Love became something I performed instead of something I experienced naturally. Every relationship started feeling like maintenance. I kept checking if people were still happy with me. Still interested in me. Still emotionally connected to me. My brain could never relax inside relationships because I was always preparing myself for distance before it even arrived. A small shift in somebody’s energy could ruin my entire day. A colder reply could make me spiral for hours. I kept acting normal outside while internally trying to figure out what changed and how to fix it before things became irreversible.

The humiliating part is how invisible this type of pain looks to everyone else. People think you are caring. Loving. Thoughtful. Few people see the fear hiding underneath it. Few people see how exhausting it feels to constantly monitor somebody else’s feelings toward you. I genuinely believed love had to be maintained through constant emotional effort. I thought if I stopped checking in, stopped reassuring, stopped trying so hard, then eventually people would stop choosing me too.

One of my subscribers, Abdallah, sent me a piece recently that honestly felt uncomfortably personal to read because it described this exact feeling so well.

ABDALLAH’S ESSAY:

I used to measure love by how much of myself I could give away. Like if I just kept pouring—time, attention, patience, reassurance—eventually it would prove something. That I cared enough. That I was safe enough. That I was worth staying for. But love, for me, always felt like it had a timer. Because somewhere in me was this quiet question: How much of myself can I give before there’s nothing left for me?

I remember a night in college. Her room was dim, lit only by a desk lamp that cast everything in this soft, tired yellow. She sat cross-legged on her bed, knees pulled into her chest, like she was trying to make herself smaller. I sat across from her. She was going through something she couldn’t fully explain. Or maybe she could, but didn’t want to. Either way, I could feel it—this weight pressing into the room, into her, into the silence between us. And I wanted to fix it. God, I wanted to fix it.

I searched for the right words like they were hidden somewhere just out of reach. Say something comforting. Say something wise. Say something that makes this go away. But everything I came up with sounded thin. Inadequate. Useless. So I did what I always did. I stayed. I asked if she was okay. Then again. Then again, just phrased differently. I told her I was there for her. Then I showed her I was there for her. Then I made sure she knew I was there for her. I texted her after I left. Then again. Then again. Just in case the first one didn’t land. Just in case she needed more. Just in case she forgot.

Clingy is a cruel word. You’re not clingy. You’re just someone who has a lot of love and nowhere safe to put it. And when you finally find someone you care about, you don’t hold back. Because you know what it feels like to have no one give to you.

I didn’t learn love in a stable place. I learned it as a refugee. In a life where things broke without warning. Where problems didn’t get solved—they just stayed. Where no one sat with you long enough to understand. So I made a quiet promise to myself: I will be the person who stays. I will be the one who notices. Who reaches out. Who doesn’t let silence swallow someone whole. Because I know what that silence feels like. And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

But here’s the part no one tells you: Love is not just about giving. It’s about respecting. Respecting their pace. Their space. Their timing. Their way of dealing with things—even when it looks like distance. Even when it feels like rejection.

She didn’t need me to fix her. She didn’t need three follow-up texts. She didn’t need me to sit there trying to translate her pain into something manageable. Sometimes, she just needed to be left alone with it. And that was the hardest thing for me to understand.

Because to me, love meant presence. Constant presence. Visible, undeniable, unwavering presence. If I cared about you, you would feel it. You wouldn’t have to question it. You wouldn’t have to ask where I was. I would already be there.

But love, real love, isn’t just about being there. It’s about knowing when to step back. And trusting that stepping back doesn’t mean disappearing.

I didn’t realize I was overwhelming her. Not at first. I thought I was doing everything right. Being attentive. Being supportive. Being good. Until one day, I saw it. Not in something she said. But in something she didn’t. The way her responses got shorter. The way her energy shifted. The way my presence—something I thought was comforting—started to feel like pressure. Like she couldn’t breathe fully with me around.

And that realization… it gutted me. Because the last thing I ever wanted was to become another weight on someone already struggling to stand. So I pulled back. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But enough to notice the difference. Enough to realize that love isn’t measured by how much you give.

Because if you give everything—without pause, without awareness, without boundaries—you don’t create closeness. You create imbalance. You lose yourself. And slowly, quietly, you start to expect something back that the other person never agreed to give.

That’s the danger. Not the giving itself. But the emptiness that follows it. The moment you look up and realize: I’ve poured so much into this… why do I feel so alone?

I still slip into it sometimes. That instinct. To reach out again. To double text. To make sure everything is okay. To be there just a little more than necessary. Because some part of me still believes: If I stop giving, something will disappear. If I step back, I’ll lose them. If I don’t show up constantly, I’ll be forgotten.

But I’m learning something new now. Something quieter. Something harder. That love doesn’t need to be proven every second. That people don’t need to receive it at every moment. That sometimes, the most respectful thing you can do… is let them have their space without trying to fill it.

Because love, if it’s real, doesn’t vanish in silence. It doesn’t need constant reminders. It doesn’t need to be poured endlessly to stay alive. It just needs room. Room to breathe. Room to exist without being held too tightly.

I’m still figuring out the balance. How to be kind without overextending. How to be present without overwhelming. How to give without emptying myself completely. How to love someone… without losing myself in the process.

I don’t think the answer is to give less. I think it’s to give with awareness. To ask not just how much you can give—but whether what you’re giving is actually being received. And whether you’re leaving enough of yourself behind to come home to.

I’m curious— Have you ever loved someone so much that you started to disappear inside it? How did you find your way back?

After reading his words, I kept thinking about how many people secretly build their entire identity around being emotionally needed. I know that feeling too well. I know what it feels like to keep overgiving because you think love disappears the second you stop proving it. I know what it feels like to panic during silence because your brain immediately mistakes space for abandonment. I know what it feels like to care so intensely that another person’s mood starts controlling your entire nervous system.

I think many of us learned love through instability. Through inconsistency. Through emotionally unavailable people. Through relationships where affection felt temporary and unpredictable. That type of love changes the way your brain works. Suddenly every connection feels fragile. Every relationship feels like something you have to maintain carefully before it collapses. You start overthinking everything because losing people feels less like a possibility and more like an inevitability waiting for the right moment.

What destroyed me the most was realizing how much of myself disappeared while I was busy trying to keep other people close to me. Entire parts of my personality started fading because my emotional world became centered around whether somebody still cared about me enough. My peace depended on reassurance. My confidence depended on attention. My emotional stability depended on feeling wanted. That type of attachment quietly ruins you because eventually you stop existing as your own person. You start existing through other people’s validation.

Things I had to learn the hard way:

• I cannot keep begging for reassurance from people who already gave me an answer through their actions.

• I cannot keep turning anxiety into affection and calling it love.

• I cannot keep abandoning my own routines, hobbies, sleep, and peace just to stay emotionally available for someone else.

• I cannot expect people to carry the emotional intensity I created inside my own head.

• I cannot keep romanticizing emotional suffering as proof that my feelings are genuine.

• I cannot keep measuring my worth through how needed I feel by other people.

• I cannot keep giving from a place of fear and expecting it to feel fulfilling.

• I cannot build healthy relationships while secretly believing everyone will eventually leave me.

Lately I’ve been sitting with the realization that I spent so much time trying to become emotionally unforgettable to other people that I completely forgot to build a life that felt safe to return to within myself. Every relationship became bigger than me. Every person I loved started occupying my mind in ways that honestly felt unhealthy. Their attention affected my mood. Their distance affected my confidence. Their silence affected my peace. I gave people emotional power over me without even realizing I was doing it.

I think what hurts the most is realizing how exhausting it is to constantly live in fear inside love. Fear changes the way affection comes out of a person. Fear makes you overextend yourself. Fear makes you monitor every interaction too closely. I kept telling myself I was “just someone who loves deeply” while completely ignoring how anxious, unstable, and emotionally drained I had become inside my own relationships.

Sometimes I look back at older versions of myself and genuinely feel sad for them. Sad for how hard they worked to keep people close. Sad for how quickly they blamed themselves anytime somebody became distant. Sad for how often they abandoned their own feelings just to maintain emotional connection with someone else. I carried this constant belief that love had to be earned through effort. Through patience. Through availability. Through proving myself over and over again. I never realized how lonely that mindset actually was until it started consuming me from the inside.

These days, I think I’m finally understanding that healthy love probably feels a lot calmer than what I spent years romanticizing. I think healthy love allows silence without immediately creating panic. I think healthy love allows space without making somebody feel abandoned. I think healthy love allows people to exist as complete individuals outside the relationship too. I spent years believing closeness meant emotional merging. Now I think closeness might actually require individuality to survive.

I still love deeply. That part of me remains untouched. I still care intensely about people. I still want the people I care about to feel understood and safe around me. I just think I’m finally learning that love should never require me to disappear completely in order to keep somebody else around.

I cannot keep building my entire emotional world around whether somebody chooses me every day. Eventually I have to choose myself too.

About the Co-Author:

Abdallah, M.D., M.B.A., is an Internal Medicine physician in the United States whose path to medicine was forged through resilience rather than inheritance. Born in Iraq and displaced by war at the age of six, he spent eight years as a refugee in Jordan without health insurance or access to formal education.

Abdallah writes from a rare “quadruple perspective” shaped by his experiences as a former refugee patient, medical interpreter, emergency responder, and now a physician. He has lived the many sides of care, once the sick child without access to treatment, the voice translating a diagnosis to frightened families, the first responder performing CPR in moments of crisis, and now the doctor writing the orders. His writing explores the long middle of healing and what it means to live in the aftermath of survival.

Substack ID: Abdallah

If you’d like to submit a piece to be featured in a future postcard, you can check the submission guidelines here: Submit your Essays

If you’d like to support me, you can: Buy me a coffee.

Over the past few months, the collaborative essays on Postcards by Hasif have slowly become one of the most meaningful parts of this space for me. There’s something special about seeing two people explore the same topic through completely different experiences, emotions, and perspectives.

For those who are new here, these collaborations are not traditional guest posts. They’re more like written conversations.

A writer begins the essay by sharing their reflections, experiences, thoughts, or observations about a topic that matters to them. After reading their piece, I write a response of my own where I engage with their ideas, expand on them, question them, relate to them, or sometimes even look at them from a completely different perspective.

Two people. Two perspectives. One shared piece of writing. Posting in my publication!

And honestly, that’s what I enjoy most about this format. It feels much closer to how real conversations happen in life. Not everything is about finding a perfect answer. Sometimes it’s simply about understanding each other a little better through honest reflection.

With that said, submissions are now officially open for July collaborations.

As always, I’ll be selecting 4–5 writers throughout the month to collaborate with.

Each selected writer will submit a 500–600 word essay, and I’ll follow it with a response of around 500 words. Together, the final piece becomes a collaborative essay that reads like a thoughtful dialogue between two people exploring the same idea from different angles. And it will be posted in my publication, Postcards by Hasif.

Topics You Can Explore

Here are some themes you can write about if you’d like inspiration:

• The Loneliness of Becoming Someone New

• Why Some People Only Exist in Certain Versions of Us

• The Quiet Panic of Time Moving Too Fast

• The Human Need to Leave Something Behind

• The Strange Intimacy of Being Remembered Incorrectly

• Growing Older While Still Feeling Emotionally Young

• The Things We Pretend Don’t Hurt Us

• The Invisible Pressure to Have a Beautiful Life

• The Emotional Weight of “Maybe”

• Why Closure Rarely Feels Like Closure

• The People We Become Around Different People

• Missing Places More Than People

• The Fear of Wasting Your Potential

• The Soft Ache of Almost Relationships

• Learning to Live Without Constant Validation

• The Versions of Ourselves We Abandon to Survive

• The Emotional Aftermath of Being Too Self-Aware

• Why We Romanticize the Past Even When It Hurt

• The Quiet Grief of Realizing Nobody Fully Knows You

• The Exhaustion of Always Trying to Be Better

• The Strange Art of Starting Over

• The Fear of Becoming Replaceable

• The Comfort of Imaginary Futures

• Why We Keep Revisiting Old Conversations in Our Heads

• The Emotional Distance Between Online and Real Life

• The Feeling of Watching Your Life Instead of Living It

• How Silence Changes Between Two People

• The Hidden Loneliness of Independence

• The Unspoken Competition Between People Online

• The Desire to Disappear Without Actually Leaving

• The Strange Ways We Try to Earn Love

• The Fear That You’ve Already Met the Best Days of Your Life

• Becoming Difficult to Reach Emotionally

• The Tiny Lies We Tell Ourselves to Keep Going

• The Quiet Embarrassment of Caring Too Much

• The People Who Changed Us Without Realizing It

• Why Certain Songs Feel Like Entire Time Periods

• The Emotional Side Effects of Constant Self-Improvement

• Learning to Sit With an Unfinished Life

• The Strange Sadness of Outgrowing Your Dreams

• The Comfort of Being Around People Who Expect Nothing From You

• Why We Archive Our Lives Online

• The Feeling of Being Emotionally Homesick

• The Unnoticed Moments That End Up Defining Us

• The Pressure to Turn Your Life Into Something Meaningful

• Missing Who You Were Before the World Hardened You

• The Quiet Fear That Everyone Else Understands Life Better Than You

• The Emotional Impact of Living Through Screens

• Why Some Goodbyes Never Fully Happen

• The Relief of No Longer Needing to Prove Yourself

• The Way Certain People Make Time Feel Different

• The Loneliness Hidden Inside Productivity

• How People Slowly Become Strangers

• The Desire to Be Chosen Without Asking

• The Quiet Shift From Dreaming to Surviving

• The Feeling of Carrying Too Many Versions of Yourself

• The Emotional Attachment We Form With Temporary Things

• The Internal Conflict Between Wanting Attention and Wanting to Hide

• The Strange Comfort of Knowing Nothing Lasts Forever

• Learning to Accept That Some Questions Never Get Answered

You also don’t have to limit yourself to this list.

If you already have a personal essay, reflection, memoir-style piece, or story you’ve written that explores something meaningful to you, you’re welcome to submit that as well. Some of the best collaborations we’ve published came from people simply writing honestly about something they couldn’t stop thinking about.

And I think that honesty is what matters most here.

How the Collaboration Works?

You’ll write a 500–600 word essay on a topic of your choice. It can be reflective, personal, narrative, emotional, analytical, or observational whatever style feels most natural to you.

You do not need to arrive at a perfect conclusion. Sometimes the most meaningful essays are simply explorations of a feeling or question.

After reading your essay, I’ll write a response where I engage with your ideas and continue the conversation through my own perspective and experiences.

The Final Piece:

Your essay will appear first, followed by my response, creating a collaborative essay of 1100+ words that feels more like a conversation than a traditional article.

Submission Details:

Submissions are currently open for July.

You can submit your essay anytime during the month of may, but earlier submissions naturally have a better chance of being selected since there are only a limited number of collaboration spots available. (Prefer by the end of May)

You’re also welcome to submit older essays you’ve already written, as long as they fit the reflective tone of Postcards by Hasif. (Yes! You can also submit for next month as well like for Aug, you can submit in June)

If your essay gets selected, I’ll personally reach out through email to confirm the collaboration and discuss scheduling, titles, thumbnails, and publication dates.

Submission Guidelines:

• Original writing only
• Essay length should be around 500–600 words
• Please send your submission as a Google Doc, Microsoft Word document, or PDF
• Avoid pasting the full essay directly into the email body
• Use a simple font such as Arial or Times New Roman, size 12
• Include your name and your Substack publication at the top of the document
• You may also add a short optional bio at the end

Send your essay to: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

Subject line: Co-Author Submission

In the email body include:
[Chosen Topic] – [Your Name]

You’re also welcome to include links to your Substack or social media.

If Your Essay Is Selected

• You’ll receive a confirmation email & payment link.

• A $50 feature fee will be required only if your essay is selected. Entry to submit your essay is completely free.

• Before you jump in, I just want to say something important. I know when I introduce something like this, it can feel a bit… transactional. But please don’t take it the wrong way. Postcards by Hasif will always remain free to read. I have no intention of turning it into a paid publication, and I never will. Every piece I write, your submissions, my reflections, and my essays will always be accessible to anyone who wants to read them. I also don’t want to bring in brands, sponsorships, or ads. This space is not about marketing, it’s not about influencer culture, and it’s certainly not about monetizing in a way that compromises the essence of what this publication stands for. This is about creating a genuine community of thinkers and writers, exploring topics that matter, sharing perspectives, and giving both you and me a chance to engage meaningfully with readers. The $50 fee isn’t about making a profit; it’s a small way to ensure this collaboration is valued and taken seriously, while also helping me maintain the publication sustainably. Postcards by Hasif will always be my voice, my vision, my space. This collaboration is simply a way to bring in other voices I respect, share ideas, and build something together without compromising what this place stands for.

• Once payment is completed, we’ll coordinate with you via email to finalize the title, thumbnail, and posting dates.

• Your essay will be published in Postcards by hasif (130,000+ readers).

• Exposure to 130,000+ readers: Your voice will reach a large, engaged audience that values thoughtful, reflective writing.

• Recommendation of Your Substack: As part of the collaboration, I will recommend your Substack publication for a week. This means followers will see “Postcards by Hasif recommends {Your Publication Name}”, increasing traffic to your page.

• Collaborative Content: This is more than just a guest post. You’re collaborating with me in a meaningful way, creating a written conversation that will resonate with readers.

You’ll also receive:

• Exposure to a large and engaged audience
• A collaborative essay featuring my written response
• A one-week recommendation of your Substack publication

Your publication will appear as: “Postcards by Hasif recommends [Your Publication Name]”

which helps introduce your writing to new readers within the community.

I’ve genuinely loved reading the perspectives so many of you have shared through these collaborations over the past months. Every essay has brought a completely different lens to feelings and experiences we often carry quietly without talking about openly.

If you’ve been thinking about submitting something, this is a really good time to do it.

I’m genuinely looking forward to reading your work.

Best,
Hasif

And what annoys me the most is how normal this is made to look. Everyone around me is doing something, building something, pushing something, and it creates this silent pressure that I am supposed to match it all the time. Even when I am doing fine, it never feels like fine is enough. It always feels like there is another level I am supposed to reach before I can even sit still.

Rest feels suspicious now. That is the problem. Sitting without doing anything feels like I am committing some mistake that I will have to repay later. My mind literally starts calculating what I am losing while resting. Time. Progress. Output. Like everything in life is being measured on a scale I never agreed to. And I hate that I still follow it like it is real.

Even the smallest parts of my day are not untouched. I eat food while thinking about what I should do after. I finish something and immediately move to the next thing like the first thing did not even deserve to exist. I sit with people but half of my brain is somewhere else running through unfinished lists. It is like I am physically present everywhere but mentally never fully inside anything. That split is exhausting in a way I cannot even explain properly anymore.

There is this constant pressure that I am supposed to be becoming something all the time. Not in some future version of life. Always right now. And if I am not actively improving, I feel like I am falling behind. I don’t even know what I am falling behind, but my brain behaves like it is urgent. Like there is a scoreboard somewhere and I am losing without even seeing the game.

And I kept calling this discipline at one point. I really did. I told myself this is what focused people do. This is what serious people feel like. But that narrative is starting to feel fake now. Because discipline should not feel like constant pressure sitting on your chest. Discipline should not feel like guilt when you rest. Discipline should not feel like your brain refusing to shut up even when everything is technically fine.

It feels more like I trained myself into a system where stopping feels unsafe. Like if I pause too long, I will lose everything I built, even though I cannot clearly define what I built in the first place. It is all just momentum at this point. Movement for the sake of movement. And I hate how easy it is to get used to it.

And somewhere in all this, I also started ignoring myself without even noticing. Tiredness becomes normal. Emotional heaviness becomes something to push through. Confusion becomes something to delay. Everything becomes later. Everything becomes after this task. After this goal. After this phase. But that “after” never actually becomes real. It just keeps moving.

This is where I want to bring in something one of my subs, Chloe, wrote.

CHLOE’S ESSAY:

I have always felt like i needed to be filled somehow. like an itch that traces the bones of my spine as I stretch and squirm my arms in absurd directions to reprieve. The spot you cannot reach by yourself.

In my first year of high school the top of my backpack towered well over my head, a walking sack of books and papers that warped the curvature of my lower back. The crave for knowledge i grasped to so deliberately, a search for answers to remedy the shadow of hopelessness that moved just as I.

See, People think intellect is a gift, wrapped in shining foils of validation. Maybe it is. But there’s a reason its common practice to take the price tag off.

Later down the line, it became athleticism, the pursuit of multifaceted excellence that my mother bestowed upon me, just as her mother had on her. Three generations of eldest daughters guide the very pattern of my footsteps, the way I reorganise the dishwasher, take skim milk in my coffee. Since the age of twelve, i have centred high performance above all else. Shifting my life from state to state, one university degree to the next - in search for this illusive idea of success that holds as a north star. But the thing about external motivation is it eventually turns inward, the expectation of others become your inner narrative. Validation becomes disguised as love.

It took four stress fractures; two mental illness diagnoses and osteoporosis at age 23 to finally understand the true havoc my relationship with success had reckoned. My body broke down long before I allowed myself to. Over years of intense physical demand, pain receptors in the brain begin to modulate – a neurological downturn of the bodies’ alarm system. Entering survival mode through repeated exposure to discomfort in search of validation teaches the brain to accept cortisol like a reward. If you’re struggling, you must be doing something right. No pain no gain.

Hustle culture guides this never-ending feedback loop of mind-body disconnect. But when stripped bare, left to sit with without productivity and busyness there’s often nothing and no one left to gain meaning from. When approval becomes your compass, you stop asking where you actually want to go. I used to think I was difficult in relationships, never knowing how to fill a space. I would find myself drifting in and out of conversation, too preoccupied with the to do list playing on a projector in my mind.

Without even realising it I had become a recluse, dismissing genuine connection as a distraction to ambition, forgoing romance and vulnerability as unnecessary energy expenditure.

And when I was stripped of exercise due to recurrent injury, there was nothing to fall back on except for forms of punishment that carry an immense weight of shame and regret. Without control and accomplishment, I was nobody and nowhere. Having a reputation among those you love as ‘good’ and ‘successful’ is more dangerous than it seems, there is much further to fall. And so, I would run in circles, repeating the same mistakes in a circular motion of familiarity and ‘safety’, whatever version of that I had manufactured. Ignorance became crucial to survival.

The brain requires up to 500 calories per day to maintain full neuronal potential. With continuous deficit, the body begins to adapt and prioritise vital systems. The physical trade-offs of this adaptative survival mode are innumerable, but include the downregulation of reproductive hormones, bone formation, aswell as impaired neural connectivity and hippocampal shrinkage. Sitting in the weight of this damage is far from simple, harsh realities become harder to accept when met with the weight of generational expectation.

In small increments, I see shifts. Having the full fat butter on my toast, savouring the last sip of coffee at the windowsill instead of the traffic light, asking the lady at the checkout how her day has been and actually meaning it. Still, I feel the arch of my back extend with hollowness in quiet moments – the intricacy of knowing exactly what’s good for you, yet doing the opposite anyways. But awareness is the first step to change.

I have spent my adulthood trying to fill something that really just wanted to be held.

Reading Chloe’s piece honestly irritated me in a strange way because it reflected things I have been avoiding naming properly. The way she talked about performance becoming identity hit harder than I expected. Because it is not something that feels dramatic when you are inside it. It feels normal. It feels like life. Until someone puts it into words and suddenly it feels wrong.

After reading it, I could not continue my day the same way. It kept sitting in my head like a loop. The idea that I might also be turning my entire existence into something I am constantly trying to prove. Even my rest. Even my silence. Even my so-called free time. Everything starts feeling like it needs justification, like I am always being evaluated even when nobody is actually watching.

And the more I sit with it, the more irritated I get at how deep this runs. Because it does not feel like pressure at first. It feels like ambition. It feels like being responsible. It feels like being “on track.” But slowly it becomes something else. It becomes a permanent state of tension that never turns off. A mind that never fully relaxes. A body that is always slightly on edge even when nothing is happening.

Even now I catch myself doing it without noticing. Thinking ahead while something is still happening. Planning the next thing while I am still in the current one. Treating every moment like a stepping stone instead of a place I am actually allowed to stay in. It is like I am constantly leaving my own life before it even finishes happening.

And what really gets to me is how hard it is to break this pattern because it is rewarded everywhere. Being busy looks good. Being tired but productive looks good. Being constantly engaged looks good. So the system keeps feeding itself. And you just keep going because stopping feels like you are breaking some rule nobody explicitly said but everyone silently follows.

We made everything about speed. Fast progress, fast growth, fast success, fast recovery, fast healing, fast everything. Even emotions are supposed to be processed quickly now, like there is a deadline for feeling things properly. And if you are still stuck on something, if you are still tired, if you are still confused, it gets treated like failure instead of just being human. I don’t understand when being human started needing efficiency.

Humans were probably meant to live with space inside their own lives, space where nothing is being earned, nothing is being tracked, nothing is being justified. Space where a moment can just exist without immediately becoming a task or a lesson or a step toward something else. And I don’t think that is laziness or lack of ambition or whatever label gets thrown at it. I think it is just the baseline we forgot while building everything faster and louder and more competitive and more exhausting than it needed to be.

There should be a way to live where your mind is not constantly bracing for the next demand, where your body is not always slightly tense like it is preparing for something, where your rest does not feel like it has to be deserved first. Where you can do things slowly without it feeling like you are falling behind reality. Where you can care about your life without turning it into a performance that never switches off.

Because right now it feels like everything is asking for output, even the parts of life that were supposed to just be lived. And maybe the actual point, the one we keep missing while running through all of this, is not to stop caring or stop working or stop building anything, but to stop treating existence itself like something that has to constantly prove it is worth continuing.

Co-Author Substack ID: Chloe

If this piece stayed with you, you can support the work behind Postcards by Hasif by buying me a coffee. It helps me keep this space alive and continue sharing stories like this.

And somewhere in my twenties I became really good at surviving myself. I knew exactly how to avoid my own feelings. I knew how to keep my brain busy every second of the day. Music in my ears while walking. Videos while eating. Scrolling until my eyes hurt. Random obsessions every two weeks. Getting attached to people too fast. Staying awake until 4am simply because silence made everything louder. I kept calling it “moving on” when half of it was just me finding newer distractions.

I think a lot of us secretly live like this. Functioning. Scrolling. Posting pictures. Laughing in group chats. Going outside. Meanwhile something inside us still feels stuck in an old version of our life that everybody else already forgot about. And that feeling is horrible because people stop checking after a while. Time passes so everyone assumes you’re okay now. Meanwhile certain memories still hit like they happened yesterday. Certain people still have access to versions of you that nobody around you even knows existed.

Sometimes I wonder how many people are carrying pain they can’t even explain properly. Pain that sounds stupid when said out loud. Pain that came from feeling unwanted too many times. Feeling easy to leave. Feeling hard to love. Feeling like everyone gets a softer version of people while you only receive what’s left of them. That type of pain follows people into everything. Relationships. Friendships. Even happy moments. Especially happy moments.

I used to think healing would feel obvious. I thought one day I’d wake up and suddenly feel lighter and wiser and completely over everything that hurt me. Instead it looked embarrassing. It looked like realizing I was still hurt by things I claimed I didn’t care about anymore. It looked like admitting some people changed the way I see myself. It looked like understanding that half my personality was built around avoiding rejection.

A few days ago, one of my subscribers, Keesha, sent me a piece about emotional wounds and healing and I had to sit there after reading it because it felt too familiar in the worst way. Especially the parts about coping. Especially the parts about carrying things for years without even realizing how heavy they became.

KEESHA’S ESSAY:

We talk about emotional pain it’s something you decide to do “move on” “get over it” “don’t think about it anymore” But emotional wounds don’t work that way.  People may minimize your experience, tell you it wasn’t that bad, or push you to move on before you’re ready. Emotional wounds are personal. No one else has lived your inner world. Your healing doesn’t need their approval.

They don’t disappear just because were exhausted from carrying them. Healing asks us to face the parts of ourselves we’ve spent years avoiding.

Sometimes, the heaviness starts long before you even understand what it is. Feeling heavy because you’ve been carrying something deep from a very young age. Realizing it later in life doesn’t happen on one random Thursday morning. It builds up over time. Childhood trauma can change the way your brain develops. You might forget painful but important events. You might feel like there’s a black spot in your memory, and that emptiness can make you question everything. Do I even want to remember?

The answer is probably not what you want to hear but yes, remembering is part of healing.

A careless comment from childhood can still influence how we see ourselves years later. We don’t just remember what happened. We also walk away with beliefs like “I don’t deserve better” So healing isn’t only about the original pain. It’s about unlearning the beliefs that grew around it and learning to see ourselves with new eyes. Unlearning these beliefs is hard but an important step.

Healing is uncomfortable. It’s sitting with thoughts you’ve been running from.

Fixating on new hobbies every week, drowning yourself in school or work, or doing the opposite like starting your day, doom‑scrolling, taking nap after nap. None of that is healing. Those are coping mechanisms. They help you survive, but they don’t help you heal. And eventually, what you’ve been avoiding will collapse on you. Suddenly you feel further from healing than ever. Suddenly you feel like nothing matters, like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

But there is. You can heal in any state you’re in, but you must want it.

For a long time, I found comfort in my own sadness. It felt familiar, almost safe? But deep down, I knew I didn’t want to live like that forever. I got help, but not all help works for everyone. I tried multiple therapists, but something always felt off. I didn’t want to talk about the events. I didn’t want to face them head‑on. I needed something different. Talking therapy isn’t the only therapy that exists. Music can be therapy. Art can be therapy. Movement can be therapy. It might sound strange, but music saved lives when words couldn’t.

Maybe none of that is for you. Maybe you don’t want therapy at all

If you don’t want therapy, therapy won’t work.

Maybe your healing looks like lying in the grass, writing in your journal, meeting friends, eating dinner with your family, or taking long walks. Healing is a process, and everyone chooses a different path.

But again, coping is not healing.

Healing is honesty. It means admitting that something hurt you more than you wanted to acknowledge. It means facing the fact that you stayed in situations that damaged you, ignored your intuition, or accepted less than you deserved. It means admitting you’re still angry, still grieving, still afraid.

Some days you feel strong the next day somethings pull you back into the past. That doesn’t mean you’re failing. it means you’re human. You revisit the same themes, but each time with more strength. It’s all part of the healing prosses. Healing is not about forgetting. That what you’re trying to achieve with coping.

Healing is acceptance.

Learning how to live with it without it consuming your mind. Talking about it without crying before starting your sentence. Asking for help isn’t a weakness although it might feel like it. Healing is a strength not everyone gets to touch. Healing doesn’t erase the past. It doesn’t make you forget. It doesn’t turn you into someone who was never hurt. What it does is change your relationship to the memory. It helps you reach a place where the past no longer controls you or defines you. Healing isn’t about erasing what happened.

It’s about reclaiming your story.

you don’t heal by becoming who you were before the pain. You heal by becoming someone new. Pain changes you, but healing changes you too. You grow boundaries.

Healing isn’t a return.

After reading her piece I kept thinking about how easy it is to confuse coping with healing, especially in this generation where everyone knows how to hide inside distractions. I do it too. I romanticize isolation and call it peace. I disappear emotionally and call it independence. I pretend I’ve detached when deep down I just expect disappointment before anything even begins.

There are so many things I personally used as coping mechanisms while convincing myself I was healing. Making jokes out of things that genuinely broke my heart. Acting unserious about people I cared about deeply. Staying emotionally unavailable so nobody could hurt me first. Keeping myself constantly entertained so I wouldn’t have to sit alone with my thoughts for too long. Getting attached to temporary people simply so life would feel exciting again. Pretending I was over things simply because I got tired of hearing myself talk about them.

And I think the scariest part is how familiar sadness can become after a while. Familiar enough that peace starts feeling uncomfortable. Familiar enough that healthy things feel suspicious. Familiar enough that chaos feels more natural than stability. I’ve seen people return to the same pain simply because at least they knew what to expect there. I’ve done it too.

Healing forced me to admit things about myself that I spent years avoiding. I had to admit that I wanted love from people who clearly couldn’t give it to me. I had to admit that I kept shrinking myself to feel chosen. I had to admit that some of my “self awareness” was actually self destruction wearing glasses and sounding intelligent.

And honestly I still think healing feels lonely sometimes because nobody really talks about the grief that comes with changing. Some people only know the broken version of me. Some friendships were built around my sadness. Some versions of me had to disappear completely for me to survive my own life better. That hurts too.

I think coping keeps pain alive quietly. Healing forces it into the open. That’s why healing feels heavier at first. Everything finally has a name. Everything finally has a face. Everything finally stops hiding behind distractions and starts sitting directly in front of me.

Still, I’d rather face myself honestly than spend another year pretending I’m fine while my entire inner world is collapsing in silence.

About the Co-Author:

Keesha is a 19-year-old writer based in Belgium with Nigerian roots she is still learning to explore and understand. Drawn to literature, film, and lately the mysteries of space, she spends much of her time searching for meaning through stories, reflection, and curiosity. After stepping away from high school due to mental health struggles, Keesha began rebuilding her life through healing and self-discovery. She is currently pursuing adult education with hopes of studying neuroscience in the future. Through her writing, she explores identity, growth, and the inner worlds we quietly carry with us.

Co-Author Substack ID: Keesha

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I used to think heartbreak was simple. Like one big thing. One moment, one ending, one wound. Something breaks, you cry, you heal, and that’s it. That’s how I thought it worked. But life has a cruel way of correcting you. Heartbreak is never just one thing. It’s a hundred small things, spread out across ordinary days, showing up when you’re doing absolutely nothing important.

Like I’ll be making coffee, just standing there, waiting for it to boil, and out of nowhere I’ll remember how someone used to stand next to me, half asleep, stealing sips from my cup like it was theirs too. And suddenly it’s not just coffee anymore. It’s memory. It’s absence. It’s me standing in the same kitchen but in a completely different life.

Or I’ll be walking down some random road and my mind will throw back a conversation that happened there years ago, word for word, like it had been saving it for this exact moment. And that’s the thing that gets me, how sometimes my body remembers before I do. Before my mind can even catch up, something in me already knows. My chest tightens, my stomach drops, and then it hits me why.

And honestly, that part messes with me the most. Because nobody really talks about how the body keeps people. My hands remember people I haven’t touched in years. My ears still hold onto voices that don’t call anymore. My heart remembers what comfort felt like, even when my mind knows how badly it ended.

And isn’t that unfair? How memory has its own way of surviving. Like even when you’re trying so hard to move on, some part of you keeps preserving things without asking for permission. Like a house you’re trying to leave, but your body keeps making copies of the keys.

That’s what heartbreak really is, I think. All the little returns. The random revisits. The way a normal Tuesday can suddenly become heavy because something reminded you of someone you’ve been trying so hard to outgrow.

One of my subscribers, Brett, wrote something about this, and while reading it, I kept stopping because it felt too familiar, like hearing someone explain a wound I had been carrying in silence. He wrote about unfinished love, about the strange burden of holding onto something that never got its ending, and maybe that’s the worst part of all this. Some stories collapse loudly, and at least loud endings give me something solid to grieve. But unfinished stories stay restless. They keep moving inside me because they never got to settle.

Brett’s essay:

I wonder what she would’ve written there when she knew it was our last date.

While her book is shoved in the back corner of my bookcase, the memory of her remains fused at the forefront of my mind.

Before her, I had no mementoes of former flames. Sad in a way, but also lucky to have nothing to show for those who flirted with the idea, but never took the leap of loving me. I’m uncomfortable with receiving gifts due to a childhood full of strings-attached presents, so I was more than content with the gift of pure time spent together. Quiet nights dancing and kissing, singing in the kitchen, making pasta, or walking across the Seaport with the cool breeze seeping between our interlaced fingers. Even though the endings never matched the beauty of the beginnings, I look back on those memories with warmth and joy.

But with her, there was no ending.

The paragraphs of our time together were left unfinished. My last text to her was left on read. Perhaps it hit harder than ever before to not receive closure from a writer of all people. That to her, I was unworthy of a goodbye, a period at the end of the brief story of us.

The pain of our parting felt duller than other times I had been let go. But amongst the tears and tightness in my chest in each occurrence, often lasting weeks if not months, there was a part of me that knew that one day the aching would subside.

But for the first time, it’s felt like a burden to hold onto the past, our past.

I’ve resisted checking her website to see if anything has been written about me since our parting of ways. I expect to relent someday, when my heart is in a self-sabotaging kind of mood. I’m not sure if I’d be more relieved if I were not a part of her written word, or if I’d be saddened if I weren’t even a word on a page to her anymore.

And if she did write about me, how would I feel knowing she shared more with her readers than she did with me? That mere strangers scrolling by were worth more to be written to than someone she shared her soul with for years. What if all my fond memories of her evaporated the moment I found her dragging my name across the mud or burying my being deep into the literary ground?

These thoughts dominate my headspace, rather than all our words of affirmation and cozy nights on the couch. Every time I hear or see her name, I encounter something that reminds me of her, and the nightly reminder of walking past my bookcase full of books by a mix of my literary heroes and author friends on my way to my bed.

I’ve contemplated donating her book to rid myself of the single memento of lasting heartache. I question how she would feel if she came across this particular copy in the wild, however unlikely it would be. But I’d rather not run the risk of ever hurting her like the hurt I’ve felt from her.

Instead, I choose to live with the burden of holding onto the past, our past. I choose to acknowledge that our story will never have a definitive ending.

And for every story I write from here to eternity, both on the page and in the world with others, will have the ending it deserves.

Reading Brett’s words felt like watching someone hold the exact weight I have been carrying for years and finally give it a name. That line about choosing to live with the burden of holding onto the past stayed with me because that’s really what it is, a choice, even when it does not feel like one. Because there are so many ways to get rid of people after they leave. Delete the chats. Throw away the gifts. Unfollow them. Stop visiting the places that remind me of them. Stop replaying old memories like they’re scenes from a movie I still wish had a different ending. But somehow, I never do it fully. I keep pieces. A text. A photo. A note. A memory. And maybe that’s because letting go of those things feels too close to letting go of the proof that it all happened. Brett talked about keeping her book, and I understood that immediately, because sometimes the smallest object carries the heaviest ache. A book on a shelf is never just a book when it belonged to a person I once loved. It becomes evidence. Evidence that for some brief part of my life, someone stood close enough to leave something behind. And maybe that’s why the past weighs so much, because it keeps turning ordinary things into emotional landmarks I can’t walk past without feeling something.

That’s the thing about unfinished endings, I think. They leave too much room for imagination. A clear goodbye hurts, but at least it closes the door. An unfinished ending keeps the door cracked, and my mind keeps standing there, hand on the handle, wondering if it was really over or if I just stopped being invited in. And that wondering is exhausting because it stretches grief. It makes me replay conversations, re-read old words, and search for clues like there was some hidden meaning I missed. Like maybe if I study the wreckage hard enough, I’ll find the reason it collapsed. But sometimes things fall apart without explanation, and carrying that uncertainty becomes part of the pain.

I think I carry the past like people carry old receipts. Crumpled, faded, almost unreadable, useless to everyone else, but impossible to throw away because they prove something existed. Proof that money was spent, proof that a place was visited, proof that something happened. My memories feel like that. Tiny proof of old love, old pain, old versions of me that existed around certain people. And I keep them all. God, I keep everything. Old chats, old pictures, old drafts, old notes in my phone that I wrote in the middle of missing somebody and never sent. Sometimes I scroll through them and feel embarrassed by how much I cared, by how deeply I felt things that eventually fell apart. But there’s another part of me that looks at those pieces and thinks, at least I was real. At least my love was real.

And maybe that’s the cruel thing about being the one who remembers deeply. I don’t just lose people when they leave. I lose the version of myself that existed with them. That version dies too. Losing a person is one grief. Losing the self that loved them is another. Sometimes I miss who I was more than who they were.

What hurts most is how differently people remember the same love. That thought messes with me all the time. I could be carrying somebody like they were a whole season of my life while they carry me like a passing afternoon. I could still be grieving moments they have completely forgotten. And that imbalance feels humiliating, realizing I gave something permanence in me while it only rented space in them. I hate that. I hate knowing my heart turns temporary people into permanent architecture.

And the thing is, memory lies. It edits reality. It makes me romanticize things that hurt me. Memory softens the sharp parts and leaves me with a prettier version of pain, which makes moving on harder because I am trying to heal from something my own mind keeps beautifying. Sometimes I think nostalgia is just grief wearing perfume.

And I think some people live inside me forever. Some as lessons, some as scars, some as unfinished stories. And maybe that’s the burden of holding onto the past. It’s waking up and realizing I survived things that still live inside me. It’s laughing while grief sits quietly in the corner. It’s building new memories while old ones still pull at my sleeve. It’s trying to love again while carrying proof of every time love hurt before.

And the truth is, I don’t want to forget. That’s the hardest part to admit. Forgetting feels too close to erasing, and erasing feels too close to pretending it never mattered. It mattered. They mattered. The love mattered, even if it didn’t last. Even if it left me heavier than it found me.

Maybe that’s why the past stays. Because some part of me keeps feeding it. Keeps revisiting it. Keeps sitting beside it like an old friend I know is bad for me but understand too well to leave behind. And maybe one day the weight will feel lighter. Maybe one day memory will stop hurting and start feeling warm again. But tonight, if I’m being honest, it still hurts. It hurts in quiet ways, in ordinary ways, in ways nobody notices when they look at me.

Co-Author Substack: Brett

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This space was never built around trends or numbers. It was built around writing that feels human, that carries honesty, reflection, emotion, and the things people often struggle to say out loud.

Each month, I open submissions and select eight pieces to feature. Over time, it has become a place where writers can share the pieces that matter to them, and readers can find words that feel familiar to their own lives.

Submissions are now open for the June, July, and August Months.

And if you already have something you’d like to save for later in the year, you’re welcome to submit for future months too.

If you’ve been sitting on an essay you wrote late at night, something personal, reflective, or unfinished in your drafts, this might be the right place for it.

I read every submission myself, and every month, eight pieces are chosen to be published in The Open Letters.

What can you submit?

There’s no strict format.

Writers usually send in:

• Personal essays

• Reflective writing

• Open letters

• Poetry

• Creative nonfiction

• Think pieces

• Fictional letters

What matters most is not the category. It’s whether the writing feels honest. Whether it carries something real that someone else can feel too.

Current submission window

Submissions are currently open for:

June Issue
6 slots available

July Issue
8 slots available

August Issue
8 slots available

You can also submit for any later month if you’d prefer your piece to appear in a future issue.

Each Month features 8 selected essays.

A small note: selections for the June issue will be finalized by the end of May, so if you’re planning to submit for June, try sending your piece soon.

Older pieces are welcome too. If you’ve written something months ago and it still feels important, you can send it.

Submission requirements

Word count:
Minimum 900 words.

There’s no strict maximum. The only thing that matters is that the piece says what it needs to say.

Original work:

• Your piece must be your own.

• Plagiarism will not be accepted.

Format:
Please submit your essay as one of these:

• Word document

• Google Doc link

• PDF

Please don’t paste the full essay into the email body.

Use simple formatting:

• 12pt font

• Arial or Times New Roman

• Your name and Substack ID at the top

Author bio:

If you’d like, you can add a short bio (100–150 ish words) at the end of your document so readers can know a little about you.

How to submit:

Send your essay to: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

Subject line format:

Open Call Submission: [Month]

Example: Open Call Submission: June

If you’re submitting for July, August, or later, just replace the month.

If your essay is selected

If your piece is chosen, you will receive a confirmation email.

A $25 feature fee will be required only if your essay is selected. Submitting your work itself is completely free.

The reason for this is simple. The Open Letters and Postcards by Hasif have always been free to readers. Even with an audience of more than 160,000+ subscribers across both publications, I’ve chosen to keep the writing accessible instead of moving behind a paywall.

Recently, I also brought an editor on board to help review submissions and assist with editorial work. The feature fee helps support editing, publication design, and the time that goes into maintaining the quality of this space.

Once the payment is completed, we’ll coordinate with you through email to finalize the title, thumbnail, and posting date.

Your essay will be published in The Open Letters (40,000+ readers) and can also be cross-posted to your own Substack so it reaches your existing audience.

Your publication will also be recommended for a week, helping new readers discover your writing and often bringing in new subscribers.

Why Submit Here

The Open Letters exist for writers who want to say something real.

Not everything needs to sound academic to be meaningful. Sometimes, the most powerful essays are simply honest reflections about life, relationships, or personal experiences that many people quietly relate to.

If you’ve written something that feels important to you, I’d genuinely love to read it.

For any questions about submissions, timelines, or formatting, you can always reach me at hasifnewsletter@gmail.com.

Looking forward to reading your work.

~Hasif

One of the first submissions I ever received for The Open Letters was from Kelsey Clarke. Her piece was called The Eternal Act of Almost, and I still remember reading it and feeling how clear her voice already was. There was something in her writing that stayed with me, honest, sharp, and deeply human in a way that made you stop and sit with it. Since then, watching her writing find more and more people has been beautiful to witness. It reminds me why I keep opening submissions every month. Sometimes the right piece finds you before the rest of the world finds it.

I think some people are born into stability and grow into love like it is the most ordinary thing in the world, like trust is the default setting of being alive, and I have always wondered what that must feel like because I can’t remember ever meeting love without also meeting fear beside it. Fear has always been sitting there like an extra chair at the table, listening to every conversation, reminding me that people change, feelings change, circumstances change, and what feels permanent today can become a memory so fast it makes your head spin. Maybe that sounds cynical, maybe it sounds like I am expecting the worst, but how do I explain that expectation is just memory wearing a new face? How do I explain that when enough things leave you, your body starts memorizing loss before your mind can process it?

I think that is what people misunderstand about people like me. They think distance means lack of care. They think silence means emptiness. They think if I act unaffected, then I must be unaffected. I wish it worked like that. I wish detachment meant freedom. But detachment has never felt like freedom to me. It feels like hunger. It feels like standing outside a house where everyone is inside laughing, wanting to enter, wanting to belong, but freezing at the door because my mind keeps whispering what if they ask you to leave later, what if you settle in and then the room changes and suddenly there is nowhere for you to stand?

And isn’t that such a pathetic thing to admit? That sometimes I ruin my own chances at closeness because I am terrified of what closeness demands. Because attachment asks me to trust, and trust has always felt like handing someone the map to all my wounds and hoping they don’t use it against me. I keep thinking about how exhausting it is to love like this, how exhausting it is to care and calculate at the same time, to feel and defend at the same time, to want and withdraw at the same time. Sometimes I wonder how much love I have missed because fear convinced me safety mattered more than connection.

I think about the people I almost let in. Isn’t that the saddest category of people? The almosts. The people who stood at the edge of my life, close enough to change me, close enough to matter, but never close enough to stay because I could never hand them the full version of myself. I gave edited versions. Softer versions. Safer versions. I kept the mess hidden because what if the mess was too much? What if being known made leaving easier for them? What if I gave them the whole truth and they decided it was too heavy to carry?

One of my subscribers, Yatharsana, wrote something that stayed in my chest for hours after I read it because it felt like proof that this fear has roots, that sometimes the places we grow up in teach us to expect departure before we even understand what attachment means, and while reading her words I kept thinking about how many of us are carrying the same wound with different names.

YATHARSANA’S ESSAY:

I grew up in the 90s, on a small island that didn’t know peace for long.

“Leaving the country” wasn’t a big dramatic decision. It was just… normal. Something everyone talked about like it was part of growing up.

In school, every kid had someone abroad. A dad, a mom, an older sibling, an aunt. Conversations always ended the same way - when is your turn?

It wasn’t said directly, but we all understood it.

People don’t stay.

Friends don’t stay.

I remember getting used to it way too early. One day someone is sitting next to you, the next they’re gone. No big goodbye. No explanation you could really understand as a kid. Just… gone.

After a while, I stopped getting close.

Not in a dramatic way. I still laughed, still talked, still had friends. But only up to a point. There was always a line I wouldn’t cross. An unspoken rule I made for myself - don’t get too attached to anyone.

Did everyone around me feel that way too?

We never talked about it. We were just kids acting like it didn’t hurt.

My parents stayed. And I know now how big that was.

But staying came with its own cost. They worked all the time. That was their way of loving us - making sure we were okay, making sure we had a future that didn’t look like theirs. They did what they knew.

There wasn’t a lot of time for emotional stuff. No one was sitting down asking, “are you okay with all this?”

You just… adjusted.

And then I left too… never realizing how much it stayed with me.

Then I met my now husband. I was 23. Since then, it’s been slow… him patiently removing one brick at a time from the wall I built, letting me feel like I could fully let someone in.

For the first time, I didn’t try to leave before it got real.

But it didn’t just click overnight.

It took years of work on myself to believe that someone wouldn’t leave. At 32, I’m still unlearning that little girl’s instinct to hold back.

Still catching myself when I try to keep people at a safe distance.

But it’s different now.

I don’t feel like I’m always about to lose something.

For the first time, it feels like I might actually get to keep it.

And after reading her piece, I kept sitting with this question that keeps following me everywhere, how many of us are loving with one foot out the door without even realizing it? How many of us have mastered the art of caring halfway because halfway feels safer? Because if I stay halfway, maybe the loss will only hurt halfway too, right? But that has never been true. I have learned that even partial love leaves full bruises. Even the people I almost loved have left marks on me. Even unfinished stories can haunt you like completed ones.

There is this ache I carry from people who are still alive, and I think that is what nobody prepares you for. Everybody talks about grief like it belongs to death, but what about grieving people who are still somewhere in the world, laughing, eating, waking up, living full days without you, while you are still carrying the version of them that once held your heart so carefully? What do I call that? What do I call losing someone without losing their existence? What do I call becoming strangers with someone whose voice I could once recognize in a crowded room?

I think attachment terrifies me because it makes me honest. It forces me to admit that I need people, and I hate admitting that. I hate how one person can shift the gravity of my day, how one delayed reply can make my mind wander into dark corners, how one changed tone can awaken old fears I thought I buried. Isn’t that humiliating in some way? To know your heart can be affected that deeply by another human being?

Sometimes I miss people I never even had. Isn’t that insane? Missing potential, missing what could have been, missing the future version of something that never got the chance to exist. I think yearning is one of the loneliest feelings in the world because it has nowhere to go. It just sits inside you, growing heavier, asking questions with zero answers. Did they ever care like I cared? Did I mean what they meant to me? Would things have been different if I had been braver, softer, easier to hold?

And maybe that is the ugliest truth in all this, that fear turns love into hesitation, and hesitation has cost me things I still think about at night. I have let moments pass because vulnerability felt unbearable. I have stayed quiet when I wanted to beg someone to stay. I have acted indifferent while breaking inside because caring openly felt too dangerous. How many versions of my life were altered by the words I swallowed? How many people became memories because fear spoke louder than love?

And maybe that is what I am learning, that attachment will always carry risk because love and loss have always lived close to each other, but maybe being human means accepting that closeness anyway, accepting that some people will leave and some people will stay and some people will change shape inside your memory forever, and still choosing to care because feeling deeply, even when it hurts, is better than becoming somebody who feels nothing at all.

I think my biggest fear has never been people leaving. I think my biggest fear has always been being left with all the love I never gave, all the words I never said, all the softness I kept hidden because fear convinced me there would always be more time, another chance, another moment.

Life has taught me there isn’t always more time.

And maybe attachment hurts because it reminds me that everything I love is temporary in some way, but maybe that is exactly why it matters so much. Maybe the ache is proof that something was real. Maybe the risk is the price of feeling alive.

I am still terrified of attachment. I still flinch at closeness. I still carry old exits in my bones. But I am tired of loving like I am preparing for loss. I am tired of turning my heart into a waiting room for departures that haven’t even happened yet.

I think I want to stay now.

Fully.

Even if it ruins me.

Co-Author Substack ID: Yatharsana M

If this piece stayed with you, you can support the work behind Postcards by Hasif by buying me a coffee. It helps me keep this space alive and continue sharing stories like this.

I think the cruelest thing about invisible pain is how ordinary life looks while it is happening. The world keeps moving like nothing inside me has changed, and maybe that is what makes it heavier, the fact that pain does not pause anything. Morning still arrives at the same time. People still ask how I am and expect the easiest answer. Food still gets served. Work still waits. Responsibilities still sit there like unpaid bills. Meanwhile, there is this private earthquake happening somewhere deep inside me, shifting old memories, breaking old foundations, making me question things I thought were settled. And nobody sees it. Nobody hears the noise of it. From the outside, I am still a person answering calls, replying to texts, laughing at jokes, posting online, and showing up where I am expected. Inside, there are days where it feels like I am carrying rubble in my chest and calling it normal.

I have always wondered how many people are walking around like that, carrying entire wars inside them and still holding doors open for strangers, still saying “I’m good” when asked, still sitting in classrooms or offices or dinner tables while their minds are somewhere else entirely. I think pain becomes invisible when it learns how to behave. That is what happened to mine. It learned manners. It stopped interrupting my day loudly and started living quietly inside my habits. It turned into overthinking. Into rereading messages to see if I sounded stupid. Into apologizing too much. Into preparing myself for people to leave before they even gave me a reason to think about leaving. Pain became less of an event and more of a system inside me, a private operating system running under everything else.

I do not think my pain came from one big tragedy. That would have been easier to understand. Mine came from accumulation, from little things repeated over years until they became permanent residents inside me. Being misunderstood by people I loved. Feeling unseen in rooms where I was physically present. Realizing effort and love are not the same currency. Learning that giving everything does not guarantee being kept. Watching people outgrow me while I was still trying to grow with them. Feeling the weight of expectations at home, in friendships, inside myself. Carrying versions of me that were built for survival and calling that personality and being normal. These things sound small when spoken out loud, almost harmless, but pain does not care about appearances. Repetition builds weight. The same wound returning in different forms can shape a whole life.

I think a lot about childhood, about how much of adulthood is just childhood wearing bigger clothes. People talk about growing up like it is this natural thing, like age automatically brings wisdom, but growing up felt more like collecting invisible bruises and learning how to cover them well. I remember moments from being younger where I felt things so deeply, but had no language for them. Feeling left out. Feeling like I was too much in one room and not enough in another. Feeling the pressure to become someone worthy of love instead of understanding that worth was never something I had to earn. Those feelings sat inside me for years and shaped the way I entered every relationship after that. I carried old hunger into new rooms, and hunger changes how a person loves. When I have gone too long without feeling chosen, even the smallest attention starts feeling enough.

Like, when something has been missing in me for years, I start holding onto whatever little warmth reaches me. Hungry people accept crumbs and call it a meal.

That is one of the saddest truths I had to learn about myself. I accepted crumbs for years. In friendships, in connections, in the way I allowed people to know me halfway while I gave them access to all of me. I kept thinking if I stayed patient enough, useful enough, understanding enough, people would eventually meet me where I was standing. I kept offering depth to people who only wanted convenience. I kept opening doors for people who had already decided they were temporary. And when they left, I stood there blaming myself for the emptiness they created, like abandonment was a review of my worth.

One of my subscribers, Prativa, wrote something similar to what I’ve been talking about. She wrote about friendship wounds in a way that made me stop and sit with myself for a while. Her story about carrying loneliness in school, about pretending to belong, about the ache of wanting friendship and the betrayal that followed later, reminded me of how many forms invisible pain can take. Her words felt familiar because loneliness has always had many costumes.

Prativa’s submission:

I must be unlucky in friendship.

When I was in my School, there were 80 students in my class and our class divided into 2 sections. I did not have a single close friend or best friend whom I could share my lunch with. I could see everybody has their bench partner and they used to go for lunch together, they spend time together, even when they go to the washroom together. My biggest fear was what if people find that I do not have a friend, especially my cousin. She was in 9^th grade while I was in 8^th grade in the same school and I usually saw her hanging out with her friends and seemed so happy. I used to envy her for having a friend around her. I lied sometimes and said a random name saying she is my best friend. But I was good at hiding my feelings and pretending that I was enjoying my school time. Whenever our school organizes a program or we need to go out of school for some occasion, I used to be scared and panicked. I used to believe If other students found out, I have no friends they’re goanna assume me as a negative person. Once I literally pretended that I was a part of one large group of friends when my cousin was around and also when teachers were around. In the last day of school my classmates were crying and showing their sadness. I was the only person who felt relief on that day. It was so hard for me, and I only know how awful my school life was. It’s kind of like I survived the war but not from fighting but with my emotions.

It’s been a decade now, if you ask me if I made friends now then I would say, I had few from my Bachelor and I made some during my internship program but all they betrayed me on some point. However, I experienced having friends around, I experienced going shopping, I experienced having lunch together and even going to the washroom together. It was a really good memory. I did my best to maintain a friendship and tried to be happy with them.

Slowly, I started setting boundaries. I stopped pretending. I even blocked some friends who drained me by their actions. You know what, Once I literally cried on exam hall when I found out that one of my closest friends did something that I can never imagined. And I wish that no one has to face the same situation as me. Growing up, I learned that everyone is not your friend. When you share a room with someone, call a roommate, same class then classmate, in a workplace, call colleague or coworker. You can be friendly but not a friend. I am very proud of myself that I have come so far. When I see people alone in class, I go to them and talk to them. I make sure that no one feels left out or being outcast in class when I am around.

I always ask my siblings or any children I meet if she/he has a friend in school or not. If they say yes, then my question will be like how many? Can you name a few of them or do you have best friends in class? When they say yes, I kind of feel joyful but when they say I don’t have, then I make sure to give advice to them like you must be happy with yourself, you will get some once you grow up. I feel kind of bad about my past version. Like, why didn’t I normalize that not having a friend means you are not a bad person. Eventually, I turned from someone who was desperate to make a friend into someone who enjoys being alone.

And while reading her story, I kept thinking about how pain multiplies. It never stays in the room where it was born. A friendship wound enters trust. A family wound enters love. A childhood wound enters adulthood. A rejection enters confidence. A betrayal enters future connections. Pain travels. It leaks into places that had nothing to do with its beginning. That is why healing is so exhausting. I am never healing one thing. I am healing the chain reaction of it.

Family, for example, gave me some of my deepest invisible wounds, and I say that with love because love and pain have always known each other well. There are things said inside a house that stay louder than anything said outside it. Expectations, comparisons, disappointment, silence, all of it leaves fingerprints. I have sat in rooms with family and felt like a stranger wearing my own face. I have carried dreams that felt heavier because they came tied to approval. I have made choices while hearing voices in my head that were never mine to begin with. I think healing from family wounds is hard because distance does not erase blood, and memory keeps reopening doors I thought I had closed.

Then there is the pain of becoming. I do not think people talk enough about how painful becoming is. Everyone celebrates growth like it is beautiful, but growth often feels like grief. Every time I changed, I lost a version of myself. The younger me who trusted easily. The younger me who believed effort would always be returned. The younger me who thought honesty guaranteed closeness. The younger me who loved without calculation. I miss those versions of me sometimes, even the foolish ones, because there was innocence there. Life educated me out of innocence. Experience made me careful. Hurt made me observant. Survival made me guarded.

And guarded people have a strange relationship with love and friendship. I want closeness, but closeness scares me because history taught me how easily closeness can become pain. I want honesty, but honesty feels dangerous because truth has cost me people before. I want to trust, but trust feels expensive now. These contradictions live inside me all the time. Wanting connection while fearing what connection can become. Wanting to be understood while being terrified of being fully seen. That tension is exhausting. It makes every relationship feel like balancing glass in my hands.

I used to think healing meant moving on. I hate that phrase now because moving on sounds like leaving something behind, and some things never stay behind. They come with me. Healing has looked less like moving on and more like carrying differently. The pain is still part of me, but it does not drive me anymore. It sits in the passenger seat now. It still speaks sometimes. It still reminds me of what happened. But it does not choose the direction anymore.

What stayed with me after reading Prativa’s story was not just the loneliness itself, but the way loneliness teaches a person to perform. That part felt painfully familiar to me, the pretending, the acting like everything is fine so nobody notices what is missing. I keep thinking about how young she was when she learned that. A child should be learning math, history, silly things, making memories that embarrass them later, but instead she was learning how to hide emptiness in public. That changes a person. It changes the way I understand closeness because once I have spent years feeling outside of it, every connection after that carries the fear of losing it. And maybe that is why her story hurt to read, because it reminded me that healing often begins with grieving the version of myself that had to survive without the things I deserved at that age. Friendship, understanding, softness, safety. Those absences shape me just as much as presence does.

What I admire most in her story is that pain did not make her close her hands completely. It changed her, yes, but it also made her notice the lonely person in the room, the one sitting alone, the one carrying the same silence she once carried. I think that is the closest thing healing gives me, the ability to recognize pain in others because I have lived with it in myself. Maybe that is what healing from what no one can see really is, carrying invisible wounds without letting them turn me into someone unrecognizable, carrying the ache of old loneliness without letting it poison new love, carrying memory without letting it become my whole identity. I still have scars nobody can point at, and maybe I always will, but I have learned that scars are proof that something ended and I remained. Maybe that is enough. Maybe surviving what nobody saw is its own form of becoming.

If there is one thing this piece asks of you, it is this: take care of the people around you. Pay attention to them. Check in on them. Ask how they are and stay long enough to hear the real answer. You never fully know what someone is carrying behind their ordinary day, what private battles are sitting quietly inside them while they smile, work, laugh, and move through life like everything is fine. A person can look completely okay and still be fighting to hold themselves together. Your patience can matter. Your words can matter. Your presence can matter. Be softer with people. Be the person who notices when someone goes quiet, when someone starts pulling away, when someone looks like they need company but do not know how to ask for it. Make room for people to feel safe around you, to speak honestly, to exist without pretending. Life leaves enough wounds on its own. You do not have to be another one. And if you have the chance to make someone feel seen, chosen, understood, even for a moment, take it, because sometimes the smallest act of care can become the beginning of someone else’s healing.

Co-Author Substack ID: Prativa

If this piece stayed with you, you can support the work behind Postcards by Hasif by buying me a coffee. It helps me keep this space alive and continue sharing stories like this.

There is a strange thing I have been noticing about life lately. Every time I think I am moving away from myself, I somehow end up right back here, sitting with my own thoughts again, trying to understand what they are trying to tell me. I used to think growth meant distance. Distance from old habits, old fears, old versions of me that felt too small for the life I wanted. I kept believing that if I kept moving, kept chasing something bigger, I would eventually arrive at a place where everything inside me felt settled. A place where my mind felt clear, where my heart felt lighter, where living felt less like carrying invisible weight and more like breathing.

Life had other plans.

There have been seasons where everything around me felt louder than my own thoughts. Work piling up, expectations growing taller, people needing things from me, my own mind asking questions I did not have answers for. It is strange how chaos enters life without knocking. One week everything feels manageable and then suddenly even the smallest task feels heavier than it should. Replying to emails feels exhausting. Getting out of bed feels like negotiating with myself. Existing feels crowded. I think that is the hardest part about chaos. It fills every corner so quietly that by the time I notice it, it has already made itself at home.

For a long time, I treated chaos like something to defeat. Like if I organized my days better or worked harder or stayed busier, I could outrun it. I kept trying to fix the outside, thinking it would repair the inside. It never worked that way. The outside kept changing its shape. Life kept shifting. People changed, plans broke, feelings moved around like furniture in a dark room. I kept realizing the world would always remain unpredictable, and the only place that could hold any real steadiness was inside me.

That thought scared me at first because it meant I had nowhere else to escape. It meant I had to meet myself fully, with all the unfinished thoughts and unresolved feelings I kept placing in the background. There is something deeply uncomfortable about sitting with yourself when your mind feels crowded. Silence starts feeling louder than noise. Old memories return like unfinished conversations. Things I thought I had moved past begin sitting across from me again, asking to be felt properly this time.

One of my subscribers, Jasmine, wrote something beautiful on this. She wrote about caring for the smaller self inside us, the part that feels everything first, the part that panics, worries, hopes, and waits for comfort. Reading her words felt like remembering something I had forgotten. There is a version of me inside that still reacts before logic arrives, still carries old fears in fresh situations, still looks for safety in familiar places. Her writing reminded me that balance has less to do with controlling the noise and more to do with knowing how to return to myself when the noise gets unbearable.

Jasmine’s essay:

This takes some practice and consistency from oneself, to focus and use their will-power to pull their attention away from the chaos that is occurring. That alone will help bring you closer to the balance you seek. It requires one to know how to go inward, for them to guide their little person inside to a place they find peace, happiness and rest. Where they feel the most grounded.

It’s only recently that I’ve started thinking about there being a little character that’s in my mind doing or saying something, freaking out, or doing nothing (bored or just chillin). You could look at it being your inner-child or a character you’ve made. By personifying your emotions— rather than letting them control you and attach them to your identity—you can observe them better and it can become clearer how to center yourself, when needed. It’s a little of both for me, depending on the moment. Right now, typing this out, my little character is happy and I picture her as my inner-child. That’s who I’m taking care of. I think what would make her even happier would be to be outside. She loves it outside; a warm, sunny day with a light, pleasant breeze and her dog dashing about, coming to check in with her before going out to chase a squirrel or a bird.

By knowing how to find your balance amidst chaos, you are taking care of you and your inner-child.

Chaos happens, it’s part of the natural law of things and so is order, hence the term ‘finding balance.’ I would say, one of the first things you can do to find that balance, or peace, is to know where you become relaxed in your mind. This can be a good memory, a specific place you’ve been to, or it can be created purely by your imagination. Maybe you like lists, schedules or reminder alerts. Anything that causes a sense of ease. Taking that small step towards order can help you find balance amidst the chaos.

It is an art form. Your own artful way of knowing what you are in control of and where you know you have always felt peace. I’ve been in chaotic moments, either within my own mind or in an environment that triggers chaos and when you don’t know how to ground yourself in those moments, then that can lead to more overwhelm and panic, and most of us know how that feels, not so good.

If it’s chaos in your mind, practice bringing your focus to your body and in the present moment. If it helps, start naming the items or colors, whatever is around you. I’ve noticed when I intentionally bring my thoughts to my body, my feet, arms, my heartbeat, my breath, etc. my body and mind will automatically relax. If it’s chaos that is outside you, find a place, if possible, that you can break away, breathe, get some air, and some quiet. Muffle the noise. When chaos is around me, and I’ll do this when there’s a lot happening in my mind too, and that is to put my headphones on and turn on music.

Where I’m at now in life is calmer and more peaceful because of how much time I’ve put into learning about myself. Learning about yourself is one of the keys to finding balance.

Sometimes all it takes is a re-focus, a moment to notice the energies, acknowledge them, and to take a deep breath. Remind yourself of what you can control and what helps you feel more balanced.

The inspiration: I haven’t always had the tools and guidance to help me during the chaotic moments in my life and now that I do, I can share my experience and a few tools that have helped me and I trust they can help someone else <3

Reading Jasmine’s piece made me think about how balance has always been a personal language. Everyone speaks it differently. What settles me may feel meaningless to someone else, and what brings someone else back to themselves may never work for me. That is the thing about finding steadiness in chaos. It asks for honesty first. It asks me to pay attention to myself in ways life usually distracts me from. Over time, I have started noticing the small things that pull me back when my mind feels crowded, and maybe balance begins there, in recognizing the little anchors I keep reaching for.

Maybe that is why the things that keep me grounded have always looked a little strange from the outside. They are never big life-changing rituals or wise routines somebody would write in a book. They are small, almost silly things, ordinary enough to be ignored, yet powerful enough to pull me back when my thoughts start running in circles. I think balance hides in ordinary places. It waits in corners of life I pass every day without realizing they are holding pieces of me.

The little places I keep finding myself in:

• in songs I have memorized so well that hearing the first three seconds feels like being recognized

• in the notes app on my phone, where half my thoughts go to rest before they make sense

• in old hoodies that still carry the smell of winters I survived

• in coffee going cold beside me because I got too distracted thinking about life

• in unfinished books with folded pages, waiting for me to return when my mind feels wider

• in staring out of windows like the sky might hand me a clue

• in the strange comfort of grocery stores at night, where everyone looks like they are quietly carrying something

• in rewatching the same films and waiting for the same scenes like meeting old friends again

• in walks that begin with heavy thoughts and end with lighter shoulders

• in the five extra minutes I stay in bed after waking up, trying to negotiate with the day

• in rainy evenings that make the whole world feel softer

• in playlists with names that only made sense to the version of me who made them

• in rearranging my room as if moving objects around could untangle my mind too

• in looking at the moon and feeling strangely less alone, even when it makes no sense

• in writing words I may never publish, just to hear myself think

It feels funny sometimes, realizing how much of life is held together by these tiny things. The world keeps praising big achievements, big moments, big turning points, but most of my healing has happened in places so small they could fit in my pocket. A song at the right time. A walk after a bad day. A sentence written in the dark when sleep would not come. These moments feel tiny while they are happening, but later I realize they carried me through entire seasons of my life.

I think that is what Jasmine’s piece reminded me of too, that caring for myself is rarely grand. It is quiet work. It is checking in with the version of me that feels overwhelmed and asking what it needs instead of asking how to fix it. Sometimes it needs silence. Sometimes it needs music. Sometimes it needs air. Sometimes it needs to be left alone for a while like a shaken snow globe waiting for everything inside to settle again.

Maybe balance has always been this. A collection of tiny returns. Returning to the habits that hold me, the places that soften me, the people who remind me who I am when I forget. Life keeps pulling me outward into noise, expectations, confusion, but peace keeps asking me to come inward again.

And maybe that is why all roads lead back to myself. Every chaotic season, every wrong turn, every heavy chapter has carried me here, back to the same person, only with more understanding this time. A little softer. A little wiser. A little more aware of what keeps my heart steady when the world around me forgets how to be still.

Co-Author Substack ID: Jasmine

If this piece stayed with you, you can support the work behind Postcards by Hasif by buying me a coffee. It helps me keep this space alive and continue sharing stories like this.

I think what makes it funny is how serious we all pretend to be on there. Real life is messy. Real life is forgetting passwords, crying over stupid things, reheating tea three times in a day because you are too lazy to make it again, and making giant life decisions while half-asleep. But online, especially there, life gets cleaned up into these neat little announcements. “Excited to share.” “Happy to announce.” “Honoured to begin.” Every achievement sounds like it came with background music and good lighting. Nobody posts, “Spent four hours staring at the wall because I have no clue what I’m doing.” That would be the most honest post on the app.

I keep thinking about how weird it is that human beings turned existence into a résumé. Skills. Experience. Achievements. Endorsements. Imagine explaining yourself like that to a duck. Imagine sitting beside a duck at a pond and saying, “Hi, I have leadership experience, strong communication skills, and adaptability in fast-paced environments.” The duck would blink once, scratch its neck with its foot, and continue eating grains like you said, absolutely nothing worth hearing. That feels correct somehow. Ducks are impossible to impress. That might be their best quality.

A few days ago, Anouk sent me her essay, Lessons from the Park, and it stayed in my head longer than most things do. Usually, I read submissions, admire them, and move on. This one stuck. Maybe it was the duck named Jerry. Maybe it was the park bench. Maybe it was the breakup sitting quietly underneath all the funny parts like a bruise under a sleeve. The essay had this weird magic where it made me laugh and then, a few lines later, made me sit there thinking about my life like I’d just been called into a principal’s office by a bird. Jerry, this awkward duck fumbling landings and staring at trash like it contained the secrets of the universe, felt more real than half the people on my feed.

ANOUK’S ESSAY: Lessons from the Park
Have you ever watched ducks walk? That waddle. The way their bodies swing from side to side like small boats in a crosswind, paddling in little circles and then standing on one leg as if nothing in the world could possibly be urgent.

The first time I sat on that bench, I watched for longer than I meant to. They were doing nothing with such conviction that I thought I might learn something from them.

I watched them float. Dip. Shake themselves violently for no apparent reason and then float some more. A duck does not feel guilty for napping at 2:17 on a Tuesday, I can tell you that.

After all, no one has told them that time is money. Nor that humanity has eighty-five seconds till midnight, give or take.

***

For about half a year, I was a regular. Same bench. Same hour, more or less. I’d sometimes bring a book I wouldn’t read. The ducks paid me no attention whatsoever, which felt oddly good. I know how that sounds. But when you move back in with your parents at 27 after a break-up, you just want to be left alone. At the time, my life felt like a series of unfinished conversations and cardboard boxes. I needed to locate some territory to call my own. And the park offered temporary relief. A private sanctuary of sorts.

***

There was one duck I called Jerry. I can’t explain why. He just looked like a Jerry. Slightly goofier than the others. A little uncoordinated, with a look in his eye that suggested he wasn’t quite sure how he’d ended up as a duck, but he was making the best of it. He’d often try to land on the water and sort of tumble forward, though of course he shook it off immediately and acted like nothing happened. That’s when I knew we’d be friends.

I once caught him staring at an empty Sprite bottle with such focus that it was almost spiritual. As if it were the most important thing in the universe. Maybe it was. After what seemed like ten minutes, he turned around, stared back at me with a glassy, prehistoric indifference, and went on with his day. To him, I was just a static part of the landscape, like a trash can or a tree. And for the first time, I loved feeling like I was briefly unnecessary.

One day, Jerry found a bread crust somewhere — God knows where, the park was empty that afternoon. And he was just... holding it in his beak, floating, staring at nothing, completely content to simply have the thing without needing to do anything with it.

I felt jealous, I’ll admit it. Watching Jerry, I felt this sharp, stupid envy. Why can’t I live like that? Why can’t I just float and stare into the distance?

I knew I couldn’t live like Jerry. None of us can. We’re cursed with these futures we can’t stop imagining and pasts we can’t stop revisiting. Not to mention capitalism.

But maybe we can borrow some of whatever it is they embody if we sit on that bench long enough.

***

The thing about watching animals — really watching them, not just glancing up from your phone — is that it reminds you how much of human life is invented. All these categories we’ve built. Success. Failure. Wasted time. Meaningful time. The duck knows nothing of this. The duck knows: water feels good. Sun feels warm. There might be bread. That’s the whole philosophy.

You see, ducks and other animals have not been fully colonized by performance. Perhaps this is why they exert such an unusual charm. Not only because they are cute, but because their life is organized around appetite, season, and companionship.

They carry on with the ancient business of being alive. Humans, on the other hand, have confused being alive with making something of ourselves.

To be honest, I have never been one to even want to participate in the “adult world.” Not really. I don’t care for the career ladder; it never called to me. Not even a little. I’ve never craved the safety of a corporate 9-to-5 or the strange bureaucracies of contemporary adulthood.

Maybe that is why I relate to Jerry.

Because when I watched him, this goofy, slightly awkward duck fumbling through his landings, I wasn’t just watching a bird. I was watching myself. Or some version of myself I’d never quite had the courage to be.

***

When winter came, they were gone. Migrated. One Tuesday, the water was full of them, and by Wednesday, it was just grey, empty glass. The sky had swallowed them up. They left, following some ancient, invisible map. I knew this, ducks migrate, obviously. But I kept going to the bench for a while, hoping I’d misremembered the schedule. Stupid.

I tried telling myself the ducks didn’t matter. I tried telling myself that the bench was just wood and metal and didn’t mean a damn thing.

Would I come back in the spring? On some days, I wasn’t sure I would.

But the truth is, I knew I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t done with that bench. And I couldn’t let winter have the last word.

***

The pond is lively again, for the first time in months: ducks everywhere, skimming the surface, diving occasionally. I sit on the bench and watch, scanning for Jerry. Hard to tell, honestly. They all look somewhat alike when you haven’t seen them in a while.

But there is one who, when he tries to land, sort of tumbles forward, then shakes it off and acts as if nothing happened.

I’d like to think that it was him. And that he’s back to show me how to be a duck again.

Of course, Jerry doesn’t know he’s resisting anything. He’s just busy being a duck. But maybe that’s the point.

What got me after reading it was this stupid realization that ducks wake up every day without a single urge to optimize themselves. They don’t have morning routines. They don’t journal about becoming better ducks. Jerry has never once sat by the pond wondering if he’s wasting his twenties. He has never compared himself to another duck and thought, " Wow, Daniel Duck already owns property and has three ducklings, and I’m still figuring things out. He just wakes up and exists bruh. That’s the whole deal. Water feels nice. Seeds taste good. The sun is warm. Day complete.

And somehow we lost that. Somewhere between growing up and figuring out what to do with our lives, we started treating every hour like it needed purpose. Rest has to be earned. Fun has to be productive. Hobbies have to become income. Even reading has become “content consumption,” or being performative, which sounds like something a machine would say right before eating a book. I miss when things were allowed to simply exist. When a walk was a walk. When music was music. When sitting in a park wasn’t turned into a mindfulness practice with five bullet points and a sponsored water bottle.

Maybe that’s why I liked Jerry. Or the idea of Jerry. A creature with zero ambition and perfect commitment to the present. He tumbles into the water, shakes it off, and keeps moving. Human beings would turn that into a life crisis. We would replay it for six years before bed. Jerry forgets it in eight seconds. That’s wisdom. Real wisdom. Forget philosophy books for a second. A duck embarrassing itself and moving on is a masterclass in emotional survival.

I think adulthood tricks you into believing life is a ladder. Everybody is climbing, reaching, chasing. And every time someone climbs faster, you feel your own feet get heavier. That’s where apps like LinkedIn hit hardest. They turn life into visible progress. Promotions. Internships. Certifications. New positions. Better salaries. Bigger cities. Everybody moving. Everybody ascending. And if you’re standing still, even for a little while, it feels like you disappeared.

But standing still has taught me things movement never did. Some of the biggest realizations in my life happened when nothing was happening. Walking alone at midnight. Sitting with music on. Watching rain hit the window. Staring at the ceiling after everybody else is asleep. Those moments look useless from the outside. Nobody can post them as achievements. They don’t fit into bullet points. Yet they change you in ways achievements can’t.

That’s what parks do, I think. Parks embarrass the modern brain. You go there carrying deadlines and worries and identity crises, and then there’s a pigeon eating chips upside down like the economy doesn’t exist. There’s a dog losing its mind over a stick. There’s a duck doing circles in water like this is the greatest thing ever invented. Life keeps happening in these tiny ridiculous ways, and suddenly your problems look smaller. They don’t disappear. They just stop acting like kings.

I wonder if that’s what Anouk found on that bench. A place where her life stopped shouting at her for a while. After heartbreak, after moving back home, after everything feeling unfinished, the ducks gave her a strange little permission to pause. That matters more than people admit. We live in a world obsessed with the next thing. Healing doesn’t look impressive. Rest doesn’t collect applause. Sitting by a pond for half a year sounds unimportant until you realize it kept somebody together.

And maybe that’s the lesson hidden inside all this duck business. Maybe life works better when it’s smaller. Smaller than the plans. Smaller than the panic. Smaller than the polished versions of ourselves we keep presenting to each other. Maybe some days the goal is just to float for a bit. Eat what you find. Survive your bad landing. Shake it off. Keep going.

Jerry doesn’t have a profile. Jerry doesn’t have connections. Jerry has never updated anyone on his professional journey. Jerry has never written a post about resilience after slipping into a pond face-first. He just lives it.

Honestly, that sounds better than whatever we’re doing here.

About the Co-Author:

Anouk is a writer from Quebec whose work explores mysticism, animals, and the search for meaning in life. Drawn to symbolism, philosophy, anthropology, and folklore, her writing moves through the intersections of the spiritual, the natural, and the deeply human, tracing the hidden patterns that shape how we understand the world.

Substack ID: Anouk

There are moments in life when you suddenly realize you have been moving through your days without really checking in with yourself. Everything around you continues as usual. Your routines stay the same. The people in your life remain the same. The places you visit every day still look familiar. Yet somewhere inside, a quiet distance begins to grow between you and the person you used to recognize so easily. It feels strange when that realization arrives because nothing outside has necessarily collapsed. Life simply kept moving, and somewhere along the way you drifted further from yourself than you ever expected.

People often talk about losing their way as if it only happens after something huge breaks apart. Like the ending of a relationship. Loosing Job. A life plan suddenly stops making sense. Those moments can definitely shake a person. Yet many people lose their direction in so many different ways. It happens while they are still showing up for their responsibilities every day. It happens while they continue being supportive friends, dependable family members, and people others can rely on. Years pass while they do everything they believed was expected of them.

Somewhere in that process, parts of themselves begin to fade into the background.

Life asks a lot from people. Certain roles slowly take over your identity without you even noticing. Someone becomes the strong one in their family because everyone else depends on them. Someone becomes the person who keeps relationships together even when they feel exhausted inside. Someone becomes the one who always adapts, always compromises, always puts their own needs somewhere at the bottom of the list.

At the time, these roles feel necessary. They help you survive complicated chapters of life. You move forward with them because they allow things to keep functioning around you. Yet survival identities are never meant to hold your entire life forever. One day you begin to feel their weight. The habits you built around them begin to feel unfamiliar. The way you respond to people starts to feel automatic instead of genuine.

That is usually when the questions begin.

You look at your life and wonder how much of it truly belongs to you. You think about the younger version of yourself who once had certain dreams, certain interests, certain parts of their personality that felt effortless. Those memories begin to feel distant, almost like they belong to someone else entirely. The person you are today feels shaped by responsibilities and expectations rather than curiosity and self-understanding.

That realization can feel unsettling because people expect clarity when they question their identity. They assume answers will appear quickly once they start thinking about it. Real life rarely works that way. The early stage of rediscovering yourself often feels confusing. Thoughts move in circles. One day you feel hopeful about change. Another day you feel unsure about everything again.

You begin noticing things about your life that you previously ignored. Certain conversations leave you feeling drained. Certain environments make you feel smaller than you realized. Certain routines continue simply because you never stopped to question them before. Awareness grows through moments like these.

That awareness can feel uncomfortable at first because it forces you to sit with truths that were easy to avoid in the past. Yet it also creates something valuable: space. Space to ask yourself honest questions. Space to notice which parts of your life feel aligned with who you are becoming and which parts belong to an older version of you that existed under very different circumstances.

During this process, hearing other people’s stories can create a surprising sense of connection. Many of us move through identity shifts believing we are the only ones experiencing them. Reading someone else’s reflection often shows how universal these feelings actually are.

While going through submissions from many of you, one piece stayed with me for a long time. Siedah wrote about the moment she realized she was standing in a space between the life she had known and the life she still could not clearly see. Her reflection captures that quiet uncertainty many people experience when they begin searching for themselves again.

Her essay:

Looking at myself in the mirror

And I don’t look the same

All I see is pain

In my eyes, on my face

Gained a little weight

I lost my way

I got to find my way

It hurts

It takes time

Hoping God sees me

This time

It hit me at 2am, after hours of staring at the ceiling.

I was in that gray area people talk about but never fully describe. The in-between. Caught between a life I was leaving and one I couldn’t yet see. And somewhere in the middle of all that restlessness, a thought crept in that scared me more than the divorce, more than the empty side of the bed: What if I don’t even know who I am anymore?

I needed answers. I also needed sleep.

Somehow I got both, not enough of either — and woke up in a fog. When I looked in the mirror that morning, I didn’t recognize the woman looking back at me. I got myself together anyway. Got my daughter ready. Dropped her at school. Came home, sat in my office, and stared out the window thinking: How do you build a new life while you’re still picking up the pieces of the old one?

That was eight years ago. New mom. Newly divorced. Newly alone with a daughter, a broken heart, and no clear idea of what came next.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that season: you don’t find yourself in a single moment. There’s no morning when you wake up and suddenly know who you are again. No conversation, no journal entry, no retreat that hands you back yourself on a silver tray.

And it doesn’t happen through grand reinvention either. You don’t wake up and decide to become someone completely new. That’s not rediscovery. That’s running.

What actually happens, what happened for me — is quieter than that. Messier. More intimate. It moves in three directions at once, and none of them are linear.

You reconnect with what you abandoned.

Somewhere in the years of being a partner, a caretaker, a fixer, a keeper of everyone else’s needs — you set things down. Passions. Interests. Parts of yourself that felt indulgent or inconvenient. You told yourself you’d come back to them later.

That thing I came back to didn’t fix anything. But it reminded me that I had a self worth returning to. That’s not a small thing.

You start reclaiming your voice.

Not your speaking voice. The deeper one. The one that knows what you actually want, what you actually feel, what you actually believe — separate from what someone else needed you to want, feel, or believe.

That voice gets quiet when you’ve spent years in a relationship that required you to make yourself smaller. You stop trusting it. You start asking everyone else what they think before you check in with yourself.

Reclaiming it isn’t dramatic. It sounds like: I don’t want to do that. Or: That’s not actually true for me. Or just sitting with a question long enough to hear your own answer before you go looking for someone else’s.

And you rebuild through the small, daily, often invisible choices.

Get her to school. Make the coffee. Sit with the window. Say yes to one thing that is purely for you. Say no to one thing that is purely for someone else. Notice how both feel.

That’s where you meet yourself again. Not in the revelation. In the routine.

I used to think being lost meant I was failing. That the confusion, the gray area, the not-knowing was evidence that something was fundamentally broken in me. I spent so much energy trying to fast-forward past the in-between, to get to the part where I had it all figured out.

But the in-between wasn’t a problem to solve. It was a process to move through.

And the journey is not clean. You’ll grieve and rebuild on the same day. You’ll feel like yourself on a Wednesday and completely foreign to yourself by Thursday. You’ll reclaim something and then lose it again for a little while. That’s not failure. That’s what becoming actually looks like.

You’re not erasing who you were. You’re sifting through it, keeping what was always authentically yours, releasing what was only ever someone else’s idea of you.

If you’re in that 2am gray area right now, not sure who you are, caught between the life you’re leaving and the one you can’t yet see. I want you to hear this:

You’re not losing your mind. You’re losing a version of yourself that supported you in the past. And that no longer can support you as you move forward.

That’s not a crisis. That’s the beginning.

Her words stayed in my mind because they describe something that many people experience but rarely talk about openly. Standing in that uncertain space can feel overwhelming because it removes the sense of certainty that once structured your life. The path ahead feels unclear. The version of yourself you once relied on begins to change. Everything feels like it is shifting at once.

Yet something meaningful often begins inside that space.

When a person starts questioning their identity, they also begin paying closer attention to themselves. They begin listening to thoughts that were previously ignored. They begin acknowledging emotions they once brushed aside because life felt too busy to process them. Each moment of reflection brings them a little closer to understanding who they truly are.

This process does not arrive with sudden revelations. It unfolds through ordinary moments that gradually reshape your relationship with yourself. You notice small preferences you once overlooked. You reconnect with interests that used to bring you joy before life became so structured. You realize certain parts of your personality were never meant to disappear; they simply waited patiently until you had enough space to welcome them back.

At the same time, this journey also involves letting go of certain things. You begin recognizing expectations that were never truly yours. You start understanding which habits were built around survival rather than genuine fulfillment. That awareness helps you reshape your life in ways that feel more aligned with your inner voice.

Some days this process feels empowering because you finally feel connected to yourself again. Other days it feels confusing because growth rarely follows a straight line. You may feel completely certain about your direction one week and uncertain again the next. Both experiences belong to the same journey.

Over time, however, something gentle begins to happen. The distance between you and your own identity begins to shrink. The person you see in the mirror starts to feel familiar again. The choices you make begin reflecting your values instead of outside expectations. You feel more present inside your own life.

That transformation does not happen overnight. It grows through patience, honesty, and the willingness to examine your life with compassion instead of judgment. Every moment of reflection contributes to a deeper understanding of yourself.

Life continues evolving as years pass, and human beings evolve along with it. Each chapter teaches us something about who we are capable of becoming. Losing your way does not erase your identity. It simply invites you to rediscover it through deeper awareness and reflection.

The work of becoming yourself again rarely receives attention because it happens quietly. It unfolds through thoughts you sit with late at night, through realizations that appear during ordinary mornings, through conversations that help you see your life from a new perspective.

These moments may seem small while they are happening, yet together they reshape the way you understand yourself.

And somewhere along the way, you begin to realize something comforting. The person you thought you lost was never completely gone. They were simply waiting for you to return with a clearer understanding of who you are meant to be.

About the Co-Author:

Siedah J.M. is the author of I Am Love and the voice behind The Author’s Alchemy on Substack a spacer for women reclaiming themselves after relationships that broke them down. She writes about identity, sovereignty, and what it really looks like to become yourself.

Substack ID: Siedah J.M

One of the things I’ve come to love the most about Postcards by Hasif is the collaborative essays we publish here. They’ve slowly become a special part of this space.

For those who may be new, these pieces aren’t typical guest posts. Instead of a single writer sharing their thoughts, the essay becomes a conversation.

A guest writer begins the piece by exploring a topic through their own reflections, experiences, or perspective. After that, I write a response where I engage with their ideas, sometimes agreeing, sometimes offering a different angle, and sometimes simply expanding on what they’ve shared.

Two voices, two viewpoints, one shared essay.

It’s a format I really enjoy because it feels much closer to how real conversations happen between people who are thinking deeply about something.

With that said, submissions are now open for the next three months: May, June, and July.

As usual, I’ll be selecting 4–5 writers each month to collaborate with.

Each selected writer will submit a 600-word essay, and I’ll follow it with a 500-word response, turning the final piece into a thoughtful written dialogue between two perspectives.

Topics You Can Choose From:

1. Overcoming the Fear of Change

2. The Strange Comfort of Ordinary Days

3. The Journey to Becoming Your Own Hero

4. The Strain of Being Always Available

5. The Fear of Not Being Enough, Despite Everything You Do

6. The Weight of Expectations and the Freedom of Letting Go

7. The Quiet Courage in Facing Your Own Insecurities

8. Rediscovering Yourself After Losing Your Way

9. The Need to Be Seen vs. the Desire for Privacy

10. The Fear of Missing Your Own Life

11. The Burden of Holding on to the Past

12. The Journey of Finding Your True North

13. The Complexity of Healing from Emotional Wounds

14. The Fear of Not Being Able to Let Go

15. The Small Rituals That Quietly Shape Our Lives

16. The Art of Noticing

17. The Beauty of Unfinished Conversations

18. The Lives We Imagine for Strangers (sonder)

19. The Unwritten Rules of Human Connection

20. The Curious Habit of Talking to Ourselves

21. The Rise of Performative Authenticity Online

22. The Modern Obsession With Optimization

23. The Slow Death of Privacy in the Digital Age

24. The Romanticization of “Busy” Culture

25. The Strange Comfort of Background Noise

26. The Emotional Cost of Always Being Reachable

27. The Gentle Grief of Outgrowing Someone

28. The Strange Feeling of Being Understood

29. The Invisible Architecture of Everyday Life

30. The Curious Warmth of Random Memories

A Quick Note

You don’t have to limit yourself to this list.

If you already have a thoughtful essay, personal reflection, or story you’ve written that explores an idea you care deeply about, you’re welcome to submit that as well.

Some of the most meaningful pieces come from writers sharing their own experiences honestly, and that’s always been at the heart of this publication.

So if you have something sincere to say, I’d love to read it.

How the Collaboration Works

Your Essay:

You’ll write a 500–600 word essay on the topic you choose. It can be personal, reflective, analytical, or narrative whatever style feels most natural to you.

You don’t need to arrive at a final answer. Sometimes the most powerful essays are simply explorations of a question.

My Response:

After reading your piece, I’ll write a 500-word response where I engage with your ideas. I might agree, challenge something you wrote, or add another perspective.

That’s what turns the essay into a genuine exchange of thoughts.

The Final Piece:

Your essay will appear first, followed by my response, forming a collaborative essay of 1100+ words that reads like a written conversation.

Submission Timeline

Submissions are currently open for May, June, and July.

You can send your essay anytime during these months, and it will be considered for one of the upcoming collaboration slots.

However, if you’re hoping to be featured in May, I recommend submitting sooner rather than later. Once selections are made, I’ll need time to review the essay, write my response, and schedule the post.

You’re also welcome to submit older essays you’ve written before, as long as they fit the reflective tone of Postcards by Hasif.

Since there are only a few spots each month, earlier submissions naturally have a better chance of being selected.

Once an essay is chosen, I’ll reach out personally via email to confirm the collaboration and schedule the publication date.

Submission Guidelines

Original Work Only
All submissions must be your own original writing.

Word Count
Your essay should be around 500–600 words.

Format

Please send your submission as:

• Microsoft Word document
• Google Docs file
• PDF

Avoid pasting the full essay directly into the email.

Use a simple font such as Arial or Times New Roman, size 12.

At the top of the document, include:

• Your name
• Your Substack publication

You can also add a short optional bio at the end.

Where to Send Your Submission

Send your essay to: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

Subject line: Co-Author Submission

In the email body, include: [Chosen Topic] – [Your Name] & the document

You may also include links to your Substack or social media.

If Your Essay Is Selected

• You’ll receive a confirmation email & payment link.

• A $50 feature fee will be required only if your essay is selected. Entry to submit your essay is completely free.

• Before you jump in, I just want to say something important. I know when I introduce something like this, it can feel a bit… transactional. But please don’t take it the wrong way. Postcards by Hasif will always remain free to read. I have no intention of turning it into a paid publication, and I never will. Every piece I write, your submissions, my reflections, and my essays will always be accessible to anyone who wants to read them. I also don’t want to bring in brands, sponsorships, or ads. This space is not about marketing, it’s not about influencer culture, and it’s certainly not about monetizing in a way that compromises the essence of what this publication stands for. This is about creating a genuine community of thinkers and writers, exploring topics that matter, sharing perspectives, and giving both you and me a chance to engage meaningfully with readers. The $50 fee isn’t about making a profit; it’s a small way to ensure this collaboration is valued and taken seriously, while also helping me maintain the publication sustainably. Postcards by Hasif will always be my voice, my vision, my space. This collaboration is simply a way to bring in other voices I respect, share ideas, and build something together without compromising what this place stands for.

• Once payment is completed, we’ll coordinate with you via email to finalize the title, thumbnail, and posting dates.

• Your essay will be published in Postcards by hasif (130,000+ readers).

• Exposure to 130,000+ readers: Your voice will reach a large, engaged audience that values thoughtful, reflective writing.

• Recommendation of Your Substack: As part of the collaboration, I will recommend your Substack publication for a week. This means followers will see “Postcards by Hasif recommends {Your Publication Name}”, increasing traffic to your page.

• Collaborative Content: This is more than just a guest post. You’re collaborating with me in a meaningful way, creating a written conversation that will resonate with readers.

What You’ll Receive

Your essay will be published on Postcards by Hasif, currently reaching 130,000+ readers.

You’ll also receive:

• Exposure to a large, engaged audience
• A collaborative essay featuring my written response
• A one-week recommendation of your Substack

Your publication will appear as:

“Postcards by Hasif recommends [Your Publication Name]”

which helps introduce your writing to new readers.

I’ve genuinely enjoyed reading the perspectives many of you have shared through these collaborations over the past months.

Every essay has brought a new lens to topics we often think about quietly but rarely discuss openly.

If you’ve been considering submitting something, this is a good moment to do it.

I’m really looking forward to reading your work.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at hasifnewsletter@gmail.com.

Best,
Hasif

Something really strange happens when you enter your early twenties and the weirdest part is that life does not actually look that different from the outside. Your days still follow the same basic pattern. You wake up, you check your phone, you respond to messages you forgot to reply to the night before, you rush somewhere you are supposed to be, maybe a class, maybe work, maybe something else you signed up for because everyone keeps saying these are the years where you are supposed to “build your future.” Everything from the outside looks normal enough that if someone watched your life from a distance they would probably assume you are doing just fine. Yet inside your head there is this constant noise that never really goes away, like a background conversation your brain refuses to turn off.

A few years ago life felt much simpler in ways that almost feel ridiculous to remember now. Conversations with friends used to revolve around things that had absolutely zero long term consequences. We could spend hours arguing about which show was better, laughing about some random thing that happened in class, talking about who liked whom, sharing stupid gossip that felt incredibly important at the time. Those conversations filled entire evenings and somehow at the end of them life still felt light. The future existed somewhere far away and someone else had already decided most of the steps we were supposed to take to get there. School led to exams, exams led to results, results pushed you into the next stage whether you felt ready or not.

Then somewhere around your early twenties the conversations start changing in this subtle but unsettling way. The same friends are sitting across from you but suddenly the things everyone talks about feel heavier. Someone is thinking about leaving the city because they believe opportunities exist somewhere else. Someone else is questioning the degree they spent years pursuing because the excitement they once felt about it has quietly disappeared. Another friend confesses they feel like everyone around them is moving ahead faster and they cannot explain why they feel stuck even though they are technically doing everything they are supposed to do.

These conversations never start out serious. They begin casually the way most late night talks do. Someone says something half joking about the future and then somehow everyone else starts admitting things they had been thinking privately for months. One person talks about career pressure. Another talks about family expectations that feel impossible to satisfy. Someone admits they feel lost and the moment that word enters the conversation you realize almost everyone at the table has been feeling the same thing.

The strange part is that these questions start living inside your mind before you ever speak them out loud. They follow you through your day like unfinished thoughts waiting for attention. You might be sitting somewhere completely normal like a classroom or a café and suddenly your brain drifts into this long spiral about where your life is actually heading. You start thinking about the next five years as if you are somehow expected to already know what those years will look like. Your body stays present in the moment but your mind keeps wandering into futures that do not even exist yet.

Your early twenties come with this constant pressure to figure things out while simultaneously realizing that you barely understand yourself. People start asking questions that sound simple but feel impossible to answer honestly. What career are you planning to pursue? Where do you see yourself settling down? What kind of life do you want to build? Every time someone asks something like that your brain freezes because the truth is that you are still trying to understand the person who is supposed to answer those questions.

This is the chaos people rarely explain properly. Chaos at this stage of life does not always look like everything falling apart. Many times it looks like your life continuing normally while your mind is constantly racing in the background trying to make sense of everything. You attend lectures, you submit assignments, you apply for opportunities, you laugh at jokes with friends, yet somewhere behind all of that there is this ongoing mental debate about whether you are actually moving in the right direction or just drifting wherever circumstances push you.

Friends become the place where all of that finally spills out. Conversations stretch longer because everyone is carrying some version of the same confusion. You start discussing decisions that feel far bigger than the ones you used to worry about. One friend is debating whether to move across the country for a job. Another is wondering if success even means what everyone claims it means. Someone else is thinking about relationships and commitment while also feeling like adulthood arrived before they fully understood how to handle it.

There is a strange comfort in realizing that your confusion is not unique. Listening to someone else describe the same thoughts that keep you awake at night makes everything feel a little less isolating. None of you have clear answers for each other but sharing the questions somehow makes them easier to carry.

While going through the reflections people sent to the publication recently, one submission made me pause because it captured this exact feeling in a way that felt almost too familiar. The writer, Maryam, talked about the moment when conversations between friends shift away from light topics and start circling around bigger questions about life, the future, and the pressure of trying to understand where everything is heading while still feeling like you are figuring yourself out.

Her reflection focused on the way these questions sit inside our minds before they ever become conversations, the way they keep turning over in our heads during quiet moments until eventually we bring them to someone else just to see if thinking about them together might help us understand something.

Her Essay:

In the past couple of years, the conversations my friends and I have went from revolving around TV shows, homework, and the latest gossip to contemplations about career paths, moving to a new city, and potential life partners. The major shift in consciousness that comes with being in your early 20s is one that I reflect on frequently. Some of us still seem to be stuck in the bodies of our high school selves and some of us are stuck in a perpetual state of question asking. Asking questions about the past, the future, and everything in between.

Before these questions ever make it to be the subject of these conversations, they toss and turn around our heads over and over again. We lie awake at night, zone out during the day, taste our food a little less, hear the rain a little quieter. A constant distraction with our minds half present and half pursuing answers. Sometimes we manage to come up with something on our own, and the life of that existential question ends with us but sometimes that’s not the case.

More often than not, we offer these questions to a friend to contemplate together. We extend the question’s life. We pass it on. Not because our friends necessarily have the answers, but because something about being confused together provides a quiet comfort. We contemplate mistakes, relationships, opportunities. Things we should’ve done, could’ve done, would’ve done. Endless hypotheticals that trail behind every exchange. We dissect every situation, the inputs, the systems, the outcomes, in hopes that no detail slips between the cracks. In hopes that every move, every decision has been accounted for. Because there’s nothing worse than ending up in a situation and not knowing why you’re here or what purpose it’s supposed to serve. Again, sometimes we manage to come up with something together, and the life of that existential question ends with us but sometimes that’s not the case.

In the pursuit to make meaning out of everything, some things will simply refuse to fall into place. Sometimes we simply fail. But what happens when we fail?

We tread carefully, accounting for every step along the way but somehow we still end up in unfamiliar destinations. Where are we and how did we get here? Sometimes we don’t get the answer. Sometimes no matter who you ask, no matter how many questions you ask, no matter how good your questions are, you don’t get any answers.

At this stage, there is so much discomfort in not getting any answers. After years of structure, of being told exactly what to do and what to expect, you stop getting answers.

You see it coming and yet it is still so abrupt. And the most natural response is always to try a different question, a different approach, a different source, because that’s what we’re used to. Regrouping and restarting.

Sometimes we don’t get answers, a greater meaning, a major revelation. Sometimes things happen and we can’t seem to make any sense of it at all. But it’s during those times especially when we have to lean on our faith and remember: God’s plan is unfolding before us and we just have to trust it. As much as we may resist certain outcomes, they will still end up finding their way into our life if that’s what’s written for us. As much as we may chase certain outcomes, they will never find their way into our life if that’s not what’s written for us.

Sometimes there’s beauty in not knowing because that simply means you’re not supposed to.

Reading her piece reminded me of something that becomes painfully obvious once you spend enough time in this stage of life. We are constantly trying to force meaning out of things that refuse to explain themselves. Every experience gets examined as if it must contain some hidden lesson waiting to be discovered. When something good happens we try to understand why it happened so we can repeat it. When something painful happens we desperately search for the reason because pain feels easier to accept when it comes with an explanation.

Life does not always cooperate with that need for clarity. Situations unfold without providing the neat conclusions we expect. Plans fail even when you spent months preparing them. People walk into your life and change it completely and then disappear without giving you the closure you thought you deserved. You sit there trying to understand what you did wrong or what you could have done differently while the world keeps moving forward as if nothing unusual happened.

That is where the real frustration of your early twenties lives. You are trying to build a future while still recovering from the confusion of the present. Every decision feels important because part of you believes these years will determine the rest of your life. At the same time you are still learning basic things about yourself that probably should have been obvious earlier but somehow never were.

Some days the uncertainty feels exciting because it means everything is still possible. You imagine different versions of the life you could build and for a moment the freedom of that possibility feels incredible. Other days the exact same uncertainty feels exhausting because having too many options can become its own kind of pressure. You start comparing your progress with everyone around you and suddenly it seems like other people have clearer paths even though you know deep down they are probably just as confused.

Living through this stage teaches you something strange about balance. Balance does not come from solving every question or controlling every outcome. Balance comes from continuing to move even when you are unsure whether the direction you chose will lead somewhere meaningful. You begin trusting that life will reveal certain answers in its own time even if your mind desperately wants them right now.

The quiet chaos of your early twenties stays with you for a while. It shows up in late night thoughts, long conversations, and those random moments during the day when you suddenly wonder how you ended up exactly where you are. Yet hidden inside that chaos is also the process of becoming someone new. Every confusion forces you to understand yourself a little better. Every unexpected turn teaches you something about the kind of life you actually want.

Most of us are walking through this stage at the same time pretending we have things figured out while privately trying to understand what any of this is supposed to mean. Sharing those thoughts, reading reflections like Maryam’s, and realizing that other people are asking the same questions reminds you that this strange phase of life is not something you are meant to navigate alone.

And maybe that is the closest thing we have to balance right now, accepting that chaos is part of the journey and continuing forward anyway.

Co-Author Substack ID: Maryam Boshnak

If this piece stayed with you, you can support the work behind Postcards by Hasif by buying me a coffee. It helps me keep this space alive and continue sharing stories like this.

There is a role that quietly forms in a lot of friendships, and most of the time nobody even notices when it begins. At first it just looks like ordinary care between people who trust each other. A friend tells you about a bad day and you listen. Another friend opens up about something personal and you stay with them through the conversation. People begin coming to you when things feel heavy in their lives because they know you will hear them without judging them. Over time that trust builds into something deeper, and before you really stop to think about it, you become the person everyone turns to when their life feels confusing.

For a while, that role can feel meaningful. When someone trusts you with the messy parts of their life, it feels like you matter in a real way. They leave the conversation feeling lighter and you feel like you helped someone breathe again. Those moments stay with you because there is something powerful about being present for another person when they are struggling. Helping people makes you feel connected to them, and connection is something all of us are looking for in one way or another.

The problem appears when that role becomes the only version of you people recognize. Conversations start following the same pattern again and again. Someone reaches out because they are overwhelmed, you listen carefully, you try to help them think through their situation, and the conversation ends with them thanking you for being there. Days or weeks later it happens again with someone else. At first it feels normal, because this is what friendship looks like when people trust each other.

But over time you begin realizing something strange about the way these friendships are working.

You start noticing that you know almost everything about the people around you. You know their fears, their family problems, their relationships, the things they worry about when they cannot sleep. You have heard their stories in great detail because they felt safe enough to share them with you. Yet when you pause for a moment and think about it, you begin realizing how little space there has been for your own thoughts inside those same friendships. Your life rarely becomes the center of those conversations.

This realization can feel confusing because it does not come from anger toward the people you care about. Most of them trust you because they believe you are someone who understands them. They come to you because you have shown patience and empathy again and again. The imbalance forms quietly because the role you stepped into leaves very little room for you to exist outside of it.

Once you begin seeing that pattern, it becomes difficult to ignore. You start feeling tired after conversations that once felt meaningful. You find yourself carrying pieces of other people’s lives in your mind long after the conversation ends. Their worries follow you into your quiet moments. Their problems sit beside your own thoughts throughout the day. Even when you are not speaking with them, your mind continues returning to the things they told you.

That is the hidden weight of becoming the emotional support system for everyone around you.

One of the readers here, Anwar, wrote something recently that stayed with me because his experience reflected this pattern in a very honest way. His story is about what it felt like to slowly become the person everyone depended on emotionally, and what happened when he began realizing how much of himself he was giving away in the process.

His essay:

Choosing yourself is one of the least selfish things you can do. We convince ourselves that self-sacrifice makes us heroes, that our lives will be filled with meaning if we constantly seek emotional martyrdom just to make others happier. Yet when we give and only give, never take, it is not just because of our big hearts and never-ending empathy, but rather truths far more sinister. Perhaps it is because we crave validation or because it is too hard, too scary to give to ourselves instead.

In the latter half of secondary school, I was depressed. Every day felt like a war to move, to breathe, to speak, all of it. All I wanted was not feel, because I either couldn’t feel or when I did, the feeling was pain and agony. But when I graduated, I saw a faint light in the distance. A new environment at university may be just what it takes to heal and to regain my spark. This was the thread I clung to to keep myself going and eventually pull myself out of the dark hole I sat in for so long.

In the winter semester of first year, I formed close friendships with my classmates; I surrounded myself with them constantly during those months. I felt so close to them that any time we were not physically together, we would text or call instead. But what I did not realise at the time was that in this group, I placed myself in a role.

I bonded with these friends through our traumas and difficulties. Going through what I had in years past, I would help them because I cared so deeply. I would spend long nights discussing their feelings, family issues, addictions, and mental illnesses. And through these long discussions, I felt immense honour that I had been entrusted with everyone’s inner world. I was the one they could talk things through with, the perceptive one, the mature one, the stable one. But as I was slowly eroding myself for others, my resentment grew. In private, I would be the gatekeeper of everyone’s hearts, yet in a group, I somehow always felt out of place. This constant dichotomy led me to eventually distance myself from them, as heartbreaking as it was.

In this distance, I reflected on my relationships and ambitions. I finally decided to pour into my own cup. And when I did, contentment was the natural byproduct. Content in that I chose to shed myself of the weight of external validation on my worth and character, and create boundaries with others. When I decided that I was not responsible for solving the crises of everyone else, that is when my existence became lighter and liberating.

Now, when I help my friends, I do so purely out of love for them, not to stroke my ego in the effort to have a purpose. I choose relationships where I am given as much as I give, where my role is simply to be a friend, not a therapist. I have the freedom to be broken, goofy and

confused. I do not pretend that I have it all figured out anymore and acknowledge my needs and humanity. Choosing yourself is not selfish, and if it is, you are not doing it right. It means to give yourself the same grace, empathy, and compassion you do for others. And when you do that, you become a truly principled and loving person.

Reading his reflection reminded me how easy it is for someone to lose themselves inside that role without realizing it at first. The moment that stood out most in his story was the point where he understood that the version of himself his friends depended on had quietly taken over his identity inside those relationships. Being the listener, the problem solver, the person who helped everyone think through their struggles had slowly become the main reason people came to him.

There is something deeply complicated about that position because it grows out of genuine care. Nobody becomes that person because they want control over others. Most of the time it happens because they care deeply about the people in their life and want to help them through difficult moments. Listening feels natural. Trying to understand someone’s pain feels human.

Yet caring for people does not mean carrying their emotional world every single time something goes wrong in their life.

What Anwar described in his essay is something many people quietly experience. When someone becomes the person who holds everyone together emotionally, the relationship starts revolving around that one responsibility. Other sides of their personality begin fading into the background. The playful parts of them, the confused parts, the moments where they need support themselves do not appear as often because the friendship has already placed them in a specific role.

That role can start feeling heavy after a while.

You begin asking yourself questions that you never thought about before. You wonder whether people would still know how to be close to you if you stopped offering solutions to every problem they brought to you. You wonder if your presence in their life is connected to who you are as a person or to the comfort you provide when things fall apart.

Those questions can feel uncomfortable because they challenge the way you have understood your relationships for a long time.

Stepping away from that role does not mean abandoning people you care about. It simply means allowing friendships to exist without turning yourself into the person responsible for fixing everything. It means letting conversations include your thoughts, your confusion, your life instead of only focusing on what someone else is going through. It means understanding that friendship is supposed to move in both directions rather than staying centered around one person’s emotional struggles.

When that shift happens, something interesting begins changing inside the relationship itself. Conversations become more balanced. The pressure to always respond with wisdom fades away. You start speaking more openly because you are no longer trying to maintain the image of the person who has everything figured out.

What remains after that change is a more honest version of connection.

Helping someone through a difficult moment can still be meaningful, but it happens out of genuine care rather than obligation. You listen because you want to be there for them, not because the friendship expects you to solve every emotional crisis that appears in their life.

Anwar’s reflection captures an important truth about relationships that many people overlook. Caring about others should never require someone to lose themselves in the process. Real friendship leaves space for everyone to be human at the same time. It allows room for laughter, confusion, support, and moments where nobody has the perfect answer.

Sometimes the most important step in a person’s life happens when they step out of the role they have been quietly carrying for years. When that happens, the friendships that remain often become stronger because they are no longer built around one person holding everything together.

And that might be the moment when you finally realize you were never supposed to be everyone’s therapist in the first place.

About the Co-Author:

Anwar is a 19-year-old mathematics and physics student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Alongside his studies, he has a deep passion for writing, often exploring themes of metaphysics, philosophy, and theology. His work blends personal reflections with bigger existential questions, shaped by the insights and realizations he encounters along the way. Through his writing, Anwar hopes to share ideas that might offer clarity, comfort, or curiosity to others navigating similar questions.

Substack ID: Anwar Ihsan

If this piece stayed with you, you can support the work behind Postcards by Hasif by buying me a coffee. It helps me keep this space alive and continue sharing stories like this.

There are phases in life where you slowly begin to notice that something about the way you are living feels slightly unfamiliar, and the strange part is that you cannot really point to a moment where everything changed. Life is still moving the way it normally does, you wake up, you go to work, you meet your friends, you scroll through your phone late at night, and from the outside nothing about your routine looks different. But somewhere inside all those ordinary days you begin sensing a quiet distance between who you are now and the person you remember being before.

Losing your way is rarely loud. It usually happens in ways that are subtle enough to ignore while they are happening. You adjust something about yourself because it feels easier in that moment. You stay quiet about something that bothers you because you do not want to complicate a situation. You convince yourself that certain things do not matter even though they actually do. None of those decisions feel important enough to question while they are happening. They feel practical. They feel like the normal things people do to keep life moving without friction.

But when those moments begin to stack on top of each other over time, you slowly start realizing that you have been adjusting yourself more than you ever intended. The distance between who you are and who you have been presenting to people grows quietly, and one day you look at your own life and something about it feels slightly unfamiliar even though everything still looks the same from the outside.

I think a lot of people experience this phase during their twenties because that is the time when everything around you is changing at once. You move to new places, you start new jobs, you meet new people, and you begin building routines that did not exist a year earlier. There is a certain excitement in that stage of life because it feels like you are finally stepping into independence, finally shaping your own story instead of following the structure you grew up with.

But independence can also blur things in ways we do not expect. When everything is new and overwhelming at the same time, it becomes easy to measure yourself through the reactions of the people around you. Attention begins feeling important in ways you never really thought about before. Approval begins shaping how you show up in conversations, in friendships, in relationships. And slowly, without even noticing it, you begin editing parts of yourself because it feels like the easiest way to keep things comfortable.

When I opened submissions in this publication around the theme of rediscovering yourself after losing your way, I expected people to talk about career shifts, identity changes, or moments where life forced them to start over. Some essays did explore those things, but one submission stayed with me because it described something quieter and more familiar than that.

The essay came from Cydney Thornton, who writes on Substack under Libradiaries, and her reflection focused on something many people experience but rarely admit while it is happening. She wrote about moving to New York at twenty-one with a nursing degree and the excitement that comes with starting life in a city that feels endless. That stage of life carries a lot of energy because everything around you feels full of possibility. A new environment, new independence, new people, a sense that your life is finally unfolding in front of you.

But somewhere inside that phase she found herself slowly adjusting parts of who she was in order to keep a relationship comfortable. At first those adjustments looked small. Acting relaxed about things that actually mattered. Pretending certain situations did not bother her. Becoming the version of herself that seemed easier to be around.

Reading that part reminded me how often losing yourself does not come from one dramatic event. It happens through smaller decisions where you slowly begin editing parts of yourself for someone else’s approval without even noticing how much of yourself you are giving away.

Her essay captures that experience with a level of honesty that stayed with me after I finished reading it.

Her essay:

When I moved to New York City in 2023, it felt like the beginning of the life I had been working toward for years. I arrived with nothing but a nursing degree, a dream, and the kind of wide-eyed optimism that only exists before reality sets in. I was 21 and finally on my own. I thought that meant I had found myself. But somewhere between busy night shifts and partying till the sun rose, I began confusing independence with validation.

It started when I met someone who felt exciting in the way New York feels exciting—fast, unpredictable, and a little intoxicating. What started as something casual slowly became something that consumed more space in my mind than it ever deserved in my life. I told myself I was non-chalant. The “chill girl”. Not “too much.” I shaved down parts of myself that I thought made me seem undesirable. I pretended not to care about things I cared about deeply. I swallowed my discomfort. I buried the most important parts of myself and became unrecognizable. I lost myself.

It’s a quiet thing, losing yourself.

No one announces it. There’s no dramatic shift. It happens in micro-decisions. In forgetting where your priorities lie. In rereading messages and wondering why they haven’t texted you back in 24 hours. In refusing to eat because the anxious pit in your stomach is so huge that the thought of consuming a meal makes you nauseous. In waiting for reassurance instead of providing it to yourself. I began looking for myself in the way he looked at me. And when his gaze wavered, I began to search for it in other people. When I did, the toxic pattern returned. And returned. And returned. It was a never ending cycle of self-inflicted emotional abuse.

The hardest part to admit is that nothing catastrophic happened. There was only the slow realization that I had abandoned myself in the hope of being chosen.

Therapy was like a mirror. I learned how easily I confuse desire with worth. How quickly I shape-shift into what I think love requires. I learned that self-betrayal presents itself in different ways. It presents as anxiety, overthinking, and constantly trying to earn something that should be freely given.

And then, slowly, I started coming home to myself.

I began spending nights with my friends without checking my phone. I visited my family and felt present instead of preoccupied. I poured myself into my hobbies and became more self aware. Istarted asking myself a simple question: What do I want? Not what would make others stay. Notwhat would make me seem more desirable.

The answer was surprising but simple. I wanted calm. I wanted consistency. I wanted an addition, not a subtraction.

For the first time in my adult life, I am confident in saying that I am single. Not in the performative way, not in the “I don’t need anyone” way, but rather in a peaceful way. I have discovered that finding a romantic partner is not an award to be won.

New York still feels vast and exciting. My job is still demanding. Dating will probably always carry some uncertainty. But I no longer feel lost inside those things. I’m no longer trying to find myself in someone else’s approval.

Rediscovering myself has been quieter. Softer. It’s choosing not to minimize myself. It’s choosing to accept the love I think I deserve. It’s trusting that when the time is right—my person will meet me at my fullest and accept me for all that I am.

And when they do, I will be whole.

After reading her reflection I kept thinking about how common this experience really is and how quietly it happens to people who appear perfectly fine from the outside. Your life continues moving forward, you are still showing up everywhere you are supposed to be, but internally your thoughts begin revolving around someone else in ways that slowly take up more emotional space than they should. You start noticing how much your mood can change depending on their attention. A delayed response suddenly feels heavier than it should. Small signals begin carrying more meaning than they deserve.

What makes this phase difficult is that the moment you begin recognizing it, you also begin noticing how far you drifted while trying to keep something alive. That realization forces you to look inward and acknowledge the moments where your instincts were quietly asking you to speak up but you stayed silent instead. It brings you back to the conversations where you convinced yourself that being easygoing meant ignoring your own discomfort.

Finding your way back from that place rarely looks difficult. Most of the time it begins through smaller decisions that slowly return your attention to the life that already belongs to you. Spending time with friends without constantly checking your phone. Being present with family without your mind wandering somewhere else. Putting energy into hobbies or routines that once made you feel grounded before someone else’s attention started occupying that space.

Those moments matter because they reconnect you with the parts of yourself that never actually disappeared. They were simply waiting for your attention to return.

At some point during that process many people begin asking themselves a question that feels simple but requires real honesty to answer. What do I actually want from the relationships in my life. Not what will make someone stay. Not what will make me easier to love. Just a quiet, honest look at the life that would actually feel stable and peaceful to live.

Once you start answering that question honestly, the way you see your own independence begins to change. Being single stops feeling like a phase where you are waiting for something to happen. It becomes a space where you rebuild your relationship with yourself without constantly adjusting who you are for someone else’s comfort.

Life outside does not suddenly transform when that realization arrives. Work still demands energy. Cities still move quickly. Relationships will always carry uncertainty because people are complicated. But something inside you becomes steadier because you are no longer searching for yourself inside someone else’s approval.

Rediscovering yourself rarely happens through dramatic reinvention. Most of the time it unfolds quietly through the decision to stop shrinking parts of who you are just to make something else work. And when that shift finally settles inside you, the version of yourself that once felt distant slowly begins to feel familiar again, which is often the moment you realize that losing your way was never the end of your story. It was simply a phase that taught you how important it is to remain connected to yourself while everything else around you continues to change.

About the Co-Author:

Cydney Thornton is a 24-year-old writer based in New York City and a Pediatric ICU nurse by profession. Journaling has been a constant in her life since her teenage years, serving as a quiet space to process thoughts and experiences. Though she never considered herself a “writer,” she recently began sharing excerpts from her journals on Substack after realizing her reflections might resonate with others. Deeply appreciative of all forms of art, Cydney sees her writing as a small way of giving back to the creative community that has long offered her comfort and escape.

Substack ID: Cydney Thornton

If this piece stayed with you, you can support the work behind Postcards by Hasif by buying me a coffee. It helps me keep this space alive and continue sharing stories like this.

There is a strange habit most of us carry around without noticing it, and if you’re honest with yourself for a second you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s that voice in your head that sounds so certain about things that aren’t actually certain at all. The one that quietly decides you’re not doing enough, not moving fast enough, not becoming enough. The one that shows up on completely ordinary evenings when you’re just sitting with your thoughts and suddenly starts replaying every unfinished dream you’ve ever had like it’s evidence in a courtroom. And the strange part is that we listen to it like it’s the most reliable narrator we’ve ever met, even though if you really think about it, that voice has been wrong about you more times than you can count.

I’ve always found it strange how easily we believe the worst stories about ourselves. If a friend told you the exact same things you tell yourself on a random Tuesday night, you would stop them halfway through and argue with them. You would remind them of all the things they’ve already done, all the ways they’ve grown, all the quiet strength they carry around without even realizing it. You would defend them like their life depended on it. But when the voice is your own, when the doubt comes dressed up as self-awareness, suddenly it feels harder to challenge. Somehow the harshest version of our thoughts starts sounding like the most honest one.

I think about that a lot, especially lately, because I’ve realized that most of us are walking around carrying conversations inside our heads that no one else ever hears. Long arguments with ourselves about whether we’re good enough, capable enough, deserving enough. The kind of conversations that start quietly but slowly grow louder until they begin shaping the way we see our entire life. And the strange thing is that from the outside, none of it is visible. Someone could be doing everything right, moving forward, building something meaningful with their life, and still feel like they are one step away from being exposed as someone who doesn’t really deserve any of it.

If you’ve ever felt that way, then you probably know how exhausting it can be to carry that constant background noise around in your head. It’s like trying to walk forward while someone keeps tugging at your sleeve every few seconds just to remind you that maybe you shouldn’t even be walking at all. And sometimes the worst part isn’t even the doubt itself. The worst part is how convincing it sounds.

Recently I read something that stayed with me for a while after I finished it, the kind of piece that quietly slips into your thoughts and refuses to leave. It was written by Sofia, and while reading it I kept noticing how familiar the feeling behind her words was. Not the details of her life necessarily, but that strange dynamic she describes between the part of you that believes in your potential and the part that keeps insisting you’re falling short. The way she writes about watching someone you care about struggle with their own inner critic, wanting to shake them out of it because from the outside their worth feels so obvious. And then slowly realizing that the person she’s talking to is actually herself.

This is what she wrote:

You are talking yourself down, again. You think you’ll never get your dream job. You think you’ll never find anyone who’ll love you in the way you want to be loved. You think you’ll never achieve anything noteworthy. I’m not good enough. I can almost see the words swirl around in your brain, swallowing everything else—a black hole.

I feel my blood racing. I hate when you do that. And it’s been happening more and more lately.

Your eyes have grown distant. I don’t think you’re here in the room anymore. You’re stuck in your head, fighting whatever demon has decided to make an appearance today. I want to grab you by the shoulders and shake you out of it. I want to scream: Don’t listen to your mind! You know who you are. Everyone can see it. They see the presence you have in this world, the way you light people up, just by being.

Why can’t you see that?

But you don’t.

I put my hand on your shoulder, forcing your eyes to mine. You are good enough, I say. You can do whatever you want, you can achieve anything you put your mind to. You look away, smiling with your mouth alone.

I sigh. How can it be so obvious to me, and not to you? I don’t know much in this world. But I know you will make it. I see it in the way you carry yourself daily. The way you work toward your dreams without even realizing it. The determination you get when something has to get done. It’s a force unlike any other. When I think about your future, I feel calm, because I know, from somewhere deep within me, that you are going to be okay.

The truth is, you are me, and I am you.

We have all been there—consoling a friend who doesn’t see their own worth. How come we can see it so clearly in the people we love, but not in ourselves? Maybe you have been there too, resenting your friend’s inner critic while secretly entertaining your own.

That is the weight of being your own worst critic.

We have all been on both sides of the story. We all carry that weight in ourselves, more or less visibly.

When I learned to read, I knew—almost immediately—that I wanted to be a writer.

I would make small paper “books”, filling them with ghost stories. I was particularly proud of one where a shark eats two fishermen, boat and all. I would print short stories—every word a different color in Comic Sans—and show them excitedly to my parents. I didn’t question if they were any good. Or what writing them would mean for my future. It made me feel alive. Why wouldn’t I do it?

But then, the critic arrived. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when—somewhere in my teenage years, when I also had the very original thought that reading was “uncool.”

For about fifteen years, I barely wrote anything.

It wasn’t because anyone told me I shouldn’t. It wasn’t even because I was made fun of for wanting to be a writer in sixth grade. I didn’t care about that, actually. I cared about one thing: that I wasn’t good enough.

Every time I would sit down to write, it had to be great immediately (spoiler: it rarely was). Other people were already way ahead of me, publishing their first novel at twenty. I couldn’t keep up. Writing was the one thing I said I wanted to do with my life. If I failed at that, it felt like I was failing at life.

So I got scared.

Perhaps, if I had learned to question my inner critic earlier, I would be somewhere else today. But it doesn’t do me much good to think like that. I am where I am now for a reason.

Still, I wonder: how do we truly learn to show up for ourselves, like we do our friends, after years of not believing we’re enough?

I look at you, and I see that you will make it out okay. More than that, there is no end to what you will achieve. Just by being you, you’re achieving so much every day. If only you could see that.

I tell you this. And I tell it to myself.

When I finished reading her piece, I sat there for a while thinking about how many versions of that conversation exist in the world right now. How many people are quietly fighting the same internal argument, telling themselves they should be further ahead, more certain, more accomplished, more everything than they currently are. And how strange it is that the same people who are capable of offering so much understanding to others struggle so much to offer even a fraction of that kindness to themselves.

I think a lot of it comes from the way we measure our lives. Somewhere along the way most of us start believing that our worth is something that needs to be proven through visible milestones. A career that looks impressive enough, a life that seems stable enough, progress that can be easily explained when someone casually asks what we’ve been up to. And once that idea settles in your mind, it quietly changes the way you speak to yourself. Every delay becomes failure. Every uncertainty becomes weakness. Every moment of rest starts feeling suspicious, like maybe you’re wasting time you can’t afford to lose.

The problem with that way of thinking is that it turns life into a constant evaluation, and when you’re always evaluating yourself it becomes very difficult to actually live. Your mind starts scanning everything you do for proof that you’re falling behind. The quiet effort you put in every day doesn’t count because it doesn’t look dramatic enough. The slow growth you’ve experienced doesn’t count because it doesn’t make for an impressive story. And suddenly you’re standing in the middle of a life that is still unfolding but treating it like it’s already been judged.

What Sofia describes in her reflection feels so honest because it touches on something many of us recognize but rarely say out loud. The realization that the person who doubts you the most is often the same person who understands you the best. You know all your unfinished plans, all the times you hesitated, all the things you wanted to do but didn’t. Your mind keeps a detailed record of every moment where you felt unsure, and it loves bringing those moments back like they define the entire story.

But the strange thing is that the same mind also holds every reason you should believe in yourself. Every quiet moment where you showed up even when it was uncomfortable. Every small decision that slowly shaped the person you are becoming. The problem isn’t that those things don’t exist. It’s that we rarely give them the same attention.

I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot lately, this question of how we learn to speak to ourselves with the same patience we offer other people. Not in a performative way, not in the exaggerated language of motivational quotes that feel nice for five seconds and then disappear, but in a real and steady way that slowly changes the tone of the conversation happening inside your head.

Because the truth is that learning to be kind to yourself isn’t about pretending you never doubt anything. Doubt is part of being human, and anyone who claims they’ve completely escaped it is probably just very good at hiding it. The real shift happens when you stop treating your doubts like final verdicts and start seeing them for what they actually are: thoughts passing through your mind, not permanent definitions of who you are.

And maybe that’s where the real work begins. Not in silencing the critical voice completely, because that voice will probably always find ways to return, but in learning how to respond to it differently. In slowly building the habit of questioning the stories it tells you. In reminding yourself, again and again, that the person you are becoming cannot be measured by a single moment of uncertainty.

I think what Sofia captured so beautifully in her reflection is that strange realization that sometimes the compassion we offer others is actually the exact compassion we need to offer ourselves. That moment where you recognize that the person you’ve been trying to encourage, defend, and reassure is actually you.

And maybe the real challenge of growing up isn’t becoming fearless or perfectly confident or endlessly productive the way the world sometimes suggests. Maybe it’s something quieter than that. Maybe it’s learning to sit with yourself long enough to realize that the person you’ve been criticizing this whole time is actually someone who has been trying their best all along.

The strange thing about kindness is that it doesn’t need to be loud to matter. Sometimes it’s just a small shift in the way you talk to yourself during those quiet moments when doubt starts creeping in again. A reminder that your life is still unfolding. That the story isn’t finished yet. That the person you are today is not a failed version of who you hoped to become, but simply a chapter in a longer narrative you’re still writing.

And if there’s one thing I’m slowly learning, it’s that the relationship you have with yourself quietly shapes everything else in your life. The way you approach your work, your dreams, your relationships, even the way you imagine your future. When that relationship is built entirely on criticism, everything starts feeling heavier than it needs to be. But when you begin to introduce even a small amount of patience into that conversation, something shifts.

You start moving through life with a little more room to breathe.

You start realizing that the voice inside your head doesn’t have to be your harshest judge.

It can also learn, slowly and imperfectly, how to become your ally.

About the Co-Author:

Sofia is a twenty-something writer from Sweden who has long dreamed of becoming a writer, even when she didn’t fully trust herself to pursue it. She recently started her newsletter, notes on living, where she combines her two biggest passions: learning how to live more fully and intentionally, and sharing the kind of reflections and advice she’s usually giving her friends. Through her writing, Sofia explores the small questions and quiet realizations that shape a life.

Substack ID: Sofia Falck

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And if you’re reading this right now, I want you to be honest with yourself for a second because I know how this works. There is probably someone who came to your mind while reading that paragraph. Someone you used to talk to without thinking twice about it. Someone who once knew the details of your day in a way that felt normal back then but now feels almost impossible to recreate. There was a time when you could send them the most random thought at the most random hour and somehow it made sense to both of you. The connection had that ease to it where you didn’t have to perform a version of yourself that was easier for the world to digest. You could just exist as you were, say things as they came to your mind, laugh at things that didn’t even make sense to anyone outside that little space you built together.

And when you experience that level of comfort with someone, your brain quietly assumes it will always stay that way.

Nobody tells you that sometimes the hardest relationships to lose are the ones that don’t actually end in a clear way. They just start changing. Slowly enough that you keep convincing yourself nothing is wrong.

I’ve seen this happen in my own life in ways that I didn’t fully understand until much later. You start noticing small shifts but you brush them aside because they seem too minor to mean anything. Conversations become shorter but you assume they’re just busy. The openness that used to be there begins to fade but you tell yourself people change and life gets complicated. At first it’s easy to explain these things away because adulthood gives us a thousand reasons to excuse emotional distance. But somewhere in the background there is always that quiet feeling that something isn’t the same anymore.

What makes it harder is that you can’t point to a single moment where everything collapsed. The connection doesn’t explode. It thins out.

There was a time when you had their full presence and then suddenly you have… less of it. Then even less. Then barely anything.

And this is the part where people start negotiating with reality without realizing it. You adjust parts of yourself without saying it out loud. Maybe you stop sending long messages. Maybe you stop talking about certain things because you sense they aren’t being received the same way anymore. Maybe you become quieter than you used to be around them because you’re trying to keep the connection from slipping further away. None of this happens dramatically. It’s subtle enough that even you don’t fully recognize what you’re doing until much later when you look back and realize you were slowly shrinking parts of yourself just to keep the relationship from disappearing completely.

The strange thing about grief like this is that you don’t even call it grief at first. You just feel off. A little heavier than usual. A little more tired emotionally than you can explain.

And then one day you read something or hear someone explain it in a way that suddenly makes everything click.

That actually happened to me recently while reading a piece submitted by one of you, Marisol Porras. When I first read her essay I didn’t expect it to land the way it did, but halfway through reading I had one of those moments where you pause and just stare at the screen for a second because someone managed to describe a feeling you didn’t even realize you were carrying.

She wrote about that exact experience of slowly losing someone you once had complete emotional access to. Not losing them through some big dramatic ending but losing the version of them you used to know. Losing the conversations, the emotional safety, the feeling that this person was a constant part of your everyday life.

And there was a lyric she mentioned that honestly stuck in my head after I finished reading it. The line goes, “I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you.” When I read that part I remember thinking that it perfectly describes what it feels like when someone disappears from your life gradually enough that you watch every stage of it happen.

Before I keep going with my own thoughts I want you to read her piece first because the way she explains this experience deserves your attention.

It’s crazy to think that grief can come in so many ways. I’ve never truly experienced grief till recently. I’ve lost pets, grandparents, relationships romantic and platonic but this quiet yet painful grief had impacted me emotionally.

This grief I couldn’t name at the time, I thought I was just depressed because that feeling is all too familiar. It wasn’t until I listened to someone explain grief in their own words. But griefs official definition is a response of loss of something that we deem important. This person is still very important to me and unfortunately, even if they don’t have a current presence in my life that will never change. I can never be bitter towards them because we didn’t end on a bad note.

But this grief that I was feeling wasn’t necessarily the relationship but the person I got to experience during that time. During a fun, non-stressful moment in our lives I got to experience happiness, genuine laugher, good company, and most importantly emotional safety. I had free reign of access to this person and in return they did to me too.

I thought that maybe if I could keep them in some weird limbo, I wouldn’t have to let go of them but really, I struggled with that too. They were a completely different person from what I was used to, from what they were originally. This person who I had endless access to in all aspects started to close off more and more until there was nothing left. There’s some lyrics to a song that perfectly describes this, and it goes like, “I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you.” And that’s where we currently are, I have none of this person.

Greif has five stages; The stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance. Thinking back, I did go through all these stages in their own way. Denial, anger, and bargaining were all lumped together; the friends that we shared noticed that they were distancing themselves, but I said no? not from me, but they were slowly. Anger because I finally noticed and then bargaining, I didn’t beg for them to stay. Instead, I convinced myself and them that if I hid and reeled my true self back a bit, if I didn’t overly express myself, they’ll stay without me having to say it.

Finally, depression: everything I felt from denial, anger, and bargaining changed. The depression consumed me until I finally said that this connection didn’t need to continue. I was depressed for what feels like a very long time but really it was just two weeks. If I’m being completely honest that depression still comes back occasionally. I’d like to say that I’ve come to acceptance but for some reason I become hesitant to fully step into it. I don’t know if it’s because I have some small glimmer of hope or if once, I fully accept it, it will officially end.

This grief of experiencing a person from before and then never getting to experience them that same way is a very hurtful and different type of grief I would never wish upon anyone. And before I would beg, I would beg the universe, God, say whatever you believe in. To just bring it back, to bring back how I had them. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works, I was forced to sit in some of the most uncomfortable emotions I’ve ever felt. But because of this and the isolation I had to go through; I look back at the situation fondly.

If you just read that, you probably understand why I wanted to talk about this topic today.

What stood out to me in her reflection wasn’t just the grief itself but the confusion that comes with it. When someone dies, the world immediately understands your pain. People know how to react. There are rituals, condolences, space given for mourning. But when someone simply becomes distant, when they slowly close parts of themselves that were once open to you, there is no script for that. You’re expected to just move on quietly even though something meaningful has clearly changed.

And the complicated part is that sometimes you can’t even be angry about it.

There was no big betrayal. No huge argument. The person just became someone else.

You start thinking about the memories differently after that. Moments that once felt ordinary suddenly feel important because they belong to a time when the connection was still alive. You remember conversations that made you laugh harder than anything else that week. You remember the way they used to understand what you meant even when your thoughts were messy and unfinished. You remember the comfort of knowing there was someone who had full access to the real version of you.

And losing that access hurts in a very specific way.

Because you’re not just missing the person. You’re missing the version of yourself that existed around them too.

I’ve realized that some of the most meaningful connections in our lives don’t last forever, and that truth is uncomfortable because we like to believe that the people who see us clearly will stay in our lives permanently. But life doesn’t work that neatly. Sometimes people enter our world during a certain chapter, they become incredibly important during that time, and then slowly the story moves forward while the connection fades into memory.

And for a while that feels unbearable.

But eventually something strange happens. The memories stop feeling like wounds and start feeling like evidence that you once experienced something genuine with another person. Even if that connection didn’t survive the long run, it still existed. It still shaped you in ways you probably don’t even fully understand yet.

That’s why I find myself thinking about grief differently these days.

Not everything we lose disappears because something terrible happened. Sometimes people just change directions in life. Sometimes the emotional space that once connected two people slowly closes without either of them fully realizing when it happened.

And even though that hurts, it also means that for a certain period of time you experienced something real with someone who mattered to you.

That’s the strange grief of losing someone in pieces. It’s quiet. Confusing. Hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t felt it themselves. But if you’ve ever watched someone slowly become a stranger in your life, then you already understand exactly what I mean.

About the Co-Author:

Marisol Porras rediscovered her love for writing after many years away from it. What once began as a childhood passion has returned in adulthood as a space to share her thoughts, personal reflections, and the experiences that shape everyday life. Through her writing, Marisol explores the small moments and quiet realizations that often hold the most meaning.

Substack ID: Marisol Porras

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If you really pay attention to the way people interact with each other, you start noticing how often vulnerability sits just beneath the surface of conversations but rarely fully arrives. Someone will almost admit that they were hurt by something but then turn it into a joke before the sentence finishes. Someone will start sharing something personal but immediately downplay it as if they are apologising for having feelings in the first place. Even when people want to be understood, there is often a quiet hesitation right before the truth leaves their mouth because experience has taught them that openness does not always receive the warmth it deserves. I sometimes wonder how many meaningful conversations never actually happen because both people in the room are waiting for the other one to make the first honest move.

And if you are reading this right now, I want you to pause for a second and think about the last time you said exactly what you felt without adjusting it to make it easier for someone else to hear. I mean the real thing that existed inside your chest before your brain started negotiating with it. For many people that moment is surprisingly difficult to remember because somewhere along the way we all became skilled editors of our own emotional lives. We learned that certain feelings make people uncomfortable, certain thoughts create tension in a room, and certain truths change the atmosphere of a relationship in ways that cannot easily be reversed.

The strange part is that none of us actually want shallow relationships. Everyone talks about wanting depth, wanting honesty, wanting to feel emotionally safe with the people in their lives. Yet when vulnerability enters the room in its raw form, when someone speaks from a place that is unfiltered and sincere, the reaction is often hesitation instead of relief. It is almost as if modern relationships operate under an unspoken agreement where everyone claims to value openness but secretly hopes that openness will remain within manageable limits.

I have been thinking about this tension a lot lately, especially the quiet pressure many people feel to make themselves easier for others to accept. There is this invisible line that exists in social interactions where being expressive is welcomed up to a certain point, but the moment someone crosses into deeper emotional territory the room becomes slightly uneasy. People rarely say it directly, but you can feel the shift. Suddenly honesty feels heavier than it should, and the person speaking starts wondering if they revealed more than the moment could comfortably hold.

And maybe that is why vulnerability feels so complicated in relationships today, because it requires something that most of us have not been consistently rewarded for. It asks us to show parts of ourselves that are still unfinished. It asks us to trust someone with emotions that might not be perfectly organised. It asks us to believe that our honesty will be received with care rather than quiet judgment. That level of openness cannot exist without emotional courage, and courage is something people often avoid when uncertainty is involved.

While I was thinking about all of this, I kept coming back to a reflection written by Millie that captures this exact struggle in a deeply personal way. Her experience speaks about what it feels like to carry a strong voice in environments where directness is not always welcomed, and how the search for meaningful connection sometimes collides with the subtle expectation that we should soften ourselves for the comfort of others. When I first read her piece, it felt less like an essay and more like someone finally saying something many people quietly feel but rarely articulate.

Her essay:

“Your throat chakra is blocked…” says my massage therapists with so much confidence and assurance that I flip my head backgrounds off the table to actually try and comprehend what that means, while she slowly releases the knotted pressure from the shoulder blades. “You need to let it all go… to trust people with your voice”.

A long pause, more knots undone and pressure released. But how do you trust people, when they always see you as ‘difficult’ because you speak your mind? I think about all the time I had to be quiet, choose silence instead of direct confrontation, because conflict doesn’t always bring a resolve and sometimes words are really cheap. I also think about emotional safety. Am I now equipped with all the tools and mechanisms to not shut down automatically when my trust isn’t met or I realise this isn’t a safe space. Where is the thin line between overshare and actually fully engaging in a connected way? My constant battle to be palatable, not too direct, not straightforward as that puts people on edge… It infuriates and sometimes unwillingly upsets them, but only if fragile egos. But in that strife to make myself palatable for others, who not always have the egos checked, I also made myself prisoner to my own restraint.

For as long as I remember, I have been open, outspoken, and brutally honest. Not on purpose, but a result of the complexity of my upbringing by a ‘tiger’ mum, as my Asian good friend will point out, and a complicated cultural setting (Balkan child of the early 80s), alongside opposing birth chart. For me, to create a meaningful connection you have to open up and let the other sees your heart, emotions, fear. Otherwise, it is just a surface level interaction, and that is okay too, if you were pursuing that kind of relationship. My culture is a complex dichotomy of extremes that seem to coexist without ever questioned — be loving, generous and open but don’t show it too much. That censured ‘too muchness’ have made so many people mimic healthy functional relationships because the fear of shaming and judgement by others simply override everything. I somehow never had that fear. I never particularly cared about opinions per se. Instead, I deliberately choose to enter into unknown, with the hope that the recipient will recognise the trust and honour it. Since I moved to the UK, the clash between my directness and the ‘appropriate’ behaviour has been a constant battle. That has affected the way I communicate and approach people, not in an insincere way, but in contained, sometimes detached, self reflective manner.

I come to understand that in the modern society, the currency of being liked is way more sought after than being open or trusting with your full self. I’ve noticed how the mass fear to bear the heart with sincerity and authenticity has crippled so many relationships and some even within my own space. And truth is, sometimes I don’t know how to lead through my personal example of being fearless that way, without seeming patronising or ‘too much’. It doesn’t seem to be working on the scale I wish I did, and certain people still don’t feel safe. But at the same time, I learnt to open up towards people regardless of having no guarantees of the outcome. UK has taught me that while my identity is fluid and changing, my integrity is unchanged. And if I act with integrity, this builds the bridge of trust and understanding and the perfect amount of vulnerability that matches mine. There is hope after all, for our hearts and meaningful connections…

Reading her reflection made me realise how often vulnerability becomes entangled with the desire to be accepted, and how easily people begin reshaping themselves in order to keep relationships peaceful. Many individuals start with a natural openness when they are younger, speaking their thoughts freely and sharing their emotions without hesitation, but somewhere along the journey of growing up they encounter moments where that openness is not handled with care. Maybe their honesty unsettles someone they care about. Maybe their vulnerability is dismissed as unnecessary intensity. Maybe their sincerity meets silence instead of understanding. Experiences like that do not simply disappear from memory, and over time they begin teaching us quiet lessons about how much of ourselves feels safe to reveal.

You can see the result of those lessons everywhere. People become more reserved about what they share. Conversations remain on the surface even when both individuals sense there is something deeper waiting beneath the words. Relationships continue moving forward, yet there is always a slight distance between who someone truly is and what they allow the world to see. That distance might not look dramatic from the outside, but emotionally it can feel surprisingly lonely.

Still, despite everything we learn about protecting ourselves, the human need for vulnerability never actually disappears. It remains present in the way we crave conversations that feel real instead of rehearsed. It appears in the quiet relief we experience when someone listens without immediately trying to correct or analyse our emotions. It lives inside the hope that somewhere out there exist relationships where honesty does not feel dangerous or inconvenient.

And perhaps the most important thing to understand about vulnerability is that it does not demand perfection from anyone involved. It simply asks for presence. It asks people to remain open when another person shares something fragile. It asks for patience instead of immediate judgment. It asks for the willingness to hold another person’s truth without rushing to reshape it into something easier to handle.

When that space exists, vulnerability stops feeling like a risk and starts feeling like the natural language of connection. Conversations deepen without effort. Trust grows quietly in the background. People no longer need to perform simplified versions of themselves because they know their full emotional range is welcome in the relationship.

And maybe that is the quiet hope hidden inside reflections like this one, the idea that vulnerability does not disappear from the world simply because it feels difficult. It continues waiting patiently for spaces where honesty can breathe without fear, and every time someone chooses sincerity over emotional distance they create one of those spaces for another human being.

So if you have ever felt the urge to share something real but stopped yourself halfway through the sentence, believing that honesty might make things complicated, I want you to know that you are not alone in that hesitation. Many people are standing at the same emotional edge, wondering whether the truth inside them will be received with understanding or discomfort.

And perhaps the only way vulnerability slowly returns to our relationships is when someone decides that connection is worth the risk of being fully seen.

About the Co-Author:

Millie is a curious and open-minded writer, cultural curator, and strategist with a deep interest in storytelling and meaningful human connections. Her work is shaped by her own complex journey of character-building, an ongoing effort to maintain integrity, balance of thought, and trust in both herself and others. Through her writing, Millie explores the possibility of more open, sincere relationships, rooted in the belief that genuine connection becomes possible when we learn to accept otherness with the same trust we extend to ourselves.

Substack ID: Millie Kotseva

If you’d like to submit a piece to be featured in a future postcard, you can check the submission guidelines here: Submit your Essays

If you’d like to support me, you can: Buy me a coffee

As many of you already know, one of my favourite things we do here on Postcards by Hasif is the collaborative essays where a guest writer and I explore a topic together.

For those who are new here, the idea is simple: instead of publishing a typical guest post, we turn the piece into a conversation.

One writer shares their thoughts, reflections, or experiences on a topic, and then I respond with my own perspective. Two voices, two viewpoints, one shared piece. It’s a format I’ve really grown to love because it mirrors how meaningful discussions actually happen in real life.

So with that said, submissions are now open for the upcoming months: May, June, and July.

As always, I’ll be selecting 4–5 guest writers per month to collaborate with.

Each selected writer will submit a 600-word essay, and I’ll follow it with a 500-word response, creating a combined piece that becomes a thoughtful dialogue between both perspectives.

Topics You Can Choose From:

1. Overcoming the Fear of Change

2. The Strange Comfort of Ordinary Days

3. The Journey to Becoming Your Own Hero

4. The Strain of Being Always Available

5. The Fear of Not Being Enough, Despite Everything You Do

6. The Weight of Expectations and the Freedom of Letting Go

7. The Quiet Courage in Facing Your Own Insecurities

8. Rediscovering Yourself After Losing Your Way

9. The Need to Be Seen vs. the Desire for Privacy

10. The Fear of Missing Your Own Life

11. The Burden of Holding on to the Past

12. The Journey of Finding Your True North

13. The Complexity of Healing from Emotional Wounds

14. The Fear of Not Being Able to Let Go

15. The Small Rituals That Quietly Shape Our Lives

16. The Art of Noticing

17. The Beauty of Unfinished Conversations

18. The Lives We Imagine for Strangers (sonder)

19. The Unwritten Rules of Human Connection

20. The Curious Habit of Talking to Ourselves

21. The Rise of Performative Authenticity Online

22. The Modern Obsession With Optimization

23. The Slow Death of Privacy in the Digital Age

24. The Romanticization of “Busy” Culture

25. The Strange Comfort of Background Noise

26. The Emotional Cost of Always Being Reachable

27. The Gentle Grief of Outgrowing Someone

28. The Strange Feeling of Being Understood

29. The Invisible Architecture of Everyday Life

30. The Curious Warmth of Random Memories

Important Note

You’re not restricted to this list.

If you have a thoughtful personal story, essay, or reflection that explores an idea you care deeply about, you’re more than welcome to submit it even if it doesn’t perfectly fit one of the topics above.

Some of the most meaningful essays come from writers bringing their own experiences and perspectives, and this publication has always valued authentic storytelling above everything else.

So if you have something honest to say, I would love to read it.

How the Collaboration Works

Your Essay

You’ll write around 600 words on the topic you choose. This can be reflective, personal, analytical, or narrative, whatever feels most natural for the story you want to tell.

You don’t need to arrive at a perfect answer. Often, the most compelling pieces are the ones that simply explore a question.

My Response

Once I read your submission, I’ll write a 500-word response. Sometimes that response might agree with your perspective, sometimes it might challenge it, and sometimes it might simply build on the ideas you’ve shared.

That’s what makes this format interesting; it turns the piece into a real exchange of thoughts.

The Final Post

Your essay will appear first, followed by my response, creating a collaborative piece of 1100+ words that reads like a written conversation.

Submission Timeline

Submissions are currently open for: May, June & July

Deadlines:

The submission window will remain open throughout the next three months, covering May, June, and July. This means you can send your essay at any time during this period, and it will be considered for one of the upcoming collaboration slots.

That said, if you’re hoping to be featured in May, I encourage you to submit as soon as possible. We are already only a few weeks away from the May publishing schedule, and once essays are selected, I’ll need time to review them, respond, and reserve the appropriate publishing slots.

You also don’t have to choose a topic from the list if you don’t want to. If you already have a thoughtful essay you’ve written before, even an older piece, you’re absolutely welcome to submit that as well. As long as it fits the reflective, essay-style tone of Postcards by Hasif, I would love to read it.

Since selections are made on a first-come basis, submitting earlier simply gives you a better chance of securing a spot in the month you prefer. Once your essay is selected, I’ll reach out (via email) personally so we can confirm the collaboration and schedule your post accordingly.

You can submit for any of these months, and selected essays will be scheduled accordingly.

Since spots are limited each month, earlier submissions usually have a better chance of being selected.

Submission Guidelines

Original Work Only
All submissions must be your own original writing.

Word Count
Your essay should be around 500-600 words.

Format

Please send your submission as a:

• Microsoft Word document
• Google Docs file
• PDF

Avoid pasting the full essay in the email body.

Use a simple font such as Arial or Times New Roman, size 12.

At the top of your document, include:

• Your name
• Your Substack publication

You may also add a short optional bio at the end.

Previously Published Work

Submissions should be exclusive. If the piece already exists on another platform, please remove it once your essay is selected so it can appear exclusively on Postcards by Hasif.

Where to Send Your Submission

Send your essay to: hasifnewsletter@gmail.com

Subject line: Co-Author Submission

In the email body, include: [Chosen Topic] – [Your Name]

You may also include links to your Substack or social media.

If Your Essay Is Selected

• You’ll receive a confirmation email & payment link.

• A $50 feature fee will be required only if your essay is selected. Entry to submit your essay is completely free.

• Before you jump in, I just want to say something important. I know when I introduce something like this, it can feel a bit… transactional. But please don’t take it the wrong way. Postcards by Hasif will always remain free to read. I have no intention of turning it into a paid publication, and I never will. Every piece I write, your submissions, my reflections, and my essays will always be accessible to anyone who wants to read them. I also don’t want to bring in brands, sponsorships, or ads. This space is not about marketing, it’s not about influencer culture, and it’s certainly not about monetizing in a way that compromises the essence of what this publication stands for. This is about creating a genuine community of thinkers and writers, exploring topics that matter, sharing perspectives, and giving both you and me a chance to engage meaningfully with readers. The $50 fee isn’t about making a profit; it’s a small way to ensure this collaboration is valued and taken seriously, while also helping me maintain the publication sustainably. Postcards by Hasif will always be my voice, my vision, my space. This collaboration is simply a way to bring in other voices I respect, share ideas, and build something together without compromising what this place stands for.

• Once payment is completed, we’ll coordinate with you via email to finalize the title, thumbnail, and posting dates.

• Your essay will be published in Postcards by hasif (120,000+ readers).

• Exposure to 120,000+ readers: Your voice will reach a large, engaged audience that values thoughtful, reflective writing.

• Recommendation of Your Substack: As part of the collaboration, I will recommend your Substack publication for a week. This means followers will see “Postcards by Hasif recommends {Your Publication Name}”, increasing traffic to your page.

• Collaborative Content: This is more than just a guest post. You’re collaborating with me in a meaningful way, creating a written conversation that will resonate with readers.

What You’ll Receive

Your essay will be published on Postcards by Hasif, currently reaching 125,000+ readers.

You’ll also receive:

• Exposure to a large, engaged audience
• A collaborative essay with my written response
• A one-week recommendation of your Substack publication

Your publication will appear as:

“Postcards by Hasif recommends [Your Publication Name]”

which helps introduce your work to new readers.

I’ve genuinely enjoyed reading the perspectives many of you have shared in these collaborations over the past months.

Each essay has brought a new angle to topics we often think about quietly but rarely discuss openly.

If you’ve been considering submitting something, this is a good time to do it.

I’m looking forward to reading your work.

If you have any questions or want to clarify anything, email me at hasifnewsletter@gmail.com.

Best,
Hasif

What makes it even more confusing is that nothing about those moments felt temporary when you were inside them. You spoke about the future like it was a room you would both eventually walk into together, and you made promises that felt natural in the moment because the idea of life separating you felt almost unrealistic. Leaving sometimes looks like two people sitting in the same room pretending that time is not moving, sometimes it looks like someone packing their life into a few boxes while the other person stands there not knowing where to place their hands, and sometimes it looks like a simple goodbye that carries far more weight than either person is willing to admit out loud.

What we rarely talk about is how the real exile begins long after the leaving itself is over. You continue living your life and doing the things you were supposed to do, chasing the goals that once felt urgent and necessary, building the future you believed would make sense of everything you left behind, and yet, somewhere in the background, there remains a quiet memory that refuses to behave like the past. It sits there patiently, not demanding attention but never fully disappearing either, waiting for something small to bring it back to life, perhaps a familiar song that suddenly plays in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, perhaps the smell of a certain spice from a restaurant you once visited together, perhaps the way the light falls into a room that reminds you of another room from another time.

Someone once wrote to me about this feeling in a way that stayed with me for a long time, and as I was thinking about the strange beauty of the places we leave behind, I found myself returning to his reflection because it captures something many of us carry but rarely say out loud. Abdallah wrote about a moment from years ago when he was preparing to leave an apartment that had quietly become a world of its own, about sitting on the floor of an almost empty space with someone who had been there through the fragile parts of his life, about laughing over a meal and pretending that the clock was not moving closer to the moment when he would walk away from that life and toward another one. His story is not only about distance or ambition or the long road that eventually led him to medicine, but about what it feels like to realize that the place you once called home may continue existing without you in it.

Here is his reflection:

what does it mean to leave a place. not just the physical act of packing cardboard boxes and hauling away the weight of your life, but the way we have to amputate parts of ourselves to fit into the future we asked for. i was sitting in my apartment recently, silence pressing in, and a song came on. An old tune in my head, just a few notes, and suddenly it is july 2021 again.

the apartment is reduced to its bones. just dirty rugs and baseboards. she is there, in an olive green dress. we are eating pho and laughing about accidentally ordering the wrong spring rolls. i could still smell the star anise. i blink and now we are wandering through a store, touching fluffy blankets and boxes of merci chocolates, pretending the clock isn’t ticking. pretending i am not leaving in two days to chase a career in medicine.

we underestimate how heavy a promise can be. we say things like i will see you again and we will always stay in touch because the alternative is letting the silence swallow us whole. we sat on the floor of that empty kingdom, our backs against the wall, a single candle burning, and i asked her if it was okay to cry. i was supposed to be learning clinical detachment. instead, i was just a man breaking apart on her lap.

if you have someone who sits with you on the floor while your life is dismantled, remember them. memorize the exact dimensions of that moment.

i kept the promise. i survived the grueling nights of clinical rotations. i learned the architecture of the failing heart. i earned the white coat. but the universe is not a romantic. the distance we thought was an incubator turned out to be a void. the texts stopped. she met someone else. someone insecure who demanded she erase the history we built. and just like that, the girl who wiped my tears in that apartment vanished.

people talk about closure like it’s a door you can just shut and lock. they tell you to move on. they tell you it’s for the best. but no one tells you what to do with the ghost. no one tells you how to survive being exiled from a memory you helped build. i learned the science. i learned all the words just to draw the word “home.” for years, she was a home i was no longer permitted to visit.

we share the same geography now. the same state. but i don’t look for her in the crowds anymore. i don’t want to resurrect the city we burned down. the stinging truth of getting older is realizing you don’t actually want them back. you just want the version of them perfectly preserved in the amber of a july night.

maybe you have a memory that hurts to look at. maybe you learned to lock it away because the way things ended makes a mockery of how they began. maybe you feel foolish for still mourning a phantom. or maybe you perseverate about how things could have turned out if you did things differently.

what if i did not leave? what if i stayed?

it takes time to unlearn that shame. it takes time to realize that you don’t have to let the bitter ending corrupt the beautiful beginning. you don’t have to anesthetize the past just because the present looks different.

so if you are carrying a memory like that, let me say this clearly. it is okay to mourn because you loved. keep the ghost. let it be a silent companion. let it remind you that you were capable of loving someone that deeply, of sitting on a floor and weeping because the world was about to pull you apart.

because to deny the pain would be to deny that the beauty ever existed.

i survived the distance. i got the white coat. i kept going. i pray you do too. the wound might still be there. but the view from here is beautiful. it really is.

When I first read his words, I kept thinking about how strange it is that life allows us to build entire emotional landscapes with people who may eventually become strangers again. There is something almost surreal about the way memory works because it refuses to follow the rules of time that the rest of our lives obey. You can spend years moving forward, achieving things you once dreamed about, becoming the version of yourself that younger you was desperately working toward, and yet a single memory from a random evening can pull you back into a moment so vividly that it feels like the present has briefly stepped aside to make room for the past. It is not that we want to return to those moments or undo the choices that carried us away from them, but there is still something deeply human about wanting to acknowledge that they mattered.

I think many of us have a memory that functions like this, a moment that sits quietly inside us even though the people involved have long since walked different roads. The painful part is not always the ending itself but the strange realization that the version of the world you once lived in has become unreachable, not because anyone deliberately destroyed it but because time naturally reshaped everything around it.

There is also a quiet guilt that sometimes appears when we think about these memories, as if holding onto them somehow means we have failed to move forward with our lives. Most of us carry pieces of our past into the present without fully understanding how they fit together, and sometimes the healthiest thing we can do is simply accept that not every story is meant to resolve itself in a tidy way.

What I appreciate about Abdallah’s reflection is the way it refuses to turn those memories into something bitter or embarrassing. There is a temptation, especially when something ends painfully, to rewrite the past in a way that makes it easier to live with the present. People convince themselves that the relationship was not as meaningful as it felt at the time, or that the memories are not worth revisiting because the ending overshadowed everything else. But there is another way to look at it, one that allows us to honor the beauty of what existed without pretending that the ending never happened.

Because the truth is that many of the most meaningful homes we build in our lives are not permanent structures. They appear during specific chapters of our story and then slowly dissolve as life carries us toward other directions, leaving behind only the memories of how it felt to exist inside them. We may never be able to step back into those places again, and sometimes we would not even want to if the opportunity appeared, but that does not erase the fact that they once held a version of us who was learning, loving, and trying to understand the world in the only way they knew how.

As the years pass, I have started to see these memories less like unfinished stories and more like quiet landmarks scattered across the landscape of a life. They remind us that we were capable of loving deeply, of trusting someone enough to build a temporary home together, of sitting on the floor of an empty room and sharing a moment that felt too fragile to describe properly. Even if the people involved eventually disappear from our daily lives, the fact that those moments existed at all is something worth protecting rather than burying.

Maybe that is what the beautiful exile really is, the understanding that leaving something behind does not automatically erase the value it once held. We do not have to pretend that the past was meaningless simply because it no longer belongs to the present, and we do not have to exile our memories just because the people connected to them have moved on with their lives. Some homes are meant to exist only in the quiet museum of memory, preserved exactly as they were in the moment we last stood inside them.

And perhaps growing older is simply the slow process of learning how to walk through the world while carrying these invisible homes within us, understanding that we cannot return to them but also realizing that we do not need to. They remain there not as wounds demanding to be reopened but as reminders that our lives have been filled with moments worth remembering, even if the doors to those rooms have long since closed behind us.

About the Co-Author:

Abdallah, M.D., M.B.A., is an Internal Medicine physician in the United States whose path to medicine was forged through resilience rather than inheritance. Born in Iraq and displaced by war at the age of six, he spent eight years as a refugee in Jordan without health insurance or access to formal education.

Abdallah writes from a rare “quadruple perspective” shaped by his experiences as a former refugee patient, medical interpreter, emergency responder, and now a physician. He has lived the many sides of care, once the sick child without access to treatment, the voice translating a diagnosis to frightened families, the first responder performing CPR in moments of crisis, and now the doctor writing the orders. His writing explores the long middle of healing and what it means to live in the aftermath of survival.

Substack ID: Abdallah

If you’d like to submit a piece to be featured in a future postcard, you can check the submission guidelines here: Submit your Essays

If you’d like to support me, you can: Buy me a coffee.