How W Read Ourselves

📖 How We Read Ourselves
By Haroon
In the quiet corner of the café, Marla sat hunched over her notebook, sipping lukewarm espresso and tracing her pen along the creases of the page. The words were hers—at least she believed they were. Her handwriting, curled and deliberate, danced across the paper in a way that felt too poetic to belong to her in real life.

She read aloud, softly:
"The rain never asked if we wanted its sorrow. It just fell—unapologetic and infinite."

It had been a line from a short story she’d written last winter, while grief clung to her skin like a second coat. Back then, her mother had just passed. She’d turned to writing not for healing, but for decoding. Her own feelings were encrypted beneath metaphors and half-rhymes. She wasn’t trying to be a writer. She was trying to be a translator—for her own soul.

That’s how Marla began to read herself.

We often think that reading is a passive act—a gaze into someone else's world. But when we read what we have written, even if it’s messy or mundane, we discover how we truly sound when we’re not performing for anyone else. We catch ourselves in raw language, in unfiltered emotion, in choices we didn’t know we made.

Today, Marla was doing just that. She’d brought with her three notebooks from different points in her life. The blue one from college, when her love life could’ve been a musical if heartbreak came with choreography. The black one from her first job, full of bitterness about cubicles and how the printer always jammed when she needed it most. And the red one—the newest—where thoughts came slower, but carried more weight.

She opened a page from the blue notebook:

"He said my laugh was beautiful. I believed him, but only until Tuesday."

Back then, she read her stories like fiction. Now she read them like evidence.

What had she learned about herself from these scattered musings and midnight scribbles?

- She loved metaphor because directness frightened her.
- Her sadness always borrowed imagery from nature.
- She rarely wrote about anger, though she felt it often.
- She used humor to undercut vulnerability.
- She always wrote in present tense when the memory still hurt.

Each discovery chipped away at the hardened facade she’d built around herself. She wasn't just learning how she wrote—she was learning who she had been in each moment.

Nearby, a teenage boy typed away on a laptop. His screen glowed with half-sentences and YouTube tabs. Marla wondered what he’d think of himself five years from now if he reread today’s texts. That was the strange truth: we don’t just write to communicate—we write to timestamp who we are at a precise moment in time.

Back in her notebook, she found a list she had written one New Year’s Eve.

*"Things I want in the next year:
– Peace without numbness
– Laughs that don’t feel borrowed
– Less apologizing for existing"*

At the time, those goals had felt distant, possibly naive. But reading them now, something shifted. She smiled. Because she hadn’t realized she had achieved most of them. Not perfectly. Not neatly. But enough. Enough for progress.

We don't always need a mirror to see ourselves—we need our own words. They hold up a lens that is sometimes kinder than memory and sometimes harsher than truth. When we re-read ourselves, we are forced to confront our evolution. And sometimes, the person we used to be is not someone we miss—but someone we feel compassion for.

Marla closed her notebooks, paid for her espresso, and walked outside. The sky was a soft gray. Not quite moody, not quite bright. Just… readable.

She imagined her future self sitting in another café years from now, thumbing through today’s words. What would she learn? What details would time blur, and what metaphors would remain true?

She didn’t know. And that was the beauty of it.

Because we are always writing ourselves—even when we aren’t aware of it. Through text messages, social media posts, shopping lists, diary entries, and notes to loved ones. We leave behind a trail of thoughts that one day become stories. And when we choose to read them—not to critique, but to understand—we begin to stitch together the shape of our inner life.

So Marla did the only thing that made sense.

She opened to a fresh page and wrote,
"Today, I didn’t feel brilliant. I just felt human. And maybe that’s enough."

Start writing...