Personal
Today, I spent five hours talking to Awab.
It wasn’t planned. no intention, no emotional preparation. he texted me casually saying: “VC in 2–3 hours?” the kind of message you expect to lead to small updates and shallow catching up as we usually do. Instead, it became one of the most profound conversations I’ve ever had. this piece exists to serve as an act of gratitude toward Awab, a person I realized today I’ve never properly stopped to appreciate. this is how I process affection: by intellectualizing the feelings, by writing instead about it, instead of feeling it directly, lol. If so, It captures fragments of what I learned about friendship, about myself, and about what it means to be understood without asking to be.
I basically ruined all the friendships I had since I was a kid, and it is me who is the problem, not the people, although I kept myself busy to the point where I don’t feel it most of the time, alongside guilt and fear of making new friendships. I started to drop people before the cycle of me starting to get cold and avoidant begins, which would eventually ruin the friendships or relationships anyway.
This question is by far the hardest for me to answer. I’ve tried for years, and every attempt was prone to failure. A big part of the struggle wasn’t just about identity itself, but about how strange my relationships were, unstable, confusing, always shifting. It’s hard to know who you are when the people around you don’t stay long enough , for you to see your reflection in them. This writing sums all my previous attempts in the search for who I am.
There is a famous Viktor Frankl quote: “When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, he distracts himself with pleasure.” Franks argues that the lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits, rather than addressing the underlying existential void. Perhaps for many, maybe even for most people, this is a big issue, but there is another group that suffers from the opposite problem. Frankel’s inverse law: when a man can’t find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.
“I think it’s important for people to present themselves as they are, which is messy, because to present yourself as perfect sets up an unfair standard for other people to live by.”
— Simon Sinek
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
Sean, Good Will Hunting (Park Bench Scene)
I get asked:
How do you deal with ordinary people? The ones that don’t bother you? and when does it start that they enter your life?