Learning to Be Human

The first time Leena understood the weight of love, she was sitting beside her grandmother in a sunlit room filled with the scent of jasmine. Her grandmother’s hands, soft and wrinkled, were braiding her hair while telling stories about a time when letters were more powerful than phone calls, when love meant waiting, not swiping.

"You know," her grandmother said, her voice a soft tremor of memory, "love isn’t always grand. Sometimes it’s quiet, like tea steeping slowly. You won’t always notice it right away, but it changes you."

Leena was thirteen then, too young to fully understand but old enough to store those words like seeds. At the time, she was still unscarred, still whole in the way children are before the world starts pressing on their hearts.

In her early twenties, Leena met Arman. He was like morning sunlight—warm, immediate, and slightly blinding. They met at a university debate workshop, and their first conversation was more of an argument about whether happiness was a choice or a consequence. Arman said it was a choice. Leena disagreed.

"Choice belongs to those who aren’t carrying burdens," she’d said. "Some people wake up already drowning."

Arman didn’t respond right away, and that silence told her he was listening. That was when she knew she’d like him.

They were inseparable for two years—learning, growing, laughing in libraries, and walking in circles around each other’s vulnerabilities. He loved her independence. She loved his patience. They built dreams over coffee and chaos, whispered about the future in the language of maybe and someday.

But love, as her grandmother had said, wasn’t always grand. And sometimes it was tested by the quiet things—by mismatched ambitions, by silence that grew longer than comfort, by the reality that even people who love each other can walk in different directions.

The day Arman left, he didn’t take much. Just a bag, a couple of books, and the promise that he still cared. They didn’t shout. They didn’t blame. They just stood there, both aching, knowing that love was still present but not enough.

Loss didn’t announce itself with a crash in Leena’s life. It arrived like a slow leak, eroding her from the inside. At first, she kept herself busy—extra hours at work, weekend workshops, endless reading. But grief is stubborn. It waits. It crawls into quiet moments, like the pause between songs or the second before you fall asleep.

She found herself revisiting old messages, rereading the notes he’d left on her fridge, listening to songs they’d once shared. It wasn’t the grand gestures she missed, but the ordinary ones: his quiet “Did you eat?” texts, his habit of squeezing her shoulder when he passed her by.

It was during one of those long nights, curled up with a blanket and her doubts, that she remembered her grandmother again. The scent of jasmine. The hands in her hair. The voice that once said love changes you.

That’s when Leena realized something essential: Love had changed her. And now, so had loss.

In the aftermath, Leena turned inward. Not in a self-pitying way, but in search of understanding. Who was she without Arman? Without the dreams they had built together?

She started journaling every night—raw, unfiltered entries filled with questions, memories, anger, and sometimes gratitude. The pages became a mirror. Slowly, she started noticing the parts of herself she had buried in that relationship: the hobbies she had abandoned, the friends she had neglected, the opinions she had softened to avoid conflict.

One day, while browsing a bookstore she had avoided since the breakup, she stumbled across a worn copy of Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. She had read it once in college but decided to read it again. This time, it hit differently. The idea that suffering could offer meaning if you faced it rather than escaped it stirred something inside her.

That evening, Leena wrote in her journal:

"Pain changes you. But so does reflection. Maybe the point isn’t to avoid the fall but to climb out wiser."

Months passed. Seasons changed. Leena no longer waited for messages that wouldn’t come. She reconnected with old friends, started a weekly yoga class, and even joined a local poetry group. She wasn’t trying to fill the void anymore—she was trying to understand it.

She forgave Arman, not in a dramatic confrontation, but silently, while sitting under a tree in the park they used to visit. Forgiveness, she realized, wasn’t about forgetting. It was about releasing herself from the weight of what could’ve been.

And through it all, she came to one powerful realization: the most important relationship she would ever have was with herself.

Years later, Leena became a therapist. She never imagined taking that path, but pain had a way of teaching her compassion, and healing had given her purpose. One evening, a young client asked her, “How do you know if you’ve healed from something?”

She smiled gently and said, “When you stop trying to erase the past and start learning from it. When you no longer see yourself as broken, but as becoming.”

That night, she walked home through the same streets where she and Arman had once walked, but this time, she didn’t feel haunted. She felt grounded.

As she passed a jasmine bush near her apartment, the scent caught her off guard. She closed her eyes and thought of her grandmother—the one who taught her that love changes you, that loss teaches you, and that, in the end, knowing yourself is the greatest lesson of all.

Final Thoughts

In life, we love deeply, we lose unexpectedly, and we are left to piece ourselves back together. But through those pieces, through those moments of silence and struggle, we meet ourselves—our truest, most enduring selves. And in that meeting, we begin again.

That is the story of love. That is the story of loss. That is the story of the self.