Have you ever said a word so many times that it stops sounding like a real word? Like it unravels in your mouth, loses its meaning, and suddenly feels made up? A word that’s always been there—ordinary, familiar—but when repeated over and over, it feels foreign and empty.

What if that same thing happens when you talk about yourself?
What if you keep telling the world who you are, keep telling yourself, until even that starts to feel false? Until your name, your traits, your truth start to slip through your fingers like water? You are what you are… right?

But say it enough times, and even that begins to feel like a lie.
It feels like you’re not a person anymore. You’re just a collection of labels and ideas. You’ve repeated them for so long that they’ve lost all meaning.

Confused? Welcome to my world.

They say we can’t truly operate until we learn to love ourselves.
But who are they, exactly? Probably the people who seem like they’ve got everything figured out. The ones who walk through life with certainty, as if they’ve unlocked some secret the rest of us missed.

Then again, maybe nobody really has their life together.
I’ve seen people who seemed so strong fall apart in the quietest of moments. I’ve watched joy slip from someone’s eyes like the light fading at sunset. Pain doesn’t care how composed you appear. Some people are just better at hiding it.

And maybe that’s what life is: one long, complicated performance.
We fake confidence to feel worthy of someone’s attention.
We fake enthusiasm in interviews just to land the job.
We fake happiness in front of friends and family, because saying “I’m fine” is easier than opening the floodgates.
We fake ourselves. We soften our edges and play roles just to fit in.

That’s the sad reality.
We spend so much time trying to be who we think the world wants us to be that we forget who we truly are. Or maybe we never really knew in the first place.

But sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone comes along and changes everything. They don’t fix you. They don’t complete you. But they see you. They hear the quiet parts. They notice the things you thought you’d buried. And in their presence, you begin to feel like maybe you don’t have to pretend anymore.

The walls you’ve spent years building suddenly don’t feel so necessary.
Vulnerability no longer feels like weakness. It starts to feel like freedom.

When you find someone you can truly be yourself around—messy, honest, unfiltered—it’s terrifying. But it’s also the most beautiful thing. You finally feel like you’ve found a place to rest. A space where your heart can breathe. A person who holds up a mirror and says, “You’re enough.”

Of course, it’s never that simple.

Because when you let someone in—when you truly let them in—you risk heartbreak. You risk disappointment. You risk losing a part of yourself you didn’t even realise you’d given away. And that’s the choice you have to make: protect yourself and walk away, or take a chance and see what could be.

Do you play it safe and wonder forever, or do you jump and take the risk?

People always say, “You have to love yourself first.”
That no one can love you until you do.
But I don’t believe that. I call it out for what it is.

I’ve seen people at their lowest, completely broken, doubting every part of themselves, and yet others are drawn to them like moths to a flame. Maybe it’s because people who’ve been shattered know how to love with more depth. Maybe it’s because their cracks let the light come through.

Sometimes, it takes someone else’s love to help you find your own.

Sometimes, you don’t learn how to love yourself until someone shows you why you deserve to be loved. Until someone holds you in all your mess and says, “You matter. Just as you are.”

If you find someone who quiets the noise in your head, who makes you feel safe in your own skin, who reminds you that you’re enough—hold onto them. Not out of fear, but out of gratitude.
Because even if it doesn’t last forever, what they gave you in that moment was real. And sometimes, that is more than enough.

If there’s someone who can make you laugh when you’ve forgotten how, who makes you feel seen in a world that often looks the other way, don’t let them leave without knowing what they meant to you. That kind of connection is rare.

You can tell yourself you’re a certain kind of person.
An introvert. An over thinker. Too much. Not enough. Broken. Strong.
You can repeat it so often that it becomes your identity.

But the truth is, we are not that simple.
We are not just one thing. We are not fixed in place.
We are constantly changing. Constantly learning, hurting, healing.
We are contradictions. We are stories still being written.

Maybe the point isn’t to define who you are with certainty.
Maybe the point is to become. To grow. To keep discovering yourself, again and again.
Until, one day, you realise you’re no longer faking it.

You’re finally living it.