For anyone who’s been following the ongoing plot that is my life, 2025 has felt like a massive character arc. I’d like to think I’ve grown, mostly for the better. After losing myself somewhere in the whirlwinds of, well, a lot, I threw myself into multiple rounds of self-leveling, trying to dissect what parts of me may have fed into negative situations. And today, I want to talk about that.
To preface, there’s a reason I tend to operate this way. In my “heartbreak audit” dated January 13th, 2025 A.D., I wrote: “I rationalize my sentiments and analyze the shit out of myself until I can prove that none of it was delusion.” Honestly? That one line sums up my coping mechanism pretty neatly.
Situations, to me, are like ghosts. Imaginative creatures that haunt everything that used to be beautiful. Rationalizing is how I tell myself, See? Ghosts aren’t real. They’re just psychological fragments haunting you. Logic becomes my exorcism. It makes me feel less crazy.
Slight tangent, but, while I don’t believe in the physical existent of ghosts, I do believe in the psychological existents. They are unresolved feelings/ limerence for something that emotionally haunts us. So, in that sense, ghosts are real.
A few days ago, while spiraling (creatively) on this topic, something clicked: my compulsive-logician tendencies are deeply tied to my profession. I am, after all, an engineer. I love post-mortems with friends, analyzing what went wrong and how to prevent it next time. I theorize and rationalize because it makes my problems feel less scary.
But here lies the fundamental issue: feelings are inexplicable. People, myself included, can be deeply irrational. I spent the past eight months consuming therapy content like it was homework, all so I could rationalize my pain, to explain the inexplicable.
And therapyspeak… god, it labels everything. I somehow turned my past into a neatly itemized list and quantified my trauma like a goddamn product backlog. The product manager in me loves it. My “issues” turned into tidy little tickets waiting to be closed, bugs waiting to be fixed.
But the engineer in me? Yeah, she has no idea how to build the solutions for half of these so-called bugs. Here’s the list as it stands: undiagnosed ADHD, father issues, lack of social cues, compulsive logician tendencies, trust issues, and the fan-favorite: dismissive-avoidant attachment style.
Look at that. I’ve identified everything perfectly. Now what?
I think to myself, Damn, I really described myself as this mentally ill unhealed person who doesn’t deserve love. And some part of me believes that. But I also know it’s not that bad. I’m just cursed with enough self-awareness to turn my problems into balls and chains I insist on dragging around.
Meanwhile, men out there go undiagnosed, unhealed, and completely unbothered. I was trying to “fix myself” in a matter of months—when maybe healing is something that takes an entire life.
Maybe I should cut myself some slack. Maybe not every flaw is a bug to be patched. Maybe some of them are features.
And the wonderful thing about me is, I’m upfront about my issues. I communicate them. I’m not out here actively hurting people. I know the scars to my wounds, and I can identify them when they get triggered. Maybe that counts for something.
Someone once said, “Western therapy does not counsel the Eastern mind,” and recently that’s been resonating. (I’ve since done my research, it is from the Netflix Drama BEEF. Great show.) If you force yourself to identify problems you can’t fix overnight, all you do is make yourself feel shittier about not fixing them fast enough.
So naybe the work isn’t about fixing. Maybe it’s about living with. Or maybe, yes, I should seek professional help—real, personalized guidance instead of TikTok/ YouTube diagnoses. But that loops back: if these aren’t “problems” in the strict sense, is fixing even the right paradigm?
I don’t know. But I think I’m slowly getting there. I think I’m okay.