The emotional whiplash of an "almost love"

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from someone leaving your life abruptly. Not the slow unraveling of a long relationship where the ending feels inevitable, where distance grows gradually and conversations become heavier until the silence finally makes sense. This is different.

This is when everything feels alive one moment - and poof - gone the next.

One day you are sharing breakfast, inside jokes, warmth. You are sitting beside someone on a Sunday morning, watching movies, talking about future plans in that half-serious, half-playful way people do when something feels promising. There is ease.

There is momentum. There is the quiet assumption that tomorrow will look somewhat like today. Maybe even better.

And then, suddenly, it doesn’t.

Something happens. Sometimes it’s big - betrayal, disrespect, a realization that cannot be ignored. Sometimes it’s small but revealing. Sometimes it’s simply timing or incompatibility showing itself all at once. Whatever the reason, the connection collapses in a matter of hours.

And just like that, they are gone.

You delete the number. You unfollow the accounts. You remove the evidence. The world keeps moving, but internally, something feels like it has stopped. Your routines are thrown off but you have to continue showing up in your day-to-day life as if nothing happened. But in reality, it almost feels catastrophic in your heart. You feel the pit in your stomach, you feel the pain in your chest. It is the type of discomfort that you cannot just brush off.

The closest comparison I can think of is sudden loss. Not in the literal sense, but in the emotional experience of it. When someone dies unexpectedly, there is no gradual preparation for grief. One day they exist in your daily life, and the next day they don’t.

Your mind struggles to reconcile how reality changed so quickly. Abrupt endings in relationships can feel the same way.

There is no slow adjustment period. No time to emotionally step down from what you were building. Your nervous system is still operating as if that person is present, while your reality is asking you to accept their absence immediately. They're gone and the connection did not last long enough for you to dwell on it or have a real mourning period. It almost feels silly.

And that is where the whiplash lives.

What makes these endings particularly disorienting is that they often happen at the height of possibility. The connection hasn’t had time to disappoint you yet. You are grieving not only the person, but the version of the future that briefly felt real. The trips you imagined, the routines you were beginning to form, the sense of being chosen and choosing someone back.

People underestimate this kind of loss because it was short-lived. But intensity does not measure itself in time. Sometimes a few weeks of emotional closeness can reach deeper than months of something lukewarm.

The hardest part is that there is rarely closure. There is no long conversation where both people slowly accept the end. Instead, there is silence. And silence leaves room for questions - replaying moments, wondering what shifted, wondering if it could have been different.

Eventually, the dust settles. It always does. The nervous system calms and recalibrates. The absence becomes familiar instead of shocking.

But for a while, there is a strange in-between space where your heart hasn’t caught up to reality yet. Where you still reach for someone who is no longer there.

And your brain tries to correct you. And boy, does it ever try to make you feel silly.

It tells you this is silly. It was only a few weeks. You barely knew them. You shouldn’t be this affected. You remind yourself that people walk away from years-long relationships and recover, so why does this feel so heavy?

And maybe the lesson in these sudden endings is not that the connection meant less because it ended quickly. Maybe it’s that some people enter our lives briefly just to show us how deeply we are still capable of feeling. To show us that fire still exists, even if it inevitably has to be extinguished.

Even if they leave before we understand why.

As always, thanks for coming to my Cez talk xo

Leading with peace

I used to think that peace was something you earned after the chaos. After the grind. After the heartbreak. After proving - day after day, over and over again - that you could survive hard things. I used to think that strong people just had to go through it.

But somewhere along the way, I realized how exhausted I was from living in reaction mode. From always bracing and believing that tension was the price of ambition and that softness meant falling behind.

What I didn’t understand then is that a soft life isn’t a life without effort - it’s a life without unnecessary resistance.

A soft life doesn't need to signify laziness. It isn’t passivity or lowering your standards or shrinking your dreams. A soft life is choosing peace as your operating system.

It’s deciding that your nervous system matters. It’s letting go of urgency that isn’t actually required. It’s asking, “Does this cost me my calm?” and being brave enough to walk away when the answer is yes.

Softness, I’ve learned, is and can be as intentional as you allow it to be.

This is coming from a former angry girl. The girl who went and pushed boundaries without respecting her own, who didn't shy away from a fight because a fight meant that she was strong enough to hold her own. The girl who always wanted to have the last word and make sure that she is not being stepped all over. This is also coming from the same girl who eventually got tired of explaining herself without that explanation leading to a mutually beneficial result. The girl who still couldn't get her way despite the amount of fight she put forth. The girl who one day decided that enough is enough.

The shift didn’t happen all at once. It happened quietly.

It started when I stopped explaining myself to people committed to misunderstanding me. When I stopped chasing clarity from situations that only offered confusion. When I realized that peace was more productive than pressure ever had been. It happened when I realized that walking away without explanation, in an "Irish goodbye" type of way, was producing more commotion than when I was fighting battles to emphasize my peace.

I began surrendering - not in defeat, but in trust. Trust that what’s meant for me doesn’t require force. Trust that alignment feels calmer than anxiety. Trust that I don’t need to bleed to prove I’m trying.

When you lead with peace, your choices change.

You choose conversations that feel mutual instead of one-sided. You choose work that energizes instead of drains. You choose rest without guilt. You choose presence over performance.

You stop romanticizing struggle and start respecting ease. You don't let people get close if their intentions aren't to be close. If their intentions are performative, superficial, entirely on the surface. You hold space for what matters and you don't overexplain yourself for anything or anyone that does not.

And strangely enough, when I stopped pushing so hard, things began to flow more naturally. Opportunities felt clearer. Relationships felt safer. My body felt lighter.

Peace became a compass.

Living softly didn’t make my life smaller - it made it more meaningful.

I became more selective, not more closed. More grounded, not less driven. More gentle, not less powerful.

I learned that calm is not a lack of ambition - it’s a sign of alignment. That softness can coexist with strength. That surrender doesn’t mean giving up. Rather, that it sometimes means finally letting life meet you halfway.

I had to come to terms that I am allowed to build a life that feels good inside, not just one that looks good from the outside. That I am allowed to move slower. That I am allowed to want ease and be intentional with who or what I give my energy to.

There are days when I still want to choose violence, speed and chaos. That part doesn't cease to exist and I think it is silly to think that you can simply shift your mindset to be so entirely 180 from what you used to know. I welcome that fire to still exist within me. It's okay to hold that space and not suppress it. That said, it is also important to always take a step back, take a minute and decide for yourself the way in which you want to react. How do you want to come across? How do you want to lead?

More often than not these days, I tend to choose peace.

When the timing is yours to miss

I’ve often said that a lot of men in my life have fumbled me - as a partner, as a woman, as someone who would have loved them well.

I’ve said it casually, sometimes jokingly, and sometimes while quietly aching behind it. That after a connection ends, I wonder if they know. If they know that I was a good woman. A high-caliber woman. The kind of partner who would have shown up fully, consistently, intentionally. The kind they might one day look back on and realize they weren’t ready for when they had the chance.

And for a long time, I was comfortable sitting in that narrative - the idea that I was always the one being met at the wrong time.

Until this morning, when I asked myself something uncomfortable:

Have I ever done that to someone else?

Last night, I dreamt about someone from my past. Someone who was never more than a friend, but who existed in that almost-something space for years. He tried to pursue me once, told me that he had feelings for me. Other people confirmed it too. And yet, I never gave us a chance.

I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t attracted to him at the time, or because I simply wasn’t ready, or because I sensed something that scared me. What I do remember vividly is a moment in my early twenties - maybe twenty-one or twenty-two - when I thought to myself: If I give him a chance now, this will be forever.

Not forever in the dreamy, romantic sense - but in the serious one. The kind of forever that feels like marriage energy. The kind of man you don’t casually date, because once you open that door, you’re not just experimenting. You’re choosing.

And that terrified me.

I felt like my life was just beginning. I wanted freedom, movement, experience. And he felt too good, too steady, too real for the version of myself I was about to become. So I chose not to choose him at all.

As the years passed, I watched him grow. We both did. And then life happened - I moved away from the city we grew up in, friendships shifted, time did what it always does. Slowly, without ceremony, we lost touch.

Then, a year or two ago, I saw that he had entered a relationship.

I was happy for him - genuinely. But I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a sting. A quiet, irrational feeling that he was somehow supposed to wait for me. Even though he was never mine. Even though I had made it clear, through inaction, that I didn’t want him.

It’s been a good while since we last spoke.

And yet, last night, there he was - in my dream. We were reconnecting, but not as strangers. We carried all the history with us of the friendship we once had. It was that sort of comforting feeling when you're in a room full of strangers and suddenly see a face you know. Warmth.

I woke up feeling oddly deflated.

Not because I want him now - but because a question lodged itself in my chest and refused to leave:

What if he was the one who met ME at the wrong time?

I’m used to being on the other side of that sentence. I’m used to being the woman who meets the right person when they aren’t ready. But this time, the roles were reversed.

And I can’t help but wonder how differently things might have unfolded if I had been braver, or less afraid, or simply more open back then.

Maybe missed opportunities don’t always look like heartbreak.

Maybe sometimes they look like peace you weren’t ready to recognize.

And maybe fumbling someone doesn’t always come from carelessness - sometimes it comes from timing, fear, and the quiet belief that there will always be more time later.

But there isn’t.

There’s only when you meet - and who you are when you do.

P.S. Happiest new year to all! I am so happy that you are joining me on another year of creating on this platform. Thank you for supporting my passions, for reading along and for encouraging me to keep writing. Love you all!!

And for the first time this year and as always, thanks for coming to my Cez talk xo