I was thirteen when my mother noticed something was wrong. The cluster of acne on my cheek was getting bigger and bigger until it no longer resembled acne. I had gotten my period early that month, a bit too early, she said. I hated wearing pads because they made me feel like I had a diaper on. My period did not stop that month. I remember it was over a week when I thought it was finally over, then a classmate pointed at my bum in gym class. Panicking, I called my mom on the phone and she picked me up. The doctor poured cold, clear jelly on my abdomen and started pushing in. She was silent for a while, zooming in on her screen. I held my breath and stared at her. She motioned for my mom to come closer and pointed something out. My ovaries had cysts, and so did my face. I felt a funny feeling that moment, and it was the second time I felt that way. First was when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, just a year prior to this moment. I felt like water, bland, strange, undefined. I was sent to do blood tests and then sent to an endocrinologist. They told me I had insulin resistance. Cysts, insulin resistance, numbers, scales, all these things I did not know of. I was sent home with a packet of pills. Everyone around me pretended to be a doctor. My annoying hippie cousin told me not to drink the medicine and that yoga will help me instead. Random aunts and uncles swore by homemade serums that helped them in the 70s. And inside me something hot was blooming. Around the start of middle school, every morning, if I did not eat within an hour , I would faint. School started very early and I had no time for breakfast. A teacher kept complaining to my parents that I slept in class. Upon diagnosis, my mom packed a chocolate bar for me to have every morning. A few times, I could not wait until the end of the first period and I secretly had some. Once a classmate noticed me and the smartass told the teacher. He raised his hand up the highest he could and said it as proudly as possible, having identified the secret chocolate eater. Eventually I was told I no longer need my pills and to keep my diet healthy. At age 20 I finally sat my parents down and told them how I felt and what I saw and heard and why I did the things I did. I confessed the poem I wrote at 15 was indeed mine, and told them plain and simple that I did not want to go outside due to the obsessive thoughts I had at the time. They helped me out and took me to a doctor. Many, many pills were changed until I found a miracle, and yes, I am doing far better. However I started gaining weight and I could not stop. At this point I have severe physical pain in my knees because my body was never used to this situation. My insulin resistance returned and boy is it resistant. I’m told I'm very close to having diabetes. I’m placed on the same pills again and my body hates me. I feel like I ate every poisonous gross thing in the world and no food has taste anymore. My own spit tastes like bitter medicine. I was given the medicine to soothe my mind but at what cost? I really wish I didn’t have to choose between my body and my mind. I really hope that my insulin going back to normal will also help my mental state. And I really hope I get to fit into my old clothes again.
I believe that every tool is a double edged sword with its own achievements and setbacks. This is non-negotiable however when it comes to the environment because we do not have a spare planet. I was hopeful in ChatGPT’s early days. When I was struggling to pass my chemistry exam three-ish years ago, I downloaded it as a last resort. It ended up breaking down the hardest points for me and thus helped me pass with flying colors after failing four times. However helpful and revolutionary it might be for some people (and ruining the environment of others) we can't deny that being shown AI text and images should not be done without consent from the human viewing it. If we see a beautiful mountain peak and we are not being told it’s AI, we are being lied to, right? But this is not my main concern. We are very prone to pattern seeking and pattern producing. We imitate each other without realizing it. Soon enough we will start sounding like chatGPT generated essays if the media we consume was literally just a chatGPT generated essay. And that’s where our own voice gets thrown out the window. I am scared of coming across AI without my knowledge and letting it sneak pass. I get that not everyone is a world renowned author or journalist and that for some tasks you do have to bullshit your way through on a deadline, but think pieces and personal research is something people do for the love of the game and not because they are forced to. And I am not talking about real writers and artists. There are youtube channels that pump out so much slop disguised as interesting documentaries that it’s funny that they are not trying to hide it.. When you post a million videos every week you could at least add a banner saying it’s AI. Some of my hobbies as well as the actual work I do is communication related. In a world where everything is being drowned by slop, you could hope to at least preserve the words coming out of your own, human, mouth right?
There’s a particular experience that’s hard to forget once it happens due to its awkwardness. Going to a birthday party for a child of divorce. A party hosted by the “cool” parent. All you know is that one is relaxed and the other one is annoying and uptight. Basically good cop, bad cop. Your friend mostly vents about how strict and absolutely OCD bad cop is. You have not met either before this point.
You arrive at a backyard Barbecue. You shake hands and engage with small talk with said cool parent. Topics usually range from the weather to school life. And then you notice it. Some small moments don’t quite add up the way they should. A conversation loops instead of progresses. A task never quite gets finished. An overconfident statement followed by uncertainty about how basic objects work. A sense that everyone around them is forced to subtly adjust their behavior. Someone else steps in to redirect things, as a mother guarding a child. And this person is indeed a middle aged child.
And slowly, almost unwillingly, the realization forms: the complaints you’ve heard from your friend about the “strict” parent weren’t really describing a monster. The exhausted parent, yes, the one who complains, corrects, controls often didn’t become that way out of nowhere. Years of carrying the mental load of another adult can turn into something bitter. Care becomes management. Management becomes criticism. Criticism becomes identity. The bad cop was not unloving towards their child. He/She was overstimulated from the work of it all and often burned out.
And the other parent, the one described as careless or unreliable by their spouse, is not necessarily malicious. But their version of life depends heavily on the care of everyone else in the room. Things are always slightly unfinished, slightly misplaced, slightly delegated to someone else by default. These things are deeply rooted in a lot of people, starting of course from childhood. Often people who have been childless for a long time tend to “baby” their child until adulthood.
After separation, people often assume clarity arrives. That each person will finally become legible on their own terms.
Sometimes that happens. Those cases are not the topic of this essay
Often a more uncomfortable residue appears: Each half continues behaving as if the original system still exists. The complaints don’t stop. They just change who they direct it to. History is never allowed to become history. Children get pulled into emotional work they never asked for. New environments inherit old tensions without adjusting to their origin.
Their marriage ends legally, but not emotionally. It continues as petty commentary, repetition, as an ongoing explanation of who ruined what, and why nothing can ever fully stabilize again. The frustrated parent keeps talking about their ex because the frustration never fully stopped. The unreliable parent keeps creating conversations that revive old arguments. Every school event feels scary for their child. Every logistical discussion carries emotional residue from arguments that happened years ago. A child growing up in this environment has to develop advanced diplomatic negotiations before they fully understand what their nervous system is telling them. They can detect tension from the slightest change in someone’s walk.
Have them stay together and you have no peace. Separate them, and you do not get peace either. And everybody around them inherits part of the burden. Friends become therapists. Coworkers become therapists, children are in-house therapists, and therapy is non-existent because they think it’s where crazy people go to. There is something deeply unsettling about realizing that two people may genuinely bring out the worst in each other while simultaneously preventing themselves from healing elsewhere.
People talk about toxic couples like they are equally unbearable at all times, but I think they operate more like a closed ecosystem. Miserable together, yes, but functional in a way that contains the damage. The chaos circulates between them. The resentment has a designated route. Everyone else gets spared the full force of it because the relationship absorbs most of the impact. And these people really do belong together because at least then their toxicity is contained in one container instead of being spilled all over the table. Like hazardous chemicals stored in the bottom drawer because nobody knows where else to put them.
Parents delight in the joy of their newborn inheriting their mother’s eyes and their father’s smile, but deep inside, they hold a small notch in their stomach and pray they do not inherit something else. I inherited an illness. Or a tendency towards it, amplified by the fact I had to witness my mom suffer from cancer and sit through a pandemic during my formative years. The pattern was woven quietly through generations on my mother’s side: unstable minds, fear, compulsive thinking, conflict seeking, delusional thoughts. I called these women insane as a child.
The bad years started just as I had stopped being a teenager. Statistically, it’s the most common period, but I did not know that. I did not know what was happening and that it was not normal. But I did know I was suffering a lot. I developed obsessive and delusional thoughts about God, punishment, morality, and evil. I felt as if I had committed sins I did not even recall. I repented and hurt myself just in case. At the same time, I fell into the hands of a man who called himself a radical Christian. Despite the sins he was a slave of himself, judgement was his specialty. Every person around him was either corrupt, sinful, impure, worldly, or doomed. He spoke about love while using fear as a method of control. He said to me that I was destined to be with him despite the things he did to me, or I will suffer the consequences and go to hell. Need I mention that he was way older? Or was that obvious?
What eventually saved me was a certain shift I felt. Despite the stigma I had started to secretly see a therapist.. I remember feeling a sort of euphoria, for the first time in my life. It was the only time that euphoria did good to me. I decided to quit it and put myself first. It happened in one day. That euphoria continued for weeks afterwards. My parents expected me to shed a tear but I did not. They were worried because even in the most abusive of relationships, some tenderness is expected afterwards. I eventually crashed into a deep depression again, powered by a different kind of delusion: that my loving parents secretly hated me and were planning to kick me out on the street. Mental illness is often horrifying to the people around you who romanticize it. They think of a wax virgin Mary figure crying, dressed in a beautiful gown. They don’t think of a malnourished girl who hasn't taken a shower in a week obsessively packing over and over, while refusing to leave her room to at least eat.
What helped, and what my parents told me over and over, was realizing that love and judgement are not the same thing. Genuine love does not stand above people waiting to condemn them. It intervenes. It redirects gently. It protects without humiliating. It tells the truth without stripping someone of their humanity. And medication. A long time of searching for the right medication.
I am who I am both because of and despite the cards I was dealt. My mother’s illness shaped me. Genetics shaped me. Trauma shaped me. Psychosis shaped me. But survival shaped me too. So did kindness. So did the people who chose gentleness when cruelty would have been easier.
Yes I will be annoying and mention my husband again, because what ultimately changed my understanding of God and true honest love between two people was not theology alone, but being loved gently for the first time. I had grown so used to judgement that kindness initially scared me. I was still never fully healed (I don’t think that exists either) and I still had remnants of my old flaws and addictions. I kept waiting for hidden anger, hidden cruelty. Instead, he treated me with a softness I did not know how to accept at first. When I spiraled, he intervened with patience instead of condemnation. He redirected instead of humiliating. Through him, I began understanding something I had failed to see for years: love does not isolate people from the world while convincing them it is protection. Love makes people feel safer inside the world.
For a long time, one phrase in Christianity confused me more than almost anything else: love thy neighbour. The people who spoke most aggressively about morality often masked it as a love for humanity. They judged strangers constantly, spoke about punishment with satisfaction, and treated compassion like weakness or compromise. I began realizing that many people love the idea of righteousness more than they love people themselves.
What finally changed my understanding was recognizing that neighbourly love is not abstract at all. It is deeply ordinary. It is choosing to resist the bystander effect that modern life quietly trains onto us. It is helping an elderly woman pick apples up off the street after her bag tears open. It is checking on someone who you heard is not doing okay. It is intervening carefully when someone is unwell instead of turning away because involvement feels inconvenient or uncomfortable. Not reckless self-sacrifice, not placing ourselves or others in danger, but small deliberate acts that affirm another person’s humanity.
I think that is the closest I have come to understanding what Christian love actually means. Not domination. Not humiliation disguised as moral concern. Not constant judgement. Just the refusal to become emotionally numb to other people’s suffering.
There are less than five people I have talked to about what happened to Freddy.* And there were less than five people who even knew that he was once my friend. We met online when I was thirteen. I was a bullied girl with a mother who had cancer, a depressed father and older half sister who hated me. There was a growing feeling that my life had somehow already gotted spoiled before it had even started. Freddy and I bonded over metal music, guitars, and television shows after meeting in a Facebook group for selling instruments. He was older than me, a senior in high school, but he never treated me like someone to exploit or impress. Looking back, that mattered more than I understood at the time.
For a while, he became the closest thing I had to an older sibling that liked me. We talked every day. He argued with me when I started harming myself, warned me about predatory men in alt spaces, and generally tried to protect me in ways that many adults around me never did. During one of the most unstable periods of my life, he was one of the few people who made me feel visible as a person rather than as a problematic teenager.
During the pandemic, my mental health deteriorated rapidly around the time my mother became seriously ill from COVID. I isolated myself from nearly everyone who cared about me because I ended up in an abusive relationship with a man who exploited the symptoms I did not yet understand were psychosis. Freddy tried calling me many times during that period. I answered once. Hearing his voice again felt like tearing open something I had spent a long time trying to numb.
After leaving that situation, I briefly reconnected with Freddy. By then my life had become chaotic in ways I barely understood myself. Addiction, psychosis, unstable relationships, medications that gave me seizures. Despite everything, he held no resentment. He told me about his new relationship, his stable job, the sense that his life was finally moving somewhere hopeful.
But I disappeared again. I became involved with a friend of his, things ended badly, mostly on my part, and instead of facing the embarrassment and emotional fallout, I cut contact entirely. It felt easier to vanish than to explain myself. I always felt like a plus one to other people, and I didn’t want to fight that fact anymore.
Nevertheless my mom did not raise a quitter, and I did end up using all my willpower into getting better. It was never a linear process but it is one of the things I have been the most proud of as of yet. After countless medications, side effects, hospital visits, and periods where I genuinely thought my mind would never belong to me again, I finally found medication that helped. Around the same time, I met the wonderful man who would become my husband. For the first time in years, I felt safe. His gentleness confused me. I had become so used to surviving that I did not know what to do with genuine care.I often thought about telling Freddy. A part of me desperately wanted him to know that I survived, that I was okay, that the frightened and self-destructive girl he once worried about had managed to build a real life for herself. But because of the fallout involving his friend, I never reached out. I found a job. I could finally do the impossible. Work despite my hallucinations. Slowly, because of work and projects and taking care of my sick and elderly parents, I did stop thinking about Freddy for a pretty long time.
One night, I saw his face in my sleep for a split second. The dream itself vanished almost immediately after waking, but the feeling lingered strongly enough that, half-awake, I searched for the Metal Archives page of his band. There was an R.I.P. written next to his name. I dismissed it immediately. I assumed it was a joke, a hacked account, some misunderstanding. A month later, I dreamed about it again. This time, despite not having socials, I checked his. He had really died. I froze. Something moved in my throat. I remember feeling a huge grayness. It tasted like water and a pill. I never got a chance to grieve properly. Not even for a pet. When my first budgie died as a child, my dad immediately replaced it, funny enough with a different colored one, and pretended it changed because of the medication at the vet. My parents, who ironically had me in their late 40s, forbade me from attending funerals all my life. I did not know what people were supposed to do with grief once it arrived in front of them. My husband offered to take me to visit Freddy’s grave, but I refused. I was afraid of what I would feel if I saw his name carved into stone. As long as I avoided it, some part of me could still pretend he existed somewhere outside of my reach instead of nowhere at all.
* made up name for privacy
In small towns, grief hits different. Nothing fully fades. Everyone is always only a few steps removed from everyone else and that changes how people deal with said emotions.
When tragedy strikes, it does not just stay in the news headlines, rather it becomes something you move inside of. Even events you didn’t personally witness can feel intense, passed down through conversations, or lack there of, and the way those around you sigh and pause and you can almost see it in the look in their eyes.
When something tragic happens in a large city, it becomes one among many overlapping narratives in a global feed. But when something similar happens in a space where most people are directly connected, the impact is more concentrated. It is a puncture in a shared web of familiarity. The comparison is not about equating tragedies, but about scale: how many degrees of separation exist between a person and the loss?
And so it returns in cycles, each anniversary, each birthday, in imagery, fragmented references, in the repeated naming of things that should not have happened. Not because people want to remain inside pain, but because in some environments, forgetting is not an option that fully exists.
In one case, a nightclub fire in a small Balkan town with a population of under 25,000 became less of an “event” and more of a sudden reshaping of the community itself. The scale alone would be devastating anywhere, but in a place in southeast Europe where friendships and families are tightly interwoven, the aftermath spreads through personal networks instantly. It is not just about the people who were inside the building; it becomes about classmates, neighbors, cousins of friends, parents who knew someone’s child, coworkers who were meant to be there but changed plans last minute. The tragedy becomes distributed across living rooms and kitchens rather than contained in public mourning spaces. The number of deaths- 63- all young people, is etched into the back of the minds of every person old and young alike.
Another moment came through a school shooting in a nearby capital region, also in the Balkans. Children often know someone who goes there, that could have been their school, that teacher could have been theirs. The distance between observer and participant becomes thin enough to feel unstable.
There are also cases that don’t fit into the same category of sudden mass violence, but still carry similar emotional weight because of how they circulate socially. A missing child case that became national focus, for example, created a different kind of collective fixation. It is not only about searching for answers, but about the slow emotional collapse that happens while waiting for them. In such traditional, tightly connected communities, such cases are not consumed passively through screens. They become ongoing conversations between relatives, shared speculation, fear, and an unbearable sense of recognition: this is someone I know’s daughter, someone’s neighbor, someone’s classmate.
The internet makes it possible to revisit loss in ways previous generations never had access to. Faces of people who died suddenly or violently circulate again and again, sometimes edited, sometimes stylized, sometimes placed into aesthetic contexts that blur the line between remembrance and fixation. To someone outside this context, it can look unsettling. To those inside it, it can feel like an attempt to keep someone present in a world where that is impossible.
AI-generated imagery and visual reconstruction adds another layer to this. Even when it feels uncomfortable to an outside viewer, it can function as a form of attempted preservation. It is a way of refusing finality. It generates a space where someone can still be visually present, even if only in an artificial form. It reflects a tension between knowing that something is gone and resisting what that absence means.
What can look morbid from the outside is often something more fragile: an attempt to metabolize loss without the institutional or cultural distance that larger societies sometimes rely on. When there is no buffer, grief doesn’t stay neatly in the past. It continues to circulate through language, art, and digital spaces, looking for forms it can survive inside.
A newer layer of this digital mourning is shaped by tools that no longer only preserve images, but transform them. Applications that animate still photographs, generating movement from static faces, have begun to circulate widely. What was once a fixed record becomes something that blinks, breathes, or smiles again. These tools introduce a complicated emotional effect. They can feel like restoration at first glance, a brief illusion of continuity. But they also raise a deeper tension: the difference between remembering someone as they were, and generating a version of them that never actually existed in time.
Alongside this, there are instances where images of deceased individuals, including children and people who are not personally connected to the viewer circulate widely in comment sections, edits, and reposted tributes. Sometimes this happens in spaces where context is thin, where names and histories are partially lost, and where the image itself becomes detached from its origin. This raises an ethical tension that is not easily resolved. In some cases, sharing is driven by empathy, an attempt to acknowledge a loss that feels overwhelming. In others, it becomes unclear where remembrance ends and consumption begins. The same image can function as tribute in one space and as content in another, depending on how it is framed and circulated.
What does it mean to “bring someone back” in a system that cannot distinguish between restoration and generation? These technologies do not create the desire to remember. But they do reshape the form that remembrance takes. And in doing so, they force a confrontation with boundaries that previously existed without needing to be stated — between public and private grief, between respect and reinterpretation, between memory and construction.
The ethical difficulty is not only about whether these tools should exist, but about how easily they fold into existing patterns of mourning without clear rules for restraint. In spaces already shaped by closeness and shared loss, the line between care and intrusion becomes especially thin.
Beneath all of it is a tension that does not resolve easily: the need to hold onto what matters, and the difficulty of knowing where holding ends and transforming begins. In places where connection is dense and loss is widely shared, that tension becomes part of the background itself. Not always spoken, but constantly present.