u/sout_fyall_

I don’t know if I cheated emotionally, if I’m just a bad person or if this is just what being young and figuring things out looks like. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I want honest opinions.
I dated my first boyfriend for about three years. Toward the end of the relationship, things got really difficult because he just wasn’t giving me what I needed emotionally. Around that time, I started talking to one of my friends. It wasn’t romantic or sexual at all. We were just talking and my boyfriend even knew about him.
But those conversations made me realize how little effort my boyfriend had been putting into our relationship. It wasn’t that my friend was flirting with me or trying to get with me. it was more that being treated with basic kindness made me realize I wasn’t even getting the bare minimum from my boyfriend.
I ended up breaking up with him. Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve stayed if I hadn’t started talking to that friend.
We kept talking after the breakup. At one point, I gave my ex another chance but nothing changed. I remember being devastated after messing up an exam and instead of comforting me, he said something like “You choose to be sad. If you choose not to be sad, you won’t be sad.” That was the final straw and I ended things again.
About six months later, I started dating that friend.
He was genuinely the sweetest guy I’ve ever been with. We had an incredibly healthy relationship for about a year. We barely fought, he treated me with kindness and respect and I honestly can’t say any other man has treated me that well.
The problems started when he lied to me once. It really broke my trust. Around the same time, I also realized our sexual preferences were very different. He wanted me to dominate him and was interested in things I realized I wasn’t comfortable with. Between the lie and our incompatibility, I slowly started drifting away emotionally.
While that was happening, another friend of mine, an artist, started texting me. Again, we grew closer while I was already emotionally pulling away from my boyfriend. Eventually I broke up with him and after that I got into a relationship with the artist.
That relationship was awful. He treated me terribly but somehow I tolerated it. Then he left me and I was so attached that I literally begged him to let me be anything in his life just not to leave completely. I’m over him now, thankfully.
Now I keep looking back and wondering if I made the biggest mistake of my life by leaving the genuinely good guy.
What really eats at me is the pattern. In both of my serious relationships, I became close to someone else while I was already emotionally checking out before I actually ended the relationship. I never kissed, slept with or romantically pursued those people while I was still committed but I can’t help wondering if that still counts as emotional cheating.
Was I monkey branching without realizing it? Was I a cheater? Was I just immature? Or is this something that happens when you’re in relationships that have already run their course?
For context, all of this happened before I was 20. Part of me tells myself I was just young and learning but another part of me feels guilty and wonders if I’m just making excuses.
I’d appreciate honest opinions, even if they’re hard to hear.

Perhaps the solution to Kashmir is euthanasia.
Not the euthanasia of bodies. Those have been dying for decades. I mean the euthanasia of a conscience that has already died but refuses to admit it. There is a peculiar cruelty in keeping a corpse alive through habit. We breathe. We marry. We build houses. We open cafes. We argue over stock markets and university admissions. We post photographs of mountains that have watched generations disappear. The body continues. The soul has quietly left the room.
One of Kashmir’s Sufi poets, Dildar Saeb, wrote“Marn’e bronthui zind’e yus mood, tas marun zyon kya karai”—“The one who has already died before death itself, what meaning can birth or death still hold for him?”
I have been wondering whether people can also die before dying. Whether a nation can continue to walk, speak, earn, laugh and pray while its conscience has already been buried.
What happens when survival becomes more important than memory?
Survival is necessary. No people can be condemned for wanting to live. But survival slowly becomes something else. It becomes routine. Routine becomes comfort. Comfort becomes adaptation. One day, memory itself begins to feel like an inconvenience because remembering interrupts business.
The tragedy is not merely that oppression continues. The greater tragedy is when oppression no longer surprises anyone.
Can prolonged oppression produce moral numbness?
I think it can.
Pain is not infinite. The human mind cannot remain at the highest pitch of grief forever. Eventually it invents anaesthesia. What begins as a defence against unbearable suffering slowly becomes indifference. At first we avert our eyes because looking hurts. Then we stop looking because we have forgotten why we ever looked.
We begin explaining away what once horrified us.
We tell ourselves that this is simply how the world works.
We become fluent in the language of our own resignation.
People often say, “We are afraid. If we speak, they will kill us too.”
Fear is real. It deserves neither ridicule nor contempt. But fear alone cannot explain an entire society. Somewhere along the journey, silence stops being an emergency and becomes a habit. And habits rarely announce themselves. They arrive quietly, disguised as maturity, practicality, realism.
Is silence always fear?
Or does silence eventually become convenience?
At what point does a society stop resisting and begin adapting?
Perhaps it happens so gradually that nobody notices. A generation grows up learning how to navigate power instead of questioning it. Careers replace causes. Salaries replace slogans. The language of freedom is exchanged for the language of opportunity.
Capital arrives before revolution does.
The market teaches us that everything has a price, including memory.
We become experts at surviving systems that our grandparents dreamed of escaping.
And then comes the strangest contradiction.
We loudly debate whether alcohol should be banned because it is forbidden in Islam. We invoke morality with confidence. But where is that moral certainty when confronting injustice? If religion teaches that oppression is wrong, why is that principle so much quieter than debates over personal conduct? Why are some sins discussed endlessly while others disappear into polite silence?
Perhaps the question is not whether alcohol is forbidden.
Perhaps the question is why injustice has become ordinary.
Can prosperity coexist with historical amnesia?
Of course it can.
History is full of prosperous societies that built beautiful cities upon forgotten graves. Wealth has never guaranteed memory. Sometimes it purchases forgetfulness. A shopping mall can be constructed on land that once echoed with mourning. People will still admire the architecture.
Perhaps this is the final victory of power. Not when it defeats resistance but when resistance becomes embarrassing. When remembrance is treated as an obstacle to progress. When people begin repeating the vocabulary of those who dominate them because it is easier than carrying the weight of history.
The most frightening death is not physical death.
It is the death of outrage.
The day injustice ceases to disturb us, something essential has already been euthanised.
Maybe the real question is not whether Kashmir is alive or dead.
Maybe the question is this:
If a people can no longer distinguish survival from surrender, if memory has become negotiable, if conscience has learned to coexist comfortably with injustice, What exactly is still alive?
And if the conscience has already died, perhaps euthanasia is not a proposal.
Perhaps it is only the certificate acknowledging a death that happened long ago.

Back in high school I was dating this drummer. We’d known each other forever. Still do.
Then there was this girl who said she was a lesbian and in love with me. She looked like she’d stepped out of a different frequency than everyone else. Thick glasses, eyes swallowed behind them. Later someone told me she was partially blind. Maybe she was.
I told my boyfriend about her and he became fascinated. She knew him through me and I remember thinking, of course. They’re the same species. They both had that strange gravity, the kind that makes you feel like you’re standing outside a room with the door half open.
I told him not to text her.
He did anyway.
Then they just kept talking.
The lesbian wasn’t so lesbian anymore. The girl who’d supposedly loved me forgot me with astonishing efficiency and attached herself to him instead. He said she was just a fan. Funny word, fan.
She got him into Twenty One Pilots. I had handed him that band months before and he barely looked at it. The same songs, different mouth, suddenly worth hearing.
Now she goes to my gym.
Sometimes our eyes meet. Sometimes she laughs with her friend. Maybe it’s about me, maybe it isn’t. The mind is a cruel editor. It cuts every scene to make itself the protagonist.
The other day I asked her to spot me. She said no. Then she came back later and apologized.
Now we don’t even talk. We pass each other like two people who were never footnotes in each other’s lives. That’s what gets me.
Sometimes I wonder if she ever liked me at all. Or if “I’m a lesbian” was just a story she told herself because no boy had ever chosen her. Maybe it was easier to want women than to keep waiting for men to want her. I don’t know. Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe it’s completely wrong. Maybe people don’t lie to other people first. Maybe they lie to themselves and everyone else just gets caught in the fallout.

I stopped listening to hip hop because it made me question something I had always taken for granted: Are my desires really mine?
I’d put on a song and for a few minutes, I’d inherit a different consciousness. Suddenly I wanted the lights, the alcohol, the women, the endless night. Then the music would stop and so would the desire as though it had never belonged to me in the first place. It made me wonder if consciousness is less a fortress than a coastline, constantly reshaped by whatever washes over it.
Maybe Plato was onto something when he worried about music reaching the soul before reason gets a chance to speak. Or maybe it’s just priming, the mind rehearsing whatever you keep feeding it until it mistakes familiarity for desire.
Music bypasses argument entirely and not just corrupts. It doesn’t convince you rather it acquaints you. And familiarity has a peculiar way of disguising itself as authenticity.
As a Muslim, I realized I wasn’t struggling against temptation as much as I was borrowing it.
So I stopped listening because I finally understood that the mind rehearses whatever it repeatedly encounters and after enough rehearsals, it forgets the difference between a passing rhythm and a genuine desire.

Every day feels deterministic in hindsight and probabilistic in advance. When I look back at my life, everything appears inevitable. Every friendship, every mistake, every departure, every moment of joy seems connected by an invisible thread. The present turns the chaos of the past into a story and stories always make events appear as though they were destined to happen. But that is not how life feels while living it. Standing in the present is like standing before a branching tree of possibilities. Every choice carries uncertainty. Every conversation could become a lifelong bond or a forgotten memory. Every risk could end in success or failure. We move forward without knowing which path reality will select. We never possess complete information. We begin with assumptions, gather experiences, update our beliefs and continue onward. Every disappointment alters our expectations. Every act of kindness changes our model of the world. Every loss and every triumph become new data points from which we attempt to predict an unknowable future. The strange part is that certainty only arrives after the fact. Once an outcome occurs, the countless alternatives disappear from view. We forget the uncertainty that once surrounded the moment and convince ourselves that things could never have unfolded differently. Perhaps wisdom is remembering that they could have.
The future is not a solved equation waiting to be revealed. It is a probability distribution continually collapsing into reality, one moment at a time. And all any of us can do is keep updating our understanding with the incomplete data we are given.
We are, in the end, imperfect statisticians trying to make sense of an unfinished universe.

Coming to Reddit from K-Twitter is actually so fucking wholesome. Twitter is filled with miserable, pressed ass people who act like you’ve personally ruined their day for existing. You could breathe wrong and someone would write a 12 tweet thread about why you’re problematic. People there cannot take a joke. Everything is a discourse, everything is a moral emergency, everything needs a complaint. I’ve gotten so used to random reports and complaints over the dumbest shit that I’m lowkey hesitant to post here too. Like damn, what am I gonna get reported for this time? Existing? Having a sense of humor?
Maybe I’m traumatized by K-Twitter because every time I open that app it’s just people being angry, sanctimonious and weirdly obsessed with policing strangers. Reddit has its issues too but at least I don’t feel like I’m walking through a fucking minefield every time I want to say something.
Anyway, idk. Just wanted to get that out.

I’ve been watching every Muharram reel that pops up on my feed just to catch a glimpse of my Shia situationship and I’m starting to question myself.
I swear I’m not trying to be disrespectful but I find matam boys ridiculously attractive.
Maybe it’s because men standing up against injustice feels like a rare species these days. Half the internet is busy making cringe Instagram reels and then you see a bunch of guys dressed in black, beating their chests in remembrance of oppression, sacrifice and resistance. My brain just goes, “Yeah, that’s hot.” It’s probably the same reason I thought Che Guevara was attractive. Not because of looks alone but because conviction is attractive. People who believe in something bigger than themselves are attractive.
So now I’m stuck watching Muharram reels for religious content and accidentally developing a crush on every matam boy in a 50 mile radius. May Allah forgive me because my algorithm definitely won’t.

Did squats with these two guys today. They had to lower the weight after a woman finished her set. Then watched them fight for their life on 40kg leg press. What a waste of testosterone!
Come here lil man child. Hide under my hijab for I shall protect you. The world is too dangerous for u

Anything you can do, I can do stoned.

I don’t know when I developed a crush on him. He started flirting and I never stopped him. I flirted back even after he told me he didn’t feel anything for me. That annoyed me and I kept telling myself I’d never get involved with a guy like that but I could feel myself getting attached anyway. One night we went up to the terrace while his sister was downstairs. We were having a smoke and he asked if we could kiss. I hesitated at first but eventually I gave in. Honestly, he was terrible at it. I practically had to teach him. To his credit, he learned fast and before long the kissing got pretty intense.
After that, I assumed it would happen again. But it never did. He never gave any sign that he wanted to repeat it and he never really sought out another moment alone with me. Now I keep wondering if the whole thing was just about proving to himself that he could pull me. And once he did, the challenge was over and so was his interest.
I don’t think I regret doing anything more than this. I’m disgusted.