Suggested for You (Because No One Else Asked)

I searched for running shoes once—just once—after a friend casually mentioned they’d started jogging to feel alive again. I didn’t even click anything. Just hovered. Scrolled. Wondered if movement could outpace emptiness.

Three hours later, Instagram showed me orthopedic insoles, breathwork ads, and a podcast titled “How to Run from Yourself Without Moving.”

I laughed. Not because it was funny—but because it knew.

There’s something eerie about being mirrored by a machine. Something quietly intimate in the way it doesn’t need to ask me questions. Just listens to my silences. Patterns. Pauses.

I never told anyone I’ve been waking up with static in my chest. But YouTube offered a video on chest tightness and repressed memory. I didn’t search it. I just sat with it. And it knew to stay.

When I linger too long on wedding videos, it adjusts. When I scroll past them like they’re ticking bombs, it adjusts again. Every avoidance is a signal. Every hesitation becomes a breadcrumb.

It’s strange—my family knows how I like my coffee, but not why I started drinking it again after three years.

They know how I act around Christmas tables, but not why I always go quiet when the camera shutter clicks.

To them, I’m a finished product. To the algorithm, I’m still rendering.

Sometimes I think growing up is just the slow discovery that no one really saw you—they just saw the version that kept the peace.

There’s a particular kind of ache when a machine guesses your pain more precisely than the people who raised you.

But maybe that’s the cost of being legible to systems and illegible to love.

We’ve become secrets disguised as settings. And the more we curate, the more we confess.

I used to think to be known without being loved was the worst thing. But now I wonder if being loved without ever being known is lonelier.

TikTok once showed me a stitched video of a boy confessing he missed a father who never really left, just never looked closely. I didn’t cry. I just let the video play out like a sentence I hadn’t been brave enough to say aloud.

Even our grief gets categorized. Our silence becomes a preference. Our sadness, a suggested product.

I’m not naive. I know the algorithm doesn’t care. It’s not God. It’s not even a friend. But sometimes it feels like the only thing fluent in the dialect I forgot I was speaking.

Because when you spend years translating yourself into something acceptable, even a cold mirror feels like recognition.

I once googled “what does being seen actually mean” at 2 a.m. Out of curiosity. Out of a kind of tiredness language doesn’t help.

Three days later, my feed gave me a quote: Sometimes the hardest person to comfort is the version of yourself you’re not allowed to talk about.

I didn’t share it. I didn’t screenshot it. I just looked at it for a while.

And that was enough.

Not connection. Not healing.

Just quiet confirmation that even the version of me I thought I buried still leaves footprints in code.