There is a particular kind of chaos that an emergency room produces on a normal night. I learned this in my first week working there. The wooden chairs lined up in rows so close together that patients’ knees almost touched, people sleeping on the floor when the chairs ran out, the small corner where we kept the computers and our medical supplies pressed against the wall like an afterthought. It was always loud, and the noises were never harmonized. A beeping machine. A moaning patient. A frantic family member. Nurses discussing patient cases. Attending physicians rounding with interns and medical students. It was always crowded. It was so crowded that your sense of smell gave up on identifying what it was registering. Antiseptic, blood, sweat, food. You learned to think inside the noise, to hold a patient’s history in your head while three other conversations were happening around you and someone somewhere was in pain.

That night was different. Even by the standards of that room, that night was different.

The city was unsettled. There had been civil unrest the kind that moves through a place not as an event but as a current, reshaping everything it passes through. Our hospital sat close enough to the center of it that we felt it before we saw it. The room was fuller than usual. The noise had a different quality. And the patients coming in were not coming in with the ordinary inventory of emergencies. They were coming in with what happens when human beings turn on each other.

He came in on a night like that. He was maybe 20 or 21 years old. You can see his youthfulness from his eyes.

I was working the Yellow/Urgent section that night, the patients who were serious but not immediately dying, the ones who needed attention and assessment before the picture became clearer. My job at that stage was to take the history, triage, and report up to the residents. So I was the first physician he spoke to. The first person in the medical chain who heard what had happened to him. I had been working for 13 hours by then, so I dragged my feet, although they wished they could walk to the duty room and take a quick nap.

His injuries were significant. His leg. His hands. His face. The kind of presentation that makes you move quickly through your assessment, running through the possibilities in your head: the mechanism, the timeline, the severity. I asked him the standard questions. What happened. When. How. The first thing I noticed was how defeated he looked. He had a resignation deep in his soul that you can feel. I assumed it must be the pain he was in. I would find out soon that the pain was more than physical.

He told me he was a university student. He told me he had been in his dormitory.

A group had gathered outside. They were shouting. They were there, he understood, because of his ethnicity, because of what he represented to them, because of the particular political current running through the city that night that had sorted people into categories of threat. He could hear them getting closer. He could hear what they were saying.

And then he went to the window.

And he jumped.

Fourth floor.

I finished taking his history. I reported to the resident. The room continued around me the way emergency rooms do, relentless, indifferent to any single story inside it. Someone else needed to be seen. There was always someone else.

But I kept returning to the same moment. Not the jump itself. The moment before it.

The moment he stood at that window and made a calculation. On one side of the equation: a four-story fall. Broken bones. The ground coming up fast. Whatever the body does when it lands. On the other side: the people outside the door. And he chose the window.

I have thought about that calculation many times since. What it requires of a person to arrive at it. What it means about the people on the other side of the door that a human being, a person with a body that knows what falling means, that understands heights, that carries every biological instruction to survive, would look at those two options and choose the fall.

We talk about ethnic violence in terms of death tolls and documented incidents and political root causes. We don’t talk as much about what it does to the internal architecture of a person before it kills them. The way it restructures the math of survival. The way it makes the window make sense.

He survived the fall. I don’t know what happened to him after that night. He was transferred to the Orthopedic ward for extensive surgeries, where I know it would take him up to a year to get back to his old level of mobility. Emergency rooms are not built for follow-up; you receive people at their worst moment, and then they move through the system and out the other side, and you rarely know what the other side looks like.

But I know what he looked like sitting in that chair telling me what happened. And I know that when I walked away from that conversation, I was not thinking about his fractures.

I was thinking about the door.

About what must have been on the other side of it for the window to be the rational choice.

About what kind of Ethiopia we were living in, what kind of normal we had constructed where that calculation was available to a person. Where it was not an act of madness but an act of logic. Where the air outside a fourth-floor window was genuinely safer than the air inside a hallway full of your neighbors.

I was twenty-four years old. I had been a doctor for less than a year. I thought I was being trained to understand what threatens the human body.

I was only beginning to understand what threatens it first.

Between grief that arrived without warning, a work environment that has been testing every last nerve I have, and the particular uncertainty and lack of control I have over some aspects of my life, July asked me to hold more than I had hands for.

And unlike the other hard seasons, where I could work my way out, research the problem, make the calls, build the plan, this one required something different. It required faith. Actual, uncomfortable, no-guarantees faith. The messier kind. The kind where you wake up and tell God and the universe that you trust what is coming and then immediately feel your stomach drop because you are not sure you do.

Neuroscience tells us we have approximately 6,000 thoughts per day. And the majority of them, by default, skew negative. This is a survival mechanism. Our brain is not trying to make you miserable; it is trying to keep you alive by scanning constantly for threat. The problem is it cannot distinguish between a genuine predator and an unanswered email from a recruiter.

So you cannot stop the fear thoughts from showing up. They are automatic. They are ancient. They are, technically, doing their job.

What quantum physics has been pointing to with the observer effect is to choose where you place your attention. Because attention is not passive. The act of observation changes what is being observed. Where you consistently look is what your brain learns to find evidence of. Fear-focused attention trains your nervous system to locate danger. Faith-focused attention trains it to locate possibility. This is why I have been trying to be careful about which thoughts I believe. Not all of them deserve my full conviction. Some of them are just noise from a nervous system doing its ancient job.

What I did not expect was that trying to have faith would make me afraid of my own fear. I’ve spent a lot of time this year praying, meditating, journaling, and reflecting on the relationship between my beliefs and the life I’m trying to build. Whether you call it faith, identity, expectation, or simply mindset, I have become increasingly convinced that what we repeatedly believe about ourselves shapes the choices we make, the opportunities we notice, and the futures we slowly construct.

Somewhere along the way, I distorted that idea. I started believing that every fearful thought was evidence that my faith wasn’t strong enough. If I woke up anxious, maybe I wasn’t trusting God. If I couldn’t stop worrying, maybe I was giving my circumstances more authority than my faith. Instead of simply feeling fear, I started judging myself for feeling it. I wasn’t just anxious anymore. I was anxious...about being anxious. It’s funny what self-awareness does. You can watch yourself spiraling almost like you’re watching a movie. You recognize every cognitive distortion. You know exactly what your brain is doing. And somehow...you still have to live inside it. You don’t get points for recognizing the pattern. You still have to choose what to do next.

After my unsuccessful boxing match with reality, July has taught me that faith does not mean the absence of fear. It means continuing to show up even when fear is loud. It means holding onto the small light even when focusing on the darkness would be so much easier. Fear is almost a prerequisite for faith. If certainty already existed, there would be nothing left to trust. Faith only becomes faith because uncertainty exists.

I cannot lie to God or the universe about where I actually am. I cannot perform trust I do not feel and expect it to count. But I can make sure fear does not lead. I can feel it, acknowledge it, and still choose, imperfectly, repeatedly, some days more successfully than others, to act from faith anyway.

The burning-bush moments have happened in my life before. More than a few times. Situations that looked impossible until suddenly, inexplicably, they weren’t. I am trying to remember that.

Some days I succeed. I am present. I do my part. I do not let my emotions run the meeting.

Some days I am grumpy and untethered and convinced things are going sideways. I take a nap and treat myself to a sugary dessert because sometimes that is the only way to fix my attitude.

Both of those days are part of the same faith. I am just finally starting to believe that.

There is fear in faith. It is not the absence of it; it is what it is made of.

[All four photographs were taken by me this July, on early morning runs along the river. I only noticed the progression when I laid them side by side. I thought that was worth sharing. Also, it is 1 a.m. on a Monday, and I wrote most of this while waiting on a call with my grandmother's doctor from several thousand miles away, doing absolutely nothing useful in the meantime except apparently writing Substack essays. If it reads like that, now you know why!]

I was wearing my most comfortable blue jumpsuit. And yes, in the back of my head, I was already having the internal debate: some people probably think I look like “ቀለም ቀቢ,” a blue-collar worker in overalls. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It is just not exactly what you picture when you think “medical student energy.” But I had made my decision. I was being daring.

As I walked toward the school compound, two of my classmates, let’s call them M&M, were coming out, probably heading to find breakfast. የደሱ ቆቆር እና ሻይ, most likely. As they walked toward me, they started talking animatedly, laughing, smiling at each other.

My stomach dropped.

Obviously, they were making fun of my jumpsuit.

I was annoyed because clearly they did not understand fashion. And I was anxious because I had gone back and forth all morning about wearing this thing, finally committed to being bold, and now here we were. By the time we reached each other, I had composed myself enough to greet them warmly while quietly seething inside.

Then I asked them why they were making fun of my jumpsuit.

They laughed. Said they weren’t. Barely even glanced at it, actually, before pivoting to ask me about the upcoming exam schedule since I was the group representative. We chatted for two more minutes. They left. I walked into the compound still half-convinced they were lying to protect my feelings.

That was 2019. I am only now, seven years later, entertaining the possibility that I made the whole thing up.

(The jumpsuit that started it all, pictured below in Lagos during a pageant trip — looking cute and royally delusional about what is happening to my nervous system.)

I work in psychiatric clinical trials, where my role is to assess how patients respond to new medications using standardized rating interviews. Most of my patients are diagnosed with schizophrenia, and I administer these assessments multiple times a week, sometimes three to five patients in a day.

The hallmark symptoms of schizophrenia are hallucinations and paranoia. Most patients experience auditory hallucinations: they hear voices and sounds the rest of us cannot hear. From the way patients describe them to me, they are profoundly distressing, reshaping how they experience the world, disrupting daily life, eroding their ability to simply be.

Then there is the paranoia. Patients with schizophrenia are often convinced that people are out to get them. That people talk about them behind their backs. That family members are plotting against them. In severe cases, that unknown forces that are trying to kill them.

Part of my job is to assess exactly how much these beliefs affect their relationships, their social lives, and their ability to function. And for close to a year now, multiple times a week, I have been sitting across from someone and asking:

“Do you think people are talking about you behind your back?”

One day, somewhere in the repetition of that question, I heard myself asking it and paused.

I am not going to sit here and claim I have schizophrenia. I do not. But I started noticing something uncomfortable: the distance between my patients’ experience and my own was not as wide as I had assumed.

My nervous system is finely tuned and optimized, really to detect threats. I can tell when someone is irritated by the pace of their typing. I notice a shift in tone in a text message before I can even articulate what changed. If a close friend is not as warm as usual, my mind does not wander if they are tired, stressed, or distracted. It goes straight to: they found out.

Found out what, exactly? That I am not as good as I seem. That the version of me people like is a construction. That at some point, inevitably, the gap between who I present and who I am will become visible, and everyone will quietly recalibrate.

I have spent a significant portion of my adult life bracing for that moment.

The cold greeting from my boss in the hallway? She must finally think I am terrible at this job. The friend who did not respond with her usual warmth? She has realized something about me. The classmates laughing near me? Obviously, the jumpsuit.

Except the boss had rushed to pick up her sick child that morning and mentioned it in a meeting an hour later. The friend had a migraine. The classmates were debating a movie they had watched the night before.

I was not in the equation. I was never in the equation. But I had written myself in anyway as the problem, as the punchline, as the thing being judged because somewhere in my wiring, anticipating rejection became safer than being caught off guard by it.

That is what I started calling emotional hallucinations.

It is not a clinical diagnosis. I invented the term. I don’t mean hallucinations in the clinical sense. I mean the emotional certainty with which my brain manufactures explanations that later turn out not to exist. But it felt like the most accurate description of what I keep catching myself doing: perceiving other people’s emotions and assigning them a cause that does not exist. Manufacturing evidence of a threat so my nervous system can stay ready. Living in a story that has nothing to do with reality and exhausting myself trying to manage it.

I still sit across from my patients and ask the same question, multiple times a week: “Do you think people are talking about you behind your back?”

But something shifted in how I hold that question now. I used to ask it as a clinician, measuring symptom severity, scoring responses, and moving to the next item on the scale. Now I ask it, and I feel something else underneath it. A quiet recognition. Not because my experience mirrors theirs, it does not, and I want to be careful not to flatten what schizophrenia actually is. But because I understand, in my own smaller way, what it is to be absolutely convinced of a story your mind generated. To feel the threat as real in your body, even when the evidence, examined honestly, is not there. To be exhausted by a reality you constructed and then had to live inside of.

The jumpsuit was fine. M&M were talking about something else entirely. My boss was not disappointed in me; she was worried about her kid. My friend was not pulling away; she had a headache. I was not the variable. I was never the variable. But my nervous system did not know that, because it was not built for accuracy. It was built for survival. And somewhere along the way, survival started to look like staying two steps ahead of rejection at all times, scanning, interpreting, bracing.

That is what emotional hallucinations cost. Not just the anxious minutes, though there have been many. But the authenticity. The courage to simply be in a room without quietly managing everyone in it. The friendships I half-withdrew from because I was so convinced I had already lost them. The moments I spent composing my face into warmth while seething inside about an offense that existed only in my interpretation.I think about the birthday invitation I almost declined because I was convinced they were inviting me out of obligation.

I have not fixed this. I want to be honest about that. But I have started doing one thing: before I spiral, I ask myself, did this actually happen, or did I write it? That question does not always stop the spiral. But it creates a pause. And in that pause is something I did not use to have: a choice about whether to believe the story.

I think about my patients when I catch myself doing this. I think about how distressing it must be to live in a version of this that is not a metaphor, where the voices are real, and the threat is constant, and no amount of reasoning your way out of it makes it stop. I carry more tenderness for them now than I did before I recognized the small echo of it in myself.

And I carry a little more tenderness for the girl in the blue jumpsuit, walking toward her classmates, already bracing. She was not paranoid. She was just afraid of being found out, afraid that if someone looked too closely, they would see the gap between who she was performing and who she actually was.

She did not need to be afraid, but her nervous system used the only strategy it is optimized for. She was already enough. She just could not feel it yet.

As we were nearing that magnificent compound, we saw about 4 police officers standing by a car and chatting. To me, all that registered was that there was 1 female officer, 3 male officers, and the van they stood by was white. They were talking animatedly, and nothing about them seemed alarming. But to my 4-year-old tiny sister, they were terrifying. They were policemen and women.

So as we approached, we had two options. We could pass directly by them, staying on our path, or we could walk on the other side of the car, closer to traffic, but without being in direct contact with them. Our house helper and I decided to keep going and say hi. My sister decided to go around the car.

The officers noticed. They smiled and called out to her, “ሚጢዬ፣ አይዞሽ, don’t be scared!” She shyly approached, and we followed, making sure she was okay. Naturally, the female officer took the lead and asked her, “What is your name, የኔ ቆንጆ?”

My sister answered in one breath, boldly: “The name can be used for a man or a woman.”

They burst out laughing, and we joined them. My sister realized what she had done and joined in shyly. They pressed again, “But what is your name?” She said, “Abenezer.”

You can see why her justification came before her name. She had been bullied and made fun of for having a name predominantly given to men.

In hindsight, that might have been the day I knew I had to protect my little sister from the world. Later in life, I would learn I had to protect her from myself and from herself, too, because that is what love is.

When my sister was in grade 1, and I was in grade 4, she had a bully I will never forget. I still remember that girl’s face. She always wore her hair in braids, she had a flat face that showed no emotion, and she was bigger than most of her peers. She had started hitting my sister and being demanding with her. I don’t remember why an older kid would pick on a first grader, but I remember coming to stay with my sister at every break so this bully wouldn’t attack her. On one occasion, I tried to talk to her and told her I would go to the principal if she kept it up.

If you don’t know me, you don’t understand the weight of that. I have always been very shy. I would avoid conflict at any cost and would rather suffer silently than speak up and seem demanding. But that is what love is. It makes you a hero. It makes you break your own barriers.

I recently had a conversation with a friend that stretched into 4 hours ( you know who you are), and we were talking about soulmates. I boldly declared that my sister is my soulmate and that I find it hard to imagine anyone coming as close to the bond, the love, and the history we share.

Love was a word that baffled me for a long time. The past few years have taught me, thanks to Nina, what it actually means.

To be loved is to be seen in your highest form. To be considered. To be tolerated on your worst days. To have someone choose to see your beauty even when you are not in your most lovable form. To be loved is to let someone be inconvenienced by you. To be cheered for. To be listened to. To be softened by someone who refuses to give up on you.

That is what my Nina taught me. In the 27 years I have known her, she has loved me in all my forms.

I could write about my sister for days. What I cannot stress enough is how much love and passion she holds in her heart. She is the type of person who stops in the street to smile at a dog. She listens to birds sing in the morning, and now I have no choice but to stop and take a video whenever birds put on a show near my apartment, just to send it to her.

Nina deeply cares about justice and the economic empowerment of women. She is a badass lawyer, business owner, consultant, economist, and leader. She is relentless, ambitious, and creative in how she approaches every challenge. On top of all that, she has a way with words. She doesn’t write often, but when she does, you will find yourself rereading the same sentence five times in awe. We joke that she is “Wisdomous,” a reference only Friends fans will catch.

She is also an absolute goofball. We are always terrified someone will get hold of our chats and voice notes, and we will go viral for our idiotic jokes. We find silliness in everything.

As if all of that were not enough, she is beautiful, carries herself with grace, and has a charismatic sense of style. She picked my photoshoot outfits. She dressed me up because I have a terrible fashion sense. She braided my hair, showed me how to do makeup, and how to find balance. She is the best friend everyone deserves.

Don’t get me wrong. We had our fair share of fights, resentments, and falling outs. Especially when we were younger, we couldn’t wait to go our separate ways. Our world ideals felt like opposite ends of a spectrum. She will still remember the summer I threw potatoes at her and barely missed. She will never forget me being the goodie two-shoes who reported her to our parents repeatedly for things any normal kid does. She will probably never forget how desperately she wanted a friend and a sister while I was stuck playing caregiver and mother for so long.

It’s okay. We have talked about all of it.

As of this year, there is nothing we haven’t vulnerably talked through, laughed about, cried over, and forgiven each other for. One afternoon, we spent an hour making the most terrible jokes about the most traumatic seasons of our lives and how we weren’t there for each other. By the end of it, we both agreed that no therapist, however well trained, could have given us what that one conversation did. Whatever happened between us is not as big as it used to be. We made it lose its power. We laughed it out of its armor.

In 2024, the last time I saw her in Addis, we got matching anchor tattoos. It was our promise to each other that no matter how big the storm, we would stay anchored in each other’s love.

Happy 27th to my person.

We joke that any man who enters our lives isn’t competing with an ex or another man. He is competing with two women who already love each other like soulmates. This whole week, I have been sending her a paragraph every day, reminding her how extraordinary she is. When we still lived together, she would give me small but deeply meaningful gifts every day of my birthday week. We throw each other surprise parties. We send the most loving texts out of nowhere just because.

So yes. Our future partners are walking into a love that already has its anchor down.

They’d better be ready.

I was a terrified 23-year-old who had passed her qualification exam a month earlier, and now found herself in the labor ward, expected to assist in C-sections, support laboring mothers to have smooth deliveries, and sometimes act as a “runner” fulfilling the needs of the residents and seniors on duty. I remember it was a Friday morning. The room still plays in my eyes like a movie, the face of the resident in charge, the mother at the center of this story, the chaos that followed within a few hours, even though it has been more than seven years now.

The mother had been transferred from a rural part of Ethiopia and admitted overnight. The morning crew was working to make sure she was seen by everyone who needed to, and that’s when we quickly realized she was critical. She had what is called preeclampsia, in lay terms, a diagnosis given when a pregnant woman develops hypertension associated with her pregnancy. Anyone in clinical medicine will tell you how much we dread this diagnosis, because it can get dangerous very fast. The most feared version is eclampsia, when the blood pressure is so severe that the mother is at risk of seizure and organ damage. It is almost irreversible once it reaches that point. So we treat preeclampsia aggressively. We fear and respect it because it can easily cost the lives of both mother and child.

Once we recognized she was eclamptic, the energy in the room shifted immediately. The attending physician ordered the necessary treatments. About an hour later, things became chaotic. The mother was going into cardiac arrest. We quickly learned that we had lost the baby. The chief resident calmly began CPR, desperately trying to save her life.

I have never felt such a heavy sadness in a room before that day.

We had to move the mother with the mattress from the bed to the floor so CPR could be performed properly. The unnatural rising and falling of her nine-month pregnant belly with each chest compression was a bleak reminder that the baby was gone and her life was on the verge of loss.

We couldn’t save her.

I wanted to cry, but I didn’t even have time. I was given the assignment of delivering the news to the husband waiting outside. They handed me her wedding ring, wrapped in a tissue.

So I took that tissue and walked out of the labor ward, fighting my tears, rehearsing how to tell a man that his wife and child were gone with compassion, without losing my composure.

My rehearsal didn’t matter. When I called out the mother’s name at the door, where crowded fathers and families were waiting, a man stepped forward and spoke to me in a language I didn’t speak. Now it was even worse; I couldn’t even tell him gently what had happened. I had to find a translator. When they told him she had passed away, I could still see his face, his shock, the incomprehension. I couldn’t stay more than two more minutes before I had to go back to other patients. So I gave him the ring wrapped in tissue and returned inside, still fighting my tears.

That was the day I decided I wanted a career built around how health systems support vulnerable people.

What I didn’t mention is this: that the mother had traveled three days to reach us at a tertiary hospital. By the time she arrived, we had already lost her. If there had been a clinic near her home that could have administered a simple injection to keep her blood pressure from reaching the level that shut down her body, she would have lived. If we had better referral systems, better transportation access, and better preventive care to catch her illness early in the pregnancy, she would have lived.

I wanted to minimize the if onlys. I wanted women, men, the elderly, those with mental illness, and the vulnerable ones to have a fighting chance. I wanted systems to actually consider them when making policy and infrastructure decisions.

So a few months after graduating from medical school, I co-founded a nonprofit. I built a network of volunteer health professionals to provide free medical services to people who tend to be forgotten. We served homeless populations around Addis Ababa, women living in sanctuaries, and elderly people who couldn’t leave their homes to access care, so we went to their houses to provide treatment. Every month, we brought together specialists, general practitioners, nurses, health officers, and medical students to reach anywhere from 100 to 300 people.

We started with in-kind donations, hospitals lending medical equipment, private labs providing free investigations, and pharmaceutical companies donating essential medications. But it was never enough. After a year of leading the organization, I understood what most nonprofits already knew: the most essential constraint was resources. Money. Paid staff. Infrastructure. So naturally, I became obsessed with grants in hopes of getting past this roadblock.

Then the Tigray war happened.

We wanted to support medical centers in the conflict zone with whatever we could. Most of my core leadership were young general practitioners like me, so I assumed there would be no question that providing medical service to underserved and vulnerable populations was literally our mission statement. But I was met with resistance. And some of that resistance came from the government, where anyone who tried to provide any kind of support risked imprisonment, abuse, and harm. My team members’ fear were legitimate.

That’s when I understood that money was not my only obstacle.

But let me back up. Because to understand what stopped me, you have to understand what I was taught.

Growing up in Addis Ababa in the 2000s meant we had one television station, ETV. In the early years, the news ran from six in the evening to nine. Six o’clock was in Tigrigna. Seven o’clock was in Oromiffa. Eight o’clock was in Amharic. My sister and I rarely made it to the end of the Amharic broadcast; we’d fall asleep, and our mother would send us to bed. As ETV grew, it added longer segments, weekend programming, and news in languages considered minority: Afar, Somali, and Sidama. By the time I was in sixth grade, the screen had become a kind of rotating celebration of what Ethiopia was: eighty-plus ethnicities, each one named and acknowledged, each one given its hour.

At school, we had a subject called Civic Education. Every year, in every grade, we were taught about the tribe ብሔር እና ብሔረሰቦች and how each one held equal standing regardless of size. We learned what federalism meant. We celebrated “የብሔር ብሔረሰቦች ቀን”, a national holiday where everyone came dressed in a cultural outfit representing one of the country’s peoples. I loved it. I genuinely loved it. I got to learn about different dances, different foods, and different ways of organizing a world. I was the child of parents from different parts of Ethiopia, and I’d grown up with both worlds in my house, so I was already someone who understood instinctively that the differences were not a problem to be solved but a richness to be inherited.

I was, genuinely, an optimist. I believed what I was being taught.

I didn’t ignore what I saw. I noticed the derogatory names one group used for another, the subtle hierarchies in how teachers treated certain students, the moment in third grade when a classmate drew a sharp line between them and us without any adult in the room blinking. I noticed. I just decided to look past it to focus on the dances, the food, the holiday, the rotating newscast that said: you all belong here, you are all the same.

I think what I was doing, without knowing it, was participating in something the country had collectively agreed to perform. We were not embracing equality. We were rehearsing it, hoping that if we rehearsed it long enough and with enough conviction, it would eventually become true. The national holidays, the renamed borders, the civic lessons, the songs, these were not evidence that we believed we were one people. They were evidence that we desperately wanted to, and had decided that wanting hard enough might substitute for the actual work.

I carried that optimism into medical school and into the nonprofit I co-founded. In the morning, I decided we should help the medical centers in Tigray.

And I watched it meet the thing it had never been built to survive.

The resistance I encountered wasn’t only from the government, though the government made its position clear enough, and my team members’ fear of imprisonment were legitimate and real. The resistance came from something quieter and harder to name. It came from people I knew, colleagues I respected, neighbors who had sung the same songs I had sung, who had worn the same cultural outfits on the same national holiday, who looked at what was happening in Tigray and found that when it came it their rehearsed solidarity had its limits. That the line they’d been taught didn’t exist had, under pressure, turned out to exist after all.

I was trained to believe that medicine sits outside of politics. That a patient is a patient. That the oath I took when I graduated covered every human body that came through a door, regardless of what language that body spoke or which region it came from. I believed this. I still believe it. But I have had to sit with the knowledge that I am the only one in the system who is bound by it, that the oath travels no further than my own hands. The hospital can be bombed. The road can be closed. The colleague can decide, for reasons that feel locally reasonable to him, that this particular patient is not his problem. The government can determine that six million people have forfeited their claim on the state’s care, and the system, the whole elaborate structure of clinics and workers and supply chains and civic lessons, will simply reconfigure itself around that determination.

A sick person is a sick person. I still believe that, too.

But I have learned that I cannot save a life with a belief.

So yes. My hands are tied.

Looking back now, I realize that my career has been shaped less by the diseases I treated than by everything that happened before patients reached me.

Sometimes a woman traveled for three days before arriving at a hospital, and by then it was already too late.

Sometimes the nearest clinic didn’t have the medication that could have prevented a catastrophe.

Sometimes there wasn’t an ambulance.

Sometimes there wasn’t a road.

Sometimes there wasn’t funding.

Sometimes fear stopped people from helping altogether.

Each obstacle looked different on its own. Together, they began to reveal a pattern I had been too optimistic to notice.

The greatest threats to my patients were rarely found inside their bodies alone,

When physicians graduate, we take an oath. At its core, it is a remarkably simple promise: when another human being needs care, you care for them. It says nothing about where they were born. Nothing about the language they speak. Nothing about their politics, religion, or ethnicity. Illness does not recognize those boundaries, and I believed medicine didn’t either.

I still believe that.

What has changed is my understanding of how fragile that promise really is.

Over the years, I have learned that my oath binds only me. It does not bind governments. It does not bind institutions. It does not bind supply chains, roads, funding decisions, or the fears people carry when helping another person becomes dangerous. It certainly does not bind history.

As physicians, we are trained to ask what illness is threatening the patient in front of us. But far more often than I expected, I found myself confronting everything surrounding the illness instead. Politics. Poverty. Geography. Culture. Conflict. They quietly stood between my patients and the care I knew they needed.

When I was twenty-three, standing outside the labor ward with a wedding ring wrapped in tissue, I thought the greatest challenge of my career would be learning enough medicine to save more lives.

I know differently now.

Medicine has never been the hardest part.

The hardest part has been realizing how many things have to go right before a doctor is ever given the chance to do what they were trained to do.

That is what I mean when I say my hands are tied.

(Pictures are from my internship year of medical school in 2020, during the height of the pandemic)

Home.
Family.
Freedom.
Success.
Walking.

A patient reminded me this week that they don’t.

I work on clinical trials involving people living with severe psychiatric illnesses.

One of my patients has lived with schizophrenia for decades.

Before we begin a clinical interview, we usually spend a few minutes simply talking. Building rapport. Meeting the person before meeting the diagnosis.

I often ask about hobbies. It’s an easy entry point, most people light up when they talk about things they enjoy.

When I asked this patient what she liked doing, she smiled and said:

“I like walking.”

I smiled back without thinking.

“Oh really? What’s the farthest you’ve walked?”

“Where do you usually like to walk?”

She paused.

Not confused exactly. More like she realized I had misunderstood something important.

Then she said gently:

“You know… when my mental state gets bad, I wander.”

“I walk because the voices make me paranoid.”

“I walk to distract myself.”

We finished the interview forty minutes later.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about that moment.

We had not been talking about the same thing at all.

To me, walking has always meant something simple.

Freedom.

Health.

Choice.

It’s choosing to leave my car behind. Walking in nature on weekends. Listening to podcasts. Clearing my head. Feeling my body move through a world that feels safe and familiar.

Walking is one of the easiest, most ordinary forms of care I have for myself.

I had never stopped to question that meaning.

For her, walking meant something entirely different.

It wasn’t leisure.

It wasn’t routine.

It wasn’t even choice in the way I understand choice.

It was survival.

A way to escape something internal that felt frightening and overwhelming.

A way to keep moving when stillness was not safe.

Same word.

Completely different world.

That conversation stayed with me.

because it revealed something I hadn’t fully named before:

We often assume our experience is the default.

Not out of arrogance.

But out of invisibility.

When something has always meant one thing to you, it’s hard to imagine it could mean something else entirely to someone else.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about how often this happens.

How many conversations do we have where we think we understand each other simply because we’re using the same words?

But underneath those shared words are entirely different lived realities.

What does home mean to someone who has never felt safe in one place?

What does family mean to someone who has been separated from theirs?

What does silence mean to someone whose mind never quiets?

What does safety mean to someone who has lived in constant threat?

We use the same language, but we don’t always live in the same meaning.

Working in psychiatry has taught me many technical things.

Diagnoses. Symptoms. Clinical frameworks. Research protocols.

But some of the most important lessons are much simpler.

That understanding is fragile.

That assumptions are automatic.

And that meaning is not universal—it is deeply personal.

That brief conversation reminded me of something I don’t want to forget:

Empathy is not just about caring for other people.

It’s about recognizing that their version of ordinary may be completely different from mine.

And that sometimes, the most important thing we can do is pause long enough to realize:

We might not be talking about the same world at all.

And so, like any mammal with a ventral tegmental area—the part of the brain responsible for reward-seeking behavior—I took this as my identity. I was the validation. So I kept chasing it. Higher grades. More achievements. More praise from colleagues, friends, parents, strangers. Anyone, really, who could tell me I was doing well. I was a junkie. And I wonder now if half of what I’ve achieved is just me being a rat pushing the cocaine lever, addicted to my own dopamine hit.

So I applied this same technique to romantic relationships.

If I’m smart, pretty, kind, and fun, I thought, then I’ll find a romantic partner. If I work hard enough to be perfect, desirable, and accommodating, then surely I’ll find someone who sees me and wants to build a life with me. I really thought this was the blueprint for love. Show up as your best self. Try harder. Be what they want.

I was 23 when I got my first rejection.

I crushed on this guy way too hard and spent a year obsessing over what I could have done differently. The conclusion I landed on was brutal: I’m just not cool enough to date a guy who is that cool. My ego took a hit, so I decided to fix it. I became obsessed with becoming cooler. But somewhere in that journey, I forgot about him and found bigger meaning elsewhere. I pivoted to career—surely that won’t reject you if you work hard, right?

So I worked hard. I got into one of the best public health schools in the world because finishing medical school at age 25 was just not enough. And then I met the second person who rejected me.

This one did it cruelly. Hot and cold. Confusing messages day in and day out. My brain couldn’t sync with reality. So I did what I’d always done: I worked harder. I tried to be what I thought he wanted. I needed his approval so badly it hurt. But it never came. I was rejected consistently and embarrassingly.

Finally, in a moment of clarity, something clicked. I was 28.

Relationships don’t work on the blueprint I’d been following. You don’t convince someone you’re good for them. You don’t work hard to show them why they should be with you. You don’t try to change their mind when they send mixed signals. You leave. Confusion is an answer by itself. You don’t need someone to explicitly say “I’m not that into you”—you see the signs, trust your intuition, and leave with your dignity intact.

Summer 2024, I made a vow: Never again would I let someone into my life who confused me about where I stood with them.

And I kept that promise. I got good at it. The moment I sensed hesitation, I communicated once. If it wasn’t resolved, I left. My radar was optimized. Anyone who made me question Do they like me? Do they want me? What are we?—they were out.

Then came the third rejection. Summer 2025.

I met someone I liked, and he didn’t confuse me, so things progressed. Two months in, he told me he wasn’t sure about me and didn’t have time to figure out how he felt. He also said I’d moved too fast, that I was rushing. I thanked him for not stringing me along—I’d sensed something was off weeks before—and he left.

But the question stayed: What could I have done differently?

That feeling lived in me for a year. Then, summer 2026, I saw him again. Long after I’d moved on. Long after my life had changed for the better. And suddenly, all that old questioning rushed back.

After a week of spiraling, I arrived at the same conclusion as always: I’m just not cool enough. Not high-status enough. Not enough, period. And I wanted his validation so badly it scared me. Just please tell me I matter. Of course, it never came.

What caught me off guard was this: I thought I’d done the work. I thought I was past this.

Apparently, I was just on trial membership, not the premium subscription to healing.

Then I was talking to a mentor—a successful, gorgeous, ambitious woman—and she told me something that stopped me cold. She said she takes romantic rejection as a sign of her own worthlessness. She knows, intellectually, that this is false. But emotionally? Her brain takes her there again and again.

And I saw myself in her.

In describing how the third guy treated me, I realized something: He’s not actually a catch. Not for me. We would have been incompatible. Looking back at all three rejections, the same thing was true. We would have probably made each other miserable.

But here’s what clicked this week: My entire sense of validation lives outside of myself.

I’m constantly looking for someone—anyone—to tell me I’m doing well, that I’m worthy, that I’m desirable. I do this in friendships. In career. In romantic relationships. And so any rejection becomes evidence that I’m not enough. I’m not doing well. I need to be better.

Rejection feels like a third-degree burn because I only know how to soothe my existential dread by having others validate my existence.

My childhood optimized me for this perfectly. Every time I performed well, I got praise. And I internalized it as: I only matter if I’m perfect, good, and productive.

But here’s the thing about relationships that nobody tells you: Most of the time, people’s choices in relationships reflect their own internal life, their perspective, their wounds—not who you actually are. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you take everything personally. You’ll exhaust yourself performing perfection for an audience that’s not even paying attention.

You’ll never know who you are or what you actually want because you’re too busy auditioning for other people’s approval.

Every rejection becomes a permanent tattoo on your ego: You’re just not good enough.

What an exhausting existence. What a perfect recipe for inauthenticity. Then came the work because I can’t keep living like this anymore.

First: Kindness. I had to be kind to the part of me that just wants to be loved and understood. I had to stop hating my neural wiring for being different, for feeling rejection so deeply.

Second: Knowledge. I learned about Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria—a real neurological condition where your brain processes rejection like a physical threat. Suddenly, I wasn’t broken. I was just wired differently. This alone made me feel less alone.

Third: Community. That mentor helped me see how distorted my view of relationships had become. She gave me clarity I couldn’t give myself.

Fourth: Somatic work. For years, I tackled everything with logic. When I had an obsessive thought about what I should have done differently, I’d give my brain the objective facts. It works—sometimes. But my nervous system doesn’t always respond to logic. So I added tools that speak to my body instead of my mind.

I sit in meditation and notice where the shame lives in my body—usually my chest and stomach. I practice breathing exercises that calm my nervous system when rejection anxiety hits. I run to metabolize the stress hormones flooding my system. I journal not to solve the problem, but to get it out of my body and onto the page. These practices sound simple, but they’re the difference between my brain spiraling for a week and me returning to baseline in a day.

Here’s what I’ve come to terms with: It will take years—maybe a lifetime—to fully rewire this. I might always feel the pull toward seeking external validation. But I’m making undeniable progress.

I’m changing the people I seek. I’m building a community that reminds me I’m enough, exactly as I am—failures, mistakes, wins, and all. I’m learning to sit with loneliness instead of running from it. I’m choosing authenticity over attachment, one day at a time.

And I’m the only me that exists in this world. I owe it to myself to be my own best validator.

After eight months, I went back to the city that felt like home for close to three years: Baltimore. Yeah, the first year there was so chaotic I hated it. If you had told me it would feel like home in a couple of years, I would have thought that version of Mika existed in a parallel universe. I spent five days galivanting myself through all the places I used to frequent. I went running with my best friend along the Inner Harbor, hit up my favorite restaurants and coffee shops, took walks with Addis, my old roommate’s golden retriever (I am referred to as Auntie Mika and maybe his favorite because I used to feed him Injera and let him steal my dinner).

One evening, I went to a club to dance my heart out with my two best friends. It’s never a dull time with them. We find ourselves dancing until 3 AM with nothing but water to fuel us and endless inappropriate jokes to keep us awake. That Saturday night was not the best day for one of our group members. In hindsight, she was burnt out, but she desperately wanted to spend time with us. I live in the middle of nowhere, and I don’t come often to visit. However much she tried, she wasn’t having a good time. We might have sensed it and offered to postpone our plans, but she’s a woman determined by nature(I know a thing or two about this myself). No one could stop her.

The story doesn’t end well. By midnight, she got up seemingly out of nowhere, her face turning angry. She refused to let us accompany her home and insisted we stay. The rest of us were left a little dumbfounded, a little offended, a little unloved. I was especially triggered because, in 2018, a friend left me in the streets of Addis at 3 AM with my other female friends, with nowhere to go, after she had promised us she would let us spend the night at her place. Thanks to my high school best friend, the one who somehow knows how to handle my wrath, he managed to get me back into a good mood in thirty minutes. The rest of us decided to enjoy the time, and surprisingly, we ended up staying until 5 AM dancing, goofing around, and making the one-hour drive back to Baltimore from Silver Spring, courtesy of Mr. High School Best Friend himself.

I got mad at my friend for two days. I didn’t see her, even though I was staying at her house. I kept feeling neglected, unloved, and my mind kept spinning stories about what it all meant. Finally, before my flight back to the middle-of-nowhere state, we talked. She told me she had been so burnt out she slept for two days straight and wasn’t herself. She said she didn’t want to miss out on spending time with me and making memories, so she pushed herself. But her body said no at some point. I realized it was nothing against me, and I let it go right there. I have done this exact thing before, and it was easy to understand where she was coming from. We spent the next thirty minutes rushing to get all my bags packed, getting her to take some shiro and berbere my mom sent from Ethiopia, and taking one last picture with Addis.

On my flight back, I couldn’t stop thinking about the gap between intention and action. This experience was the perfect example of it. My friend had good intentions. But her action of leaving abruptly and angry seemed to say the opposite. And I kept thinking about how that space, that gap between what we mean and what we do, is where resentment lives. My next question was: How do we close this gap? Do we even need to?

Right now, I see a few things that might help us narrow it.

First: Communication yeah, yeah, we’re all tired of this word. I know I am.

Communication isn’t as easy as prescribing it. It’s especially hard when we have to be vulnerable about what’s going on in our lives, minds, and realities. We want to present a strong, capable person to the world, but it hurts us when we can’t be honest with those close to us. I wonder how that Saturday night would have gone if my friend were able to say: “I know I haven’t told you this because I wanted us to have a good time, but I’m stressed and going through a rough week. Can I be excused from today’s plans?” It sounds easy, right? But most of us take saying no, saying I need a break, saying I’m feeling tired as a sign of moral failing. And we let it define our worth. That’s the real barrier. Not the words. The shame around saying them.

Second: Realizing almost all people have good intentions, but the translation into action can look different.

I tell myself that the majority of people in the world don’t get up from sleep and think: “Okay, how do I fuck up in the world today? How do I make myself and others miserable? How do I cause chaos?” Except for some specifically mentally ill people diagnosed with sociopathy, most of us want to be good and do good. And this anchors me when I start to feel angry at people’s actions. They mean well. It just doesn’t show in the way I want it to. How many times have I annoyed my loved ones when I truly believed I was doing what was good for them? I had good intentions, but I didn’t have the skills to show them in a way others could receive. This doesn’t mean we should excuse bad behavior. But it will help us be more understanding and less resentful toward our fellow humans who are just trying to get by while fighting hundreds of cognitive biases.

Third: Not taking things personally and realizing we’re all at the center of our small universes.

I’ve struggled with this for years, and it’s only this year that I called myself on my own bullshit and realized I interpret far too many people’s actions, reactions, or lack thereof as a measure of my self-worth or identity. Did someone take three to five business days to reply to my warm message? I must be boring, and they must not like me! Did they not get as excited as I expected when I shared news? They must not care about me! Did someone I thought to be very close not check up on me for a month? Our friendship must be over, and they must not see value in me anymore.

Notice how it’s all me, me, me? How did I turn a two-way interaction into a solo audition for worthiness?

Here’s the truth: everyone is so absorbed in their own lives. Even the ones who love us so much don’t occupy as much brain space as we think. So if they take three to five business days to reply, they’re probably drowning in their own stuff. If they’re not as warm as they used to be, they’re probably dealing with life and its endless bullshit. I’m not saying we should be naive and ignore signals. But we should have a mindset that we’re not as important as we would like to think in others’ lives. And honestly? That’s freeing.

But here’s what I’m still figuring out:

The gap between intention and action isn’t something we can fully close. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the goal isn’t to eliminate the gap; it’s to make peace with it. To be curious about it instead of resentful about it.

My friend didn’t fail me that night. She was honest (eventually) about her limits. And I was honest about my hurt. In that honesty, we actually got closer than we would have if she’d just powered through and resented me the whole time.

So maybe the question isn’t “How do we close the gap?” Maybe it’s “How do we talk about the gap before it turns into a wound?”

Shout out to my friend for putting me on it.

I was reading a specific passage about objectivity, and I had to laugh out loud because it was almost like the author knew exactly what I was thinking.

Right before I opened the book, word for word, this was my thought:

"Okay, awesome—a feminist book by a man. That ought to be objective and give me a better sense of this dilemma we seem to be in as a society."

Well. He destroyed that belief with one paragraph.

The First Light Bulb: I Change My Mind Easily

As I was reading, I became aware of something.

Even though some of the ideas challenged my deeply held beliefs, I didn't have much resistance to changing my mind.

I would stop, think for ten minutes, and go:

"Okay, that argument makes sense. The evidence he's mentioning is compelling. I can even think of examples from my own life that support what he's saying. So I will update my position."

And this is not an isolated incident.

My friends have made me change my mind.

My colleagues have made me change my mind.

Hell, even my patients have made me change my mind.

I don't seem to have unbreakable resistance to being wrong.

I'm willing to say that two seemingly contradictory things can both contain truth.

Sometimes this makes me wonder if I'm a spineless, fickle person.

I change and evolve so quickly—my beliefs, assumptions, even my broader worldview. It can feel unstable.

But I also know I wouldn't be the person I am today if I wasn't willing to change so much.

And the person I am today (and yes, I'm probably biased) is self-aware, curious, understanding, and adaptable.

My boss literally used the word "adaptable" about a hundred times in my annual review yesterday. She could not stop talking about how open I am to feedback and how eager I am to learn.

So maybe this isn't a weakness.

Maybe it's just who I am.

The Second Light Bulb: The Cost of Changing

Then I had another light bulb moment. More like a mental exercise.

I was reading Kimmel's arguments about masculinity and femininity, and I imagined someone I knew briefly a person with much more rigid and traditional views on gender roles sitting in my seat reading the same book.

I could almost feel how distressed he would be.

How difficult it would be to reconcile the worldview he currently holds with the worldview being presented.

I could feel the potential anger.

The discomfort.

The resistance.

And here's what I realized:

That reaction is valid.

That is a deeply human response.

Because changing your mind is expensive.

Human beings seem to need a balance between stability and curiosity.

Too much certainty can make us rigid.

Too much questioning can make it difficult to function.

Most of us spend our lives trying to find a workable balance between the two.

And when a new idea threatens a core belief especially one tied to identity, family, community, or meaning—the resistance isn't always intellectual.

Sometimes it's protective.

Sometimes the mind is trying to preserve a coherent world that allows us to function.

The more I thought about it, the more compassion I felt.

The Third Light Bulb: The Cost of Curiosity

Then and imagine this is all happening on a two-hour flight, by the way. The yerba mate tea I chugged before leaving must have been working overtime.

I remembered the first time curiosity drove me to the brink of existential collapse.

I was seventeen.

It was summer break.

I was trying to download a sitcom from my dad's friend's hard drive when I stumbled across hundreds of books instead.

One of them was The Biggest Secret by David Icke.

Looking back, many of the claims in that book were highly questionable.

But that wasn't the point.

The point was that it was the first thing I had ever read that fundamentally challenged my understanding of reality.

At the time, I was deeply involved in my church.

I attended youth fellowship several times a week.

We planned events.Studied the Bible.Practiced choir performances.

It wasn't just a religious institution. It was my community. My identity.

And this book challenged everything I thought I knew. After a few days of reading it, I developed a measurable amount of anxiety.

Not normal stress.

The kind of anxiety that makes you feel like the floor beneath reality is moving.

I remember walking home after choir practice and feeling completely out of place.

Like I no longer belonged.

I kept reading.

I kept praying.

I kept showing up.

But internally, I was struggling.

I couldn't make sense of the world anymore.

Everything was conflicting.

And I remember wishing I had never picked up the book.

Because I'm not someone who can learn something and simply ignore it.

If I find truth in something—if I find it useful or convincing—I tend to let it change me.

And at seventeen, I couldn't reconcile the worldview I had inherited with the worldview I was exploring.

After about two weeks, I couldn't take the anxiety anymore.

So I made a decision.

I had a conversation with myself.

I said: "I'm going to put this book down. I'm not going to question the existence of God. I'm not going to question the institution I'm part of. I'm going to act like I never read this book."

And surprisingly, it worked. The anxiety went away.

Life became familiar again.

I felt connected to my community again.

Everything returned to normal.

Well.For about six months.

Then I started questioning things again.

But that's a story for another day.

The Point

What that experience taught me is how uncomfortable curiosity can be.

Especially for a young mind.

An untrained mind.

A mind without the tools to navigate uncertainty.

We often talk about curiosity as if it's automatically virtuous.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes curiosity comes with a cost.

It can destabilize relationships.Communities. Identities. Entire ways of understanding the world.

And not everyone has the resources to survive that process.

Some people might be rejected by their families.

Some might lose their communities.

Some might be persecuted—or worse—for questioning the wrong thing in the wrong place.

I was fortunate.

I lost certainty.

I lost innocence.

I lost parts of my old identity.

But I still had food. Safety. A roof over my head. People who loved me, even when they didn't understand me. Not everyone gets that.

Which makes me wonder if changing your mind is not primarily an intellectual exercise. Maybe it's a resource-intensive one. It requires emotional stability. Social safety. Enough security to tolerate uncertainty.

And if that's true, resistance to change starts looking a little less like stupidity and a little more like self-preservation.

So maybe people who don't question things aren't lazy, stupid, or closed-minded.

Maybe they're doing what humans have always done:

Trying to survive.

And maybe, just maybe, I can have some compassion for that.

So here I am, writing about it on a Saturday evening while live jazz plays at a coffee shop. I’m trying to hide my feelings so the performers don’t think I hate their music. I don’t. I hate that I can’t fully enjoy it because my brain is spinning.

I picked up Sydney Sheldon’s “Nothing Lasts Forever” at a book sale last month - a dollar book from an author I hadn’t read in decades. I was excited. Nostalgic. Ready to slip back into the world that shaped me.

But from the first chapter, I was shocked.

The way he described different cultures - Africa, Asia - was so superficial. He threw in random foreign phrases and expected that to show us his character cared about suffering people from low-income countries. I let it slide.

Then came his attempt at describing sex.

I was baffled by how misogynist and flawed it was.

Then came his portrayal of love and marriage, and I couldn’t let it slide anymore.

In this book, a woman says no to a man. He persists. She falls for him anyway - magically, after five dates - and accepts his marriage proposal.

Another woman goes on a date with a guy specifically to sabotage his bet that he can sleep with any woman. While trying to sabotage him, she falls in love with him. Hours before the bet ends, she sleeps with him. That same night, she accepts his marriage proposal.

This is a recurring pattern in his books. And it defeats everything I know about real life and love.

These are supposed to be strong female leads - doctors, smart, ambitious, beautiful. But they’re written as women who will abandon their own boundaries for the promise of being chosen. Women who confuse persistence with romance. Women who equate being wanted with being loved.

Why This Matters to Me

I need to take you back to when I was a kid.

I read voraciously. Anything and everything I could get my hands on. I’m talking shampoo bottles, my dad’s theology books, my mom’s English literature books when I was only seven or eight. My curiosity was boundless.

But I was frustrated a lot. Ages six to nine, I had so many questions but I didn’t even know how to ask them. The world didn’t make sense to me. I felt trapped in my tiny world because I wanted to know about the world but I couldn’t make sense of it. I remember this deep seated feeling of “what the fuck is this even” - this confusion about what life and its complexities meant.

I desperately wanted to be an adult soon so I could finally understand things.

Then fictions became my escape. Especially sci-fi, psychological thrillers, crime stories.

Somehow I got my hands on Sydney Sheldon’s “Tell Me Your Dreams” when I was around thirteen. That’s when I discovered my first psychological thriller. That’s when I learned about “split personality” - or more formally in psychiatry, “Dissociative Identity Disorder.” Looking back, that book might be what sparked my deep interest in human psychology and psychiatry. It might be why I work in psychiatric clinical trials now.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t just read that book.

I devoured it.

And I became instantly obsessed with Sydney Sheldon. I read every single book I could get my hands on. “The Doomsday Conspiracy” is another one I still remember - it was about UFOs, and it made me feel like I was looking into a world others didn’t have access to. I still remember how that book made me feel, and it’s been more than fifteen or twenty years since I read it.

I loved him. I loved his worlds. I loved his women.

Before Sydney Sheldon, I had found Paulos Gnogno’s books - short stories in Amharic about paranormal activities and UFOs. That book taught me that curiosity was possible, that stories could take you somewhere. (I learned later that Paulos was a 4th grade dropout who taught himself English and rewrote 11 books. That detail fascinated me - it meant you didn’t need permission or formal education to tell stories that matter.)

But Sydney Sheldon? He was different. He taught me what it meant to be a woman. For context, Sydney is a white American man who was 81 when he wrote the book i mentioned earlier(I know, I know I also thought Sydney was a woman for a long time because of his name!)

In all of Sydney Sheldon’s books, strong female leads are common. They’re mostly smart, educated, beautiful, strong-willed and ambitious. He writes them in a way that a thirteen-year-old shy girl like me wanted to be when she grew up.

But they’re also almost always willing to sacrifice their own judgment for a man’s persistence. They confuse lust with love. They equate marriage with completion.

The sexuality in his books is sensual and detailed, but it’s written from a male gaze. Women exist to be desired. Their pleasure is secondary to being wanted.

And the cultural context he describes is always Western culture. Always. Western society was the civilized version. The better version. The version ambitious women should aspire to.

I grew up in an Ethiopian household. A religious household. And certain topics - love, sex, what it meant to be a woman - were not discussed. They were forbidden. Taboo.

I was a shy, confused kid in a tiny world, desperate to understand life beyond my neighborhood. These books promised me answers. They showed me what adult life could look like - glamorous, sexual, romantic, Western.

Sydney Sheldon’s books became my mentor. My sister. My auntie. The teacher I didn’t have in real life. They taught me about love, sex, ambition, success - all the things no one in my actual life would talk about.

And when I didn’t have access to experience and conversations like I do now, I depended on these books to understand myself and others. But there was no one to discuss the topics I learned about. There was no one to challenge my beliefs or assumptions I derived from the books I read. I didn’t have discernment because, duh, I was a ten, thirteen, fifteen-year-old.

So I absorbed it all. The belief that love means someone chasing you until you surrender. The belief that womanhood means being beautiful and desirable. The belief that Western ideals are superior to your own culture’s. The belief that marriage is the ultimate validation of a woman’s worth.

And I lived it. For years. I spent relationships mistaking a man’s persistence for love. I accepted proposals from persistence instead of partnership. I chose being wanted over being known. I equated infatuation with destiny.

It took me until my late twenties to recognize the pattern. And even longer to understand where it came from.

It’s been maybe eighteen years since I last read Sydney Sheldon. Eighteen years of actual experiences. Real relationships. Life Education.

And now I can see the damage with clarity.

I can see how I’ve equated validation with love. How I’ve mistaken infatuation for depth. How I’ve believed that persistence from a man is romantic, not controlling. How I’ve absorbed the idea that womanhood means submission disguised as choice.

I can see it in my past relationships. In my old choices. In the beliefs I didn’t even know I held until they showed up in my patterns.

And I’m angry.

Not because Sydney Sheldon was trying to hurt me. He wasn’t. Maybe he was just writing what he knew. Maybe he was a man of his time, working with the narratives available to him. But that doesn’t make his blueprint less dangerous for the young women who read it as truth.

Because he was careless with the power he had. He wrote millions of women - young women, curious women, women in restrictive households - into a blueprint of love that serves men’s desires, not women’s humanity.

And he did it repeatedly. Unapologetically. As if it were just romantic fiction.

It’s not just bad writing.

It’s a dangerous blueprint.

I don’t know how to undo eighteen years of absorbed beliefs.

But I’m trying.

I’m going back and dismantling my own biases. I’m questioning the narratives I took as truth. I’m unlearning the idea that being chased is the same as being loved. That being desired is the same as being known.

And I’m thinking about younger versions of me - kids reading books in restrictive households, desperate for answers about what it means to be a woman in the world.

I want them to know what they’re reading.

I want them to know that Sydney Sheldon’s women aren’t real. That love isn’t supposed to feel like surrender. That ambition and womanhood don’t require you to erase yourself.

I want them to have the conversations I didn’t have.

Because if Sydney Sheldon had been honest - if he’d written women as full human beings with desires and boundaries and the right to say no and have it mean no - maybe I wouldn’t be here at thirty, untangling the knots he tied when I was thirteen.

Maybe I’d just be enjoying his books.

And now I have another problem.

I have Michael Crichton’s book sitting at home waiting to be read. I picked it up at the same book sale, same dollar, same nostalgia. Another author I loved as a kid. Another author I haven’t read since I was eighteen.

And I’m terrified.

I’m scared to find out if he will piss me off too.

Because if two of my favorite writers - the ones who shaped me, taught me, showed me what the world could be - turn out to have the same blind spots, the same carelessness with power... what does that say about what I absorbed?

What else did I take as truth that was actually just someone’s limited imagination?

Thanks to my new friend loneliness who refused to leave me alone for even a minute.

I told him: “I work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. This 3-day weekend is precious. I need to see the friends I miss.” These friends that I desperately wanted to see are called productivity, human connection and experience.

But he wouldn’t budge.

Not when I went to a live jazz event at a coffee shop with my laptop, hoping to feel “connection” from afar.

Not when I went for a run and the humidity almost made me faint three miles in.

Not when I tried shopping, writing or reading.

Not when I cooked alone in my kitchen.

After fighting loneliness through activities(like a true Type A person), I gave up. I stayed home and decided to be miserable.

Loneliness was thrilled.

He found me alone and started whispering all kinds of lies:

You are unloved.

No one notices you.

You don’t matter.

And sometimes, I believe him.

Here’s What I Know

I have a new dream that feels embarrassing to admit out loud:

I want people to keep tabs on me.

Not in a controlling way. Not like parents checking curfews. But in the way that says: I notice you. I wonder how you are. You matter enough that I think about you.

Three years ago, when I first moved abroad, I would’ve laughed at this version of myself. I wanted freedom so badly—to live on my own terms, stay out late without explanation, disappear if I wanted to.

I got that wish.

But freedom, it turns out, is not the same as mattering.

Now I live completely alone in a city far away from every friend and family member I’ve ever known. No community. No familiar rhythm. No one watching my life unfold in real time.

And over the past few months, I’ve realized something uncomfortable:

I don’t actually want complete independence.

The Problem

I’m terrible at making friends.

Most of my close friendships came from school—places where connection happened naturally through repetition and proximity. When you move to a small city alone, where you’re constantly reminded you’re different, making friends starts to feel like nuclear physics.

At first, I tried hard. I said yes to almost every invitation. Coffee meetups. Hikes. Parties. Random social events.

Within a month, I burnt out.

The conversations felt surface-level, and I desperately wanted to be myself without yet knowing whether these people were safe enough to hold that version of me.

So I chose solitude instead.

And then I built a story around it: These people aren’t my people. I’ll just focus on my old friendships. This is temporary. I’m fine.

But if I’m honest, I gave up too soon.

The frustrating part is that I know exactly what would help. Go somewhere consistently. Make one local friend and text them regularly. Invite someone for something casual. Build the infrastructure for intimacy instead of waiting for it to magically appear.

But I don’t do it.

Instead, I think about the problem endlessly.

I analyze my loneliness. I journal about it. I voice-note my friends about it. I write essays about it.

Because thinking about loneliness is easier than risking rejection, awkwardness, or another draining conversation that goes nowhere.

And so I stay stuck.

The Thing About Being Alone vs. Being Lonely

I know they’re different.

I’ve felt lonely in rooms full of people I loved. I’ve had seasons where I was surrounded by community and still felt deeply misunderstood.

But right now, I am alone.

And sometimes that slips into loneliness.

What I miss most is being witnessed.

For most of my life, there were people around me who naturally noticed things. Friends who saw my routines. Family who knew when I came home late. Someone who remembered what I said last week and asked about it again.

Now my closest relationships exist mostly through phones and texts. They’re still deep and meaningful, but there’s a limit to long-distance intimacy. No one sees the ordinary details of my life anymore.

And I think that’s what’s hurting me.

Not validation.

Witness.

I want someone to notice when I disappear for a few days. Someone to ask how the thing I was anxious about turned out. Someone close enough to my daily life that I don’t have to summarize myself every time we talk.

Because I come alive around people.

I’m funnier. More creative. More present. More myself.

And this phase of my life—while healing and necessary in many ways—has also made me feel strangely invisible.

The Part I Keep Avoiding

I know I sound dramatic.

I know I have things to be grateful for.

But I can’t shut off the deeply human part of me that wants connection.

Especially on weekends, my brain starts whispering: There’s no one here to witness your life.

And it makes me sad in a way I still don’t fully know how to explain.

Not because I need constant attention.

But because I want to share a life with people who are close enough to notice it.

And here’s the truth I keep running into:

I know exactly what I need to do.

I need to show up consistently. I need to risk being awkward. I need to stop trying to think my way out of loneliness and actually build a life here.

But knowing that and doing that are two completely different things.

So today, I’m just sitting in the discomfort of that truth.

Feeling it.

Hating it.

And admitting that maybe I optimized my life for independence so well that I accidentally removed intimacy too.

Until very recently, I prided myself on not being superficial. I was convinced I saw beyond labels and aesthetics, fully convinced I focused on deeper meaning. I was sure the way I lived my life and the principles I adhered to so passionately made me look beyond presentation.

But this year, slowly, I started to see how untrue that was.

I was too close to the problem to diagnose it. Now, thinking about it, some type of cognitive distortion must have been in place to make me believe I wasn’t driven by how things look more than how things are. I feel a little out of touch with reality in realizing what I’m about to say.

I’ve spent my entire life judging people and myself by their appearance. And I didn’t even know I was doing it.

The Medical School Cool Kids

In medical school, there was a group of “cool” people in my first year. They looked nice, spoke well, had good English accents. They seemed to come from good families or strong financial backgrounds, seemed smart, seemed fashionable.

I so desperately wanted to be friends with them.

I hadn’t actually talked to them besides the “hi”s and “bye”s when we crossed paths. I didn’t dare to, because I was convinced they were way out of my league. I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them. Just thinking about it, I had these crazy scenarios in my head where I’d become friends with them, and they’d soon find out I was lame, and my existence would be shameful in their eyes.

All the assumptions I had about them were driven from what they presented or looked like superficial attributes they didn’t even work for (not all, but most).

Fast forward a year or so: my dormmate started hanging out with that group, and I, by extension, started getting invited to events, birthday parties, lunches, shopping dates, spa dates. I was so grateful and felt like I’d achieved one level up in social status.

But that crippling fear and anxiety never left me.

I tried my best to hide many sides of myself to fit in because I was convinced they were better than me. As I got to know them, I realized they were awesome but just as any human being, they were flawed. Some things didn’t resonate with who I am or how I saw the world.

But that didn’t let me speak up or leave when things weren’t working in my favor or I wasn’t appreciated as I should be.

Because I was still stuck on the whole “they look like they’re cool” assumption, I stayed for years even when some of the people didn’t serve me well at all.

Looking back, I realize: I wasn’t just intimidated by how they looked.

I was convinced that how they looked MEANT something about their inherent value.

Beautiful = valuable. Well-dressed = worthy. Good accent = superior. And since I didn’t have those markers, I must be inferior.

This wasn’t just insecurity. This was a belief system.

Looks = merit. Presentation = truth. Aesthetics = worth.

And this wasn’t an isolated incident. A lot of the relationships I’ve found myself in were driven by how people looked or presented themselves. If they presented as confident, if they presented as smart, if they presented as accomplished, if they presented as attractive I believed them and ran with that information.

The Part That Makes Me Cringe

The part where it makes me cringe is where I associated looks with merit.

I would genuinely be amazed if I saw someone without the superficial markers accomplish something. I’d think: Wow, you don’t have xyz, you don’t look like xyz... how did you manage to be this smart/peaceful/wealthy?

As if looking a certain way was a PREREQUISITE for success.

As if beauty or polish or the “right” aesthetic was what QUALIFIED you for achievement.

I can see now how deeply condescending this is. How limiting. How it robbed me of seeing people and myself clearly.

But I didn’t make this up. I learned it.

The Ugliness Theory

Apparently, this thinking of mine was so deep-rooted that for the longest time, I blamed my “bad looks” for why I struggled to make friends or be accepted by people.

Until age 18 or even older I was convinced the reason I was awkward, unable to make more than a few temporary friendships that felt meaningful, was because I was ugly.

I was very sad about this because even though I tried my best, I could never at least to me look even decent.

So I was sure that’s why people didn’t give me attention growing up. Why men never asked me out until I was 19. Why my classmates made fun of me. Why my friendships changed every year from grade 1 to 12.

Simply because I was ugly.

I was sure it was my long skirts, my baggy sweaters, my big bag full of books, my lack of fashion sense that led me to be a social outcast.

I remember thinking, whenever I saw someone who wasn’t conventionally attractive but was socially successful: How did they do it? It baffled me.

Now, in hindsight, I believe my brain was protecting me from seeing the reality: I was not socially aware. I was a nerd and religious fanatic who had zero social skills.

So my brain chose a trait I couldn’t change to blame my face rather than showing me the painful truth: I was socially inept, rigid, awkward, and completely unaware of how to connect with people.

The reason I judged others by their looks is because I was taught and believed that I was being judged by mine.

If my awkwardness and social failures were because I was ugly (which is what I told myself), then it followed: other people’s social success must be because they were beautiful.

The logic was simple: looks = social value.

I didn’t have looks, so I didn’t have value. They had looks, so they had value.

This is what my brain did to survive. It created a rule. And then it applied that rule to everyone.

Where This Came From

I didn’t invent this “looks = worth” equation. I inherited it.

Among many things I resent, it’s my parents’ understanding of Christianity.

They had persistent prejudices and a strong sense of “us vs. the world” mentality. They understood things in black and white. On top of this, they were deeply culturally rooted in their Habeshaness, which means looks meant a lot.

I think that’s a recipe to raise a delusional person when you teach a kid:

“My religion is the only true one. The rest of the world is wrong. And yeah, also make sure you always appear good, composed, organized, clean, smart. Never let others see your flaws. Don’t let the neighbors know what’s going on.”

My parents found their sect of Christianity in their mid-20s, before they found each other. They met because of the small community they were building, where I would later be born as their firstborn. They set up the first church in the area. They were so passionate and fired up, and it consumed their existence. It brought so much healing from the previous lives they were living, and God was working wonders in their lives.

Hence why they named me “Misker” which literally translates to “a witness” or “testimony.”

They wanted to show the world I was the testimony to God’s work in their lives.

I think in the process of their healing and finding God, they got a bit disconnected from reality. They focused on showing, in everything they did and how they lived, the glory of God.

And to them, that meant presentation was everything.

They taught me that how we LOOKED to the outside world was a direct reflection of our relationship with God.

If we looked polished, put-together, and holy, that PROVED God was working in our lives.

To them, living the holy life meant:

• Not letting their kids wear revealing clothes, which apparently meant super long dresses. Never pants. (I was, I think, 13 when I finally convinced them to buy me jeans. It would be a whole drama to get them to buy us skinny jeans when that was the fashion in 8th grade.)

• Never doing anything “worldly,” such as listening to music. (We would turn the TV off when 120 the famous Sunday Ethiopian entertainment program was showing music clips, because there was no channel to change it to.)

• Being docile, always trying to appear agreeable, nice, and good. (Which meant we were never allowed to speak too loudly in the shared compounds we lived in.)

• Never cursing, never saying a bad word, working hard, never speaking up, making sure we appeared well-polished and put together and never out of the norm.

All the people we lived around and interacted with were also of similar religious background, so we weren’t given a fair chance to understand how others thought and lived. The “us versus them” mentality was very strong.

Either you served God and your type of Christianity was right, or you were wrong and you were likely going to hell.

And they focused so much on how we dressed when we went to church, went to visit relatives, went to school... that it ingrained in me the assumption that looks must matter so much that they must tell the inherent quality and merit of someone or something.

So of course I internalized: my worth = my presentation.

And of course I judged others the same way.

If my parents named me “testimony” because I was supposed to be living proof of God’s work not through my character, but through my appearance then of course I’d believe:

How you look = who you are.

How you present = your value.

Your aesthetics = your truth.

The Walking Contradiction

But here’s the thing that breaks my own theory:

I’m a walking contradiction.

If my “looks theory” was right, how do I explain:

• Doing pageants in medical school? (Because pageants are superficial and are for “not-so-intelligent” people, right?)

• Having social anxiety and being an introvert but going on to be somewhat of a public figure at some points in my life, where I spoke in front of thousands of people or was part of panel discussions?

• Appearing to be a regular girl who likes to go out, dance, dress up, but internally being very nerdy with many quirky interests and personality traits?

My presentation doesn’t tell you who I am. It tells you what I want you to see. What I think will make me acceptable. What I’ve curated to survive.

And if that’s true for me, it’s true for everyone else.

But my brain still hasn’t caught up.

The Constant Struggle

I don’t feel like I’ve expressed the depth of this ideology well because it’s so subtle. If I tried to give more examples, I fear I’d sound clichéd and wouldn’t have the words to describe the machinery working behind them.

But here I am, at age 30, finally waking up from a daze where I saw the world through a lens that divided it into two: right and wrong, us or them, true or false, beautiful or ugly, worthy or worthless.

Here I am, trying to find the shades of gray between the black and white.

Here I am, desperately trying to tell my brain that nuances exist. That looks are only an entry point. That presentation is mostly a facade and doesn’t tell us much more than that.

It’s a constant struggle not to assign merit and meaning based on how someone looks.

I fail most days. I find myself having the most ignorant assumptions. It truly saddens me sometimes.

Maybe it’s because I have a deep desire to see things for what they are, but this is my biggest roadblock.

I’ll keep trying, and I don’t think I can ever see things 100% for what they are. But I hope I can get close enough not to miss out on the beauty of life because of my biases.

Picture context

Pic 1 was taken in 2009 in 8th grade after me bawling my eyes out because I felt ugly and knew the pics would come out badly

Pic 2 was taken in 2018 after winning Miss Africa Beauty Queen among 15 countries representing Ethiopia

I’ve always been curious about psychic readings but never tried one, so I decided to give it a go.

Surprisingly, the things she said resonated.

The scientific part of me kept saying, “Hey, you’re not special! Almost all humans have fundamental problems, aspirations, and behaviors. The things she’s telling you aren’t groundbreaking truths about yourself. They likely apply to maybe 70% of the people at this party.”

I had to tell my brain to quit yapping. As long as I was sitting in front of her, I wanted to experience it for what it was.

And she didn’t disappoint. She made me do a small visualization exercise, which was helpful and interesting in seeing how our thoughts lead to emotions which lead to somatic manifestations. She also said I carry other people’s emotions like they’re my own. (Accurate.) That I’m searching for something I think is “out there” but it’s actually inside me. (Also accurate.)

But it was The Moon card that made me stop and think some more.

So I have decided to fully base my life decisions on psychic mediums and dedicate myself to being a channel. Full stop.

...I’m kidding. That’s not how this essay ends.

The psychic experience is just a segue into a realization I had a day or two after meeting her.

The Moon Card

One of the things she mentioned was that I struggle to be vulnerable because I got The Moon card. She added that I struggle to show the full range of myself to others and always strive to be helpful and “have it together.” She said this takes away from my authenticity and is a form of self-deception, and deception to others.

Well. That was on point.

And it’s something I’m actively working on this year as part of my list of priorities (the list is looooong).

The Instagram Audit

A day after this event, I was busy choosing the best picture to post on my Instagram stories from the double-digit pictures I took.

I had to be careful to choose the one that showed my “good side.” Careful to show my playful side, but not too much. Careful to say something witty but relatable.

It was exhausting.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been away from the game for a while and that part of my brain has forgotten how to do all that. I was away from major social media for more than a year, and I’m just slowly coming back in small and controlled ways.

I told myself I’d come back to social media “differently” this time. More intentional. More real. But here I was, doing the same dance, just with a year’s worth of self-awareness watching me do it.

I had some free time on my hands, so I decided to do a sweep of my Instagram feed and highlighted stories.

First of all: why did I feel the need to put my entire life in my Instagram stories? Interesting!

I spent a good part of an hour going through my travel highlights, my grad school highlights, my art highlights, dating as far back as 2018.

While checking each picture and video, my brain was saying things like:

“Oh, remember when this pic was taken? This was happening in your life.”

“Remember what this person did or said, even though you look like good friends in this picture?”

“Remember why you shared this quote and what you actually meant to say without giving away too much?”

It was like revisiting my life in quick succession of videos and pics.

Through it all, it bothered me that I looked happy. Put together. Even in the times my life was on fire.

My perfectly curated selfies where I look “cute” didn’t tell 10% of the story. My reality.

I felt like a fraud.

I started archiving most of these highlighted stories.

That’s when I was reminded of what the psychic said about me being performative and struggling to be vulnerable.

But I Try To Be Real... Don’t I?

And mind you, this is from someone who genuinely tries to show the honest side of herself.

I’ve written about how medical school was an uphill battle for me. I’ve had magazine interviews talking about how struggling with my mental health made me passionate about destigmatizing it. I share extensively on LinkedIn about times I failed and what I learned, probably one of the few reasons I have 55k+ followers. People love to hear when you look accomplished but are relatable and tell them you’re human too. I know I do.

All to say: I do consciously try to show my real side.

But even my “realness” is curated. I share my struggles, but only the ones that make me look brave for overcoming them. I’m not sharing the ugly, boring, unimpressive struggles. Just the ones that fit the narrative: “I failed, I learned, I grew.” But what about the times I failed and just... stayed failed?

And I have a limit to what I share.

Because I still want to fit in with my peers. I want a stranger to think I’m smart and attractive. I want the people in my past to see how well I’m doing.

I want to scream at the world that I am doing well and I have it together and I am thriving, one Instagram picture and reel at a time.

I understand it’s deep-rooted human nature to feel a sense of belonging, to desire higher social status, and to be admired. So I don’t berate myself more than necessary because I know, ultimately, I’m governed by evolutionary mechanisms, many of them out of reach of my conscious decision-making process.

And add to this how social media is specifically designed to capitalize on this desire to be validated? Of course I’m doomed.

Well. We’re all doomed.

The Perfectly Painted Version

So as I was scrolling through years’ worth of my life’s highlighted moments, I realized: I am indeed not authentic and vulnerable.

I painted a picture of someone impressive.

Mostly focused on her looks. Mostly focused on her career achievements. Mostly focused on her awesome experiences. Mostly focused on how she can be multi-talented.

Maybe a very precisely painted version of me that fits perfectly within the social standards of the people I want to impress, people who exist in my imagination. I don’t even think these people exist in real life because they’re too busy living their lives, or they aren’t what I made them to be.

Everything I built is well-curated to paint me in a specific light.

Throughout the year, I’ve received messages from strangers or people I’ve only interacted with briefly but who followed my work and content on social media. They’ve sent me poetic admiration that made me ask: “Are they talking about me?”

Because I know the image I’ve curated isn’t the real me.

The Illusion

I think these people immensely helped me understand: most social media is an illusion.

If I can paint this perfect picture of what my life is when it’s not even 10% of what my story actually is, then that impressive person I follow, the one I deeply want to be like, might not even be what I think they are.

Social media gives us snapshots of a moment. The story is missing. The context is missing.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some awesome content creators, individuals, and pages who have mastered the art of being real and vulnerable, so I’m not criticizing everyone. But these people are the exception, not the rule.

So What Now?

I’m still asking myself: how do I be vulnerable, real, and not performative in my social media persona without exposing myself to unnecessary harm and privacy issues?

I don’t even know what “authentic” means on Instagram. Does it mean posting my 5:30 AM face when my cat Belete wakes me up? Does it mean sharing the days I feel like a failure without packaging it into a “lesson learned” post? Does it mean... just not posting at all?

I’m trying to find the courage to only share, say, and post things that are truly me, and done for the right intention, not to impress.

If they’re truly impressive? Okay, good. Do it. But let that be the byproduct, not the main objective.

I’m still trying to tell my brain not to be envious when I see a cool post, travel story, fashionable dress, award in a field I want to work in.

I have to remind myself: I can’t compare their highlight reel to my bad day.

I don’t know their story. What they had to learn. What they had to sacrifice to get there.

Just like how people might think I’m just lucky, superficial, or had smooth sailing in life when they see my social media presence.

So in conclusion: the psychic was spot on.

And I’m trying to see how I can do better so on my next reading(if there is one), I’m not told I’m inauthentic.

በአማርኛ ሙሉ አረፍተ ነገር ከፃፍኩኝ ምናልባት አመታት ሆነውኝ ሊሆን ይችላል∷ የብዕር አጣጣሌ ስርዓት አልበኝነቱ በጣም ያሳብቃል∷ ድሮ “የግሬድ” ተማሪ እያለው አማርኛ ክፍለ ግዜ ወይም አማርኛ ትምህርትን በጣም እወድ ነበር∷ ምሳሌያዊ ንግግሩ፣ ፈሊጡ፣ ቅኔውና ሰዋስው ለኔ በጣም “አርቲስትክ” ነበሩ∷ አብዛኛው ተማሪዎች አማርኛ ቀላል ነው ብሎ ስለሚያስቡ ትኩረት አይሰጡትም ነበር∷ ምን መተት እንደሆነ እንጃ ገና ከሁለት ወይ ሦስተኛ ክፍል ጀምሮ አማርኛ መፃፍና ማንበብ ደስ ይለኝ ነበር∷ እናቴ እንግሊዝኛ ቋንቋ አስተማሪ ናት∷ ኮተቤ ለዲግሪዋ ስትማር “ማይነር’ የወሰደችው አማርኛ ነበር∷ አንድ በጣም የምወደው አጋዥ መጽሐፍ ነበራት፤ አስተማሪዋ ነበር የፃፈው∷ አማርኛ ሰዋስው “ሪፈረንስ” ነበር መጽሐፉ∷ ሁሌም አነበው የነበረው አማርኛ ምሳሌያዊ ንግግሮችን ከእንግሊዘኛ ተቀራራ ጋር የሚያነፃፅርበትን ምዕራፍ ነው∷ አሁን ቆም ብዬ ሳስበው ውስጤ ያለችው “የ80 ዓመት ምስክር” የተፈጠረችው “in part” በዚህ መጽሐፍ ምክንያት ነው∷ አራተኛ ክፍል ሆኜ “fascinate” ካደረጉኝና የማይረሱኝ ምሳሌያዊ ንግግሮች መካከል

ቂ በ ቃ ይስቃል

ሲያጌጡ ይመላለጡ

ድስት ግጣሙን አያጣም

መተው ነገሬን ከተተው

ካለመናገር ደጃዝማችነት ይቀራል

አህያውን ፈርቶ ዳውላውን

ጅል እና ውሃ ወደመሩት ነው

ክርስቲያን ተስፋ አይቆርጣም

አባይን ውሃ ጠማዉ

ግም ለግም አብረህ አዝግም

የጂብ ችኩል ቀንድ ይነክሳል

አወቅኩሽ ናቅኩሽ

አጥብቆ ጠያቂ የእናቱን መሞት ይረዳል

ሰርገኛ መጣ በርበሬ ቀንጥሱ

ባጎረስኩ እጄን ተነከስኩ

እከክልኝ ልከክልህ

አቅሌን ያዞሩኝና ምናልባትም “feminist” እንደሆኑ ከገፋፉኝ

ሴት ሲበዛ ጎመን ጠነዛ

ሴትና አህያ በዱላ

ሴት የወለደ በአመቱ ተሰደደ

አወቅሽ አወቅሽ ሲሏት የባሏን ዳዊት አጠበች

ሴት አበባ ናት ነገር ግን ጠንካራ አጥር ያስፈልጋታል

አማርኛ አስተማሪዎቼን እስካሁን አስታውሳቸዋለሁ∷ የስምንተኛ ክፍል አስተማሪዬ በተለይ ስለ ስነ ግጥም ሲያስተምር የመንግስቱ ለማን ግጥም በቃሉ ያነበንብልን ነበር∷ የመጀመሪያዎችን ጥቂት ስንኞች እስካሁን ትዝ ይሉኛል∷ ( አይ አርጅና ፣የመጀመሪያዎችን ስንኝ ብዬ የማስታወሰው ግን ተደበላልቆ ነው∷)

በጠራ ጨረቃ ፣ በእኩለ ለሊት

አይኖችዋ እያበሩ ፣ እንደ ከዋክብት

“ሳማት ሳማት” አሉት ፣ እቀፍ እቀፋት

ዋ ጀማሪ መሆን ፣ ዋ ተማሪነት

ዋ ትእዛዝ መፈፀም…

ልጅ ሆኜ በጣም “cringe-worthy” ከሚመስሉኝ ዘፈኖች መካከል የዲያስፖራ ጥሪ መሰል ዘፈኖች ነበሩ∷ ኑ ተመለሱ የሚሉት ሁሉ ያስቁኝ ነበር∷ የፈሩት ይደርሳል የጠሉት ይወርሳል ማለት ይህ ነው∷ ከኢትዮጵያ ለትምህርት ከወጣሁኝ ሶስት አመት ሊሞላኝ አንድ ወር ነው የቀረኝ∷ ከዕለት ፀሎቶች የመካከል ወደ ኢትዮጵያ መመለስ መቻል “without compromising the life and career i am building in the US “ ነው ∷ ገና እምቦቃቅላ ዲያስፖራ ነኝ∷ የዲያስፖራ-itis በሽታ እያጀማመረኝ ነው∷ አያድርገውና በሽታው ሙሉ ለሙሉ ቢንሰራፋና ዓመታት ቢሆነኝ ፣ እንጃ መትረፌንም!

ዲያስፖራ-itis ምልክቶች ምንድን ናቸዉ?ይህ በሽታ እንዳብዛኛው ህክምና ትምህርት ቤት እንደተማርኩዋቸው በሽታዎች “idiopathic” አይደለም∷ ምንጩ ግልጽ ነው∷ ከገዛ ማህበረሰብ ፣በአካል፣ በልብና በባህል መለየት ነው∷ የበሽታ የተለያዩ ልኬቶች/intensity ሲኖሩት እንደ የሰው የኑሮ፣አስተዳደግና የልብ ሁኔታ ይለያያል∷ አንዳንድ ሰዎች በቀላሉ ተጠቂ ሲሆኑ(እንደኔ ያሉት)፤ የበሽታውን ምልክት ከአገር በወጡ በተወሰኑ ወራቶች እስከ አንድ ሁለት አመት ውስጥ ሊያሳዩ ይችላሉ∷ አንዳንዶች አስርት ዓመታት(decades) ሊወስድባቸው ይችላል∷ ለአንዳንዶች ምልክቶቹ ድብቅ ሲሆኑ፤ አንዳንዶች እጅጉንን ግልጽ የሆኑ ምልክቶች ያሳያሉ∷ እንደኔ ያሉት ስለበሽታ የሚያወሩና በአደባባይ የበሽታ ተጠቂ መሆናቸውን የሚለፍፉ ጥቂት አይደሉም∷

የዲያስፖራ-itis ተጠቂዎች ህመማቸውን ለማስታገስ የአገር ቤት ዘፈን ደጋግሞ መስማት፣ከሀገር ቤት ልጆች ጋር ጊዜ ለማሳለፍ መሞከር፣ ሀገር ቤት ካሉ ጓደኛና ቤተሰቦች ጋር ደጋግሞ መደወል/ማውራት፣ የሀገር ቤት ምግብ መስራት ወይም ያለበት ቦታ ለመመገብ መጣር ፣የሌላ ሃገር ዜጋ ለሆኑ ጓደኞቻቸው ስለ ሀገር ቤት ለማስተማር መሞከር ፣የሀገር ቤት ልብስ መልበስ……ብዙ ይጥራሉ∷ የበሽታ ተጠቂዎች ምንም ያህል በሽታው ስር የሰደደና እጅግም የተወሳሰ በመሆኑ፣ህመሙን ከመስማት ወደ ኋላ አይሉም∷ አፍ የፈቱበት ቋንቋቸው እየተረሳቸው ይመጣል ፤ያደጉበት ሰፈራቸውንና ከተማቸውን ለውጥ በፎቶ ሲያዩ የማያውቁት ሀገር ይሆንባቸዋል∷ “እውነት ይሄ CMC ነው?አዲስ አበባ ነው?” እያሉ ከመደነቅ አይቆጠቡም∷

ከኢትዮጵያ ለትምህርት ስወጣ፣ ትልቅ ውሳኔ አደረግኩ። MPH ከጆንስ ሆፕኪንስ? እድል ነው! እንዴት እንከራከርበታለን? The plan was ትምህርትን ጨርሼ፣ ልምድ ሰብስቤ፣ ወደ ቤት እመለሳለሁ። ሶስት አመት ብቻ። ምናልባት አምስት። ሶስት አመት ሊሞላኝ አንድ ወር ነው የቀረኝ። ገና አልተመለስኩም።

“ለምን?”

መልሱ ቀላል ነው። ግን መናገር ከባድ ነው፡

“ኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ ያለኝን ስራ፣ ያለኝን እድል፣ ያለኝን ገንዘብ አላገኝም።”

እዚህ ላይ ነው የሚያሳዝነው። ሀገሬን እወዳለሁ ግን ሀገሬ የምፈልገውን ህይወት ልትሰጠኝ አትችልም። Admitting this እንደ ክህደት ይሰማኛል። ግን እውነት ነው።እና ይህን እውነት ለመቀበል አመታት ወስዶኛል። ምክንያቱም ማመን ማለት፡ መምረጥ ነው። የመረጥኩት አሜሪካ ንነው ፤ኢትዮጵያን ሳይሆን።እና ይህ መምረጥ ዋጋ አለው!

ከአንድ የልብ ጓደኛዬ ጋር ስለዚህ በሽታ ስናወራ እንዴት ይህን በሽታ እንደምከላከል በጉራ እያወራሁለት ነበር∷ የማስተርስ ዲግሪዬን “ጆንስ ሆፕኪንስ ዩኒቨርስቲ” ስማር የኢትዮጵያ የባህል አምባሳደርነት ከትምህርት ቀጥሎ ሁለተኛ ስራዬ ነበር∷ የሀገር ቤት ምግብን ጥንቅቅ አድርጌ ሰርቼ፣ ጓደኞቼ “የኢትዮጵያ ምግብ እንደዚህ ድንቅ ነው?” እስኪሉ ድረስ “ከትቢያቸው” ነበር∷ አንድ የናይጄሪያዊ የቅርብ ጓደኛዬ እንደውም የኢትዮጵያ ምግብ ከመውደዱ እንደ ኢትዮጵያውያን በሳምንት አንዴ የስጋ ወጥ ካልበላ ቅር ይለው ነበር∷ ከሀገር ቤት ተሸክሜ ያመጣኃቸውን የባህል ልብሶችን በሰበር አስባቡ እየለበስኩ ለጠየቀኝ ሁሉ ስላልባሳቶቻችን፣ ስለ አመት ባህላችን እናገር ነበር∷ “Hopkins Got Talent” የተባለ የታለንት ሾው ላይ ሁላ የቅርብ ጓደኛዬን “bully” አድርጌ መድረክ ላይ አምስት አይነት የተለያዩ የብሄር ጭፈራዎችን በሦስት ደቂቃ ውስጥ ለብሰን አሳይታን ነበር∷ ምን አለፋችሁ ምስክር ያለችበት ቦታ ሁሉ የኢትዮጵያ ምግብ፣ጭፈራ፣ቡና… አይጠፋም∷ ኢትዮጵያዊነትን በሄድኩበት ሁሉ ይዤው እሄዳለሁ∷ ታዲያ ጓደኛዬንም ልመክረው ጀመርኩ∷ እሱ ከሀገር ከወጣ ወደ አምስት ዓመት ሆኖታል እናም እንደኔ ኢትዮጵያዊነትን በየቦታው ይዘህ ሂድ ብዬ መከርኩት∷ ስራ ቦታም ኢትዮጵዊያ ያልሆኑ ጓደኞችህም ጋር ስለ ኢትዮጵያ ተናገር∷ የተወሰነ ያህል “connected” እንደሆንክ ይሰማሃል አልኩት∷

ጓደኛዬን አጥብቄ ብወደውም ሁሌም “bubble burst” ማድረግ ይወዳል∷ ብሽቅ ቢያረገኝም ግን ብዙ ስለምማርበት እና ስለ ህይወት ያለኝን አተያይ እንድፈትሽ ስለሚያደርገኝ ከሱ ጋር መወያየትን አላቆምም(you know who you are ጓድ!)∷ ታዲያ ምን አለ ምንም እንኳን ባህልሽን ላለመርሳት ብትሞክሪም ከባህልሽ ጋር ግን እኩል እየተራመድሽ አይደለም “you are frozen in time “ብሎኝ ቁጭ! ምንም እንኳን የቻልሽውን ያህል ከሀገር ቤት ሰዎች ጋር ብታወሪም፣ የመዝናኛ አውታሮች ላይ ያሉ ባህል ተኮር ነገሮችን ብትከታተይም፣ ሀገር ውስጥ እንደመኖርና ከባህሉ ጋር “interact” እንደማድረግ አይሆንም∷ ትንሽ ልከራከረው ሞከርኩ ኧረ እኔ በጣም ቅርብ ጓደኞች አሉኝ ስለ”current” ነገሮች የሚነግሩኝ ደግሞ ዘይቤዎንም ፈሊጡንም ከማህበረሰባዊ ትስስር ገጾች ላይ አገኛለሁ∷ ”He doubled down” ነው የሚሉ የአሁን ልጆች? አንቺ ከአሁን ጋር አይደለም እየተራመድ ያለሽው ፤የምታቂዉ አብዛኛው ነገር 2023 ላይ ከሀገር ቤት ስትወጪ ቆሟል∷ ከሌሎች የምትቀበይው መረጃ/ኢንፎርሜሽን እንጂ ልምምድ“experience” አይደለም∷ አሁን ተመልካች ነሽ፤ ተጫዋች አይደለሽም∷ ተጫዋች ካልሆንሽ ቱሪስት እንደመሆን ነው∷ ትልቅ ሜዳ ላይ ያለ ፌስቲቫልን በመስኮት አጮልቆ እንደመመልከት ይቆጠራል∷ ምናልባት የተወሰኑ ሰዎች መጥተው ስለፌስቲቫሉ ሊነግሩሽ ይችላሉ ፤ነገር ግን ሙሉ ለሙሉ”experience” አደረግሽው አይባልም∷ ሁሉም የስሜት ህዋሳቶችሽ አልተሳተፉም ፤አልዳሰሽ ሽውም፤ አላየሽውም፤ አልሰማሽውም፤ አላሸተሽውም∷ በዋነኛነት አንቺ ላይ ቀጥተኛ ተጽዕኖ አላሳደረም ከአንቺ ግብዓት አላገኘም∷

ይህን በደንብ ካስረዳኝ በኋላ ለተወሰነ ቀን በጣም አዝኜ ነበር∷ ዲያስፖራ-itis’ እጅግ ጥልቅ እንደሆነ የገባኝ የዛን ቀን ሳይሆን አይቀርም∷ ምናልባትም ከሀገር የመውጣት እና የመኖር ውሳኔዬ “weight” የተሰማኝ የዛን ቀን ነው∷ የተሻለ ኑሮና ትምህርት ባገኝም እኔን ግን እኔን የሚያረገኝ ህብረተሰብ እና ማንነት “compromise” እንዳደረኩና መቼም ወደዛ ማንነትም ላልቀርብ እንደምችል ገባኝ ∷ ይህን ሁሉ በደንብ ካስረዳኝ በኋላ ለተወሰነ ቀን በጣም አዝኜ ነበር።አዝኜ ብዬ እናገራለሁ ግን እውነቱ? “ተናደድኩ!”

ተናደድኩ የሀገሬ ባህል ያለኔ እየተራመደ ስለሆነ፤

ተናደድኩ ሁሉንም ነገር ለማድረግ ስለሞከርኩ ግን በቂ ስላልሆነ፤

ተናደድኩ መምረጥ ስላለብኝ፤ ስራ ወይም ባህል፤ እድል ወይም ማንነት፤

ለምን ሁለቱንም መያዝ አልችልም?

ግን ቁጣዬን ለማሳየት አልደፈርኩም። በሀዘን ቀየርኩት። ምክንያቱም ሀዘን “acceptable” ነው እውነት ነው ዲያስፖራይተስ ሁሉም ጎኑ መጥፎ አይደለም∷ ራሴን በራሴ መንገድ ፈልጌ እንዳገኝ (ካደኩበት የባህል ጫና እርቄ)፣ የሌሎች ማህበረሰቦችን የህይወት አተያይ እንዳስስ እና አለምን አስፍቼ እንዳይ ረድቶኛል∷

ምንድነው የምታካብዥው? ወደ ሀገር መመለስ ትችያለሽ! ምናልባት የተወሰነ ዓመት ቆይተሽ ስትመጪ ካቆምሽበት ትቀጥያለሽ! ልትሉ ትችላላችሁ∷ የሚያሳዝነው ይህ እውነት አይደለም∷ አገር ቤት ያለው ባህል፣ ዘይቤ ፣ እናናአስተሳሰብ “evolve” እያደረገ ሲሄድ እኔ ግን ከሀገር በወጣሁበት ጊዜ ባለው ሁኔታ ላይ “stuck” አድርጊያለሁ∷ ወይ አሁን ካለሁበት ቦታ “western society” ጋር “belong” አላደርግ ነገር! ብሞክርም ከተወሰነ ፐርሰንት በላይ “assimilate” ላደርግ አልችልም∷ ታዲያ መሃል ሰፋሪ መሆን ማለት ይሄ አይደለም? Diaspora-itis ማለት መናፍቅ ያለፈውን ነገር ግን እኩል መራመድ አለመቻል ከዛሬ ጋር!

ለአሁኑ መፍትሄ የለኝም∷ ከኢትዮጵያዬ ጋር እኩል ለመራመድ እድሃለሁ∷ እንጀራ በሳምንት አንዴ የሀገር ቤት ዘፈን እየሰማው እጋግራለሁ∷ በያመት ባሉና በሰበብ ባስባቡ ድፎ ዳቦ እደፋለሁ∷ የአገር ቤት ሙዚቃ ክሊፕ አይኔን በልጥጬ ደጋግሜ አያለሁ∷ ከኢትዮጵያውያን ኮሚኒቲካ ጋር ”interact” ለማድረግ እሞክራለሁ∷ የሐበሻ ልብሶች ለመልበስ ምክንያት አሳድዳለሁ∷ ይሄ ሁሉ “meningitis” ወይ ማጅራት ገትር ለያዘው ሰው ለእራስ ምታት ፓራስታሞል ማስታገሻ እንደመስጠት ነው∷ ግን ምን አደርጋለሁ ህመሜን ከማስታገስ ባለፈ? Maybe part of my solution is realizing that my loss is a loss of belonging and not of survival. Maybe the solution is acknowledging that i have agency and i am at the moment making sacrifces and a future where i don’t choose between identity and opportunities will come.

(Disclaimer- there is no actual disease called diaspora-itis, and I am making it up for artistic purposes. I wouldn’t enjoy being sued over a disease I made up for fun and giggles!)

I once planned a friend’s birthday party while still being admitted at the hospital. I won’t take any excuses unless I am seriously out of resources like time, money, or mental energy.

My parents were the first victims of these surprise birthdays. I started young like, really young. I would cook a meal, decorate the house with the tiny pocket money they gave me, and surprise them when they were back from work.

I recently had a heart-to-heart conversation with my mom and she reminded me of the surprise birthday parties I would throw for her with my sister as early as age 12. She told me how during the summers she was doing her master’s degree, I would clean the house, cook her favorite meal, and make sure it was heated right before she came home from school so she could rest as much as she could. She was telling me how caring I was since I was a kid.

As I grew older, these targeted warfares spread to my parents’ anniversary. My sister and I would lock them in their bedrooms (yes, really), then proceed to decorate the house and cook their favorite meals for a couple hours.

The biggest victim of this warfare was and is my sister. Her birthday week is a national holiday in my head. She gets small gifts every day. She will get a surprise party, trip, gift, and whatnot. I made sure she felt fully loved and adored.

In the past few years when I wasn’t in the same country as her, I had to bully my friends in Addis to get her flowers and gifts. I still managed to make her feel loved even when I was continents away. Because that’s what you do when you’re a people pleaser you find a way. Even when it makes no logistical sense.

As I got older and my social circle expanded, I still managed to make the people that mattered to me feel special. Sending genuine long paragraphs to friends when they felt down or needed to be celebrated. Helping a mentee by going above and beyond. Prioritizing my friends’ emotions when they were going through things, which meant I might not share my own misery, good news, or anything else because they came first. We’re friends, duh I should care for them!

If they were sick I would go visit even if I had a million things on my plate. I would buy them groceries if needed.

I remember vividly in grad school: one of my then-friends (currently ex-friend for a good reason) was sick and couldn’t make it to a group hangout because she had a stomach bug. After the hangout I probably had 30 minutes to spare before going home and tackling my million assignments, but I managed to call her, ask for specific drinks and food she needed from the grocery store, bring them to her, and see her for 2 minutes.

I remember how surprised she was. I was confused by her surprise.

Isn’t that what friends do for each other? They take care of each other even if it means they have to compromise a little from their capacity.

Let Me Be Clear About Something

This article isn’t a recounting of how awesome I am as a friend or family member. I am awesome a tad bit over the top, but still awesome but that’s not the point.

And I am not here to say we should not all be kind and caring. Not at all. All the things I mentioned I did are extremely normal and good human behaviour. I’m here to challenge the intention and intensity behind it.

The Heartbreak Moment

Until I turned 30, I thought I was being kind, caring, and such a good person because I focused so much on making sure others were okay.

I chose my words carefully not to disappoint others even if what I wanted to say was different. I let things slide because I was “understanding.” I burned myself out trying to be helpful to everyone as much as I could because duh, we are social animals and we are meant to help each other. I tried to celebrate and uplift people as much as I could because duh, that is what community is about.

But I finally learned a term that we are all so tired of hearing at this point thanks to social media and pop psychology: people pleasing.

I knew I was one. I just didn’t know why I was like that or why people who are like this do it.

The day I learned it not read it or heard about it, but more like felt it to my core something in me broke. Kind of like a mini heartbreak. I was genuinely very sad for a week and was grieving myself.

I learned that people pleasers, to an extent, are using a reverse technique to what people with narcissistic tendencies use. They focus so much on others and want to please others so they can control the narrative of what others think of them. A form of covert narcissism.

I need you to think I am kind, caring, beautiful, smart whatever the adjective is I am in need of internally so I am going to do everything in my power to make you think it, because I don’t actually believe I am these things.

Ouch.

Playing God (And Why That’s a Problem)

Another time it sunk deep in my psyche how people pleasing is quite maladaptive and manipulative is when I realized: you are playing God by being a people pleaser.

Let me explain it will make sense in a couple sentences.

When you are people pleasing, you are so focused on others’ emotions, lives, and issues. You think you need to do this and that for them to help them or save them. You think by not speaking your truth and focusing on their needs, you are shielding them from harm. You think if you just help them with this and that, they might be able to solve their problems.

You are playing the role of a rescuer in their lives. If they share a problem with you, you rush in to solve it rather than taking some time to really just listen and acknowledge their ordeals.

Well, isn’t that playing God?

Who really made you assume you can solve anyone’s problems? Why do you think you can rescue others unless you are God? Why do you think you are so special that you have answers to people’s problems?

Of course I am making this more dramatic and I don’t think people pleasers sit down and think “I am so special, I want to solve everyone’s problems.” It is more like a lens we see the world through. It is more a deep desire to want to be helpful, to want to be seen as good, kind, and sometimes perfect.

Why Both Parties Lose

The sad thing about people pleasing is that both parties are at a loss. The pleaser and the pleasee (is this even a real word?) do not have actual genuine connection in this dynamic.

The people pleaser is always hiding behind performance, validation seeking, and trying to fit a mold of who the other party wants them to be (or at least who they think the other party wants them to be). And so the pleasee never gets to know the real or authentic feelings, ideologies, opinions, and stands on matters.

Even worse, most people pleasers harbor a feeling of resentment towards the pleasee because their efforts and people pleasing tendencies might not be reciprocated.

I definitely held a lot of resentment and grudges towards my friends, the people I pleased, and the world in general until recently.

I was baffled how people I had done so much for couldn’t spare a minute or two to provide me with what I needed. I was baffled how they didn’t ANTICIPATE what I needed before I spoke like I did for them. I was surprised when they prioritized themselves and had boundaries unlike me. I felt neglected, like I didn’t matter, when people didn’t consider me in their decisions, actions, or how they spoke.

It was an exhausting existence, to be honest.

It is also a sad existence because I didn’t know what exactly was going on behind the facade, the role I was playing so well. Looking back it felt like I was trapped in my own conditioning. If anyone had tried to teach me what I know now, I would not have been receptive (this is coming from someone who prides herself on being very flexible, curious, and open-minded).

Putting Down the Superpower

So yeah, people pleasing was a superpower I had that I consciously had to put down.

I say superpower because it was a force in me that made quite a scene and impact. I was so good at it that I didn’t even realize the cost to myself and to the authenticity of my relationships.

The Unlearning

Where I am now is in the phase of unlearning.

I am unlearning that prioritizing myself is not being selfish. I am unlearning that I need to always be helpful when others are struggling. I am unlearning the need to excessively seek validation from others. I am unlearning that to love is to fully give yourself to another person. I am unlearning that silence is abandonment.

I am learning it is better to fully express myself and be authentic and gain only a few true connections rather than cater to the needs of everyone and have superficial transactional relationships. I am learning to not rush to fix others’ problems but to be there and hold space and acknowledge their reality. I am learning that I should get to know me and give myself validation first any external validation is additional and secondary. I am learning it is okay to disappoint people sometimes because I am just human and can’t be perfect. I am learning not to take things too personally and that we are all at the center of our own personal universes.

It’s slow work. Some days I still want to lock my parents in their bedroom and throw them a surprise party. Some days I still check my phone obsessively to see if a friend responded to my check-in text with the same energy I gave.

But I’m learning.

I’m learning that love doesn’t require performance. That caring doesn’t require martyrdom. That friendship isn’t measured in surprise parties and grocery runs and perfectly timed text messages.

And maybe (just maybe) the people who love me would rather have the real me than the perfectly curated, endlessly giving, secretly resentful version I’ve been offering all these years.

A Note to My Younger Self

If I could go back and tell 12-year-old me something, I’d say:

“You don’t have to lock them in the bedroom to prove you love them. Just be you. The messy, sometimes selfish, sometimes moody, sometimes disappointing you. That’s enough. That’s always been enough.”

This gem was not uttered by my father, my mother, my uncle, or any actual mentor in my life. Why? Because they all recognize I’m an adult who doesn’t need to be spoken to like a wide-eyed apprentice awaiting enlightenment. More importantly, they have enough actual wisdom to know that real wisdom doesn’t announce itself with a drumroll and a neon sign.

No, this phrase was repeatedly delivered by a man I briefly entertained as a romantic interest before I finally admitted to myself that he subscribed to a patriarchal system of thinking that only benefits him and his peers. I don’t regret most people I’ve dated, but I am a little embarrassed I entertained “Wisdom Guy” longer than necessary. The signs were there about a month in, but as someone who is wildly tolerant and tries to avoid assumptions, I let him stick around long enough to write about him and to collect some truly remarkable quotes.

Buckle up. Let’s dissect.

“The Sex I Am Currently Giving You Is the Only Sex I Have to Give You”

When I think of physical intimacy, I think of it as two (or however many- not to exclude poly-amorous individuals) people expressing their desires using their bodies. Various acts, emotions, and explorations. A collaborative art project, if you will.

I never had to think of sex as something someone gives me until I met this man, and he deployed this sentence when I suggested we be a bit more... explorative. Less paint-by-numbers, more abstract expressionism.

It took me a few days to realize he probably grew up being told that men provide and women accept, and he’d apparently applied this framework to the bedroom too. In his worldview, sex was a transaction with fixed terms and conditions. Men penetrate. Women receive. The end.

Imagine my surprise when I realized I’d been issued a non-negotiable service package.

“I Don’t Give Head Because It Hurts My Jaw”

Ah, yes, the jaw. That delicate instrument he needed to preserve for essential functions like talking and eating.

This would be a perfectly reasonable boundary except he had no problem asking me for the same act. Repeatedly. Fiercely, even. To the point of, shall we say, visible evidence of enthusiasm.

When I pointed out this asymmetry, I got a fascinating explanation: he only did that for people he held to “high standards.”

So let me get this straight: I performed this act with no hesitation because I consider giving my partner pleasure an important part of a relationship. But apparently, my willingness made me... what? Easy? Not worthy of high standards?

The math wasn’t mathing.

It became clear this wasn’t about his jaw at all. It was about traditional assumptions where women submit and serve sexually, but men aren’t expected to reciprocate. One person gives. The other receives. There’s that framework again.

To me, intimacy is about exploring each other’s desires, taking care of each other’s needs, sometimes without expecting anything in return. It’s saying “I’m focusing on you right now” even if no grand finale happens. But I fear he saw the world in “black and white,” as he proudly stated multiple times, which, to me, is just a polite way of saying “I don’t do nuance.”

“When I Do Things, I Do Them Big”

This declaration came in response to me suggesting a Sunday hike to a national park 40 minutes away. Round trip with hiking: maybe 4-5 hours.

According to Wisdom Guy, this didn’t meet his threshold. When he travels, he needs to stay overnight and “make the best of his time.”

Sir, it’s a day hike. Not the Oregon Trail.

But this reveals something important: some people are so committed to their self-narrative that they’ll reject perfectly good experiences because they don’t fit the image of how things should be done. The optics matter more than the function.

Sound familiar? (It should. We all do this sometimes. I certainly have.)

“Are You a Woman of God?”

Early on, this man told me he wasn’t religious but was “still a Christian” who’d found his own way of understanding God. He went to different churches on Sundays because he enjoyed the music.

Against my better judgment, I typically don’t date religious people because we tend to see the world differently. I went along with it.

Then, during our final days together, after I’d brought up concerns about compatibility (specifically around his understanding of gender roles), he brought Christianity into the conversation. Hard.

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon, we spent three hours with me trying to understand(grilling him a bit, maybe) what he meant by various things he’d said over two months. I’m a nerd, so I’ve written down questions in my notes. On Tuesday, we decided to continue the conversation.

He opened with: “I was feeling spiritual unease after we talked, so I went to church on Sunday. The pastor was talking about being equally yoked with your partner. So I’m asking, are we equally yoked?”

Then, with an almost rehearsed confrontational expression: “Tell me this: Do you consider yourself to be a woman of God?”

I asked him what he meant by that. If we’re taking it at face value, yes, I’m a woman, I believe in a higher power or God (though not necessarily the way the Bible describes it), and I try to live accordingly. But if he meant it in the evangelical sense? No.

He then tried a different tactic: “Like, if crusaders said they’d only spare men and women of God, would you say you’re a woman of God?”

That’s when my heart sank. I was talking to someone on a completely different wavelength. It felt like a slap.

The next day, I ended things. I told him our differences were too fundamental to reconcile, and I didn’t see a long-term path forward. I admitted I’d given him a chance because I was trying to be less assuming and avoid labeling people in categories, but I should have also listened to my gut and acknowledged the early signs.

I asked him: if your faith is this important to you, why pursue someone who told you upfront they’re not religious, left the church at 18, and went through phases of atheism and agnosticism?

His answer? “Everyone has different journeys. I thought you might be going through a phase.”

A phase. My spiritual beliefs were a phase he could wait out.

That was the most condescending part of all.

“Women These Days Want to Talk About Being Independent, But Then They Go to Sperm Donors”

During one of our marathon conversations where I was trying to understand his worldview, this man told me feminism is flawed because it “needs men.”

He also said he felt uncomfortable when women, including myself, say things like “strong independent Black woman” because it makes men feel devalued.

Let me be clear: feminism, or any balanced movement, doesn’t say the other part isn’t important. Men and women are equally important. We need each other. That’s not up for debate.

But independence doesn’t mean devaluation. When most of us talk about being independent, we’re talking about financial resilience, being able to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. It doesn’t mean we can or want to do it alone. Humans are communal beings. We’re meant to support each other.

So yes, women go to sperm donors when they need to. Because we need men in various parts of our lives, just as women are needed in men’s lives. That’s not a gotcha. That’s just... biology and community.

But in his bitterness, he couldn’t see it.

What I Learned (The Actual Wisdom)

This man made me realize how delusional people can be. He’s educated, accomplished even, but he lives in a bubble where he has the most wisdom among his friends and feels entitled to advise others when he desperately needs to check himself for biases.

It scared me to think: What biases am I severely blind to?

Because here’s the thing, I stayed longer than I should have. The signs were there. Around month one, actually. But I’m wildly tolerant, and I try not to make assumptions, so I ignored my gut.

I also realized I have a deep aversion to categorical thinking. Gender roles, labels, and rigid frameworks make me deeply uncomfortable. I believe part of why the world is divided, at war, and abusive to each other is because we categorize ourselves, slap on labels, and declare we’re fundamentally different from each other.

But underneath all the labels? We’re the same. We all want safety, love, and acceptance. By focusing on gender roles and categories, we lose the value of the individual.

My friends and I agree on this. Our language and behavior reflect it. We’re not perfect, we fall short, we have biases, we slip into categorical thinking, but we try to correct it and challenge each other.

When someone leads with “let me give you some wisdom,” what they’re really saying is: “I’m right, and I hold a superior view.” Real wisdom doesn’t announce itself. It speaks for itself.

And you know what? I’m glad I met Wisdom Guy. Not because the relationship worked, it spectacularly didn’t, but because he taught me to trust my gut earlier. To listen to the quiet voice that says, “This doesn’t sit right with me.”

To notice when someone sees me as a category first (woman, religious/not religious, traditional/progressive) and as me second.

And to recognize when I’m being given a service package I never asked for and dare to say, “No thanks, I’ll pass.”

The Bottom Line

If someone has to label their perspective as “wisdom” to convince you it’s valuable, it probably isn’t.

If someone sees the world in rigid black and white and calls it clarity, they’re probably missing the entire spectrum.

And if someone treats you like a category instead of a person? That’s not a relationship. That’s a role you’re being asked to audition for.

Trust your gut. Listen to the early signs. And for the love of all that’s holy, if someone asks you to perform acts they refuse to reciprocate while citing their precious jaw, run.

You deserve someone who sees you as you, not as a woman first and a person second. Someone who explores with you instead of issuing fixed terms. Someone who doesn’t need to announce their wisdom because they’re too busy actually being wise.

And if that person is just you, solo, for a while? That’s more than enough.

P.S. To Wisdom Guy, if you’re reading this: I hope you find someone who wants exactly what you’re offering. Truly. But maybe lead with the “equally yoked” question on date one next time. It’ll save everyone some time.

P.P.S. The jaw thing still makes me laugh.

I’d avoided everyone. Ate junk food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Scrolled my phone until my eyes hurt. Avoided showering. Thought about going to the gym, then didn’t. Thought about cooking, then didn’t. Thought about calling a friend, then didn’t.

Just... stayed in bed. With my cat. Feeling sorry for myself.

And at some point in the afternoon, I grabbed my journal and wrote this letter. Not because I’m good at self-compassion (I’m learning), but because I needed to say something to the part of me that was drowning. The part that felt completely alone. The part that didn’t know who the hell she was anymore without all the things that used to define her.

So here it is. Raw. Unedited. A letter to my brain when he’s freaking out. (I still haven’t figured out why my brain is a “he”)

Dear Mr. Brain,

Guess who’s being a little bitch? You! Mr. Brain.

Well, in his defense, he is undergoing tons of change and he had be confronted with his irrelevance and insignificance. He’s being challenged by sitting alone and deriving meaning from the depth of his existence. It’s a hard undertaking.

He feels like he’s on a tiny boat on a big, wild ocean, and he has been tasked to follow the light. The trick is the light goes wherever he decides to go, and so he has to be self-assured that he’ll make the right decisions, and he has to trust God and himself that he will go where he is loved, protected, and can be his best self.

I know he’s being a little bitch because he’s in a place he’s never been in before. He never had to stop and ask which way to go. He was used to frantically taking the boat towards any direction that he felt would lead him others where validation and proof of existence can be drawn.

Dear Mr. Brain, I’m sorry for calling you a little whiny bitch. Well, not because you’re not a little bitch, but more so because you had a good reason for it, and I should have been more understanding. More than anyone, I should know how hard you’ve been working, and I should be kinder to you. You are really trying your best, even though you are in a seemingly completely new world and you feel alone.

Dear Mr. Brain, you are one damn good, resilient gray matter. You are so curious, you love to learn, you love to grow, and you love to experience the world. You are caring, understanding, and loving. You are not perfect and make a shit ton of mistakes, but you are self-aware (sickeningly sometimes ), and you are willing to work on it.

Dear Brain, I know 2026 is hurting you egotistically in ways you didn’t even know were possible. I would be lying if I said it’s not challenging you in ways you didn’t know. You feel like you’re completely alone. You feel like you’ve lost your community. You feel insignificant because you had made a lot of meaning out of your career and passions, which are on pause right now. But I promise things will change. You will find direction again. You will find your people again.

Dear Brain, just hold on a little bit longer. In this discomfort, you will find the best version of you that has been hammered down by years of self-erasure and toxic productivity. You will find the beautiful you again. Take it one day at a time, and soon you’ll be amazed at how far you’ve come.

Dear Brain, I love you despite you being a little bitch sometimes.

—M

What I’m Learning About Being Kind to Yourself When Everything Hurts

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about transformation: it’s not a montage. It’s not a beautiful Instagram story with a triumphant soundtrack. It’s very messy and slow, and some days you stay in bed eating your 10th roll from Texas Roadhouse and calling yourself a little bitch in your own journal.

And that’s okay.

I used to think self-compassion meant being soft with myself all the time. Like I had to coddle every hard feeling and whisper “it’s okay, baby” to my anxious brain until it calmed down. But that’s not actually what compassion is. At least not for me.

Compassion, I’m learning, is being honest about how hard something is while also being kind about the struggle. It’s saying “yes, you’re being difficult right now, AND you have a good reason.” It’s not letting yourself off the hook, but it’s also not beating yourself up for being human.

When I wrote that letter to my brain, I wasn’t pretending everything was fine. I wasn’t gaslighting myself into positivity. I was acknowledging: This is really fucking hard. You’re in a place you’ve never been before. You’re terrified. And you’re doing it anyway.

That’s the balance I’m trying to find. Tender but firm. Honest but kind.

The Boat Metaphor (Or: Why My Brain Is Freaking Out)

I keep coming back to this image of being on a tiny boat in the middle of a wild ocean, tasked with following the light. But the trick is that the light goes wherever I decide to go.

For thirty years, I’ve been rowing frantically toward external lights. That achievement over there looks bright—row toward it. That relationship looks safe—row toward it. That person’s approval looks validating—row toward it. Being of service and running a non-profit looks meaningful—row toward it.

I never had to stop and ask, “Which way should I go?” because there was always some external beacon telling me where to row. Achievements. Relationships. Validation. Proof that I existed and mattered.

But now? Now I’m sitting in this boat in the middle of the ocean, and there’s no external light to follow. The light is inside the boat. It goes wherever I decide to go.

And my brain is like: “What the fuck do you mean, trust yourself? I don’t know how to do that. I only know how to row frantically toward validation.”

Of course, he’s freaking out. Of course, he’s being a little bitch.

He’s never had to do this before.

What 2026 Is Taking Away (And Why It Hurts So Much)

The letter mentions that “2026 is hurting you egotistically in ways you didn’t even know were possible.” And that’s true. This year is dismantling my ego piece by piece.

My ego = the part of me that needs achievements to feel valuable, validation to feel real, performance to feel lovable, and an impressive career to feel significant.

And 2026 has systematically removed all of those things:

• No impressive career (just a stable job that pays the bills)

• No nonprofit and consultancy to run (taking an extended break)

• No relationship (just ended with someone I knew wasn’t right)

• No big achievements (just... existing. Recovering. Resting.)

• No community yet (five months in Arkansas, building slowly)

• No external validation (learning—painfully—to validate myself)

Of course, my ego is hurt. It’s being demolished. And the version of me that’s been buried under years of performance and proving my worth is being unearthed.

But here’s the thing: that process sucks.

It’s not beautiful. It’s not inspiring. Some days it’s just me in bed with my cat, eating junk food, feeling like I don’t know who I am anymore.

And I’m learning that’s okay. That’s part of it. The becoming-real part is uncomfortable and slow and sometimes you have to sit with the fact that you feel insignificant without all the things that used to make you feel significant.

Sitting With Hard Emotions (Even When They Feel Unbearable)

I’ve spent most of my life avoiding hard emotions. Numbing them with busyness, relationships, achievement, and performance. Anything to not feel the loneliness, the unworthiness, the fear that if I stop doing enough, I’ll stop being enough.

And now I’m choosing to be better, and I can’t numb anymore. I just have to feel it. All of it. The loneliness. The grief. The fear. The “I don’t know who I am without all my coping mechanisms” terror.

Some days, like the day I wrote this letter, it feels unbearable.

But I’m learning slowly that emotions aren’t actually unbearable. They just feel that way when you’ve been avoiding them for years. When you finally stop running and turn around to face them, they’re big and scary and overwhelming.

But they’re not infinite. They have edges. They rise, and they peak, and they fall.

The work is sitting with them long enough to realize: Oh. I can survive this. This feeling won’t kill me. It just... hurts.

And then being kind to myself while I sit with it. Not berating myself for struggling. Not forcing myself to be productive through it. Just... acknowledging it. “This is hard. You’re doing your best. I’m here with you.”

That’s what the letter to my brain was. Me being here with myself. Not running. Not numbing. Just sitting in the boat and saying: I know you’re scared. I am too. But we’re going to be okay.

The Promise I’m Making to Myself

Near the end of the letter, I wrote: “But I promise things will change. You will find direction again. You will find your people again.”

I need to be clear: I don’t know if that’s true. I can’t predict the future. I don’t have a roadmap or a guarantee.

But I’m choosing to believe it anyway.

Because the alternative, believing that I’ll be alone and directionless and insignificant forever, is too painful to sit with. And more importantly, I don’t think it’s true.

I’ve been in hard seasons before. Not this exact flavor of hard, but hard nonetheless. And I’ve always found my way through. Not because I’m special or resilient or strong. But because I kept showing up. Even when I didn’t want to. Even when it hurt.

So that’s the promise I’m making to myself: Keep showing up. Even when you’re a little bitch about it. Even when you don’t know where you’re going. Even when the light inside the boat feels dim, and you’re not sure you trust it.

Keep showing up.

The direction will come. The people will come. The meaning will come.

But only if I’m still here to receive it.

What “I Love You Despite You Being a Little Bitch Sometimes” Actually Means

The last line of the letter is my favorite: “Dear Brain, I love you despite you being a little bitch sometimes.”

Not “I love you because you’re perfect.”
Not “I love you when you’re not struggling.”
But “I love you despite you being a little bitch.”

That’s the kind of love I’m trying to build with myself. Unconditional. Not contingent on being impressive or productive or put-together. Not requiring me to have my shit figured out or to stop struggling or to be some idealized version of myself.

Just... loving myself exactly as I am. Even when I’m difficult. Even when I’m scared. Even when I stay in bed all day, eat junk food, and don’t know who I am without achievements.

I’m allowed to struggle. I’m allowed to be a little bitch sometimes.

And I’m still loved.

If You’re Also in the Boat Right Now

Maybe you’re reading this and you’re also in a boat in the middle of the ocean, terrified because the light goes wherever you decide and you don’t know how to trust yourself yet.

Maybe you’re also grieving an old identity. An old way of being. An old set of coping mechanisms that don’t work anymore but at least you knew how to use them.

Maybe you’re also feeling insignificant without the things that used to make you feel significant.

If that’s you, here’s what I want you to know:

You’re not alone in the boat. Even if it feels like it. Even if there’s no one physically there. You have yourself. The part of you that’s reading this, that’s trying, that’s showing up even when it’s hard. That part isn’t going anywhere.

And the discomfort you’re sitting in right now? It’s temporary. The growth it’s producing? That’s permanent.

You’re not behind. You’re not doing it wrong. You’re just in the hard part. The becoming-real part. The part where you learn that you’re significant even when you’re not achieving, that you’re lovable even when you’re not performing, that you exist even when no one’s witnessing.

And in the meantime? Be kind to yourself. Even when you’re being a little bitch. Especially then.

You’re doing better than you think. ❤️

In my slightly ambitious brain, I have a couple of books I’m meant to write in the coming years, and this is, I guess, me challenging and practicing my writing before I leap into sharing some 200 pages of myself to the world. But slow down, baby girl. You’re just writing your first essay. Don’t get carried away.

(Though getting carried away is kind of my thing.)

What Safety Actually Means

Safety, to me, is the ability to express the full, uninhibited version of myself without fear of abandonment, judgment, or loss of resources.

When I’m less performative. When I’m more focused on expression rather than validation. That’s how I know I feel safe.

I have many facets. My dream is that one day I feel safe enough to be me all the time, everywhere. Mika at work, Mika with her friends, Mika on social media, Mika alone, Mika with her parents, Mika with her partner, Mika with important people all one Mika. The same across the board because she’s so safe she’s not scared of losing dignity, resources, or reputation for being herself all the way, everywhere.

That’s the dream, anyway.

Right now? I’m a chameleon. I adjust. I perform. I code-switch between versions of myself depending on who’s in the room. It’s exhausting, honestly. But I’m working on it.

Here’s what I’ve learned about where I do feel safe where I can drop the act and just... be.

Being in Nature

When I’m surrounded by trees, a body of water, fresh air, rocks, mountains, birds chirping I feel safe. Like I belong.

Watching the sunset or the sunrise. Talking to the moon. The stars telling me their secrets. Hiking up a mountain, however difficult it is. I feel safe, probably because I think God is found in these places. Or the universe. Or whatever you want to call that expansive, indescribable thing that makes you feel both small and significant at the same time.

In a paradoxical way, these places make me feel tiny a minuscule being in a vast, complex world. And there’s safety in that smallness. My daily “human” worries get replaced by this deep understanding that life is bigger than the bills that stress me out, the career goals I’m chasing, the fight I had with a friend.

Nature doesn’t care if I’m impressive. It doesn’t need me to perform. Trees don’t ask for my resume. Mountains don’t care about my LinkedIn. The moon just... is. And so I get to just... be.

Being with My Sister

My sister is, for lack of a better word, my soulmate.

She gets me in ways most people don’t. We can laugh at the most random thing over an inside joke for a solid half hour. We can also cry together over deep, meaningful things. The range I have with her is close to 90%. She knows all the sides there are to know about me.

She knows the silly, goofy me who is absolutely an idiot and won’t stop talking. She knows the damn good accents I can do of different Ethiopian languages quite impressive and a bit wrong to perform in front of others, but she gets it. She knows the side of me that’s empowered, relentless, super ambitious. She knows the me that’s deeply spiritual in ways that are hard to describe to others because it doesn’t fit mainstream ideology.

She knows the mentor-me that’s always there to help others. She knows the impressive me more than anyone.

But she also knows the shit show of a person I can be. The one who gives up so easily. The one who’s helpless and low in self-esteem at times. She’s seen me at my absolute worst. She’s seen me make terrible decisions born out of complex life tragedies that shaped me to be self-sabotaging.

And through all of this? She still loves me.

We’ve had our ups and downs, but she still chooses to show up for me. She still lets me be all of me. I feel the safest when I talk to her, text her, spend time with her. There’s no acting with her. If I’m sad over the silliest thing, she’d know. I won’t be embarrassed that it’s petty. I’m just more human with her.

If I’m happy, she’s the first to know no acting humble. If I’m proud of myself, I’m obnoxiously complimenting myself because I know she doesn’t take it the wrong way and think I’m being too much. She’d probably be happier for me than I am for myself.

So yes, I feel incredibly safe with her.

When I mess up, it might take me time, but I tell her. To me, safety is not filtering. It’s not thinking about how things might come off. It’s just... saying it and trusting you’ll still be loved.

Conversations with Like-Minded Friends

I have a handful of close friends who, when I talk to them, make me feel like I’m tapping into some collective energy where I actually belong.

As someone who overthinks and spends a lot of time in my brain thinking, scheming, overanalyzing it’s rare for me to feel a sense of belonging. I’ve only found it with a handful of people. Part of that is my fault because I’m sometimes stuck on optics and don’t give people a chance to develop this kind of deep friendship and understanding.

The good friend who challenged me to write this? He’s one of those people.

We say the most politically incorrect things. We laugh at jokes we probably shouldn’t as “educated people who try to be fair and are proponents of equality.” But when we laugh at things that poke at stereotypes, ethnicity, religion, and other sensitive topics, we know it’s not coming from ignorance or malice. It’s coming from the fundamental absurdity of being human and how nuanced life actually is.

Conversations with this friend might start with us sending voice notes back and forth, arguing about some deep concept like love or death or some issue in our lives and might end with us roasting each other to the point of getting scared we might block each other.

All to say: there’s range. And there’s safety in knowing I won’t be misunderstood when I make jokes. People like this know the fundamental, deep personality and beliefs I have.

My two closest female friends and me? When we get together, it’s absolute chaos. The conversations aren’t what you’d expect from three highly educated women with big aspirations. There’s no need for performance. We entertain our weak sides. They know some of the dumbest things I’ve said and done and will bring them up and it won’t make me feel any type of way. It would make me feel loved, actually, because they know me enough to know how to use that experience in a manner that isn’t retraumatizing.

So yes, I feel deeply safe with them in shedding my accolades and being a feral, silly person.

Being Alone (And the Surprise of Actually Liking It)

This one is surprising because I never thought I would say it, but yes being alone and by myself makes me feel safe.

It’s still new to me to feel safe in my body, in my own company, in solitude without feeling like I’m missing out on achievements and connections. Over the last year, I’ve slowly found safety in being alone without it feeling lonely. (Not always, because I still sometimes struggle with feelings of loneliness, but more often than not.)

As someone who struggled with depression and anxiety for close to a decade, it never really felt safe to be present in the moment. My mind seemingly chased me into overthinking, self-sabotage, self-loathing, and a desperate need to escape my reality by any means, however detrimental.

For a very long time, being alone meant I had to face my demons and I usually didn’t win. They felt like a mountain to be avoided by any means necessary.

It took years of therapy, some very loving friends and family, and honest self-reflection to finally get to a place where I’m alone for the majority of my time but feel very safe and secure. In this process of loving my own company, I found that I even felt safer when I talked to myself kindly and faced emotions head-on rather than shoving them down for fear they’d win over me.

I’m safe enough in my body now to work around hard emotions like anger, hopelessness, loss of meaning, loss of career clarity, loss of friendships, financial insecurity, and all the rest. I found that things like hiking, running, and working out helped me feel even safer in my body.

If a year ago you’d told me I would write about how running makes me feel safe, I would have laughed in your face and felt like you were reading from someone else’s storybook. But now I run 10K every Sunday for no apparent reason other than it makes me feel empowered and connected to myself.

Doing Things Just Because I Enjoy Them

I also found that doing things just because I enjoy them makes me feel safe.

I cook meals just because I like them they might not look good or Instagram-worthy, but they taste like home. I paint terrible-looking things just because it makes me feel creative and I enjoy the process of playing with colors and patterns. I’m learning to DJ, not to make money or side income, but because I’ve always been impressed and intrigued by DJs, and my love for music can be entertained by learning to mix my favorite songs.

As someone who had a big social circle and a million projects going on, with a wide variety of hobbies and a deep-seated need to overachieve and perform, it’s incredibly new to me feeling safe and content spending my weekends with my cat, cooking my favorite meals, journaling, going to a coffee shop to write my articles, running and hiking alone, going to art events alone, spending a Friday night being lazy or watching standup comedy or talking to a friend.

It finally feels safe to be with me. To spend time with this magnificent person that is me.

What I’m Still Learning

Safety isn’t something I feel everywhere yet. I’m still learning how to be the same Mika in all rooms.

I’m still learning how to stop performing for validation and start expressing for... me.

I’m still learning that being loved doesn’t require being impressive. That being safe doesn’t require being perfect.

But I’m getting there. One conversation, one hike, one inside joke, one solo Sunday run at a time.

The Practice of Safety

Safety, I’m learning, isn’t a place. It’s not a person. It’s not even a feeling I can hold onto all the time.

It’s a practice. A choice. A slow unwinding of all the ways I’ve learned to perform.

It’s nature reminding me I’m small and significant at once. It’s my sister knowing all of me and loving me anyway. It’s friends who let me be feral and brilliant in the same breath. It’s being alone and not needing to fill the silence with achievement or noise or proof that I exist.

It’s becoming the same Mika everywhere. One conversation, one hike, one honest moment at a time.

And maybe one day, I’ll walk into any room work, family dinner, first date, important meeting and just be me. No filter. No performance. No fear.

Just Mika. The same one everywhere.

That’s the dream.