The name Yoghurt stuck to me like a forgotten piece of gum on the sole of a shoe. It wasn’t always an insult. It started in the hazy, sugar-fueled chaos of a tenth-grade sleepover, a truth-or-dare casualty. “Yara’s too pretty,” my friend Mia had declared, her words slurred by cheap wine coolers. “She needs a goofy name to balance it out. I dare you to let us call you Yoghurt for a week.” A week turned into a month, then into a permanent label. At first, it was a joke I was in on. Then, it became a identity I couldn’t shake. It suited me, I suppose. Yoghurt is soft, easily spooned, adaptable to any flavour added to it. It sits there, waiting to be consumed.
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For most of my twenties, I was the human equivalent of that. My default setting was “Okay.” It was a breathy, accommodating sound that served as the white flag I waved at my own boundaries. It was the word that paved the path of least resistance, a path that always, always led to me being used.
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There was Mark, from my Philosophy 101 seminar. He’d leaned over in the library, his breath smelling of stale coffee, and said, “You have the most listening eyes.” It felt like a profound compliment. Our first date was him monologuing about his existential dread and his ex-girlfriend’s failure to understand him. He kissed me with a kind of angry desperation against his car door at the end of the night. His hand slid under my shirt, cold and presumptuous. “Come upstairs,” he mumbled into my neck. My skin prickled with a revulsion I didn’t feel entitled to voice. Saying ‘no’ felt melodramatic, rude. So I whispered, “Okay.”
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It was in his dim, messy apartment that I first felt the distinct sensation of leaving my own body. I watched from a corner of the ceiling as a girl named Yoghurt went through the motions, her politeness a cage she couldn’t break. He texted me once after that, at 2 a.m.: “u up?” I wasn’t, but I replied anyway. “Okay.”
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Then there was Leo, the musician. Leo was a different kind of vampire. He didn’t want just body; he wanted emotional rent. He’d call me, his voice slurry and beautiful with whiskey and self-pity, and talk about the gaping void in his soul, the cruelty of the industry, the way no one truly saw him. I’d listen for hours, a silent, devoted priestess to his pain. My reward for this emotional labour was a booty call. A summoning. A text that just said, “Hey.” And I, the ever-reliable Yoghurt, would answer. I’d pull on my jeans in the dark, drive across town, and let him use my body as a temporary patch for his loneliness. I’d lie there afterwards, feeling the emptiness in the room and in myself, and think, This is what I’m for. This is my function.
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My friends saw it. Mia, the very one who’d christened me, would grip my shoulders after a Leo incident, her eyes fierce with concern. “Yoghurt, he’s using you. He’s a black hole. He’ll suck you dry and then move on.”
I’d just shrug, a master of minimising my own hurt. “He’s just lonely,” I’d say, defending him as if he were my client. “And I don’t mind. It’s okay.”
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The currency of my worth was the attention of men who didn’t see me. I was a moon reflecting their own borrowed light, having none of my own.
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The change didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, cellular revolt. It was the cumulative weight of a thousand “okays.” It was waking up one Tuesday morning in a bed that wasn’t mine, next to a man whose name I had to grasp for, and feeling a hollowness so profound it was less an emotion and more a geological feature inside me. I looked in his bathroom mirror and saw a pleasant, pliable stranger. Yoghurt. The girl who was always there, the easy snack, the convenient ear, the warm body. A sob caught in my throat, not of sadness, but of sheer, undiluted frustration. I was so, so tired of being okay.
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The dam finally broke with Julian.
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Julian was handsome in a way that felt like a press release about himself. He had a smile that was all perfect teeth and calculated charm. He pursued me with a focused intensity that was new; it felt like being seen. For three weeks, I was swept into a whirlwind of artisanal cocktails, witty text messages, and conversations that felt, for the first time, almost reciprocal. He asked me questions and seemed to listen to the answers. A dangerous, fragile hope began to bloom in my chest. Maybe, I thought, this is different.
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We were at a restaurant with tiny, overpriced food on giant plates. The lighting was flattering, the wine was smooth, and Julian was laying the groundwork.
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“I really like you, Yoghurt,” he said, leaning forward. His cologne was expensive. “You’re so… easy to be with. Not like other women. You’re not demanding.”
The cold trickle of recognition started in my stomach. I kept my smile pinned in place. “Oh?”
“It’s just,” he continued, swirling his wine like a villain in a movie, “I’m not really in a place for anything… heavy. Labels. Meeting the parents. All that draining stuff. I think we should just keep this light, you know? Have fun. See where it goes. No pressure.”
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The speech. I knew it by heart, though the wording was slightly different. It was the preemptive strike. The setting of terms designed for his benefit alone. It was the declaration that he was lonely, yes, but only for a specific, convenient, low-maintenance kind of company. He wanted the girlfriend experience without the girlfriend. The emotional labour of a relationship with the freedom of a situationship.
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The old me—Yoghurt 1.0—would have performed the required surgery on my own expectations. I would have neatly excised any hope of commitment, swallowed the disappointment, and nodded. I would have said, “Okay. Yeah, of course. No pressure.” I would have accepted his crumbs and arranged them on a plate, pretending it was a meal.
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But as I looked at him—at his perfectly curated casualness, his smug certainty of my compliance—the new thing inside me, the hard, quiet kernel of rebellion, finally cracked open.
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I set my wine glass down. The sound was small but definitive in the space between us.
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“No,” I said. My voice was quieter than I intended, but it didn’t shake.
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Julian’s smile didn’t so much fall as it recalibrated into confusion. “No? No to what? I’m just being authentic about my emotional availability.”
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“I understand what you’re being,” I said, and the words came out clear and cool, surprising me. This new voice had a spine. “You’re saying you want the benefits of my company and my body without any of the responsibility. You want me to be on call for your fun, to be the salve for your loneliness, but to expect nothing in return. To be… convenient.”
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He stared at me, a flicker of genuine annoyance breaking through his polished facade. “That’s a incredibly ungenerous interpretation. I’m just setting a boundary.”
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“No,” I said again, and the word felt even better the second time. It was a solid thing, a brick I could hold. “You’re not setting a boundary. You’re drawing a circle that includes everything you want and excludes everything you don’t, and you’re asking me to stand politely outside of it, waiting for you to toss me a scrap of attention. That’s not a boundary. That’s a dictatorship. And I’m not a subject.”
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I stood up. The motion felt powerful. I reached for my purse, its weight a comforting anchor.
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“I’m not lonely enough for this anymore,” I said. And it was true. The loneliness I’d feel in my own company would be a palace compared to the stifling prison of his. I left enough cash on the white tablecloth to cover my share of the meal and walked out.
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The night air was cool and shocking on my skin. I braced for the familiar aftershocks—the regret, the anxiety, the fear of having been “too much.” But they didn’t come. Instead, there was a vast, echoing silence. It was terrifying in its emptiness, but it was mine. For the first time, the silence wasn’t something to be filled with someone else’s noise. It was just silence. And it was okay. Truly okay.
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The weeks that followed were a masterclass in discomfort. The habit of acquiescence was a deep, neural superhighway. My phone was a barren wasteland. The silence in my apartment was a physical presence I had to learn to live with. I felt the old, addictive itch to text Leo, to scroll through dating apps, to find someone, anyone, to inject a temporary meaning into the void.
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But I didn’t. I remembered the look on Julian’s face—not anger, but pure, unadulterated bafflement. I had broken the script. I had refused my role. And in doing so, I had become the playwright.
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My rebellion started small. I said no to a coworker who tried to dump a tedious report on my desk at 4:55 p.m. on a Friday. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird, but I held my ground. “I can’t take that on,” I said, my voice only trembling slightly. The world did not end. The coworker blinked, shrugged, and asked someone else.
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I spent a Saturday completely alone. Not lonely, but alone. I didn’t make plans. I didn’t turn on the TV for background noise. I cleaned my apartment, not as a chore, but as an act of reclamation. I scrubbed away the ghostly residue of old expectations. I cooked a meal just for myself, something decadent and spicy that no one else liked. I ate it at the table, with a placemat, savouring every bite.
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I began the slow, meticulous archaeology of the self. Who was I beneath the layers of “okay”? I discovered Yara liked documentaries about deep-sea fish. She loved the smell of petrol and old books. She was terrible at yoga but loved the feeling of stretching in the morning sun. She had strong opinions about the proper way to load a dishwasher and a secret love for cheesy 80s power ballads. These were small, silly things, but they were mine. They were the building blocks of a person.
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I went to a movie by myself. I sat in the dark, and I laughed when I wanted to laugh. I cried without worrying about who saw. The freedom was intoxicating.
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I signed up for a pottery class. My first attempts were tragic, lopsided things that collapsed under their own weight. But I kept going. There was a profound metaphor in it: centering the clay on the wheel. It required firm, steady hands and relentless focus. If you were too soft, the whole thing went wobbly and flew off. If you were too hard, you crushed it. It was about finding the exact right pressure to hold your ground. To say, This is my center. This is where I stay.
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There were moments of weakness. A late-night text from a forgotten number that I almost answered. A party where I felt the old, familiar pull to become a mirror, to reflect back whatever the person in front of me wanted to see. But the memory of that “no” in the restaurant was my talisman. It had been so small, yet it had been the lever that moved my world.
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I learned the crucial difference between loneliness and solitude. Loneliness was a hollow, aching hunger, a vacuum that begged to be filled by any passing warmth. Solitude was a choice. It was the rich, full silence after the storm of other people’s demands had passed. It was the space where I could finally hear my own voice, and I was starting to quite like what it had to say.
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Months later, I was in my favourite coffee shop, curled in an armchair with a novel. I was deep in the story, perfectly content in my own company. A man approached. He had kind eyes and a gentle demeanour.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, his voice respectful. “But I noticed you reading. I love that book. Is this seat taken?”
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The old script, worn smooth from use, flashed in my mind: the flustered, pleased smile, the immediate shuffling of my things to make room, the eager, “Okay, sure!”
I looked at him. He seemed genuine. There were no obvious red flags. But the question was no longer whether he was good enough for my company. The question was whether his company was good enough for my peace.
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I smiled, a real, easy smile that reached my eyes. “I’m actually really engrossed in this chapter right now,” I said. “But thank you for asking. I appreciate it.”
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It wasn’t a rejection of him. It was an affirmation of me. He nodded, smiled back with what looked like genuine understanding, and moved on. The world continued to turn on its axis, undisturbed.
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I took a sip of my coffee, the warmth spreading through me. I am still soft. I think I always will be. But my softness is no longer a weakness. It is not an invitation to be spooned. It is the softness of resilience, of a strength that has been forged not in fire, but in the quiet, steady, daily practice of choosing myself. I am Yara. I used to be called Yoghurt. And I am finally, completely, and gloriously, my own. The silence around me is no longer empty. It is full of my own potential. It is full of me.
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and then Add to home screen.