The Heart That Could Not Fill

On wanting love so deeply it became its own kind of weight — what it made of me, what it cost me, and what was left after it went quiet.

The Wanting

I had felt love so deeply that it did not stay in my chest. It moved through the whole body — occupied it the way water occupies the shape of whatever holds it. Every cell knew the shape of the longing.

I wanted the touch. I wanted the breath on my face — that particular warmth, that closeness, that proof that another person was real and near and choosing to remain. I wanted the hug that goes tight enough to feel like someone is trying to hold you together. Not the greeting kind. The kind that holds. That says: I have you. I am not going anywhere. Stay.

I wanted the cuddles. The ordinary ones. The ones that do not announce themselves.

And nothing — not once — felt enough. Not complete. Not the right size. Something in me kept looking past what had arrived, toward what had not yet come. I asked myself, often: Why is this want so immense? Why does one turn to love so blindly? I was confused — not by the wanting itself, but by the scale of it. By the way it refused to reduce. By the fact that it did not behave like ordinary hunger, which eventually quiets when fed. This did not quiet. It grew louder every time it was answered. More specific. More insistent.

Why was love so important to me? Not just the quality of it — though quality mattered, mattered deeply, mattered more than anything. I needed it genuine. True. Passionate. Intense. Not the version of love that performs itself on appropriate occasions. The kind that arrives because it cannot help itself. The unscheduled kind. The kind that does not compute and simply is.

What the Longing Made of Me

But the longing made something of me.

I imagined. I dreamt. I wrote. I expressed — loudly, in ways that surprised the people who had decided I was quieter than I am. I was not quiet about this. I could not be. When you want something with that kind of intensity, the wanting finds its shape. It moved into everything I made. It became the engine behind the words, behind the reaching, behind the making.

I was loud to talk about love. I was adamant to have it. I did not apologise for the size of the need — not then, not while that fire was still burning. This wanting is mine, I told myself. It is true. And I am going to keep saying so until something answers.

And things answered. People answered. Life answered — in its complicated, ungovernable way.

What Was Returned

But was I given it all?

I have sat with this question for a long time and I do not have a clean answer. Did I deserve the love I was seeking — the intensity, the completeness, the enough? Was I served what I needed, or something else entirely?

What I received was: pain. Chances that did not land the way I hoped. Insults that arrived dressed as something softer. Hurt in forms I had not prepared for. Promises — so many promises — and then the breaking of them. Betrayal. Cheating. The specific devastation of discovering that something you had decided to trust had been hollow the whole time.

Life became complicated. Too many stories running at once. Too many threads to hold. Too many mazes entered with hope and exited — when exited at all — into something harder than what came before.

Some of it did not even seem real. I would look back at certain things and think: did that actually happen? Did I imagine it? I am not entirely sure, even now, where the border was. The longing had made me imaginative — and imagination, left long enough in pain, starts filling in what reality leaves out.

It ate my thoughts. My brain suffered. My heart — the same heart that had opened itself so wide, that had asked for so much, that had hoped and hoped and kept reaching — died a little. In the way that things die when they are asked too much of, for too long.

Life challenged me. It did not apologise.

The Gathering — and the Gap

And still I gathered. Love, from wherever it came.

From the people who gave freely and the ones who gave carefully and the ones who gave in the only way they knew — even when that way cost me something. I held all of it: the beautiful and the painful and the ambiguous, in a heart that was determined to receive.

And still my heart never filled.

This is the part that is hardest to explain, even now. Not the wanting — the wanting makes a certain kind of sense. But the receiving. Love arrived. Real love, genuine love, love that was not performing. And still something in me looked past it, toward more. Toward the layer beneath the layer. Toward the version that was surely, surely, enough.

It never was.

True to the moment, I told myself. True to the feeling. True to the want. I kept saying it. And I was — I kept being true to it. But the feeling kept wanting. The gap between what I had and what I needed had no fixed edge. It kept moving. I could not reach it. I could not call it satisfied.

The craving only grew. It never exhausted. It never said: rest now. You have enough.

Until one day — not dramatically, not with tears or ceremony — everything dried up.

The Day It Stopped

The wanting went quiet.

Not resolved. Not answered. Not met at last and released into peace. It simply — stopped arriving. The way fire stops when it has consumed every last thing available to it. Not extinguished. Finished.

What came in its place was not peace. I want to be precise about this: it was not relief, not satisfaction, not the quiet of a need finally met. It was emptiness. The particular kind that does not come from the outside — not from loss, not from being left — but from the inside out. The heart that had held so much, carried so much, reached and reached — went still. Wanted nothing. Felt nothing. Not anymore.

I did not grieve it immediately. I was too tired to grieve it. And grief requires still wanting things to be different — and I was no longer sure I wanted anything at all.

But I Lived

On what is left after the wanting goes quiet — and the one thing that has not.

Survival Looks Like This

But I lived.

I continue to.

This is the part nobody warns you about — that survival sometimes looks nothing like flourishing. That you can be emptied and still wake up in the morning. Still move. Still show up to the ordinary demands of being a person in the world. You do it differently. You depend on strange things. Unexpected anchors. The small mercy of a routine. The stubbornness of a body that continues even when the spirit has gone quiet.

And on some days — the hardest ones, the emptiest rooms — I found myself depending on only one power in this world.

Not the people. Not the love that had spent itself trying to fill me. Not the wanting, which had long since gone silent. Something older. Something that did not require me to earn it, to be enough for it, to reach the right level of deserving before it would arrive. Something that had been there — I understood this slowly — the whole time. Before the wanting began. Before the gathering. Before the going quiet.

What Remains

I have lost dear ones along the way.

Lost them in the way that cannot be undone — the way that changes the shape of every room they were once in. The way that teaches you what permanent truly means, for the first time, in your body. The absence that does not shrink. The chair that keeps being empty. The voice you reach for in the middle of an ordinary day and find only silence where it used to be.

And still — still — I want more from them. The craving that went quiet for so much else returns here, in this direction, undimmed. One more conversation. One more presence. One more ordinary moment with someone the world no longer contains.

I am still wanting from them. I am still demanding more — the way you demand things from the people you love most, because loving them fully means expecting them to stay, even after they cannot.

I am hoping to see them all again.

Perhaps loss teaches you something that love, in all its abundance, could not: that the heart was never meant to fill from the outside. That what we spend our lives reaching for — the touch, the breath on the face, the completeness, the enough — is not a failure when it doesn't arrive the way we imagined. It is an arrow. It was always pointing somewhere beyond what we could see.

I followed love blindly for a long time. Through the imagining and the dreaming and the writing and the demanding. Through the pain and the promises and the mazes. Through the longing that never filled, and the wanting that finally went silent.

I am still learning where it was actually trying to lead me.

Not a Writer. Just a Witness.

On journals, not novels — and why the truest stories are the ones that actually happened.

I Do Not Invent. I Record.

People sometimes ask if I am a writer. I am never quite sure what to say. The honest answer is: I do not think so. Not in the way the word usually means — someone who sits down with a blank page and conjures people and worlds from nothing. That is not what I do. What I do is closer to journaling. I have written poems and stories, yes — but none of them arrived from imagination alone. They came from life. My life. Things that happened to me, things I felt, things I could not stop turning over until they found their shape in words.

If you ask whether I am creative, I genuinely pause. Maybe not in the traditional sense. I do not think I can invent a character from nothing — not a real one, not one that breathes. What I can do is become a character. I love that. I love stepping into a story — inhabiting a role, feeling what it would feel like to be someone slightly different from who I am today. The characters I write are not invented. They are versions. Versions of what I have dreamed of being. What I have hoped for from love. What I have wanted from life, and not yet received, or received and lost, or received and not known how to keep.

That is where my stories come from. Not from a room of the imagination I have never entered. From the rooms I have actually lived in.

The Stories That Come from Others

Because it is not only my own life I draw from. I am endlessly hungry for other people's. When someone tells me something — really tells me, the way people do when they have forgotten to be careful — I feel something shift. A kind of attention that is different from ordinary listening. I am not just receiving the information. I am feeling for its shape. Its particular sadness or strangeness or grace. I am wondering: how would I say this? How does this connect to something I already know? Where is the line in here that no one has written yet?

I see stories when I meet people. In the pause before they answer. In what they choose not to say. In the way someone's face changes when a name is mentioned that they were not expecting. People carry entire novels in their silences, and most of the time nobody asks them to open. When they open for me — even a little — I feel trusted with something I do not take lightly.

This never ends. I have not once run out of material because the world has not once run out of people who are quietly extraordinary in ways they cannot see themselves.

The Website. The Ideas. The Tools.

Recently I started a website — and something unexpected happened. The ideas did not slow down when I began to make them public. They sped up. It is as though the act of creating a space for the words gave them permission to arrive faster, in greater number, with more insistence. I find myself looking at everything as potential content — not in a cold, strategic way, but in the way a person looks at the world when they have recently remembered that they have something to say about it.

I have also been relying on AI tools to help me shape those thoughts into something others can read. I will be honest about this: it is not a replacement for the feeling or the lived experience — those remain entirely mine. But it has become a kind of collaboration. I bring the material, the raw weight of it, the thing that actually happened or was felt. The tools help me arrange it. I am still the witness. I am still the one who was there. But I have found a way to translate that presence into something that travels.

The Hijab. The Quiet. The Fear.

And then something shifted in the texture of daily life. I started wearing the hijab.

I did not expect it to change as much as it did — not on the outside, not in what I could see in others. But it has. There is a different kind of day now. A kind of held-breath quality to every morning where I wonder: what will today ask of me? What will I encounter — in a look, in a word withheld, in the particular quality of a silence that did not used to be there? Each day carries a small uncertainty I did not carry before, and I am still learning how to wear it alongside everything else.

What I have noticed most is the quiet. People talk to me less. Not out of hostility, perhaps — or at least not always — but the ease has changed. Conversations that used to begin on their own now wait to be invited. The casual, spontaneous exchanges that were once just the texture of being present in a shared space — the ones that made me feel like part of the ongoing story of a place — have thinned. What remains is functional. Purposeful. Need to know.

This is harder than I expected. Not because I need to be liked — I have made a kind of peace with not being universally comfortable to others. But because I need stories. And stories come from people. They come from the unguarded moments, the ones that are not transactional. They come from someone saying something they had not planned to say, to someone they felt safe with in the ordinary way — not in spite of who that person is, but forgetting to think about it at all.

I do not know what this period will make of my writing. I do not know if the quiet will become a source in its own right — if absence can teach you things that presence never could, if the stories you are no longer handed freely begin to arrive instead from deeper inside. That is the question I am living with right now.

What I know is this: I have never written from comfort. Every poem, every piece, every line that has ever felt true has come from somewhere that cost me something to visit. The wanting that never filled. The love that complicated itself. The grief that does not reduce. And now this — the changed texture of a day, the recalibrated way of moving through a world that has decided to see me differently.

I am a witness before I am a writer. And there is still — there will always be — something here worth witnessing.

The Writing That Forgets Me

On finishing a poem and finding it already belongs to someone else — and what that strange detachment might mean.

I Write. And Then I Let Go.

I am a writer. I have written poems, stories, shayaris, articles. I have written things that have moved people — things I know this about only because they told me, because I could not have told them myself. The moment a piece is done, I am done with it. Not in a considered, deliberate way. Not because I decide to release it. It simply — leaves. The writing and I separate, quietly and completely, the way a breath leaves the body. You do not notice it going. It is just gone.

Other writers, I have heard, remember what they write. They return to their own lines the way you return to a place you love — with recognition, with ownership, with the particular warmth of something that is yours. They can quote themselves. They can identify their voice in a paragraph, their hand in a poem, their particular rhythm in a line they haven't read in years.

I cannot do this.

I have come across my own work and not known it was mine. Read a poem, felt moved by it, felt something shift — and only afterwards, by some external marker, understood that I had written it. Sat with lines that felt true and foreign at once, the way a face in a mirror can look both familiar and strange depending on the light. There is a particular kind of awe in that moment — and a particular kind of loneliness. Did I write this? Was I there?

What the Internet Says — and What It Doesn't

I have asked doctors about this. Therapists. No one has given me a clean answer. So I turned, the way one eventually does, to the wider conversation — to what writers and psychologists have made of this experience in the spaces where such things get discussed honestly.

What I found was this: it is not as uncommon as silence has made it feel.

Psychologists describe something called flow state — a concept developed by researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — which refers to a condition of deep creative immersion in which ordinary self-awareness recedes. During flow, brain activity shifts away from the prefrontal cortex — the seat of self-monitoring and critical thought — toward more spontaneous, automatic regions. Self-doubt quiets. The critical inner voice goes silent. The person doing the creating is, in a meaningful sense, not fully present in the way they usually are. They are somewhere else. The work is happening, but the conscious, watchful self has stepped back.

Some writers have returned to their desks to find wonderful material in their own handwriting that they have no memory of producing. "Flow," one writer notes, is actually another name for creative dissociation — a natural phenomenon in which some parts of the brain disengage from others. It is the same mechanism that makes you forget the drive home when your mind was elsewhere, or lose an hour to a book without realising it.

The more emotionally charged the writing, the more pronounced this can become. When writing draws on traumatic or intensely felt experiences, depersonalisation can occur as a kind of coping response — the self stepping back from material that would be too much to hold consciously while also crafting it. The writing gets done precisely because a part of you has moved aside and let it through.

This is not pathology. It is not evidence of something broken. It is, in a strange way, evidence of the opposite: that the writing is coming from somewhere very real, very deep, very unguarded. The parts of us that produce the truest things are not the parts that keep careful records. They do not file and catalogue. They pour — and then they are empty, and they do not remember what they poured.

The Stranger in the Archive

There is something I have not yet found a word for — the experience of reading your own old writing and feeling genuinely surprised. Not embarrassed, not nostalgic, not proud in the ordinary way. Surprised. As though the person who wrote it was not quite you, or was a version of you you have since grown away from, or was channelling something you did not know you contained.

I have felt awe reading my own work. Real awe — the kind that does not feel like vanity because it genuinely does not feel like me. The poem is there, and I can see that it is true, that it has reached something, and I cannot entirely account for how it came to exist. The hand that wrote it left no memory behind. What remains is the artifact, but not the making of it.

I used to find this troubling. The gap between the act and the memory of it felt like a loss — as if something was being stolen from me even as I created it. Now I am less sure. There may be a particular kind of grace in it. If the writing does not stay attached to me, it travels more freely. It reaches the person who needs it without dragging the weight of my ownership behind it. Someone reads a line and feels less alone, and they do not need to know what state I was in when I wrote it. The line is enough. It is complete without me.

And perhaps that is the nature of writing that comes from the deep places — the honest places, the worn-through places. It was never mine to keep. It was always passing through.

Living With the Not-Knowing

The doctors and therapists who have not given me an answer are not, I think, withholding one. I think they genuinely do not have the language for what I am describing, because medicine has not caught up with the full texture of creative experience — particularly the creative experience of people who write from grief, from longing, from lives that have asked a great deal of them.

What I have arrived at, slowly, is this: I do not need the answer to keep writing. The not-knowing has not stopped a single poem. It has not closed a single story before it was ready to close. The work arrives and I do not understand how, and then it leaves and I do not hold on, and somehow there is always more. The source does not seem to deplete. The well I am drawing from does not appear to have a bottom I can reach.

Perhaps this is its own kind of answer. Perhaps the detachment is not a symptom of something absent — not a failure of memory or a fracture of self. Perhaps it is simply the way writing works when it is coming from somewhere beyond the ordinary reach of the thinking mind. Poets across centuries have tried to describe this. The Greeks called it the Muse. The Sufis called it ilham — divine inspiration, breath from beyond the self. Others have called it the subconscious, the unconscious, the deep. The names change. The experience they are all pointing at is the same: something that moves through you and leaves its mark on the page, and does not stop to explain itself.

I write. I finish. I let go — or rather, the writing lets go of me, which is not quite the same thing but amounts to the same result. And then, sometimes, I come across it again, and I read it like a stranger would, and I find it true.

That is, I have decided, enough.