Dear World, From juhi 💕

  Dear world,  Imagine you’re sitting in a huge exam hall, and you’re alone. You have 1 hour left on the clock and you have watched everyone leave the venue. You try and finish the paper, to run outside and exclaim to everyone that you finished just like them, and when you finally leave the hall? The landscape is empty, and the weight of your fatigue from finishing the exam, not knowing how others found it and your experiences of past exams finally arise. Those thoughts that choke you? that is the feeling of burnout  Recently, as we’ve been presenting our final matric speeches for English in class, I noticed an increasingly saddening theme across most speeches, and that is theme of burnout and a growing sense of apathy amongst learners.  I’m categorised as someone with a high-functioning brain and high-performing to most, somebody who enjoys the adrenaline of pressure and thrives in it. I have been raised under the quote that pressure makes diamonds.  Yet I myse...

  Dear world, Everyone has a story that they will gush out in an odd moment of silence, or possibly, to a person they have never met before to shout out to seem vaguely interesting. It’s like shouting out “hey! Look I’m pretty cool too”  Here’s mine: When I was in 9th grade, my mum became weary of traditional medicine. She said that doctors had failed people she loved when she needed them the most. Naturally then, when I complained about a weighty feeling of tiredness alongside my increasingly poor immune system, she decided to take me on a retreat to a homeopathic doctor.  It really did feel like a scene from a well-established horror movie, where the main character summons a ghost by asking some question like “Is anyone here?”  We had driven 2 hours away from home to a desolate house, made from slabs of concrete with thick vines winding up the walls of the home. A woman greeted us, I cannot remember her name, she had a deep German accent and a short brown bob....

  Dear world,  “Okay now, so now I’m going to give you this ace, and then ask me ‘is this your card?’” I blinked twice, confused as I usually am and asked my friend, “Is this your card?” She pulled off the most theatrically-shocked expression as she could and exclaimed “Yeah, your trick worked! That was my card!” as she gaped in disbelief. I recently watched a YouTube video on how to perform a compelling card trick, and just because a magician will never reveal her secrets, I can’t provide you with the link to the YouTube video. It made sense then, when my IT teacher slammed a deck of cards onto our table to congratulate us for finishing the syllabus to practice one of my many elaborate tricks with my friend.  Of course, I muddled up the trick, facing two cards upwards, turning the deck over twice more than I needed to and even revealing the failed trick to my friend even though we had not gotten a successful attempt at recreating the visual masterpiece in the video....

  Dear world,  I have a playlist on my phone, like most teenagers, named something like “you are the main character” or “roll the end credits.” There is an impossible expectation to make your own movie, filled with risky adventures or dancing around in your kitchen at midnight with somebody you love or possibly, taking a hiatus from your daily agenda and fleeing to a mountain scape with no human connection or the internet.  This is because we assign societal importance to ‘being unique,’ because unfortunately, falling prey to our mundane lives would mean that we have conformed to the world’s expectations of us.  If you asked me three hours ago what I thought about this theory, to be a main character, I would have devoutly told you that it is ingenious because means of escaping our lives, through a playlist, gives us the unconditional capacity to dream beyond what we can conceptualise.  However, on the way to school this morning, my dad decided to fill me in on s...

  https://open.spotify.com/track/3stWWPN41byqp8loPdy92u?si=JLj62piZTjSN_sLIsu8Oyg Dear world,  If somebody asked me what I feared the most, my first and only response would be: balloons. I know . There’s something about this helium filled vessel that gingerly moves around that I do not trust because just as you begin to enjoy its shape and colour it suddenly, without warning, explodes. You’re left with an afterthought, “why me?” and “why now?.”  I think my fear stems from a deeper wound of emotional inconsistency. When somebody you love explodes, without warning, you are forced to step away. We are left perplexed, how could we know that we should expect this emotional reaction? Much like any birthday party, there is also the clean up. You pick up the rubber pieces of what was once a spectacle of entertainment, and you reminisce carefully about what you remember of the party as you slowly discard the pieces one by one, begrudgingly of course.  Similarly, we begin to t...

  Dear world,   After deleting most of my social media platforms with the exception of my blog, you start to feel a sense of detachment. In both relieving and anxiety-inducing ways I suppose.   What led me to this decision was an interesting metamorphosis of perspective. When something becomes easy to let go off, then you let it go. Until then, there is a lesson to be learnt, and once you have learnt it, you will trust yourself to leave. I know you will, you can internalise the advice and pop me a message when it works.  Social media is an increasingly toxic environment. We both know this, and there are some that filter through the noise and some that absorb it, such as myself.    There was an impossible expectation for me to post pictures where I felt beautiful, for people to tell me that I looked beautiful and to look at the photo again to make sure both my followers and I were analysing the same photo with the appropriate song choice of course, but ...

  Dear world,  You have heard of the saying “always the poet, never the poem” or “always the artist, never the muse.” It is an uncanny concept, to love and to never be loved. Surely, we are loved in order to love, that your passion is the poem and hence you are the etched surface which you write upon. To me, you are the inspiration for your work, that you yourself giving love is the same as receiving it and your thoughts on paper make you both the poem and the muse.  Our desire to be crafted into something eternal by somebody we love is an innate human desire, we unfortunately have created personal hierarchies on the kinds of love we accept and in what ways we choose to accept this care.  I have recently found myself in a situation where I myself am unsure about whether I am cared for by somebody I love. It has led to multiple attempts of trying to connect, reconnect and trying to hold onto feelings that I refuse to allow to disintegrate. This is the feeling of tryin...

  Dear world,  It is a Monday morning, I have multiple assignments that have collected dust over the last week, I stayed up at night thinking deeply about how to craft a flawless study timetable and have managed to successfully hide from our school librarian. Can you believe I have had all these increasingly complex thoughts at only 8:40am in the morning? Throughout this omnishamble, I have managed to convince myself that I have disappointed everyone around me (yes this includes our librarian) and have dissected every text message and slightly abnormal tone from people I love.   By definition overthinking is “a state of excessive rumination or worry” where thoughts are replayed until one has managed to analyse them from every angle and reanalyse them… rinse and repeat. A 2024 study by Cambridge mentioned briefly that overthinking is a process by which we ask the wrong questions to analyse the correct issue.  You see, although I have micromanaged every sin...