The Art of Never Being the Muse, Always the Poet

There is a quiet ache in being so painfully self-aware that you begin to believe you could never be a muse, never a poet’s muse.

Forget being immortalised in a poet’s verses; you have convinced yourself that you could never be someone’s true love, either. The kind of love a man would spend his entire life waiting for, just for the chance to catch a glimpse of you. The kind that turns an ordinary woman into a lifelong longing, a passing glance into a thousand unwritten verses.

You know you are pretty. You have never been entirely oblivious to your beauty. But somewhere along the way, you began to believe that you were only pretty enough to be desired, never beautiful enough to be adored. Pretty enough to catch someone’s eye, but not enough to hold their heart. Worth a moment’s lust, perhaps, but never a lifetime’s devotion.

And so, you become the poet.

You learn to find beauty in the smallest things, to romanticise passing glances, to turn fleeting encounters into entire love stories. You give strangers the kind of devotion you secretly wish someone would give you. You write of longing as though you have been loved deeply, when perhaps all you have ever known is the art of longing itself.

You make muses out of people who would never think to make one of you.

And perhaps that is the cruelest part of it all: not that you have never been loved, but that you have begun to believe you are somehow unworthy of the kind of love you so effortlessly imagine for others.

You become so accustomed to being the one who feels, the one who notices, the one who writes, that you cannot imagine what it would be like to be the reason someone picks up a pen.

To be someone’s unfinished sentence. Their favourite metaphor. The woman whose name makes a poet forget every beautiful word he has ever known because, for once, language is not enough.

Perhaps you will always be the poet, you tell yourself. The one who watches, who wonders, who writes.

But somewhere beneath all that self-awareness, beneath the carefully constructed certainty that you are not the kind of woman a man waits a lifetime for, there is still a girl who wonders what it would feel like to be chosen without having to be extraordinary first.

To be loved without having to become a story worth telling.

To simply exist, and still be someone's favourite thing in the world.

Can I be the poem and not the poet for once !!

The admired and not the admirer?

The captured and not the capturer?

The written and not the writer?

The loved one and not the lover ?

Letters to a love that was never there

And Then, All I Had Was Myself

And then, all I had was myself.

There was no one. And all around me stretched an eerie silence, a loneliness I could neither escape nor explain. It was the kind of loneliness that followed you into crowded rooms, sat beside you at family dinners, and whispered to you even in the company of people you loved. A loneliness that made you wonder whether anyone would notice if, one day, the smile you wore so effortlessly simply disappeared.

Everyone around me seemed to have their own kind of love. They were admired, adored, and cherished in the very ways they wished to be. They were pretty—pretty in the way romantic Bollywood songs were written for them, as though every lyric about a beautiful woman had been composed with their faces in mind. As though the universe had conspired to make them the protagonists of some grand love story, with the stars in their eyes and the world at their feet.

Their expressions were noticed. Their silences were questioned. Their smallest changes in mood were enough to make someone ask, What happened? Their feelings mattered. Their absence was felt. Their presence was something people looked forward to.

And then there was me.

Sometimes, I wondered whether it truly mattered if I existed at all. Not in the dramatic sense of wanting to disappear, but in the quiet, devastating sense of wondering whether my existence made any difference to anyone beyond the space I occupied. People might appreciate having me around, might laugh at my jokes and welcome my presence, but would anyone notice the things I never said? Would anyone look beyond the smiles I carried so faithfully and recognise the exhaustion beneath them?

Even my own family could appreciate my presence without always noticing when something was wrong. They could see me sitting beside them and assume I was fine. They could hear me laugh and believe I was happy. Perhaps I had become so good at disguising my sadness that even I had forgotten how to show it without feeling ashamed.

And that was the strangest part of it all: I was not necessarily asking for grand gestures or a love that would move mountains. I did not need the world to stop spinning whenever I entered a room. I only wanted someone to notice when my world had stopped turning.

Someone who would hear the difference between my laughter and my happiness. Someone who would look at me on an ordinary day, when I had nothing extraordinary to offer, and still find something worth staying for.

Perhaps that is what I have always wanted—not to be the most beautiful woman in the room, not to be the girl every poet writes about, but to be seen. To be understood without having to translate every ache into words. To be loved in a way that does not leave me wondering whether I am, in fact, lovable at all.

Because there is a particular kind of heartbreak in being the person who notices everything about everyone else, while quietly wondering if anyone has ever truly noticed you.

And after all the poems, all the longing, all the stories I wrote in my head, I was left with the one person I had spent so long trying to convince that she was not enough.

Myself.