C.S #2

18 June 2026

The Saddest Thing I’ve Ever Written

Sometime in 2025, I joined a book club that was really more of a writers’ club; a group of people who gathered to share their work with eachother to give and get feedback.

While I had shared a few pieces of my own, I was still more a spectator than a member.
At a recent meeting, while we waited for the others to arrive, I got into conversation with a newer member. Somehow, we ended up discussing what we write, and somewhere along the timeline he asked me:

“What is the saddest thing you’ve ever written?”

As a writer, I don’t believe I have a genre. When people ask what I write, I usually say:

“I write my feelings.”

Because from a young age, when words failed me and tears consumed me, writing was where I went.

So I thought about his question for a moment, and my mind went to my 2026 vision journal. One of the things I promised myself this year was to take better care of myself. The exact heading on that page was:

Spoil Yourself.

In a world full of doom and gloom, where I constantly want to help and save everyone, I had burned through my savings while doing almost nothing for myself.

And while that may sound admirable, remember this:

Once the teapot is empty, and every cup has drunk from it and still wants more; if you have nothing left, those cups simply go elsewhere to be filled.

Under the heading Spoil Yourself, I had pasted a picture of a girl having fun and written beneath it:

“Spending your money on yourself is not selfish or a waste.”

I have known many heartbreaks in life, but thinking about that line, made something inside me truly crack.

I had to put pen to paper to remind myself to care for myself.

What a disgrace.

My whole life, I had carried responsibilities far too heavy for my small shoulders. And even as an adult, I still had the nerve to justify it:

There are children all over the world who have it worse.

Where the hell did I even learn that?

How neglected must a spirit become that it dismisses its own storms, simply because someone else is weathering harsher weather?

The conditioning of childhood survival often grows into careless adulthood.

Because no matter how many people I thought I helped or saved, if the sacrifice was myself, then the price I had paid was always too damn high.

I have no regrets. Life is a trail of fire, and I have walked through it with scars far lighter than they could have been.

But I also understand now that there were times I chose to stand in the hottest part of the flames to try burn in the place of others…

And maybe that was the saddest thing I had ever written.
Not the sentence itself, but the fact that it had to be written at all.

That somewhere along the way, I learned care was something to earn,
instead of something I was owed.

Nthabiseng Kareemah