There is a lie we were fed growing up, the kind that sounds harmless at first. The idea that one day you would finally know who you are. As if identity is an arrival. A revelation. A single moment of clarity where the fog lifts and the world pauses and you recognise yourself without hesitation. But becoming does not happen like thunder. It happens like dust. Slow. Invisible. Accumulating softly when you are not paying attention.
You did not invent yourself. You gathered yourself. Piece by fragile piece. Memory by accidental memory. You are stitched together from the songs that kept your chest warm on nights you thought nobody understood you. From the films that made ordinary life look survivable. From the conversations that felt insignificant until they rearranged the furniture inside your mind.
If anyone looked at you from the outside, they would see one person. But you know better. You are a lifetime layered into skin. The child who collected shiny objects because they believed small things mattered. The teenager who wrote their name over and over just to prove they existed. The almost adult who learned that homes are not always houses. And the version of you right now, still fumbling for meaning in a world that keeps insisting you should already have one.
Nothing is wasted. Everything stayed. Even the things that hurt you left tenderness behind. Even the people who left gave you light to walk by. You are not unfinished because you are lost. You are unfinished because you are still becoming. You are allowed to take as long as you need. Nobody is timing you. The universe has never asked you to hurry.
You are a mosaic. Not because you are fractured, but because you are made of many things that were once loved enough to remain.
The past selves you outgrew are still sleeping under your ribs.
There are versions of you that will never return, but they have not disappeared. They live quietly like old songs stuck between the radio static, only resurfacing when the world slows down enough to let the memory breathe. Sometimes they arrive disguised as familiar sadness. Sometimes as a strange comfort you cannot name. Sometimes as the sudden ache of missing a life you do not want back.
You carry every age you have ever been. The small child who cried too easily still hides inside your silence. The thirteen year old who wished so desperately to be someone else still lingers in your insecurities. The version of you who thought heartbreak would kill them still flinches when someone raises their voice. Growth did not replace them. It simply layered over them like paint on a wall that will always remember the colour beneath.
There is a tenderness in outgrowing yourself that no one prepares you for. Nobody tells you that becoming better can feel like betrayal. Nobody warns you that healing sometimes looks like losing parts of your identity you once relied on. You will grieve people who were once you. You will miss them even when you are relieved they are gone.
But do not mistake distance for disappearance. You are not a stranger to your past selves. You are the living proof they survived. The life they could not imagine is the life you are now inhabiting. You are their answered prayer, even on the days you feel like a disappointment.
Be kind to who you were. They walked through storms so you could reach sunlight. They held on when they had no reason to. They carried you here. And they are still inside you, not as ghosts to haunt you, but as roots to steady you.
You are not ashamed of who you were. You are simply taller now.
The people you loved became rooms you still live in.
There are people who enter your life like weather. Sudden. Unexplainable. Gone before you learn how to name what they were. And yet years later, they still exist inside you like unfinished sentences. You do not speak to them anymore, but they have become a place your mind returns to when the night is too quiet.
Not every love was meant to stay. Some loves were meant to open you. Some were meant to break the glass so light could reach where it never had. Some were meant to show you the shape of your capacity. You did not love wrongly. You simply loved before you knew how to hold something that heavy.
There are scents that still make your chest tighten. Songs you skip without explanation. Streets you avoid because your body remembers what your mind has tried to forget. But memory is not punishment. It is proof. Proof that something mattered enough to leave a mark.
You do not need closure to heal. Closure is just the name we give to the ending we wanted but never received. Some stories do not resolve. Some doors stay half open forever. You will learn to live with that. You will learn that peace is not forgetting. Peace is remembering without bleeding.
And here is the quiet miracle. Not everyone you lose becomes a wound. Some become architecture. They shape the corridors inside you. They make you softer than you would have been. They make you kinder than you planned to be. They make you braver without witnessing it.
You are not defined by who left. You are defined by how deeply you were able to feel in a world that keeps teaching people to stay numb.
It was never foolish to love. The foolish thing would have been to remain untouched.
The friendships that saved you without ever asking for credit.
There are friends who arrived like quiet miracles. No dramatic entrances. No cinematic timing. Just ordinary people who stayed long enough to become extraordinary. The ones who noticed the change in your voice before you noticed it yourself. The ones who did not demand explanations for your distance. The ones who sat beside you in silence without needing to fix a single thing.
We grow up believing that the most important relationships in our lives will be romantic. Nobody teaches us that sometimes it is a friend who changes the entire architecture of your heart. The friend who waited outside the bathroom while you cried. The friend who learned your silence like a second language. The friend who held your world together with nothing but presence.
You do not become yourself alone. You are built through shared nights that turned into confessions. Through laughter that arrived like oxygen. Through the comfort of being seen without performance. There are people who never told you they loved you, but they proved it through the thousand tiny ways they kept choosing you.
Some of them are still here. Some are gone. It does not make their impact any smaller. Not every forever is measured in duration. Some forevers are measured in depth.
You are not only a mosaic of the people you loved romantically. You are a mosaic of every friend who reminded you you were not impossible to care for.
You did not survive because you were strong. You survived because someone quietly held part of your weight when you could not carry it alone.
The schools you survived are still hiding in your reflexes.
There are buildings that stopped existing in your daily life years ago, yet somehow still live inside your nervous system. Schools are one of them. Not the structures themselves, but the echo of them. The bell that told you when you were allowed to speak. The classrooms where you first learned that silence could be both safety and punishment. The corridors where your footsteps sounded louder on days you felt small. You think you left school, but parts of you are still trying to graduate from moments no one else remembers.
There is a version of you that still sits at a too small desk, waiting for permission to exist correctly. The fear of raising your hand even when you know the answer. The instinct to apologise when someone bumps into you. The way your body tenses when someone calls your name too sharply, as if you are already in trouble. These reflexes did not appear out of nowhere. They were trained into you long before you understood that authority is not the same as truth.
You became who you are in rooms that were never neutral. You learned competition before collaboration. You learned to measure yourself against people who were also trying not to drown. You learned to confuse achievement with worth. And without noticing, school became less about learning and more about survival.
But here is the softness nobody taught you. You are allowed to unlearn the fear of getting things wrong. Life is not marked in grades. Nobody is keeping score anymore. There is no exam waiting at the end of your healing. You do not need to earn rest through performance. You do not need to prove your intelligence by being louder than your uncertainty.
You survived a world that expected perfection from people who were still children. That alone is enough. The younger version of you is still sitting somewhere inside your mind, waiting for the results of a test that no longer exists. You can tell them now. You passed. You made it out. They are allowed to stand up from their desks and go home.
The cities you outgrew still live in your spine like unfinished sentences.
There are places you never stayed long enough to belong to, yet somehow they are stitched into you more tightly than anywhere you ever lived. When you grow up packing your life into cardboard boxes before you even learn to spell permanence, cities are not locations. They are temporary versions of you that never got the chance to grow up. You do not have a hometown. You have a trail.
You remember each place not through landmarks, but through sensory fragments. The colour of sunset against a different coastline every two years. The echo of your own footsteps in unfamiliar corridors you eventually left without warning. The sound of your parents speaking softly the night before another relocation, pretending it was exciting so you would not realise it was also loss.
Other people talk about roots as if they are proof of identity. You learned early that roots can also be restraints. Your home was never a map. It was a movement. You did not stay long enough for streets to learn your name, but your body still knows the monsoon in three different cities and how each one smelled completely different. You memorised how to introduce yourself without revealing how many times you have already done it.
There is a loneliness in being from everywhere and nowhere at once. When someone asks where you are from, you pause, not because you do not know, but because there is no short answer that does not erase entire versions of yourself. Each city took something when you left, and each city gave something back without meaning to. A new accent. A new defence mechanism. A new way of disappearing before anyone notices you are getting attached.
You learned how to leave before you learned how to stay. You became fluent in beginnings and clumsy in permanence. Goodbyes stopped feeling dramatic and started feeling routine, which is its own kind of heartbreak. But here is the quiet truth that softens the ache. You are not rootless. You are multi rooted. You are not missing a hometown. You carry every city like a pocket map folded carefully inside your ribs.
The world never taught you how to belong to one place, so you learned how to belong to yourself instead. And that is not a loss. It is a different kind of homecoming.
The objects you kept are proof that memory does not need reason.
There are things you have carried from place to place without understanding why. A bracelet with a missing bead. A ticket stub from a film you barely remember. A key that no longer opens anything. An old hoodie that smells like a year you cannot return to. These objects mean nothing to the world, yet somehow mean everything to you. They are not possessions. They are anchors.
Sometimes the smallest items hold the heaviest versions of us. We keep them because they remind us of a time when life felt lighter or clearer or painfully complicated in a way that now feels innocent. They are not valuable. They are evidence. They say yes, you were here. Yes, you felt something. Yes, there was a moment that mattered enough for your body to remember it long after your mind tried to move on.
You do not need a logical reason for holding onto things. Humans are not logical creatures. We are emotional archives disguised as adults. We are walking museums of objects that once held meaning. You can throw away the clutter without discarding the memory. You can keep something without wanting to return to the life attached to it.
There is no shame in sentimentality. It means you were paying attention. It means you cared. It means a moment was real. Even if the people are gone. Even if the place is gone. Even if the version of you who loved it no longer exists.
One day you will sort through your belongings and stumble upon something ordinary that makes your chest ache in the most unexpected way. You will realise that you have been carrying a memory longer than you carried the moment itself. And instead of breaking, you will soften.
Objects stay when people cannot. And sometimes that is enough.
The versions of you that existed online were still real.
There was a time when you tried to become someone softer or louder or stranger than you felt allowed to be in your real life, and the internet became the only place that version could breathe. You were thirteen and typing like the world was ending. Fifteen and curating an identity out of favourite lyrics and blurry photographs. Seventeen and pretending you were fine through jokes that were almost too sharp to laugh at. These digital selves were not fake. They were rehearsals for the person you were trying to become.
We treat our old online versions like embarrassing evidence, but they were survival. You were building connections before you learned how to speak it in person. You were searching for reflection in strangers because the people around you were too close to see you clearly. You were experimenting with honesty in a world where honesty felt dangerous. Even the cringe was a kind of courage.
There is a tenderness in remembering who you were when you thought the internet could save you. You were trying to be seen without being exposed. You were trying to express what your real world did not have space for. You were trying to feel less alone at a time when loneliness felt fatal.
Do not apologise for those versions. They kept you alive. They taught you language for feelings you could not name.They handed you pieces of identity when the offline world handed you silence. You did not become someone new. You simply outgrew the need to hide behind a screen.
But nothing you said was wasted. Nothing you felt was dramatic. You were real then. You are real now.
And every version of you deserves to stay.
The things you once loved are still waiting for you to come home.
There are versions of joy you abandoned without meaning to. Hobbies you packed away because the world convinced you that enjoyment only counts if it leads to productivity. Dreams you stopped speaking about because someone raised an eyebrow. Talents you downgraded into shame because they did not fit into efficiency.
But the things that made you feel like yourself never left. They are patient. They sit in the corners of your life like unopened letters. The piano is gathering dust. The stories you never finished. The hobbies that made you forget to check the time. They are not reminders of failure. They are invitations back to yourself.
You do not owe the world usefulness. Not everything you love must become a skill. Not everything you create must be witnessed. Some things are meant to be private. Some things are meant to exist simply because they make you feel alive.
There is still time to return to the things you loved before you learned to fear looking foolish. You are allowed to be a beginner again. You are allowed to try without needing results. You are allowed to want something simply because it feels like breathing.
Nothing you loved was wasted. Even if it never became a future, it shaped your interior. It softened you. It reminded you that life is not measured in milestones, but in the moments where you felt like a person instead of a performance.
It is not too late. You are not too late.
Hello, fellow mosaic <3
There is no finish line for becoming. No moment where the universe hands you a certificate and says congratulations, you are complete. You are not meant to arrive. You are meant to continue. Slowly. Quietly. With softness and curiosity and mistakes that do not erase you.
You are a collection of everything that ever held you. The kindness of strangers. The warmth of old songs. The laughter that broke through the heaviness. The goodbye that taught you survival. The version of you who kept going even when you did not want to. Nothing was random. Nothing was wasted.
You are not missing pieces. You are mid construction. One day, you will look back and realise you were never lost. You were gathering.
And you still are.
And if all of this made your chest feel a little too warm, a little too achy, a little too “oh god why is she reading my diary out loud,” good. Becoming is messy. Beautiful. Slow. And you’re doing it exactly right, even on the days it feels like you’re made entirely of loose threads.
For more writing that sits with you, ruins you gently, and stitches you back together with humour, honesty, and a dash of chaos — come find us at Her Campus at MUJ.
This is Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ, signing off with the soft reminder that the things you love never leave you.