Eulogy: My hardest goodbye
Not my usual piece: A personal and emotional writing of an erasure of a person.
It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t happen all at once. There was no big fight, no final words, no slammed door or emotional voicemail. It was quieter than that. A slow erosion. The kind of distance that creeps in like water damage, seeping into places you don’t check often, until one day the wall collapses and you’re reminded it’s been rotting from the very start.
That’s how it ended.
The strange part is that I still can’t pinpoint the exact moment things began to shift. It was just a feeling at first. The unspoken tension. A slight hesitation where there used to be ease.
The silence wasn’t cold. It was tender. That’s what made it so hard. It would’ve been easier if there had been a moral catastrophe or a radical tragedy. Something to hold onto. Something to hate. But there wasn’t. There was just the ache of growing apart from someone who had once been the extension of my soul.
I don’t remember exactly what we said in our last conversation, it all seemed too vague. I remember the way our presence used to feel—like being wrapped in something warm and familiar, something that asked nothing of me except to exist. We were the only place I could fall apart without judgment, the only place I could say, “I’m scared” and not be met with advice or discomfort. Just space. Just breath. Just that steady kind of witnessing that doesn’t demand me to make sense.
I was so safe there. And God, how I miss feeling safe like a child.
There are still places I avoid because they make me feel like the past I used to enjoy a little bit too much. Cafés where we spent days reading to self-find from strangers’ perspectives. Songs that carry the kind of emotional specificity only shared memories can give a track. The rooftop where we had an eye-to-eye with the stars as the full moon was our witness. Clothing I haven’t worn in years because its smell reminds me of who I was when I wore it—when it felt like home.
And maybe that’s the worst part. It wasn’t that anything was wrong. Just the inevitability of change. Just time doing what time always does. Just space expanding larger than we could ever be. And then just me, evolving into someone that didn’t quite fit in that life anymore.
I didn’t choose to outgrow anything. But I did. And now I live with the guilt of survival. The regret of moving forward. The contradicting ends of a string—of finding the comfort that I had to leave behind.
It’s something older than romance. But it’s quieter and deeper. Like Norah Jones’ low hum in the background of a whisky chit-chat, reminding me of the version of myself that felt the most real. And it’s not nostalgia. Just a missing person. The ease. The clarity. The complete lack of performance that was confusing but liberating.
The world loves stories about breaking up with other people. We have an entire dictionary for it. Language soaked in metaphor and therapy speak. But no one gives you words for the deep cuts of grief that happen when you outgrow yourself.
No one tells you how much it can feel like heartbreak. No one tells you that the grief will mimic everything you’ve ever felt when someone walks away and doesn’t look back. The confusion. The rage. The resignation. The quiet hope that maybe, one day, you’ll run into them again and be able to say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to change.”
And then one day, without disclaimers, I woke up fluent in a language I was never meant to learn. I used to speak instinctively and in hunger. Or the irrational joy of being known without needing to justify myself. But now I’m busier thinking about my posture and softened takes than I am about my substance. In tidy little frameworks that keep the mess at bay.
Because it’s not enough to say that I want this, it has to be overintellectualised. Then it’s not enough to say that I feel hurt, I have to self-diagnose. It’s also not enough to say, I need it, it has to be overexplained. Because this world is not made for honest people to be embraced. It’s made for those stoïc enough to repress their feelings to the point of flattening themselves into a piece of card no one can read, then decorate it with only a subtle hint of feelings to make themselves seem human.
And that’s what I did. I did all that to strategise communicating the part of myself I’m so scared of being misunderstood by others I fear may “un-love” me. And most frequently people who are closest to me, whose perceptions and actions matter the most to me. And I’m thriving. I’m excelling at the art of careful calibration—a negotiation between essence and appearance, shaped by my persistent fear that what lies at the core might be reduced, distorted, or worse, dismissed entirely. I rehearse every sentence through hypothetical reactions. I reroute it through possible interpretations and rewrite it to preempt potential harms. I morph expressions in careful calculations, not out of deception but in defence. Because what I need most to express is precisely what I fear exposing: the interior truths that, if misread, would feel like annihilation of my existence. So I rehearse because I can’t afford not to. Because being seen for who I truly am feels like a luxury and a condition for survival all at the same time. And so, rather than speak plainly, I choreograph nuance. Rather than trust my subject of conversation, I over-code the message. Rather than relying on who I am, I avoid at all costs any possible interpretations of who I am not.
So I risk becoming incomprehensible, even to myself.
My way of speaking—of expressing, of articulating, of making myself known—has become so tethered to context, so bound by the dimensions of space, audience, and interpretation, that I’m no longer sure if it belongs to me at all. It’s shaped by imagined receptions, coded for legibility in rooms I sometimes don’t even want to be in. I’ve become so obsessed with perfecting the semantics—so attuned to how it’ll be heard that I’ve stopped listening to what I’m actually saying.
I suspect I don’t understand any of it anymore. Not in a way that this language feels like a bridge between the inside and the outside.
And people call this “growth.” But sometimes I can’t seem to see it that way. I sometimes see it as a betrayal. A slow one. A betrayal that claps when I perform clarity but looks away when I quietly lose access to the parts of myself that I used to feel comfortable in. But in the process, I stopped speaking me. And the scariest part is that I got so good at it—so good at translating myself that I almost forgot there was another language underneath.
You know the one I mean. The one I spoke before I knew words like “self-regulate” or “boundaries.” The one that wasn’t bound by space and time, nor processed in ways that fit into others’ understandings and perspectives. The one that didn’t need to be cross-checked for narrative coherence before it left my mouth. The one that used to blurt things out at 1 AM and fall in love too fast and cry too easily and say this matters even if no one put a spotlight on it, aside from Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 48 No. 1 orchestrating its backdrop.
And I know I had to toughen up. The world isn’t built for that kind of softness. Especially not if you want to be respected. Especially not if you want to be taken seriously. So we shaved off the parts of us that made people uncomfortable. We sanded ourselves down to a clearer shape.
And it costs a lot.
I feel like I learnt to put on competence as a stand-in for connection; only to learn that in reality connection is the stand-in for competence when competence actually matters the most—as long as it’s the right connection. Then I was taught that honesty was a value to uphold to become good—only to find that “doing the work” is a choreographed performance of being the most palatable version of myself because honesty is not really honesty. Honesty is eloquence in dressing up lies and masking it as our truth.
And if this is what we call growth, I’m angry. I’m grieving. And I think so are the people around me. A kind of rage so vast, most don’t know where to put it, how to release it, or who could possibly hold it. So some carry it quietly. Some bury it beneath pleasantries. Some repress it until they forget it was ever there. And that last one, people say, is part of not only growing, but maturing. You learn to withhold and suppress. Deny, deny, deny. And in denial, people develop yet another language—one they speak with astonishing fluency: a language that neither they nor anyone else truly understands, because this one isn’t made to express nor communicate. It was built to conceal.
I think I’ve been correct in what people see as correct. Strategic in a way that people do see me the way I portray myself to be. I think I’ve been careful and consistent and occasionally even profound. But I don’t think I’ve been honest—not in the way I was when I was still allowed to be confused. Not in the way I was when I didn’t yet speak this shiny new dialect of adult selfhood that sounds amazing in theory but never quite reaches the gut.
This is the kind of betrayal that doesn’t break me all at once. But it makes me less certain. Less moved.
It’s the slow, necessary, high-functioning erosion of the self that once believed I could be both messy and ok. That I could be broken, wanting to be fixed, and yet accepted all at the same time. But that self wasn’t sustainable in this life. She would’ve combusted. But damn, she was fluent in something I can’t even touch anymore. And I miss her voice. But I don’t know who’s doing the translating anymore.
The cover art is the artwork that represents my 3-year Fine Art degree. It’s an artwork in a form of a self-made language, and it’s still evolving as I evolve. And this piece speaks, in part, of what and who inspire it, though I’ll keep some mysteries fully personal for the time being.