There’s a specific kind of relationship that social media has gifted us, and I think we need to talk about it!

You know the one. The person you’ve been mutuals with for years, you may even have met them IRL a couple of times too. You react to their stories. They send you memes that are genuinely funny, like, scary accurate to your sense of humour. You share TikToks back and forth. There’s warmth there. There’s familiarity. For all intents and purposes, it looks like friendship.

But at some point, I started asking myself: if something actually happened to me, would this person know?

For a lot of those relationships, the answer was no.

What social media has become extraordinarily good at is simulating the texture of closeness. The in-jokes. The shared references. The sense that someone is witnessing your life because they’ve seen your content. It creates ‘intimacy-adjacent’ experiences, the feeling of being known, without the dedication, the intention or the infrastructure that real knowing requires.

Real knowing requires sitting with someone in something. Grief. Disappointment. A decision that’s keeping them up at night. Joy that hasn’t been announced yet. The quiet, unglamorous, inconvenient parts of a life. Memes don’t get you there. They’re not supposed to. But somewhere along the way, I fear we started letting them substitute for the thing they were never meant to replace.

We talk a lot about parasocial relationships, the one-sided attachments people form with creators, celebrities, public figures. You feel like you know them. They don’t know you exist. But I think there’s a less-discussed version that’s far more common: mutual parasociality. Two people, both performing the rituals of friendship, the reactions, the DMs, the consistent presence in each other’s digital periphery, without either of them actually holding the other. You both feel like you have a friend, however neither of you are being a friend, in the way that word has been experienced historically. It’s not malicious. It’s not even intentional. It’s just what happens when connection gets optimised for ease.

For me the discomfort came from the realisation that by being on social media, we grant access so casually now. Someone can reach you at 3am. They’re in your pocket. They exist in the margins of your day, the commute, the queue, the five minutes before you fall asleep. It’s energetic intimate real estate. That should mean something. And in exchange for all of that access, what are we actually getting? For a lot of these connections, I was giving someone the background hum of my presence, my reactions, my responses, my attention, and receiving content back. Not care. Not curiosity about my actual life. Content. Listen, I’m known to be that person that makes everything deep, which is why I’m on Substack lol, but I think that’s an imbalance worth naming, because the cost of misidentifying it is that you spend years feeling like you have a full social life, while quietly starving for the kind of connection that can actually hold you. Really unsure why you even feel like that

I’m not saying these relationships have no value. Lightness has a place. Shared humour is genuinely bonding. Trust me I love a kiki! Not every relationship needs to go deep, and there’s something lovely about someone who just makes you laugh.

What I am saying is: know what it is. Don’t let the volume of a connection trick you into mistaking it for depth. Don’t let constant contact substitute for actual presence. And maybe more importantly, audit where you’re putting your relational energy. Because if most of it is going into connections that can only meet you at the surface, there might not be much left for the ones that could actually go somewhere.

Think about the people you’re most consistently in contact with digitally, in the DMs, in your comment sections. Now think about the last time one of them asked you how you were actually doing. Not in passing. Not as a preamble to something else. But really asked, and waited for the real answer.

If that question lands with any kind of weight, it might be worth sitting with what you’re calling friendship, and what you’re actually building.

Some connections are meant to be light. Just make sure the light ones aren’t the only ones you have. 🫶🏾

So I’ve been sitting with something. It’s about repair. About what it looks like when two people decide, consciously or not, what a relationship is actually worth.

I used to think the hard conversation was the thing. That showing up to it, being willing to sit in the discomfort of someone else’s hurt or your own wrongdoing, was the highest form of love you could offer. And for a long time that felt true. Because I’d seen the alternative. Two people talking past each other in raised voices, neither one actually listening, just waiting for their turn to be right. So much heat. So little light. Nothing ever really resolved, so that even if the fracture is temporary, the texture of the relationship never really recovers, and we both just pretend not to notice.

So I used to tell myself: just show up. Just be willing. That’s the love.

But I’ve been in a few situations over the past year or so that quietly, gently, corrected me. The way the Universe has a tendency to do.

After a fracture, I showed up. I asked for the hard conversation. I extended my hand across whatever distance had formed between us and said, I’m here, I’m willing, let’s look at this together. And in some of those situations my hand wasn’t taken. The space I made for repair just stayed empty and felt vacant. Or at least that’s what it looked like at first.

It isn’t empty though. That’s what I’ve learned.

I started to realise that the silence after an unanswered request for repair fills up slowly with information. Careful, precise, unkind in its accuracy. A hit to the gut if you will. It is never about your worth though, and I want to be clear about that, because I know how easy it is to turn someone else’s limitations into a story about yourself. The silence isn’t about you. It’s about them. Their fear, their ego, the places in themselves they haven’t been willing to look at yet. The words they couldn’t find or wouldn’t let themselves say.

But it is still information. And I started to understand that I got to make a choice about what to do with it.

For me that looked like adjusting. Quietly, without announcement, without the dramatic severing I might have reached for in a previous version of myself (thank God, because that block button era of my life was a timmmmeee, I had no mercy at all!). Now depending on the nature of our relationship it can sometimes be just a gentle internal recalibration. A little shift if you will.

Because I’ve also learned this: repair is only possible in something that was healthy, loving, and real to begin with. Mutually real. Where care moved in both directions and the foundation was something you could actually stand on. I don’t believe in repair as a concept for relationships that were never truly safe. Sometimes the most loving thing is to let the silence be the ending.

This is only for the ones built on something genuine that just hit a fracture point, the way most real things do eventually.

Repair has to be mutual. That’s the part I didn’t fully understand before. It can’t be one person doing all the reaching, all the tending, all the careful maintenance of something the other person won’t even acknowledge is broken. You can’t hold a relationship together from one side. You just end up holding the weight of it alone, wondering why it feels so heavy.

The relationships I invest in emotionally now are the ones where I know the other person has the maturity, desire and the tools to repair when a fracture occurs. The rupture needs to be met with mutual effort. I will never beg someone to meet me in the hard part again.

So I’ll leave you with this. Have you experienced a relationship fracture where the silence taught you everything you needed to know?

The internet discourse has many of us stuck in the trenches of the 50/50 conversation, debating who pays for dinner, who earns more, who owes whom what, and it fails to move us forward into any real resolution. It is a distraction from the conversation we should actually be having, which is this: women who have done the work of becoming whole want partners who have also done that work. And that work is not about money.

Now, on a serious note. There is a real conversation to be had about male loneliness. And like every other system we experience in this world, it is the result of conditions that have been building for decades. We are feeling the full weight of this collectively now because we finally have the language, the research, and, let’s be honest, the internet access to have this discussion on a global scale.

I want to have that conversation honestly. Which means I am going to say some things that may be difficult for some men to read. I am okay with that because transformation lives in discomfort. You ready?

What men were promised

For generations men were given a very clear contract from society and from their fathers. Provide. Protect. Produce. If you could put a roof over your family’s head, food on the table and a car on the drive, you had done your job. You had arrived. Think of Maslow’s hierarchy applied to masculinity, provision was the summit, the proof of worth, the thing that justified your place in the home and in the world.

And for a long time, that contract worked because the systems and conditions around it supported it. Globally, women had limited access to education and financial independence. Family units were held together by necessity, by religion, by social pressure, and yes, by fear. Love was a nice-to-have, an upgrade if you will. The contract held for decades because without education or financial means, women simply did not have the option to renegotiate it.

So when I hear men speak nostalgically about the women of yesteryear their grandmothers, the ones who stayed, who cooked, who gave their bodies as duty, who never complained they tend to forget, or perhaps exercise a rather convenient cognitive dissonance about the fact that many of those grandmothers were teenagers when they married men a decade or more their senior. They forget the domestic violence. The silence that was not peace but survival. The personalities that slowly disappeared. The dreams that were never spoken because there was no space for them to exist.

Those women did not stay because the relationship was good. They stayed because leaving was not a viable option. It is strange to me that so many men dress this up as a love story when, to me, it sounds rather more like a hostage situation dressed in the language of tradition.

As bell hooks wrote in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love (2004): ‘patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples.’ What she understood was that the system did not just harm women, it stunted men too. It told them that feelings were a weakness, that vulnerability was dangerous, that the only currency that mattered was what they could provide. Society trained men out of their inner lives before they were old enough to know they had one. And because we should always be thinking in layers, when you compound this with religion and culture, the collision of all three becomes a beast entirely.

Why women evolved

Women have, over the past few decades, collectively decided to evolve. They’ve made a quiet accumulation of individual decisions made in direct response to the social conditions they inherited. The understanding that the only thing that guaranteed protection was self-sufficiency, became their roots. Because of that, education and financial independence didn’t start with the desire of being ambitious, it was cause and response, a survival strategy. Ambition is a product of privilege, freedom and safety. Our grandmothers by and large did not have this.

You may see women thriving now and read it as abundance. What it actually exists in proximity to is decades of resilience, disenfranchisement, and a profound absence of support. The flourishing is real. So is the history that made it necessary.

Women now make up the majority of university graduates across much of the developed world. In 2024, girls globally had higher rates of proficiency in both reading and mathematics than their male peers. Women are building careers, buying homes, investing, creating, leading. This was never done to compete with men, regardless of how it has been marketed to you. It was actualised because there was real data, real evidence, and very real information about what life looked like for women who did not.

Over this time women built emotional infrastructure that men largely did not. Female friendships, therapy, community, women created networks of support that meant they were no longer relying on one person to meet every need. A self-actualised woman in 2026 has a therapist, a group chat, a best friend who has known her for twenty years, and probably a gay male friend who will tell her the truth about his hetero counterparts. Her emotional needs are largely met. She is not desperate. She is not looking to be completed.

Some of us, because of capitalism, are simply looking for a partner. And for those of us who dare to think expansively and imagine beyond what we may have seen or experienced, we are looking for a love that transcends partnership entirely. But that is probably a piece for another day.

The mismatch

Right. Let’s talk about the gap.

The man who was trained to believe that provision was enough arrives at a relationship with a woman who can already provide for herself. His primary offering, the thing he was told would make him valuable is no longer the currency it once was.

What self-actualised women need from men now is not complicated, but it does require work. Emotional robustness. Emotional resilience. A wide and fluent emotional vocabulary. The ability to sit with discomfort without shutting down or blowing up. Spiritual depth, not necessarily religion, but a man who is well-journeyed within himself and at peace with what resides there. A set of values. A relationship with something beyond the ego. A man who seeks wisdom in eldership and accountability. Adaptability, the willingness and courage to grow and change as the world changes, rather than resenting women for evolving with the times.

A brief but important sidebar: passport bro culture and sex tourism are, I would argue, massively born out of a resistance to the above. Travelling to countries whose infrastructure has been fractured by colonial interference, in order to have sex with women who are still navigating those older paradigms we described, is not the flex they think it is. It also signals that on some level, men are acutely aware of the inner work it would take to sit eye to eye with women in their own countries. It is avoidance at a cellular level and it is, frankly, tragic. Those women are having the same quiet thoughts our grandmothers had. They are taking your coin and investing it, so that they too can make the same changes women on this side of the world have been able to make. There is a very good chance that in a few decades, passport bros are going to have to account for why not only the women in their home countries are now too much, but the women they thought they had the upper hand with elsewhere are also too much. As Lauryn Hill said, it could all be so simple, but you’d rather make it harrrrrd.

Anyhoooo… ‘Weaponised incompetence’, the performance of helplessness or aloofness to avoid responsibility, is no longer tolerated. As bell hooks observed in The Will to Change: most women, regardless of where they stand politically, want men to do more of the emotional labour in relationships. That is not an unreasonable ask. It is the baseline for genuine partnership.

Studies consistently show that approximately 74% of men would turn first to a romantic partner for emotional support before reaching out to a friend or family member. Women, by contrast, have distributed networks of support. Which means when a relationship ends, or when one is not available, many men find themselves with nothing. Completely exposed. Not because they are incapable of connection, but because they were never taught to build it anywhere else, and by and large, many are still refusing to learn.

The parent-child dynamic

In the 1950s, psychologist Eric Berne developed a framework called Transactional Analysis, which proposed that in any given interaction, people operate from one of three ego states: Parent, Adult, or Child. The Parent state reflects the values and behaviours absorbed from authority figures. The Adult state is grounded, rational, and present. The Child state is where our unprocessed emotions, unmet needs, and unconscious patterns live, it is reactive, dependent, and seeks external validation to feel okay.

Berne’s model was designed to help people understand why relationships so often become unequal. Why one person ends up doing all the emotional heavy lifting while the other remains passive, dependent, or intermittently explosive. The hallmark of what therapists now call a parent-child dynamic in adult relationships is exactly this: one partner consistently assumes responsibility, makes decisions, manages the emotional temperature of the relationship, while the other becomes reliant, reactive, and looks to their partner for guidance, approval, and regulation.

My thoughts on that are this, being an adult is, in many cases, only something we can claim biologically, unless we are intentional about our emotional development.

And when I look at the patterns that emerge when emotionally unavailable men enter relationships with self-actualised women, what I see repeatedly is this dynamic playing out. The woman, practised in self-reflection, emotionally fluent, and boundaried, finds herself unconsciously stepping into the Parent role. Managing, explaining, absorbing. The man, untrained and quite frankly fearful of his inner world, unaccustomed to being asked to show up emotionally, defaults to the Child. Withdrawing, deflecting, expecting to be guided through feelings he has no language for.

It is the result of a system that never required men to grow up emotionally. But it is also not sustainable. And increasingly, women are refusing to parent their partners. Which is the right call because that dynamic corrodes intimacy. You cannot be someone’s lover and their mother simultaneously. It does not work and it is not fair to either person. And as my good sis K. Michelle sang, ‘you can’t raise a man.’

The male choice of victimhood

So now we are up to speed, we can address the male loneliness epidemic properly. And I want to be precise.

Male loneliness is real. The data is dark, men are five times more likely than they were in 1990 to report having no close friends at all. One in four young men report feeling profoundly lonely. The consequences are serious, isolation is linked to significant deterioration in both mental and physical health. This is, by any reasonable definition, a public health crisis and it deserves a serious, funded, government-level response.

The problem is that the two systems most equipped to respond to this, patriarchy and capitalism, are the same two systems that built it. Patriarchy told men that feelings were weakness and that provision was enough. Capitalism monetised their loneliness rather than addressing it. Neither system has any real incentive to produce emotionally healthy men because emotionally healthy men are harder to control. And so as you might expect, as a Black woman, I have no faith in, the two systems that have historically benefited men the most, to do anything meaningful about this. The lionshare, of the work of addressing male loneliness should ultimately lie with men themselves, engaging seriously with their own inner lives and improving the male experience for the generations to come.

In 2026, with the internet, with therapy more accessible than it has ever been, with entire communities of men actively doing the inner work and documenting it publicly the information is not hidden. Men know that this work is necessary. They know that emotional intelligence is a skill that can be built. They know that vulnerability is the foundation of real connection. And I think most men know, on some level, that the old blueprint is broken.

The victimhood narrative, the idea that men are lonely because women have changed, because feminism moved the goalposts, or because modern women ask too much, is a choice. It is easier to be angry at women for evolving than to do the uncomfortable work of evolving yourself. It is easier to find community in resentment than in growth. Andrew Tate did not create lonely men. He monetised their refusal and fear of looking inward and gave it a language that felt like power.

The possibility

The men who are doing the work exist. They are not loud about it because the internet does not reward that particular kind of masculinity, but they are there. Men who have been to therapy, who have cried in front of their friends, who have sat with their own wounds and decided to understand them rather than project them. Men who have learned that being a partner means showing up emotionally, not just financially. Men who understand that a woman who has built herself does not need to be managed or diminished, she needs to be met. Eye to eye level.

Those men are not lonely.

The male loneliness epidemic has a cure. It requires men to want growth more than they want to be right, or to remain comfortable in their fear. It requires them to acknowledge and grieve the blueprint they were given, without using that grief as a weapon to further inflict harm on themselves and the women in their communities. It requires them to understand that the women who will not settle are not the problem.

We have only ever been the invitation.

As bell hooks put it in The Will to Change: in patriarchal culture, men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort.

The work is the effort. And on the other side of it is everything they say they want.

Thanks for reading this far, and engaging with my thoughts on this. For anyone who has felt a resistance to anything that I have written and is about to get in the comments, with some whataboutism. I have some answers for you below, you’re welcome! Let’s talk about it in the comments.

What about women who are emotionally unavailable? They exist. This piece is not about them. Emotional unavailability is not a gendered flaw, it is a human one. But this piece is specifically about a systemic pattern that emerges from how masculinity has been constructed and sold to men. That is a specific conversation and it deserves to be had without being immediately redirected.

What about men who have done the work and are still lonely? Those men exist and I see them. The systemic critique in this piece is not a verdict on every individual man. If you have done the work and you are still lonely, that is genuinely painful and it deserves care. What I would gently offer is that doing the work is not a transaction, it is not done in exchange for a relationship. It is done because it makes you a fuller human being. The loneliness may still visit. But it changes in character when you are no longer running from yourself.

What about women who take advantage of emotionally available men? They exist too. Healed does not mean invincible and emotionally available men can absolutely find themselves in dynamics that are not reciprocal. That is worth a whole separate piece. What it does not do is invalidate the argument being made here.

What about men who were raised without fathers or without healthy male role models? This is probably the most legitimate mitigating factor in this entire conversation and I want to honour it properly. The absence of emotionally present male role models is a real and devastating gap. Boys who never saw men process emotion healthily have to build that from scratch, often without a map. That context matters enormously. It is also not a life sentence. The information, the therapy, the community it exists. The question remains whether men choose to access it.

What about the mental health crisis in men, isn’t loneliness a symptom of that? Yes. And the mental health crisis in men is in large part a consequence of the very system this piece is critiquing. Men have been taught that seeking help is weakness. That stoicism is strength. The same patriarchy that told men provision was enough also told them that struggling in silence was noble. These are not separate conversations, they are the same one.

What about women who left good men because they were chasing an impossible standard? Possibly some did. But I would ask what made the standard feel impossible? Emotional availability, communication, accountability, these are not extraordinary requests. If these felt like an impossible standard, that tells us something important about what was being offered.

Deconstructing from religion doesn’t have to lead you to a specific destination. Spirituality, being human, doesn’t operate on a spectrum. Contrary to what you may have been taught, the opposite of being a ‘insert religion here’ isn’t a devil worshipper.

I walked away from Christianity at 17, after growing up in a cult like version of it. To give you the full context on everything I witnessed and experienced would take a few chapters of a book, so I’ll top line it here. I spent years trying to arrive somewhere. I never did. And I’m glad.

I saw people in the church self-identifying as prophets and as God himself, convincing others of that, then using that power to abuse people, financially, sexually, spiritually, emotionally, all of the ways. I saw victims of this become shells of themselves; lose their personalities, their voices, convincing themselves they were experiencing this because they were sinners, and somehow chosen by God to be punished in this way. I saw their self-care slip, I saw people fall into debt, and I saw domestic violence used to maintain order. As a child I saw a lot. I always had questions that weren’t answered and was made to feel difficult for asking them. Before the age of 16 I had witnessed coercion and manipulation, and had figured out how to maintain an awareness that kept my mind as safe and protected as a child can manage.

So at 17, whilst registering for college, I was handed a form. On it, a question I had answered many times before: select your religion. I stared at the word ‘Christian’ and I just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t say that I was anymore, it didn’t feel right. So I ticked ‘other’. That was the beginning.

That day was a strange one. I couldn’t focus on anything else. I kept coming back to the decision to tick ‘other’ and what it meant. I felt untethered but somehow free at the same time. It was the first truly adult decision I had made for myself, now I think about it. It lightened me in some ways, but I also felt the weight of not being able to call myself something. I was existing in the in-between unsure of how to think about my decision, and unsure of how to talk about it to others. Most people around me were a devout something.

In the months that followed, I talked myself into choosing another religion. ‘If you want to still go to heaven you need to be devoting your life to something,’ I felt. So I studied and studied and studied. I went to my local youth centre and spent hours researching on the internet, in 2004/5, mind you lol! Buddhism, Rastafarianism, and more, printing pages and pages to take home and highlight the things that resonated with me from each one. I was locked in. At the time I was quite close with a Black Muslim family. I spent a lot of time at their house, in their home music studio with the brothers, getting my hair braided by the sisters, sometimes just chilling with their mum. They were Jamaican Muslims, so I got to see first-hand how my culture interacted with a religion I was completely unfamiliar with. I stayed nights at their home, woke up for prayers. I committed to it, but it didn’t pull me in.

A year or so later, in 2006, I fell ill on holiday in Jamaica and ended up in a coma for a week. When I was well enough, I returned to England, and that’s when the pressure to choose a religion intensified. I had just had a near-death experience, and prayer circles from all over the world had flooded in (if you know anything about how they travel, you’ll know I’m not exaggerating). I was told repeatedly that Jesus had brought me back from the dead, and so I had to give my life to him. In theory that made sense, but I’ve never had the kind of brain that just accepts things, and from the childhood I had, religious guilt and shame were never effective enough tools to make me do anything. So I prayed about it.

Ironically, after everything I had lived through, I never questioned the presence of a higher power in my life. I only questioned the organised way I had been forced to practice. I prayed that if any particular religion was meant for me, it would be placed on my spirit in such an obvious way that I couldn’t ignore it. I continued to research, attended church and other religious spaces when invited, and over time became aware that the conviction I had prayed for never came.

It was a good few years before I gave up my pursuit of religion. I had genuinely tried to convert to something, as wild as that may sound. I was tryna be recruited, lol! But in that time I had learned so much from other faith systems and beliefs. So many beautiful things that deeply resonated with me.

One day after work, a Hindu colleague offered to drop me home. While we were driving, we got talking about her beliefs, heaven, hell, what happens after. I had already started questioning the concept of heaven a few months prior. My thinking was that all of the insane behaviour I had witnessed as a child was carried out by adults who were hell-bent (no pun intended) on getting into heaven, willing to do almost anything, even sacrifice their own children, to get there. So the promise of heaven, and the way it compromised people’s behaviour, was very much up for discussion for me.

She told me about Nirvana, that in her belief, people reincarnate on Earth as many times as they need to until they’ve learned whatever soul lessons they came here for. When a person completes their lessons, they no longer need to return, and when they die, their evolved soul joins the ‘energetic current’ of the universe. That energetic current, she said, is what people experience as God/Nirvana. Well. That blew my mind. I can’t say I believed it in that moment, but it made far more sense to me than a place in the sky you get to live in forever for being ‘good.’

In the 20 years since, I’ve had many more conversations like that with people from all different walks of life, religions, and belief systems. People have shared things with me that stopped me completely in my tracks.

One that took me years to process came from a Rastafarian woman I used to work with. I was ranting to her about my mother one day and she looked at me dead in the eye and said, “You know you chose your parents, right?” I was speechless. I genuinely don’t remember responding. She carried on and explained that before we come to earth, we choose our soul lessons, our bodies, our life experiences, our families, essentially everything we need in order to grow in the way we’re meant to. She said our higher self makes those choices, and when we arrive here, we forget. Our life’s work is about remembering why we came, so we can fulfil those lessons.

It was a lot. How could I have chosen this life? The coma, the abuse, I don’t feel like I would have signed up for that. But the reason I didn’t immediately dismiss it was because of how she shared it. She could have indulged my rant, used it as an opportunity to pry. Instead, she offered a perspective that reframed everything. Something about her doing that felt noble. Like she was sharing it because she felt I needed it. I’ve reflected on that conversation for years, and it’s now a belief I hold for myself, with the full understanding that most people would refuse the idea entirely. Which is fair. This journey is deeply personal.

Over time I started to genuinely love not having to align myself to any one religion. I enjoyed that I could keep having these kinds of conversations, ones that challenged me, expanded me, made me think. I let go of the pressure to be something, and leaned into the human experience of just being. The last 20 years have been exactly that: a quiet, open welcoming of wisdom, wherever it comes from.

I’ve often thought about the fact that there are thousands of languages in the world, and that language and culture tend to reflect the dominant religion of a place. There’s a beauty in that. There’s something lovely about people being able to connect with God, if they believe in a higher power, in a way that genuinely makes sense to them. And I like the idea that so many avenues to wisdom exist. Yes, even for the tarot, witchy, spiritual babes, I have absolutely dipped my toe into that world and only had positive experiences.

I’ll be honest, on this ‘I’m not a Christian’ journey, letting go of what I’d been taught about psychics and mediums was hard. Christians tend to say that prophets channel from God and psychics channel from the devil. I disagree. I believe a God who creates everyone with gifts also creates people with psychic and prophetic ones. It’s just language. Source is source. I don’t believe darkness has dominion over anyone involuntarily. Does darkness exist? Yes, everything has polarity. But I believe you invite darkness or light in. The fear I carried at the start of this journey was the idea that I had no choice, that if I put myself in certain spaces or around certain people, darkness would just come. Religion works hard to strip you of your agency. It tells you to ‘lean not on your own understanding’ and offers an interpretation of that which encourages you to hand your critical thinking over to people outside of yourself.

But here’s what I want you to know: you can gather information and reflect on it. You can choose to move. Choose to stay still. Choose to learn more. Choose to sit in silence while you process. Your deconstruction, and wherever it takes you, is yours alone. The destination, if there ever is one, is simply to be at peace within yourself, with beliefs that feel true to who you are. If that connects you to a higher power, beautiful. If it doesn’t, and that feels right to you, that’s equally fine.

The systems at play in the world have done a number on disconnecting us from ourselves. Coming back to yourself is not easy. Patriarchy, white supremacy, religion, all of them play a part in telling us who we are before we’re old enough to decide for ourselves. It’s entirely normal to pause and take another look at how those systems serve you, and how they don’t.

So on your deconstruction journey, be kind to yourself. Take your time. You’ll get wherever you need to be, when you get there. The deconstruction isn’t the gap between who you were and who you’ll be, it is the becoming.

Enjoy the journey my loves 🫶🏾

I believe we should all be seeking friendships we cannot hide in. This has been a very recent realisation for me.

I grew up not being seen. My parents didn’t see me. My teachers didn’t see me. It was really easy to somehow be a brilliant, bright child, whilst simultaneously fading into the background. As you can imagine, I then spent my 20’s and my 30’s, choosing men who didn’t, and let’s be real, couldn’t see me either. Three decades of being unseen felt normal to me I guess. But it didn’t take the yearning I had away for deep connection with others

When I started therapy, I began connecting the dots. I saw how the physical and emotional abandonment from my parents left deep scarring and wounds that coloured every relationship I built as I grew into early adulthood. Threads that ran so deeply, I genuinely had no clue they were there until I sat across from a therapist and started talking.

I began to recount conversations I’d had with family members and friends. I was honest about the twinges of discomfort in my body I felt when the way I was spoken to in a way that was absent of care. And slowly, I started to connect the dots for myself. I had no foundational experience of what it felt like to be treated with love and care. So the people I picked to be in my life continued that thread.

I did a recce of my relationships and asked so many questions, who did I not have to shrink around? Who could I be my complete self with? If I wanted to talk about spirituality, astrology or sex, who would make me feel like I was too much, or weird? Who did I not have to moderate my opinions around, and who actually wanted to hear them?

I ran the numbers. I had two people.

Those two people weren’t friends I spoke to every day. We didn’t have a group chat. They didn’t claim me as their sister or their bestie. But whenever we connected, I felt free, like I was finally able to unmask.

I don’t think I did anything with this information for a while. In hindsight, now that have an ADHD diagnosis, I understand it was probably such a big realisation that it overwhelmed me, so I let it go. Filed it away somewhere and moved on. Entertained by the next thought

On my birthday a years ago, I received a FaceTime from one of them, “Happy birthday, my love,” she said, and I immediately burst into tears. I had no idea why.

She held the space. “It’s okay love, let it out.”

Uncomfortable, I tried to make a joke out of it, naturally, but it felt like a safe enough space to keep crying until I was finally able to make sense of what was happening. she didn’t rush me, she softly looked at me until I calmed down and said, ‘what do you think the tears were about?’

The truth came to me finally: I have always hated my birthday. It’s a reminder of family estrangement. Of how many years I’ve survived by myself. Of how, even though I am deeply family and community-oriented, I don’t come from a family that feels safe enough to actually do that with.

The reason I tell this story is because she witnessed me in a way that allowed me to uncover something deeper for myself. The space she held let me voice it, and be held in it.

Reflecting on that moment, I knew I wanted to deepen into friendships I didn’t have to mask in. Years later I’m happy to say that, that number has now increased to 4! And that’s good enough for me

I’ve written about this before, but I genuinely believe that the only people who can really hold you, or deeply see you, are people who have done the work of journeying within themselves. I don’t believe you can create deep connections with people, romantically, or in our friendships, unless you cultivate deep connection and radical honesty with yourself first.

Side Note:: I think it’s also crucial and important to say at this point, that I never then went a cut off everyone else that didn’t provide that container for me. I think the internet has a tendency to encourage people to cut folks out of their lives if they don’t (insert some form of service here) We are so layered as humans and the internet tries to convince us to live in binaries, we have different parts of us that need to be witnessed. Some people are placed in your life to make you laugh the hardest you’ve ever laughed, so you reconnect with your body in a way that may feel unfamiliar. They are not there to witness you on a deep emotional level. And that’s ok

Now, a few years on, I’m intentionally choosing to deepen into friendships where I cannot hide. When certain friends ask me, “how are you?” is not a pleasantry. It’s a real question, and the only answer they want is the full truth, however long it takes me to get it out. They are deeply present, they listen, they engage, and they don’t allow me to hide.

It’s a strange feeling. One I’m happy to keep getting used to.

Because I’m a Virgo, I have of course turned this whole life lesson into a curriculum. Next term I’m gonna be working on letting myself be seen in romantic relationships.

I recently ended a “romantic adjacent” situation/friendship thing (a story for another day) for exactly this reason. As much as I enjoyed our little cosplay, I was hiding again. The container of that relationship didn’t allow me to be witnessed or truly seen, and as scary as that will probably always feel, I owe it to the little girl whose parents physically left and emotionally checked out to be deeply witnessed in all of my relationships from here on out.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ And I think you do too babe. x

I sat with it for a bit because I needed to think. I have people in my life that can hold me. It’s how I was able to make the distinction between the three in the former piece. But what I didn’t reflect on there is that the people who are able to hold me the best are the people who are exceptional at holding themselves. Let me explain…

There’s this quote that I’ve loved for years, and it’s: “People can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves.” The irony is this quote has sat true for me for years, even when I was in the shallow end of the deep pool. 🤣

The depth at which I want to be held now romantically, in friendship (family is a stretch, but we can only accept where people are at, right?) is drastically different to the depth I needed to be held at 10 years ago. The only people who can hold you are almost always people who can hold themselves.

As a Scorpio Moon, Venus, and Pluto, I am not afraid of the excavation needed to sit with myself. I have oftentimes mistook emotional literacy, kindness, and chemistry to be the thing that drew me towards people. Only to find out that if these people are petrified of their inner world, they cannot meet you or even deserve to sit within yours. When choosing someone to hold you, you need to consider people who have a willingness to sit inside their own inner world, especially when it’s uncomfortable.

Someone who is frightened of their emotions, their complexity, their past, or their future will avoid that internal space at all costs. And when someone avoids themselves, they can’t stay present in turmoil theirs or yours.

They cannot soothe themselves. And truth be told, because of that, they cannot soothe you.

When someone hasn’t learned how to stay with their own fear, grief, shame, or uncertainty, those emotions feel overwhelming. They flood the system. So the nervous system does what it’s designed to do: it finds a way out.

Distraction.

Intellectualising. (I’m looking at you, babes.)

Humour.

Spiritual bypassing.

Busyness.

Shutting down.

Fixing.

Avoidance dressed up as positivity. (I’m judging here this is the worst, imo.)

These are tools, but they’re survival tools, not holding tools. And these tools don’t build roots. At this stage of my life, I only want relationships that can establish roots.

Someone who avoids their inner world hasn’t learned how to regulate themselves in distress. They move away from discomfort rather than staying with it long enough for it to soften.

And because of that, when you bring your pain, your confusion, or your emotional weight into the room, it activates their own unprocessed material.

They may minimise.

They may deflect.

They may go quiet.

They may rush to solutions.

They may disappear entirely.

Not because they don’t care but because they don’t have the capacity to stay.

To hold another person, you have to be able to sit inside yourself when things are messy. You have to be able to feel without collapsing, to stay present without fixing, to tolerate uncertainty without running.

Holding is not something you do for someone.

It’s something you’re able to be with them.

This is why some people feel safe but unavailable.

Why others are warm but unreliable.

Why intensity doesn’t equal depth.

Why closeness doesn’t always equal care.

And this is also why we have to be honest with ourselves.

If we struggle to hold ourselves, to sit with our own emotions, to regulate in distress, to stay present when things are uncomfortable then we will also struggle to hold others. The work of becoming someone who can be held and someone who can hold is the same work.

Learning to stay.

Learning to feel.

Learning to soothe without escaping.

Learning to tell the truth to yourself first.

Capacity grows inward before it ever shows up in relationship.

And once you understand this, something softens.

You stop trying to be understood by people who don’t have the internal space to understand you.

You stop taking emotional limits personally.

You stop mistaking avoidance for incompatibility, or care for capacity.

And instead, you begin to ask a different question:

Can this person stay with themselves when things are hard?

Because if they can’t they won’t be able to stay with you either.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ And I feel like this is the key to choosing people to be in relationship with.

There’s a difference between being seen, being experienced, and being held.

And confusing the three can make relationships feel close on the surface, but strangely empty underneath. I’ve often felt this in some of my family relationships. It wasn’t until I understood this distinction for myself that I was able to make peace with that feeling.

Being seen

Being seen is when you allow someone to witness your vulnerability.

You let them hear your thoughts, frustrations, fears. They don’t necessarily need to offer advice or comfort. They don’t even need to be vulnerable with you in return. Sometimes, they’re simply there while you speak.

This kind of connection can feel intimate and it is, to a point.

But I’ve realised that being seen can easily stop at observation. It can become emotional witnessing with no follow-through, no action, no real responsibility. These interactions often carry an awkward air something intangible. You might not be able to name it, but you can feel it.

This is what I’ve started to call performative intimacy: sharing vulnerability with someone who doesn’t have the capacity to offer actual support. For some people, this isn’t performative in a conscious way — it’s genuinely all they can give. There’s a certain wisdom in acknowledging that, and making peace with it rather than expecting more.

Being experienced

Being experienced is different. These are the people you feel safe enough around to exist unmasked. No makeup. Low energy. Sick. Quiet. Broke. Successful. Flat. Human.

Your nervous system relaxes around them. There’s no need to perform or explain yourself. And importantly, they don’t have to give you anything.

You might experience this kind of safety at work, in social groups, or with people you spend time around regularly. You can sit beside them in silence. You can just be.

But someone can experience you without being able to emotionally support you.

You can exist around them but you can’t always fall apart with them. Again, there’s often that familiar awkward edge to it. You can unmask to a point, but not all the way.

Being held

Being held is different again.

Being held requires mutual vulnerability first with yourself, and then with another person. It also requires radical honesty: the ability to tell the truth to yourself, and then to another person in relationship with you.

These people are rare. Real diamonds.

I have a friend like this. When she asks me if I’m okay, she pauses and waits really waits for an honest answer. I know that if I try to gloss over the truth, she’ll sense it. And she’s told me as much. Gently, she lets me know: here, you can tell the truth I can hold it, and it forces me to exhale every time

Being held includes being seen. It includes being experienced. But for me, it goes further.

Being held means someone can stay with you when things are uncomfortable. When you’re overwhelmed. When you lack clarity. When you’re not your best self.

And you can do the same for them.

This doesn’t mean fixing each other.

It doesn’t mean constant availability.

It means emotional capacity and the intention to hold one another when it matters.

Not everyone has the capacity to hold you. And that isn’t a moral failing. Someone can experience you and still not be able to hold you. Being seen doesn’t automatically mean you’re safe. And closeness doesn’t always equal care.

Each form of connection has value. Each serves a purpose. Problems arise when we expect one to be something it simply isn’t.

The question I started asking myself wasn’t:

Who do I feel close to? Or who do I have history with?

It was simpler and harder:

Who in my life actually makes me feel held?

I’m grateful that I have a few people who do.

And now, when new people enter my life, I’m not looking for intensity or potential. I’m no longer confusing access with care. I’m paying attention to capacity. That question alone has changed how I move through relationships and what I’m willing to accept from them.

Welcome to Healing Isn’t Linear. This is my corner of the internet where I’ll be writing about healing, relationships, sex, and the messy, complicated, beautiful work of being human.

I’m not here to sell you ten steps to wholeness. I’m here to tell the truth my truth and maybe help you meet yourself in it. This is my first post, so thank you for being here at the beginning.

I lost my virginity at 19.

Like many kids who grew up in the early 2000s in the UK, I’d caught the occasional late-night Channel 4 binge and seen Eurotrash alongside other soft-core cable porn. Because of that, I thought I knew what sex was supposed to feel like, or at least what it should look like.

So when the moment finally happened and I felt nothing, my mind spiralled. Was something wrong with me? Had everyone and their mother been lying about sex this whole time?

Given the childhood I’d had, I kind of assumed the latter, but the Gemini rising in me needed more information. If sex wasn’t good, surely I should at least feel something? Even a not-good feeling? But each time I had sex it felt like nothing. Like the light hovering of a hand over my stomach. Nothing.

So I took myself to Brook sexual health clinic to see if I was broken. I explained my situation to the doctor in detail, my whole body buzzing with anxiety. I’d never spoken about sex before. I hadn’t told anyone I was going to the clinic.

I’d grown up in a cult-like version of Christianity, carrying a deep shame about not even being a virgin. Sitting in that chair having this conversation was something I could never have rehearsed. She waited for me to finish and then calmly asked, “Were you sexually abused as a child?”

Internally it was the biggest WTF moment. What happened to “Hello, how are you, my name is…”

I was jolted into contemplating something I hadn’t even considered while trying to understand what was happening with me. The answer was yes. Yes, I was. I whispered it to her. She said, “When sexual abuse happens over a long period of time, it’s very common for a person to shut off all sexual feelings in their body. That’s probably what’s going on.”

“Ok,” I said.

“It should come back over time,” she added.

“Ok,” I said again.

“Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

“Erm, I think that’s it, you know…”

I levitated out of the building. Floating. Completely confronted by what had just been said to me. Confronted by the fact that at that point in my life no one knew about the abuse. My friends didn’t know. My boyfriend didn’t know. The only people who knew were the abuser and my family who I was estranged from.

My mind raced furiously. I had no idea what to do. The tears I’d cried as a child were no longer available to me as a teenager. Somewhere along the way I’d learned that tears didn’t change anything. They didn’t make anything better.

I write this now as a 39-year-old woman who has spent the last 20 years chasing healing. Trying to understand my own life, the world around me, my family relationships and most importantly, my relationship with my body and sex.

I find myself returning to these moments again and again. The moments of, “Oh, it gets better,” but also the moments where it still hurts deeply. That’s where Healing Isn’t Linear was born the space I’m creating for myself to just be. Not to perform togetherness. Not to perform being healed.

I feel messy most of the time. I have a lot of stories to tell and lessons to share from the past 20 years. I’d love for you to join me. But it’s important to say: I’m not selling healing. I’m only telling my story, and sometimes the stories of people who give me permission.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear your reflections. You can reply to this post, share it, or simply sit with it quietly. However you choose to engage, you’re welcome here exactly as you are.

Love,

Rochelle