’t use social media as your source of news. Rely instead on established news organizations, official statements, and sources that have accountability rather than virality. If something feels emotionally intense or shocking, assume it needs verification. And remember, if something spreads fast, it doesn’t automatically mean it’s true.

Most importantly, slow down your own mind instead of reacting instantly. Learn what to ignore, what to verify, and what to trust slowly. So much misinformation right now are suceeding not because people are careless, but because they are tired. They’re scrolling too fast, trusting too quickly, and not pausing long enough to question anything. That’s why it’s important to slow down, think, and refuse to be easily manipulated.

I used to think the world was becoming clearer as it advanced. But now it feels like clarity is something you have to actively protect and consciously choose. Hopefully, that’s the shift we’re all going through right now, not just learning more, but learning how to think slowly again in a world that never stops speeding up. Manifesting a calmer, clearer life for all of us ✨

Am I Unlucky In Love Or is The Universe Just Protecting Me

There’s this weird moment after you ask the universe for a sign… when you realize it’s already been answering you the whole time—you just didn’t like the answer.

I say that prayer—the one that goes, “If it’s not good for me, take it away.” It feels right to ask for signs so I don’t end up wasting time on something that isn’t meant for me. I say it as if I mean it without condition. As if I am prepared for the removal. In practice, I am not always prepared. I ask for clarity, and then I hesitate when it arrives. I recognize it, and then I argue with it privately, as though the argument might change what I have already understood.

Sometimes I want to disprove the sign. I want to test it. I want to behave as though persistence might force a different outcome. And if I’m being honest, there’s also this stubborn part of me that wants to prove the sign wrong. So I stay a little longer than I should. I explain away what I have seen. I tell myself that consistency is a form of love, or patience, or maturity. Like I want to be the exception to what I’m being shown. But somehow, every time I do that… it circles back and proves itself right in the end.

The signs aren’t even subtle. It’s like I start turning into a version of myself I don’t like. I feel more anxious. I start noticing patterns I can’t unsee, little inconsistencies, emotional distance, things that don’t match what I was promised at the beginning. And sometimes, it’s not just emotional. Sometimes something happens in real life that makes you pause and go… wait.

I remember this one situation where someone I was with got into an accident. It just happened like one of those real-life things that forces everything to slow down. Time continued and with time, other things became visible.

The earlier patterns did not resolve themselves; they accumulated. Small omissions became larger inconsistencies. What I had once dismissed became impossible to ignore. Little lies stopped feeling small. The lack of empathy, the impulsiveness, the way consequences always seemed to follow but never really change anything started stacking up. There was a moment that I understood that what I was watching was not an exception to a pattern, but the pattern itself. I remember saying: oh. This is why things in their life keep going this way.

It is at this point that people often reach for the word karma. But karma is not always instant. It’s more like life slowly becoming a mirror of your behavior. And for some people, that mirror gets heavier over time. It is a life that continues to produce the same outcomes because it continues to produce the same choices. I don’t think the universe is actively punishing someone as revenge. This is who you are and eventually, life reflects that back at you.

There’s also this internal part, which I think is worse. The guilt that doesn’t really leave. The restlessness. The inability to build something stable. The repetition of the same cycles with different people, different excuses. That kind of “karma” just lingers. It stays in the background of everything.

Sometimes bad things just happen. Not everything is karma. Not everything carries a deeper meaning, and life does not always visibly punish those who do wrong, which feels unfair but also… real.

What I’ve started to realize, though, is that staying too long in something that keeps showing you it’s wrong doesn’t make you loyal. It just makes you involved in it. You start carrying something that was never meant to be yours in the first place. Its like you’re sharing the weight of someone else’s actions instead of letting them face it on their own. In the end, that’s another form of karma I’ve experienced, not what happens to them, but what happens to you when you ignore what you already know.

And so the question returns whether I am unlucky in love, or whether what I have been calling luck has been something else entirely.

Protection is not always recognizable as protection while it is happening. It does not always feel like relief. More often, it resembles interruption. It resembles disappointment and loss. Sometimes it feels like things falling apart at the exact moment you were trying to hold them together.

The universe doesn’t always remove people in dramatic ways. Sometimes it just keeps showing you the truth repeatedly until staying becomes the harder option.

What’s Real After Everything Else Isn’t

Astrology isn’t real. Manifestation, tarot readings, MBTI, maybe none of it is real in a literal sense, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work in people’s minds. Sometimes belief itself is powerful enough to change how we see the world, how we act, even what we notice. The mind is strong enough to create meaning where there is none, or maybe to reveal meaning that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It’s like a placebo effect for reality. Nothing physically changes but instead we do.

That pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.

Your name is part of it. Watching the scene in the movie Project Hail Mary where Rocky said the name of his girlfriend made me think that our names are just a sound that someone gave us. You didn’t choose it, but you got used to it until it started feeling permanent and like it belonged to you. And now, when someone says it, you respond automatically even if it’s just repetition and a shared agreement. Its something that tells us who we are.

Money works the same way. It’s paper, or numbers on a screen, yet it controls almost every decision we make. Where we live, what we eat, how we move through the world. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, people used what they called “Mickey Mouse money.” It became nearly worthless later because the system behind it collapsed and people no longer trusted it as a stable way to trade value. Even though it was real paper money, it lost its value when people lost trust. This shows that money only works when people collectively agree it is important and believe they can use it to buy things. That’s what gives money power. Not the material itself, but the collective belief.

There’s a moment in The Little Prince where a man claims to own a star because no one owned it before him. He sits and counts his stars, writes the number down, locks it in a drawer. The Little Prince finds this completely absurd. And once you see it, you start noticing the same thing everywhere. When you step back, it almost feels surreal — like watching adults seriously argue over something a child would question immediately.

We do the same thing with land. The ground existed long before any person did and yet someone can own it, so that others have to pay simply to stand there, to build there, to live there. If you really think about it, the ground doesn’t know it belongs to anyone. It’s just there. We’re the ones who decided to divide it until it started feeling like the natural order of things. And then we drew lines on maps and called them countries. Invisible borders we treat like walls. You’re born on one side and suddenly that shapes your language, your passport, and your opportunities.

From there, it becomes easier to see how we extend the same logic to people.

People reduce entire groups into inherited labels or group identities, as if those labels could contain the full complexity of a person’s life, thoughts, or humanity. People can’t define others by stories written about people before them or by assumptions tied to others who merely share a similar appearance.

Yet, once a label exists, it starts shaping how people are seen. Who people assume belongs or is important. Who gets noticed or overlooked. People begin to sort each other without noticing. Into useful and not useful. Into valuable and replaceable. It doesn’t always look like open hostility. Sometimes it just looks like indifference. But indifference can also be a way of erasing someone without realizing it.

And when that way of seeing grows larger, it doesn’t stay small. It scales. People take that habit of reducing others into categories and expand it into something much more serious, where they stop seeing entire groups as individuals and start seeing them as a single idea, a side, a problem, or a threat. Into something that makes it easier to distance from their humanity. The mind protects itself by simplifying what it cannot fully hold but that simplification comes at a cost. The moment someone is no longer seen as fully human or as someone with a life as detailed and real as your own, the weight of what happens to them begins to feel lighter than it should.

No one is born inherently above anyone else. No one is born below. Those ideas only appear after systems are built—systems of power, economics, survival, fear. And once those systems exist, people start using them to organize the world, even if they quietly distort what a human being actually is.

If you trace that further, you start to wonder what is actually real underneath all of this.

If you strip away the systems, the money, borders, labels, status, you don’t actually find nothing. You find consciousness, memory, emotion, experience—the small, unmeasurable things that don’t exist in systems but exist in life. Those things don’t come from systems. They come from being alive.

Maybe a lot of what we treat as “real” is actually just shared agreement. But the way we treat each other inside those agreements is real in a much deeper way, because it has consequences. It shapes how people feel about themselves and how they move through the world. It leaves marks. That’s why it matters.

Because even if names are invented, money is invented, borders are invented, people are not. And what we do to each other inside these inventions becomes lived experience. It becomes memory, pain or care or distance or connection.

Maybe nothing is real in the way we think it is.

But people are real. Our connections, our feelings, our memories and experiences are real.

And maybe the only thing we’re truly responsible for is not letting the systems we invented make us treat the real parts like they don’t matter.

Humanizing Myself

I have spent years trying to convince myself and everyone else that I was human enough.

Not in a science-fiction sense as if I’m a robot or an alien or another specie. I wasn’t questioning whether I had a soul. It is more like standing in a room full of people who all seemed to understand it. They cried at the right moments without overthinking it, laughed easily and wore their feelings like a second skin. There I was on the other side wondering why I felt like I was just watching it all behind a glass.

What makes a person human, exactly? I used to think about this like it was a riddle I could solve if I thought hard enough. I’d go so deep into my own head that I’d forget my name. I’d lose the thread of where I ended and my thoughts began. I still do this sometimes and it is not going away.

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” — Søren Kierkegaard

What I was experiencing is called emotional suppression. Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who suppress their emotions don’t experience them less intensely. They just carry the weight of them alone and their bodies and minds pay the price. Higher stress levels. Difficulty connecting with others. A kind of loneliness that’s hard to explain because everything on the outside looks fine.

That was me. Everything was fine. My face said so.

The first time I realized I felt things more intensely than most people around me, my instinct wasn’t to lean into it but to hide it. To perform neutrality. To master the poker face. If I didn’t show it, no one could use it against me. No one could look at me like I was too much. I became very good at it.

What I didn’t realize was that I was becoming a stranger to myself.

For years I wore it like an armor, and I thought I was protecting myself. On the outside, happy and sad and furious all looked the same, a kind of calm, unbothered neutrality that people probably read as composed. On the inside, I was a weather system. Thunder with no sound. I was exploding constantly and no one around me had any idea, because my face was always neutral.

I wouldn’t say I woke up one day and decided to change. It didn’t happened in a heartbeat. It was gradual. I started learning. Slowly, then all at once. I tried to get to know more about myself. What it means to be someone who feels deeply in a world that often rewards people who perform with less emotion. I started paying attention to what was actually happening inside me.

And then, just last year, something shifted. I cried. It was the kind where you don’t care what your face is doing. I laughed so hard at something stupid that my stomach hurt. I told someone I was angry, and I meant it, and I didn’t immediately soften it into something easier for them to hear just to make them feel comfortable. I felt things and I let my face show it.

I made myself feel safe. That’s the thing no one tells you. Sometimes the person who has to give you permission to feel is you. I would have loved for someone to have done that for me when I was younger. I would have loved for someone to sit across from me and say: all of it is okay. The big feelings, the loud feelings, the ones that don’t make sense. You are not too much or broken. You just feel things, and that is one of the most human things there is.

But no one did, and so I’m telling it to myself now. It may be late but not too late.

There is something quietly revolutionary about letting yourself feel. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you present. It makes you real and free.