Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Forgets

You can have a checklist and know exactly what healthy love should look like- kind, consistent, emotionally available. You can read every self-help book, follow every therapist, and still find yourself drawn to someone whose silence feels achingly familiar.

This is your nervous system betraying you in the most heartbreaking way possible. The thing is, your brain doesn’t wire itself for happiness, but it wires itself for survival.

This is the oldest reflex we have. And if survival once meant chasing after a parent’s attention, earning love through performance, or walking on eggshells to keep the peace, then that’s what your body will recognize as normal.

Why Healthy Love Feels Wrong 

What if you met a person who ignores you? Your body will remember when love looked like having to earn someone’s attention.  Or if you meet someone who dumps their chaos on you, or keeps you guessing? You mistake unpredictability for excitement because your nervous system was trained to carry weight that wasn’t yours.

This is why the healthy person feels wrong. Not boring, WRONG. 

Your body doesn’t know what to do with someone who doesn’t trigger your hypervigilance. So ultimately, when someone shows up consistently, your nervous system stays calm, and your brain interprets this as ‘no chemistry.’

This revelation is not to say that you have bad taste. You have a nervous system that does exactly what someone trained it to do: seek what it knows, even if what it knows might slowly kill you.

The post Why Do We Fall In Love With The Wrong People?  first appeared on SUNGJEM AIER.

This silent suffering is a ticking time bomb wearing the mask of masculinity.

He was the life of every party, the one always cracking jokes, the friend everyone described as “solid.” A week after his funeral, the group chat was still haunted by silence. No one knew he was struggling. He never said a word.

His last message was a meme. His last act was ending his life. And he wasn’t the only one.

It’s frightening how we all know this isn’t an isolated tragedy.

This is a story that rings like an echo in countless stories of men bound by loyalty, yet divided by silence.

You might have come across this statistic that states men die by suicide nearly twice as often as women worldwide. And this is not because they lack strength, but because society silences them until silence becomes irreversible.

They’re taught to joke instead of cry. To brush it off instead of speak up. To hold it in, even when it’s killing them.

This reality reveals a stark truth: Your best man will take a bullet for you, offer up a kidney without blinking. But ask him to talk about how he feels… Suddenly, the room goes quiet.

This is the paradox of male friendships. The love runs deep but the language of that love is insults, sarcasm, and banter.

Why?
Why do so many men bottle up their emotions, deflect with humor, or implode in private? Maybe the answer lies in a mix of biology, psychology, and generations of social conditioning.

The Biology (and Society) Behind It All

To understand how we got here, we might first look to biology. Research shows that male and female brains process emotions differently. Men have a smaller prefrontal cortex compared to women, which influences emotional regulation.

Testosterone also plays a role in reducing the intensity of emotional responses, making men naturally more inclined to suppress rather than express. It is linked to risk-taking behavior, dominance, and aggression.

Evolutionarily, this made sense. Our ancestors needed protectors, hunters, fighters. Men were, in some ways, biologically predisposed for survival, to be less overtly emotionally expressive and more action-oriented.

But we’re not fighting sabertooth tigers anymore. And while biology offers a starting point, it’s crucial to remember that we are not merely slaves to our hormones.

Society and culture are powerful sculptors, intensely shaping how these predispositions are expressed, encouraged, or suppressed. Studies have found that boys and girls experience similar levels of emotional intensity as children, but by adolescence, boys exhibit less outward emotional expression. This shift isn’t because they stop feeling emotions, but rather because they learn that expressing them has social consequences.

We mistake silent suffering for strength, but it’s really society’s way of keeping men in emotional solitary confinement. We’re dealing with job loss, heartbreak, loneliness, identity crises, and the overwhelming weight of being “a man” in a world that often doesn’t allow him to bend.

The wiring hasn’t changed much. But the world, and our understanding of it, has. And the result of this?? An emotional bottleneck. It’s just pressure building and building with nowhere safe to go.

Raised to Be Tough, Not Tender

From the moment a boy cries, he’s told, “Don’t cry like a girl.” He’s taught that vulnerability is weakness. That sharing is soft. That asking for help is a defeat. And by the time he becomes a man, he’s mastered the art of emotional silence.

Boys learn fast: “If you show emotion, then the pack will descend.” The word “gay” itself, stripped of its meaning, becomes a slur to police their tenderness. If you show too much care, too much softness, you’re suddenly seen as less of a man.

This isn’t just fathers; mothers too, enforce these lessons. They push sons toward ‘strength,’ sanding down their edges to fit society’s mold. It rarely has anything to do with cruelty, rather, it’s generations of inherited scripts: ‘Don’t cry. Don’t flinch. Don’t need.’ 

This mocking isn’t harmless. This is textbook emotional policing. But what fuels this policing? It’s more than just “boys being boys.” If you dig deeper, you’ll find society’s allergic reaction to male intimacy. Even straight men internalize this homophobia, then wield it like a cudgel against vulnerability. This fear ensures that any deep emotional expression between men becomes suspect, forcing interactions into a narrow, “acceptable” band of masculine behavior.

Men are constantly on guard, performing a rigid version of masculinity even with those they should trust most.

It’s the unspoken rulebook of male friendships: never be too open, never feel too much.

And the irony is that these are often the same friends who would stand by you through hell but can’t sit with you in your sadness, precisely because the rulebook forbids it.

He’s fine. He’s dying inside.

In therapy, we often trace the roots of depression, addiction, even aggression in men back to one thing: unexpressed emotion. Decades of pain with no outlet.

And the worst part is that this toll extends beyond mental health. Chronic, unexpressed stress corrodes arteries and cripples immune defenses. So in other words, emotional suppression doesn’t just harm mental health, but it also chips away at the body.

Men die earlier, in part, because their stress has no outlet. Often, the only “acceptable” emotion for men to display is anger- a dangerous conduit for unexpressed sadness, fear, or shame. Furthermore, the inability for men to be vulnerable makes it difficult for them to truly receive love and support, even when it is offered. And all this does is continue perpetuating a cycle of profound isolation.

The Truth About “Toxic Masculinity”

Let’s get one thing straight: masculinity itself is not the enemy. The internet has, in part, diluted the concept of toxic masculinity, unfairly dragging basic male traits.

What toxic masculinity does is weaponize this silent suffering, and call it ‘resilience’; all the while ignoring its fatal consequences.

Emotional Orphans: The Silent Suffering of Men

Many men become emotional orphans in their own lives. Surrounded by people, but starving for connection. And we often talk about how emotionally unavailable men affect their partners. But what about their friends? Their kids? Their brothers?

When men don’t know how to emotionally show up, they become strangers to the people closest to them. Their romantic partners often become unwilling sole emotional custodians, shouldering the entire weight of their partner’s unexpressed inner world. A burden that healthy friendships are meant to help share.

This outsourcing of emotional labor can lead to resentment, burnout, and ultimately, relationship breakdowns, leaving men feeling even more adrift. They become absent in presence. And over time, even their most loyal friendships start to feel like hollow performances, shadowed by an unspoken competition or a fear of judgment that keeps true connection at bay.

Brotherhood Without The Silent Suffering

Because sometimes, the pressure to offer solutions is just another way we avoid sitting with uncomfortable feelings – our own, or someone else’s.

Unlearning the Silence

If you’re a man reading this maybe it’s time to check in on your friends. Not just with a “Yo, what’s up,” but with an “Are you really okay?” And if you’re someone who loves a man, your partner, your brother, your father, give them the space to talk. Don’t judge how or when they do. But just let them know it’s safe.

Breaking these cycles isn’t easy. It requires conscious effort:

• Ask your friend how he’s really doing and wait for the pause.
• Don’t fix. Just be there. Sometimes, presence is the only answer.
• Share something real from your own life. Vulnerability breeds safety.
• Challenge the jokes that cut too deep. You can love someone and still call them out.
• And yes, it might feel awkward at first. Do it anyway. That’s how change begins.

Male friendships don’t have to be built on silence. Emotional strength isn’t about pretending nothing affects you, it’s about facing what does and that doesn’t make you any less strong. In fact, this is the very thing that makes you whole.

Because behind every joke, every insult, every “I’m fine,” there might be a weight they’ve carried for far too long. And they’re waiting, perhaps desperately, for permission to finally set it down.

The post Man Up. Shut Up. Break Down: The Deadly Cost of Being ‘One of the Guys’ first appeared on SUNGJEM AIER.

You’ve seen it. Cinematic montages of morning coffee captioned like movie scripts, dramatic retellings about life’s mundane events, plot twists, and people stepping into their “main character era” like they just walked onto a film set. The idea is simple- romanticize your life, see yourself as the protagonist, and bask in the spotlight of your own narrative.

Sounds empowering, right? Well, not always.

What is Main Character Syndrome, anyway?

Main Character Syndrome (MCS) isn’t an official psychological diagnosis, but it’s definitely a cultural moment. It’s the tendency to see yourself as the star of the show; where everything that happens is part of your storyline, and everyone else is just supporting characters, obviously!

A little self-importance is natural. Heck, it’s even necessary, but when does it go too far? In my own understanding, perhaps it’s when your personal story arc becomes the story.

Reality with a Filter

Social media didn’t just encourage MCS, it put it in 4K resolution and everyone wanted social media to be the director of their lives. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have turned everyday existence into a performance that encourage people to document their lives like a carefully curated film reel.

It was no longer about just about sharing life’s moments, it became so much about crafting a narrative and making sure they look like something straight out of an A24 film, complete with aesthetic coffee shots, dramatic text overlays, and indie soundtrack-worthy captions.

But constantly curating your life to fit a storyline can wrap self-perception. You just end up spending too much time scripting your life, and before you know it, you are living for the aesthetic, not the experience.

When we’re too focused on being the main character, it’s easy to forget that everyone else is living an equally complicated, messy, meaningful lives too.

Main Character Energy Gets Lonely

There’s nothing wrong with adding a little flair to your life; after all, perspective shapes experience. And tbh, romanticizing your life does have the potential be all fun and games. You might even manage to convince yourself of this, but …

when everything becomes content, conversations will turn into dialogue rehearsals, experiences become photo ops, and relationships can feel transactional. The pressure to constantly be someone funny, wise, effortlessly cool, and whatever else is trending, can leave little room for just being.

When you’re always trying to fit your life into an Instagrammable narrative, the mundane parts of existence (which, let’s be honest, is most of life) start feeling unbearable.

Everyone knows that not every moment is a perfect, slow-motion, sun-drenched scene. Real life isn’t always cinematic. Sometimes it’s awkward, uneventful, or downright boring. Sometimes you spill coffee down your shirt five minutes into the day.

And that’s okay.

How to Be the Main Character Without Losing the Plot

Social media rewards a carefully curated version of authenticity, but true connection comes from embracing the unfiltered parts of life too. Studies have even linked excessive social media use to higher levels of narcissism and decreased empathy. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that shows up when people start treating others as background characters instead of fully realized humans with their own emotions.

When your desire to be the protagonist disconnects you from reality, or makes real-life relationships feel secondary to your own narrative, it might be time to take a step back. Because the best protagonists evolve, stay grounded, and (shockingly) care about others too.

You are the main character in your own life, but you’re not the only main character.

So, how do we embrace self-romanticization without getting lost in our own echo chamber?

• Acknowledge other storylines. Every person you meet has their own plot twists, struggles, and triumphs. Don’t just play a role in their lives, actually engage with them.
• Drop the script. Let go of the performance because not everything needs a highlight reel.
• Be real, not just relatable. If you’re having a deep conversation with a friend, maybe don’t pause to tweet about it.
• Appreciate the unedited version of life. Not every experience has to be aesthetic or romanticized. Sometimes, a cup of coffee is just a cup of coffee.

At The End Of The Day…

There’s nothing wrong with embracing your main character energy now and then. But the real magic happens when we recognize that we’re all protagonists in a shared world, with overlapping narratives, unexpected plot twists, and co-stars worth listening to.

Real connection is about embracing life in all its unfiltered, unedited moments. So go ahead and romanticize your life, capture the aesthetic, but don’t forget that sometimes the best scenes unfold when no one’s watching.

The post Dear Main Character, You’re Not the Only One in the Story first appeared on SUNGJEM AIER.

There’s a kind of grief we don’t talk about enough. And it’s the grief of unlived lives, of who we could have been. It lingers in the spaces between our choices, in the roads we never took, in the lives we imagined but didn’t live.

It sneaks up on you in small moments like when you scroll past someone living the life you once dreamed of, when an old ambition resurfaces out of nowhere, when you wonder, what if? It’s not exactly regret but something softer, and it’s heavy nonetheless. It’s a mix of nostalgia, curiosity, and sometimes, a little bit of sadness.

And this grief is not just personal, but cultural too. A lot of our choices never felt entirely our own. We came of age in a time that preached independence and ambition, especially for women. We were told we could be anything, do anything but in the background, tradition kept whispering reminders of what we should be. Marriage, family, stability- those age-old benchmarks that have long defined a woman’s worth. So while we reached for more, we also carried the weight of expectations that inadvertently shaped our decisions.

By mid to late 20s, we’re expected to have a steady job, an income, and a life that looks put together. But what if getting there meant giving up parts of ourselves? What if, in choosing the practical path, we had to let go of the dreams we once nurtured?

And if so, how do we live with this grief? More importantly, how do we stop mourning the lives we didn’t live and start embracing the one we have?

The ‘Job by 26’ Rule

Remember those kids in school who swore they’d be astronauts, artists, or world-famous chefs? Fast forward a decade or two, and most of them (like us) are just trying to figure out how to reply to emails without having an existential crisis.

Maybe they wanted to be an artist but ended up in a government job because you can’t eat dreams.

Maybe they swore they’d leave town, yet here they are, running the family business.

And maybe you too see yourself in them.

Most of us didn’t choose our careers out of passion. We chose them out of necessity. And now, at 28, still figuring things out feels heavier than ever, especially in a world where every teenager seems to already own a startup.

Many of us weren’t just chasing a career, we were stepping into roles as family breadwinners, cultural torchbearers, and proof of success for our parents’ sacrifices. The weight of responsibility often shaped our choices before we even realized it.

The Psychology Behind the Grief of Unlived Lives

This longing for a parallel life is more than just a passing thought, it has deep psychological roots.

The “What If” Loop: Our Brain’s Obsession with Alternate Endings

Psychologists call this counterfactual thinking. Our brain’s tendency to replay past decisions and imagine different outcomes. It’s a survival mechanism. If we analyze our past mistakes, we might avoid similar ones in the future. But when this becomes obsessive, it can trap us in a cycle of regret, making us feel like we failed simply because we didn’t choose a different path.

Neuroscience also backs this up with studies that show how the medial prefrontal cortex (a region linked to self-reflection), lights up when we think about our past choices. The more emotional the memory, the stronger the brain’s response. That’s why we feel the deepest regret when our identity – our careers, relationships, or personal goals- is on the line.

Erik Erikson’s Theory

Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development explain why this grief intensifies at different life stages.

• In our 20s and 30s (Intimacy vs. Isolation), we’re making major life decisions like career, relationships, independence. This is also the time when regret creeps in because we compare ourselves to peers who “figured it out” faster or seem more successful.
• By middle age (Generativity vs. Stagnation), we start questioning our impact. Did we build something meaningful? Did we waste time? This is where people feel the strongest pull toward “what could have been.”
• In old age (Integrity vs. Despair), all those bottled-up regrets can start to bubble over and not in a poetic, healing way. You know that one grandpa on the block who grumbles at kids for existing? Or the aunty who always looks like life personally offended her? We joke and call them hags or grumps, but honestly that could be any of us if we don’t make peace with the “what ifs.” That kind of cynicism doesn’t just come from age but are the results of emotional leftovers from a life full of should-haves and could-haves, microwaved over and over till it sours.

We Pretend We’re Fine, Then Scroll and Compare Anyway

Ah yes, the age-old villain of every TED Talk, therapist’s office, and Sunday night existential crisis- social media. That highlight reel we keep doom-scrolling through has turned into a full-blown comparison Olympics. We’re out here watching everyone’s greatest hits- job promotions, Bali vacations, baby announcements- while sitting in our pajamas wondering if switching shampoos counts as personal growth.

What we don’t see is the behind-the-scenes mess. They also pushed through bad days, wrestled with silent doubts, and made compromises to get where they are. And yet, it’s so easy to believe everyone else made all the “right” choices while we accidentally took a nap during life’s roadmap briefing. No wonder this stuff feeds our grief; especially the grief of the life we never lived.

Rewriting the Grief: Finding Meaning in Your Current Life

So, how do we stop circling the what-ifs and start moving forward? How do we release the lives we didn’t live and fully embrace the one we’re in?

It starts with reframing regret- not as a sign of failure but as proof that we cared. That we had dreams. That we were capable of imagining different possibilities for ourselves. And that, in itself, is a beautiful thing.

1. The Myth of taking the “Right” Path

One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that there was one perfect path, and we missed it. But life isn’t a linear story with a single correct script. It’s a collection of choices, circumstances, and chance.

If you’re a Marvel fan like me, maybe you’ve had this thought too- the multiverse theory. Somewhere out there, another version of you chased her passion, moved to a new city, or married someone else. But here’s the thing we don’t consider: even in that timeline, she has regrets too.

Every choice comes with trade-offs. We romanticize the lives we didn’t live because we don’t see the behind-the-scenes: the doubts, the sacrifices, the struggles. But they’re always there. Just hidden behind a prettier filter.

2. Reframe Regret : What Did Your Choices Give You?

Instead of mourning what you lost, ask yourself: What did I gain?

Sure, you didn’t become an artist, but maybe you found stability and a way to support your family.

You didn’t move abroad, but you built a community where you are.

You didn’t follow your teenage dreams, but you discovered new ones along the way.

We call this benefit-finding– the practice of recognizing positive outcomes from past decisions, even if they weren’t what you originally planned.

It’s not about toxic positivity or pretending everything’s perfect. It’s about shifting your focus from “what I missed” to “what I gained.”

When we reframe our past decisions through this lens, we stop seeing them as mistakes and start seeing them as meaningful stepping stones. Because even the so-called wrong turns had something to offer.

3. Flip the Script on Your Story

The stories we tell ourselves about our past shape how we feel about our present. If you constantly replay your life as a series of missed opportunities, you’ll always feel like you fell short. But if you see it as a journey- one with detours, unexpected lessons, and second chances, it becomes a story of growth.

You’re not “too late” for anything.
There’s no invisible timeline you need to catch up to.
This is your life and you’re allowed to move through it at your own pace.

4. Find Ways to Honor Your Grief

Just because you didn’t take a certain path doesn’t mean you have to bury that part of yourself forever. Maybe you can’t go back and redo your 20s, but you can still:

• Take that art class.
• Visit the place you once couldn’t stop thinking about.
• Write, dance, create- whatever it was you once loved.
• Mentor someone who’s walking the path you once considered.

The dream doesn’t have to die, it can just grow up with you.

5. Letting Go of the Need to “Prove” Yourself

A lot of our grief comes from feeling like we need to show the world we made the right choices. That we have something to show for our decisions. But true contentment doesn’t come from external validation, but it comes from internal peace.

As Erikson’s theory suggests, we reach true life satisfaction when we stop trying to compare, compete, or prove, and instead find meaning in what we have.

And if you ever feel like you “should be further ahead” by now, remind yourself:

You are not a failure for taking a different path.
Your worth isn’t measured by a timeline or a title.
You are allowed to be proud of the life you’ve built, even if it’s not the one you imagined.

You Are More Than Your Grief

The grief of who you could have been is real. But so is the beauty of who you are now. Life was never about ticking all the right boxes. It’s about stumbling, learning, growing, and learning to hold space for both the dreams we lost and the person we became instead.

And if you ever find yourself looking back, wondering what could have been, just remember:

The version of you who made those choices was doing the best they could with what they knew.
The version of you today still has time to create, explore, and redefine what fulfillment looks like.
And the version of you in the future will thank you for choosing to be present, instead of living in the past.

The post The Grief of Who You Could Have Been: Rewritten first appeared on SUNGJEM AIER.