August 13th - 2026

I turned 31 in January, and I have just gone through my 12th break-up.

Twelve... 

Saying it out loud feels surreal. Honestly, right now, I'm scared. Scared of being single. It's a sobering thought when you realise that you've never actually been fully, 100%, single. EVER. I'm scared of the longer silence that follows when the person who used to fill your days is suddenly gone. It's a raw, echoing kind of loneliness that hitting hard. 

For so long, I've looked relentlessly for love outside myself -- like it was something I could only find in someone else's arms, someone else's approval. I've tortured myself with alcohol, drugs, self-harm and food since I can remember; but most of all, I have tortured myself with people, love idealisation and sex. Sex has become a pseudo-currency for love. But now, more than ever, I realise the hardest person to love, and the one I need to learn to love first, is ME.

It absolutely terrifies me.

Because how do I love myself when I don't even know who my "self" is? Really is? When the voice inside is harsh and doubtful and so used to being overshadowed by the loudness of heartbreak? 

This fear isn't sitting quietly. It's churning inside me -- I worry that being single represents a sense of incomplete-ness of myself, that there's something broken that I'm not seeing; that maybe I'm destined to be alone because I don't know how to love and to be loved. Sometimes, like now, the thought of facing life without someone beside me feels overwhelming, like a vast, empty space that I don't know how to fill. Sitting with it was never an option before; but now it is my only one. This void, that internal gaping void;  I feel it should have been filled by marriage and children by now and their absence is screaming "failure". The longer without; the longer the nights feel and the silence, heavier. 

And then there’s the inner voice. It sneaks in like a shadow, whispering, “You’re not enough. You’ll always be alone. What’s wrong with you?” At times, it feels impossible to drown out, that voice that knows all my fears and points them out. But lately, I’m trying something different. When that voice says, “You’re scared, and you’ll stay stuck,” I answer back, “Yes, I’m scared right now. But I’m trying. I’m still here, and that counts.”

It feels strange and fragile, having this conversation inside myself, but it’s the beginning of something new—something kinder.

I don’t have a roadmap for this. I don’t have it all figured out. I know I will have days where I will feel lost in the uncertainty, and that’s okay. The rawness, the confusion, the sadness—they’re part of the process. Maybe this break, this pause, is what I need to really hear myself, to start the hardest kind of love story: the one with myself.