Fragments of the Quiet Mind

 I’ve been thinking about patterns lately. Not the loud ones—the mistakes that crash into your life and demand to be noticed—but the quiet ones. The ones that repeat so subtly they start to feel like personality. Like how I default to gentleness in conflict. How I make excuses for silence. How I anticipate needs I was never told, then overextend to meet them. It doesn’t feel heroic. It feels familiar. Mechanical. Reflexive. I used to call it empathy. I’m not sure that’s the right word anymore. Somewhere along the line, I learned to offer the kind of care I wanted to receive. Not consciously—not as strategy—but as language. As instinct. The kindness wasn’t performative. It was sincere. But it was also laced with a hope I never admitted out loud. That someone might notice. That I might be met there. But the truth is, I gave so much of that kindness in rooms where it went unnoticed. Not unappreciated—just... unreturned. And that does something to a person. Not all at once. Not in...

There was a time when I believed that happiness had a shape, a clear, undeniable form—something I could reach out and touch if I tried hard enough.  And so I built it piece by piece: the right job, the right place, the right people, the right version of myself. It all seemed so simple, so attainable, like following a map laid out in front of me, each step leading closer to the thing I thought would make everything click. But now that I’m here, standing amidst everything I ever wanted, the map feels oddly irrelevant. The edges are frayed, the ink is smudged, and the directions seem somehow off. All the things I gathered, hoping they would fill me, now stand like silent monuments to an unknown truth. They don’t soothe me. They don’t calm the storm inside. They just make the silence more conspicuous. I thought getting what I wanted would silence the voices of doubt, but now it’s louder than ever. The strangest thing about having everything is realizing that you’re still missing some...