It’s been over a week since I binge-watched Love Story (2026), and I can’t stop thinking about Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

But, in hindsight, this shouldn’t really surprise me. I went into the series knowing almost nothing about her, and I suspect that’s exactly why she stayed with me. Carolyn has long occupied a particular corner of the internet’s imagination, one populated by grainy paparazzi photographs, oversized camel coats, minimalist wardrobes and endless discussions about effortless style. Like many women, I’ve understood the appeal. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t spent more time than necessary studying photographs of her, trying to identify the elusive quality that seemed to separate Carolyn from every other well-dressed woman of her era.

What surprised me, however, was realising that after ten episodes, it wasn’t the style I was thinking about. It was the privacy.

Beneath the photographs, the headlines and the mythology surrounding her marriage to John Kennedy Jr., I found myself increasingly drawn to the idea of a woman trying to hold on to some part of herself in a world that felt entitled to all of it. Watching the series from the vantage point of 2026, what interested me wasn’t how famous Carolyn became, but how much she seemed to want to maintain some distance between herself and the public, even if it was often a source of tension and unhappiness in her life.

Privacy is something I’ve found myself thinking about differently in recent years.

And yet, the longer I write, the more I’ve come to realise how little correlation there is between disclosure and understanding. Some of the most significant moments of the last few years have never made it into an essay, and some never will—not because they’re secrets, but because not every experience becomes more meaningful once it’s witnessed by an audience. I’ve written publicly about the end of a seventeen-year relationship, and yet some of the people who understand me best know very little about the details. Meanwhile, complete strangers occasionally reach out convinced they know exactly who I am.

I think that’s why Carolyn stayed with me. Not because I recognised myself in her, but because I recognised the instinct. Writing has taught me that privacy isn’t the opposite of honesty. You can tell the truth without telling the whole story. There is a difference between being seen and being known.

I was born in 1990, which means I was too young to be a live witness to the courtship, marriage and tragedy that transformed John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette into one of the defining celebrity couples of that age. By the time I encountered them, they already belonged to history. Like many millennials, I inherited them as mythology rather than current events. Their story arrived through photographs, documentaries, magazine retrospectives and the strange digital afterlife reserved for beautiful people who die young.

The same is true of many women who continue to occupy an outsized place in our cultural imagination. Princess Diana. Amy Winehouse. Marilyn Monroe. They remain fixed in time -- for years, popular culture seemed far more comfortable consuming these women who didn’t have the chance (or give themselves the chance) to live out their stories as symbols than engaging with them as people. The symbol remains fixed. The person keeps changing. Whereas women like Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson and Amanda Bynes have had to endure the messier reality of continuing to evolve in public. We have watched them struggle, disappear, re-emerge, contradict themselves and reject old narratives.

Yet for someone who has been so thoroughly mythologised, we know remarkably little about Carolyn compared to almost any public figure today. The series hints that part of this mystery may stem from the fact that John and Carolyn had fundamentally different relationships with public life.

John seems unable to fully detach from public perception. Even as he insists (and is most probably lying) that he doesn’t want a political future, public life hangs over him like an inheritance he can’t quite escape. He seems to have accepted visibility as a condition of his life in a way Carolyn never quite does. Beneath the arguments and frustrations, the series suggests they may have been grappling with something more fundamental: two completely different beliefs about what a public life should look like. One person reluctantly accepting visibility as the cost of who he is. The other continually questioning why visibility should demand quite so much in return.

You can see this playing out in India—and, really, across much of the world—in real time. Politicians are still doing the traditional photo-ops: sharing meals with people from different sections of society, visiting villages, meeting workers and farmers. But increasingly, we’re also learning that they’re trained diving instructors or 5 AM marathon runners. They have favourite books, hobbies, playlists and pets. The public persona is no longer confined to speeches, rallies and policy positions.

These days, you don’t need to be a celebrity to find yourself navigating some version of the same dynamic. The definition of a public figure has expanded far beyond politicians, actors and business leaders. Increasingly, it includes anyone trying to build an audience online.

As someone who spends much of her professional life thinking about public perception, I find this fascinating. I’ve spent close to a decade helping build a brand, and one thing I’ve learned is that people can tell when you’re trying too hard to convince them of something. The harder you insist you’re authentic, the less authentic you appear.

That’s why the current obsession with personal branding sometimes leaves me cold. We are all encouraged to become narrators of our own lives, carefully selecting the details that make us seem interesting, relatable or aspirational. Professionally, I understand why this works. Personally, I find myself resisting it.

The stories we tell about ourselves can be useful. They help other people understand us, and sure, they help us understand ourselves. But they can also become strangely limiting. The moment a story starts working, there is an incentive to keep performing it.

I went into Love Story (2026) expecting to think about the Kennedy legacy, inherited mythologies and one of the most photographed couples of the 1990s. Instead, I found myself thinking about a woman who spent much of her public life pushing back against the idea that visibility should automatically grant access.

Maybe that’s why Carolyn continues to fascinate people nearly three decades later. We know what she looked like. We know what she wore. We know how her story ended.

The rest, we fill in ourselves.

Disclaimer: I use AI as part of my drafting and editing process. The ideas, experiences, perspectives, and final direction of the writing are entirely my own.

I have permanent access to versions of myself I can never return to. They exist across TBs of photos and videos, scattered through iCloud backups, Lightroom folders, duplicate hard drives and camera rolls I can’t quite bring myself to clean out. Screenshots of menus and recipes I never made, blurry cocktails, airport windows, badly lit selfies, apartments I no longer live in — tiny digital remnants of entire emotional eras, all sitting quietly inside a device that periodically informs me I’m running out of storage.

This week, while trying to clear storage off my iPhone after months of avoidance, I found myself reopening old videos almost compulsively — not because I was looking for anything specific, but because I wanted to see what version of myself would walk back onto the screen once I pressed play. It felt less like revisiting memories and more like opening mystery boxes. Some videos made me smile immediately, some made me physically recoil, and some felt emotionally neutral in a way that almost offended me considering how devastating those moments once felt. A few cracked something open so suddenly that I had to put my phone face down on the bed and stare at the ceiling for a while before continuing.

I’ve started calling these stretches of time my SadGirl days. They usually happen inside my apartment while I work from home — answering Zoho Cliq messages, joining calls two minutes early, making coffee, half-cleaning things, ordering food, doomscrolling a little too long, watching light move across the room while pretending not to think too hard.

I still respond mostly politely. I still remember to put laundry in the washing machine and order (allegedly) compostable garbage bags in sizes small and large. But emotionally, everything slows down just enough for grief to become audible again.

And contrary to what the name suggests, I don’t spend all my SadGirl days spiralling through old photos and videos. Sometimes I barely open my camera roll at all. Sometimes the sadness attaches itself to music, or cooking, or cleaning the apartment at midnight, or sitting silently on the balcony too long after it starts raining in May — a classic Bangalore summer phenomenon. Sometimes it looks like hyper-functionality and overwork. Sometimes it’s eating the exact same comfort meal three days in a row and watching terrible television while ignoring texts for hours before suddenly becoming social again. Each set of SadGirl days takes on a different life of its own. They are never exactly the same because grieving a future itself is never particularly consistent or disciplined. It shapeshifts depending on what part of your life it finds access to that week.

And yes, I document them too.

SadGirl days are less about sadness in the dramatic sense and more about suspended emotional weather. They are the days when I stop trying to optimise my healing into productivity or neat lessons or evidence of growth. They are the days I allow sadness to exist without immediately trying to convert it into wisdom.

For a long time, I thought healing was supposed to look linear and disciplined — therapy breakthroughs, routines, closure, emotional maturity, eventually becoming someone who could speak about the end of a seventeen-year relationship in clean, processed language. But the truth is that some of the most important parts of healing have happened during these quieter stretches of suspended emotional weather. Sitting alone in my apartment with coffee going cold beside me, reopening old photos while trying to literally make space on my device. Deciding what gets archived, what gets deleted, what survives another storage cleanup, and what I’m finally ready to stop carrying forward with me. Learning the difference between memory and baggage. Realising that grief changes texture over time. That some things become softer while others remain strangely sharp. SadGirl days have become less about wallowing and more about exposure therapy for my own life. A slow reacquainting with the archive of who I was before everything split apart.

So we documented birthdays and vacations and soft mornings and stupid jokes and the exact way sunlight fell across apartments we thought we’d stay in forever.

And now all of it lives somewhere. In iCloud, Lightroom, Google Photos, archived chats, synced folders, old hard drives, duplicate backups I barely understand but continue paying for monthly because the alternative feels strangely violent. At some point, upgrading my cloud storage stopped feeling like a tech decision and started feeling like emotional procrastination. Every month, I pay a small fee to avoid deciding what I can live without. The workflow itself is absurdly confusing in a way that feels accidentally profound: Lightroom wants to optimise local storage while keeping originals in the cloud, Apple wants to offload files but preserve previews, WhatsApp quietly saves fragments of entire relationships into camera rolls unless you tell it not to, and somehow everything duplicates itself endlessly across invisible systems until nothing ever really leaves. Maybe that’s what unsettles me most — not the memories themselves, but the permanence of them. The way modern life allows every version of you to continue existing simultaneously. 20s-you. Wife-you. Coloured-hair-you. Girl-filming-her-partner-cooking. Woman-rewatching-that-video-alone-two-years-later. I don’t know if I’m preserving my life or just postponing the uncomfortable, necessary, and probably healthy act of making space for what comes next.

The most absurd version of this happened on Valentine’s Day earlier this year, when I spent the afternoon scrambling to get my wedding photographs printed for divorce paperwork. Not reminiscing over them dramatically, not crying over old memories, just sitting on a day meant to celebrate love while every cell in my body felt betrayed by it, emailing JPEGs, resizing files, and making sure everything met filing requirements before a deadline. I eventually sent the photos to Blinkit’s photo printing service because apparently modern adulthood means you can emergency-print photos of a younger, naïve, hopeful version of yourself in under ten minutes if you live in any part of Bangalore.

After that, I had to courier the photographs to my lawyer along with copies of our wedding invitation and marriage certificate, which I miraculously still had because I store everything. Not just sentimental things, but screenshots of my own despair, itemised phone bills, vouchers, emails, archived chats, notes app fragments, receipts, confirmations — tiny digital remnants of entire emotional eras that are now so deeply imprinted in my brain that I don’t even need to reopen them to remember exactly how they made me feel. But I keep them anyway.

We learned to screenshot things before they disappeared, preserve context, save timestamps, hold onto records not just because we were sentimental, but because somewhere along the way memory stopped feeling trustworthy on its own.

And there was something deeply surreal about the fact that the same folders I once opened to post anniversary tributes or revisit happy moments were now being mined for legal documentation. The same wedding photographs that once represented permanence were suddenly attachments in an administrative process designed to formally dissolve it. Maybe that’s part of what feels so disorienting about the end of a long relationship. When you spend nearly two decades building a life alongside someone, there are very few versions of yourself that exist independently of them. My late teens, entire twenties and early thirties are there. Salary credit screenshots, pictures of IKEA furniture tags taken hastily and never purchased, the first photos from the day we brought home the cats, pictures of a Chandigarh chair I was mercilessly teased for wanting, sofa fabric swatches for a couch we once dreamed of, dinner reservations, fights in parking lots, mangled spellings of names during airport pickups, Sunday mornings that once felt so permanent they barely seemed worth documenting at all. The relationship didn’t just occupy part of my life — it structured entire eras of it. That’s the thing nobody tells you about being someone who documents constantly: one day the archive outlives the person who created it, or at least the version of them that did.

But SadGirl days are entirely mine — and maybe that’s what makes them feel strangely exhilarating at times. Beneath the grief and suspended emotional weather is the unfamiliar experience of becoming fully answerable to myself again. My routines, my apartment, my silence, my mess, my healing, my decisions about what stays and what finally gets deleted. For the first time in a very long time, there are parts of my life being created that belong only to me. And maybe that’s what SadGirl days really are for me now — not wallowing exactly, but sitting quietly among the evidence of all the selves I’ve been, trying to decide what deserves to follow me into the next version of my life and what I’m finally willing to let disappear.

P.S. I still haven’t deleted anything, figured out my cloud storage workflow, or successfully cleaned out my camera roll. Wish me luck.

Disclaimer: I use AI as part of my drafting and editing process. The ideas, experiences, perspectives, and final direction of the writing are entirely my own.

There are some cultural moments that don’t quite arrive as new experiences, even when they belong to the present. They come carrying memory, projection, and the weight of who we were when we first encountered them. You don’t just watch them—you measure them against earlier versions of yourself, against conversations that have lived on long after the credits rolled, against the mythology that builds when something becomes shorthand for a phase of life. For many of us—Millennial women specifically, who didn’t have too many role models of what it meant to be in a boardroom—The Devil Wears Prada offered a version of power we could study, even if we didn’t always agree with it. It shaped how we imagined ambition, how we understood work, and how we interpreted the subtle choreography of power long before we had the language for it. So when the sequel was announced, it didn’t feel unexpected; it felt like something that had been waiting in the wings, gathering anticipation without ever quite being questioned.

And, against my better judgement, I let myself be excited.

Alongside that anticipation sat something else, just as familiar—the understanding that sequels rarely hold the same weight as their originals. It’s a belief most of us absorbed early on, one that sits just beneath excitement, tempering it without fully diminishing it. Still, there are some stories we make exceptions for, not because we expect them to be better, but because we want them to return to us intact. We want them to hold the same shape they did when we first encountered them, even if we no longer do.

Not ruined, not unrecognisable, but altered in a way that feels deliberate and slightly disorienting.

I was 16 when the first film came out, at an age where ambition still feels directional and untested, where the future exists as something you can outline with surprising clarity. Journalism—specifically features writing—sat at the centre of how I imagined my life unfolding. It wasn’t just a career option; it felt like a natural extension of who I was becoming. Andy Sachs made immediate sense to me, not because she was extraordinary, but because she was trying in a way that felt deeply familiar. Her commitment to her work, her eagerness to prove herself, and that constant negotiation between who she was and who she needed to become—it all mirrored something I recognised in myself. More than anything, it was the way she responded to feedback—the willingness to absorb it, adjust, and keep going—that stayed with me.

That version of the future didn’t remain entirely imagined. A few years later, in 2009, I interned at the features desk of a newspaper in Bangalore, stepping into a version of the world I had once only observed from a distance. I was guided through the first few days by an editor and colleagues who knew what they were doing, and once I found my footing, the bylines followed. It wasn’t dramatic, it wasn’t punishing—it was structured, and it worked.

Much later, when I began having interns and reportees of my own, I returned to that version of myself more often than I expected—and, in some ways, to Andy as well. Not because either of us had it all figured out, but because we were willing to be shaped. I took feedback seriously. I wanted to get better. At the time, it felt like instinct; in hindsight, it was probably the most valuable thing I brought into those early roles.

That early stage wasn’t always as composed as memory makes it seem. My friends and I, as interns and in our first jobs, clashed more than we’d like to admit—with colleagues, with bosses—because we were unrestrained and raw. There was energy, but not always direction. Sometimes we were like bumbling puppies—eager to please, but also snapping at everyone’s heels, not yet sure how to channel that urgency into something constructive.

Miranda existed in an entirely different register. She was fascinating and intimidating in equal measure, not because she was loud or overtly cruel, but because of how exact she was. The economy of her words, the way a single glance could recalibrate a room, the expectation that competence was only the baseline—this was a form of authority many of us would later encounter in internships and first jobs. Whether we realised it at the time or not, that dynamic shaped us. It sharpened our instincts, complicated our relationship with power, and influenced how we learned to navigate professional spaces.

I’m 36 now, which means I’ve lived enough life to no longer approach that world as an observer. I’ve been inside those rooms. I’ve worked under people who carried echoes of Miranda’s presence, and I’ve also held roles where I’ve had to reckon with what authority looks like when it’s mine to wield. Time adds texture to things that once felt absolute, and I went into the sequel carrying that texture with me. I wasn’t looking for a replica of the original; I was looking for something that met me where I am now while still retaining the edge that made it unforgettable.

But that moment never arrived. I had waited for the impact of her cutting remarks, and instead I watched them land without consequence, their sharpness blunted before they even reached the surface. Every character felt as though they had been placed on a chessboard—positioned with intent, but drained of force. Only instead of moving like players who understood the stakes, they moved like pawns of time: careful, contained, almost apologetic in their progression. In the original, each step felt deliberate and dangerous, every interaction carried the possibility of gain or loss. Here, the movements feel smaller, safer, as though the game itself has been rewritten to ensure no one truly loses. What once felt like power now reads as restraint, and not the kind that signals control, but the kind that suggests hesitation—rendered with a kind of polished indifference that keeps everything in place and nothing at risk.

And this is where I slip, almost unwillingly, into questioning territory. Because the muted quality of it all doesn’t feel accidental—it feels calibrated. So I have to ask: why does it feel this way? What, exactly, has shifted so fundamentally that a character once defined by her precision now feels so carefully restrained?

Entire generations have entered the workforce with a different vocabulary around boundaries, respect, and what constitutes acceptable behaviour, and that has inevitably reshaped how leadership is performed and received. The kind of unquestioned dominance Miranda once embodied doesn’t sit as easily in this landscape, and perhaps it shouldn’t.

But even as I recognise that, I can’t ignore the other reaction that sits alongside it, sharper and far less diplomatic. Because what replaces that dominance here doesn’t feel like evolution—it feels like dilution. It feels like something has been edited down to ensure it offends no one, unsettles no one, demands nothing from the audience except passive agreement. And that’s where the frustration creeps in, because the original never asked for comfort. It asked you to sit in the discomfort of ambition, to confront the cost of proximity to power, and to reckon with the ways in which admiration and fear can coexist.

So yes, I understand why the edges have been softened. I understand the cultural context that makes a character like Miranda more difficult to render in her original form. I even agree, on principle, with the shift toward more accountable, self-aware leadership. But understanding it doesn’t make it any more satisfying to watch. Because somewhere in that transition, something essential has been lost—not cruelty, not even severity, but the clarity of force.

And I want to say it plainly, without qualifying it into something more palatable:

Where are the fangs?

Not for the sake of nostalgia, and not because the past was better, but because the absence of them leaves behind a version of the story that feels strangely weightless. The stakes blur. The tension dissolves. And what remains is a world that looks familiar on the surface but no longer carries the same charge underneath. The fashion delivers, as expected—but everything else lands with a kind of polished indifference. Almost… meh.

There’s also a more personal layer to this, one that has less to do with the film and more to do with the distance between who we were and who we are now. There is a particular kind of dissonance in returning to something that once felt definitive, only to realise that it no longer lands with the same intensity. Not because it has lost all value, but because we have changed in ways that make us less susceptible to its original pull.

Instead, what we’re left with is something that feels more aligned with the present moment—self-aware, measured, careful in its portrayal of power and ambition. These are not inherently negative qualities, and in many ways they reflect necessary cultural shifts. But they don’t quite translate into the kind of tension that lingers. And so the metaphor of the sweater holds, not because the sequel is without merit, but because it no longer fits in the way we remember. Somewhere along the way, both the garment and the body changed shape, and what remains is the subtle but undeniable mismatch between the two.

I don’t regret watching it, and I don’t think I ever could. But what once felt like something to study now feels like something to move past—like a dress that looks great on the rack, but one you have no hesitation putting back once you take a closer look.

Like many Millennial women across the globe, I too have found myself drawn deeply into the allure of Conrad Fisher’s character from The Summer I Turned Pretty. Like Conrad, I was a very different person when the show started — far removed from the woman writing these words here today. I operated from what I now refer to as the baby pool of life — one that I had paddled around in, carefree and oblivious to the pull of the depths that would soon threaten to drown me. I looked to the mercy of people who I believed would save me if I encountered true pain or danger — surely I would be shielded and I lived life ensconced in that comfort, and in that safety. And here’s where my first bit of wild connection making and theorising takes root — what is it about this fictional character that piques my interest almost subconsciously (and okay, if we’re being honest: what is it beyond his obvious attractiveness and sharp wardrobe choices).

In the show, much of Conrad’s character development comes after the loss of his mother (Susannah Fisher) to cancer and the plot of Season 2 & Season 3 continues to explore the impact of her death on all principal characters including her older son. But I want to first turn the lens back to young Conrad in Season 1. We see him struggling. Not just with his feelings for Belly, but as we later find out, we see him battle to straddle the role of protector & secret keeper and with his barely-developed sense of self. Conrad believes it is his responsibility to hold everything together — it’s almost like he believes it is his duty, without really understanding that in the process, he ices himself out of his ring of warmth and strength of protection. Season 1 Conrad does not recognise that he needs to be the first recipient of the feeling of safety that he so deftly creates for the people he loves the most without them even knowing. He probably just assumes that someone will have his back, or that he will eventually get around to taking care of himself. It can’t be that hard, can it? But if he were to focus on himself and his own grief, who would step up for the others? And surely everyone understands that grief looks different for each one of us. The people who truly love him will most certainly support his healing journey — he doesn’t need to ask, they will just know. Surely they will carry him when his resolve weakens.
And so we see him crumble in Season 2. We watch the weight of unresolved grief manifest in the life of this boy-man. We watch him lose his mother and lose himself in the depths of his sadness.

I suspect that I saw Season 1 & Season 2 Conrad to be a lot like baby pool me. Until I lost my father when I was in my early 20s, I didn’t know anything about death. I had never been to a funeral or entertained the thought of loss. I distinctly remember the first moment of confronting what a world without my father would even feel like: it was the day I walked into his hospital room in March 2013 and found a pamphlet on palliative care services. I was filled with rage and anger — now I know those were the first moments of my own sense of self seeking out to protect me from grief and pain. But I chose to reject it, by choosing not to process. And nobody could have helped in that moment, even though I was so sure that someone would “if it got too bad”.

What we don’t know about the loss of a parent — or the loss of someone close — is that it unmoors us beyond recognition. It sweeps you away from a path of safety and throws you into a whirlwind that leaves you in a different place: literally like those helpless cows that get swung about and displaced in every tornado movie you’ve ever watched. In my case, I believed that the people closest to me in my life cushioned my fall. And to be fair, almost every single person did and I am so eternally grateful. But I learned a lasting lesson almost 11 years later: that your grief can also be weaponised against you by those who are incapable of seeing beyond what you “should have done for them” even when you are broken and depleted (but that’s a subject for another day).

What I want to stress on here is the danger of believing that you can or should be saved by those who claim to love you, simply because it is what you would do for them. That is where both Season 2 Conrad & baby pool me both faltered: we failed to offer a safety net to ourselves; we failed to follow the thing we hear (and tune out) each time we buckle our seatbelts on an aircraft — to put on our own oxygen mask before helping someone else. Conrad delayed his grieving to the point where he blew up his relationship with Belly. I went in the other direction — I believed that love that would protect, cherish, respect and reciprocate. I channeled my grief and every part of my fledgling sense of self into this belief. Neither approach is wrong or right. Both are simply human, but both have lasting consequences.

When my journey with therapy started, I went in expecting to be told I was broken beyond repair because that was what was echoed to me. But again, I want to be clear — no voice in this respect was stronger than my own. Over the next few years, I learned to listen to myself and my body (I’m still learning). Ironic because I know I present as confident and assertive, but they are not mutually exclusive. I began to learn how to center myself in moments of emotional absence in my environment. I started to learn how to differentiate between what is my responsibility to fix and what isn’t. I began to find the emotional vocabulary to describe to myself that I wasn’t meant to decipher and solve for vacuums that were not of my making. The hardest thing about learning to ask for accountability is to know that you cannot control the outcome. You can simply do what is in your power, and you must learn to sit the consequences, whatever they may be.

I assume this was the case with fictional Conrad. We see him at his appointments, uncomfortable but brave. Finding the words to articulate what he’s up against as he continues to find his place in his world beyond ideal son, protective brother, good friend, perfect student and emotionally regulated partner. And he does this not just within the four walls of his therapist’s office but in multiple episodes throughout Season 3. We watch him verbalise his feelings, which always difficult, but more importantly, we watch him create moments of safety for himself after having the courage to face his own demons, and often, demons that were not his to confront.

But this is not all perfect, linear and in an orderly fashion. It never is. Because none of it would be believable or real if it was. At the time of writing this, we are a few days away from the alleged series finale. And while the last few episodes have been dubbed by fans as filler episodes (and honestly, I also feel the same in some ways), I think they’ve done a lot to show us more of Conrad’s healing journey. That it’s messy, misunderstood, spontaneous but irrevocable. That everything is a step forward, whether someone else understands it or not. That healing is complex — loudest in moments of silence, present in moments of joy and the most important form of love you can show yourself once you recognise that your journey has its own language — one that only you can choose tell once you learn to speak it.

Because I’m not a stranger to a blinking cursor on a blank white screen - I’ve been writing (sporadically) online for a few decades now. There’s bits of me scattered all over the internet - as an emo 13-year-old who just had her first blog set up for her by her dad on LiveJournal while she customised the themes on her Geocities page; as a hopeful 17-year-old who gave my heart away before I could truly get to enjoy it myself; as a determined 25-year-old who was set on living my best grown-up, responsible life (hah); as a 32-year-old who decided to begin my journey with therapy even though I couldn’t really pinpoint why.

And now - as a 35-year-old: broken in more ways than I know how myself, but picking up the pieces and figuring out if I really want them to go back into forming the same shape as they once did (spoiler alert: NOPE).

The truth is, 8 months ago my life changed overnight. In ways I didn’t ask for, didn’t expect, didn’t see coming. But I’ve learnt since that I am just one of many with a story like this - so this isn’t about what happened to me or why. It’s about what comes next for me. It’s about channelling all the strength and love that’s come pouring like a waterfall - from people who have come forward from the corners of my past to the new friends I have discovered along the way. Each conversation, interaction and exchange has injected a little bit of courage on days when I couldn’t see past the looming darkness that had consumed me.

If you’re here for drama, I’m not sure you’re going to find it. What I expect you’ll find instead is just a girl, standing in front of a screen, asking it to release her: from a manicured life painted with the palest watercolours into a blank canvas, begging to be filled with the most brilliant & messy strokes of her own making — not tidy or polite, but alive, unfiltered, and entirely hers. A riot of colour where she finally learns that chaos can be beautiful, and freedom isn’t found in perfection, but in the courage to begin again.

Where does one go when the future you once envisioned gets pulled out from under your feet on one random Thursday night? We’ll find out :)