Your destiny might end before you reach there — the future that you so religiously and devotedly worry about. Have you thought maybe your lifeline is not traced to that point? It’s not written at all for you?

You worry about the wrong partner, but maybe marriage isn’t even in your destiny — maybe your soul will be called back before that time.

You keep thinking about exams you haven’t taken, about results that haven’t come, about degrees you haven’t earned. You plan houses, careers, jobs, wedding days, and children’s names. You imagine cities you’ll move to, people you’ll meet, milestones you’ll cross — and you lose sleep over them. You’re breaking yourself over a future that might never be yours. All those dreams might just be dust in a timeline you’ll never walk.

You worry about NEET, MDCAT, ECAT, JEE — about degrees, about careers, about children, but maybe your path ends before the results are ever declared. Maybe you’ll never wear the white coat or the engineer’s tag you dream about. Maybe you won’t be there to see your name on that merit list.

You stress over jobs you haven’t applied for, visas you haven’t gotten, and salaries you haven’t earned. You wonder if your toxic family will ever change, if you’ll ever find peace in that house, if healing is even possible. You hold onto people who left, chase closure you’ll never get, and replay conversations that no longer matter.

You cry over not being enough for someone who was never meant to stay. You want to fix everything, to be everything, but maybe you’re not meant to carry all that weight — maybe you’re not even meant to stay long enough to see it all unfold.

Why do we anchor our sanity to things that might never come to pass? Why does our breath hitch on events we’ve never lived through — and might never live through?

What if your life was never meant to hold these milestones? What if your timeline ends… right here, right now, without warning?

You keep thinking — what if you don’t make it? But what if the moment you’re living now is all there’s ever going to be? What if the future you’ve sacrificed your present for, the dreams you’ve bled for, the peace you’ve postponed — never comes? What if you’ve wasted your only time here, worrying about a life that was never yours to begin with? What if you aren’t meant to make it?

— Sadia Hakim

People were never my need.