why are you still waiting for someone to start your life?

i have 3000 followers and two people i can call.,

come here. sit down.

i need to tell you something before life teaches it to you violently. and mind you, life has terrible bedside manner

i was sitting alone on a rooftop in a new city when this article struck me

you’re waiting for someone to arrive before you begin your life.

i know.

god, i know.

you’ve been doing it for years and you’ve almost convinced yourself it’s not waiting.

it’s just being patient. and idk, realistic. right?

but honestly, baby, it’s just waiting,

we have a name for it.

and we’ve gotten very creative about disguising it.

it looks like scrolling through reels and saving a restaurant. “i wanna go here.” and then you just don’t. because go with whom, exactly? you wait for the right people to be free at the right time in the right mood. and while you wait, the folder grows.

one restaurant becomes twelve. becomes a hundred. becomes a graveyard of places you meant to go when life cooperated. you have 1,400 saved posts. you have been to approximately none of them. the algorithm thinks you’re cultured.

you are not cultured. you are a person with excellent taste and zero follow-through because you’ve been waiting for a co-signer on your own life.

and the funniest part? sometimes you send the reel to yourself. directly. as a note. a little digital sticky note that says: “you. someday. maybe. if someone comes.” your own contact sitting at the top of your dms. a conversation with yourself made entirely of things you haven’t done yet. which is honestly incredible because now even your delusions have customer support.

baby,

that’s not a vision board. it’s almost a waiting room with good wifi. it looks like “i’ll start eating well on monday.”

god.

monday.

the most optimistic day of the week.

but monday has never once delivered on what friday promised it.

monday is basically a rumour at this point.

meanwhile tuesday showed up anyway. completely unbothered. no apology. didn’t even ask if you were ready.

the audacity of time, honestly.

she’s unbelievably rude. she doesn’t care that your friends are busy. she doesn’t care that he hasn’t texted back. she doesn’t care that everyone’s schedules don’t align.

mango season happened. the sunsets clocked in. spring showed up for work. and there you are saying, “can you come back when i have company?” which is bold, honestly. because time has never struck me as someone who takes requests.

and here’s the audacity nobody talks about. the one that lives specifically inside ambitious people.

because i don’t actually think you’re sitting around waiting to be rescued. i don’t think you’re waiting for somebody to come and magically fix your life either. you’re too busy for that. you’ve got goals and plans and timelines and seventeen tabs open and a general sense that you’re headed somewhere, even if you don’t entirely know where.

but, god.

you lot are sneaky.

because you’ve built an entire fantasy life in your head.

and your person is already in it. not in some tragic way. not in a “i need a relationship to complete me” kind of way. honestly, it’s much sneakier than that. it’s the way you furnish a house before you’ve bought it.

you imagine finally getting that job and immediately imagine who you’re going to call. you think about that city you’ve always wanted to visit and somehow they’re already there, walking beside you. you picture lazy sunday mornings with good coffee and there’s already someone sitting opposite you. you’ve cast them without even realizing it.

and maybe that’s the thing. maybe you don’t just want someone to love you. maybe you want a witness. somebody who gets to say, “no, no, i remember. i was there. i saw you become this.”

and because that person isn’t here yet, you’ve started treating your current life like the behind-the-scenes footage. you don’t even notice you’re doing it.

every solo trip feels vaguely temporary. every nice restaurant becomes somewhere you’ll “properly” come back to later. every achievement feels good for a second and then there’s that tiny echo afterwards because nobody was sitting in the passenger seat while it happened.

baby, you’ve turned your own life into pre-production. and meanwhile? the actual film has been running this entire time.

which, honestly, feels a bit rude on life’s part. because you’d think it’d have the decency to wait? you’d think time would at least send a calendar invite. but apparently not.

and i know why you reach for people. god, i do.

i know what it feels like when something good happens and your first instinct is who can i tell. something delicious arrives at your table and before you’ve even tasted it your hand is already reaching for your phone to take a photo for someone who isn’t there. you watched a film that wrecked you and you immediately want to text someone “you have to watch this” before you’ve even processed what it did to you.

you can’t let an experience be complete until it’s been witnessed.

think about that for a second. really, sit with it. you don’t trust your own life to have happened unless someone else confirmed it. you are living in permanent beta, waiting for external validation to push you to production. the sunset was beautiful but did anyone see you see it? the meal was incredible but did anyone know you had it? did it count? does any of it count?

i know the specific panic of everyone being busy. when you text five people and they’re all unavailable and you sit there with that low-grade hum of “does anyone actually want to be around me or have i just been convenient this whole time.” that thought at 7pm on a friday is a particular kind of violence.

i know the instagram-refreshing. the posting a story and watching who views it like it’s an attendance register for people who care about you. he viewed it. what does that mean. nothing. it means he was bored and his thumb moved. and yet.

and yet you’re in the bathroom at 11pm rotating through the viewer list like a detective. like the answer to whether you matter is somewhere in that little strip of profile pictures. it’s not. it was never there. but we keep looking.

i have three thousand followers on instagram. over two thousand people in my contacts. and if something went genuinely wrong tonight, if i needed someone to actually show up, i could call maybe two people without it being weird.

two.

out of five thousand.

we are connected to thousands and known by nobody. the math is not mathing and we all know it. we call it ‘life.’ it is what it is apparently?

here’s what i think is actually happening.

you’re not afraid of being alone. you’re too competent to be afraid of being alone. you know how to do things by yourself. you’ve been doing hard things by yourself your whole life. that’s not the problem.

the problem is that you’ve been building a life so full and so fast that somewhere along the way the loneliness started living inside the ambition. it moved in quietly. put its things down. made itself comfortable. started forwarding its mail there.

every milestone you hit, you look around for someone to share it with. not because you can’t feel proud of yourself, you can, you do. but because achievement without witness has a specific kind of echo to it. you did the thing. the thing was hard. the thing was worth doing. and you’re sitting with the certificate or the offer letter or the moment, and it’s genuinely good, and yet, the moment is not complete. not by yourself. not on your own. something’s missing.

and so the fantasy grows. you’re not just building a career anymore. you’re building a life someone will want to be part of. you’re building the version of yourself that someone will love. and every experience becomes a rehearsal.

you’re living in the trailer of your own life. waiting for the feature film to begin.

and meanwhile the actual film is running. has been running. will keep running. with or without a co-star.

look at what else we’ve built while we were busy waiting.

we’ve engineered boredom out of existence because boredom introduces us to ourselves, and apparently that’s a meeting we’d rather reschedule indefinitely. you cannot stand in a lift for thirty seconds without pulling out your phone. thirty seconds. the lift hasn’t even moved yet. you were alone with your own thoughts for less time than it takes to skip an ad and you needed an exit.

we’ve become consumers of each other too. we swipe through humans like a menu we’re not that hungry for. we ghost people because a conversation got mildly inconvenient. we have a folder of people we “should catch up with” who have graduated from friends to contacts to memories we visit occasionally when a song comes on.

i let the woman selling these pipe cleaner lilies rob me for it just because they made me so happy

some of it is managing your energy. but some of it, and we’re being honest today because i started it and now we’re here, some of it is just fear with better branding.

because if everyone is disposable, nobody gets to hurt us. and if nobody gets to hurt us, nobody gets to matter either. very efficient system. absolutely devastating results.

so go on the solo date.

not because some wellness account sandwiched between an ad for a new cafe and an ad for therapy told you it’s self-care. not because you’ll post about it later and people will reply “omg i need to do this” and save the post to the same graveyard where all good intentions go to die. not for the story. not for the caption. and definitely not for the one person you’re secretly hoping sees it and thinks wow, she’s so secure.

go because i think you need evidence.

evidence that you can exist without an audience.

go sit in a café alone. and i mean actually alone. not with headphones in. not hiding behind laufey like she’s your emotional support animal. not with a book you’re not even reading because you’re too busy checking if anybody texted.

just you.

which, i know, sounds terrifying.

but yeah, go ahead. order the thing you actually want. not the aesthetic instagrammable thing. not the thing you’d recommend to somebody else. the thing you want. sit by the window if you want the window. stop saving the good seat for someone who isn’t there yet.

and notice how quickly your hand reaches for your phone. notice how within four minutes you’ve checked it twice and somehow instagram still has absolutely nothing new to say after you refresh it thrice frantically. notice the specific impulse to think, “he/she would’ve liked this place.”

there you go again. furnishing the house before you’ve bought it. casting people before you’ve written the scene.

and also notice something else. nobody in that café cares that you’re alone. the woman at the next table isn’t secretly pitying you. she’s wondering if she can get away with ignoring that situationship for another week. the guy by the window isn’t judging you. he’s replaying an argument from three days ago and somehow winning it this time.

everyone in that room is busy being the main character.

which means something strange.

you’re free. completely free.

and weirdly, that feels worse than being watched. because if nobody’s watching, then nobody’s validating. and if nobody’s validating, some part of you starts asking the question we’re all pretending not to ask.

does it still count?

my love, that’s the whole thing, isn’t it?

because somewhere along the way we’ve confused being witnessed with being alive.

and tuesday coffee alone counts. random walks count. crying over a film at 11 pm with nobody to debrief with counts. eating over the kitchen counter because you’re too tired to sit down counts. the version of you sitting alone at that table isn’t the before photo.

she’s not the placeholder or the rehearsal. she’s the whole thing.

---

letters from nush runs on caffeine and the life left in me after being a full time woman in tech, support my work and keep the coffee coming <3

---

i have to tell you something else, because the internet already has enough people selling solitude like it’s the magical solution to being independent or detached or the one stop solution to never getting hurt again.

solitude will break you too.

you’ll crave company. you’ll see a group of friends laughing two tables over and feel that stupid ache in your chest and immediately start treating it like a problem to solve. you’ll see a couple sharing earphones on the metro and suddenly phoebe bridgers sounds way too personal.

and god, you’ll miss people. you’ll want to text your ex.

don’t.

drink water. go to sleep. you’re not having a spiritual awakening. it’s 1:37 in the morning and your brain has mistaken nostalgia for destiny again.

behave. because missing people isn’t a design flaw. that’s the whole point. things that matter are supposed to be missed.

and i don’t want you to become someone who doesn’t need people. god, no. what a grey, airless, loveless way to move through the world.

i want you to love people. with your whole stupid tender heart. i want you to cry at airports. i want you to grieve. i want people to wreck you a little.

because things should matter.

but when your person finally does show up, i want them to enter a life that’s already warm. already full. already yours. not one that’s been sitting in storage waiting for them to switch the lights on.

because here’s the thing nobody tells you. if you’ve spent ten years postponing joy, somebody eventually inherits the bill. every deferred trip. every postponed celebration. every “i was saving this for us.”

baby, that’s not romance. that’s an invoice.

poor thing just got here and suddenly they’re responsible for paris and birthdays and sunday mornings and the italian place you’ve had saved since 2022.

that’s backpay. and that’s too much to ask of anybody. solo dates were never about becoming someone who doesn’t need people. that’s not freedom.

that’s self-protection with good branding. they’re about becoming someone who isn’t terrified of needing people. those are very different things.

because life will break you. love will break you. solitude will break you too. you cannot spreadsheet your way out of suffering. trust me. i’ve tried. extensively.

stop trying to choose the option that hurts the least. choose the thing that makes being here worth it. and stop waiting.

because let me hold your hand while i say this, darling, there is no trailer.

there is no pre-production. there is no season where your real life finally starts.

tuesday was the whole thing.

it always was.

yours imperfectly,

Nush <3