I do not like words.

It is a strange thing to say for someone who writes. For someone who keeps returning to language as if it were the only tool capable of touching what lives inside. Words are what I use to express what I feel, what I remember, what I cannot keep silent anymore. Without them, I do not know how any real human understanding could exist between us.

And yet, even with them, understanding is never complete.

There is always something that remains behind. A private sound. An inner truth that refuses to survive the journey from feeling into sentence. I can write around it, choose the most precise image, the cleanest line, the most honest confession, and still never fully transmit the exact noise something makes inside me. Words reveal one half of the truth and blur the other.

I do not want to turn this into an essay about language. Maybe one day I will. Maybe one day I will write about the word itself, about its beauty and its failure, about the way it saves us and betrays us at the same time. Today, I only want to begin here, with this small impossibility of expression, because some feelings seem to exist exactly where language becomes insufficient.

Some feelings do not enter every language equally.

Some feelings do not translate without losing their body.

One of them is dor.

I love this word. Maybe because it comes from my own language. Maybe because it belongs to Romanian before it belongs to explanation. Dor is one of those words people like to call untranslatable, although I do not think any word is entirely untranslatable. There are always approximations. Similar shadows.Words that stand close enough to be recognised, but not close enough to become the same thing.

In Portuguese, there is saudade. I have always loved that word too. It carries something beautiful, almost sacred. But I do not feel it in the same way. Saudade seems more nostalgic to me, more resigned. It feels like the sadness of things that remain unreachable, but somehow become softer because they are preserved inside you. It is the feeling of looking at something that cannot return and letting it become poetry.

Saudade is absence that has learned how to be beautiful.

Dor is less peaceful.

Dor is the absence that still hurts. The kind that enters the body, floods it, sinks it, and still makes some irrational part of you want to return. It does not only remember what is gone. It still reaches for it. It still wants to open the door. It still listens for footsteps. It still behaves as if the impossible might change its mind.

In English, there is I miss you. But it has never felt deep enough to me. It sounds almost practical, almost polite. You are not here. I wish you were. There is distance between us.

But dor is not that calm. Dor does not simply notice absence. It absorbs it. It becomes weight, pressure, water.

And as much as I love this word, I do not say it often.

In my mind, it has a heaviness I rarely know how to use. It is not a casual word for me. It is not something I can throw into a sentence and abandon there. I live with dor, yes. With tears, with smiles, with memories, with anxiety, with desire. But speaking about it feels almost dangerous, as if giving it a voice might make it larger.

Sometimes, though, it becomes so suffocating that if I do not give it a voice, it takes mine.

Maybe that sounds monstrous. But dor has never been only a monster to me. It is more like a devil with the face of an angel. Something that wounds me, but also proves that I have loved. Something I fear, but could not live entirely without.

This is one of the hardest things I have ever tried to write, even though I have always kept my heart open to anything that turned its head towards it.

There have been only a few moments in my life when I felt dor in its purest form. But for the past seven years, I have lived with one kind of it in a way that sometimes scares me. And in the past few months, another layer has placed itself over the first one. A different kind of absence. A different kind of haunting.

I cannot lie and say there are no days when it lets me breathe. There are days when I live fully inside the present, with an almost childish joy, grateful for every ray of sun and every branch tapping against my window when the wind moves through the trees. There are days when the world feels gentle enough to forgive.

But there are also days when the same sun becomes intrusive, and I feel like Meursault beneath a brightness too cruel to ignore. Days when the same branches no longer seem innocent. They hit the glass as if it were a door, as if something outside is waiting to be let in. As if all my memories are standing there, patient and terrible, waiting for one small opening to enter me again.

Still, I need to make a distinction.

For seven years, I have lived with the kind of dor that belongs to what cannot return. The kind no prayer can reverse. The kind no god, no underworld, no impossible bargain could undo. Even if I begged God, even if I begged Lucifer, no one could bring back what I lost.

I lost the captain of my boat.

Actually, I lost the boat itself.

I never called him father, but that did not stop him from being one.

He did not need a title, a ceremony, or a promise. He was simply there. Always there. Like an old wooden bench you sit on without wondering whether it will hold you. Like a dim, warm light that does not blind you, but still somehow guides you home. I saw him as an old tree in the middle of a fragile garden.

He was a quiet man, but in that quietness, an entire world was built. A world where I did not have to become something else in order to be loved. A world where nothing was demanded from me except presence.

And for a child, sometimes that is everything.

To know there is someone who will not leave.

He existed in the smallest things. In the short walks to school. In the way he waited for me. In the patience he had when I made mistakes at the piano. In the silence with which he answered me when everyone else raised their voice. He did not speak much, but his silences were soft. They were not cuts. They were not punishments. They were places where I could rest.

He knew how to exist beside me without pushing me, without asking me to explain myself before I even understood what I felt. He simply was. And that was enough.

He tied my shoelaces without asking me why I was crying. He left wafers beside my notebook without saying, “eat.” When I made mistakes, he did not raise his voice. He only looked at me with a long, gentle gaze, as if he understood that I had not failed out of cruelty, but out of not knowing better yet.

He taught me that protection does not mean control. That love does not need applause. That true closeness does not always make noise.

I learned safety not from grand declarations, but from the way he handed me a plate of food, from the way he left his book down to ask me what I was doing, from the way he repaired things without announcing it. He gave me space without abandoning me. He stayed close without suffocating me. He was the kind of presence that asked for nothing and somehow offered everything.

I do not remember him doing many things for himself. Everything seemed to move around me, but never in a way that felt oppressive. He was there, calm and constant, with a generosity that never displayed itself.

He did not brag about his love.

He demonstrated it.

In silences. In gestures. In the fact that he never left my space, not even when life was hurting him. He liked to stay on the margins, but his margin was the centre of my balance.

He was the first form of love that did not ask me to be different from what I was. The first form of love in which I did not feel the need to justify myself. When I was afraid, he did not take me in his arms with dramatic gestures. He simply stayed in the room. He did not tell me he loved me. But somehow, I knew.

I knew from the way he zipped my coat all the way up. From the way he fixed things without waiting to be thanked. From the way he told me, “you did well,” even when it was only a line drawn correctly in a notebook.

I saw him as a wall that did not fall when the storm came. As a hand stretched towards me without trembling. I did not even realise how much peace he gave me. It felt natural. It was simply the way the world was around him. A way of being that entered me quietly and made me believe, for a while, that the world was kinder than it looked.

When illness came, I understood injustice in its quietest form.

I did not revolt. I did not cry then, not properly. I kept going to school, doing my homework, breathing. But inside me, something was slowly detaching, like a leaf falling without sound. I did not know how to define suffering yet, but I could feel its presence in the way his voice faded, in the way his hands moved more slowly, in the way he no longer opened the sudoku book in the corner of the room.

I watched him begin to hold on to furniture. I watched his large body become light, almost shadow-like. But I did not want to admit that he was leaving. Not even when his eyes, once so steady, began to tremble. I did not want to make him feel weak, so I learned how to smile at him as if nothing had changed.

But inside me, every day, something was breaking.

A child who watches her hero die does not cry. She locks herself somewhere deep and becomes quiet.

And I was quiet.

So quiet that I no longer knew where my pain began.

I watched him weaken, lean against walls, transform from the man who took me to school into the man who could barely carry his own body. And even then, when his pain had already become an animal biting into his bones, he made me a cake.

The last one.

It was not really about celebration. It was about a kind of love that did not know how to leave empty-handed. I do not remember its exact taste, but I remember what it meant. Or maybe I only understood what it meant much later. I think about the effort now. How he must have leaned slowly towards the sink. How heavily he must have breathed. How stubbornly he must have refused help.

It was his goodbye, baked into something I did not yet know how to recognise as goodbye.

And I received it with an ordinary “thank you,” because I did not know it was the last one.

What I know now is that the whole cake was full of everything he never said out loud. It was proof that real love does not always need to be spoken. Sometimes it is there, in the simplest gesture, made through pain, made with light. It was the last shape his love managed to take.

The last time he showed me that I mattered more than his own suffering.

Lastly, he told me not to watch him. That I should not watch a wreck.

Then he disappeared.

Not with a proper goodbye. Not with an ending I could understand. He left with the same discretion with which he had lived, a quiet withdrawal from my world. I did not have room for tears then. I did not have room for anger either. I became trapped in a form of silence that imitated him without having him.

I could not enter his room.

I did not look back when the coffin was lowered.

But somewhere inside me, I started screaming. Not loudly. Not with my voice. I screamed through heavy silences, through slow withdrawals, through a retreat from everything that felt alive.

I remember, around the grave, two beggar women approaching us. They were insistent, intrusive, almost violently alive in a moment where everything in me had gone still. Something inside me exploded. I was not shouting at them, not really. I was shouting at the cruel injustice that had taken him from me. At the fact that I no longer had anyone to tell, “it hurts,” because the person who had taught me silence had left without teaching me how to live with it.

From that day on, I began carrying an empty space inside me. One that nothing has ever fully filled, no matter how full the world around me became.

Later, I got a tattoo of a boat.

Not because he left.

Because he carried me. He saw himself as a wreck, but I saw a beautiful sailboat.

He carried me through waters I did not even know I was crossing. He was my quiet ship, my invisible steering wheel. The pillar in a house where no one knew how to keep a window open without letting the cold hurt. He was not my father by name. But he was more father than any masculine figure that ever passed through my life.

The boat is more than ink under my skin. It is a silent promise that I will not forget him. It is proof that he built something in me without ever asking for anything back. That he kept me afloat before I even knew I could drown.

When people ask me what it symbolises, I never tell them the whole truth. I say I like the sea. I say I like stories. Sometimes, at the end, I say it is also about him.

But the truth is simpler and more unbearable.

I did not want to forget.

I held on to that boat the way you hold on to the last thing that ever made you feel safe. The way you hold on to something that was real.

It hurts me to think that I did not fully understand him while he was alive. That I did not know how to tell him what he was to me. But maybe he knew. Maybe he knew from the way I looked at him, from the way I searched for his presence, from the way I tested his attention without asking for anything. Maybe he knew from the quietness with which I listened to him, from the impatience with which I waited for him, even when I had nothing to say.

Sometimes I am afraid I will forget the sound of his footsteps. The way he breathed in. The smell of his shirt. So I hold on desperately to everything he left inside me.

Not objects.

Reflexes.

The way I look when I listen. The way I stretch out my hand without speaking. The way I try to stay, even when staying hurts. He taught me all of this. Not through lessons. Not through speeches. Only by living.

And if now I carry a mute pain that does not heal, it is because he was the only one who looked at me without judging me, who listened without interrupting me, who loved me without asking me to become easier to love. In a world where everyone seemed to want something from me, he simply had me.

He did not make me feel small. He looked at me as if I was already what I was trying to become.

Maybe that is why, when I feel lost, I imagine what it would be like to have him for one more moment. Not to say anything extraordinary. Just to have him sitting on the edge of my bed, quiet. Just to have him look at me without a verdict.

Because in his eyes, there was never guilt. Never demand. Never expectation.

Only a silence that told me: you can be yourself here.

He was a man. But for me, he was shelter.

A form of love that did not disappear, but settled. A love without noise, but with an echo. And maybe one day, when I look in the mirror and see myself whole, it will also be because he once showed me what it means to be seen without being repaired.

Until then, I carry his name in my blood and his boat on my skin.

And in every gesture of care I offer someone, I know it is, in some way, his gesture.

Unforgotten.

Maybe this is where my love for cakes began.

Not from sweetness or celebration. But from goodbye.

No one really knows this about me. No one knows that, somewhere deep inside, I learned to understand a cake as a final act of tenderness. A way of saying what the mouth cannot say. A way of placing love on a table before absence enters the room.

I made one once, too. Only once.

And maybe, from the outside, it looked like a small gesture. Something ordinary. Something almost childish. But inside me, I knew what it meant. I knew that cake was an accepted goodbye. A goodbye I would still carry, yes, but one that showed me my own soul. One that told me I had learned, from him, that love does not always leave through words.

Sometimes it leaves through the hands.

Sometimes it leaves through the last thing we make.

Sometimes it leaves quietly, hoping to be understood later.

And then, another layer appeared.

A new kind of dor. One I did not expect to wound me so deeply, because from the beginning, I knew there was an expiration date. I knew time was limited. I knew, in theory, that some people enter your life already carrying the outline of their departure.

But we do not choose when we become attached.

And apparently, I became attached much more deeply than I imagined.

The time was short. Maybe too short for what it became inside me. Maybe I did not know how to appreciate it properly while I was living it. Maybe I was already afraid. Maybe some part of me tried not to hold on too tightly because I knew the ending was already waiting. But knowing that something will end does not protect you from feeling it. Sometimes it makes you feel it more intensely, because everything arrives already touched by loss.

It was the first time in those seven years that I felt seen, not only looked at. Heard, not only listened to. Maybe I am grieving him, yes. But maybe I am also grieving the version of myself that discovered, for a brief moment, that a translator existed.

I did not know what to expect. In fact, I do not think I started with expectations at all. But something disoriented me from the beginning: the way my mind became completely empty around him.

My mind, which is usually full of voices, thoughts, questions, fears, arguments, unfinished sentences, never stops. It is always moving, always building something, always destroying something else. But near him, it became quiet.

Completely quiet.

That was my first question mark.

On the same day, I also learned that time was limited. And for the first time in my life, I decided that I wanted to feel everything. Not to protect myself. Not to escape into analysis. Not to turn away just because the ending was visible from the start. I wanted to let myself be taken by whatever came.

Without fear.

So I jumped.

I do not think I had seen that version of myself in seven years.

I felt understood. Not in the generic way people say they understand you because they recognise the outline of your pain. It was different. It felt as if someone understood my substance and answered me in the same language. Sometimes I would simply sit there and listen to him, because he was verbalising thoughts I had not yet managed to say out loud. He understood my literary references. He even played with them. And although our views, our lives, and the ways we grew up may have been different, I felt that somewhere underneath everything, we had the same structure.

I felt safe with him.

That is the right word.

Very safe.

I still do not know whether the feelings were fully mutual. Maybe they were. Maybe they were not. Maybe the truth sits somewhere in a place I will never be able to reach. But I do not think it matters as much as I once believed it did. For me, it was real enough not to forget.

Maybe I idealised him. Maybe I did not appreciate him enough while he was there. Both things may be true. But as I have written before, he was, and still is, the most human person to me. Or as I like to say, the humanest human. And I will always be grateful for that.

In an unimaginably short time, he reflected so many parts of me I did not even know I still had. Woman and child. Fragment and whole. A grain of sand and the entire desert.

Why should I lie?

His leaving hurt much more than I had planned.

Days, weeks, months in which only God knows how much I cried. I cried for him, but I also cried for myself. For the gentle version of me. The calm one. The loving one. The one who appeared for a little while and then had nowhere to go.

It still hurts. In the same way. Maybe even more than at the beginning. Because now fear has entered the room too. I am afraid I will forget him. I am afraid it meant nothing. I am afraid that all my projections, all my old wounds, all the softer and uglier parts of me have attached themselves to this absence and made it impossible to see clearly.

And although I would like to speak to him, I am afraid.

Afraid of being too intrusive. Afraid of pulling him back from his own road. Afraid that my longing might become a cage around a heart I promised I would not trap.

I like to think of myself as a selfless egoist.

Because I am selfish. I know that. I have made promises I did not keep.

I promised him I would not miss him.

I promised him I would let him go.

I promised him I would not place a cage around his heart.

And believe me, I tried.

But I could not.

So now I feel like a traitor. Because, in some hidden way, I am doing all of those things. The more time passes, the more I hold on. Not always visibly. Not always loudly. But in the private corners of myself, I hold on with a force that frightens me.

Madness, delusion, hope. Everyone can interpret it however they want. That is also the strange beauty of being human. We are rarely one clean thing. We are contradiction dressed as intention.

I kept every crumb I still had.

Small objects. Small signs. Things someone could blame me for. Things that may seem excessive from the outside. But I could not throw them away. I could not treat them as meaningless when, inside me, they had become proof that something had happened. That I had not invented the entire tenderness of it. That there had been a time, however brief, when I felt translated.

It is difficult. More difficult than I know how to admit.

That is why the only goodbye I could offer had to be true. Real. Not casual. Not detached. Not dressed in an indifference I did not feel.

A cake and a handwritten letter.

The only two things that fully represent the way I love.

The cake because of him, because somewhere in my childhood I learned that love can enter the world quietly, through tired hands and a final gesture.

The letter because words are still the only place where I can put what would otherwise rot inside me.

I wanted him to remember me like that.

I still do.

Not as the most beautiful. Not as the easiest. Not even as the one who knew how to leave without trembling.

But as someone who loved honestly.

Someone who tried to say goodbye with her whole soul, even when the soul was not ready to release anything.

And this is where I would be expected to say how I deal with dor. It would make sense to end with an answer, with some small piece of wisdom, with the impression that naming a wound already means knowing how to heal it.

But I do not have that.

Most days, I improvise.

There are mornings when the world feels almost kind. I make coffee, I smoke a cigarette, open the window, let the light enter the room without fighting it. I answer messages. I laugh. I remember that I am young, alive, still unfinished. On those days, dor loosens its hand around my throat.

On other days, it returns before I have had the chance to defend myself. It hides inside ordinary things: a smell, a song, a bug in the street, a cake in a bakery, the accidental image of a boat. Nothing needs to happen. Memory does not always knock before entering.

I do not think I overcome dor. I live around it.

I let it pass through me, then I gather what is left. I write because I do not know where else to place what remains. I turn it into images, into sentences, into rituals small enough for the body to survive. It may not be wise. It may not be healthy. But it is human, and for now that is the only explanation I have.

As much as it hurts me, I do not think I want a life untouched by dor. There is something inside it I cannot fully hate. It only exists where something mattered. We do not ache for what never entered us. We do not carry an absence for years unless, at some point, that absence was love.

The man I never called father left me with a boat under my skin and a tenderness I still repeat without noticing. He taught me that love does not have to be loud in order to save you. And for that, I loved him.

The person I had to let go left me with another kind of echo. He reflected a version of me I thought I had lost. With him, I remembered what it felt like to be understood not as an idea, but as a substance. For a brief moment, someone seemed to translate me back to myself. But not only that, I loved his mind. His gentleness. His passion.

That is why both absences hurt differently.

One belongs to what can never return. The other belongs to someone who still exists somewhere in the world, unreachable in a way that feels almost harder to bury.

I used to think goodbye meant release. Now I am not so sure. Some goodbyes are only rituals, small human attempts to give form to what cannot be kept. A cake. A handwritten letter. A final gesture. A way of placing love outside the body for a moment, because keeping all of it inside would be too much.

Maybe I do not know how to let go beautifully. Maybe I only know how to love until the last possible gesture, and then live with what remains.

This is why I do not say dor often.

When I say it, I am not only saying that I miss someone. I am saying that their absence still has a shape inside me. That my mind may understand the ending, while something deeper continues to reach. That there are people and moments I no longer have, but that still move through me as if they were not entirely gone.

Even now, after all these words, I know I have failed a little. The real sound remains inside me, partly untranslated. But perhaps that is all writing can do. Not repair. Not fully explain. Only build a fragile bridge between what was felt and what can be understood.

I do not write to escape dor. I write because of it.

Some absences become unbearable when they remain silent. Some loves deserve a shape, even if the shape is imperfect. Some people leave so deeply that the only way to continue is to turn the wound into language.

And if this essay cannot contain everything I mean, perhaps that is not a failure.

Perhaps dor was never meant to be contained.

Only carried.

Like a boat on the skin or a cake made when language failed.

I cannot remember the exact moment when the paranormal first began to attract me. Maybe there was never one clean beginning. Maybe I was simply born with a small instinct for the unknown, something quiet and half-asleep, waiting for enough darkness to become a question.

Ghosts fascinated me before I knew what I believed. I liked the possibility of them. I liked the idea that ordinary life might not be as solid as it pretends to be, that somewhere behind the visible world there might be another one, thinner, stranger, impossible to prove and just as impossible to dismiss.

As a child, I think I was less afraid of ghosts than of a world without them. A world where everything that disappears disappears completely. A world where death, absence, and silence are final in a way the human mind cannot soften.

Perhaps that is why I was drawn to haunted places. Not because I wanted fear exactly, but because I wanted the feeling that something remained. An old house, a mirror, a room too silent for its own good. I liked the discomfort of standing near a door that had not been fully closed.

And still, the more I thought about ghosts, the less interested I became in proving whether they existed in the usual sense. A voice in the wall. A figure at the end of the bed. Footsteps in an empty hallway. Maybe those things exist. Maybe they do not. I do not think I have the authority to close that question.

But I have started to wonder if we made the idea of ghosts too small.

Even the word itself feels unstable. A ghost is a presence that cannot fully become present. It appears, but it does not arrive. It touches reality without belonging completely to it. And maybe that is why the word has always stayed with me. It does not only describe the dead. It describes everything that refuses to leave clearly.

For a long time, I asked myself whether ghosts lived around us. Somewhere along the way, the question changed.

I stopped asking only whether they lived around us.

I started asking whether they lived inside us.

Because the ghosts that haunt us most rarely look like ghosts at all. They often arrive with the face of someone we no longer speak to, with the atmosphere of a room we have not entered in years, with a sentence we thought we had forgotten until life placed it back in our mouth.

A moment can end in the world and continue inside the person who lived it. That is the form of haunting I understand best.

And because I can only speak honestly when I speak from the first person, I will share a small haunted story.

It was not long ago that I started admitting their presence. Time kept passing, as it always does, but something in me stayed behind. It was still autumn. My tea was still hot. My nights were still not spent alone.

I was still on my couch, looking into a pair of eyes that had already begun to leave the present. I knew he would eventually become a ghost. Some part of me may have known it even then. And because I could not be selfish enough to keep him where he no longer belonged, I had to let him go.

Freedom is the highest form of love. I believe that. Or at least, I want to believe it. And I could not put a cage around someone’s heart, who was already leaving.

And these were also the words I shared with him.

But the strange thing about letting someone go is that it does not always mean they leave. There are people who disappear from your life and still keep a room inside you. You stop touching them in the world, but the mind continues touching what it cannot hold.

So maybe I am selfish after all. I promised to set them free, but I still carry them.

Everywhere, I hear the same old consolation. Time heals. You will forget. You will move on.

I have never fully trusted those sentences. They are too clean for something as strange as memory. Time does not always behave like a doctor. Sometimes it behaves like a museum. It preserves what should have decayed. It places glass around the wound and calls it history.

And then we are surprised when we keep returning to look at it.

This is what makes ghosts so interesting to me. Even in the paranormal, they seem to have a different relationship with time. They do not simply belong to death. They belong to delay. Something happened, something ended, and yet the ending did not complete itself.

Maybe ghosts are not only about the dead returning.

Maybe they are about the past refusing to become past.

There are people who leave our lives in every practical sense. They stop calling. Their name becomes delicate. Their face no longer belongs to the present, but it does not fully become history either. It remains somewhere in between, where all unfinished things go.

Not as a person exactly. More like an atmosphere.

A place feels different because they once existed there with you. A song changes meaning. A season keeps their temperature. You pass something ordinary and, without warning, the present opens in the wrong direction.

This is why I have never believed that absence is empty. Absence can be terribly full. Sometimes a person becomes more powerful after leaving, because the real person no longer interrupts the imagined one. Memory is free to make them larger, softer, crueler, more beautiful, or more permanent than they ever were.

The paranormal version of haunting seems almost merciful by comparison. At least then the ghost is outside you. It has a location. You can point to the room and say, there, that is where it lives.

Memory is not so polite.

It does not stay in one place. It enters the body. It waits inside language. It hides inside hours that should have remained innocent. You think you have forgotten something until one ordinary afternoon brings it back with ridiculous precision. Suddenly you are not remembering the past from a distance. You are standing inside it again, as if no time has passed at all.

Perhaps this is why certain memories feel supernatural. They do not behave like dead things. They return with too much life.

I have often wondered why some people become ghosts and others do not. It cannot only be love. We are not haunted only by what was beautiful. We are haunted by what remained unclear.

A person becomes a ghost, I think, when they leave behind a question the mind cannot stop touching.

What did it mean?

Did you feel it too?

Some endings are clean because they explain themselves. Others happen before meaning has time to arrive. Life moves, pride hardens, fear chooses silence, and suddenly something is over without ever becoming understandable.

Those endings do not know how to die.

They continue in fragments. They become private mythologies. We return to them not because we want to suffer, or not only because we want to suffer, but because the mind hates an unfinished shape. It keeps revising. It keeps arranging the same scene from another angle, as if the right version might finally reveal the truth.

Perhaps this is why ghost stories so often speak of unfinished business. The phrase sounds almost childish until you realize how much of adult life is made from it.

Not because the dead are always restless.

Because the living are.

We are the ones who cannot leave certain rooms. We are the ones who keep opening the door. We are the ones who turn small details into sacred objects and then pretend not to worship them.

And yet I do not think all haunting is tragic.

Some ghosts hurt because they remind us of what we lost. Others hurt because they remind us of who we were when we still believed something was possible. But there are also gentle hauntings. People who remain without destroying us. Memories that do not demand our life back, only a small place in the architecture of who we became.

Maybe being haunted is not always a curse. Maybe sometimes it is the mind’s strange form of loyalty.

To remember is to refuse total disappearance. It is to admit that not everything ends just because it stops happening.

I think this is what the idea of ghosts has always been trying to tell us. Beneath all the fear, beneath the cold rooms and white figures at windows, there is a more human terror: that something loved can become nothing.

Maybe we invented ghosts because we could not survive that idea.

We needed the dead to linger because total disappearance felt too cruel. We needed houses to remember and objects to absorb the weight of what happened near them. Every ghost story is, in some way, an argument against the unbearable cleanliness of loss.

But the strangest part is that we do not need proof of ghosts to live haunted lives.

We already do.

A childhood room can haunt us. A city can haunt us. A friendship that dissolved without a proper ending can haunt us. A version of ourselves can remain in a place long after we have physically left it.

Sometimes the ghost is not another person.

Sometimes it is you.

The version of you who trusted more easily. The one who stayed too long. The one who left before knowing how to say goodbye. The one who believed a place, a person, or a future would save her. The one who was once desperate to become who you are now, without knowing what that becoming would cost.

Those ghosts may be the hardest to face. People from the past can be blamed, romanticised, forgiven, forgotten. Old selves are more complicated. They are both stranger and ancestor. You outgrow them, but you are built from their mistakes.

Perhaps growing up is learning which ghosts to keep and which ones to stop feeding.

Because not every haunting deserves a home. Some memories return because they still have something to teach us. Others return because we have mistaken pain for meaning. There is a difference between honouring what shaped us and living forever in the rooms that broke us.

I do not know if I believe in ghosts. Not always in the way people usually mean.

But I believe in the strange afterlife of moments. I believe a person can leave and still rearrange the furniture inside your mind. I believe ordinary objects can become unbearable when they remember too much. I believe some rooms hold versions of us we are not ready to meet again.

Maybe ghosts are not proof that the dead return.

Maybe they are proof that the past never leaves cleanly.

So yes, perhaps I do believe in ghosts. Not necessarily the kind that open doors at night or stand at the end of a hallway. I believe in the quieter kind, made of memory, longing, unfinished sentences, and people who never fully left because some part of us did not know how to let them go.

To be haunted is not always to be cursed, I repeat.

Sometimes it only means that something was real enough to remain.

This text began like that, from a conversation with a friend about Orpheus and Eurydice. With her, subjects like myths, strange stories, the paranormal, or the symbolic never felt out of place. They belonged naturally to our friendship, the kind of things we could begin discussing almost casually and then, somehow, end up treating as if they contained the entire human condition.

I do not think every myth has to become a lesson. I dislike the idea of forcing every story into a moral, as if human beings were ever that simple. Still, some myths remain alive because they touch something time does not seem to erase. The names change. The gods disappear. The rituals become unfamiliar. But certain fears remain recognizable.

Loss. Doubt. Desire. Silence. The need to know.

Maybe that is why the story of Orpheus and Eurydice still feels so close.

Orpheus loses Eurydice, the woman he loves, and his grief refuses to stay within the limits of the living world. Instead of accepting death as final, he descends into the Underworld and sings with so much pain that even the gods of death listen. For a moment, the impossible becomes negotiable. Eurydice is allowed to return with him.

There is only one condition: he must walk ahead of her and must not look back until they both reach the light.

This is the part that always gathers meaning around itself. His turning back. That single movement of the head. The instant in which everything collapses.

Many interpretations return to the same question: did he love her enough?

My friend read his failure as evidence that he did not. In that version, a stronger love would have trusted, obeyed, and endured the silence until the end. One glance would not have been worth the risk of losing her forever.

I understand why that argument exists, but it has never convinced me.

The question of love feels too small for this myth. Orpheus had already crossed into the land of the dead for Eurydice. His love had already done something extreme, almost impossible, almost violent in the intensity of its devotion. To me, the tragedy begins somewhere deeper.

What if the real question is not whether he loved her enough?

What if the question is whether any grieving human being could have survived that condition?

Hades does not simply give Orpheus a rule. He creates a situation in which the mind is turned against itself. Eurydice is returned, but without proof. Hope is offered, but without certainty. The beloved is placed behind him, silent, invisible, impossible to verify.

That is where the cruelty begins.

Before the command, looking back is only a possible movement. After it is forbidden, it becomes charged. It gathers weight. It starts to live inside the body before the body has even moved.

The forbidden gesture is no longer outside Orpheus.

It enters him.

There is a strange violence in being told not to think of something. The mind, trying to obey, has to keep returning to the very thing it must avoid. It has to watch the forbidden thought in order to make sure it is not there. And so the thought survives, not despite resistance, but through it.

When Orpheus is told not to look back, the command does not remove the possibility of looking.

It makes the possibility intimate.

The road out of the Underworld is no longer only a path toward life. It becomes a private struggle with one movement of the body. One glance. One mistake. One thought made louder by prohibition.

But the rule is not the only trap. There is also the silence.

Orpheus does not know whether Eurydice is truly behind him. He does not know if the miracle has worked, if Hades has lied, if the gods have been merciful or cruel. There is no hand reaching for him, no voice reassuring him, no small human sign strong enough to calm the part of him that has already lost her once.

He is forced to walk inside a maybe.

And maybe it is one of the most unbearable places for the human mind.

Certainty, even when painful, gives the mind something to hold. Uncertainty has no edges. It keeps opening. It lets imagination move too freely. In the absence of an answer, fear begins to create its own evidence. Silence becomes suspicious. Hope starts to feel dangerous because it has not yet been proven true.

For Orpheus, every step requires trust, while every second without proof gives fear more material.

Behind him could be Eurydice, alive again in the strange way the dead can be returned. Behind him could also be nothing. The miracle could be real, or another punishment disguised as mercy. He has no way of knowing. He can only continue walking, with the woman he loves somewhere behind him, existing only as a possibility.

That is why I cannot read his look as proof that he did not love her.

It feels much more human than that, and much sadder.

His love is inside the gesture, tangled with panic. He does not turn because he loves too little. He turns because uncertainty becomes heavier than obedience. Because the forbidden thought has grown too loud. Because silence, after loss, no longer sounds innocent.

The look is not the opposite of love.

It is love after fear has entered it.

And then comes the most painful part of our story. Eurydice is there.

His fear was wrong. Hades had not lied. The miracle was real. She had been following him all along, quietly, invisibly, almost saved.

For one second, Orpheus receives the proof his mind had been begging for. Then he loses her.

There are few things more painful than certainty arriving too late. To discover that trust would have been justified only after mistrust had already destroyed what it wanted to protect. To realize that the silence was not absence, but simply the form the miracle had to take until it reached the light.

This is why I think Eurydice never had a chance.

Her return depended on Orpheus doing something almost impossible for a grieving human being. He had to resist a thought made stronger by being forbidden. He had to remain inside uncertainty when everything in him needed proof. From the outside, Hades’ condition looks almost simple. From inside the wound, it asks for a kind of peace grief rarely allows.

Orpheus was human.

That is the tragedy.

There is something unbearable in this, but also something deeply recognizable. Human beings are rarely clean in the way stories sometimes demand them to be. Love does not always makes us calm. Trust does not always arrive before fear. Sometimes the mind reaches for evidence with shaking hands, even when evidence is the one thing that will destroy what it wants to save.

I do not read Orpheus with contempt. I see someone who loved, descended, hoped, feared, and reached for proof too soon. His failure does not make his love false. It makes his love human.

Maybe that is what the myth understood long before psychology found names to it. A forbidden thought does not disappear just because we are told to resist it. Uncertainty does not remain empty. Silence is rarely neutral to someone who has already lost what they love.

Sometimes, the need to know becomes stronger than the thing knowledge was supposed to save.

Orpheus wanted proof that Eurydice was there.

She was.

And that is why he lost her.

Someone dear to me once told me this phrase in a city where neither of us fully belonged. We were different in many ways, almost too different sometimes, but we recognised something in that sentence. Both of us had left something behind. Both of us were alone, coming from different parts of the world, trying to understand whether this new city would become part of our identity or simply another place we once survived in.

Studying abroad is often described as a beginning.

More specifically, the beginning. The clean one. The cinematic one. You pack your bags, compress your old life into one limited container, leave your hometown and the people who knew you before you became a project, and arrive in a new city. Somehow, you are expected to become a person with better coffee, better public transport, better opportunities, and a better version of yourself waiting somewhere between the university library and the supermarket aisle where you still cannot read the labels properly.

At first, everything feels charged with meaning. You are thrilled and terrified at the same time. You meet other people who have also left something behind, other souls searching for a version of themselves they could not fully become at home. The connection feels instant, almost suspiciously easy. For a while, you feel more yourself than you have in years, because now there is finally enough distance to perform, discover, or maybe simply reveal who you are.

In the first days, weeks, maybe even months, happiness and adrenaline flow through your bloodstream. Every street looks like a possibility. Every stranger could become part of your story. Every small act of independence feels symbolic: buying groceries, taking the tram alone, learning the rhythm of a city that does not yet know your name.

That is one version of the story. It is not false. But it is incomplete.

And I have always been more interested in the tension inside things than in their clean explanations.

The other version is quieter. It is the version where studying abroad feels less like freedom and more like a bargain. You are grateful, because you know that leaving is a privilege. Not everyone gets to choose another country, another language, another education, another possible life. But gratitude does not cancel exhaustion. Opportunity does not erase loneliness. And leaving home does not always mean you have escaped the expectations that shaped you there.

The cost is not always visible from the outside. Sometimes it looks exactly like success.

For many students, especially those coming from places where education is still treated as a serious family investment, studying abroad is never only personal. It becomes a collective project. A proof that something was worth it: the money, the worry, the distance, the sacrifices, the arguments, the hope.

It is never only you. It is also us.

Your achievements are not entirely yours, and somehow your failures are not entirely private either.

You are not simply going to university. You are carrying a story. And sometimes, the hardest part is realising that the story is not only yours.

This is not true for every student I have met. I do not want to turn one experience into a universal law. But I have seen this tension often enough to believe it deserves a name. Not only because I have lived it, but because I have recognised it in others too: the strange emotional debt of being given a chance.

You carry the family members who wanted something stable for you. You carry the pressure to make practical choices. You carry the fear of disappointing people who supported you, even when their support came with conditions. You carry the guilt of wanting something different from the life that was imagined for you.

And then you arrive in the country you once romanticised.

Or maybe you arrive in a country you did not romanticise at all, but the act of leaving makes it shine anyway.

Everything becomes meaningful because everything is new. The bus stops, the unfamiliar streets, the language around you, the architecture, the small routine you build in a place where nobody knows the earlier versions of you. There is something intoxicating about anonymity. You can buy groceries without being someone’s daughter or son, someone’s neighbour, someone’s future profession, someone’s plan.

But anonymity has another side.

Nobody knows you, which also means nobody knows what it took for you to be there. Nobody sees the private negotiations behind your public independence. Nobody sees the phone calls home, the translated documents, the money calculations, the panic before deadlines, the fear that one failed exam could suddenly turn your entire life into a question mark.

Nobody sees you sitting in a foreign room, refreshing a university portal, trying to understand whether a missing document, a delayed grade, or an unanswered email might disturb the entire fragile architecture of your future.

Nobody sees how much administration there is inside becoming yourself.

Studying abroad teaches you independence, but often in an unromantic way. Independence is not only dancing in a foreign city, discovering yourself, and collecting stories to tell later.

Sometimes it is sending emails you do not know how to phrase. It is understanding rent, contracts, health insurance, deadlines, bureaucratic portals, and the quiet humiliation of not knowing how basic systems work.

It is learning how to be an adult in a place where even adulthood has different instructions.

There is also the emotional split of becoming more than one person.

In your new country, you become the international student: adaptable, open-minded, grateful, slightly lost but functional. Back home, you remain the person people remember. The child, the daughter, the promise, the one who left but is expected to return with something useful.

Somewhere between these two versions, you try to locate yourself.

This is where the cost becomes harder to name.

Because studying abroad does change you. It gives you language, distance, confidence, and a wider map of the world. It shows you that life could be arranged differently. That cities can feel different in the body. That freedom can be practical, not only philosophical. That there are places where you feel more possible.

But the moment you realise this, another fear appears.

What if the life you are building no longer fits the life waiting for you at home?

This is the part people do not always say out loud. Studying abroad can make return complicated. Not because home is bad, and not because abroad is perfect, but because distance changes the way you understand both.

You begin to notice which expectations were love, which were fear, and which were simply inherited ideas about what a respectable life should look like.

You begin to understand that some people wanted safety for you because they loved you. But you also begin to understand that safety, when chosen for you, can start to feel like a beautiful room with no door.

For some students, the degree becomes more than a degree. It becomes a negotiation between duty and desire. Between the life that makes sense on paper and the life that feels alive internally. Between being grateful for support and wanting autonomy over the future that support was supposed to secure.

And that is emotionally expensive.

It is expensive to live in a place that expands you while knowing expansion may hurt the people who expected you to return unchanged. It is expensive to want more without appearing ungrateful. It is expensive to be told you are lucky while privately wondering why luck feels so heavy.

None of this means studying abroad is not worth it.

It often is.

It can be one of the most formative experiences of a person’s life. It can sharpen your mind, soften your assumptions, and force you to meet yourself without the familiar architecture of home around you. It can give you friendships that feel like chosen survival. It can give you mornings when you walk through a foreign city and suddenly realise that you are no longer waiting for permission to exist differently.

I like debates. I like hearing as many perspectives as possible, as many subjective truths, so that I can slowly build my own. But more than debates, I think what truly fascinates me is the attempt to decipher the secret of our existence. What are we? Why are we the way we are? What actually makes us human?

That’s how I arrived at empathy.

A seemingly simple word. Almost banal. We use it often, we expect it from others, we admire it when we see it, and we condemn its absence. And yet, the more I think about it, the stranger it becomes. Because empathy is not just a beautiful trait. It might be one of the deepest proofs of our humanity.

The question that kept following me was simple: are we born empathetic, or do we become empathetic?

I think each of us has, at least once, met someone who seemed like the living definition of empathy. The kind of person who helps instinctively, without calculation. The one who cannot walk past a hungry animal without feeding it. The one who feels everything too deeply, who cries easily, who absorbs other people’s pain as if it were their own.

But at the same time, I think we’ve all met the opposite. People who seem made of a completely different substance. I don’t say this in a judgmental way, because I don’t think I have the right to condemn what I don’t fully understand. But there are people who seem cold, inaccessible, almost glacial. People in front of whom the word “empathy” finds no surface to attach to.

And precisely because I’ve seen both extremes and all the grey in between, I began to wonder: is empathy something we all carry within us, hidden somewhere, or is it something only some people are given?

That’s where my obsession began.

The more people I met, the more I paid attention to this one human detail. How they react when someone is suffering. What they do when no one is watching. How they speak about the vulnerable. How quickly they judge. How quickly they reach out.

And although I can’t say I’ve found a final answer, I believe I’ve found one that, at least for now, brings me a sense of calm.

Let’s imagine a scene for a moment.

Italy. 1963. A cave. A researcher in the middle of what initially seems like a simple archaeological discovery. Old bones, traces of a world that no longer exists, fragments of life buried under time. Then a skeleton appears. An adolescent from about 11,000–12,000 years ago.

At first, the fascination lies in its age. But then comes the real question. 

Because this adolescent was not an ordinary individual. He had a severe form of dwarfism, associated with acromesomelic dysplasia. His body would have been different from childhood. Movement limited. Participation in the group’s daily activities difficult. In a hunter-gatherer community, where survival depended on strength, mobility, contribution, his existence becomes a question.

How did he live that long? How did he reach adolescence? How did he survive in a world we imagine as harsh, simple, almost mechanical? A world where, in theory, only the useful survive. Only the strong. Only those who can provide.

And yet, he lived.

This case is known as Romito 2. And for me, it is not just an archaeological discovery. It is something that speaks about us. About humans. About who we were before cities, before moral systems, before religion, before we learned how to talk about kindness. Because for this adolescent to survive, someone had to care for him. Someone had to feed him. Someone had to protect him. Someone had to accept that his value was not defined by immediate usefulness.

And here, something deeper appears. Because if people living at the edge of survival chose to protect someone who could not contribute in the usual physical ways, then maybe survival is not what defines us most deeply. Maybe what defines us is the capacity to care.

There are other cases like this. Atapuerca, in Spain. Cases in China. Ancient Egypt. Vietnam. South Korea. Florida. I don’t want to turn this into a list of examples. That’s not the point. The point is the pattern: vulnerability was not always abandoned. Sometimes, it was carried.

And that makes me believe that empathy is not a modern invention. It is not a luxury of civilization. It is not something that appeared only after comfort, free time, and written moral systems. I believe empathy is much older than the ideas we have about it. Perhaps even older than the language we use to explain it.

That’s why I tend to believe that we are born with a form of empathy. Not necessarily its mature, conscious, refined version. Not the kind that asks the right questions, understands context, avoids projection, and doesn’t turn into self-serving rescue. That kind is learned. That kind is built through life.

But I believe there is something initial. A seed. A primary light. A capacity to recognize another’s pain not as something external, but as something that touches us. Then, of course, life happens. Some people grow their empathy. Others hide it. Others suppress it. Others misuse it. Some turn it into guilt, sacrifice, exhaustion. There are traumas, fears, defense mechanisms, cold environments, harsh upbringings. There are people who, perhaps, had to freeze their sensitivity in order to survive.

This is where the difference between innate empathy and mature empathy appears. The first is impulse. The second is understanding. The first is the ability to feel. The second is the ability to remain lucid in the face of someone else’s pain. The first can exist in a child, in instinct, in closeness. The second is built through experience, through loss, love, shame, mistakes, through the moments when you have been hurt and finally understood how deeply a single sentence can wound. 

I know there is also the uncomfortable question: what about people who seem completely lacking in empathy? What about psychopathy? Neurological differences? Biological factors? Here, I think we enter a space I cannot fully claim. I am not a doctor, nor a neurologist, and I don’t want to turn a personal reflection into a universal diagnosis. There are exceptions, clinical cases, different neurological structures. But I don’t believe exceptions erase the broader question of human nature.

And my question remains this: if empathy did not have deep roots within us, how did we get here? How did we survive as a species without care? Without protecting children, the elderly, the sick, those who couldn’t run, hunt, fight, or contribute visibly? How did we build groups if everything was reduced to strength alone? Maybe empathy is not the opposite of survival. Maybe it is one of its most intelligent forms.

Putting together my experiences, the stories of others, anthropology, history, and my own obsession with what it means to be human, I believe I’ve reached a conclusion that satisfies me.

Empathy exists in us from the beginning. But it does not remain unchanged. We are born with its possibility. Life shapes what we do with it. We can grow it, distort it, suppress it, transform it into wisdom or into an open wound. But something is there. A flicker. A recognition. A small light through which we understand, even for a second, that the other is not just a separate body, but another form of the same fragility.

Maybe that is what empathy truly is. Not just kindness. Not just sensitivity. Not just tears. But the ability to see in someone else something that, in a way that is hard to explain, belongs to you too.

And maybe that’s why this question matters so much to me. Because when I ask what empathy is, I’m not just asking about others. I’m asking about myself. About us. About what remains human in a person when you strip away all theories, all masks, all justifications. Maybe through all these questions, I am trying to understand what it means to exist.

But that is for another day. For now, this is my truth: empathy is not only something we learn. It is something we carry. Sometimes hidden. Sometimes wounded. Sometimes almost extinguished. But there.

And the only truth that can be called, even for a moment, real, is the one that manages to bring light within you.

But I do not want to speak about loneliness. Not about how I spend my hours, nor about the silences I fill on my own. I want to speak about something else. About the reason why, although I love people and conversations to the point of exhaustion, I do not, in the end, believe in advice.

I love connection. I love people almost in a way that frightens me sometimes. I love their voices, their obsessions, the way they carry their wounds, the way they tell their stories without realizing that they have just opened themselves up in front of someone else. I love listening to them. I love writing them down. Taking fragments of what they say, of how they look, of the way they break at certain words, and keeping them somewhere. Maybe that is immoral. Maybe it is a form of tender theft. To take pieces of other people’s lives and place them between two covers, without asking their permission, does not seem like the purest way of loving memory. And yet sometimes that is how I love: by preserving.

People feed me. But not only that. I live them. I feel their anxieties like dark rooms I have entered too. I feel their joys, their shame, their sleepless nights, their waiting, their illusions. I am the kind of person who would answer at any hour of the night, not because she has the solution, but because she knows how important it is that there be someone at the other end of the line. Someone there. Someone who does not leave. Someone who hears you.

And yet perhaps, because of that, I know I cannot truly help through advice. Just as others cannot help me in that way either.

I prefer to listen. I prefer to be present. I prefer to hold space for someone else’s pain instead of rushing to bandage it with ready-made sentences. But I do not believe in the notion of advice as a clear, clean, objective truth. I do not believe in the existence of a completely objective opinion. And more than that, I do not believe in absolute sincerity outside the first person.

I can only speak sincerely in the first person. Everything else feels, inevitably, like a translation. An approximation of truth, perhaps, but not truth itself. No matter how much I try to look at someone else’s pain from the outside, to get close to it, to understand its edges, I will never be able to feel it exactly as they feel it. So how could I offer them sincere and perfectly objective advice if I do not live inside their flesh, their memory, their fears? I cannot. Because total objectivity does not exist. And if it did, perhaps it would be so cold that there would be nothing alive left in it.

To be human, in my eyes, is to be inevitably subjective. Each of us projects. Without exception. When we hear someone else’s story, we do not enter it empty. We enter it carrying our own luggage, our own past, our former loves, our humiliations, the ways we have been lied to, abandoned, loved badly, or loved too little. Our first impulse is not to see the story in its pure form, as it is, but to ask: What would I do? What does this mean to me? Who is the hero? Who is the antagonist?

And that is exactly where advice begins to bend. Because we are no longer responding only to the other person’s reality. We are also responding to our own biography. We project our own life onto someone else’s and call that advice. It is not something to condemn. It is not a moral defect. It is simply the human condition. It is the way we are built. But the moment we project, we can no longer pretend we are offering truth. At best, we are offering an interpretation.

When you ask for advice, even from the most well-intentioned person, you never receive your reality returned to you in a pure form. You receive their reality filtered through your story. You receive their fears, their traumas, their survival instincts, all dressed up as care. For one person, a bouquet of flowers received without any other context may mean mockery. For another, revenge. For another, manipulation. For me, perhaps, longing. The same gesture, and so many different worlds.

And each person believes they understood. But the truth is that only you hold all the pieces of the puzzle. Only you know the tone of a sentence, the way a door closed, the way someone looked at you, what was said and what was left unsaid, what you felt and why you felt it. Only you know the whole. Everyone else sees only fragments.

That is why I do not believe in the “correct” version. I believe, rather, in the version that is honest toward yourself. In the answer that does not betray you. In the choice you can carry without denying who you are.

Listening to perspectives is useful. Looking from multiple angles is even necessary. But no one can be perfectly sincere and perfectly objective at the same time.

For me, that is where the most beautiful paradox lies: sincerity comes precisely through subjectivity. Through saying “I.” Through admitting that you are speaking from a body, from a past, from a wound. And subjectivity, precisely because it is alive, cannot be objective.

Perhaps that is exactly where its beauty lies.

We know something else too, even if we do not like admitting it: very often, when we receive an answer that contradicts what we already feel, we return to ourselves anyway. To our own intuition, to our own version, to our original stubbornness. And perhaps that is exactly the role of an opinion: not to change us, but to bring us closer to our own truth. To irritate us just enough that we begin to hear ourselves more clearly.

I do not believe in the rigid concepts of right and wrong. I believe in truth. Not in universal truth, but in personal truth, owned and carried to the end. As long as I can remain beside my choice without lying to myself, as long as I can say “this is what I feel,” “this is what I choose,” “this is what I am,” then, even if only for a moment, I am living inside my own truth. And to me, that is beautiful.

Even though I say I do not believe in advice, I love conversations. I love phrases gathered from other people, sentences that linger in the air after a long night, confessions spoken too late or too soon. I love everything in people that is alive and unpolished. But I know my place and I know my limits. I know I am not objective. I know I do not even want to be. That is why, instead of telling someone else what their truth is, I would rather accompany them to the door of their own truth. Tell them a story. Hold up a mirror. Leave them with an image. And from there, let them choose for themselves.

For me, one of the most important words remains autonomy. And I do not confuse autonomy with independence. Independence may mean not needing anyone. Autonomy, by contrast, means having the inner freedom to choose your own answers, even when you are bound to others, even when you love, even when you suffer. It means not letting anyone else think in your place what only you can understand all the way through.

Perhaps that is why all theories of happiness, however debatable they may be, keep returning to the same roots: autonomy, competence, belonging. Three simple words, yet enough to hold an entire life.

And yet we live in a world where advice pours in from everywhere, sometimes without ever being asked for. Everyone wants to help. A good friend. A good parent. A good sibling. A good stranger. And perhaps this is exactly where confusion begins. Because in our desire to save, we forget to look. In our desire to repair, we forget to understand. We forget to be guides and become, without meaning to, executioners. We forget that every human being has layers, levels, hidden rooms, closed doors, wounds that cannot be seen. I like to say that each person is an onion. It may sound like a trivial image, but it is a true one: if you want to reach the core, you have to move through layers. And your eyes will almost always sting.

So then, why don’t I believe in advice?

Because it almost always comes packaged with labels and projections. Because it is human, and for that very reason, limited. Because no matter how well-intentioned someone may be, they cannot live inside you. They cannot feel exactly what you feel. They cannot carry your demons, nor know all your layers, your fractures, your contradictions.

Only you know where it truly hurts. Only you know where you lie, where you hope, where you defend yourself, where you are still waiting. Only you know your demons, and perhaps only you know your answer too.

The answer does not always come from outside. Or if it does, outside only finds the echo of something that was already there within you. The answer lives in you. And above all, in what you can see concretely, in what is tangible, not in illusions. Because most of the time, we do not suffer because of facts, but because of interpretations. Not because of reality, but because of the story we place over it. And perhaps the saddest thing is not that we suffer because of our own illusions. Perhaps the saddest thing is that we end up suffering because of other people’s illusions. Their fears. Their projections. Their lives pasted over ours.

That is why I do not believe in advice.

I believe in presence. I believe in listening. I believe in questions asked well. I believe in mirrors. I believe in stories. And above all, I believe that each person must be allowed to reach their own core on their own, even if that means crying through the layers until, at last, they find their own truth.