I used to go out to our farm, sketchbook and paints in my hand, and sit under the palm trees. I had no idea what I was about to paint. But I remember the smell of the farm at 4 and 5 pm and the breeze. I’d sit there and think: okay, what color do I start with? And then everything else would just follow. I don’t start with a place, person, or something to paint. Once I have the color on hand, my hand starts painting, sometimes the ocean bleeds into the sky. Sometimes mountains. Sometimes the desert, which I don’t even particularly like, but apparently my hands disagreed.

I have to make sure to add that I’m not an artist. I just really, really liked where the colors took me. Then I started university, and I stopped. I got so busy with university, then forgot to paint even when I went to the farm; it was a slow disappearance. I don’t remember the day I just didn’t pick it up anymore.

In my twenties, I started organizing my life around what I thought someone in their twenties was supposed to do. Everything became scheduled. Every activity had to justify itself. If something wasn’t productive or didn’t serve a clear purpose, it got removed from my calendar.

Even books became like that. Every book I read had to be useful. When I traveled, the places had to have meaning. You might ask, “What do you mean by meaning?” I mean I couldn’t just go somewhere to relax and unwind. It had to teach me something, expose me to a new culture, or have historical significance. I’m not saying that’s wrong, because I still do that when I travel, but my mindset was that everything had to be about gaining something.

Even rest became strategic because “you need to recharge your energy.” I renamed everything. Even the things I loved had to have a reason that justified them.

I stopped doing things simply because they made me happy or brought me comfort. Not everything needs to be explained. Not everything needs to lead somewhere.

Now and then, after long gaps, I think about drawing. But I never actually do it. I bought sketchbooks and coloring books. They’re nice, and I had fun with it. I had organized everything around me. I traveled, met people, stayed busy, and made plans. A whole life.

But there are things I should be doing simply because they make me happy. The question is: what are they? And how do I find my way back to them?

When I was 29, sometime around the middle of the year, I think, I was in the middle of that constant spiral of thinking and planning for the future: work, travel, what I’m going to do in six months, what I’m supposed to learn, what I’m supposed to be doing. Again, I’m not against planning or any of that. But I stopped and asked myself: what’s something simple and gentle that makes me happy? I asked myself, okay, what is it that I actually want? Not later. Right now. Not the plan. The thing itself. I didn’t have a clear answer. But the question was there, and I kept thinking about it and wondering about it.

One day, I was on my phone, and a video came up about turning thirty and going back to the things that used to make you happy when you were younger, before anyone told you what your hobbies were supposed to mean. So I made a list. Drawing was on it.

And I thought, what if it doesn’t feel the same? What if I’m worse at it now? What if I sit down and feel nothing and realize I had romanticized the whole thing? Turns out that wasn’t the point.

I went to an art therapy session led by my friend, who’s an artist. I sat down, picked up a brush, and there was a painting they wanted us to recreate. I had no idea what I was doing. I started drawing with a pencil, and my lines were really simple and shaky. I was honestly so embarrassed. My friend didn’t say anything. She encouraged me, actually. No one was watching me. Everyone was busy with their own work. But I still felt embarrassed.

What I made looked like nothing, and somehow it felt like everything. I was there. Calm. There was nowhere else I needed to be. The world slowed down to 0.5 speed.

Then I started playing with colors and enjoyed it so much. People complimented my work, and I ended up changing a lot of things in the painting and making it my own.

This is the first part of my series of things I’ve started doing again that make me happy, without needing a reason, benefit, or productivity behind them. Before rest became something to optimize, joy became something productive, and hobbies turned into either side projects or a whole identity. I’m happy, and I’m going to start drawing again and share my drawings when I make more.✨

I watched a lot this year. Most of it was a good time. But only some of it actually stayed with me, the kind that I wouldn’t shut up about until everyone around me had watched it. Some I fell for immediately, some needed a few days to land. Either way, they all left something behind. Either it was a feeling, a question, or a scene.

After Yang

The feeling I’m always looking for in films. The film gave me a thoughtful, quietly devastating experience. The way it explores humanity, memory, and identity in the near future feels less like science fiction and more like a very gentle, very honest question about what it means to be alive at all. What we remember.

Sentimental Value

As someone deeply attached to family and to the idea of home, and what homes do to you, this one hit differently. I grew up between two houses, and have lived in five since. The more that number grows, the more a film like this moves something in me. Sentimental Value touched on a lot, but what it captured most is how complex and enormous the relationship with family can be. In the quietest, most honest way. One of the best ensemble performances I’ve seen in a single film for four actors.

The Voice of Hind Rajab

As someone from the region, I strongly urge you to watch this film. Not for the art alone, but because it shows you what is actually happening. Then everything else hits differently. The Voice of Hind Rajab doesn’t let you look away, and it shouldn’t.

Project Hail Mary

As someone who read the book first, I wasn’t that excited for the film. But once it finds its footing, the heart of it is genuinely wonderful. I cried because of a rock. Four times. The buddy dynamic at the center of this film will leave you smiling, whether you planned to or not. The cinematography = Breathtaking.

Michael

I’ve been a Michael Jackson fan since before I can remember. The film misses a lot; some storylines deserved more space and didn’t get it. But the music and Jaafar’s performance? Phenomenal. That part they got right.

The Books

I didn’t read as much as I wanted to this year. But the three I did read were exactly what I needed. Right book, right time, cliché or not.

The Last Lecture

Midnight Pastry Shop

Careless People

The Colors

This half year I wore red, green, and pink. Not by any real decision. Those colors just kept showing up in my wardrobe without me planning it, and every time I put one on, I feel quietly nice about it.

The Places

I traveled to Azerbaijan, with more countries coming in the weeks ahead. Solo, as always. And like every time I travel alone, I came back knowing something about myself I didn’t before and with no one to perform for and nowhere to be except exactly where I am.

What I Learned

I learned to say no more. And I started making decisions without waiting for the perfect moment that never really comes anyway. I quit my job, traveled, and got out of a situation that had been draining me for a year and a half. And honestly? I didn’t cry when it was over. I laughed. Like, actually laughed. I think that says it all.

🤍🤍

Rawan. Vlora, Albania

I was booking my Azerbaijan trip yesterday when I started thinking about the many different ways I travel, depending on my mood, depending on my budget, depending on what I need that month. Every year, it seems, I find a new way of looking at it.

There’s a version of me that once spent fourteen hours in an airport because the connecting flight was fifty dollars cheaper if I left at six in the morning instead of nine the night before. I slept on my backpack. I ate snacks I can’t even remember the type of anymore, something I’d thrown together three countries ago from whatever ingredients I had on hand. I had saved fifty dollars so I could now spend on a hostel bed and a plate of street food in the next city.

And then there’s the version of me who paid for a resort with a bathtub overlooking the sea, ordered room service, and I didn’t leave the resort for an entire day except to walk barefoot to the pool, making polite small talk with other guests in their nice cover-ups. I felt, also honestly, exactly the same kind of triumphant. Just a different flavor of it.

The cheap years

I started traveling solo on a budget at the age of 22 that was the only way I could travel. I was young. I had time but not money, but the desire to see the world was through the roof. So I learned the things you learn. The night bus is half the price of the day train, and you save a hostel night, so really it’s free. The best meal in any city is the one the taxi drivers eat. You can wear the same two t-shirts for three weeks if you wash one in the sink every other night.

What nobody told me, and what I think is the actual gift of that kind of travel, is that you become very, very good at being uncomfortable. Not in a martyr way. In a useful way. You stop being scared of small things. The bus is six hours late? Fine. The hostel has no hot water? Fine. The map app died and you’re lost in a city where you don’t speak the language? You’ll figure it out. You always have.

There's a great piece on The Broke Backpacker, a man reflecting on twelve years of budget travel, and one idea he mentioned, that the road eventually teaches you:

“Everything I have built and the person I’ve become has all been built on the foundation of embracing discomfort. To continue to expand your skill set and to evolve into a more capable, more confident human being you need to frequently get uncomfortable.”

What really matters to me is the people I met, the ones I would, I would never have met in a nicer hotel, strangers on long bus rides, the small accidental encounters that only happen when you’re tired and unguarded and there is no concierge standing between you and the world.

we travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.

Those years I lived in cheap travels were the years I found myself. They gave me a personality I didn’t know I had: resilient, a fighter, quick to find joy, accepting of everyone, looking at situations from multiple angles before judging, searching for the reasons behind whatever situations I encounter—more patient—not extremely patient—but definitely more patient than before. I think a large part of my self-confidence as an adult stems from that girl who used to sleep on the airport floor.

Rawan. San Juan, Puerto Rico

The pampered years

At some point, as you get older and land a job, you start having more money than time. You start arriving at your destination already exhausted from the life you’ve escaped. So instead of the 4 a.m. flight on the first day of your trip costing you the entire day, this time you spend it sleeping comfortably on the plane with the shades drawn, arriving at your new destination on time and feeling relaxed.

Then, I’d have those times where a flight at a normal hour. The resort with the bathtub. The dinner that cost what a whole day of street food used to cost. It feels like you’re getting soft, and I love it.

Rawan. Houston, Texas

The way I see it, this is a different kind of attention. A blogger I love, writing on Bemused Backpacker about how travel styles change with age has this good quote:

When I travel like this now, I notice different things. from the smallest things, let’s say the light moves through the room in the afternoon in a room just by myself. I notice the texture of the bread at breakfast compared to the street food. I notice that, I’m just actually here. What the pampered years taught me, is this: rest is not a prize you earn after a trip. It can be the trip.

Everything has its season

كل شي له وقته. Everything has its season.

I’ve turned this phrase over and over in my head when I think about travel. I used to believe you had to pick. You were either the backpacker or the bougie traveler. I don’t believe that anymore. The best travelers I know who are the ones I learn the most from, who slide between the two depending on what season of life they’re in, and what the trip is for. Solo Traveler World put it well in a piece on travel budgets:

there’s no single right way to travel solo, only the way that fits the version of you who’s going.

Sometimes I need to feel uncomfortable. I need to remind myself that I’m capable, that I can overcome difficulties, and that the adventurous Rawan who loved to throw on a backpack and explore new cities—the one I first discovered and fell in love with when I was 10—is still somewhere inside me. So I’ll book a cheap flight, a sketchy hostel, and a multi-day road trip through a place I’ve never been before. Not because I have to. But because I want to reclaim that version of myself for a moment.

And sometimes, with the pressures of life, work, and life’s difficulties in general, I find myself needing a bath. I need to be reminded that I deserve to be cared for, that I don’t have to earn my rest, and that relaxing in a beautiful room isn’t a betrayal of myself—on the contrary, it’s a form of travel. So I’ll book a luxury hotel, enjoy a quiet morning, wear something new every day, and explore the city. Not because I’m trying to pretend to live a certain lifestyle, but because I want that version of myself, too.

Rawan, Kindle, and a latte. Berlin, Germany

I think the mistake lies in believing that only one of them is “real” and the “true” way to travel, while the other isn’t. I’ve experienced both versions of travel, whether backpacking or staying at resorts. Both are me. Both have taught me things. Both, in their own way, have taught me how to travel—which, the longer I do it, I realize is just another word for how I live.

Whenever I debated with someone who favored one of the two approaches, I always tried to justify my reasons to them and explain my perspective, but after that, I stopped apologizing for either one. I don’t apologize for the trip where I spent fourteen dollars a day, nor do I apologize for the trip where I spent that amount on a single cup of coffee with a breathtaking view. Both are mine. I’ve earned them both—I’ve experienced them all. Each has its own sweet taste and feeling; it doesn’t mean one is better than the other.

My next trip is Azerbaijan, backpack, hostels, the whole thing. The one after is Copenhagen with friends, a comfortable Airbnb, slow mornings, soft beds. Two trips, back to back, two completely different versions of me. And I’m not picking one. It’s my trip and it’s my season.

References:

• Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel” (Salon, 2000)

• Bemused Backpacker, “How Travel Styles Can Change. And How That Is Okay.”

• The Broke Backpacker, “12 Lessons from 12 Years as The Broke Backpacker”

• She Goes With Purpose, “Why Self-Care Is Important for Solo Travelers”

I watched Wadjda ten years later and felt that comment again, fresh, within the first ten minutes.

Wadjda is an eleven-year-old girl from Riyadh who wants a green bicycle. She sees it in a shop window, she wants it, she tries to get it. Everything else, the school, the mother, the father who is disappearing toward a second wife, the headmistress with her rules and her red-bottomed heels, orbits around this one simple wanting.

“Al-Mansour vision is that she decided early she didn’t want the film to carry a slogan and scream, instead, to create a story where people can laugh and cry a little.”

Wadjda doesn’t want the bicycle as a symbol. She wants it because her friend Abdullah has one and she wants to race him and she thinks she can win. Her desire is immediate, physical, uncomplicated, which explains the desire of a child who hasn’t yet learned to shrink what she wants into something more acceptable. The bicycle is small, however, it represents is not. And the film is wise enough to let you feel both at once.

I thought about my roller skates the whole time. My mom gave them to me without a second thought. I was a child who wanted a thing, didn’t think of anything beyond that. Instead there were comments, looks, the specific weight of other people deciding what my wanting meant. Wadjda knows that weight. The film is quietly subversive precisely because of Wadjda’s adroit manipulation of the society she lives in. She isn’t a loud rebel. But she schemes. A scene when she starts memorizing the Quran not out of faith but to win the prize money. That’s a girl who has already learned that the front door isn’t available to her, so she finds every other door.

When the principle appears, she is severe and controlled. She tells the girls that a woman’s voice is her nakedness, that they must walk quietly, that music is forbidden, and that they must always be aware of how they are perceived. She is not a villain in the cartoon sense, but a woman who has survived by following the rules, and now enforces them on the girls with the precision of someone who has paid their price herself. More often than not, it is the women who remind Wadjda of her place. They are the ones who tell her to sit down, be quiet, stop. They were taught this, and now they are the ones teaching it.

Wadjda does not accept the lesson. She wears Converse under her abaya and listens to music on her phone. In the opening scene, she is set apart from the other girls by her black high-top Converse, while the others wear more conventional shoes. From the very first frame, she is marked as someone who insists on being herself, within the small spaces available to her. This is not grand heroism. It is simply a girl refusing, quietly and consistently, to become someone she is not.I recognized her immediately.

You must know Haifaa Al-Mansour had to communicate with cast and crew while inside a van, it’s 2012, using a walkie-talkie and monitors, because of the government ban on women working with men in public. She directed her own film from the back of a vehicle, invisible, while the scenes she wrote and imagined and fought for years to fund played out in front of a crew she could not physically stand beside.

It’s tempting to imagine Al-Mansour’s journey to making the film as yet another parallel to Wadjda’s quest, a likable Saudi woman subverting societal norms and circumstances to have the thing she wants. And it’s not wrong to see it that way. Wadjda wanted a bicycle. Al-Mansour wanted to make a film. Both were told, in different ways, that what they wanted was not for them.

yes, it’s the first Saudi film by a female director. yes, it made history. yes, it went to the oscars. i know. but honestly? forget all of that for a second. If I want you to watch the film, just watch the girl.

Wadjda isn't a symbol. she’s not a message dressed up in a child’s body. she’s just a real kid, scheming, stubborn, a little selfish for the outside world, grieving quietly under all that attitude. her father is leaving. her mother is scared. and she wants a bicycle to race with her friend Abdullah. Waad Mohammed plays her so naturally that at some point you stop thinking about acting entirely and just watch a girl exist on screen.

i had roller skates once. i still remember that first second of putting them on, that specific weightless feeling right before someone decided to have an opinion about it. Wadjda gets that second. i’m glad she got filmed.

Sources:

• Wadjda — Wikipedia

• Haifaa al-Mansour — Wikipedia

• Wadjda director Haifaa Al-Mansour: ‘It Is Time To Open Up’ — NPR

• ‘Wadjda’: Women’s Voices in Saudi Arabia — PopMatters

• Wadjda quotes — IMDb

• ‘Wadjda’ is first Saudi Oscar entry — Arab News

• Cannes 2012: Saudi Arabia’s First Female Director — The Hollywood Reporter

• In the Company of Women — UCLA CSW

• First Films: Haifaa Al-Mansour’s “Wadjda” — Michigan Quarterly Review

• Meet Haifaa al-Mansour — AnOther Magazine

• Waad Mohammed — IMDb

There is a shot near the end of Naga that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Sarah is running, not elegantly, but desperately. Hair messy, shoes wrong for this terrain, lungs burning through the dark. She has to make it home before her father does. That’s the whole film, distilled into one image: a woman sprinting through the night with everything she has, before something catches her. Meanwhile, the men at the party she left behind are still outside, still laughing, the same men you see on the street when she was running, happy in their cars or walking, carrying nothing on their shoulders. Going nowhere in particular. No curfew. No calculation. No math they have to do just to exist after midnight. The film never says any of this out loud. It doesn’t need to. If you’re Saudi, you already know the math.

Naga is, on its surface, a wild ride. Sarah sneaks out from family and especially her young brother for a date, ends up with her date at a desert party, later at night when the car breaks down, and a genuinely unhinged camel becomes her primary antagonist for the next forty minutes. Director Meshal AlJaser throws everything at the screen, psychedelic visuals, handheld chaos, dream sequences that bleed into reality. And most important, there’s a really good through-the-night thriller hiding inside the swirling chaos and stylistic eccentricities.
But here’s the important thing when watching the film: it’s not about feeling disoriented or seeing that as a flaw. The core is the goal itself. This is a film designed to put you under pressure, a plot full of anxiety that only resolves at the very end, leaving you holding your breath, unsure if you’ll finally get to exhale. The dizzying, fragmented sensation, as if you can’t catch your breath, is exactly what a night like Sarah’s feels like from the inside. The film doesn’t explain the anxiety, it recreates it. The rapid camera work and fast editing make you share in the intense journey of quick thinking, willpower, and luck needed to get home before curfew. You don’t watch Sarah’s panic, you feel it.

I want to get a little personal here because this really hit me. The way Sarah dresses, how she moves through a room, the calculation in her eyes when deciding how much of herself to show, every detail feels so real. There’s this kind of performance women learn in certain situations, not fake but not fully natural either, something in the middle. A slightly adjusted voice, a slightly shifted posture, the version of yourself you show in front of certain people, in certain rooms. Adwa Bader absolutely nails it.

And the little jokes, references, and lines of dialogue, Adwa Bader brings authenticity and originality that makes her feel like a real person, not like the characters we’ve been used to seeing in Saudi films. She isn’t acting rebellious, she’s acting survival, and that is a completely different energy, one that hits you right in the chest.

The dialogue felt so real, and that’s rare. The realness is what hits you. We’ve seen a thousand Saudi film characters talk like they were written for someone who doesn’t know us at all, and that always felt off. But Sarah? She speaks like someone you went to school with. And for her very first acting role, she absolutely nails it. TIFF even gave her a Rising Stars award, and honestly, it makes total sense the moment you see her on screen.

That last run keeps coming back to me. Even when she’s safe, it’s still a sprint against the clock. The men at the party don’t run. They finish their drinks, go home when they feel like it. Aljaser turns patriarchal obstacles into something you can feel. The camel, the broken car, the desert, the dead phone signal, all of it is both real and metaphorical. Every near-miss is exactly what it’s like being a woman in a world that sets the clock but pretends it doesn’t exist. The film doesn’t tell you what to feel. It just shows Sarah running, the men standing, and the night doing its thing. That gap, the casual freedom of men versus the frantic math women have to do, is the real horror here. The camel’s wild, but the curfew is scarier.

“Naga” is chaotic, and I won’t deny it. The story can be hard to follow at times, you’re not always sure if what you’re seeing is real or imagined, and the nonlinear jumps sometimes confuse more than they clarify.

Aljaser wears his influences openly, but his vision makes this film entirely his own. He turns the desert, the father, the poet, the camel, the clothing, into the language of a thriller. He builds a Saudi framework and lets the genre conventions fold into it. Nighttime thrillers exist, sure, but none feel like this. Here, the night bends around one woman’s specific limits, her calculations, and her version of freedom that must remain invisible just to survive.

Here’s what I want you to take away. Watch it for Adwa Bader, who carries every chaotic scene with an astonishing groundedness for a debut. Watch it for the desert cinematography that makes the outskirts of Riyadh look like the moon and the inside of an anxiety attack at the same time. And yes, watch it for the camel.

Follow Sarah through the night while the men around her go about their evening without a care feel every step every choice every obstacle she has to navigate just to move safely through a world that doesn’t pause for her those small constant calculations we live with every day are all there seeing it on screen hits hard vivid emotional quietly heartbreaking nothing explained nothing justified nothing neatly tied up just lived just real.

Let me start by sharing with you a text message that went viral a couple of years ago, where a woman named Anna received it from a friend she had known for five years. It read, “I am in a place where I am trying to honor my needs and act in alignment with what feels right within the scope of my life, and I am afraid our friendship does not seem to fit into that framework. I can no longer hold the emotional space you have wanted me to, and think the support you need is beyond the scope of what I can offer.” Anna said it felt like she was getting laid off from a friendship, while she had hoped that after five years, she might at least get the chance to respond, to have an actual conversation, to explain herself or to ask for clarity. Instead, the door closed before she could even open her mouth. That is the part that lingers. The suddenness of it, the careful wording, the way it felt so perfectly written, yet shut down the friendship before it even had a chance to breathe.

I keep thinking about that text, not just because it felt cold, which it did, but also because the person who sent it probably thought they were doing something healthy and even brave. They carefully picked what to say, had a plan, and said it with full confidence. It was the language of every TikTok therapist, every Instagram carousel, every voice note about self-care and mental wellness. They were protecting their peace.

Protecting my peace, is everywhere now, and it’s starting to drive me a little crazy. I’m not against it, I get it, and I support anyone who wants to protect their peace, but it’s just everywhere. It shows up in captions, group chats, voice notes, like background music you can’t turn off. I understand why. People wanted language that gave them permission to say no, to leave spaces that hurt them, to stop pretending they were fine when they weren’t. That permission mattered then, and it still matters now.

But somewhere between setting healthy limits and where we are now, things got twisted. Here’s what I think really happened. The ideas that were meant to be used in therapy rooms, with all their nuance and context, got turned into bite-sized content. A psychologist posts a 60-second video on how to end a friendship. A carousel tells you the signs of a toxic relationship. A voice note says discomfort is a red flag. None of that is wrong on its own, but it’s stripped of everything that made it actually useful. The complexity, the context, the other person, all the messy human stuff gone.

At its worst, all this therapy-speak becomes armor. Words that sound kind but are really just excuses for selfish choices. ‘No, I’m not canceling on you last minute. I’m setting boundaries.’ ‘No, I’m not ending our friendship. I’m just reassessing my capacity for you.’ On the surface, these phrases can seem healthy and wise. But too often, they’re being used to shut down conversations that should stay open, to make one-sided decisions feel mutual, to wrap up avoidance in the language of self-awareness.

The tension comes because the same culture that tells you to protect your peace also tells you to be vulnerable, to open up, to let people in. Both are true, and somehow, both are demanded at the same time. Be open, but not too open. Be supportive, but keep your limits. Build closeness, but don’t let anyone cost you your peace. What kind of friendship can actually survive that?

You start noticing it everywhere once you look for it. Take Dr. Brandolini’s TikTok video, ‘Here’s how you break up with a friend.’ It caused a lot of backlash. People called it condescending, cold, even sociopathic. One comment was, ‘I too speak to my friends like an HR rep.’ Another comment, ‘This feels so sterile and avoidant.’ And this wasn’t just anyone, it was a licensed psychologist with a verified blue checkmark, showing what she called the recommended approach. Honestly, it sounded like a layoff notice.

Then there’s the 2019 Twitter thread by writer Melissa Fabello. She suggested friends should ask each other for consent before sharing anything heavy. Her template went something like, ‘Hey! I’m so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity, helping someone else who’s in crisis and dealing with personal stuff right now, and I don’t think I can hold appropriate space for you.’ The idea was to normalize emotional boundaries, which makes sense. But what it actually did was bring corporate language like ‘at capacity’ and ‘hold space’ into the most personal conversations we have. Words that were supposed to help us connect started creating distance instead.

The phrase the only real person in the world is chilling. It shows where a framework that only asks what do I need right now ends up. This is not therapy anymore. It is solipsism dressed up in a smarter vocabulary. When psychology jargon becomes everyday talk, the words start to lose their meaning. The more people use them, the less they actually mean and the more freely they get used to justify anything, including choices that have nothing to do with health and everything to do with control.

Think about all the advice floating around. Do not ask your friends to help you move. Do not expect airport pickups. Check someone’s emotional capacity before sharing anything heavy. Each one of these tips might make sense on its own, for a specific situation and a full context. But string them all together and what you get is a friendship that only works in perfect conditions, on good days, with no mess, no inconvenience, no conflict, no human error. A friendship that survives only in theory, not in real life.

Actual friendship is not like that. Friendship is about being part of a support system. Deep connection comes with conflict, inconvenience, and the messy work of showing up. Sometimes that means doing things you do not want to do. Sometimes it means being there even when it is uncomfortable. Sometimes it means listening when you are tired or distracted. That is how bonds form. That is how people are trusted with the weight of your life. Clean boundaries alone cannot create that.

Let’s take someone named Layla. Layla did everything right. She had friends, she did not rely on them for emotional validation, and she was not afraid to cut off toxic people. By today’s therapy-speak standards, she seemed flawless. But deep down, she was lonely. She had friends, yet she kept them at arm’s length under the guise of setting boundaries. Independence was not freedom. It was loneliness, rebranded.

What I am mourning is specific. The kind of friendship that can carry the weight. Where a misread tone does not need a post-mortem. Where someone can say I am upset with you without it being logged as evidence of a pattern. Where you can be briefly difficult and still be loved. Where hard conversations happen in person, messy and unscripted, and you walk away understanding something you did not before. That used to just be called friendship.

Now it needs a trigger warning.

I want more holding each other close, less holding space. Otherwise space will be the only thing left between us and maybe forever. Boundaries matter, yes and for sure I agree, but so does showing up. So does leaving the door open. Peace is worth protecting, but so is connection, presence, and love, even when it is inconvenient, messy, or imperfect. That is what real friendship looks like.

Yahoo Image

I know, I know. I know what I’m supposed to say, not to judge. Because everyone’s on their own journey. Stop judging people for how they find themselves. Who are you to decide what’s authentic? Isn’t discovering new things through social media still discovering? Should I add something about how we’re all just doing our best? Should I mention that gatekeeping self-discovery is actually really problematic? Should I remind you that growth looks different for everyone? And by the way, I’m not away from this, I do include myself.

And also, can we talk about what’s actually happening?

Everywhere I look, there it is. It’s subtle at first, and then it’s not subtle at all. It’s patterns repeating themselves across different people, different aesthetics, different versions of the same idea.

Sometimes it’s the girl who just got really into reading. She has the Stanley cup, the Kindle, the little sticky tabs, her Bookstagram, and the “currently reading” highlight on Instagram. She talks about her reading practice like it’s therapy, like she’s found The Thing That Will Fix Everything. She reorganizes her shelves. Films quiet mornings. Annotates every page like it’s a ritual. And yet, she hasn’t finished a single book since February.

Sometimes it’s that girl. 5am alarms. Pilates. Green juice she made once but didn’t finish. Gratitude journal, day one out of maybe eleven. Her whole personality, for months, is her morning routine. She’ll talk about it at dinner unprompted, like it’s not a phase she’s trying on, but a real part of who she is.

Sometimes it’s the cottagecore girl who has never been near a farm but owns four linen aprons and a foraging book with a pressed flower on the cover that’s never been opened. Her life looks soft, slow, intentional, at least from the outside.

I know these girls. You know these girls. I’ve been these girls. That’s why I’m not an outsider here, and I’m not apologizing for it, but I am going to talk about it. And I keep asking myself, who am I really? Are those me, or just something I tried on? I know they’re not harmful, but without the internet, would I have even done it? Or would it have felt forced?

Collage / Alessandra Banal

I was under the influence of the clean girl trend, and I don’t mean I saw it as a bad thing, quite the opposite. But when I tried it, I realized the makeup I was using didn’t really suit me, yet suddenly I felt like I had to fit into this style. Like, I just had to. Who decided I had to? I don’t know, but I felt I did. I convinced myself that being “clean” meant having no details on my face, and the social expectations were huge. I felt like I had to look this way to be accepted.

If you believe in astrology, I’m a Libra rising, which means I love to try things, to see and experience everything. Anything I hear about, I feel like I have to try it. I read everything, I learn everything, because why not? I only live once, so why would I waste my life on just one thing?

I love the aesthetic, but at that time I felt forced to adopt it even though it didn’t match my features. Even the filters and lighting made my face look different from reality. I tried being a clean girl, and it never looked authentic on me. The soft life aesthetic showed me a calm, quiet life, but I forgot that I’m actually full of energy and love makeup.

Most of the responses I’ve seen reveal a deeper cultural perspective. I felt like Arab society praises simplicity, but we do it not because it reflects us, but because it’s what’s visible, what’s seen. I had confidence in myself before, but after trying to be a clean girl, I felt a gap inside me. I felt like I wasn’t really myself, while at the same time, there was this inner part of me testing how to be “acceptable” or “visible” in that style.

That’s what I mean. That exact feeling when you watch someone’s thirty-second video and think: yes. This is who I am now. Not who I want to be. Who I already am. The video didn’t create it, it just revealed it. Or at least, that’s how it feels.

The certainty is the weirdest part. You don’t ease into it. You don’t think, maybe I’ll try this. You just know: I’ve always been a person who does this, I just hadn’t started yet. There’s no pause. No distance between seeing it and becoming it. It hits immediately. It convinces you completely. And then you spend hundreds of dollars, thousands of SAR, on supplies and it lasts for almost six to eight months.

Hold on for a second, it’s not just that I saw a video and copied it. It’s part of something bigger, and even that explanation is too shallow for what’s actually happening. It’s deeper than that, and honestly, more interesting. The algorithm is super important because it doesn’t show you things randomly. It’s watching you, and it’s watching your patterns across TikTok and other social media accounts, but in a very precise way. It notices what you pause on even a second longer than everything else, what you replay, what you save, what you screenshot without thinking, and what you come back to at 1 a.m. when you’re not performing for anyone, just lying there half asleep, scrolling without intention but still responding to something. Then it gives you more of that.

And here’s where it gets a little unsettling. Sometimes TikTok identifies something real in you before you do. Before you even have the words for it. Before you’ve consciously admitted to yourself that you’re drawn to it. It takes a small signal and amplifies it, cleans it up, organizes it, aestheticizes it, and sends it back to you in a way that feels clearer than your own thoughts. It finds the frequency you’re operating on and reflects it back to you louder, sharper, more beautiful than you could have articulated yourself.

So when the video lands and something inside you goes yes, this, what is that, really? Is that you finding yourself? Or is it a system using your data, building a version of you, and asking you to try it on? I don’t know. And I think pretending to know would miss the point. That uncertainty is probably the most honest place to start.

I keep saying this, I’m not against trying things or exploring ourselves, not at all. But when it gets to the point where you feel like you have to chase trends, or when someone tries to stick to one thing in their life and it ends up looking silly to everyone else, that’s where it stops. I’m speaking as a Saudi girl, an Arab, about beauty and identity, about that feeling when you try to be a version of something you know deep down doesn’t fully fit you. I’m not saying you have to fit the stereotype, and it’s not wrong if you don’t follow your community, but sometimes trend culture sells us images of who we’re “supposed” to be in such a convincing way that we start believing the desire was ours. As if we chose it freely, but instead of being ourselves, we start becoming like everyone else, in a way that feels a little artificial.

The culture of conformity is scary because it feeds itself and runs automatically. All it needs is a tiny spark, a small idea, a short video, to spread like wildfire that might never go out. But I think about it every time I watch a trend move across the internet like a storm, like a force pulling everyone in, making you feel like you have to follow it too. The more people do something, the more normal it feels. The more normal it feels, the more you feel drawn to it, even if deep down you know it’s not you, even if it doesn’t really suit you. And somewhere in that cycle, the question, “Do I really want this?” starts feeling almost radical, like you’re overthinking it, like you’re the one making it complicated, while everything around you tells you this is normal, accepted, expected.

Hobbies are softer, obviously. Not life or death, not dangerous, and it’s never wrong to try or explore. But the mechanism is the same. When a certain image of a life is repeated enough, perfectly curated apartment, a specific bookshelf, exact morning routine, a very particular way of existing, it stops feeling like just one option among many. It starts feeling like recognition. Oh. That’s me. I just haven’t started yet. And every time you try to make yourself, or get to know yourself, or explore something new, it’s not just a surface-level attempt. It’s something inside trying to scream: this is me, even if it’s not obvious to others, even if your features don’t perfectly match the image you see on screen.

This is what I keep coming back to. The real test isn’t about where something came from or its source, even though that’s interesting. I’ve let that idea go because it’s not the point I’m focused on. You didn’t develop your taste in a vacuum. You didn’t discover your favorite film out of nowhere. Something was shown to you. Someone introduced it to you. There has always been a path. TikTok didn’t invent it—it just sped it up and made it feel seamless. That’s why it’s so easy to feel like you’re discovering yourself, even if what you’re seeing has been curated.

For me, de-influencing actually helped me cut down the brainrot. I stopped just consuming everything and started trying things for myself. I cleaned up my social media, filtered out a lot of the clickbait, and paid more attention to content that actually adds something instead of just grabbing my attention for a few seconds and disappearing. It made me more intentional, not just about what I watch, but about what I keep. And that’s where it connects back to everything else. The real test is what stays after the algorithm moves on. If something is still part of my life when no one’s watching, when it’s not aesthetic, not content, not being shared, then I know it’s actually mine.

My gratitude journal is sitting in a drawer. The linen apron? Worn once. And a lot of trends I started, I never finished, but they’re still there in the drawer.

I’m not embarrassed by any of it. They were all questions. That’s it. Questions I asked about myself, disguised as hobbies. Some of them got answered. Some didn’t. And some are still sitting somewhere, unresolved, with a price tag still attached. That’s how I measure what really matters to me. Not the moment I saw it online, not the initial excitement, but what it asks of me when nobody is watching. That’s the thing that proves ownership, authenticity, and endurance.

It’s not about avoiding trends or exploration. It’s about noticing which ones truly resonate when all the performance and audience are gone. That’s how I know what belongs to me, not what the algorithm temporarily told me to want.

I don’t think this generation is failing. I need to say that straight away. What we’re doing is human. Really human. We’re trying to figure out who we are. The difference now is it’s faster, louder, public, and there’s an algorithm watching, helping, complicating, all at the same time. It’s messy, and that’s the point.

We’re searching. Actually searching. Not always gracefully. Not always efficiently. Sometimes at a cost, money, time, mental space, but still searching. And that girl, on her third aesthetic this year? She’s not lost. She’s looking. And maybe none of that aesthetics will stick forever. Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe they weren’t supposed to. But each one leaves something behind, even if it’s small, even if it’s quiet.

Cottagecore might have shown her that she needs slow mornings, space to breathe, mornings with sunlight instead of a checklist. Dark academia might have shown her she actually loves reading, loves getting lost in words, even if she never finishes the book. Clean girl might have taught her that she wants less, not more. Less pressure, less noise, less pretending. And those aren’t failures. They’re lessons. Tiny markers of taste and attention and curiosity that she gets to keep.

The era wasn’t the destination. It never was. It was just a door. A door she walked through at that particular time. And she learned something on the other side, whether anyone else noticed or not. The internet might have amplified it, might have made it feel urgent, like a trend you have to follow or fall behind, but the discovery itself, the quiet part that actually matters, happens when nobody’s watching.

That’s what I keep thinking about when I scroll. The searching, the trying, the failing, the adapting. It’s real, it’s human, and it’s necessary. Not all lessons are permanent, not all aesthetics become identity, but they all teach something. And eventually, we pick up the pieces that matter, the ones that feel like ours, the ones we return to on an ordinary Tuesday when no one’s watching. That’s what builds us, slowly, quietly, in the parts of life that algorithms can’t touch.

The era isn’t the destination. It’s the doorway. And what I’ve learned walking through it is that who I am now, the choices I’ve kept, the energy I’ve held on to, the quiet lessons from every “trend”, that’s mine. I wouldn’t trade it for perfection or approval or a perfectly curated feed. It’s just me.

This is the moment I pause and notice. The thirty-second video, the soft lighting, the life that looks intentional, I feel it pulling me. I don’t fight it, but I also don’t try to become it immediately. I take a breath and think: what am I actually responding to?

Not the look, not the tools, not the filters. What’s underneath all of that? The quiet that comes with the routine? The stillness that feels mine alone? The sense that my life is chosen instead of accidental? A tiny moment where I feel like I have control in a chaotic day?

Most of the time, it’s not the habit itself I want. It’s the feeling it promises. Focus, energy, clarity, that small sense that what I’m doing actually matters. And if that feeling is real, it deserves attention, even if the form it showed up in doesn’t last.

I don’t need to be the trend, the aesthetic, or the version someone else crafted online. I just need to notice what sticks with me quietly, when no one’s watching.

What I’ve realized about myself now? That I care more about what improves me, not what makes me look like everyone else. I’m not saying I’ve figured myself out 100 percent. I still scroll, I still see the trends, I still feel the pull sometimes. But now I don’t run after it immediately. I let myself pause, reflect, and see what actually resonates with me. That’s where the truth is.

I was watching the film and for a while it feels like nothing is happening. I’m watching a woman cooks, cleans, peels potatoes, makes the bed. then the camera just observing her routine over and over. Then slowly when the film continues, the smallest shifts start to stand out, seeing a pause that lasts too long, a tiny mistake in a task she usually performs perfectly. The routine, once calm, begins to feel heavy, almost oppressive.

The film isn’t about what happens, t’s about what repeating the same small actions does to you. You notice every pause, every missed detail, and it becomes almost unbearable.

By the end of the film, you realize this film is about the quiet pressure of a life built entirely on repetition and the attention to ordinary moments that cinema usually ignores, And your attention is completely drawn in, impossible to look away from. I could say this film that turns the mundane into something profoundly human, reminding you how much depth exists in the routines we take for granted.

The Piano (1993)

I first watched The Piano when I was 14, and then again at 24, it was completely unplanned. I didn’t expect to ever see it again, but somehow it found me. On the second time, I really absorbed my own feelings and energy through it; it stayed with me in a way it never did before.

Ada doesn’t speak, but you understand her and her piano is her voice, expressing everything she can’t say out loud. When it’s taken from her and left on the beach, the loss feels almost physical.

“SHE JUST WANTED TO PLAY HER PIANO.”

Jane Campion filled the film with mud, wind, water, and people moving toward each other even when they shouldn’t. Desire isn’t soft or romantic, it’s wild, uncomfortable, and human. The landscape itself feels alive, shaping everything around Ada’s struggles. I felt the weight of every gesture, every silence, and the tension beneath it all.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

When a two women slowly watch each other, learning each other, noticing every tiny detail from each other. The longer you sit with it, the more intense it becomes. I felt their glances, their hesitations, everything that is not said.

Every look feels like it’s carrying a secret.”

With every glance starts to weigh on you. It’s like it is full of meaning. By the end, the emotions break through so strongly that I couldn’t hold myself. In the last scene, I completely broke down crying.I couldn’t move. Every moment stayed with me, every detail pressing into my chest.

Watching it, I realize it is not just about the story. It is about presence, attention, and the raw feelings that rise from the smallest gestures. It stays with you long after the credits roll, echoing in your own heart and memory.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)

A quiet film, it almost feels like it’s protecting its characters. Autumn barely speaks, but her face tells you everything. I was watching her travel to another city just to get something that should have been simple, and I kept thinking how cold and indifferent the world around her feels. Her face says it all, even when nothing happens. Then there’s this scene where she answers a list of questions with four words: never, rarely, sometimes, always. Watching her face there? Heartbreaking.

I felt everything she felt in that silence. I couldn’t look away.

It’s crazy how a film this quiet can grab you like that. Every look, every pause, every small gesture carries so much feeling. I kept thinking about it long after the credits rolled. It just stays with you.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

A man falls from a window and dies. And you think, okay, did she push him or not? But the more you watch, the less that question even matters and don't forget about the loud music.

With every conversation shows something uncomfortable about love, resentment, ambition, and how people rewrite their own stories. There’s that scene where she finally faces her husband, speaks so openly, challenges him directly, and lays everything on the table. It was like I was right there with her.

You don’t know who to believe, and that’s what makes it so intense.

Sandra Hüller’s performance never lets you fully decide what to believe about her. Every glance, every pause, every word carries weight. By the end, you’re left thinking about all the layers, all the resentments, and it stays with you long after the credits. It’s exhausting and captivating at the same time.

Past Lives (2023)

I could use one word about this film which is, it feels , bittersweet. Two childhood friends reconnect after years apart and just spend time together for few days. But every scene carries this quiet sense of longing.

It’s amazing how something so small can feel so big.

The film keeps asking a simple question: what happens to the many lives we didn’t choose? By the end of the film, there is no big resolution, just a quiet acceptance of the life that exists now. I always have a soft spot for films with ending is soft, but it hits harder than anything dramatic.

“You dream in a language that I can’t understand. There’s this whole place inside you where I can’t go.”

I felt the unspoken connection between them.

I love love. I mean it as completely, embarrassingly, all the way down. Romantic love, the love that catches you off guard but it’s at the right moment, the love you feel walking through a city at that hour when the light goes golden and soft and you think this, this, this. All of it. I’m in. I always have been.

Believe me, I know. I know how that sounds, I’m not new to this. Because people all of a sudden decided that caring too much is cringe. That the person who needs less, show less, not caring or showing any feelings, wins. That you’re supposed to hold yourself at a cool distance from everything and everyone, like you’re too interesting to be undone by something as ordinary as love. I see you. I just don’t need you. That whole performance. Yes, I’m not a big fan of that at all.

I could never do it. I tried. I mentioned people casually, like they weren’t living rent-free in my head. Said I’m not really looking for anything serious when I meant the complete opposite. Laughed at love like I was in on the joke while secretly being its most devoted, most hopeless student. Made myself smaller around people who wore cynicism like armor. Pretended I could take it or leave it.

CJ Hauser wrote about this in The Crane Wife. She spent years thinking that wanting someone to say they loved her was a personal failing she needed to fix. A flaw in herself, not in the situation. I read that essay and felt it in a way I couldn’t name, because I had done the exact same thing. I hid what I wanted. Pretended I needed less. And for what?

When I love someone, I love them completely. I want to know their fears, what they were like as a kid. I want the ordinary Tuesdays, the inside jokes that turn into a language, the coffee handed over just right without a word. I notice. I remember. I show up. I keep showing up. It used to feel like too much. Now it just feels like me. It would be easier to close myself off. To stop believing in people after it went badly. But that’s not weakness. That’s not naivety. That’s the bravest thing I know how to do. And I’m done treating it like a flaw I need to fix.

Love isn’t about performing, or winning, or pretending you don’t care. I can tell you it’s all about showing up fully, being open, being all in. Every small, silly, beautiful moment matters. Every morning I notice something new about someone. Every time I choose to stay, even when it hurts. So here it is. My full confession. I love love. It’s cost me. It’s broken me open more than once. And I’ve come back every single time, still wanting it, still in, no notes, no apologies. Fully, embarrassingly, gratefully in.

Nostalghia (1983) - Andrei Tarkovsky - 125 min - Italy /USSR

Near the end of Nostalghia, A middle-aged Russian poet, whos name Andrei Gorchakov, stands at the edge of a drained thermal pool in Bagno Vignoni, Italy, holding a lit candle. His task, given by a mystic he barely knows, is to carry it to the other side without letting the flame go out. The wind keeps putting it out. He relights it, starts over, reaches the halfway point, loses it again. He relights it once more and walks the length of the pool in complete silence. The scene lasts nearly nine uninterrupted minutes. When he finally sets the candle down at the far wall, he collapses.

Nothing about this sounds like conventional cinema. Yet the scene is devastating. Tarkovsky has spent the preceding two hours shaping time, space, and the body of his actor, Oleg Yankovsky, so that you feel the exhaustion as if it were your own. Nostalghia earns its ending through the accumulation of every subtle moment before it. Watching it is less about following a story and more about feeling the weight of every second, every movement, and every pause.

Some viewers on Letterboxd often describe it as a deeply human experience. They talk about the loneliness, the fragile persistence, and the quiet struggle to keep a small light alive in a world that resists it. The scene doesn’t rely on music or dialogue to move you. Instead, it moves you because you can feel the effort, the hope, and the vulnerability in each slow step.

The grammar of duration

Tarkovsky isn’t interested in conventional drama, he doesn’t cut shots fast, rush you through a plot, or he sure doesn’t explain everything in dialogue. Instead he lets the camera breathe, holding long, still takes that demand your attention without giving you anything obvious to react to. Viewers on Letterboxd talk about this film not as something you watch, but something you feel , a weight of emotion that builds slowly as you sit with Gorchakov in each quiet frame.

In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky says cinema’s real power isn’t in showing events happening inside time. It’s in capturing time itself, as a felt experience, a kind of substance you can almost touch. And Nostalghia is the purest expression of that. The long takes here are not decoration. They are the film’s language made physical.

People on Letterboxd often say the movie drains you, because Tarkovsky teaches you to sit inside the character’s inner state, to experience his longing and his fatigue as if it were your own. The homesickness isn’t told through plot twists or dialogue. By watching a man in slow motion move through foggy, soaked landscapes that almost resist his presence.

“Our nostalghia is not your nostalgia. It is a disease, an illness, that drains away the strength of the soul, the capacity to work, the pleasure of living.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky, Cannes 1983

I opened the article with the ending scene because it’s such a powerful moment, and I wanted to begin there. But now I want to take you back to the very beginning of the film, to the moment it starts and slowly pulls you into its rhythm. From the first shot you feel that something is different. You see the long roads of Tuscany covered in mist. Then a car arrives at a half-submerged field. Nothing rushes. Nothing is trying to grab your attention. It almost feels like the film is quietly asking you a question. Are you going to notice? Are you going to stay and really look?

Then we see Gorchakov sitting there, still and quiet. And as the scenes pass and the minutes go by, you slowly start to realize that his stillness isn’t emptiness. It carries weight. It’s filled with grief, a quiet ache that slowly spreads across the frame.

Colour, light, and the architecture of interiority

Giuseppe Lanci, was working with Tarkovsky for the first time here, and together they made one of the most noticeable choices in the whole film. Almost everything you see is filmed in these pale, washed-out tones, nearly monochrome. But whenever the film moves into dreams or memories, the image suddenly warms up into soft sepia and amber. You feel the difference immediately. It’s not a small detail. It feels like stepping into another emotional space.

The Italy Gorchakov moves through feels grey, misty, and cold. The stone walls look soaked with damp. The interiors are wide and hollow and barely lit. Bagno Vignoni, which in real life is one of Tuscany’s most beautiful and unusual places, feels almost empty here, like the world has quietly stepped away from it. Rain keeps falling the whole time. Not in a dramatic way, just constantly, as if it belongs to the air itself. Tarkovsky isn’t trying to make Italy look ugly. What he’s doing is making it feel distant. Unfamiliar. Like the way a place can feel when your heart is somewhere else. And that’s exactly how Gorchakov experiences it, through this constant, quiet longing for a home he can’t reach anymore.

The dream sequences feel different. Whenever Gorchakov drifts into memory, we see his wife, his home, and the Russian landscapes he left behind. The images suddenly grow warmer, filled with soft sepia and amber tones, almost glowing against the cold grey world around him. But these memories aren’t comforting. They blur, overlap, and feel fragile, as if they could fall apart at any moment. Tarkovsky doesn’t present memory as a refuge. Instead it feels like a quiet kind of torture, vivid enough to feel real but still completely out of reach, turning the contrast between the grey present and the warm past into something that feels less like two worlds and more like a trap.

Water as a feeling that fills the film

I love water, and seeing it almost everywhere in Nostalghia made me so happy. However it wasn’t in a heavy symbolic way, but simply as something that quietly exists in the world of the film. It drips from the ceilings in the thermal baths. It gathers on the floors of old interiors. It covers the stones with a thin, wet layer. In the middle of the town there’s the thermal spring, spreading like a shallow lake that people slowly walk through. Even the rain keeps falling into open courtyards. Water feels less like an element in the background and more like part of the air the characters are breathing.

Tarkovsky had always been drawn to water. You see it across many of his films. But in Nostalghia it starts to feel like something deeper than an image. Water moves between places. It doesn’t hold a fixed shape. It slips through everything it touches. And that somehow mirrors Gorchakov’s inner state. He’s a man who can’t quite draw a clear line between where he is and where he longs to be. Between Italy and Russia. Between the present and memory. Water becomes the quiet visual language for that feeling.

And then the ending changes everything. The pool where the final scene takes place is suddenly drained. The water that has been everywhere throughout the film is gone. The basin is empty, the steam has disappeared, and what remains is bare concrete, cold wind, and a man trying to keep a small flame alive. After two hours of watching water slowly dissolve everything around it, Tarkovsky removes it completely. What’s left is solitude, effort, and a fragile light that almost doesn’t survive.

The strange connection between Gorchakov and Domenico

The film doesn’t really follow a traditional story, as you may notice from the beginning. But if there’s a backbone to it, it’s the quiet connection between Gorchakov and Domenico. Domenico is the local mystic who once locked his own family inside their house for seven years because he believed an apocalypse was coming. They barely meet or even talk. However, their presence around each other feels important, like two lives somehow reflecting one another.

Domenico is someone who acted completely on his beliefs, even if it destroyed him. Gorchakov is the opposite, he feels stuck between worlds. He can’t move forward, can’t go back, can’t even feel fully present where he is. When Domenico asks him to carry the candle across the empty pool, it feels less like a task and more like a quiet passing of responsibility. Carrying a fragile flame across an empty space without letting it die becomes the closest thing the film has to a metaphor for living in exile.

When form becomes the feeling itself

Nostalghia is a Russian film shot in Italy, written partly with an Italian writer, and its characters often communicate through a translator. At one point Gorchakov even says that poetry can’t truly be translated. That idea quietly sits underneath the whole film. Some feelings, some experiences, can’t really be transferred from one place to another without losing something.

I don’t expect people to have similar view of the film, and I can see why the film can feel difficult at times, especially in our fast time the film moves slowly. It withholds explanations. It doesn’t give you the usual emotional satisfaction most films do, but what it offers instead is something different experience. The experience of a long takes, a faded colours, a dripping water, and the long candle walk at the end aren’t just stylistic choices. They slowly place you inside the same emotional state as the character.

For two hours, I can say I'm not simply watching a film about exile and longing but a quietly living inside those feelings with him.

I chose myself, quietly, without ceremony, without anyone’s permission. And I was terrified. Terrified because I’d spent years learning to make everyone else comfortable, to shrink, to be easy, to never disturb the room. But I know I did the right thing.

This choice wasn’t about rebellion or defiance. It was about finally giving myself the space to exist fully, to honor the life I’ve lived, here in Saudi, in my small circles, and even in the years I spent in the U.S., without apology.

And even now, the fear lingers sometimes. But it no longer tells me to stop. It reminds me that I’m alive. That I’m present. That I finally belong to myself.

I.

Growing up in Saudi Arabia, I understood on my own, without anyone needing to explain it for me, that the “good” choice was always the one that did not disturb anyone, the tribe, and the society.

I didn’t learn this from one lesson. I learned it from a thousand small moments. The way a compliment came when you were easy, agreeable, low-maintenance, and a good girl who follows the rules. The way being quiet was seen as maturity. The way certain feelings had no language around them, so you assumed they didn’t exist and you must keep quiet, or worse, that they were yours alone to carry. I carried a lot of unnamed things and feelings.

My teenage years weren’t really a full teenage years. I only began to experience pieces of them, when my family tried their best to give me space, to create an environment where I could explore who I was becoming, experiencing my hobbies and talents, dancing, lifting weight, tennis, running, and so many more. They did try and i love them for that. But when I to the world outside that small circle could still be unforgiving.

Sometimes all it took was having a different opinion or when speaking a little too directly and while being confident about it. Being a little too visible. And suddenly the smallest things felt like they needed justification and reasons of why am I holding and leaning to this opinion. So I learned to read rooms and people’s’ personalities before I read myself.

There was a version of me who became very good at this and I can say too good even. I was good at shrinking and at anticipating what people wanted to hear. While also giving the right answer before I had even figured out what my own answer was. She was loved for it. That is the part nobody warns you about.

II.

One of the first times I felt this tension clearly was during the years when the driving ban for women was still being debated in Saudi Arabia. I was 16 years old, I remember sharing my opinion that women should be allowed to drive. I said it politely and explained my reasons carefully. To me it felt like a simple, reasonable thing to say.

But in the wrong environment, even a quiet opinion could trigger strong reactions. The responses were sometimes harsh, much harsher than the words I had offered. And when the criticism came from people close to me, it stayed with me for a while, maybe I remember it less now, but it’s still here.

At one point I even received anonymous comments on Ask.fm. People I didn’t know leaving messages simply because I had expressed an opinion. From the outside it probably looked small, just words on the internet. But inside it felt much bigger. Moments like that quietly teach you something: that speaking can cost you something. And for a while, it makes you wonder whether staying silent might be easier.

III.

I once read in an essay, that real freedom is frightening because it comes with responsibility. But I guess I have the responsibility to take it.

I didn’t understand it then. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, where expectations often shaped the choices around you, life sometimes felt like something carefully navigated rather than openly designed.

In my twenties I spent almost five years living in the United States. Being in a different place, surrounded by different assumptions about independence and identity, quietly widened something in me. It made me realize that freedom is not only about what a society allows, but also about what you allow yourself to become and to shape your own boundaries.

I learned that choosing yourself means no one else is responsible for what your life becomes. There’s grief in that. Real grief. Because sometimes it is easier to blame the walls than to admit you have been standing in an open field for a while now, wondering what to build. I have stood in that field, confused, a little cold, and strangely, quietly glad.

IV. What I believed before

I believed that choosing yourself was selfish, or that’s what I was taught. No one said this directly, but the message was everywhere.

Selflessness was the highest compliment a woman could receive. She gives so much. She never complains or not even expected to complain at all. She makes everyone comfortable. I was believing that this was the right way to exist in the world, for a while.

I wanted to be that woman, not because that’s me but because that’s the easier way to live. I thought being good meant being easy, agreeable, and always putting others first.

What I didn’t understand then, and what I understand now, is that there is a difference between generosity and disappearance. Between being good and being gone. I was disappearing and calling it virtue.

V. What I wish someone had told me

For a while, I thought that fear doesn’t mean you are wrong. That guilt we feel after choosing yourself is not proof you made a mistake. because it simply means you were trained to believe that your needs were an inconvenience, I know I had to learn this and understand as a part of my journey.

I spent so much time diving deep into women writers and intellectuals who stated so many times that women who choose themselves are not cold. and they’re honest about what they want, honest about what they will no longer accept, honest about who they are when nobody is asking them to be something else.

Nawal El Saadawi once wrote, “They said, ‘You are a savage and dangerous woman.’ I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.” this quote helped something in me recognized it immediately. Sometimes the simplest honesty can feel threatening in places that expect silence.

I wish someone had sat across from me years ago and said one simple thing: you are allowed to take up space. Not because you earned it. Because you exist and you’ve the space to do so.

VI.

I’m not going to lie, I do still feel the fear sometimes, or not share my opinion. I do not think it ever fully disappears, and maybe it is not supposed to, but at least now I can simply understand it and work around it. I can also, know where and whom can I be around not feel the heaviness. I always read books or watch films where they say that fear is simply proof that you are doing something real, that you are present in your own life in a way that costs something.

What has changed is this: I no longer treat fear as a sign to stop me to be me. I choose myself now, not always loudly and not always perfectly, but with far less apology than before.

And I always remind myself that choosing me is not selfishness. This is simply being alive, fully, in a body and a mind and a life that belong to me not to a place or a person. Years ago I made a choice I couldn’t name, and I still cannot fully name it. But I know this: it was the first time I felt like I was living my life instead of performing it and pleasing the surrounding.

What hurt most wasn’t even the questioning of something I didn’t see as negative in itself. It was the question it planted inside me—one I kept returning to for years: why do I think this deeply when no one else seems to? We were the same age, in the same classrooms, the same hallways. But it felt like we were living in entirely different worlds. And for a long time, I wondered if something was wrong with mine.

Later I understood: they hadn’t grown into themselves yet. Some still haven’t. But back then, their shallowness felt like my flaw.

Later, I learned that what I was experiencing actually had a name. Psychologists call it Sensory Processing Sensitivity, a trait estimated to affect about 15 to 20 percent of people. It isn’t a flaw. Researchers describe it as a nervous system that processes information more deeply and responds more strongly to sensory and emotional stimuli. In simple terms, some people move through the world with a little more awareness of its details, moods, and subtleties.

For the first time, there was language for something I had felt my whole life but never knew how to explain. I wasn’t broken. I was simply wired differently. But knowing the science didn’t immediately make it easier.

There were moments, more than I can count, when I wished I could turn it off. Not quite it. Turn it off completely. I used to wish I could think the way some people seemed to. Sharp, dry, unaffected. Process something and move on. Not carry it. Not replay it over and over at 2 a.m. on a weekday. Not feel it settle into my body like it belonged there. Because that’s what deep feeling does. It doesn’t visit. It moves in.

And the exhaustion isn’t just emotional. It’s physical. There were days where I felt so heavy with feeling that I could barely breathe, like something pressing on my chest from the inside, like my own heart was too loud for the room I was in. A conversation. A look. A moment most people would’ve forgotten by now, and I couldn’t release it. I just kept going deeper, pulling at threads that had no clear end. I asked myself so many times: why can’t I just let things be what they are? Why does everything have to mean something to me?

Research partly explains this experience. Studies on Sensory Processing Sensitivity show that highly sensitive people tend to process emotional and sensory information more deeply and can experience higher levels of perceived stress and emotional overwhelm. The body often reflects what the mind is holding. The weight can feel real because, in many ways, it is. And sometimes I genuinely envied people who didn’t feel this way. People who could go through something difficult and shake it off cleanly. I wanted to feel the lightness. That ability to live on the surface without constantly sinking into what was underneath and more than once, I wished I could become cold and dry. But I couldn’t. And slowly, I had to learn to live with that.

Here is what no one told me when I was young: sensitivity is just a portal.

Art, in every form, became my escape, and I use it a way of expression. When I watch a film, I don’t just watch it. I live inside it. The feelings I’ve been carrying that have no words suddenly find their shape on screen, in a melody, or in a sentence from a book that makes me stop breathing for a moment. Art, Museums, Music, all kind of arts let me pour everything out. All the depth. All the weight. And for a little while, the world makes sense again.

The more I searched online and on social media, then I found my people. The people who, are deeply moved by music, art, and beauty. Those whose minds seem to linger in places connected to awareness, empathy, and deeper processing. I realized I wasn’t overreacting to a song or overthinking a situation. The same depth that once exhausted me turned out to be the very thing that made real connection possible. Sensitivity gave me people in a way I didn’t fully understand before. I feel them beyond their words and I notice the ones who are hurting but smiling or the ones who have never been truly seen by anyone. There was a time when I started to realize something about myself, when I’m with people, I don’t just notice them, I recognize them, and I can sit with someone who has never felt understood and somehow find the door into who they are. Not because I’m trying to, but because I genuinely feel what they’re carrying, which made me realize that some of us don’t just see people, we feel them, and while that can be draining, it’s also one of the most human things I know.

I keep giving people the benefit of the doubt, and I extend grace where others give up. I try to understand people others haven’t taken the time to understand, and that isn’t a coincidence. It grew from the same place that once made me cry too easily, feel too deeply, and ask too many questions without easy answers, and over time that sensitivity turned me into someone who can hold space for others because I spent so long learning how to hold space for myself.

I can’t say there was one exact moment I could call a turning point, and it wasn’t some big realization either. It was a slow process of healing, sitting with the situations I had been through and letting them teach me instead of only hurting me, working through things and returning to old wounds not to reopen them but to finally understand what they had been trying to tell me. And slowly something shifted when I learned how to channel my sensitivity instead of suppressing it, directing it toward art, toward people, and toward understanding myself and the world more honestly, because when we do the work and find the right spaces and outlets we don’t just heal, we can actually flourish.

The moment I understood how to use it, I fell in love with it.

Today I feel close to myself, to who I am, even though not every day is easy or the best but there are still moments when the depth of my own feelings catches me off guard, and making me feel low and wish I could skim the surface the way some people seem to. But those moments are becoming smaller now, and what feels bigger is the gratitude and I mean gratitude that I notice things, that I care, that a piece of music can still break me open, that I can look at someone and feel, not just see, who they really are, because feeling everything isn’t a flaw, it never was, it’s simply the most honest and alive way I know how to exist in this world.

“Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race.” — Johann Georg Hamann

Film scene in Saudi Arabia currently is a place to share storytelling. Cinemas have returned to our cities after a long absence. There is an electric feeling in the air, the feeling of a culture remembering its own voice.

But long before our screens lit up, before the multiplex opened in my neighborhood, I was a young filmcinple who is sitting in front of a laptop screen, following a rabbit hole of recommendations, lists, and whispered legends about a cinema that existed just across the water. One of my discoveries was Iranian cinema.

Iranian cinema.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine, where I shared spent several weeks working methodically through “Iranian Masterpieces”, a curated Letterboxd list. I didn’t list it as an education in world cinema. But something far more personal for me: a series of quiet shocks of recognition. Of seeing my own world, my family, my silences, my love, reflected back at me through a language I do not speak. To be a Saudi cinephile watching Iranian cinema is to look into a mirror that is very slightly tilted.

The language is Farsi, not Arabic. The faces are Persian, not Arab. And yet the rhythm of a mother calling her child inside for dinner, the gravity of a father’s unspoken shame, the way religion is not a backdrop but the very air that characters breathe, which makes it feels closer to home than anything Hollywood has ever produced.

The Taste of Cherry (1997) — Abbas Kiarostami

For me, the easiest way to explain Abbas Kiarostami’s place in cinema is simple: he is to Iranian cinema what Talal Maddah is to Saudi music. A voice so central that you cannot speak about the art form without him. Taste of Cherry begins with a stark premise: a middle-aged man, Mr. Badii, drives through the dry hills outside Tehran looking for someone who will bury him after he takes his own life. A plot as this made me immediately watch it as a 14 year old girl.

What made me connect to this film even after watching it in my teens and twenties, and still feel close to it, are the conversations inside that car. Badii picks up a Kurdish soldier, an Afghan theology student, and finally an elderly Azeri taxidermist. Each man responds differently to the idea of death, while exchanging conversations that remain quiet and patient. Watching them speak felt strangely familiar to me, the pauses, the respect between strangers, the way difficult questions about life are approached slowly.

I can share the moment that stayed with me most is during the scene when the taxidermist tells Badii about the day he himself tried to end his life and how something as small as the taste of a mulberry stopped him. It isn’t an argument or a sermon, just a story. And this is so recognizable, the way wisdom often travels in our cultures through “hikayah” telling stories, a story that quietly reminds you of the beauty still present in the world.

That is what Taste of Cherry ultimately left me thinking about. Even when life feels heavy, the world keeps offering small reasons to stay, as for the warmth of the sun, the wind moving through the trees, the taste of fruit, the memory we shared with the people we love. The film doesn’t force hope on you, it’s not a fake and forced optimism, it reminds you that being alive, is already something quietly miraculous.

Close-Up (1990) — Abbas Kiarostami

Close-Up was the first Abbas Kiarostami film I saw, and I fell in love with his cinema immediately. The film feels like both a magic trick and a quiet manifesto about what movies can be. If someone asked me where to start with Iranian cinema, this is the one I would recommend without hesitation.

The story is based on a real event, Hossein Sabzian, who’s a poor and unemployed man, pretends to be the famous director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and gains the trust of a wealthy Tehran family. He’s arrested, and Kiarostami receives permission to film the real court proceedings. Later, in the film, he reenacts the entire story using the real people involved, including Sabzian himself and Makhmalbaf. The result swing between documentary and fiction, constantly asking what’s real and what cinema can reveal about reality.

I can say what stayed with me most is that Sabzian is not really an evil man. He’s a man who loves cinema so deeply that he wanted, and for just once, to be treated as someone whose thoughts matter and he is heard, not a good choice but it’s a choice with reasonable reasons for him. When the judge asks him why he did it, his answer is heartbreaking: when people believed he was Makhmalbaf, they listened to him. For the first time, a poor man with a borrowed library book was treated like an intellectual.

That’s what makes Close-Up so powerful. Sabzian aim wasn’t chasing money or fame. But wanted for a brief moment, people to listen to him and took his love of cinema seriously. And sometimes what we’re really searching for isn’t recognition, but the simple feeling that our inner life matters to someone else, and our stories connect to even one person.

The Color of Paradise (1999) — Majid Majidi

If Kiarostami is the philosopher of Iranian cinema, I can say that Majid Majidi is the poet. In general his films operate almost entirely in the register of feeling, They skip the intellect and speak directly to the heart. The plot of The Color of Paradise is about Mohammad, a blind boy returning home from school in Tehran to the lush forests of rural Northern Iran, and his fraught relationship with his widowed father, a man who is ashamed of his son’s disability and desperate to remarry.

The visual language of this film is overwhelming in its honesty. Majidi gives us the world as Mohammad experiences it, through the sound, texture, and a kind of radical, tactile attention. The boy picks up a fallen baby bird and returns it to its nest by feeling the bark of different trees. He reads the world with his fingers. He reads God with his fingers.

What struck me most in the film is Mohammad himself. When he moves through the world with quiet attention, slowing down and feeling everything around him. His experiences life through touch, sound, and presence and listening carefully to the wind, the water, the smallest movements around him. Watching him felt deeply personal to me. Then there’s a calm awareness in the way he exists, I see that he’s more present in the world than everyone around him, noticing things others pass by without a second thought. In that sense, he feels like the most awake person in the film, while the people who can see seem to move through life without truly noticing it.

On the other hand, The center of the film the father’s shame sin, and Majidi is unsparing about it. But he is also deeply compassionate. He understands that this man is trapped, by poverty, by social expectation, by the fear of being seen as diminished. These are pressures we recognize. The expectation to provide, to appear strong, to protect family honor.

A Moment of Innocence (1996) — Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Let me start with the story behind the film, because it is remarkable on its own. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, long before becoming one of Iran’s most important filmmakers, was a young revolutionary in the 1970s. At the age of seventeen years old, during an attempt to disarm a police officer in Tehran, he stabbed the officer while trying to take his gun, and was arrested and sent to prison. Years later, after the revolution had passed and Makhmalbaf had built a remarkable career in cinema, that same officer reached out to him. Instead of turning him away, I like what Makhmalbaf did, he made a decision that still astonishes me: he invited the man to help recreate the morning that had once brought them together in violence, and to turn it into a film. Both men cast young actors to play their younger selves, each reconstructing the same morning from his own side. As the reenactment unfolds, something shifts quietly in the atmosphere, and the memory they are recreating begins to change in subtle ways.

In the original memory, his hand reached toward a knife. In this film, it reaches out with a pot of flowers. I loved that change and the symbolism behind it. Such a small shift, yet it carries enormous weight. The film becomes less about the past itself and more about what we do with the memories that shape us within the years, how we carry them, how we revisit them often, and whether we allow them to harden us or soften us over time.

While watching the film, I kept thinking about how familiar that idea of the belief that strength can sometimes mean choosing grace over retaliation. That even the deepest wounds can be met with a different response. In the end of the film, where it leaves you with something simple but profound: we can’t change what happened, but we can choose what we place in our hands when we return to it, the knife we remember, or the flowers we decide to offer instead.

I could keep sharing and talking about Iranian films, and what stays with me about these films is how personal they feel. Watching them never felt like discovering something distant. It felt more about the recognition of something I had always known but had never seen reflected on screen before. When Kiarostami pauses on a quiet moment, a dusty road, a face thinking something it will never say out loud in the film but I see it and feel it. It feels close.

The things those films return to also feel deeply familiar to me: family, hospitality, and the small moral choices people carry inside themselves. These aren’t treated as dramatic themes. They simply exist as part of everyday life, the way they do in the world I grew up in. Because of that, watching these films feels less like interpretation. The emotions, the pace, the way people move through the world all feel close to home. Something I understood instinctively the moment I saw it.

And that is why Iranian cinema is so special to me. It finds depth in the quietest moments and reminds you how powerful simple stories can be. If you haven’t explored it yet, I can’t recommend it enough.

For years, society, magazines, and the collective anxiety of the internet had warned me about this day. Turning 30 is framed like a deadline, as if I needed to figure everything out before changing the 2 to a 3 in my age. It’s supposed to be dramatic. It’s supposed to be a crisis. But for me, it felt less like a milestone and more like a reset. I see it as a new page in my book.

Now that I’ve changed my 2 to a 3, I see it as a chance to renovate. We talk a lot about “finding ourselves” through careers or relationships. Rarely do we give the same weight to finding ourselves in the mirror. When I started looking at my reflection and recognizing myself, I realized getting here wasn’t quick. It took years of experimenting with outfits, a law degree, moving abroad, and slowly dismantling everything I thought I was supposed to wear.

The Ghost of Outfits Past

My teenage years honestly don’t count. I’ve forgiven myself for those. That wasn’t really me—it was mostly trying to look like everyone else around me.

I was excited for my twenties. They were supposed to be different. They were supposed to be the years where everything makes sense. Looking back, a lot of it was just experimenting… and that’s fine. From 20 to around 27, my style was mostly chasing. Chasing trends, online bloggers, and the idea that if something was everywhere, it must fit me too. I bought things because I saw them on Instagram.

The Blazer Story

I still remember a day when I was 20. I was scrolling through a blogger’s Instagram, she lived between Dubai and Los Angeles. She was wearing an oversized beige blazer. On her, it looked chic and effortless, the kind of outfit that seemed to define an entire lifestyle. So I went to the mall and bought something similar from one of the brand stores.

The next day I wore it to university. While walking with my friends, I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror and felt my stomach drop. The blazer was huge. I was practically drowning in it, and the color washed me out so badly that I looked exhausted. Instead of effortless, I looked like someone who had been swallowed by their own clothes. I wasn’t wearing the clothes, the clothes were wearing me. I had bought someone else’s look, placed it on my body, and hoped it would somehow transform my life.

The pieces that looked good on other women, or on my phone screen, simply didn’t belong on me. I had a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear.

The Lawyer’s Dilemma

Loving fashion while working in a formal field isn’t easy. I never really found a social media stylist who felt relatable. I kept scrolling and searching, and what I often found was the “Corporate Baddie” aesthetic. It often feels like a costume of what people think lawyers wear. I like seeing it, but my reality is different.

I need structure. I need credibility. When I walk into a room, my clothes must say, “This is me, and I know what I’m doing.” But here’s the dilemma: I also love fashion. I love the art of it. I love texture and silhouette. I didn’t want to resign myself to a life of ill-fitting gray suits and sensible flats just because I chose a serious profession.

I wanted to experiment. I just didn’t know how.

Early Career Clothes Lessons

When I first started practicing, I bought safe colors—black, gray, and white. The fabric was usually a stiff polyester blend that made a swishing sound when I walked.

Every morning, getting dressed felt mechanical. I didn’t feel excited to style anything. I felt small and invisible. That’s when I learned an important lesson: comfort is confidence.

If I’m physically uncomfortable in my clothes, I can’t be fully present.

The Shift (Age 28)

Around 28, something shifted. I can’t pinpoint exactly when or how, but the fog started to lift. I stopped looking outward for inspiration and started looking inward for data. I stopped consuming fashion and started studying it.

I began paying attention to colors that actually suited my skin tone. Some shades washed me out, while others made me look awake and vibrant. Another important step was understanding my body shape. I stopped trying to force trends that required a completely different body structure and started choosing silhouettes that made sense for me.

It became about balance.

Building from Scratch

I slowly started building my style from scratch. The quality became the new religion.

I know this is a privileged position, to be able to choose quality. But I realized I was actually spending less money by buying fewer, better pieces instead of constantly buying cheap tops for a dopamine hit.

The Balance of my Two Worlds

I’m still trying to find the balance between two worlds. On one side, there is the formal side of my life. On the other, there is the part of me that genuinely loves fashion, the creative side.

I’m learning that these two worlds don’t have to be enemies. They can be collaborators. I try to keep things interesting, but still appropriate. Not boring, but not like a stock photo of a lawyer either. It just looks like me.

My goal is no longer to dress like someone else. I’m done trying to imitate the lifestyle of a freelancer somewhere on the internet. I have a job to do, a life to live, and a body that deserves to feel comfortable. And most importantly, my goal is simply to look like myself.

When I look in the mirror now, I see someone who knows who she is. Someone who is still exploring, still searching, and trying her best to enjoy the journey.

Female friendship is one of the most intimate relationships a woman will ever have.

It’s the space where you’re seen before you’re polished. Before you’re someone’s wife. Before you’re someone’s mother. Before you’re introduced with a new title.

It’s where you’re just you.

And yet, for something that foundational, it’s treated surprisingly lightly.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how differently women view female friendship. For some, it’s central. For others, it’s seasonal. For some, it’s sacred. For others, it’s circumstantial.

And the tension between those definitions is where so much quiet disappointment lives.

There’s a softness to female friendship that nothing else replicates. The shared language. The emotional fluency. The way you can talk in fragments and still be understood. The way you can sit in silence without performing strength.

But there’s also fragility.

Because unlike romantic relationships, female friendships don’t come with rituals of permanence. There’s no engagement party for loyalty. No ceremony for commitment. So when life shifts, careers, cities, engagements, marriages, children, friendship becomes negotiable.

That’s the part no one prepares you for.

Some women expand their lives and make room for the people who walked with them before. Others unconsciously categorize friendship as belonging to the “before” era.

Before the ring.

Before the wedding.

Before the baby.

I’ve seen both.

I have a friend who got married and somehow became closer to me. Marriage grounded her. It didn’t erase her friendships; it clarified them. She didn’t treat partnership as a replacement for connection. She treated it as an addition.

And I’ve had another friend who, the moment she got engaged, began to drift. Not dramatically. Not maliciously. Just slowly. Plans became rare. Depth became surface-level. It felt like I had been part of a chapter that had quietly closed.

Same milestone. Different interpretation of loyalty.

That contrast stayed with me.

It made me realize that the real difference in female friendship isn’t about life changes. It’s about how someone defines permanence.

Some women see friendships as companions for a season. They invest deeply, until their life structure changes. Then their energy reallocates completely. Not because they’re heartless, but because they’ve internalized a hierarchy where romantic partnership outranks everything else.

Others see friendship as structural. As something that grows with them. As a bond that doesn’t get downgraded when love enters the room.

There’s comparison the kind that sits under celebrations. The subtle recalculating when someone shares good news. The unspoken scoreboard that sometimes creeps into spaces that were supposed to be safe.

Because when female friendship is real, it is steady in a way that nothing else is. It’s the person who remembers who you were five years ago. The one who sees your patterns. The one who can call you out without trying to compete with you.

It’s the friend who grows, and doesn’t need you to shrink. The truth is, female friendship today exists in tension.

Sometimes there is celebration without comparison. Other times there is a subtle tension that neither of you names.

It is not all beautiful. It is not all disappointing either.

I do not believe female friendship is disappearing. I just think we are realizing that not everyone holds it at the same weight.

And maybe growing up is recognizing that difference without turning it into resentment.

For me, the women who grow with you, not just beside you during one season, are the ones that stay. Not because they are loud about loyalty. But because they choose it quietly, even when life expands. And that, to me, is what makes female friendship feel real.

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