Grief is so complex. It appears differently for everyone. The emotions, conditions and triggers surrounding it doesn't always show up the same way. Moreover, it doesn't always announce itself as "devastation."
It's more like a dimming, the feeling of a soft retreat from sensation, just as the world continues to keep moving. It hits you in the middle of the day while the buses still run, emails still arrive, friends asking you how you're doing — but something inside you pulls inward, conserving energy, narrowing its field of vision.
You are present, technically, yet slightly removed, as if watching your own life through glass.
I didn't know I was living in that emotional climate. Until, it hit me. I heard Harry Styles' Aperture the moment it was released. I didn't feel the theatrics of heartbreak. And it didn't make me undone. But it exposed a sense of exhaustion. I was tired in a deeper way. The kind of tired that comes from carrying unprocessed endings, unmet expectations and the quiet grief of realizing that something you once relied on has shifted, or ended, or simply changed shape.
Grief, especially the kind that follows prolonged burnout or emotional overextension, doesn’t demand spectacle. It just asks for space. It narrows your aperture.
You don’t stop loving life. You just stop letting it all the way in.
Aperture doesn’t dramatize this state. It doesn’t posture or plead. Instead, it lingers in the in-between — that suspended emotional space where nothing is resolved, but something is beginning to move. The song feels less like a declaration and more like a pause: an inhale held just long enough to decide whether it’s safe to exhale again.
Is it? I ask myself, repeatedly.
Now, in a culture accustomed to immediate transformation arcs, and glorifying revivals, there is something profoundly honest about honouring grief not as something to overcome, this time around. It's just something I'm going to have to allow to pass through at its own pace. Like a friend stopping by for a visit.
Burnout and grief often come with a quieter companion: isolation.
Not always physical isolation, but emotional distance — the sense that the world is happening somewhere else, to other people, at a tempo you no longer recognize. You attend dinners, scroll feeds, show up where expected, yet feel curiously disconnected from the pulse of it all.
There is a particular loneliness in that state. One that isn’t solved by company. Or words of affirmation. Or physical touch. It makes you wonder, have I always been the problem?
Culturally, we tend to interpret isolation as a problem to be fixed. More plans. More noise. More stimulation. But psychology tells us that withdrawal is often a protective response — the nervous system’s way of regulating after prolonged stress. The issue isn’t the retreat itself. It’s what happens if we never reopen.
This is where Aperture feels culturally precise.
The song doesn’t insist on connection. It doesn’t rush toward togetherness. Instead, it acknowledges the hesitation — the ambivalence that comes with re-entry. That moment where you’re not sure if you’re ready to feel deeply again, but you’re no longer willing to stay numb.
Listening to it, I recognized something familiar: the fear of letting life back in after you’ve learned how easily it can overwhelm you.
Isolation teaches you how to survive. It gives you comfort in being by yourself. You grow through the independence of knowing that nothing can hurt you if nothing can reach you. But we are meant to connect. And so, re-connection has been that teacher of how to live again.
But re-connection requires trust — in yourself, in your capacity to feel and in the idea that openness doesn’t automatically mean collapse. That trust is fragile after grief.
It must be rebuilt slowly.
February has always been culturally loaded — positioned as a month of romance, coupling and external validation. But for those emerging from grief or burnout, February can function as something else entirely: a threshold.
I'm not saying we have reset every single February. And we don't always have to reinvent ourselves in the glossy sense. But it's our decision point.
This year, February feels less like a demand to perform happiness and more like an invitation to experiment with openness. To widen the aperture — not all at once, not recklessly, but intentionally. Just as a way to fall in love with life all over again.
Reinvention, in this context, isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about allowing yourself to be more fully who you already are — without apology, without editing, without waiting for permission. I write about this in "Dear February: An Experiment in Falling Back in Love With Life" where I open up about how I'm running an experiment on how to fall back in love with my life all over again.
That’s the cultural shift I feel Aperture tapping into.
Across music, fashion and art, there’s a growing movement away from perfection and toward presence. Away from polish and toward truth. The appetite isn’t for spectacle. We're all looking for sincerity. For work that admits uncertainty. For people who are willing to be seen mid-process. And so that's why I'm laying everything out.
For me, reinvention this month looks like letting go of the need to be “picture-perfect.” It means allowing feelings to move through me without immediately categorizing or correcting them. It means doing things simply because they make the story richer — because life is short and meaning is often found in motion rather than mastery.
It also means trusting myself again.
Because I lost that the past year when loved ones passed away, or put myself out there, and was met with manipulation and silence. I believe that we can learn to feel deeply again without losing our footing, that we don't need to have everything resolved to participate in life and that openness is not weakness. It never was. It's simply courage in the most raw form.
This is the ethos I want Matte Equation to embody: a space where reinvention isn’t a performance, but a practice. Where people can arrive uncertain, unfinished and entirely welcome. Where exploration is valued over answers, and safety is created through honesty rather than control.
Aperture doesn’t promise clarity. Maybe it was just the aha moment I needed to allow myself to feel again. And sometimes, after a long season of grief and distance, the revelation is more than enough to start over with.
---
From Matt's Rituals:
The Function Flow Cleanser is a pause in motion. Designed to cleanse without disruption, it refreshes the skin while keeping its rhythm intact. Simple, grounding, and restorative — the kind of clean that doesn’t ask for more.
