MARGINS: Drop 9—The Consequence of Returning to Yourself
On Shedding, Yearning, and the Strange Freedom of Being Fully Seen
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
— Audre Lorde
The Consequence of Returning to Yourself
There’s a moment—small enough to overlook, quiet enough to doubt—when the self you’ve been performing begins to loosen its grip. It doesn’t arrive as clarity. It arrives as discomfort. A thinning. A breath you didn’t mean to take. The faintest awareness that the shape you’ve been living in is no longer the shape you can survive in.
That moment is the axis of this Drop.
The Consequence of Returning to Yourself is not triumph. It’s the tremor that comes before the truth. It’s the realization that liberation isn’t a prize; it’s a price—and every writer here has paid it in a different currency. They know the body’s long apprenticeship to smallness. They know the emotional contortions required to stay agreeable, legible, unobtrusive. They know the hunger that settles beneath compliance, steady and patient as a pulse.
Some write from the quiet violence of being useful, where love was something earned through erasure. Some from the soft starvation of untouched skin, where the body forgot its own thresholds. Some from the ache of wanting a mind that answers back. Some from friendships that dissolved like fog, leaving no scene to grieve. Some from whiteness’s long shadow, where desire learned to twist itself into politeness. Some from the echo of childhood instruction—be easy, be small, be grateful—long after the child was gone.
What binds these pieces is not symmetry.
It’s refusal.
Each writer has stopped lying about what their life has cost them. They speak from the after: the space where the mask has cracked but the face underneath is still learning how to breathe. They write from bodies rediscovering sensation. From minds that no longer want to play dead. From identities reclaiming their original temperature, degree by degree. They write from a hunger that feels less like lack and more like recognition.
If something here strikes the deepest part of you, it’s because every piece touches the same unspoken question:
What breaks when you stop performing—and what finally begins?
On the other side of that break is a different kind of freedom. Not the cinematic kind. The lived kind. The kind that teaches you to sit with your own voice without flinching. The kind that reminds you your desires were never excessive. The kind that names the body as witness, not obstacle. The kind that lets the truth leave your mouth without asking whether you’ve earned the right to say it.
This Drop is not about transformation.
It’s about aftermath.
It’s about the room that appears when the world’s demands go quiet and your own begins to rise.
It’s about the slow, startling recognition that you are no longer willing to disappear.
Welcome to MARGINS: Drop 9.
Let’s begin.
Who Are You When You’re Not Pleasing Anyone?
There’s a certain kind of exhaustion that builds in the body when you’ve spent years making yourself easy to carry. It doesn’t show up suddenly. It gathers quietly—behind the eyes, along the jaw you clench without noticing, in the breath you cut in half so no one hears your disappointment. It’s the fatigue of a self trimmed down for survival. Lina names this with disarming clarity when she says people would leave conversations with her feeling understood, while she often left feeling erased.
That line is the door into her whole story.
She grew up in a home where love becomes conditional on your usefulness. Where you learn to track every emotional shift in the room, not because you’re gifted, but because you’re not safe unless you do. In high-empathy, low-safety environments, the nervous system adapts—it becomes vigilant, porous, attuned to danger in the smallest expression. A glance, a sigh, a shift in posture all become data points. The body becomes an interpreter, a buffer, a peacekeeper.
And people mistake the cost for kindness. They call you intuitive. Warm. Easy to talk to. They praise the very shape-shifting that empties you out. They don’t see the parts of you you’ve locked away—the needs you’ve swallowed, the boundaries you’ve softened, the pieces of selfhood you’ve bartered for harmony. How could they? You’ve made disappearing look effortless.
Lina writes from the center of that tension: the place where being good becomes a burden and being easy to love becomes a form of self-abandonment. Being easy to love often means being hard to access. Every yes that should’ve been a no. Every nod disguising discomfort. Every silence meant to keep the peace. The body remembers all of it.
And grief accumulates. The grief of being easy to love accumulates quietly. In the pauses you refuse to fill. In the stories you edit before someone can reject them. In the decisions you let other people make so you never have to risk being “too much.” It accumulates in the physical body—tight shoulders, shallow breath, a strange buzzing under the ribs. Not pain, exactly. More like the aftermath of having lived too long as someone else’s mirror.
What Lina understands, and names without flinching, is that fitting is not belonging. Compliance is not closeness. Peace is not the same as connection—not when you’ve made yourself small enough to be unthreatening. The mask works until it doesn’t. And when it slips, it reveals the truth: the self you constructed for survival has become the self that’s suffocating you.
Her turning point isn’t violent. It’s gentle, almost tremulous—the kind of shift that happens in the body before the mind agrees. She doesn’t leap into hardness; she tries it on and realizes that armor is just another performance. Being cold doesn’t heal what warmth distorted. Distance doesn’t undo self-betrayal. With heartbreaking honesty, she admits that sealing yourself off is still a version of disappearing.
So she chooses something riskier: honesty.
Not the dramatic kind. The small kind. The kind that requires presence instead of performance. She lets silence stretch before she fills it. She says “I don’t know” when she doesn’t. She lets herself need things. She allows disagreement. She stops apologizing for her emotional volume. She accepts that the right people will not require her disappearance as proof of her worth.
And then she names the line that sits at the center of every fawn survivor’s awakening: You were never meant to be a mirror for someone else’s need for calm.
That sentence is her rupture. Her reclamation. Her return.
Because at its core, Lina’s essay is not about trauma—it’s about aftermath. About the slow, startling freedom that emerges when you stop performing safety and begin practicing selfhood. It’s about letting the body unlearn its old instructions. It’s about trusting that not everyone will punish your fullness. It’s about stepping back into your own life, even when your voice shakes.
Masks are heavy.
And hers has finally become too heavy to hold.
By the end of her piece, you can feel the self she once abandoned begin to surface—tentative, trembling, but present. You feel her choosing a life that does not require contortion. You feel the consequence of returning to yourself: the grief, the possibility, the relief.
Lina doesn’t offer closure. She offers permission—
to stop being convenient,
to stop performing calm,
to stop making yourself easy to love
and start making yourself true.
The Forgotten Ritual That Quietly Saves Your Sanity
by Grey Huffington (read here)
There are seasons when everything inside you begins to slip—quietly, almost politely—before you’ve found the language to name what’s shifting. The days run together. Your mood frays at the edges. You move through the world aware of some internal heaviness you keep trying to dress around instead of confront. Grey writes from inside that season, a place where the emotional weather is unpredictable, and the only thing that feels remotely within reach is the part of you you can still touch: your body, your presentation, the daily rituals that anchor you when the ground goes soft.
Her story begins in a coffee shop—a passing exchange between two Black women who recognize each other without explanation. It’s a recognition born of survival, a soft sisterhood forged in spaces where there are too few mirrors that reflect you back whole. The manager sees her walk in, dressed intentionally, and lets the affirmation spill from her smile. Grey laughs it off, but the truth is already sitting between them: the ritual worked. She dressed herself into a steadier version of her own spirit.
She writes, “I feel better when I am pleasantly dressed.” Not for spectacle. Not for the male gaze. Not for compliments or attention. She is talking about the feeling of coherence that comes when your outer world aligns, even briefly, with the version of yourself you’re trying to safeguard on the inside. She is talking about the subtle emotional lift that happens when you refuse to let your body collapse in the same direction as your nerves.
When she confesses, “On the days I dress like shit, I feel every bit of it,” she is naming the quiet truth that many women move through but rarely articulate: there is a direct line between how we assemble ourselves and how we endure our lives. Not because clothes fix anything, but because intention does. Because ritual creates a boundary where exhaustion once lived unchecked. Because the act of dressing yourself with care becomes its own small ceremony—one that whispers stability back into a body that has been quietly slipping toward chaos.
Grey widens her lens from that moment into a meditation on ritual as feminine infrastructure—the invisible architecture that keeps women from dissolving into the demands of other people’s needs. She lists the rituals of feminine life not as indulgences, but as quiet claims to personhood: the nails done on the second Tuesday, the bubbles added to the bath, the handbag rotated, the latte by seven. These acts are not frivolous. They are the grammar of self-respect. They remind you that the body is not simply a site of labor. It is a site of return.
This distinction—ritual versus routine—is the deepest wisdom in her essay. Routine keeps you functional. Ritual keeps you alive. Routine serves others. Ritual calls you back home. Routine makes you efficient. Ritual makes you real. In a culture obsessed with optimization, Grey returns the reader to the older truth: care is not the same as improvement, and the feminine has always survived through practices that appear small but hold entire emotional worlds together.
As she moves through what this ritual restored in her, she writes, “Your visibility increases exponentially.” And the line hits because visibility here is not aesthetic—it is existential. When you treat yourself like someone worth tending to, the world responds accordingly. People look up. Doors open. Opportunities expand. Not because the outfit is expensive, but because coherence is magnetic. Because someone who has chosen themselves radiates a steadiness that others instinctively trust.
By the end, when Grey urges, Get dressed, it no longer reads as advice. It reads like a permission slip. It reads like someone offering you a way back into your life. It reads like a woman who has learned—through seasons of quiet unraveling—that the smallest rituals often save us before the larger healing arrives.
This is not an essay about fashion.
It is an essay about return.
About the smallest gesture that keeps you from disappearing into your own life.
About the ritual that reminds you—gently, insistently—not today.
The Constant Struggle to Be Articulate.
There is a particular ache that settles in the throat when your mind moves faster than your language can follow. A tightening. A brief static of panic. The sensation of reaching for a sentence just as it dissolves between thought and breath. Maeve writes from inside that tension—not as someone who lacks ideas, but as someone who has lived too long with the fear of misrepresenting herself.
She begins with a confession that feels almost whispered: “My tongue is in a constant state of chasing.” Her thoughts vibrate with urgency, eager to make a home in another mind, but the moment she tries to speak them, they splinter. It is not ineloquence she fears; it is the possibility of betraying her own intelligence in real time. A fear many people outgrow. She never did.
What she’s describing without naming outright is the long shadow of dismissal. Years of being told she asked too many questions. Years of subtle corrections that taught her curiosity was inconvenient. Years of being encouraged toward silence while others took up all the air in the room. That kind of conditioning doesn’t just shape behavior—it rewires the nervous system. Speech becomes risk. Expression becomes exposure. Silence becomes sanctuary.
She admits that silence grew comfortable—a place where she understood herself even if no one else did. But comfort can become a cage. Her quiet wasn’t ease; it was armor. Her mind stayed alive, but her voice thinned. She learned to think boldly in private and speak cautiously in public, until the two versions of herself no longer resembled each other.
And then she asks a question both innocent and devastating: “What is it that makes someone positively articulate?” Confidence? Education? Arrogance? Manipulation? It’s the kind of question someone asks only after being made to doubt their own intelligence for years. She circles the concept slowly, trying to understand not only how to claim articulation, but why she ever believed it belonged to someone else.
The heart of her essay appears in a single vulnerable line: “I want to be heard. Is that arrogant?” There is so much history inside that sentence. Wanting to be understood is not arrogance—it is the most human desire of all. But to Maeve, who was conditioned to treat her voice as a burden, wanting to be heard feels like a transgression.
She moves into the confession that she relies on Google to elevate her vocabulary—“I could argue the reliance feels robotic, unnatural, pre-scripted.” But the shame she feels is not about the search bar. It is about learning her voice alone. It is about having to build a vocabulary in solitude because the world around her never believed her mind needed tending. The tools are not the problem; the loneliness is.
Her essay is a portrait of the long aftermath of underestimation. It is about the internal disorientation of trying to speak in a world that preferred her quiet. It’s about what happens when the people who should have nurtured her intellect instead taught her to shrink it. But beneath all her self-doubt is a resistance that won’t extinguish. “One day I hope to articulate ‘no’ with no room for reservations.”
One day.
One day.
One day.
The repetition reads like a heartbeat.
The gift of her writing is not resolution—it is recognition. She has not conquered the struggle; she has made it visible. She has turned her hesitation into a study of how a voice breaks, and how it begins to relearn itself. She does not ask the reader to fix her. She asks them to consider what articulation even means in a world that diminishes the voices it fears most.
And then she ends with an invitation—open, unguarded, quietly brave.
It is her clearest articulation yet:
she is ready to know her own mind in public.
The Body as Prayer: Healing Through Touch, Pleasure & Intimacy
by Otissia Lynette (read here)
There are aches the mind can explain, and aches the mind can only circle. But the ache Otissia names lives deeper than language. It settles under the ribs, behind the sternum, in the quiet stretch of skin that remembers being held long after the memory fades. It is the ache of the touch-starved, the closeness-deprived, the ones who learned to survive without softness and now struggle to remember what softness feels like.
She begins with a truth almost too simple to admit: “There’s a kind of ache that hides under achievement, independence, and even spiritual growth.” The body wants closeness even when the mind performs competence. The body hungers even when the life you’ve built suggests you shouldn’t. And the longer you ignore that hunger, the louder it becomes—sometimes as loneliness, sometimes as anxiety, sometimes as a numbness so subtle you mistake it for peace.
This is the terrain Otissia walks with her reader: the quiet devastation of a body that has forgotten how to be approached.
She names the contradiction with startling gentleness. We live in a world saturated with access—scrolling for connection, liking for proximity—yet when real intimacy arrives, we flinch. We brace. We withdraw. Not because we don’t want it, but because our bodies learned long ago that closeness is unpredictable terrain. Touch was once tied to danger, judgment, obligation, or exploitation. So now, even the safe hands feel suspicious.
Her insight cuts deeper when she writes, “The body was never meant to be a battleground. It was meant to be a garden.” And something in the reader loosens. Because she is not romanticizing touch; she is remembering it. She is reminding us that before we intellectualized our pain, before we mastered survival, before we learned to armor ourselves for adulthood, someone’s steady warmth taught us what safety felt like. The first language any of us ever spoke was physical: heartbeat, breath, skin.
To be touch-starved, then, is not superficial—it is spiritual.
Otissia moves through this landscape with a tenderness that never softens into sentimentality. She speaks of the friend who hasn’t been hugged in months, the woman who carries her entire life alone, the survivor whose body tenses at the slightest gesture of care. She refuses to flatten their responses into pathology. She sees them for what they are: bodies negotiating the aftermath of breached trust.
The heart of her essay emerges in a sentence that feels like a diagnosis and a benediction at once:
“There’s a grief that lives in the fingertips.”
It isn’t dramatic. It is honest. Touch deprivation is not a metaphor—it is cortisol, shallow breathing, sleepless nights, hypervigilance masquerading as strength. It is the nervous system guarding the doors long after the intruder is gone.
What Otissia offers is not advice. It is a slow reintroduction. A way of teaching the body to recognize itself again. She writes of placing a hand on your chest long enough to feel the warmth gather, of tracing your skin with intention instead of critique, of letting a hug last one breath longer than you normally allow. Not as performance. Not as a plea. But as proof: I am still here. I am still inhabit-able.
When she speaks of pleasure, it is never decorative. It is reclamation. She ties Black women’s desire to a lineage of misinterpretation—centuries of being spoken about, surveilled, fetishized, controlled. Pleasure for Black women, Otissia suggests, is not indulgence; it is defiance. To choose softness is to refuse the script of invulnerability. To choose sensuality is to return to a self the world tried to fragment. To choose joy is to contradict every system built on your depletion.
But her most radical insight appears when she shifts from touch to intimacy. “Real intimacy is not the rush—it’s the return.” After trauma, the body doesn’t crave fireworks; it craves consistency. Someone who asks how you are and can hold the truth you give them. Someone whose presence doesn’t require performance. Someone who doesn’t punish your silence or mistake your slowness for disinterest. Someone who gives your body time to unclench.
And then she speaks directly to the reader—the one who is still learning to stay:
Healing doesn’t demand that you open your body to someone new. It asks that you open your body to yourself. That you recognize your flinch not as failure, but as memory. That you understand your numbness not as detachment, but as a nervous system overworked into stillness. That you trust yourself to move one breath at a time, one sensation at a time, one yes at a time.
Her essay ends not with certainty, but with blessing. A reminder that the body remembers how to bloom, even after long winters of withholding. A reminder that your desire is not dangerous. A reminder that touch is not a luxury. A reminder that intimacy, when it’s real, doesn’t ask you to disappear—it asks you to arrive.
Otissia’s writing is not about eroticism.
It’s about permission.
It’s about returning to the body as if it were a sanctuary instead of a site of survival.
It’s about learning that the hunger beneath the skin is not shameful—it is human.
I’ve Seen Some of the Best Minds of My Generation Taken Down By a White Partner
Desire is never neutral.
And yet we talk about it as though it floats above history—untouched, unshaped, unbothered by the world that formed us. Savior refuses that delusion. His essay begins with a question that sounds casual until you recognize the depth beneath it: Why do we like who we like? Not rhetorically. Not academically. But with the sincerity of someone who has watched brilliant Black people—scholars, artists, activists, thinkers—gravitate toward whiteness with a hunger that feels older than language.
His opening confession is disarming in its simplicity: he has spent years studying his own attractions, not to shame them, but to understand the quiet machinery beneath them. And what he reveals is both intimate and indicting: desire is not a free agent. It’s a reaction to memory, to survival, to longing, to wounds we inherited before we ever had the language to name them.
Savior speaks of growing up in predominantly white environments and feeling a different kind of ache when he developed crushes on white boys—an ache he describes as masochistic, competitive, pleading. Those words matter. They reveal a desire shaped less by the individual and more by what the individual represented. He writes, “What I wanted from them wasn’t tied to who they were as individuals but to what they represented—something unattainable to me, yet tantalizingly close.”
This line alone takes the conversation out of the shallow realm of “preferences” and into the deeper territory of psychological inheritance. Because for some Black people—especially queer Black people—whiteness was not just proximity; it was promise. A promise of safety. A promise of visibility. A promise of being seen as fully human.
And that is where Savior begins to puncture the narrative.
He doesn’t shame Black people who date white partners. He does something harder: he interrogates the internal architecture of desire without indicting the people who hold it.
He describes the moment two years ago when something inside him snapped after being rejected by a white boy he longed for. The rejection itself wasn’t new. The ache wasn’t new. But the clarity was. He remembers asking himself, “What did I want whiteness to prove to me?” The answer arrives like a wound opening: that he was beautiful, intelligent, safe, worth wanting.
Not because the boy was special.
But because whiteness had always been framed as the ultimate validator.
What makes Savior’s essay brilliant is that he doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t settle for the easy conclusion—internalized racism—even though he acknowledges it exists. Instead, he expands the frame. Because he knows many Black people who love their Blackness deeply and still love white partners. He is not interested in flattening the phenomenon. He wants to understand the emotional economies within it.
The section where he quotes his friend J becomes the philosophical hinge of the entire piece. J writes that some Black thinkers, artists, and activists may find themselves attracted to white partners because those partners do not require the same revolutionary labor. Because loving someone as marginalized as you means protecting them from a world that harms you both, and some Black people are simply exhausted. Savior doesn’t romanticize this. He doesn’t excuse it. He recognizes it as a trauma calculus: love where you don’t have to fight as hard to survive.
He touches a nerve when he writes: “I had done so much work to decenter whiteness, and yet that same maddening feeling came up when I found myself attracted to a white person.” This is the internal contradiction so many carry and so few articulate. Healing is not linear. Desire doesn’t obey politics. Wanting someone doesn’t erase centuries of meaning attached to the wanting.
The essay sharpens when he shifts the question inward: “What couldn’t I prove to Blackness?” This turn is devastating because it reveals the other half of the wound. Savior speaks of growing up Black and queer in an environment where queerness was unacceptable at home but embraced among white peers. The anxiety he names—that growing up around whiteness had severed something from his Blackness—is a fear many never speak aloud.
When he writes, “I had a consistent, underlying anxiety that growing up around so many white people ruined me,” he is naming the private shame of a generation of Black kids who were “the only one” in their schools, their friend groups, their neighborhoods. Kids whose desire was shaped by isolation long before it was shaped by choice.
The brilliance of his essay lies in his refusal to grant whiteness the power of final definition. He admits attraction. He admits conditioning. He admits contradiction. But he does not surrender to any of it. He scrutinizes it. He dissects it. He contextualizes it. Then he returns it to scale.
Because at the end, Savior comes to a truth that resists both moralizing and denial: desire has roots. And any root that grows inside a racialized world will carry the sediment of that world—its wounds, its myths, its violences, its longings.
He doesn’t argue that Black people shouldn’t date white partners.
He argues that they should understand why certain attractions burn differently.
He argues for self-awareness, not self-condemnation.
He argues that unexamined desire is not freedom—it’s inheritance.
And in the closing paragraphs, when he refuses both the simplicity of the colorblind romantic and the sanctimony of the purity police, he writes the clearest line in the essay:
“If we insist on repeating this conversation twice every year, then we must stop sounding like Dr. Umar.”
With that, the piece lands exactly where it needs to:
firm, honest, unsentimental, deeply human.
Shed Your Skin, Come Home
Some lives don’t rupture in a blaze—they split quietly, the way a seam gives before the fabric tears. Gaby writes from that seam. From the decade she spent inside a system that mistook discipline for salvation, from the classroom where she learned how much a young person’s shoulders can hold before they slope into resignation. She writes from the slow realization that the care she carried like armor could not stop the machine from grinding her down to its own shape.
The piece opens in the aftermath: “A year ago I walked out of a job that had become a costume I couldn’t bear to wear.” That sentence alone tells you everything—the grief embedded in survival, the exhaustion masquerading as loyalty, the way a calling can calcify into a cage. For ten years she taught the children the system had already decided were failures. Kids retaking the same exams as if repetition could replace recognition. Kids she understood because she had once been asked to contort herself the same way.
What gives this essay its marrow is the tenderness in her witnessing: “They weren’t broken; they were tired of being bent into shapes that didn’t belong to them.” She sees them with the clarity of someone who never lost the memory of her own bending. And still, she loved them fiercely. She made her classroom a soft landing. She held chaos with the gentleness the world refused them. But care has its limits when the institution refuses to change, and that is the heartbreak she names without flinching: “Love alone couldn’t alter the machine.”
The leap she takes is not romantic. It is not clean. It is not a pretty arc. “I didn’t grow wings before I jumped. I grew them on the way down.” That is the truest sentence in the entire piece—rebirth not as myth but as improvisation, stitched midair. She did not leave because she stopped caring. She left because she finally cared enough to stop shrinking inside her own life.
What follows is the slow, ongoing rehousing of her spirit: the kitchen table turned desk, the nontraditional writing wins that “feel like standing in sunlight that used to be behind glass,” the forty-five-year-old woman becoming a PhD student after years of believing academic spaces were for other people. She names the long shadow of trauma, the undiagnosed autism and ADHD that shaped her earlier attempts at schooling, the old voice whispering you can’t—and the new voice, softer but steadier, saying try anyway.
This is what the shedding really looks like: not a triumphant montage but the daily discipline of refusing to contort. Emails typed with shaking hands. Doubt that arrives uninvited every morning. A future that won’t send a calendar invite. But also this: the room getting bigger the moment she chose alignment over permission. Her life turning toward itself. A sense of possibility returning like breath after panic.
The lesson she leaves us with is unadorned and devastatingly honest:
“Security without self-respect is a small prison with a comfortable mattress.”
“Fear isn’t a stop sign; it’s an indicator your life is moving again.”
“I didn’t leave because I stopped caring. I left because I finally cared enough.”
By the end, she is not pretending she is fearless. She is simply afraid in the right direction.
And that, in a world that teaches women to shrink until their lives no longer resemble them, is the bravest kind of self-return.
The Quiet Truths of Nihilism
Some essays don’t arrive to comfort you. They arrive to stand beside you at the edge of the dark and name, without trembling, the shape of the void. Lily writes from that terrain—where philosophy stops being theory and becomes survival, where meaninglessness isn’t an abstraction but a climate the spirit has to weather.
She begins at origin: “Out of nothing, somehow, everything emerged.” The line reads like a creation myth stripped of illusion. No divine choreography, no cosmic choreography—just awe. From there she threads the human confrontation with nothingness across centuries: the Greeks, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Buddhism, modern science. But the accomplishment is not the breadth—it’s the clarity. She doesn’t write to posture. She writes to understand.
Her strength is synthesis. She moves from the indifferent tragedies of ancient drama to Nietzsche’s insistence that nihilism is the spiritual sickness of a world that “killed God,” to Kierkegaard’s claim that despair is the doorway to faith, to Camus’s demand that we embrace the absurd without surrendering to it. At every point, she asks the same quiet question: if nothing is guaranteed, how do we still choose to live?
The spine of the essay lies in the phrases that deserve to be underlined:
“The abyss… is not a prison, it is a mirror.”
“The greatest hazard of all—losing one’s self—can occur very quietly.”
“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
“The desert grows… and woe to him who hides the desert within.”
“Perhaps meaning is not found at the end of history, but recreated endlessly within it.”
What Lily understands—what gives this piece its staying power—is that nihilism is not a problem to solve. It’s a threshold. A place you pass through when the stories that once explained your life dissolve in your hands. She doesn’t rush the reader toward hope, but she leads them toward something sturdier than optimism: responsibility. The responsibility to create meaning when none is given. The responsibility to revolt gently against the void by insisting on aliveness.
She leans into Camus’s Sisyphus—not as a figure of punishment, but as a symbol of defiant joy. She recognizes Kierkegaard’s leap as an act of courage, even if one refuses to jump. She sees in Buddhism the possibility that nothingness is not erasure but spaciousness. She acknowledges that science disenchanted the world but argues that disenchantment itself can be a form of clarity.
And then, almost casually, she lands the truth that ties the essay to every writer in this Drop:
Meaning is not discovered. It is made.
That is the quiet revolution of her piece.
Not instruction. Not comfort.
Permission.
By the end, she offers no promise—only possibility. That the void may not be a verdict but an opening. That dancing at the edge of nothingness might be its own kind of faith. That existence is not justified by purpose but rendered beautiful by attention.
What lingers after reading is not despair, but a strange steadiness.
A sense that maybe the point is not to escape the dark, but to walk with it until you can hear your own heartbeat again.
Some essays illuminate.
This one illuminates by refusing to lie.
You’re Bored Because You’re Boring (And That’s Fixable)
Some truths don’t arrive gently—they arrive with a raised eyebrow and a hand on your shoulder, telling you what you already know but were too polite to admit. Myleik writes from that exact register. Her voice is clear, unblinking, slightly amused by our excuses, and deeply invested in our expansion. She’s not here to soothe stagnation; she’s here to name it.
The thesis arrives early and lands with the weight of an intervention: you are not bored—you’ve stopped evolving. You’ve optimized your life into flatness. You’ve built routines so rigid nothing living can survive inside them. You’ve mistaken comfort for identity and fear for preference. And, maybe without meaning to, you’ve become unseasoned—knowledgeable, yes, but untextured. A person who consumes endlessly but experiences very little.
She lists the culprits with surgical precision: the autopilot days, the echo chambers masquerading as community, the childhood prohibitions that taught you curiosity was dangerous, the preferences you set twenty years ago and never revisited. She names how “people like us don’t do things like that” becomes a generational spell that seals off entire regions of your life before you even get to enter them.
But the genius of this piece is the pivot. She doesn’t shame the reader; she invites them back to aliveness. She insists that becoming interesting is not a rebrand—it’s a reawakening. Not a performance, but a widening.
The heart of her essay sits inside the deceptively simple lines:
“There’s a life strategy I want you to keep close: become more interesting.”
“You cannot be compelling if you are not curious.”
“Most people aren’t boring on purpose; it happens slowly over time.”
Myleik understands the emotional mechanics of stagnation—the way fear gets folded into habit, the way routine calcifies into identity, the way adulthood convinces us that risk is irresponsible. Her antidotes are as grounded as they are transformative: go down a rabbit hole, take a class you think you’ll fail, talk to strangers, disrupt your inputs, follow obsessions, rediscover childhood fascinations, choose depth over volume.
She knows that compelling people are not born—they are made through attention. Through saying yes to experiences that stretch the imagination. Through choosing curiosity even when confidence is shaky. Through allowing life to impress itself upon you in ways that algorithms never could.
What makes this piece essential in the arc of Drop 9 is the way it reframes desire—not the erotic or philosophical desire of the earlier essays, but the desire to live a life that feels worth inhabiting. Myleik argues, almost implicitly, that boredom is a spiritual symptom. A sign that you’ve stopped learning yourself. And the only cure is to let the world touch you again.
That’s why her closing movement lands so hard:
“If you feel flat or uninspired, the next step may not be to push harder. It’s probably time to get more interesting.”
It’s both a challenge and a mercy.
A call to agency without the violence of self-blame.
A reminder that curiosity is a way back to yourself.
Where other essays in this Drop confront longing, shedding, rupture, or meaninglessness, Myleik confronts possibility—the overlooked muscle. She asks what your life could feel like if you stopped rehearsing it and started participating again.
This piece doesn’t just wake the reader up—it tells them where the door is.
500 Unread Messages and Counting.
Some endings don’t announce themselves. They arrive the way seasons change—incrementally, almost imperceptibly—until one day you look up and realize you’ve crossed into a different climate without noticing the moment of transition. Feifei writes from inside that drift, mapping the slow dissolution of a friend group that once felt like an unshakeable ecosystem.
The power of her essay lies in its refusal to villainize anyone. She’s not narrating betrayal; she’s narrating entropy. The heat death of intimacy. The way a group collapses not from conflict but from fatigue—emotional, logistical, spiritual. She opens with the haunting image of a group chat she hasn’t checked in four months, “like I’m driving by the house I grew up in after someone else bought it.” That’s the entire ache right there: a place you once belonged to that no longer remembers your name.
Her lines cut because they arrive quietly:
“We didn’t end. We faded.”
“We loved the idea of the group more than we loved being in it.”
“We were still performing our roles from five years ago, but none of us were those people anymore.”
This essay is an autopsy of friendship—not the dramatic kind, but the kind that dies from neglect and unspoken exhaustion. She names the silence that used to be warm but turned sterile, the jokes that once carried chemistry but now feel like costumes. She captures the moment every adult eventually faces: the recognition that shared history cannot compensate for present incompatibility.
What makes her writing so quietly devastating is the nuance. She doesn’t accuse. She observes. She recognizes how group chats become graveyards of nostalgia, how “we should catch up soon” becomes a ritual of avoidance rather than connection, how wanting the memory of a friendship becomes easier than wanting the friendship itself.
And then comes the sentence that crystallizes the entire essay:
“We want to want to get together. But wanting to want something isn’t the same as wanting it.”
That’s not just insight—that’s diagnosis.
Feifei understands how friendships fracture under the weight of adulthood: relationships, jobs, relocations, growing inward or outward at different speeds. She names what so few dare to admit: sometimes the people who once knew you best become strangers who speak the same language but no longer share the same world.
The essay’s emotional pivot arrives in the final scene—when she unexpectedly runs into one of them. A hug. A familiar cadence. A brief exchange. And then the truth, delivered with stunning restraint:
“When I walked away, I felt relieved.”
Relief—not nostalgia, not longing—relief.
This is the adult grief no one teaches you how to hold: the realization that closure can be a soft exhale, not a reunion.
What stays with the reader is not bitterness but clarity. Feifei understands that friend groups don’t always end with rupture; sometimes they dissolve because the version of ourselves they belonged to no longer exists. She refuses to shame the past or deny the tenderness it once held. But she also refuses to pretend it still fits.
This is the quiet courage of her essay: she lets the past be the past without embalming it or resurrecting it. She tells the truth without theatrics. She grieves without dramatizing. She honors without clinging.
It’s not a eulogy.
It’s an unburdening.
A quiet acceptance that the people who were right for you once may not be the people who can walk with you now.
And sometimes the most loving thing you can do is let the group chat stay muted.
I want you to fuck my mind
by Alina Is Typing 💬 (read here)
Some confessions announce themselves with a smirk, but underneath the bravado is a very old ache: the desire to be known past the surface, past the roles inherited, past the script handed to you before you ever learned your own name. Alina writes from that ache—not the ache of romance, but the ache of intellect, curiosity, and selfhood pressing against its inherited limits.
At first glance the title shocks. But that’s the point. She isn’t talking about sex. She’s talking about mental intimacy—the kind that rearranges your inner architecture, the kind that invites you to become someone larger than the version of yourself the world taught you to settle for. Her desire is not for stimulation in the casual sense, but for dialogue as oxygen, conversation as expansion, thought as intimacy.
The essay’s emotional engine is in her origin story: a shy, anxious daughter with a twin who spoke for her, raised in environments where curiosity was not merely discouraged—it was inconceivable. The paths laid out for her were narrow: men who sought money, women who sought to be claimed. A life pre-scripted. A future predetermined. And yet, she was already drifting in another direction—the child who watched more than she spoke, gathering data on rebellion, on women who reached for more and were punished for it, on those who tried to escape and never fully could.
And then there’s the pivot—her father, her stepmom, the Sunday nights around the dinner table. The place where she first learned that conversation could be a doorway instead of a cage. The place where she discovered the sacredness of people who aren’t ashamed to think out loud. Be with those you can talk to for hours, her stepmom advised—and the line becomes a thesis for her entire adulthood.
What gives her essay its real force is the way she threads that advice into her present longing: she wants conversations that stretch her, interrogate her, reveal her. Debates where disagreement is not danger but discovery. Exchanges where difference is not rupture but invitation. She wants the kind of mind-fucking that’s about revelation, not dominance; intimacy, not performance.
The essay widens as she recounts the trauma that forced her to grow up faster than she should have, and the moment her father—gentle, clear, unpanicked—told her the truth she still carries: The only thing you can’t take back in life is time. That line becomes her compass. It is the sentence responsible for the life she now curates with intention: friendships that can hold complexity, lovers who can hold depth, spaces where curiosity is not a burden but a shared language.
Her adulthood, as she describes it, is shaped by a single principle: alignment. She is no longer interested in mindless company or inherited scripts. She wants conversations that challenge the theories we build around ourselves. She wants to be surprised by another person’s thinking. She wants to risk being changed by what she hears. She wants her life to be shaped by people who want to be awake.
The essay’s most disarming truth arrives quietly:
I always yearned for more.
Not more noise. More aliveness. More imagination. More interiority. More connection that feels like permission instead of punishment.
This is why her closing movement hits so cleanly. She names not just a yearning, but a commitment—to living a life that honors her mind, her curiosity, her queerness, her emotional range. To defining herself in ways that create room for others to join her. To crafting relationships where conversation is not filler but fuel.
What lingers is not the provocation of the title, but the clarity of the desire beneath it:
To be understood.
To be expanded.
To be met in the places where language becomes intimacy.
To be known at the depth she has always known herself.
This essay is not about sex.
It’s about intelligence as touch.
Curiosity as foreplay.
Conversation as a form of devotion.
And in a world that often rewards silence or surfaces, that hunger is radical.
What Found Me
Somewhere in the middle of this Drop, I felt something shift. Not a revelation, not a flash—something quieter. The sense that every story I’d just traveled through was tugging at the same thread, loosening the same knot. It wasn’t about desire or fear or meaning or rupture, though each piece held those in its own way. It was about the moment a person finally stops lying to themselves about the life they’re meant to live.
What found me here was not spectacle—it was precision. A body recognizing its own hunger. A mind refusing to shrink for anyone’s comfort. A spirit stepping out of a role it never agreed to play. Someone remembering a ritual that kept them alive when the world went dim. Someone returning home and realizing home had become a museum of an earlier self. Someone shedding a skin made of obligation, or silence, or loyalty that outlived its tenderness. Someone staring into meaninglessness long enough to realize it wasn’t a void but a mirror. Someone admitting that boredom is a symptom of having stopped learning themselves. Someone grieving a friendship that didn’t break so much as dissolve. Someone whispering a desire so honest it rearranged the air around it.
And beneath each of those moments was the same truth: the lives we build when no one is watching are often the most faithful versions of us.
As I moved through every piece, I kept returning to the way their bodies spoke before their mouths did—the held breath, the tight shoulders, the trembling before the leap, the subtle ache of pretending to be unchanged in rooms that no longer fit. I kept noticing how many of them had spent years apologizing for wanting more, only to realize that wanting more was the earliest sign of aliveness.
The stories in this Drop didn’t ask for permission to grow; they simply grew. They cracked themselves open. They told the truth the way people do when they’re finally tired of negotiating with their own diminishment. They didn’t wait for absolution. They didn’t wait for applause. They didn’t wait for certainty. They just stepped out of the old shape and into a version of life that felt like breath returning.
What found me in all of it was a kind of mercy—a recognition that change is rarely cinematic. It’s often a series of small, honest decisions. A morning you wake up and can’t go back. A conversation that opens a door. A silence that tells the truth. A realization that safety isn’t the same as belonging. A hunger that refuses to be reasoned with. A grief that clarifies instead of destroying.
And underneath every story was this whisper, steady and unignorable:
You are allowed to become someone your past self never imagined.
That’s the arc I walked.
That’s the current running under every confession, every ache, every awakening in this Drop.
Not reinvention.
Not rebellion.
Return.
A return to the self that has been waiting at the threshold all along, patient but unwilling to be forgotten. A self that no longer asks for permission to exist. A self that trusts its own weather. A self that refuses to shrink just because shrinking is familiar.
What found me in these essays was not courage.
It was inheritance.
The inheritance of every person who ever chose truth over performance, alignment over applause, becoming over belonging.
And maybe that’s the quiet promise of this entire Drop:
When you turn toward the life that calls your name, the world doesn’t get smaller.
You do.
In the best, most holy way—
to fit back into yourself.
Let that be enough—for now.
If these pieces widened you, tell me who is widening you further. Send the writers turning on lights you didn’t know were wired. I want to be changed by what is changing you.
MARGINS highlights voices shaping the contemporary canon—writers, artists, and thinkers who expand what language can hold.
This feature is part of MARGINS, an ongoing series dedicated to literary craft, witness, and the politics of imagination.
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It is a pleasure to learn from you. Thank you for introducing me to some amazing writers. I am grateful to all.
I say this from a very humble place, thank you for shining a light on writers who are through words evolving, transcending and simply becoming.
I write in the quiet moments, in the dark when fear constantly says hello, but my entire thesis here is 'I didn’t leave because I stopped caring. I left because I finally cared enough'.
Thank you for writing something that shows many that you care enough to really digest and not just read the words. I can tell you let it sit within you.