To Love, Inauthenticity, and Joy

before all else… to love.

I never expected love to hurt this much. Turns out it's sharp. It cuts. Then you're left holding pieces of something you never realized could be this fragile.

I never expected love to make me stay up until sunrise. To devote my everything to my everything. To find pieces of myself in someone else and believe, for just a moment, I was finally whole.

It still feels bittersweet.

I guess I didn't know what love was before it broke me. Growing up taught me it was a feeling, one that made the world brighter. But I quickly learnt love doesn't always light up the dark. Sometimes it's the dark. Sometimes it makes everything harder to see.

I wasn't ready for love.

I thought love was supposed to heal. But love isn't just a gift. It's heavy. It's hard. It's fragile. You spend so much time holding it in your hands, afraid to let it slip through your fingers, that you forget how to live without it.

The love you see in the movies, the love you see shared on Instagram with a filter squeezed into a hashtag. Turns out, that wasn't love. That was a performance.

Sometimes I still feel it. Fleeting. Rushing through my mind for just a moment. But then it's gone. I'm left with echos of a faded memory that was once alive.

I've learnt that love is finding something uncomfortable. It's finding a perfect balance of friction. Sometimes it's slow. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes you wished it never happened at all.

But it's still worth it. Even if it broke you. Because the parts that are left, those that survived, are stronger.

It's strange how something meant to be so intangible can leave scars.

when you think you know someone so well
and when they break your heart…

…from strangers to friends,
…, to strangers again…
when you know someone…

where illusion ends… to inauthenticity.

There's something unsettling about how much of your life has been chosen for you. What you wear. What you listen to. What you think is good. What you think is beautiful.

Taste isn't personal. You never woke up one day and decided it's what you liked. It's something agreed upon, something shown to us, not something felt.

It's a social construct. A collective agreement. It's not visceral, raw, and unfiltered. It's mediated, processed, handed you in a way that makes you feel like you're participating in joy.

But you're not. You're consuming the idea of joy, the illusion of having preferences. The world hands you a menu of choices and tells you to pick one, but it never tells you that the choices were already made.

Every aesthetic, every movement, every new thing—it exists because somewhere, someone, wanted to sell it. Our modern world doesn't care about joy. It cares about engagement. It cares about if you still want more, to make sure you're never satisfied.

Because real joy, real experience, doesn't sell.

Real isn't easy. Real isn't curated. The closest thing to real is friction. Discomfort. The things that aren't optimized for convenience, those that aren't handed to you in neat little packages.

Boredom is real. Pain is real. The things that make you feel alive. Where nothing is trying to sell you anything. That's real.

Everything else? Inauthenticity.

between all worlds… to joy.

For so long, I thought joy had to be something big. Something worth writing about, something that looked so beautiful in the moment, something that made sense.

But real joy isn't big. Those moments of real joy are the smallest things in the world.

It's the silence between two people who don't need to speak. The first sip of a drink that tastes like a memory you didn't know you had. The song you forgot about until it plays at exactly the right moment.

It's running into an old friend on a street you almost didn't walk down. It's the way a stranger smiles at you in passing. The last ray of light through the tree before it disappears.

I fell in love with the joy of biking because it let me catch the sunset on warm summer evenings. The same happened with literature, as I picked up my first book in years just to try. I discovered joy in long conversations, in laughter with friends echoing long after the moment ends.

Joy is what happens when you stop trying to find it.

1. Get bored.

2. Go somewhere ugly.

3. Break something.

4. Do something difficult.

5. Meet someone new.

6. Get lost.

7. Find something real.

Toothpastes, mistakes, headphones,
Your basement, car keys, girlfriends, passwords,
Your last words, Brookfield, T-shirts, three words…