this week's lesson: self-awareness

self-awareness is mad underrated

this week was a full-on spiritual colonoscopy

This week? Bro. This week felt like someone put my brain through a juicer and forgot to clean up the pulp. Emotionally, spiritually, existentially, intellectually, I got rinsed, spun, dried, then lightly set on fire.

And somewhere in the middle of this mental rollercoaster, one thought just kept ringing louder than everything else:

Self-awareness is the most underrated trait a person can have.

Not because it fixes anything. Not because it makes you look good. But because it saves you from turning into your worst self while thinking you're the main character of a healing arc.

So here it is. Three unrelated (but very much spiritually linked) events that cracked me open like a stress ball and showed me that, hey, maybe the most powerful thing you can do in chaos is just know who the fuck you are before you start swinging at shadows.

This ain’t a motivational post. It’s a post-mortem. Of ego. Of judgment. Of fear. Of restraint.

Grab a drink. You’re gonna need it.

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#1: the religion debate that made me the judgy one

Let’s start soft.

I was talking to my friend AM (not her real name, obviously, because I still want to be invited to makan sessions). She’s my go-to person whenever I have questions about Islam. The kind of friend who’s patient with my chaos and curious enough to engage with my borderline-blasphemous-syirik curiosity. We debate sometimes(mostly I yapp and she nods). Sometimes I accept things that don’t make sense to me because I trust that they have the context, the lived experience, the depth behind the answer. And that’s okay. It doesn’t need to make sense to me. I’m just the observer, the collector of perspectives.

Like, I have different friends for different areas of my life. One for comedy breakdowns. One for marketing rants. One for mental health spirals. One for religious deep dives. I collect humans like emotionally intelligent Pokémon.

So we were having one of our usual debates. And I threw out a question that, in my head, was totally normal:

“Aren’t you curious about other religions? Like, don’t you want to explore how they work?”

Her answer was honest(and I’m paraphrasing here). Calm. Chill:

“Not really. I already have what I need.”

And for some reason, that absolutely fried my brain. And bro. I spent the next few days lowkey judging her. Not out loud, but in my head I was like, “Seriously? That’s it? You’ve got no curiosity? No hunger to compare, contrast, zoom out, zoom in?”

The tone-deaf intellectual snobbery of someone who thinks curiosity is a moral virtue.

I replayed the convo again and again in my head. Tried to make it make sense. Tried to find some kind of deeper logic. Trying to reverse-engineer her logic. Trying to make it make sense. Trying to forgive her for being… I don’t know, so certain? While I’m here spinning like a top in existential limbo?

And then it hit me: I was projecting.

I don’t value curiosity because it’s universally good. I value it because I need it. It’s my coping mechanism. My shield. My escape route from dogma and inherited bullshit. That’s my trauma response. Not hers.

She doesn’t owe me intellectual hunger. That’s my operating system, not hers. And her peace with what she knows? That’s not ignorance. That’s alignment. Which I clearly lack sometimes.

Self-awareness moment #1: Not everyone needs to explore the world like you do. Stop making your curiosity a moral metric. It’s not.

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#2: the funeral that made me see my emotional circuit board

Fast-forward to the second incident. Funeral time.

My aunt passed away, the one who practically raised me. And my reaction? Emotionally speaking, I might as well have been waiting for a Grab driver.

That sounds cold. But I need you to understand, grief doesn’t hit me like a wave. It just unplugs me.

If I know I’m never seeing you again, my brain quietly deletes the emotional folder labeled "You." Not out of malice. Just… auto-delete. Like a security protocol. And if I do see you once in a while but you’re not central to my life or my people, I don’t remember you either. I don’t store you. I don’t investigate your background. Only people in my inner circle get memory real estate.

So at the funeral, I did what I always do. I showed up. I helped. I participated in the rites. But emotionally? I was unplugged. Not because I didn’t care, but because, in my mind, once a person is gone, all the emotional baggage and family fights and unresolved dramas die with them.

The nihilist in me kicks in real hard at funerals. It’s like, Why are we still arguing? They’re gone. None of this matters anymore. And that’s the part that oddly gives me peace.

And then it got spicy.

People grieved. But instead of closure, it felt like everyone showed up with their own emotional weapons, ready to avenge decades of emotional wounds. That broke me in a very specific way. Not because it hurt (though it did), but because I suddenly saw the machine. The system. The inheritance of pain, of scripts, of unspoken narratives that we pass down like family recipes.

Drama is rarely personal. It's just history, grief, and ego wearing your name tag.

I started bumping into people who apparently were relatives. Or knew me. Or knew someone who knew someone who changed my diapers in 1993.

They’d walk up, smile, and hit me with:

“Do you know who I am?”

And I’d say, deadpan:

“No.”

Not even pretending. Not even fake-smiling. Just straight-up, polite blankness. Because I genuinely didn’t know. And I genuinely didn’t care.

Why? Because I’d spent my whole life watching family drama implode like a badly built IKEA shelf. My own family dynamic was dramatic enough. I never had the mental space or emotional budget to subscribe to the extended universe.

And for a long time, I thought I could fix it. I thought I could be the peacekeeper. The adult in the room. But this week, I finally realized: this wasn’t about me. It never was. I was just another actor thrown into a script written long before I got here.

So I did the only thing that felt right. I stepped out. I chose peace. I chose not to react, not to correct, not to “heal” the dynamic. I chose to be Switzerland, not out of apathy, but out of exhausted clarity. Because the most self-aware thing I could do in that moment was nothing.

Not every battle is yours to fight. Especially when the war is older than you.

And this was the moment it connected back to the AM’s thing.

I don’t remember relatives.
She doesn’t question religions.
Same mechanism. Different direction.

We’re all choosing what to care about based on the pain we’re trying to avoid.

Self-awareness moment #2: Just because you don’t care doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. Know why you don’t care. Know what that says about you.

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#3: the stalker, the trauma, and the war I refused to fight

Let’s crank the chaos meter up.

I’ve been dealing with a stalker. Not just any stalker. A married stalker. With very vivid sexual fantasies. About me.

At first, I honestly thought it was a bit. You know, some weird flirt-troll-larp situation. I played along, half amused, half curious. But then the vibe changed. Lines were crossed. I saw patterns I couldn’t ignore: obsession, emotional manipulation, delusions of intimacy. What I once called “unhinged” started looking less like chaos and more like something darker: calculated, damaged, deranged.

So I did the smart thing: I pulled back. Cut contact. Ghosted.
Because in my head, I thought, She just wants attention. If I don’t give it to her, she’ll go away.

That’s what a sane brain would do.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t dealing with a sane brain.

A few days later, she sent a death threat.

Now here’s the twisted part: I wasn’t scared. I was fascinated. This was a smart person. Broken. Traumatized. But intelligent in a way that made it clear she had no emotional guardrails left. I pitied her.

I made a police report. Then another. I tried using the system. The system yawned and gave me paperwork. Because honestly, the real villain here isn’t her. It’s the system that failed her. The culture that silences women, that doesn’t have the infrastructure to handle mental health breakdowns with empathy and safety. And every step made me feel more powerless. The system didn’t care until it was too late, and even then, it cared more about paperwork than protection.

So I did what survivors do:

Eventually I said: You tried. Move on.

But trauma’s a sneaky bastard. Last month, I went to a small networking talk a friend was organizing. Nothing fancy. But as I stood at the door, I felt actual fear. Like, trauma-in-my-throat fear. I didn’t want to meet new people. I didn’t want to talk. Something in me was screaming: dude what if someone here becomes her? What if this happens again?

Self-awareness kicked in like a Dota coach:

“This is trauma. Normal response. Let’s breathe.”

So I worked on it. Slowly. I reprogrammed myself. And this week, I went to a bigger networking event (Timeleft). I was nervous. I went out for a smoke more than once to reset. Then walked back in and became my charming, curious self. I talked. I made friends. Even got couple of girls asked me out during the event and after.

And i guess, that is progress. That was win number one.

Then came win number two.
Same week. Different plot twist.

Then she came back. Again. Crossed another line. Again.

And I was ready. Plans, legal angles, tactical takedown ideas. Psychological traps. All the villain arc tools without the blood on my hands.
I was ready to fight.

But then…
After everything I’d gone through that week, the funeral, the reconnections, the debates, the lessons, I saw the loop.

This wasn’t a battle I needed to fight.
This wasn’t a villain I needed to defeat.
This was a story that would write itself with or without me.

She’s playing a game I already opted out of.

Self-awareness moment #3: Sometimes the strongest move is not playing the villain back. Just leave the story. Let it collapse without you. This too shall pass.

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closing cime.

This week kicked my sanity in the face. Multiple times. In three wildly different but spiritually linked moments, I learned one very annoying, very humbling truth:

Self-awareness doesn’t make you better. It just stops you from becoming a walking disaster with good intentions.

I judged someone for not being curious like me.
I realized I don’t give a damn about my extended family because emotional investment has a budget, and I’ve been in overdraft since 2009.
And I almost went full Batman on a stalker before remembering I’m exhausted and therapy isn’t covered by my imaginary insurance.

So I zoomed out.
Chose peace.
Not because I’m Zen.
But because chaos is seductive, and I’m trying not to be a dumbass this year.

If you’ve been feeling weird, numb, too loud, too quiet, unhinged, or like the NPC in your own origin story, you’re not broken.
You might just be becoming aware.

And yeah, self-awareness feels like shit at first.
But it’s cleaner than delusion.
And way cheaper than court fees.

This week didn’t end with me fixing anything. I didn’t heal generations of family trauma. I didn’t change anyone’s belief system. I didn’t outmaneuver my stalker in some genius court drama.

This is growth, apparently. I’m 37.
Life keeps throwing lessons like unpaid invoices.
And honestly? I definitely need premium therapy after all this shit.

I came out of this week convinced of one thing:

self-awareness is mad underrated

If you’ve been acting weird lately, go easy on yourself.

Might not be a flaw. Might just be your brain updating its operating system.

Self-awareness feels ugly in real time. But later? It’s the cleanest feeling in the world.