Fragments of the Quiet Mind

It started in line at a coffee shop. The guy behind me kept brushing my backpack with his tote bag, not enough to be aggressive, just enough to be noticeable. I turned slightly, made eye contact, gave that tight-lipped smile — the one that says, “We're both human, I forgive you, please stop.” He smiled back. And did it again. So I let him. I didn’t move. Didn’t say anything. I just stood there, rehearsing twenty polite versions of “Could you please back up a little?” in my head — none of which I actually said. When I finally got my drink, I thanked the barista too brightly and left too fast. That’s the thing about politeness. It masquerades as kindness but often performs silence. It applauds itself for not causing conflict — even if that conflict is the only way something real can happen. At some point, we learn that to be "nice" is to be inoffensive, which slowly mutates into being invisible. We trade boundaries for harmony, truth for tone, self-expression for soci...

It’s my first day at work and I fussily spent it with the usual ‘assessment’ of the place. It’s a new environment, new chair and table, new bosses and new ‘work mates’. I painstakingly learned a lot from the past (and learned things the hard way!) and from that, I made a promise to myself that I will be ME this time. I will kill the remaining esoteric thoughts, and my sole concern now is to be able to be me as me without the masks.  I am so used into creating an image to make conversations bearable, but this time, I won’t do that. I want to be like water, least resistance – not influencing people at all… I want to be able to seep through cracks, flow through fingers, can’t be held and yet, firm enough to lift a boat. I will no longer try and climb walls just to see what’s on the other side, rather, I’d stupidly bash my head on that wall and secretly bleed. It sucks to do something that your heart isn’t really into, but the problem with the heart is that it ‘misleads’ people i...

I’ve never been good at it. Small talk. Idle words traded like pocket change, meant to buy just enough silence to keep us from slipping into something too real. “How’s your day?” “Busy.” “Weather’s been weird lately.” “Yeah, climate change or something.” No one means anything they say. Not really. And yet we say it anyway, like incantations to ward off the ghosts of intimacy. I find myself participating out of habit. Not because I enjoy it, but because I don’t know how not to. Because answering “How are you?” with “I don’t know, I haven’t felt like myself in months” is too much honesty for a hallway or a checkout line. But what is small talk, really? A dance? A mask? A form of mercy? Maybe it’s all three. We’ve been trained to speak without saying, to connect without touching. Politeness as performance. Distance as default. We ask about the commute, not the chaos. We mention the new restaurant, not the quiet ache in our chest that hasn’t left since December. Sometime...

All I ever wanted was to find a place where happiness wasn’t just some distant idea—where it felt real, close enough to touch. A life where what I dream at night isn’t so far from how I live by day. I wanted to grow stronger, to be better tomorrow than I am today. And maybe that’s what happiness really is—the mirage you keep chasing until you learn how to walk without it. Dreaming keeps me steady. It’s like breathing for my mind. I’ve read all the theories, but theories never capture the weight of what a dream leaves behind. It’s not the images or the story—it’s the feeling that stays. It reaches some part of me that words can’t. Maybe that’s selfish, to live in something that’s not real, but it’s the only way I know how to hold on to what I can’t explain. Sometimes I think dreams don’t lie—they just refuse to explain themselves. But trying to be happy, honestly, sometimes feels pointless. Because if chasing what lights me up ends up hurting the people I care about, then what’s the c...