This one… I feel more than I analyze.

Tems. Her voice doesn’t just sound beautiful, it lands in your body. It’s grounded, honest, and unperformative. She’s not trying to impress you; she’s just telling her truth. And you feel it.

From the very first lines—
“Five in the morning / I wake up to fight for my earnings”—
you can feel the exhaustion. Not dramatic, but life-tired. That sense of waking up already in survival mode.

Then:
“The fear in my mind is a warning”
“The noise in my mind wouldn’t leave me”

This is it. The whole struggle isn’t life or people—it’s the noise. The mind that never quiets, that never stops.

Tems doesn’t pretend to be okay:
“I try to be fine but I can’t be”
Simple. Honest. Human.

Every line reminds me of the fight it takes just to exist:
“All these thoughts have troubled me / Fighting to give up my pain / Fighting to be on my lane”
…because even when it’s time to live, your mind can’t always follow.

And the chorus hits like a quiet revelation:
“I really need time now / I need a free mind now”

It’s not a request for success or love. It’s a request for space. For peace. For release. A reminder that peace isn’t something you can buy or perform your way into. You have to create space for it.

By the end:
“I might be falling deep…”,
there’s no resolution. No neat ending. Just presence. Just being in it. And that’s why I love this track. It doesn’t push you. It sits with you.

Maybe this is the moment I stop rushing my own becoming. Maybe the lesson is simple: slow down, build it right, and just listen to Tems.

In this episode, I unpack a tension I’ve carried for years: the desire for intensity, movement, and beginnings—while also craving slowness, depth, and deliberate creation. Therapy, astrology, and music helped me realize something simple: I’m not inconsistent. I just never allowed both sides of myself to coexist.

We explore what it means to:

Slow down without losing momentum; Choose deeply which ideas to nurture; Build projects that last, not just impress; Translate contradictions into power.

Tems’ Free Mind sets the tone: a gentle reminder that creation doesn’t need to be loud, urgent, or optimized. Sometimes, meaning comes from slowing down, listening to your rhythm, and letting your fire light something on purpose.

This episode is for anyone who feels torn between intensity and stillness, ambition and patience, fire and depth. Let’s explore how slowing down can actually help us start living fully.

Credits :

Written by: A fire-and-water soul learning to balance speed with stillness

Produced by: Therapy, astrology charts, and late-night reflections

Executive Producers: Overthinking, contradictions, and a stubborn desire to create deeply

Mixed & Mastered by: Stellium in Capricorn & intentional patience

Special Track: “Free Mind” — Tems (because some things are meant to be slow and felt)

Dave — Lesley

I have been sitting with something for a while and I am just going to say it.

I think a lot of men do not actually like women.

Not in the obvious way. Not the cartoon version. I mean something quieter and weirder than that. I mean that many men who have been with women their whole lives, who love their mothers, who consider themselves good partners, have their real emotional home somewhere else. With other men. In the approval of other men. In being seen a certain way by other men.

We are adjacent to that. We are not it.

That is why they will absorb almost anything from a male friend, a boss, a father. Humiliation. Dismissal. Compromises that cost them real pieces of themselves. They swallow it. But a woman who names something clearly, who sets one boundary, who says actually, no, that doesn’t work for me, she becomes too much. Complicated. Difficult.

And once she is too much it is already over. The conversation stops being about what she said and becomes about how she said it. Her tone. Her delivery. Whether she was too emotional or not emotional enough. The content evaporates and suddenly her character is the subject.

Respect from a woman unsettles them. Validation from men soothes them.

So inside that dynamic, we are not really desired for who we are. We are scenery. Social proof. Evidence of something. And our love cannot quite reach them because it is not where the hunger lives.

I cannot write any of this without looking at myself though. That would be too easy.

I have a six year old son. And I have, if I am honest, been raising him like a small king. Over-serving. Smoothing things before he notices they needed smoothing. I said to him once, exhausted, I am not your slave. And I felt the weight of those words in a particular way, as a mixed race woman, in a way I will not try to fully explain here.

But I stopped. I stopped offering what I was calling love but was really just constant invisible service. Not only for myself. For whoever will one day share a life with him. His future partner. His future housemates. The people who will need him to actually see the labor around him, not just admire it from a grateful distance.

Because that is the version I see so often. The son who genuinely loves his mother. Posts about her on her birthday. Calls her a queen. Is moved by her story. From a safe distance. Without ever being touched by what it actually cost her.

The love is real. But…

I do not think men are incapable of feeling things. I have stopped believing that.

I think they are unbrave. So fucking unbrave!

Not by nature. By practice. By a lifetime of being rewarded for the smooth surface, the controlled response, the managed distance. Women are trained from the beginning to stay inside their feelings, to name them, survive them, carry other people’s alongside their own. Men are praised for rising above.

So what gets built is not incapacity. It is avoidance so well practiced it looks like incapacity. Comfort over confrontation. Reassurance over depth.

And then the fantasy. God, the fantasy.

The one that sits at the center of all of this. The woman who empties his balls and fills his belly. That is the prototype. That is what is actually being desired in so many of these relationships, even when the man in question would be horrified to hear it said that plainly. Now listen and be brave.

Before she moves in, she is magnetic. Exciting. Everything. Once she moves in, she is cast. The nurturer. The domestic manager. The person who makes the edges of his life smooth enough for him to function in the world. Desired less for who she is than for what she maintains. And desire declines in almost exact proportion to how indispensable she becomes.

The more present she is, the less she is seen. Truly seen.

I have watched this happen to women I love. To me. I have felt versions of it. I still do not have a clean answer for it. I am not sure there is one.

And then we try to fix it by becoming more independent. More equal in every measurable way. Splitting everything down the middle. Building something unassailable. And sometimes that works and sometimes it quietly costs us something we did not account for. We take on a harder energy to keep up and we put down something softer without really deciding to and then somehow they miss the softness. And we are holding both losses at once.

I am genuinely so tired of this particular loop.

Just in the way of someone who has been watching the same thing happen in slightly different configurations for years and years and cannot quite stop noticing it.

I do not have a conclusion. I am not trying to teach anyone anything here. I just wanted to say it out loud. That many men do not seem to like us very much. That the prototype they are actually chasing would erase us if we let her. That the bravery required to do any of this differently is not something most of them have been asked to find.

And that I am still here. Still noticing. Still, somehow, not quite done believing it could go differently.

I have been sitting with something for a while and I am just going to say it.

I think a lot of men do not actually like women.

Not in the obvious way. Not the cartoon version. I mean something quieter and weirder than that. I mean that many men who have been with women their whole lives, who love their mothers, who consider themselves good partners, have their real emotional home somewhere else. With other men. In the approval of other men. In being seen a certain way by other men.

We are adjacent to that. We are not it.

That is why they will absorb almost anything from a male friend, a boss, a father. Humiliation. Dismissal. Compromises that cost them real pieces of themselves. They swallow it. But a woman who names something clearly, who sets one boundary, who says actually, no, that doesn’t work for me, she becomes too much. Complicated. Difficult.

And once she is too much it is already over. The conversation stops being about what she said and becomes about how she said it. Her tone. Her delivery. Whether she was too emotional or not emotional enough. The content evaporates and suddenly her character is the subject.

Respect from a woman unsettles them. Validation from men soothes them.

So inside that dynamic, we are not really desired for who we are. We are scenery. Social proof. Evidence of something. And our love cannot quite reach them because it is not where the hunger lives.

I cannot write any of this without looking at myself though. That would be too easy.

I have a six year old son. And I have, if I am honest, been raising him like a small king. Over-serving. Smoothing things before he notices they needed smoothing. I said to him once, exhausted, I am not your slave. And I felt the weight of those words in a particular way, as a mixed race woman, in a way I will not try to fully explain here.

But I stopped. I stopped offering what I was calling love but was really just constant invisible service. Not only for myself. For whoever will one day share a life with him. His future partner. His future housemates. The people who will need him to actually see the labor around him, not just admire it from a grateful distance.

Because that is the version I see so often. The son who genuinely loves his mother. Posts about her on her birthday. Calls her a queen. Is moved by her story. From a safe distance. Without ever being touched by what it actually cost her.

The love is real. It is just the love of an audience.

I do not think men are incapable of feeling things. I have stopped believing that.

I think they are unbrave.

Not by nature. By practice. By a lifetime of being rewarded for the smooth surface, the controlled response, the managed distance. Women are trained from the beginning to stay inside their feelings, to name them, survive them, carry other people’s alongside their own. Men are praised for rising above.

So what gets built is not incapacity. It is avoidance so well practiced it looks like incapacity. Comfort over confrontation. Reassurance over depth. Fantasy over the inconvenient reality of another whole person.

And then the fantasy. God, the fantasy.

The one that sits at the center of all of this. The woman who empties his balls and fills his belly. That is the prototype. That is what is actually being desired in so many of these relationships, even when the man in question would be horrified to hear it said that plainly.

Before she moves in, she is magnetic. Exciting. Everything. Once she moves in, she is cast. The nurturer. The domestic manager. The person who makes the edges of his life smooth enough for him to function in the world. Desired less for who she is than for what she maintains. And desire declines in almost exact proportion to how indispensable she becomes.

The more present she is, the less she is seen.

I have watched this happen to women I love. I have felt versions of it. I still do not have a clean answer for it. I am not sure there is one.

And then we try to fix it by becoming more independent. More equal in every measurable way. Splitting everything down the middle. Building something unassailable. And sometimes that works and sometimes it quietly costs us something we did not account for. We take on a harder energy to keep up and we put down something softer without really deciding to and then somehow they miss the softness. And we are holding both losses at once.

I am genuinely so tired of this particular loop.

Not in a dramatic way. Just in the way of someone who has been watching the same thing happen in slightly different configurations for years and years and cannot quite stop noticing it.

I do not have a conclusion. I am not trying to teach anyone anything here. I just wanted to say it out loud. That many men do not seem to like us very much. That the prototype they are actually chasing would erase us if we let her. That the bravery required to do any of this differently is not something most of them have been asked to find.

And that I am still here. Still noticing. Still, somehow, not quite done believing it could go differently.

Even though I probably should be.

But I’m an optimist.

This song is not about detachment.

It’s about desperation wrapped in pride.

From the first hook, the emotional structure is clear:

“Either you down or you ain’t / You either riding or you can’t.”

That isn’t softness.
That’s binary loyalty.

Philosophically, it frames love as allegiance — not intimacy.
There is no slow unfolding here. No ambiguity. No nuance.

It’s: are you in or not?

And that tells us something important.

When someone fears instability, they reduce love to yes-or-no terms.
Complexity becomes threatening.
Certainty becomes safety.

Then comes the crack in the armor:

“You told me I could trust you, don’t lie / I could really use it.”
“Everybody need love, even niggas like me.”

There’s pride in the persona — status, self-sufficiency, hood fame.

But underneath it is exhaustion.

“I could really use it.”

That line isn’t romantic.
It’s tired.

Trust here isn’t aesthetic.
It’s survival.

He’s not performing indifference.
He’s negotiating how much he can afford to need.

Then this:

“So much I wanna talk about / But I ain’t got no one to talk to.”

That line dismantles the idea of strategic love as manipulation.

This isn’t control.
It’s isolation.

He isn’t withholding because he’s above intimacy.
He’s withholding because there is no safe container for vulnerability.

Strategic love often looks like dominance.
But often, it’s just unprocessed loneliness.

And then the contradiction:

“And I know that I get rough / But I just wanna feel love sometimes.”

This is self-awareness without transformation.

He knows he’s hard to handle.
He knows he pushes.
He knows he guards.

But the desire underneath is simple:

I want softness too.

This is where the episode connects.

Strategic love doesn’t mean you don’t want intimacy.
It means you don’t know how to access it without destabilizing yourself.

Then comes the most revealing line:

“The more I tell you, the more you wanna know / If I tell you, will you use it when I’m low?”

That is the philosophy of guarded people.

If I reveal myself, does it become ammunition?

This isn’t romantic trust.
It’s informational trust.

Can I give you my weakness without you weaponizing it?

For someone who grew up feeling exposed — racialised, sexualised, watched — this lands differently.

Because you learn early:

Visibility can be dangerous.

So the real question becomes:

If I show you my interior, will you protect it?
Would you love what you see?

Then my favorite contrast:

“Hood fame, everybody knows my name when I come through / But don’t nobody scream it like you.”

Public recognition versus private validation.

Status versus being seen.

Strategic love often prioritizes perception.
But what he craves is singularity.

Not admiration from the crowd.
One person who holds him differently.

That mirrors the shift from power over to power with.

And then the imagery:

“Swimming in deep water, save me from my sorrows.”

Now he’s not managing the emotional temperature.

He’s drowning.

And asking to be saved.

That’s not hierarchy.
That’s surrender.

Philosophically, Trust is not a song about dominance.

It’s about conditional vulnerability.

It’s someone saying:

I need you.
But I’m terrified of what you could do with that need.

When he repeats:

“You told me I could trust you… don’t lie.”

It almost sounds childlike.

Not seductive.
Not strategic.
Just afraid.

And that’s the part people miss.

That’s why I chose this track.

Because my evolution isn’t about becoming less powerful.

It’s about no longer treating vulnerability as leverage.

I ended the episode with this:

I don’t want power over you.
I want power with you.
And if that means I fall too — so be it.

Trust is the sound of someone who wants to fall
but needs reassurance they won’t be dropped.

And the lesson isn’t:

“Make them fall first.”

It’s:

Even if I could get leverage…
I don’t want it.

I want shared risk.

That’s the difference between strategic love
and reciprocal intimacy.

Enjoy the song — and let yourself be seen.

This episode feels different.

It’s fluid. Intimate. Controlled, yes— but honest.

And ironically, it’s the first time I’m introducing myself properly. Which already says something.

The truth is: I’m not naturally good at letting people in. Not in the way people think vulnerability works. It’s not intentional. It’s automatic. A reflex.

Letting people see who I really am has always felt like risk exposure. Because, if you see me fully, you might decide I’m too much.
Or worse — not lovable.

Yes. I’m working on that in therapy.

But therapy doesn’t erase history. It just helps you understand it.

So let’s begin again.

My name is Aurélie.
I’m 37.
I’m a mother of two — but I am a woman first. And that distinction matters to me. Because my femininity, my sensuality, my presence — they’re not aesthetic choices.
They’re political.

When you grow up being told your body is “too much,” reclaiming it becomes resistance.

I’m a mixed-race woman. My mother was white. My father was Black. And mixed identity is rarely neutral.

My father was absent. I don’t know his culture deeply.
I grew up mostly surrounded by white friends.

Brown skin in predominantly white spaces teaches you awareness early.
You learn to read rooms before you read books.
You learn to adjust your tone, your hair, your posture.
You learn that belonging is conditional.

That “in-between” identity people romanticize? It’s not poetic. It’s destabilizing. Even my mother — who I love — couldn’t fully understand what I was navigating. Because racial experience cannot be imagined into empathy. It has to be lived.

So I grew up slightly translated : not fully here. Not fully there.

And then came early sexualisation.

Comments about my body before I understood what sexuality even meant.
Being watched in school corridors as if my curves were public commentary. When you are racialised and sexualised at the same time, you internalize something dangerous: “Your body is visible before your voice is.”

So I built armor. A shield that says: you can see me, but you don’t get access to me.

Because access means vulnerability. And vulnerability did not feel safe.

I was told — explicitly and implicitly — that I was too much. Too visible. Too sensual. Too intense.

Now I understand something different.

I wasn’t too much. I was unseen correctly.

And when love feels unstable growing up, your nervous system adapts. This is where the real lesson begins. The lesson isn’t “don’t manipulate.” It isn’t “just be vulnerable.” That’s too simplistic.

The real lesson is : I turned love into strategy.

Not because I’m cold. But because I’m perceptive.

I read people fast.
I enter their inner worlds easily.
I sense emotional currents before they’re spoken.

That’s not toxicity (well,…). That’s emotional intelligence shaped by insecurity.

If they fall first, I’m safer.
If they’re vulnerable first, I have leverage.
If they love me first, I won’t be the one abandoned.

It creates an emotional hierarchy. And hierarchies feel safe.

So yes — I made people fall before I did.

Not consciously.
Not maliciously.

But I managed the emotional temperature. Because underneath all of it was one quiet belief: I am too much. And if I fall first, I might disappear.

Therapy is teaching me something radical: I don’t need to orchestrate love to deserve it.

I don’t have to engineer depth.
I don’t have to stage mystery.
I don’t have to control the narrative.

Equality in vulnerability is not danger.

It’s intimacy.

And here’s the political layer again.

As a mixed-race woman sexualised early, I was taught that my power lives in perception.
In how I am seen.
In how I am desired.
In how I affect a room.

So of course I mastered perception.
Of course I mastered influence.
Of course I learned how to make people feel.

But that’s power over.

And I’m learning something different now.

Power with.

Not:
“I will manage the emotional temperature.”

But:
“I can survive being emotionally equal.”

Not:
“I will make you fall.”

But:
“I can fall too.”

Strategic love asks: How do I protect myself while staying desired?

Reciprocal intimacy asks: Can I remain whole while being seen?

I don’t want power over you. I want power with you. And if that means I fall too — … so be it.

Credits

Written by: A mixed-race woman who learned to read rooms before she learned to rest

Produced by: Therapy & generational plot twists

Executive Producers: Early sexualisation (uncredited but loud)

Mixed & Mastered by: Scorpio rising & controlled vulnerability

Special Track: “Trust” — Brent Faiyaz (because everybody needs love)

When you really listen, Cheating On Me isn’t about betrayal from the outside.
It’s about drifting away from yourself.

“Rolling with the tide” isn’t romantic — it’s passive.
It’s what happens when practicality, comfort, and responsibility start choosing for you, until you wake up in a life you never consciously chose.

That’s what I did.
I didn’t choose badly. I chose unconsciously.
I built something that made sense on paper, while slowly disconnecting from my body.

When Kwabs sings “I was cheating on me,” everything becomes clear. The betrayal isn’t romantic — it’s internal. Loving someone, or a life, while quietly abandoning yourself.

This song speaks to a quiet loneliness. Not the absence of someone — but the absence of yourself, even when you’re not alone. Living well. Functioning. Holding it together. And realizing that living isn’t the same as being alive.

Track 3 is about that moment of clarity — when you understand the heartbreak wasn’t caused by another person, but by years of not listening inward.

I wasn’t cheating on love.
I was cheating on me.

The next episode opens a different door : vulnerability, therapy, and letting myself be seen, slowly and consciously.

Until then, take care.
And come back to yourself.

This episode isn’t really about infidelity.
At least, not the kind we usually talk about.

It started with a song title that made me pause: Cheating On Me.
Not cheating on you. Not cheating with someone.
On me.

Kwabs’ voice is deep, almost ancestral. But when you really listen to the lyrics, something shifts. This isn’t a story about betrayal from the outside. It’s about drifting. About passivity. About the quiet ways we abandon ourselves while building lives that make sense on paper.

I talk about the moment everything cracked open — an encounter that changed nothing… and revealed everything. About choosing stability over desire. About silencing parts of myself for years. About mistaking calm for fulfillment. And about how denial, when it lasts too long, doesn’t disappear, it settles into the body.

For me, infidelity wasn’t about another person.
It was about hunger.
For aliveness. For desire. For a version of myself I had left behind.

Track 3 is dense, uncomfortable, and deeply honest. It’s about the moment you realize the heartbreak wasn’t caused by someone else but by the years you spent not listening to yourself.

If you’ve ever lived well but not fully alive… This episode is for you.

🎧 Listen to Cheating On Me.
And see what comes back to you.

Credits:

Written by: Sleepless nights, heartbreak, and excessive self-reflection Produced by: Therapy, music, and pure stubbornness Executive Producers: That encounter & my inner storm (uninvited) Mixed & Mastered by: Intuition, Scorpio fire, and bad timing Special Features: Kwabs; Cheated On Me (because of course)

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Let me say this first: good therapists are actual magicians.

You can spend your whole life trying to figure yourself out, building theories, journaling obsessively, crying into Ben & Jerry’s with a cup of hot green tea, begging the Universe for signs through dreams, symbols, astrology charts, tarot cards, whatever keeps you afloat.

Then boom.
First therapy session.

Two hours of me spilling my entire life like an open suitcase on the floor.
Five minutes later, she looks at me and calmly says: “This is who you are.”

Excuse me?? How?? How do they do that?

They find the words you didn’t even know you were starving for.
It’s brilliant. Borderline supernatural, honestly.

And here’s the part people get wrong: therapy isn’t about fixing yourself. Or becoming someone more “acceptable,” more digestible, more socially approved. No. Stay as crazy as you are. The world desperately needs that too.

Therapy is about cutting through the fears, coping mechanisms, and layers you built to survive… so you can finally meet the person you already are underneath. The one who’s meant to shine bright like a diamond (yes, Rihanna reference. Always intentional).

You don’t lose your demons either. You just stop being their puppet.

You start catching yourself in real time. You hear the old reflex kicking in and suddenly think: “Oh look, I’m about to act like my usual—still fantastic— self-sabotaging b*tch… but wait. Why? Ah. That old wound. Got it.”

And then you stop.

Over.
Done.

That’s the new you.

And the wildest part? Once you meet the real you, you start realizing what you actually want.

All those questions you never asked because your life was on autopilot : partner, kids, dog, stable job, repeat. Therapy rips that autopilot right out. It gently (or not so gently) asks: what do you want? And then dares you to build a life that answers honestly. Some truths feel terrifying in your head. In real life? Much less dramatic.

I quit my partner.
My beautiful house.
My job.

And I’m happier than ever… (Okay, let’s say more aligned than ever.)

Nobody hates me. And honestly? No one will ever hate you as hard as you hate yourself for not daring.

So go big.
Speak your truth.
Protect your sanity.

And please, don’t get sick because you were too scared to live.

Credits

Written by: Childhood absence, unspoken fears, and endless therapy notes Produced by: Therapy sessions, introspection, sleepless nights, and sarcastic humor Executive Producer: My inner child (that little wise-ass) Mixed & Mastered by: Self-awareness, clarity, and a touch of Scorpio fire Special Features: H.E.R.; Focus (on repeat during all epiphanies)

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Before I even really heard the lyrics, I saw the title: Focus. I heard H.E.R.’s voice. And something in me just clicked.

The song is full of longing, of asking to be seen, to be chosen. And I realized I’ve spent too long chasing someone else’s attention. The person I really needed to focus on… was myself.

That’s what this track became for me: a mantra. Focus on me. Even when it’s hard. Even when old patterns whisper: “It’s easier to please someone else.”

Therapy is what helps you get there. Not by fixing you, but by helping you catch your patterns, notice when you’re shrinking, and consciously choose yourself. It’s quiet, messy, slow magic; the kind that teaches you how to stop bleeding from old wounds.

So breathe. Listen. Let this track remind you: the love you deserve starts with choosing you first.

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Swim Good by Frank Ocean (2011) opens Therapy Mixtape because it captures an emotional state that often comes before understanding.

This isn’t a song about healing or transformation. It’s about survival, the quiet, almost invisible kind. The kind where you’re not moving toward answers or clarity, but you’re still moving. Still here.

In this track, swimming isn’t about reaching land. It’s about refusing to sink. It becomes a metaphor for carrying emotional weight and choosing motion without knowing where it leads. Not fighting. Not giving up. Just staying.

There’s a moment in life, often before therapy, before language, before insight, where you can’t explain what’s happening inside you, but your body knows. Music can meet you there. Swim Good doesn’t try to fix anything. It matches the mood. It holds the space.

Some people hear this song as dark or dangerous. And the imagery is heavy. But for many of us, darkness isn’t destructive — it’s protective. Matching the emotional weather can feel safer than forcing light.

This song lives in a liminal space. Between despair and hope. Between collapse and direction. A place that’s rarely honored, but deeply real.

Swim Good didn’t pull me out of the water. It taught me how to float until I was ready to swim somewhere. Before therapy gave me words, this song gave me rhythm.

If you’re new here: this is what Therapy Mixtape is about. Music as emotional language. Tracks as markers of inner survival. Reflections that don’t rush meaning.

If all you’re doing today is staying afloat, that’s enough.

Mid-2024 and 2025 have been my personal tsunami crush. Life smashed me into tiny pieces, and now I’m just trying to swim good (thanks, Frank Ocean — without your talent, I’d already be in hell).

I’ve spent most of my life living in my head: overthinking, overanalyzing, theorizing about love, money, self-worth, and everything in between. I charge forward like an Aries sun, crave depth and intensity like a Scorpio rising, and observe it all with the detached curiosity of an Aquarius moon. Translation? Chaos with a philosophical soundtrack. Add a Saturn return to the mix — that infamous cosmic boot camp where life strips you down and forces the lesson and suddenly everything cracks open at once. Comfort was never part of the syllabus.

That’s where therapy came in. Expensive, humbling, occasionally hilarious therapy. Each session costs me 70 euros, so instead of hoarding the wisdom, I decided to recycle it. I suffer, I pay, and you get the summary notes for free. You’re welcome.

This mixtape was born there — in the mess. X tracks. X lessons. Each one a moment of revelation, a vulnerable snapshot of learning how to notice patterns, trust intuition, loosen old wounds, and reclaim personal power. My biggest one? Rejection. That shadow that followed me for years is finally starting to lose its grip, one session at a time. And that feels huge.

This isn’t a how-to guide. It’s not enlightenment packaged neatly with a bow. It’s a map of my personal chaos. A journal of vulnerability. A manual for laughing at yourself while you figure things out. Because the truth is, we’re more alike than we pretend: messy, flawed, self-sabotaging in familiar ways. Same themes, different actors.

So here’s the invitation: listen, read, reflect. Laugh, dance, maybe cry a little. Let this mixtape be a companion on your own journey. Remember, your body knows. Your heart knows. Your mind is clever, but your inner compass? That’s the real genius.

Welcome to my therapy mixtape.
Press play. Let’s swim.

Album Credits

Title: Therapy Mixtape
Artist: Aurélie Mboule

All tracks written by: Sleepless nights, heartbreaks, fucked up situationships, Saturn returns, and one overactive Aquarius Moon (i.e : overanalysing)
Produced by: Life itself : messy, relentless, and oddly poetic
Executive Producer: My higher self (she was late but she showed up)
Mixed & Mastered by: Therapy, long walks, and playlists on repeat
Vocals: My inner child (sometimes screaming, sometimes singing)
Featuring: Ex-lovers, rejection wounds, infidelity, unpretty mirrors, body wisdom, and money lessons that refused to quit
Special Thanks To: My therapist (a goddess), Astrology (for making me feel less crazy), my girlfriends (for insisting I’m beautiful even when I didn’t believe it), my kids (beautiful mirrors) and music (for being the language my heart understands before my head does.) Recorded at: Every city and shoulder I cried on, every room I laughed in, every place I finally chose myself — mostly in my shower and bed, when I was too tired to give a f*ck.

Not quietly. Not shyly. Not like one whispers about astrology conspiracies at brunch. But loudly, publicly, repeatedly—as if they’ve just discovered fire or emotional literacy. On TikTok.

And before anyone panics: I know, this desire is not new. Intergenerational attraction has existed forever—quietly, shamefully, behind closed doors. What is new is the volume. The confidence. The way it’s now announced, aestheticized, posted like a personality trait.

And yes, I am watching. I always watch.

I’ve flirted with chaos more than once, so naturally, when this phenomenon hit my feeds like a viral confession, I stopped, stared, and thought: oh honey, this is worth a dissertation and a cocktail.

No judgment. No romanticization (well, very little). Just the dangerous question: what is really going on here?

Gen Z didn’t invent the attraction to older women; they invented the audacity to talk about it out loud, often without fully understanding what they’re asking for.

And yes, I speak from experience. Young men notice me, and my girlfriends are not immune either. An age gap of ten to fifteen years can feel like a universe; but it can also feel surprisingly light, fleeting, and full of excellent footnotes. Subtlety, always.

And yes… sex is very much in the room. And it’s messy, playful, and occasionally incendiary—just like life.

Three Generations, Three Relationships to Desire

Gen X women learned desire under constraint: desirable before autonomous, negotiating freedom through compromise—marriage, motherhood, strategic silence. Their erotic power, reclaimed later in life, is often fierce, unapologetic, quietly radical. They don’t flirt to be chosen—they flirt to remind themselves they’re alive. And yes, sometimes they get attached. Sex is fire, attachment is fire, and both are messy.

Millennial women (my category) learned desire through contradiction. Promised freedom, delivered precarity. Told they could “have it all,” then handed the bill. Emotional labor, therapy-speak, burnout: our erotic intelligence was sharpened by disillusionment. We desire connection, but not captivity. Pleasure, but not erasure. Boundaries became survival skills. And yes, sexual desire is full of curiosity, delight, and sometimes a lingering ache.

Gen Z men, meanwhile, learned desire in collapse: economic instability, ecological dread, political cynicism, and the erosion of traditional masculinity. They were told to be sensitive, but not shown how to be stable. Emotionally available, but without economic or symbolic grounding. Sex? Often performance anxiety wrapped in a TikTok.

So when Gen Z men desire older women, it’s not just erotic—it’s aspirational.

They are not chasing age. They are chasing containment: a space that holds them, steadies them, allows emotional and sexual expansion without requiring construction.

Let’s Set the Stage: Desire, Age, and the Glitch in the Matrix

Older men with younger women have always been the norm. Tradition, biology, capitalism, destiny: pick your narrative. But young men publicly proclaiming love for women in their 30s, 40s, 50s? Loudly, proudly, sometimes desperately. That’s glitching the matrix.

Women in their Thirty, Forty, Fifty collapse into one abstract category: older. Scroll TikTok, Instagram, or the DMs of someone who thinks emotional literacy is a badge (it isn’t; it’s practice), and you’ll see it: “I love older women. She gets me. Girls my age are too immature.” Fascinating, coming from brains still under construction until around twenty-five. But I promised myself to pause open misandry in 2026—so let’s proceed calmly.

When Desire Becomes a Signal

Visible desire—repeated, aestheticized, commented on—stops being a private preference. It becomes collective data, a social signal screaming for interpretation. And interpretation? I live for it.

Why now? Why so loudly? Why Gen Z men, whose emotional and social infrastructures are still under construction, drawn to women whose lives—and yes, bodies—are already assembled?

The humor here is structural. Older women flirt with a lightness born from surviving seriousness: heartbreak, dazzlement, domestication, liberation. They’ve learned to distinguish potential from presence. So when a younger man flirts, there’s no urgency. No countdown. No hidden agenda.

This is erotic humor: not mockery, but detachment. Tease without hope. Desire without projection. Enjoy without negotiating a future. This unsettles men raised to equate desire with conquest.

For once: the woman is not waiting; the stakes are undefined; power becomes playful. And play is dangerous because it resists control… At least in the beginning.

The Age Blur

Thirty, forty, fifty—collapsed into one vague category. Youth is not just biological; it’s cognitive. The difference between thirty-two and forty-eight feels theoretical at twenty. Age becomes symbolic, flattened.

When young men say they’re attracted to “older women,” are they attracted to age, or to what age represents?

“Older” isn’t wrinkles or orthopedic insoles (sorry to the young ones who already have them). It’s confidence. Composure. Erotic literacy. Knowledge of oneself. A woman who knows her body, her desires, and how to make pleasure immediate, without needing to workshop identity over brunch. Not an age—a state of being.

Competence, Not Mothering

Yes, some (a lot) young men have attachment issues. I mean : “Mommy issue.” Freud would have had a field day. But reducing this to a maternal complex? Lazy and patriarchal.

Older women are appealing not because they mother, but because they don’t need mothering. No panic texts. No mistaking chaos for depth. No confusing intensity with intimacy. They’ve survived enough to stop romanticizing instability (lol, clearly I am not one of them). For a generation raised on precarity, that steadiness is sexy as hell. And yes, sex is part of that steadiness.

Or Keep Dreaming

The “older woman” being desired is rarely allowed to just be. She’s expected to be young for her age: fit but effortlessly so, stylish but approachable, sexually available but never needy, experienced but never demanding, independent yet somehow warm, confident yet nurturing.

Translation : keep dreaming, my loves.

Also, there’s a real risk of instrumentalization here: performing emotional infrastructure, offering affective reassurance, and—oh yes—providing a soft landing for men who haven’t even finished building themselves.

The danger isn’t the age gap. The danger is expectation masquerading as admiration. Older women have earned their freedom—the heartbreaks, compromises, the endless negotiations with life and love. Young men? They stroll in, swipe right, and enjoy the benefits without having paid the toll. When admiration quietly mutates into expectation, the dynamic becomes extractive—and, frankly, exhausting to watch.

This is where older women must remain lucid. Because erotic generosity is not a public service. Wisdom is not a renewable resource. And desire does not oblige caretaking.

The most powerful older women know the rules instinctively: flirt, but don’t mother; enjoy, but don’t stabilize; remain generous but always, always selective. Good luck.

Sex, Fire, and Human Messiness

Yes, sex is here. And yes—it’s messy. Playful. Hot. Vulnerable. Sometimes tender, sometimes confusing. Sometimes attachment sneaks in, whether you like it or not. Older women know desire—but we are human. We can get attached. We can want more than we planned. Desire is fire, and fire leaves marks.

Sex with older women is rarely about novelty or transgression. It’s not “forbidden fruit”—it’s immediate, uncompromising pleasure. Bodies known, desires stated, mistakes acknowledged, boundaries tested. Effort is no longer confused with proof—but intensity is very much alive. For younger men raised in a culture of constant evaluation, it’s destabilizing: no tutorial, no scoreboard, no panic about being “enough.” And yes, that can be thrilling and terrifying at once.

It’s light… until it’s heavy. Grounded… until it catches fire. Urgent… until it lingers in memory, pleasure, or regret. Erotic relief, yes—but also curiosity, attachment, laughter, and sometimes frustration. Not a blueprint. Not destiny. Not transcendence. Just human. Just fire.

The Silent Question

While much is written about what young men want, less attention is given to what older women negotiate: is this a pause, or a detour?

Some enjoy novelty, power, the encounter precisely because it is temporary. Funny, flattering, rebellious. It asks nothing. Restores confidence without demanding sacrifice.

Others are navigating their own timelines: still wanting children in their late 30s or 40s, balancing fertility with autonomy. Still desiring intimacy that doesn’t compromise freedom, wisdom, or professional ambition.

This is where the fantasy can fracture.

The Politics Hiding Under Flirting

Historically, heterosexual desire has always been power-adjacent: older men, socially established, secure; younger women, adaptable, still in formation. Desire wasn’t neutral—it was structured. Now? Not a reversal. Not a revolution. More like a suspension, a glitch in the expected hierarchy.

Young men, still under construction emotionally, socially, even financially, are craving intimacy without the full weight of responsibility. But let’s call it what it is: they also crave warmth, touch, desire that doesn’t come with a syllabus or a performance review. They want someone who knows herself, knows her body, and isn’t asking for a blueprint.

Older women, meanwhile, are already assembled, messy and human but confident in their boundaries, rhythms, and appetites. They offer desire as presence, not pedagogy. They don’t need to be chosen, they don’t need to build a future, and they don’t need reassurance. But—and here’s the crucial human layer—sex, attraction, and attachment are messy. You can flirt without needing to mother, but you can still feel a spark you didn’t expect. You can enjoy the fire and still care about the person across from you. That’s human. That’s real. And it’s hot.

Freedom here is intoxicating—but temporary. Desire is playful, urgent, sometimes tender, sometimes selfish. When young men flirt with women who’ve survived heartbreak, dazzlement, and domesticity, the stakes aren’t instructions or expectations—they’re presence, attention, and pleasure. And yes, sometimes attachment sneaks in, uninvited but undeniable.

This is where the messy, human, sexual reality lives. Desire isn’t neat. Sex isn’t just pleasure. Intimacy isn’t just comfort. It’s flirtation, fire, vulnerability, occasional attachment, and the electric awareness of being fully present. It’s mutual, finite, urgent, unapologetic. More than theory, more than sociology—that is what makes this dynamic delicious, destabilizing, and impossible to ignore.

And when these men hit their thirties, their emotional architectures more settled, they may well pivot. Will they then seek younger women, where asymmetry, malleability, and the thrill of building something from scratch is still available? History and sociology suggest yes.

Desire is flexible, opportunistic, and stubbornly aligned with what the culture, biology and economy reward.

Gen Z Exhaustion vs. Millennial Completion

Gen Z men enter love burned out, suspicious of structure. Relationships are shelters, not blueprints.

Millennial women, by contrast, arrive with careers, children, passions, scars, narrative—autonomous lives to plug into. Stable Wi-Fi after buffering. Refuge, not transformation—but seductive nonetheless in a world where instability is the default.

Gen Z women? Exhausted early. Hyper-aware, hyper-visible, hyper-analyzed. Taught boundaries before safety. Empowerment before stability. Performance before rest. They are cautious, politicized, tired of carrying emotional labor for men still figuring out what they want. Many opt out—not for lack of desire, but because desire is expensive.

They are not avoiding men. They are avoiding unpaid internships in love. So when young men say “women my age are too much,” what they really mean is: women are no longer disappearing for them. And that’s exactly as it should be.

That, too, is a cultural shift worth noticing.

So What Are We Really Witnessing?

Not a revolution. Not a regression. Not a reversal.

A collective pause. Desire curling into the present. Intimacy preferred over ambition. Power loosens, becomes playful—temporarily.

Permanent? History suggests no. But as a cultural symptom, it reveals: stability is erotic; completion is attractive; real freedom is magnetic.

Older women are no longer waiting to be chosen. And perhaps that—more than anything—is what everyone is responding to.

Maybe this isn’t a sexual revolution. Maybe it’s emotional. Or maybe it’s exhaustion dressed as preference.

Gen Z fascination with older women? Less about age gaps, more about refusing to gamble on instability. Connection without construction. Intimacy without futurity. Love today is increasingly about resting, not building.

Desire laughs at chronology, winks at pleasure, and reminds us that the best things are unexpected, fully lived, messy, and maybe a little scandalous. When young men look up… let’s hope it’s with curiosity, delight, and maybe a little awe.

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“Family Business” by Kanye West played softly as I wrote. The song reminded me that family, even when fractured by absence, carries lessons, love, and strength. Learning to land, to root myself, is part of honoring that legacy.

I’m writing a book about my Maman;

About her life, her tenderness, and the hidden cost of being a woman and a mother. I didn’t begin this project with the intention of indicting anyone. I wanted to understand her. And through her, to understand how women learn to survive in worlds that quietly ask them to disappear.

In her story, my father is the central illegitimate character. Not because he was omnipresent, but because his absence shaped everything. He structured our lives through what he withdrew. He left behind a silence that became architectural.

My father killed my maman.

Not in the way courts recognize. Not in the way headlines announce. There was no single act, no weapon, no precise moment the world could point to and say: this is where it ended. What happened was slower, quieter, and therefore easier to ignore. It was the kind of violence that rarely earns a name: the gradual erosion of a woman through abandonment, neglect, and emotional disappearance. A feminicide enacted second after second, breath after breath, until a woman’s inner world collapses under the weight of carrying everything alone.

I was born and raised in Benin for the first five years of my life. Then he left. There was no explanation, no negotiation, no soft exit. No final conversation that could later be revisited for meaning. Only anger and pride. The only languages he seemed fluent in. His departure carried violence precisely because it asked nothing of him and demanded everything of her.

In many places, this kind of disappearance barely qualifies as an event. Men leave families every day. Women reorganize their lives around the absence. Children learn early not to ask too many questions. But absence is not neutral. It has a shape. It reorganizes time, memory, and identity. It shapes nervous systems. It rewires attachment. It teaches children how fragile love can be, long before they have words for love at all.

And yet, with time, my relationship to this story has grown more complex.

I have had to learn, not without resistance, to thank my father for giving me life. This is not forgiveness. It is not reconciliation. It is an acknowledgment of reality. Parts of who I am: my resistance to confinement, my need for freedom, my capacity to reinvent myself carry his imprint. These traits saved me.

The work now is more delicate: learning to cherish these inheritances without confusing freedom with escape. Without believing that movement is always growth. Without mistaking avoidance for independence. Learning how to stay without feeling trapped.

My Maman adored him.
This remains one of the most difficult truths to hold.

Even after everything, she loved him fiercely, quietly, without condition. She never spoke a harsh word about him. Not to me. Not to anyone. Her love was not naïve; it was disciplined. No bitterness. No public anger. No private denunciation. Her silence was intentional.

But silence does not erase emotion. It only displaces it.

The anger had to go somewhere. And it came to rest in me.

I absorbed what she refused to express. I carried the rage she believed would poison her tenderness. Over time, I learned to transform it, not into bitterness, but into strength. Into direction. Into an internal structure that allowed me to stand upright in a world that had already taught me instability.

But my Maman gave me something far more radical than resilience. She taught me how to be a soft warrior. How to hold power without brutality. How to remain open without self-erasure. She believed stubbornly, almost defiantly that love is not weakness but force. Not romance, not illusion, but an ethical commitment to life.

She taught me that strength does not require hardness.
That love is not the opposite of power.
That tenderness, when chosen consciously, can be an act of resistance.

She believed with a conviction forged through suffering that love is the most valuable currency in this world. That love, real love, saves lives. Perhaps that belief kept her alive longer than it should have. Perhaps it saved mine.

Still, my father derooted me.

He destabilized my earliest sense of belonging. He removed the soil before I had learned how to anchor myself. Children raised in fractured environments often develop a specific skill set: adaptability, independence, flight. I learned early how to move, how to rise above situations, how not to depend too heavily on ground that might disappear.

I learned to fly before I learned to land.

For years, grounding felt unfamiliar. Unsafe. I trusted altitude more than stability. Distance more than proximity. This shaped not only how I lived, but how I loved. Loving a masculine presence often felt like standing at the edge of something vast and unpredictable: beautiful, intoxicating, and always at risk of collapse.

The first man who shaped my understanding of the world taught me that love can evaporate overnight. That departure can be deliberate. That abandonment is sometimes a choice. Many women inherit this lesson early. It settles into the body long before it becomes conscious thought.

Lately, my body has been speaking in a different register.

It is asking me to descend from the heights I mastered out of necessity. To land in my own life. To grow roots where I once only grew wings. To choose a form of love, of home, of stability that is shaped not by inherited trauma, but by intention.

This is not a rejection of who I’ve been. It is an integration.

I am learning to root again.
Not in him.
Not in the ruins he left behind.
But in myself.

In the lineage of women who taught me endurance without bitterness. In the wisdom my Maman carried with grace. In the belief that cycles are not destiny, they are invitations to intervene.

I am learning to become the woman she knew I would become.
The one who stays.
The one who softens without disappearing.
The one who loves, deeply, not as an act of sacrifice, but as an act of conscious choice.

At this time of year, when homes are lit from the inside and families rehearse their rituals, I am reminded that safety is not found in perfection, but in presence. In choosing to sit at the table. In choosing to stay.

Flight is not failure.
But it is not a destination.
And grounding, conscious, chosen, embodied, may be one of the most radical acts we can make.

PILLOWTALK - Zayn

Right now, my life feels paradoxical.

Fragile and luminous at the same time. I’m standing in one of those quiet in-between places where nothing is resolved, where the old story has dissolved and the new one hasn’t quite formed yet. And somehow, everything feels more alive because of it.

It feels like being at the bottom of the ocean. The pressure. The darkness. That strange awareness of your own breath. Not knowing which direction is up, unsure of the next movement… and yet carrying a calm, almost irrational certainty that whatever comes next will be beautiful.

Or maybe I’m just romanticizing chaos. Entirely possible.
But honestly, a little delusion has always been part of my survival kit.

What I do know is this: I’m choosing slowness. Silence. Abstinence.
Not as deprivation. Not as virtue. But as a way of listening again.
A way of returning to myself without interference, without echoes, without borrowed desire.

I’ve never believed in casual sex, at least, not for me. Not because of morality; I despise the whole body-count obsession. Pleasure isn’t a scoreboard. It shouldn’t be measured like trophies. It shouldn’t even be counted.

I’ve shared myself with fewer bodies than I once imagined I would (my life is not over yet though…) especially for someone who has always lived in desire. I like sex. I think about it. I talk about it. I respect it. But my mind is too honest, too porous, too attentive to engage without depth. And inevitably, the body follows.

That hasn’t protected me from meeting men who weren’t ready to go there, not in relationship, but in connection. Depth is not something you can negotiate or extract. Presence isn’t contagious. Depth isn’t contagious. You can’t want it for someone. And learning that, slowly, gently, broke something open in me. And taught me, too.

Touch is my ultimate love language. Not the decorative kind. The real one. The healing kind. The kind that settles the nervous system while waking the skin.

How I hold you says more than what I text you. How I breathe with you is more honest than any “I miss you.” How I touch you tells you everything my mouth doesn’t know how to articulate.

Sex, to me, is never just sex. It’s a confession. An unveiling. A surrender. A claiming. A prayer. A risk. And no, it’s not just penetration.

When I sleep with someone, I meet them in a way they cannot curate. Their energy spills. Their softness leaks. Their ego melts. Mine too. What remains is truth : unfiltered, unguarded, unperformed.

Some people heal you without trying. Some rearrange your nervous system with a kiss. Some awaken an ancient hunger you didn’t even know you were carrying.

Some lovers are fire.
They don’t ask, they ignite. A look that lingers too long, a hand that already knows where to go. With them, desire rises fast, hot, undeniable. They don’t make you feel safe; they make you feel alive. Your skin wakes up before your mind does. You leave burning, sometimes brighter, sometimes singed.

Some lovers are water.
They move slowly, patiently, like they’re learning the exact shape of you. With them, sex feels like being soaked rather than taken. They don’t rush your opening; they wait for it. You soften without noticing. You melt. You surrender because your body wants to, not because it’s being pulled there.

Some lovers are air.
They undress you with words, pauses, almost-touches. Desire with them is anticipation, the space between mouths, the breath before contact. They make you ache before they ever touch you. You feel lighter, dizzy, suspended. Sex becomes a conversation, playful and sharp, charged with everything that hasn’t happened yet.

And some lovers are earth.
They are steady, anchored, inevitable. Their touch is slow but certain. They don’t rush, because they don’t need to. With them, you feel claimed without force, held without question. Your body trusts them instinctively. You relax because something in you knows they won’t disappear mid-touch.

None of them are better than the others.
They are all sacred.

They simply awaken different parts of us different hungers, different truths, different versions of ourselves. Some teach us fire. Some teach us softness. Some teach us longing. Some teach us how good it feels to stay.

And sometimes, the deepest pleasure is recognizing which element you need and which one you’re no longer willing to settle for.

And others? They touch you and everything inside you folds shut.

Sex reveals people, not their technique, but their essence.

Loving sex, though, doesn’t mean wanting any sex. What I love most is pairing. That rare alignment where two bodies actually speak the same language. Not just desire, but rhythm. Not just attraction, but attunement. It’s when frequency matches frequency. When wanting aligns with wanting. When neither of you has to speed up, slow down, translate, or perform. When you don’t wonder whether the other wants you, you feel it in the way their body answers yours.

Pairing isn’t about acrobatics. It’s about cooperation. About listening. About the quiet intelligence of bodies that know how to adjust to each other instinctively. A hand that stays when it should. A mouth that understands timing. A presence that doesn’t rush the moment but deepens it.

Sometimes it’s as simple and as powerful as staying connected. Remaining inside, while also staying attentive. Letting touch travel where it’s needed. Understanding that pleasure multiplies when attention doesn’t leave the room.

That kind of sex doesn’t feel like consumption. It feels like collaboration.
And it’s incredibly arousing.

Because true sexual compatibility isn’t just about desire; it’s about resonance. About wanting together. About bodies that converse instead of compete. About the relief of not having to ask for what is already being offered.

That’s also why I’m choosing abstinence right now. Not to escape desire, but to refine it. When I’m not exchanging energy with anyone, my own rises. It thickens. It concentrates. It becomes sovereign.

I become more sensitive. More intuitive. More instinctive. I can finally hear the difference between craving touch and craving connection. Between wanting sex and wanting someone. Between needing release and choosing presence.

I won’t choose sex to escape anything, not loneliness, not boredom, not the need to feel desired. I’ll choose it only to be fully here. To step into something meaningful. To let it return me to myself, not pull me away from myself.

I imagine myself naked with my books, sun on my skin, untouched and alert. Not waiting. Just listening. Breathing deeply, fully, with my whole belly. Feeling my own rhythm again, uninterrupted.

And if, during this pause, a body crosses mine with clarity, with that unmistakable yes, I’ll honor it (you can count on me). Because desire is a teacher. And sex, when chosen consciously, is one of the ways we become more alive.

People say love is emotional, spiritual, mental. But without the body, love becomes abstract : poetry without breath. Touch matters. Scent matters. Presence matters. Desire matters.

Love must think.
Love must feel.
But above all, love must touch.

And honestly? Sex is often where a human ego dissolves — a man’s, especially. If he lets it.

Because real sex asks for presence, not performance. It asks him to listen instead of lead, to feel instead of control, to soften instead of conquer. It’s one of the rare places where certainty doesn’t help him, where strategy collapses, where the body demands honesty. And when he stops trying to be impressive, when he stops managing the moment, something sacred happens.

He disappears just enough for something real to take his place.

Which brings me to this paradox I live inside.

In abstinence, I seek God.
Not the moral God. Not the punishing one. But the quiet, vertical space inside me. The place that asks for clarity, restraint, alignment. Abstinence strips the noise. It turns my attention upward and inward. It reminds me that desire is energy, and energy deserves direction.

And in desire, I find myself.
Not the curated self. Not the disciplined one. The embodied one. The woman who feels before she explains, who knows before she justifies. Desire brings me back into my skin, into sensation, into truth.

God lifts me.
Desire roots me.

And somewhere between the two, I stay awake.

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Music Credit: Megan Thee Stallion – “Savage” Because sometimes, heartbreak requires a little confidence, a little sass, and a whole lot of attitude.

Healing is expensive. Sarcasm is free. Algorithms is optional.

I write from the frontline of modern love: heartbreaks, micro-therapies, and astrology-spiced chaos. I watch my girls, my feed, and my soul simultaneously combust and occasionally, I take notes so you don’t have to. If this resonates, congratulations: you’re officially emotionally woke and slightly unhinged, like me.

I have a five-year-old emotional heart, a triple split definition in my Human Design, and the devastating realisation that I’ve only been truly in love once in my 37 years of existence… and last but not least, because I’m in my own heartbreak era, the soft grieving of a place I no longer hold in someone’s life, I’ve had to accept something:

I’m very (very, very, very) sensitive.
Having my Moon in Aquarius does not seem to help me here.

Like everyone, actually.
Except some people seem… better trained. Emotionally gym-fit. I’m jealous.

So I do what any emotionally chaotic, spiritually exhausted millennial would do:
I observe, analyse, take notes on the love sphere like an anthropologist.
Because after my long pause of abstinence and celibacy, I will be back in the game. Emotionally toned, spiritually moisturised, and ready.

Let’s be honest:
2025 is a circus of heartbreak, depression, spiritual fatigue, and collective chaos. And most of us, except the few who somehow remain spared (I love hating you, truly), are wandering around pretending we’re fine while our inner child is silently screaming into a satin pillow.

In this emotional apocalypse, I found my unlikely medicine: Instagram reels.

Yes. Reels.
Tiny 15-second emotional support animals that pop up like digital healers with good lighting and questionable credentials. But, somehow they work.

We’ve entered the era of micro-therapy: strangers whispering punchlines that stabilize our nervous system faster than any meditation app ever has.

Things like:
“May those who want your presence but not your depth never find you.”
That sentence alone deserves a Nobel Prize in emotional intelligence. My friends adore me, but none of them send that level of sacred encouragement at 2:17 a.m.

Or the devotional classic:
“My flag isn’t red or green. It’s white. I give up. Leave me alone.”
Honestly? That’s scripture.

And then the scientific masterpiece:
“The egg does not swim to the sperm, bitch.”
Biology, empowerment, a full TED Talk in one sentence. Moral of the story: never chase a man. Move with integrity, honesty, consistency.

But the real magic lives in the reels that make you laugh and cry at the same time, where your sadness has to take a break.

Like “You deserve a gentle, emotionally stable heart attached to an unproblematic dick.” A rare species. Nearly endangered. But theoretically real.

Or the masterpieces that declare:
“And as my final act of love, I will achieve everything we talked about but you’ll watch it happen through a screen instead of living it with me.”
Iconic. Biblical. Fuck you.

And then the sacred truth, the final blow, the drop the mic moment:
“You literally can’t hurt me. I’m a millennial with degrees I don’t use, trust issues crafted by 90s R&B, and a dark sense of humor sharp enough to slice through any emotional disappointment.”

Those healed us more in 8 seconds than any therapist did in 80 minutes.
And therapy is expensive.
Reels are free. Case closed.

Of course, sometimes we are not spiritually noble.

Sometimes we like a reel as a subliminal message.
As in: maybe they will see it.
Maybe the algorithm will deliver it straight to their soul like an emotional drone.

Maybe I’m communicating through irony, trauma humor, and astrology-coded symbolism.
Maybe I’m a Mars-in-Aquarius tech witch who can track what every single follower likes in 0.7 seconds.

And honestly?
It’s fascinating.
Because five minutes into scrolling through someone’s likes, and it’s like the universe sending a push notification:
“Hey love, your standards are calling. Pick up.”

(My women are the wittier ones, of course.)

I didn’t choose this life.
The algorithm shaped me.

But micro-therapy has limits.

That clarity only lasts about an hour.
Then you come back to your nonsense, your analysis, your overthinking, your emotional PhD with no diploma.

And that’s okay.
That’s literally how micro-therapy works: tiny hits of insight… followed by an immediate relapse into chaos.

Reels are more than entertainment.
They are coping mechanisms, emotional vitamins compressed into jokes, mini TED Talks for the wounded. They comfort us, validate us, expose us, drag us, resurrect us, and tuck us back into bed.

They’re the digital equivalent of having your best friends on loudspeaker 24/7 but more consistent, and immediately accessible without scheduling a dinner two weeks in advance.

So next time someone judges your screen time, just say:
“Actually, I’m engaging in neuro-emotional stabilization through curated audiovisual punchlines. It’s called healing.”

And if you ever need help decoding someone’s emotional availability through his/her birth chart or Human Design type?
You know where to find me.
My Scorpio rising was built for this.

Anyway, I’m logging off now to continue my deep spiritual work: refreshing my feed until the universe sends me a sign, a joke, or one of my soulmates.
Whichever arrives first.

With all my love.

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ROSALÍA – “Reliquia” (2025, LUX)
The perfect soundtrack for ghosting yourself, crying on the floor, and realizing your own damn light has been there all along.

In a world where ghosting is apparently the absolute coolest vibe ever—lol, let’s text or like each other for two days and then vanish like responsible adults. Here’s another level.

Ghost yourself. Completely. Voluntarily. No texting, no mirrors, no borrowed applause. Just you, your voice, your chaos… and discovering that the person you’ve been trying to find all along was sitting quietly inside you the whole time.

I’m in a peculiar place right now (like always. Consistency is key), where I keep asking myself: why the fuck is it so hard to choose myself?

Mentally, sure, but physically too.
I feel it in my chest: this tight, annoying pressure that shows up every time I inch closer to letting go. This ridiculous terror of actually… choosing myself.

And the irony?
The gift is priceless. Literally the one investment that never crashes.

Why is it so painful to shut out all the noise, sit alone, and enjoy the void without panicking?
Why do we keep giving our power away like we’re running a charity?
Why do we keep letting others define us when their gaze only ever reflects our own damn light back to us? (Read that again. Seriously.)

I think that’s exactly what happens in grief, in infidelity, in loss, in (toxic) relationships. We lose a piece of ourselves, or we think we do, and we go looking for it in others. We chase reflections, hoping they’ll make us whole again.
And sometimes, it fucking delusionally works… until it doesn’t.

There once was a woman who lived in a world made entirely of echoes.

Every word she said bounced back at her. Sometimes perfect, sometimes weirdly off. Every laugh, every sigh, even her “I’m fine”s returned with someone else’s inflection, polished, sharpened, mildly judgmental.

At first, it was comforting. She never had to wonder if she was heard. Someone always got her. Or at least, pretended to.

She learned to recognize herself by the way the echoes responded:
Her softness in the gentle murmurs of someone else.
Her brilliance in the applause of another’s voice.
Her laughter in the sparkle of someone else’s amusement.
She felt whole as long as someone else’s ears were paying attention.

But echoes have a price.

The woman noticed that when she moved, her real sound stayed behind.
The version of herself she loved most only existed when someone else’s ears was tuned in. Without it, she felt hollow: real, but without shape.

She tried to follow the echoes deeper into the forest, across rivers of sound, through caverns where voices multiplied, hoping to find the one that belonged to her.

The further she went, the more she fragmented.

One evening, utterly exhausted, she stumbled upon a clearing she had never noticed. In the center stood a simple, silent pool. The water absorbed every echo. Nothing came back.

Curious, she sat at the edge.

Silence. Not empty but terrifyingly honest.
Her own voice, unreflected, whispered back.
And it was funny, terrifying, beautiful, uncomfortable as fuck…
But somehow, it was home.

Suddenly, she felt a pressure in her chest. The kind that comes just before tears. Not the soft tears of sentiment, but the painful tears that claw their way out because something inside you finally breaks open.

She realized: choosing yourself is hard because no one is cheering.
No one’s nodding. No one’s reflecting your brilliance back at you.
You have to trust your own eyes, your own voice, your own messy, chaotic self.

It means facing the version of yourself no one else sees.
And deciding, I love her anyway.

She cried, not because she was lost, but because she remembered the self she had abandoned long ago: the self who existed before all the echoes, before all the reflections, before the borrowed versions of her own light.

And for the first time, she stayed.
She breathed.
She let the silence settle around her like a second skin.
And slowly, her outline returned.
Not borrowed.
Not reflected.
Born entirely within.

Outside, the world buzzed with noise and expectation. But inside, she finally heard herself clearly.

The cords we carry—habits, expectations, fears, attachments—make it easy to leave ourselves behind. We abandon ourselves to survive, to be loved, to fit in, to keep the peace.
We mirror what others need, hoping it will make them stay.

Choosing yourself is difficult because it requires returning home to that abandoned place. A homecoming, yes, but also a reckoning.

One day, my daughter will be heartbroken.
And when that day comes, I will remember all the times I learned—painfully, stupidly, dramatically—to find myself.

Like that era when my voice notes to friends were essentially unpaid, unsolicited therapy sessions.
The nights I wrote in my journal like I was preparing top-secret evidence for the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Heartbreak.
The mornings I woke up to Toni Braxton’s UnBreak My Heart like it was a sacred ritual and I was its only disciple. Me deleting Instagram dramatically. Reinstalled it 14 minutes later. Brave? Kind of. Not that brave.
That phase (still ongoing, Jesus Christ) where I blamed my horoscope for every questionable decision: “It’s not me, it’s Mercury.”
The time I practiced a breakup speech in the shower like it was a TED Talk that would change the world.
And all the other ridiculous, embarrassing moments like crying on the floor with my red-light therapy and filming myself for my friends. Because yeah, in your 30s, you have to master the art of being glowing sad.

All the cords I cut.
All the echoes I let fall behind.
All the versions of myself I buried and then resurrected. (Scorpio rising, literally a phoenix.)

So when she needs guidance, I will not project myself onto her. (I hope so . Poor babygirl.)
I will not speak for her.
I will be the home she always returns to.
The mirror she actually needs.
The voice that whispers the only truth that ever matters:

You are enough.
You are whole.
You are seen by the person who matters most: yourself.

I will teach her quietly, through presence, through example (I pray to be a good one by then). Because choosing yourself is the most radical, most loving act a woman can make.

She will know that even in the emptiness, the silence, the chaos, the kind that feels chaotic as fuck, she is still enough.

And among all the ghosts people leave behind, she’ll become the plot twist:
the one who doesn’t chase, doesn’t flinch, and definitely doesn’t wait.
The most dangerous one in the room.

The one who learned how to ghost herself and never checked anyone’s reflection again.

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Frank Ocean – Pink + White

Some days I feel like my brain is running fifty tabs at once, all arguing about who’s in charge. I didn’t plan on loving only once in thirty-seven years. I also didn’t plan on making a career out of overthinking, but here we are.

Plot twist: overthinking has accidentally turned me into someone who can pause, zoom out, and ask why before I implode. Between the mind that catastrophizes, the body that refuses to lie, and the heart that insists on learning the hard way, I’ve somehow built a full curriculum in love, triggers, and embodiment. Growth? Trauma response? Who knows. But it makes for a good story. So here it is.

I’m the kind of woman—like many women— who catches subtleties the way other people catch colds: effortlessly, involuntarily, and often at the worst possible moment. I don’t need words spelled out; I feel the shift before you even form the sentence.

My nervous system? Trauma-trained, experience-approved.
Hypervigilance disguised as intelligence.
Sensitivity masquerading as “intuition.”
Survival made me perceptive, analytical, alive to nuance whether I wanted to be or not.

I overthink.

Not the cute, “haha anxiety brain” kind.
The PhD-level, forensic, neurotic kind—the one where a single text message triggers a full CSI episode: analyzing punctuation, tone, timing, emotional history.

Academically speaking, overthinking is “cognitive rumination stemming from hypervigilance rooted in early emotional inconsistency.”

In human words: my mind is an overprotective bouncer for my heart, checking every emotional ID, scanning for hidden weapons, and verifying no one’s here to waste my time.
But the real red flag?
I often don’t listen to it.

I read between the lines.
I remember every word. E-v-e-r-y word.
I feel every micro-hesitation.

Exhausting, but efficient.
My toxic trait is knowing the truth and still asking questions just to watch you lie.
(Kidding. I just read that quote on Instagram and thought it was fun. I’m not that much of a psychopath. I wish I were though—life would be easier.)

So of course clarity is my obsession. Pure, transparent, intentional clarity. Speak honestly and with nuance, and you’re already halfway into my world. That’s intimacy for me: saying everything without hiding anything.

And here’s the surprising perk of the overthinking curse: eventually you learn not to take things personally. If something triggers me (and manyyyyy things do), I’m now capable of asking, “Okay, why?” When I find the root, it’s peace again.
Freedom again.

Still, I overthink.

Thus, I write.
Religiously. Compulsively. Endlessly.

As a child, I wrote fiction to escape boredom and dream.
Now, I write to unload the noise, translate the chaos, and turn my five hundred mental tabs into coherence. The page absorbs what my mind refuses to release.
It is my ventilation system, my survival tool, my therapy.

Here’s the ironic, slightly tragic, slightly funny truth about having an overthinking hijack system:

We don’t actually trust love.

Not the real, soul-to-soul kind.
Fusion? Intimacy? Two humans dissolving their defenses and meeting as they truly are?

No.
Thank you.
Absolutely not.
Danger detected. Abort mission.

Even happiness feels suspicious, like a bright light you squint at because your system learned early that softness is often followed by a storm.

Letting someone love you means letting them see you—the real, unfiltered you—and trusting they’ll stay.
How is that not terrifying?
How does anyone do that without flinching?

Because let’s be honest, people like me don’t overthink for sport. We do it because the idea of fusion, of someone actually seeing us and still choosing to stay, feels borderline dangerous. And I refuse to believe I’m the only one whose nervous system treats joy like a suspicious stranger.

But I’m learning. Slowly.

Which brings me to love.
Or rather, the difference between feeling love and loving someone.

I’ve felt love many times: the warmth, the adrenaline, the rush of connection, the illusions of passion, the heart-racing “are we dying or dating?” kind. All of that. Beautiful, necessary, educational.
But not love.

Not the kind that lets you breathe.
Not the kind that holds without possessing.
Not the kind that feels like honesty instead of intensity.

That love happened once.
In thirty-seven years.

The grounded kind.
The kind where your nervous system stops shaking, your mind stops performing, and your body whispers,
“Here. This feels like home.”

Because as an overthinker, passionate by love,

Letting go is rare.
Trust is rare.
Presence is rare.

And here’s the truth I don’t say out loud often: I loved once but even that story was half-bodied. Fourteen years of devotion with a heart fully present, and a body quietly tapping its foot like, “Are we sure?” The mind held on, the history held on, the loyalty held on… but the physical attraction never burned the way it should have. Loving deeply doesn’t always mean loving wholly. And sometimes the body knows long before the breakup does.

I’m aware that every person carries a private dictionary of what love means. Shaped by fear, memory, hope.
But I believe real, grounded love has one universal trait:
it doesn’t make you dizzy; it makes you breathe.

Love is not intellectual at its core.
It is sensory.
Somatic.
Primitive.

Touch, scent, voice, these are the first languages we ever learn.

A baby cannot survive without touch.
Through skin, we first learn we exist.
Someone holds us, and our body concludes: I am real. I am safe. I am loved.

So of course love without physical attraction is complicated. Our earliest programming is somatic. Before we understand words, we understand warmth. Before affection, we understand contact.

The body doesn’t lie. It whispers truth without overanalyzing.
And unlike the mind, it cannot be manipulated, outsmarted, or reasoned with.

You can trick your mind into loving the wrong person,
but not your body. (Gemini Venus, my fatal flaw.) I love words, concepts, stories. But feeling, sensing, grounding, that’s where my truth lives.

And when I manage to stay in my body, I connect with people without judging them.
I just feel them. It’s quiet. It’s human. It’s rare.

So here I am: shaped by wounds, trained by survival, wired for nuance, terrified of fusion, capable of loving once in three decades, but learning to let my body speak first. A woman who feels fiercely, writes endlessly, and is finally choosing the one thing that has never lied to her: her body.

If adulthood has taught me anything, it’s that the real plot twist isn’t heartbreak, it’s finally understanding your own wiring. And choosing, for once, not to override it.

Will I love again? Absolutely. Probably. Maybe… Ask me after my next overthinking spiral.

Until then: I write, I feel, I listen to my body… and occasionally I let happiness approach without calling security.

Progress my dear. Progress.

And honestly… at this age, progress counts as seduction.

ps: While finishing this text, ’m currently battling a glamorous case of white tonsillitis: swollen tonsils, divine drama included. Because, well…I’m not saying everything that needs to be said.
So I write.

The Art of Overthinking: a 37-year case study in loving once.

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To the men reading this:

I hope I’ll be your favorite misandrist. Don’t worry, I only bite when necessary.

There’s an endless debate about masculinity—what it is, what it should be, whether it’s under attack, whether testosterone is vanishing, whether society is “feminizing men.” Honestly? I don’t even know how to talk about it without feeling like every sentence is a battlefield.

Because masculinity is not the enemy. Toxicity is.

Masculinity can be beautiful: strength without cruelty, confidence without domination, protection without possession, leadership without hierarchy.

Historically, masculinity wasn’t always about dominance. Take the Vikings—some women owned land, managed farms, had legal rights. Strength meant responsibility, not silencing or suppressing others. Dominance, control, fear disguised as authority—that’s not masculinity. That’s the inability to tolerate equality.

If you need someone beneath you to feel like a man, you don’t feel like a man at all.

Training, Not Fault

The problem isn’t men. It’s the training.

Boys learn to exist through a choreography: the controlled tone, the detached timing, the nonchalant silence that’s supposed to mean strength. The performance.

Girls learn to survive by pleasing, apologizing, shrinking, absorbing. They learn to read the room, anticipate everyone’s emotional weather, apologise before they speak, dim the parts of themselves that feel “too much.” Their performance is quieter but just as rehearsed: the nice girl, the accommodating girl, the emotionally fluent girl who carries the emotional logistics so no one else has to. They learn connection, but through sacrifice. Presence, but through self-editing. Intimacy, but through over-responsibility.

Different trainings, same outcome: we grow up unable to understand each other.

And that’s the real issue, isn’t it? So many men confuse masculinity with performance. With volume. With poses. With the ability to look unbothered, unreachable, untouched. They’ve learned to exist through a choreography—a survival architecture built mostly for other men, because so much of their power isn’t about women at all, but about the hierarchy between themselves. And behind every posture, there is always a wound.

They’re not born this way. They’re taught. And that’s where the manipulators step in. People like Andrew Tate and the masculinist sphere didn’t invent these insecurities—they prey on them. They take the wounds created by family, society, culture, impossible standards, and the pressure to “be a man” without ever being taught how, and they turn them into weapons.

They sell the fantasy that domination fixes your self-worth. That control equals respect. That money equals dignity. That women exist to obey or to be conquered. Real men? Warriors who feel only anger and erections. (Okay, I’ll give them the last one.)

They make you forget about presence. The courage to occupy the moment without armour. To show up instead of performing. To feel instead of rehearsing. And the tragedy is that so many boys were only ever taught the performance, never the presence. So when we ask for connection, they respond with theatre.

It’s a scam. A con. An emotional Ponzi scheme built by piece-of-shit men preying on other men’s humanity.

Who do they target? Not monsters. Not losers. But men who feel: unseen, insecure, unvalued, intimidated by women’s freedom, hungry for guidance, wounded by upbringing.

Recognize yourself? Congratulations—you’re human. Not weak, not beta. Just a person with emotions. Shocking, I know.

Dominance vs. Love

Instead of helping you heal that pain, they weaponise it. They tell you the solution is to dominate the very people you hope will love you. (It’s the emotional logic of a five-year-old boy in kindergarten who hits the girl he secretly likes. Cute. When you’re five.)

And has that ever worked? (Because trust me, even my five-year-old self hated the boy who tried that on me). Has dominance ever made you feel loved? Or only feared? Has it brought connection? Or just noise, distance, and resentment?

Because here’s the truth you don’t seem to want to hear: Women don’t want to dominate you. We don’t want to infantilise you. We are not your mom and we don’t want to be. We have see our mothers sacrificing themselves, losing themselves, shrinking themselves, aging themselves, killing their dreams so that the man next to them didn’t fall apart. We’ve seen them sacrifice everything and call it love. Hard pass. (Thanks, but no).

We don’t want to replace you. We want you whole. Healthy. Free from the nonsense society forced down your throat.

The crisis isn’t women’s power. The crisis is that too many men equate power with dignity, love, masculinity. Power without reflection is fear.

And here’s the biggest irony:

The men Tate claims to defend, “overlooked,” “unloved,” “ignored” men, are the SAME men he insults. He calls his own followers: “losers,” “weaklings,” “idiots,” “betas”. Then sells them the fantasy that domination will fix their self-worth. He positions himself above them. Above all men.

So if men are oppressed, let’s be clear: they are oppressed by men like him. While we, women, are just trying to dismantle a system that hurts both of us. A system that breaks women quietly and breaks men silently. A system that teaches women to disappear and men to harden until they crack.

And we want to stop fighting a system that hurts us and you at the same time.

Masculinity isn’t the enemy. Far from it. The kind we love? Protection without possession. Strength without dominance. That’s the masculinity we want. We crave it.

And yes… it’s sexy as hell. AS HELL.
It turns us on so much we could write poetry about it. Or, let’s be real, fantasize about all the ways.

See? “Healthy” masculinity isn’t just a concept. It’s a vibe. And if I had to package it? My package? Heaven.

The Patriarchy Conversation (time to panic — but breathe)

Look around: most institutions are built by men, for men, and still protect men. Who writes policies about pregnancy? Who controls money, industries, laws? Who commits sexual violence and often walks away unpunished?

And yet the same men scream: masculinity is under attack. No. Women are.

So maybe the real problem isn’t that society (or feminism) is attacking men. Maybe the real problem is that men are finally being asked, not-so-gently, to look at themselves.

And that’s new. And new feels threatening. I know that too.

Questions for Reflection

If sensitivity is weakness, why are the strongest men in history also the most emotionally literate?

If calling a gay man “a woman” counts as an insult, what does that say about your view of women? About your mother, your sister, your daughter, your grandmother?

Does it mean being a woman is inherently less? Fragile? Second-class?

Does it mean your mother, your sister, your daughter, the women you claim to love are not your equals?

If masculinity is so powerful and strong, why is it so fragile that one comment can “threaten” it?

If a woman gaining rights “threatens masculinity,” then how fragile was masculinity to begin with?

If women wanting equality feels like an attack, then perhaps you weren’t looking for partnership, you were looking for control.

Confessions from a Parallel Universe

Before you shout, “But men and women are different!” (if we stay binary for a moment — which I don’t believe), let me say it myself.

It was always difficult for me to accept the essentialist narrative. At some point, I dropped the weapons and admitted it : biology or culture, the result is the same, we inhabit parallel universes.

I share stories with women — real, tragicomic stories — and we laugh. Desperately. The kind of laugh you hear at 2 a.m. when the universe is clearly pranking you. Because honestly? Men are often the biggest joke in our parallel world. And I say this with love… and mild trauma.

They often tell their wives, “Women were more resilient before.” Sure, they were less free, less vocal, and frankly, more trapped. Easier? Usually, yes. Slaves usually are. Fewer rights, fewer options, fewer freedoms.

A caged bird sings predictably. A free one terrifies you.

Now women are free. Men are forced to face their own emotional responsibility, to access their own resilience, to feel. And oh boy, it’s hard. Hard enough that some retreat into influencers promising: “You don’t need to evolve. Just dominate.”

I could write a whole Netflix comedy : men praised for dropping kids at school, changing a diaper once a week, noticing the trash. Shocked (shocked!) when laundry doesn’t fold itself like in a Pixar movie. Calling you dramatic because you remember things (apparently, witchcraft). Holding the TV remote like it weighs 45 kilos and asking, “Why are you so tired?”

Meanwhile, women get judged for breathing wrong: Forgot to wash the clothes? Monster. Didn’t cook today? Selfish. Said no? Hysterical. (How dare you?). Dared to want a life? Dangerous feminist. Expected to be pure, soft, “low body count,” polite, quiet, perfect. Dresses a certain way? “Easy.” Speaks loudly? “Too much.” Defends herself? “Angry.” Successful? “Intimidating.” Knows what she wants? “In love” or “too needy.” Is a mother? Must stop being a woman… or risk being called a whore.

It’s funny… until it’s not. Until you realize the joke is a mirror. And the mirror is cracked.

So I’m asking you, genuinely, not sarcastically this time,

How do we understand each other without empathy?
And how do we build empathy when neither side feels understood?

That’s the heart of the noise between us: men think women want too much. Women think men give too little. Both sides feel unseen. Both sides are tired.

Where do we go from here? How do we, who live in different dimensions, find a common language?

Not through domination. Not through fear. Not through TikTok masculinity manuals. Not through “alpha” delusions.

Without power. Noise. Ego.

I Still Want to Find a Husband (But Let’s Be Honest)

Since I’ve been pointing fingers at men, let me do something rare: I’ll turn the mirror on us, women. (Because yes, I still hope to find a husband one day.)

We’re not flawless angels floating above the chaos. We make noise. We create confusion. We hurt.

How? We demand emotional skill from men we barely articulate ourselves. We call them emotionally unavailable while we shut down the moment we feel vulnerable. We punish them for the sins of ten exes, ten generations, ten patriarchies. We want strong-but-soft, confident-but-humble, present-but-not-clingy—flexibility we don’t always offer back.

Yes, we laugh at men—but sometimes it’s fatigue. Sometimes fear we might also be incapable of building the bridge.

We forget that many men weren’t raised with the tools we take for granted.
We learned how to feel; they learned how to endure.
We learned how to talk; they learned how to silence.
We learned how to analyze ourselves; they learned to “be strong.”

Here’s the emotional twist: I proudly call myself a mysandrist because I blame them. And yet, I still believe in them. I have seen men be extraordinary. Brave. Gentle. Loyal. Deep. Sensitive. Capable of transformation that would humble the gods. I believe they can rise to the people they were meant to be, rather than shrink into the versions the world has molded them into.

And I don’t blame women out of guilt. I blame us because we also need to grow. To make space. To unlearn. To choose vulnerability as much as we demand it.

Both sides carry wounds. Both sides carry pride. Both sides carry longing. We talk about masculinity as if men were solely responsible for healing it. But the truth is: we’re in this together not in a romantic fairytale way (sadly), but in the real, raw, uncomfortable way that relationships and societies evolve.

Raising a Son in a World Where Masculinity Isn’t a Prison

I’m a mother of a son. A boy who will grow into a man in a world louder and more complex than the one I grew up in.

Everything I write here is for him.

I want him to know:

He doesn’t need dominance to be respected.
He doesn’t need silence to appear strong.
He doesn’t need money to deserve love.
He doesn’t need to suppress softness to prove masculinity.
He doesn’t need to fear women’s freedom.
He doesn’t need to distrust emotion.

Protection is not possession. Protecting the people you love is not only standing in front of danger; sometimes it’s standing in front of your own ego.
Providing is not only financial.
Strength is not about suppression, but expression.
Being vulnerable does not equal weakness.
Being strong does not mean never breaking.

Masculinity is lived, not performed.

I want him to grow up in a world where masculinity isn’t a prison. And women’s freedom is not a threat.

And I want men to understand this clearly:

Women protect too. Women provide too. Financially, emotionally, physically, spiritually. Not just when men can’t, often even when they can.

Women uphold entire emotional ecosystems. They stabilize families, finances, hearts, schedules, dreams.

So no, men don’t need money to be respected. Money is a tool. Respect is a relationship. Love is earned.

When men say, “Women only want money,” I laugh. If love were transactional, humanity would have gone extinct centuries ago. We do not expect men to be ATMs. We do not measure a man’s worth by his wallet. And if a woman only loves you for money, that’s not love.

And yes, if the only date you can offer is a coffee? Perfect. Coffee is enough. Authenticity is enough. Presence is everything.

I want my son to know: love is shared. Responsibility is shared. Care is shared. Power is shared. And masculinity, real masculinity, thrives when it stands next to women, not above them.

The Final Questions

To the man reading this:

Are you threatened—or scared? Angry at women—or at your own unmet needs? Unseen, unvalued, unheard, insecure, unloved?

Do you want dominance—or connection? Obedience—or intimacy? Fear—or respect? A stereotype—or a real human being?

What is masculinity for you? Not your father’s, not your peers’, not some influencer’s. For you.

What do you stand for? What do you want to embody? What legacy will you leave (for your kids, your sons)?

If women are ready to face their contradictions, shadows, and wounds—are you ready to face yours? Not as villain, not as victim, but as a human capable of unlearning, relearning, transforming?

To build a world where masculinity and femininity stop fighting—and start listening.

That’s where everything begins. Not in domination. Not in silence. In courage. Yours. Ours. Together.

Until you answer honestly, all we hear is noise between us.

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(Credit: Frank Ocean, “Pyramids”)

We don’t talk enough about the in-between — the space where affection and attraction meet but don’t have to collide.
Where intimacy doesn’t require ownership, and connection isn’t a prelude to anything else.

Because the truth (well, my truth) is, yes we could fuck and still be friends.
Not out of confusion or denial, but out of evolution.
Because maybe friendship and desire were never meant to be enemies; maybe they were meant to learn how to exist side by side, without supervision.

There is something profoundly sacred about friendship between people of different genders — or simply different energies — when it’s real, unforced, and free of expectation.

It’s not a diluted romance, nor a failed love story.
It’s a meeting of two worlds that were taught to orbit each other carefully, bound by attraction and caution, yet rarely allowed to touch without a clear purpose: love, sex, marriage, or need.

Friendship across gender lines defies a silent rule, the one that insists every bond must be explained, categorized, or sexualized.
But some connections simply are.
They don’t need to lead anywhere; they exist to remind us that intimacy doesn’t have to be consumed to be real.

A man who befriends a woman (and vice versa or however you identify and mix your energies) meets a part of themselves that was never allowed tenderness. They learn to listen without fixing, to feel without fearing softness.

A woman who befriends a man meets a part of herself that was never allowed freedom. She learns to speak without shrinking, to trust her strength without apology.

And perhaps, through that exchange, each person learns something radical: that friendship, at its deepest, is an act of emotional intelligence. A quiet rebellion against the transactional logic of modern relationships.

It’s not about balance; it’s about expansion.
When friendship transcends gender or expectation, it opens a portal. A space beyond power, beyond attraction, beyond performance where two souls meet not as roles, but as humans.

And maybe that’s why it feels otherworldly.
Because in a culture obsessed with defining, owning, and performing connection, true friendship, especially one that challenges the old binaries, is revolutionary.

No performance.
No mask.
Just presence.
(Which, by the way, is much harder than pretending you’re above it all.)

Of course, the world will roll its eyes.
“They must secretly want more.”
“They’re in denial.”
Or my personal favorite: “It’s impossible.”

That’s true. Sometimes.
(More often than I would love to.)
Because yes, desire exists.
And ego too.

People want each other. It’s biological (probably) not a moral failure.
A man might want to fuck a woman, a woman might want to be wanted — or fuck too.

Equality, remember?

But what if that wasn’t the problem?
What if the real issue is our cultural allergy to complexity. Our refusal to believe that a friendship can hold both attraction and respect, both energy and boundary, without combusting?

We were raised in binaries: Love or friendship, Sex or purity, Possession or distance.

But human connection was never that clean.

A true friendship that holds attraction is not the absence of desire, it’s the maturity to hold it without needing to consume it. It’s recognizing beauty without ownership, and tenderness without agenda.

No one has to prove control.
No one has to dim their light.
Both can exist, wild, curious, alive, without turning the bond into a transaction.

In that kind of friendship, sexuality doesn’t need to be erased; it’s simply integrated. It becomes a note in a larger symphony, not the whole song.

Because sometimes the most powerful relationships aren’t the ones that cross the line, but the ones that learn to dance around it. With honesty, humor, and a healthy dose of self-awareness.

It reminds me of Pyramids by Frank Ocean: a song that moves between worlds, between desire and reflection, between the physical and the emotional; tracing the complicated, sometimes contradictory, ways intimacy can exist. Like his song, friendship and attraction aren’t neat or linear; they’re layered, fluid, and a little sacred.

Maybe that’s the future of intimacy.
Not repressing desire, not sanctifying friendship, but expanding our understanding of both.

It’s the meeting of two mirrors finally realizing they were never enemies. Just reflections.

So yes, we could fuck and still be friends.
Because maybe that’s what friendship really is:
the sacred, the sexual, and everything beautifully human in between.

Footnote: These are my reflections, not prescriptions. I do not assume to have discovered the ultimate truth about human connection. But when I imagine the future of intimacy, the ways desire, friendship, and care might coexist, this is what I find myself thinking.

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[Olivia Dean - Let Alone The One You Love]

Love doesn’t always end in fire.
Sometimes, it softens, it unthreads.
It becomes a quiet art: the art of releasing without erasing.
Of staying tender, even as everything changes shape.

We broke up with love.
And honestly, it could’ve been the title of a Tupac song.

There’s an art to separating in love, a way to unweave a shared life without turning it into war. To recognize that even when a relationship ends, the love that once existed doesn’t vanish; it transforms. It becomes part of who we are, stitched into our history, into the way we care, the way we forgive.

Because freedom isn’t the absence of connection; it’s the ability to stay yourself within it.

That, perhaps, is the most dignified kind of love.

Sometimes, separation begins quietly.

A sentence lands differently—“I got your part of the house”— and suddenly the ground beneath shifts. It’s the moment one realizes that choosing oneself isn’t an act of betrayal, but of becoming. Terrifying, yes. Liberating, too.

And yet, the unraveling is never graceful. It comes with tears, long voice notes, a flood of words and snot; the kind of breakdowns that demand witnesses, preferably the ones who love you enough to send heart emojis instead of advice. Because if you’re going to fall apart, you might as well do it memorably.

Then comes the jealousy—sharp, stupid, human. The realization that while one keeps the house, the other floats again. Ungrounded. Alone, not just logistically but existentially. Until clarity returns and it becomes obvious: it was never about the money, but about the invisible scaffolding we build around ourselves to feel safe.

Separation, after all, is a mirror. Not the flattering kind. The one that shows what we value, what we fear, and the exact distance we’re willing to walk into the unknown.

Choosing yourself isn’t clean. It’s not cinematic. It’s messy, lonely, often bureaucratic : banks, papers, and the polite condescension of men who assume your ovaries disqualify your financial literacy. But choosing yourself also means not shrinking to fit the space someone else made for you. It’s expansion through discomfort.

And here’s the unexpected grace: sometimes, when two people truly choose themselves, they end up choosing each other again. But differently. Not through attachment, but through respect. Not through dependence, but through understanding.

That’s the strange beauty of growing up in love.
It’s not about breaking apart; it’s about breaking open.

We learned that love can survive in new forms, less romantic, perhaps, but more honest. It can exist beyond the couple, within the family, within the quiet loyalty of shared history.

So yes, we broke up.
But gently.
(Except for that one day we yelled, hard, and I almost had a stroke. Aries–Scorpio energy is not for the faint of heart.)

It took over a year to really understand what we wanted, from life, from love, from ourselves.
And that understanding didn’t erase the bond.
It refined it.

Love, when stripped of possession, can turn into admiration. Into care. Into a quieter, cleaner tenderness. The kind that doesn’t need to own to protect.

We don’t stop loving just because we stop being together.
We just learn a new way to love.

And sometimes, yes, the holy path is not soft at all.
Sometimes it looks like packing up the car in silence, driving through the night, the air thick with everything unspoken. It’s taking the fancy coffee machine because you’ll actually use it, leaving behind the lamp you never liked, and laughing mid-cry at how absurdly human it all feels.
It’s rage and relief sharing the same breath.
It’s knowing that both tenderness and distance can be sacred acts.
Because love is not measured by who stays, but by how gently we let go.
Both can be holy. Both can be love.

In the end, separation isn’t an ending, it’s an evolution.
Our relationship shifted from us to both of us.
He learned to soar.
I learned to ground.

And maybe that’s the quiet secret no one teaches us:
you don’t heal by becoming smaller.
You heal by becoming fully yourself and letting love meet you there.

So yes.
We broke up.
With style.
And love.

PS: Scorpio loyalty? Still u.n.d.e.f.e.a.t.e.d.