Photo by Zakir Rushanly | Courtesy of Pexels.com She started noticing the little changes in her skin. Saturday morning, she hit me up saying she wanted to loop me in on the progress. “Do you know that when you have it, your skin becomes dry?” Confused, I asked her what it . “You know, the one I have,” she said. It was only a few months ago when she messaged me after a long time without contact. She said at first, it was just fatigue. Then the tests, the waiting, the sterile

Photo Courtesy of Ron Lach | pexels.com I was at the office when I got a call that he was having another mental breakdown. I rushed to the bathroom to find some privacy. He had been spitting words for hours. Kill, pray, church. Fragments strung together by a mind unraveling. I watched him through a video call he did not know I had joined. His flight of thoughts was like my memory of him—disjointed, desperate. I thought about his place in my life (a place I was forced to give

After weeks of seeing this constantly in my feed, I started to feel bothered. The phrase “no one will save you” has become a kind of modern mantra, circulated through self-help spaces, productivity culture, and even therapeutic discourse. At its surface, it appears empowering. Like a call to agency, a refusal of passivity, a rejection of dependence on unreliable others. Yet beneath its clean, motivational framing lies a more complicated ideological weight that I believe deser