I know it well. I grew up in it. I was raised to believe in Bhagwan Swaminarayan, and for most of my life belief came to me the way language comes to you I didn’t choose it, I absorbed it. Nobody sat me down and made a case. Nobody had to. God was simply part of the furniture of the house, like the tulsi plant and the smell of the kitchen in the evening.

And here is the thing I want to say clearly at the start, before anyone decides what kind of person is writing this: I still believe. I have not become an atheist. I have not stopped folding my hands. Something in me still reaches for something.

But I have questions now. And the questions are not going away.

It started with a boy who wouldn’t stop asking!!

My boyfriend is the kind of person who does not accept a sentence just because it was said in a serious voice.

He asks me, “Do you believe in some energy?”

I say yes. Obviously. There is something. There must be something.

And he says, “Okay. What energy? Describe it. Where is it. What does it do. What does it want. How do you know.”

And I sit there with my mouth open, because I have never in my life been asked to describe the thing I have believed in since I was three years old.

That is what he does. He doesn’t shout at me and he doesn’t mock me. He just keeps asking the next question, and the next, and at some point, I realised that I had been carrying a belief around for twenty-something years the way you carry a locked box someone handed you never once opening it to check what was inside.

He isn’t trying to take God away from me. But he has made it impossible for me to be lazy about God. And honestly, I don’t know if I can forgive him for that yet.

The questions I can’t answer!

These are his. Now they are mine too.

If God exists, and God is good, and God is watching why is the world like this?

Not “why do bad things happen sometimes” I mean the specific, unbearable things. Why does a two-month-old baby get raped. Why does a ninety-four-year-old woman get raped. Why do the ones who cannot run, cannot speak, cannot even understand what is happening to them why are they the ones it happens to?

Why is an animal, which has never sinned, never lied, never even had the capacity to disobey a commandment it was never given, tortured for someone’s entertainment?

Why does injustice work so reliably in one direction? Why does it so often fall on the people who already have the least?

And the one that hurts the most, because I have seen it with my own eyes: Why are some of the most religious people the cruellest people I know? People who will not eat onion and garlic, who fast on the right days, who touch the feet of the right elders and who will humiliate a servant, beat a wife, disown a daughter, and sleep perfectly well that night. If faith makes you good, why does it so often not?

“It’s karma”

This is the answer I was given. This is the answer everyone is given.

It’s karma. She must have done something. He must have done something.

So I ask: what karma did a two-month-old baby have?

And they say: from a past life.

And here is where the whole thing collapses for me. What past life? I don’t remember it. She doesn’t remember it. Nobody remembers it. What kind of punishment is a punishment for a crime you cannot recall, committed by a person you cannot identify, in a life you have no evidence you lived?

If I punished a child for something they had no memory of doing, you would call me a monster. You would take the child away from me.

So think about what we are actually saying when we say “it’s her karma.” We are saying God runs a justice system with no trial, no evidence shown to the accused, no memory of the offence, and no possibility of appeal. We are defending God by making Him crueller than any human court would be allowed to be.

I don’t think people realise that when they defend God this way, they are insulting Him.

The thing about Shivaji and Swaminarayan that I can’t unsee!

Here is the question that got me scolded the worst.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj lived in the 1600s. Bhagwan Swaminarayan was born after him, in 1781. Two men, in the same land, less than two hundred years apart.

Open a history book about Shivaji’s time. You will find wars, forts, betrayals, strategy, politics. Human beings doing human things. You will not find demons. You will not find magic. You will not find a single documented supernatural event that historians take seriously.

Then you come to Swaminarayan’s era later, closer to us, better documented, more literate and suddenly the accounts are full of miracles, possessions, evil spirits, the supernatural.

So I asked, out loud, at home: Why did devils and magic only start existing when it was convenient?

Why is the miraculous always in the story, never in the record? Why does it thin out the closer you get to a camera?

I was not being clever. I genuinely wanted to know. There might be an answer. Someone might be able to explain it to me properly and I would listen.

Instead I got shouted at.

“This is what happens when we educate her”

That was the sentence. That is what my questions earned me.

Not an answer. Not “beta, let me explain.” Not even “I don’t know, but this is why I still trust.” Just anger, and then: this is all because we let you study.

I want to sit with that sentence for a moment, because I think it is the most revealing thing anybody in my family has ever said to me.

They did not say my question was wrong. They said my ability to ask it was the problem.

You only respond that way when you are protecting something you’re not sure will survive the conversation. If the answer were solid, my education would be no threat at all it would just be a chance to show me how solid it is. Anger is what fills the space where an answer should be.

That was the moment something changed for me. Not because I decided they were wrong about God. Because I realised they didn’t know either. They had been handed the same locked box, and they had never opened it, and my questions were making them hear the rattle.

Osho, and the permission to doubt!

Around this time I started reading Osho Rajneesh. I know he is a controversial man I am not here to defend his life, his cars, or his commune. I’m talking about one idea of his that reorganised my head.

His argument, roughly, is this: a belief you inherited is not yours. It is borrowed. You are wearing someone else’s clothes and calling it your skin. Real trust, if it comes at all, has to be earned by walking through your own doubt and doubt, therefore, is not the enemy of faith. It is the price of admission to it.

That was the first time anyone had ever suggested to me that questioning God might be a form of taking Him seriously, rather than an insult to Him.

Because think about it honestly. If God is real, He can survive my questions. He made the brain that generates them. A God who cannot withstand a twenty-two-year-old girl in Gujarat asking, “but why the baby?” is not much of a God.

The one who cannot survive my questions is not God. It’s the version of God I was handed. And maybe that version needed to break.

So where does that leave me!

Not an atheist. I want to be honest about that, even though I know it would make this essay cleaner if I picked a side.

I still feel something. When I am frightened, my hands still come together on their own. There is still a part of me that suspects the universe is not indifferent. Maybe that is genuine perception. Maybe it is just childhood, wired deep. I cannot tell the difference from inside my own head, and I’ve stopped pretending I can.

But I cannot go back to the belief I had before, and I don’t want to. That belief was comfortable because it was unexamined. It required nothing of me. It had never once been asked to explain a two-month-old baby.

What I have now is smaller and colder and, I think, more honest: I don’t know. I don’t know if there is a God. I don’t know if the cruelty of the world is evidence against Him or a test I’m too small to see the shape of. I don’t know why the magic left the history books. I don’t know what the energy is.

I only know that “don’t ask” is not an answer, and that the adults who raised me got angry instead of answering, and that anger has never once made anything true.

So I want to ask you, and I mean it I’m not asking to win:

If you believe: what is your answer to the baby? Not karma. A real one. I will read every reply.

If you don’t believe: was there one specific question that broke it for you, or did it just wear away slowly?

And if you were also the child who asked the wrong question at the dinner table what happened to you afterwards?

And then, somewhere between the airport security line and the first unfamiliar street, you realise something: you have spent so much of your life being afraid of things that haven’t even happened yet.

Travelling solo teaches you that you are capable of handling more than you give yourself credit for.

For women especially, I think there is something incredibly powerful about going somewhere by yourself. We are constantly taught to be careful, to wait for someone, to have someone with us, to tell someone where we are going, to not stay out too late, to not wander too far, to think twice before doing things alone. Of course, some of that caution is necessary. The world isn’t magically safe just because we want it to be.

But there is a difference between being careful and being afraid to live.

And sometimes, you need to experience a little bit of freedom to understand that difference.

I didn’t start with travelling!

Funny enough, I didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly become the girl who could travel to another country alone.

I started much smaller.

First, it was little day outings by myself. Going somewhere just because I wanted to, without waiting for a friend to be free. Then it became going to cafés alone. Sitting there with my coffee, my headphones, maybe a book, and realising that nobody was actually looking at me wondering why I was alone.

Then I started going to the movies alone.

And honestly, the first few times felt weird. There is something about buying one movie ticket that makes you feel like everyone in the cinema is somehow aware that you’re by yourself. Spoiler: nobody cares.

Eventually, it stopped feeling weird.

A café became normal. A movie became normal. Going shopping alone became normal. Taking myself out became normal.

And then I thought, if I can spend an entire afternoon alone in a city I’ve lived in, why can’t I do the same somewhere I’ve never been?

That’s how it slowly grew.

Day trips became solo travel. Familiar places became unfamiliar ones. And something that once made me nervous became one of the most freeing things I’ve ever done.

I think that’s why I don’t believe you have to suddenly become “brave” enough to travel alone. Start tiny. Take yourself out for coffee. Go to a bookstore. Watch a movie. Have lunch somewhere. Take a day trip.

You slowly realise that being alone isn’t something you need to escape from.

You realise you don’t need someone beside you to have a life!

I think one of the biggest things solo travel teaches you is how to enjoy your own company.

When you’re travelling with people, every decision becomes a group decision. Where are we eating? What time are we leaving? Do you want to go there? Are you tired? Should we go back?

When you’re alone, you just go.

You wake up when you want. You take the train because you want to take that train. You spend an hour sitting in a café because the sunlight looks pretty. You change your plans halfway through the day because you suddenly want to see something else.

Nobody is waiting for you.

Nobody is asking you to explain yourself.

And weirdly, that feels so liberating.

You start discovering the tiny things about yourself that you never really noticed because you were always adapting to somebody else’s preferences. Maybe you love walking around cities with your headphones on. Maybe you love museums more than you thought. Maybe you actually enjoy getting lost. Maybe you’re the kind of person who wakes up at 6 a.m. just to watch a sunrise.

You begin to meet yourself outside of the version of you that exists around other people.

And I think that’s beautiful.

You learn that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing

This was probably one of the biggest lessons for me.

Being alone can feel uncomfortable at first. There are moments when you see a group of friends laughing at a restaurant and suddenly you wonder why you’re sitting there by yourself. There are moments when something beautiful happens and your first thought is, I wish someone was here to see this with me.

But then you realise that being alone doesn’t automatically mean being lonely.

Sometimes you can be surrounded by ten people and still feel completely misunderstood.

And sometimes you can be sitting alone on a train, watching an unfamiliar landscape pass by the window, feeling completely at peace.

Solo travel gives you space to sit with yourself without constantly trying to distract yourself. You get to hear your own thoughts. You get to figure out what you actually want. You get to exist without performing for anyone.

And honestly? We don’t get enough of that.

You become braver in ways you don’t even notice

The first time you navigate an unfamiliar metro system alone, you feel like you’re solving a national security case.

The first time you order food in a place where you don’t speak the language, you suddenly become an expert at pointing and smiling.

The first time you realise you’ve taken the wrong bus and somehow need to figure out how to get back, you panic for five minutes and then… figure it out.

And that’s the point.

You figure it out.

Every tiny problem becomes proof that you can trust yourself.

You stop needing everything to go perfectly before you feel confident. You learn that confidence isn’t knowing exactly what to do. Confidence is knowing you’ll be okay even when you don’t.

That lesson stays with you long after the trip ends.

You stop waiting for people!

This might be my favourite part.

How many things have we postponed because nobody was available to do them with us?

That restaurant you’ve wanted to try.

That movie.

That city you’ve wanted to visit.

That museum.

That little weekend getaway.

That dream you’ve been talking about for years.

Sometimes we’re so used to having someone beside us that we accidentally turn our lives into waiting rooms.

I’ll go when my friends are free.

I’ll travel when I have a partner.

I’ll do it when someone comes with me.

Maybe next year.

But what if next year never looks exactly how you imagined it?

I’ve realised that I don’t want to keep waiting for somebody else’s availability to experience my own life.

I want to go.

I want to see things.

I want to sit in cafés in cities I’ve never been to, watch movies even when nobody else is free, take random trains, explore streets I’ve never seen, and collect little memories that belong entirely to me.

Solo travel taught me that my life doesn’t have to pause just because nobody else is ready to come along.

And somewhere along the way, you become free!

Not completely free. Not fearless. Not invincible.

Just a little freer.

Free from needing constant validation.

Free from worrying about whether you’re doing things the “right” way.

Free from the idea that you need someone else to make your life exciting.

Free to change your plans.

Free to sit quietly.

Free to make mistakes.

Free to discover yourself without everyone’s opinions sitting on your shoulder.

I think every woman deserves to experience that feeling at least once.

Not because travelling alone is some magical cure for everything. It isn’t. And you absolutely should take safety seriously, research where you’re going, share your itinerary with someone you trust, and trust your instincts.

But don’t let fear convince you that you are incapable.

Because you might come back from that trip with photographs, souvenirs and a hundred stories.

Or you might come back with something much more important:

proof that you can take yourself somewhere you’ve never been and still find your way home.

And maybe that’s what solo travel really gives you.

Not just a new place to remember, but a new version of yourself to come home to.

So if you’ve been waiting for someone to come with you, maybe this is your sign to stop waiting.

Start small.

Take yourself to that café.

Go watch that movie.

Take the day trip.

Then maybe, one day, book that flight.

Get slightly lost.

Figure it out.

And for once, let your life be yours.

Because you deserve that beautiful.

I was drowning in my own thoughts.

Not the dramatic kind of drowning you see in films, where someone thrashes and calls for help. This was slower, quieter, more insidious. The kind where you perfect the art of looking alive while something essential rots from the inside. I smiled at work genuine smiles, even. I answered texts within reasonable periods. I showed up to social gatherings and said the right things. I performed the role of a living person so convincingly that nobody suspected the truth: I had become a ghost in my own life, going through the motions of an existence I no longer felt connected to.

The trauma had accumulated like winter snow layers upon layers, compressing into something dense and immovable. Family wounds I never healed, passed down like inheritance, teaching me that love came with conditions and pain. Friendships that broke me in ways I didn’t know where possible, leaving me convinced that I was too much or not enough, never quite right. Insecurities so deeply rooted I thought they were personality traits fundamental truths about who I was rather than lies I’d learned to believe. And underneath it all, whispers. Constant, persistent whispers that suggested maybe the world would be better off without me in it. That whisper became such a constant companion I gave it a name. I let it live in my head rent-free.

I was dying inside. Not metaphorically. Literally, I was disappearing.

When Someone Chooses You Back to Life

And then he arrived.

Not like a knight in shining armour I’ve learned that narrative is often incomplete and disappointing. He didn’t swoop in and save me with grand gestures or promises. He arrived more quietly than that. He arrived like oxygen. Like the moment you stop holding your breath and your body remembers what it felt like to expand. Like someone turning on a single lamp in a room you’d lived in darkness.

He didn’t fix me. I need you to understand this, because it’s the most important thing. He didn’t fix me. I’m not some broken thing that his love glued back together. But he held space for my healing in a way I had never experienced before. He became the still point in every storm I created, and I created so many storms. He was the patient presence when I spiralled at 2 AM, convinced I was too damaged to love. He was the steady hand when I was certain the ground beneath me would give way and pull him down with me.

I remember one night in particular. I was angry really, truly angry. The kind of anger that comes from years of accumulated pain, from never feeling safe from believing I wasn’t worth protecting. I was furious at everything: at him for no reason, at myself for existing, at the world for its cruelty. I said terrible things. I said things designed to hurt, to push him away, to confirm what I believed was inevitable that he would leave when he finally understood how broken I was.

He didn’t leave.

He listened to every harsh word. He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t yell back or shut down. He simply sat with me in my rage and said, “I’m not going anywhere. I know you’re hurting. I’m still here.”

And when I asked him for the hundredth time, my voice shaking with a doubt that ran so deep it was almost spiritual “Do you really love me? Are you sure? Because I don’t understand why you would “he would look at me with such absolute certainty in his eyes and say, “Yes. Always. I’m sure.”

He never wavered. Not once.

There’s a particular kind of magic that happens when someone believes in you while you’re still convinced, you’re unlovable. There’s a transformation that occurs when someone consistent shows up, day after day, through every ugly crying session, every panic attack, every moment when you’re certain you’re too much. That consistency becomes a mirror. Eventually, you start to see yourself the way they see you.

The calm partner became my greatest teacher. In every situation where I wanted to explode, he chose gentleness. In every moment I spiralled into catastrophizing, he chose perspective. In every instance I doubted his love, he chose reassurance. His thousand percent effort met my fifty percent belief, and slowly, I learned to meet him halfway. Then three-quarters of the way. Then almost all the way.

The Quiet Revolution of Choosing Love

People speak about love with such careless, dramatic language. I would die for you; they sing in songs that have played a thousand times. I would move mountains. I would walk through fire. I would sacrifice everything.

We’ve romanticized the grand gesture, the ultimate sacrifice, the willingness to end for someone else. And while that sentiment isn’t wrong, I learned something deeper something that changed everything by watching him show up, day after ordinary day.

I want to live for you.

That’s what I realized. Not die. Live.

Because here’s the truth nobody tells you: dying for someone is easy. It’s dramatic and final and requires only a single moment of courage. You close your eyes, you make your choice, and it’s over. But living for someone? That’s the hard part. Living for someone means showing up when you’re exhausted. It means choosing patience over frustration when you’ve been asked the same question for the hundredth time. It means staying calm when someone you love is spiralling. It means believing in them when all evidence including their own words suggests they’re unlovable. It means choosing to love over and over again, in small ways, until those small ways add up to a life saved.

That’s the real revolution.

His thousand-percent effort when I was only fifty percent sure I deserved to be alive. His unwavering calm when I was pure chaos and confusion. His ability to look at my wounded responses and separate them from my true heart to see that my anger wasn’t directed at him, but at the pain I carried. His refusal to let me become my worst moment.

These weren’t grand gestures. There were no rose petals or surprise trips or public declarations. These were quiet, consistent, utterly ordinary miracles. A handheld in the dark. A voice that never raised, even when justified. Showing up when I expected abandonment. Believing when I couldn’t.

In the quiet moments when I was lying in bed unable to get up because anxiety had wrapped itself around my body like chains, and he brought me water and simply sat beside me I learned what love actually means. It’s not poetry. It’s presence. It’s not words. It’s the choice to stay.

He taught me how to breathe in situations where every instinct told me to suffocate. Through his example, I learned that panic isn’t a life sentence it’s a storm that passes. He showed me that spiralling isn’t permanent, that the darkness I felt wasn’t the truth of who I was, that I could survive the night.

And most importantly, through his presence alone, he demonstrated something I needed to know with my whole being: I was worth sticking around for. I was worth his effort, his patience, his calm. And if he could see that in me, if someone I loved and trusted could look at me really look at me in all my brokenness and choose to stay, then maybe, just maybe, I could begin to see it too.

The Lesson the Universe Wrapped in Human Form

There’s a timing to everything in life, and I believe maybe I’m sentimental, maybe I’m just someone who needed to believe this to survive that some people are meant to find you exactly when you need them most. Not because they complete you or make you whole. Not because they are your “other half” or your soulmate or any of those incomplete narratives we’re sold.

They arrive because they carry the exact tools your specific heart needs to remember how to live.

And if you’re reading this if you’re somewhere in that fog I knew so intimately, in that place where you can’t remember what it felt like to want to stay, I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me sooner:

Do not be afraid of love because it might leave. Choose love anyway, because it has the power to resurrect you.

I know vulnerability feels dangerous. I know opening your heart feels like handing someone a weapon they could use against you. But here’s what I learned: staying closed is also dangerous. Drowning in your own thoughts is dangerous. Believing the whispers that tell you the world would be better without you that’s the most dangerous thing of all.

At least with love, there’s a chance. At least with someone who stays, there’s a possibility of being pulled toward the surface. And sometimes, that possibility is enough to change everything.

The love that heals isn’t the kind that sweeps you away from your problems. It’s not the kind that promises to fix everything or take away your pain. That love is a fantasy.

The love that actually heals is the love that sits beside you in your darkest moments and refuses to move. It’s the love that stays calm when you become a storm. It’s the love that looks at your worst self and chooses you anyway. It’s the love that believes in you when you can’t believe in yourself, and believes long enough and loud enough that eventually, you start to believe too.

This love exists. I’m not telling you a fairy tale. I’m telling you, my truth.

It saved my life.

And more than that, it taught me how to save my own life.

A New Kind of Living

I’m not healed in the way people imagine healing. There’s no dramatic before-and-after photo. There’s no moment where I woke up and everything was suddenly fixed. I wish the healing worked that way like flipping a switch from broken too whole. But it doesn’t work like that. It’s messier and slower and infinitely more complicated than any metaphor can capture.

Some days are still hard. Some mornings I still wake up with anxiety before I wake up with joy. Some nights the old patterns try to creep back in, the old whispers attempt to convince me that I don’t belong here. I still have moments when the weight feels too heavy and the darkness feel too deep.

But I am transformed in ways that matter.

I breathe differently now. Deeper. With intention. I look in the mirror, and I don’t hate the reflection staring back at me. I look in the mirror and see someone worth staying for not because I’m perfect or fixed or healed in the way the world wants me to be, but because I’ve learned that my life has value even when I’m broken. Even when I’m struggling. Even when I’m not okay.

That’s the real gift he gave me, and more importantly, that’s the gift I learned to give myself permission to stay. Permission to try again. Permission to believe that my existence matters, that my survival means something, that there are people in this world who are better because I’m here.

The suicidal thoughts? They don’t whisper anymore. They’re gone not erased or forgotten but transformed into something that no longer has power over me. Not because he magicked them away with his love, but because through his consistent presence, I learned that I could survive the darkness. That the pain is temporary. That endings aren’t always the solution sometimes; the solution is learning how to live with what you’re carrying.

I can’t hear those whispers over the sound of him laughing at something ridiculous. Over the feeling of his hand holding mine through another difficult day. Over the simple, profound fact that I’m still here. Still breathing. Still learning to live not just survive but live.

And I’m choosing love. Not because it’s easy. It’s not. Love is work. Love is showing up when you’re exhausted. Love is vulnerability when protection feels safer. Love is trusting when you’ve been broken.

But I’m choosing love because it works.

Not because it promises to fix everything or make all the pain disappear. It doesn’t. It can’t. But because it makes the pain bearable. It makes the darkness less absolute. It gives you a reason to stay when staying feels impossible.

Love saved my life.

And more than that it taught me how to save my own.

A Letter to Anyone Still in the Dark

If you’re reading this and you’re still in that fog if you’re drowning in your own thoughts and can’t remember what it felt like to want to stay, I want to speak directly to you.

You are not meant to leave this world. I don’t care what your brain is telling you right now. I don’t care how convincing the darkness sounds or how logical it all seems. That darkness is a liar, and I know this because I listened to it for so long.

Choose love anyway. Choose it before you think you’re ready. Choose it while you’re still afraid. Choose it especially when it feels impossible.

And choose it for yourself first. Choose to love yourself enough to stay. Choose to love your life enough to fight for it. Choose to believe that the pain you’re in right now is temporary, and that your death would be permanent.

Someone is waiting for you. Maybe it’s the person you haven’t met yet. Maybe it’s a friend who doesn’t know how much they need you. Maybe it’s a family member who would never recover from losing you. Maybe it’s someone who will read your story someday and recognize themselves, and because you stayed, they’ll stay too.

You matter. Your existence has ripples you can’t even see yet.

Stay for those ripples. Stay for the possibility of love. Stay for the ordinary, everyday miracles that will change your life.

Stay.

If you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out. Your life has value, even when you can’t feel it. Speak to someone: a therapist, a crisis line, a trusted friend. The darkness you feel right now is not permanent, and you deserve the chance to experience the kind of love that brings you back to life.

You matter. You are meant to stay.

Holly is the fourth novel centred around Holly Gibney, the private investigator first introduced in Mr. Mercedes. King has said Holly was originally supposed to be a minor character and then essentially stole the story from him. It is extremely easy to see why. By this book, Holly is no longer the nervous, socially awkward woman hovering at the edge of someone else’s story. She is the story, and thank God for that, because the woman has enough problems already. The novel begins in the middle of the pandemic. Holly has just attended her mother’s funeral over Zoom when Penny Dahl contacts her about her missing daughter, Bonnie. Holly initially has every reason to leave the case alone, but obviously she doesn’t, because apparently the one thing Holly is incapable of doing is minding her own business when someone needs help.

As she investigates Bonnie’s disappearance, she starts connecting it to other missing people, and then we meet Rodney and Emily Harris, which is when this book completely loses its mind. Because Rodney and Emily Harris are retired professors. They are elderly. They live in a nice house. They have spent their lives in academia. They look like the kind of couple who would complain about parking at the university and have extremely strong opinions about tea. They are also cannibals. Not “metaphorically devouring people.” Not “society is cannibalistic.” They literally kidnap people and eat them.

The book introduces this horror with Jorge Castro, a creative-writing teacher who is tricked into helping the Harrises with their wheelchair-accessible van, only to wake up imprisoned underground. The first thing Emily offers him is raw liver. And this is where Stephen King demonstrates his particular talent for making something horrifying sound almost offensively ordinary. It isn’t just, “There is a man trapped in a cage.” It becomes, “Here is your food.” Except the food is raw liver. And there is no explanation. Just eat it. Or don’t eat. Honestly, if I were ever kidnapped and somebody offered me raw liver, I would simply accept that my life had taken a very dark turn.

But the raw liver is not random. This is where the Harrises become even weirder. They genuinely believe their cannibalism has a biological purpose. They believe consuming human flesh, particularly organs such as the liver and brain, can help restore their ageing bodies and relieve their various illnesses. Their entire murder operation is dressed up in this bizarre pseudo-scientific logic about health, regeneration, and bodily deterioration. Basically, they invented a terrifying version of a wellness retreat. Everyone else is saying, “Have you tried yoga?” or “Have you tried meditation?” Rodney and Emily are essentially saying, “Have you tried human organs?” And Stephen King commits to this idea so hard that there are moments where the Harrises sound less like serial killers and more like two people passionately discussing the newest miracle anti-ageing treatment.

At one point, the Harrises’ language becomes completely detached from the humanity of the people they have kidnapped. One of the most disturbing recurring ideas is the word “livestock.” That is what the victims become to them. Not people. Not neighbours. Not sons or daughters. Livestock. King keeps bringing you back to that language, and it honestly bothered me more than some of the graphic descriptions. Gore tells you what happened, but “livestock” tells you how the killer thinks. That word explains the entire horror of the Harrises: they have mentally removed the humanity of their victims so completely that the person downstairs is no longer a person to them. They are a resource.

And then King makes it worse by giving the Harrises an entire vocabulary of ritual around eating people. There is a scene where meat and liver become almost religious to Emily, with the line, “Meat is sacrament. Liver is sacrament.” Excuse me? I came here to read about a detective finding a missing girl. Why am I suddenly attending Cannibalism 101? The sentence is so weird because of how seriously it is delivered. Emily isn’t embarrassed by what they do. She isn’t questioning it. To her, this has meaning. It is ritual. It is almost holy. She has taken something monstrous and built a belief system around it, which somehow makes everything even more disturbing.

Then there is Ellen Craslow, one of the victims, who is vegan. And I genuinely did not expect one of the funniest details in this entire nightmare to be an elderly couple trying to force a kidnapped woman to eat liver while she refuses because she is vegan. Even in a situation where she is literally imprisoned by cannibals, Ellen still has her principles. She doesn’t suddenly become someone else because the circumstances are terrifying. There is something almost darkly funny about the sheer stubbornness of it. Imagine being kidnapped by cannibals and still being like, I said what I said. But it also matters because King keeps reminding us that these victims are not just bodies waiting to become food. They have preferences, personalities, beliefs, and histories. The Harrises want to reduce them to meat, but the novel keeps showing us the human being underneath that dehumanising language.

Then we get Bonnie, and the story becomes much crueler. She is a missing teenage girl, and the Harrises’ treatment of her is one of the places where the book becomes genuinely painful. They force her through their bizarre feeding process, and she understands something that the Harrises refuse to say plainly: she is never leaving the house alive. Rodney tries to give her explanations about research and health and everything else they have constructed to justify themselves, but Bonnie isn’t stupid. She knows. That is one of the things King does well here. The victims understand the horror before anyone else can rescue them from it.

The Harrises are terrifying because they don’t behave like movie villains. They are not constantly screaming. They are not dramatically announcing their evil plans. They have conversations. They eat. They sit around the house. They watch television. They argue. They worry about their health. They complain about getting older. And then they go downstairs and check on the person they intend to murder. That normality is what makes them horrifying. They don’t believe they are monsters. They have convinced themselves they are conducting a kind of experiment, and when people can build enough logic around what they are doing, anything can become acceptable to them.

And then there is the raspberry sorbet.

Of course there is the raspberry sorbet.

Because Stephen King cannot simply write one horrific thing. He must put several horrific things in a blender and then serve them with dessert. At one point, the Harrises eat raspberry sorbet mixed with Peter Steinman’s brain. I don’t even know how Stephen King came up with that combination. What brainstorming session produces: cannibalism, brain, dessert, raspberry sorbet? But the absurdity is what makes it memorable. You have this image of an elderly couple sitting peacefully in their home, having dessert like every other retired couple in America, except their dessert contains a dead man’s brain. That sentence should not work. It absolutely does.

And Stephen King keeps doing this throughout Holly: placing the grotesque next to the mundane until the mundane itself becomes creepy. There is food. There is television. There are university departments. There are writing classes. There are conversations about ageing. There are funerals. There are pandemic restrictions. And underneath all of it, there is a basement where people are being treated as food. Sometimes I think the most frightening thing King does isn’t showing you the blood or the body. It is showing you how easily these people can return to ordinary life afterwards.

Holly is also not supernatural horror, which is another reason I found it so unsettling. The horror comes entirely from human beings. There is no monster hiding in another dimension, no supernatural explanation that lets you tell yourself this could never happen. These are people who have made a series of choices and then justified those choices until the choices became normal to them. And that is much scarier. At least with Pennywise, you know you’re dealing with a demon clown. With Rodney and Emily, you could theoretically meet people like this at a university faculty meeting. You could have tea with them. They could seem perfectly respectable. You would never know what was happening downstairs.

That is also where Holly becomes more than just a disgusting cannibal thriller. King is deeply interested in what ageing does to people. The Harrises are not only cannibals; they are terrified of getting old. They are dealing with illness, physical deterioration, and the slow realisation that their bodies are no longer what they once were. Instead of accepting mortality, they become obsessed with defeating it. Their solution is obviously: eat people. Which is horrifying, but there is an idea underneath it that is quite sad. People are terrified of becoming less useful. Terrified of becoming sick. Terrified of losing their independence. Terrified of death. The Harrises take that fear and turn it into something monstrous.

Holly, meanwhile, is dealing with another kind of loss. Her mother has died. She is grieving. She is isolated. She is navigating the pandemic. And she is still trying to figure out who she is without the person who shaped so much of her life. That is why Holly’s character matters so much here. The book is technically a thriller about a missing girl and two serial killers, but emotionally it is also about people trying to live with things they cannot control: death, ageing, grief, illness, and change. Holly’s answer to all of that is not to pretend those things don’t exist. She just keeps going.

And that is what makes her such an interesting protagonist. Holly is anxious. She is awkward. She overthinks. She struggles socially. She sometimes doubts herself. And she still investigates. Still asks questions. Still notices things. Still puts herself in danger for someone she barely knows. She is not fearless. She is brave anyway. I think that is why I liked her so much. King doesn’t suddenly turn her into a polished, action-hero detective just because she is the protagonist. She remains Holly. She remains uncomfortable, vulnerable, and strange, and somehow that makes every good decision she makes feel even more impressive.

Of course, because this is Stephen King and peace was never an option, Holly eventually ends up inside the same basement cage. Yes, the detective investigating the missing people becomes one of the missing people. At this point I was yelling at the book: HOLLY. GIRL. PLEASE STOP GETTING YOURSELF INTO THESE SITUATIONS. But Holly does what Holly does. She observes. She waits. She uses what she has. She doesn’t suddenly become superhuman. She survives by being herself, which is the most satisfying thing about the ending.

What makes Holly especially interesting as a thriller is that it isn’t really a traditional “who did it?” mystery. We already know who did it. King gives that away early. The question becomes how Holly will figure it out and, more importantly, how long the Harrises can get away with it. Instead of waiting for a giant reveal, you’re watching two timelines slowly crash into each other. The Guardian called it more of a “whydunit” than a whodunit, and that is exactly what it feels like. You know the monster; you just don’t know when it will be caught.

And while all of this is happening, King is also writing about writing. Which sounds ridiculous considering we have spent most of this review discussing human brains in raspberry sorbet, but Holly has a surprisingly strong thread about creativity. Jorge is a creative-writing teacher. Emily has connections to the writing department. Jerome is drafting a book. Barbara is an aspiring poet. Olivia Kingsbury becomes an important mentor figure. There are conversations about why people write, what stories are for, and how creativity can be a way of processing things that otherwise become poisonous. That felt very Stephen King to me. The whole novel is full of people trying to get poison out of themselves in different ways.

Holly investigates because someone is missing. Barbara writes because she needs to say something. The victims fight because they want to survive. The Harrises kill because they cannot accept their own mortality. And King writes horror because apparently making us think about death isn’t enough unless he also gives us a recipe involving someone’s liver.

The pandemic setting adds another layer to everything. Covid is not simply mentioned once and forgotten; it shapes the atmosphere of the story. Holly attends her mother’s funeral virtually. Characters worry about exposure and vaccines and masks. The strange isolation of that period sits over the entire novel. King captures that feeling of the world becoming unfamiliar, of ordinary routines suddenly feeling dangerous, and of grief becoming harder to process because normal ways of mourning have been taken away. And then, because that wasn’t enough darkness, he puts two elderly cannibals in the middle of it.

What I ultimately loved about Holly is that it constantly refuses to stay in one genre. It is a thriller, a detective story, horror, a grief story, partly a story about ageing, partly a story about writing, and partly a portrait of America during Covid. And somewhere in there Stephen King found time to make an elderly couple eat human brains with raspberry sorbet. That man has range.

Would I call Holly perfect? No. There are moments where the political commentary becomes very obvious, and some of the side plots could probably have been tighter. The book is long, and King is absolutely not the kind of writer who believes every sentence needs to move the murder investigation forward. Sometimes he wanders. Sometimes he gives you a character’s entire life story when you were perfectly happy waiting for someone to discover the basement. But honestly, I think that wandering is part of why I liked it. The characters stop feeling like chess pieces and start feeling like people. And when something horrible happens to them, you actually care.

That is the difference.

The gore works because there is a person underneath it.

So yes, I started reading thrillers because of Holly. I came for the mystery. I stayed for Holly. I stayed for the horrifyingly weird villains. I stayed because every time I thought, surely Stephen King cannot make this scene any more disgusting, he apparently took that as a personal challenge. Somewhere between the missing girl, the basement cage, the liver, the “livestock,” the bizarre sacrament of meat, the elderly professors with their anti-ageing cannibalism, and the cursed raspberry dessert, I realised something: I may actually be a thriller girl.

Which is honestly a terrible thing for my future reading list.

Stephen King, I have one request: please keep Holly safe. And maybe, just for one book, let her have dinner without someone being eaten.

Also, I am begging everyone reading this: do not read Holly while eating. Especially anything involving liver. Especially anything involving sorbet. And definitely do not read the words “raspberry sorbet” the same way again, because Stephen King took a perfectly innocent dessert and permanently attached a human brain to it in my imagination.

And apparently that is how Stephen King got me. He didn’t just scare me. He made me care.

Then he gave me brain sorbet.

★★★★★ 4.5/5

Would I recommend it? Absolutely especially if you enjoy crime thrillers that are willing to get genuinely disgusting and psychologically strange. Just maybe don’t read the dinner scenes while eating.

Content warning: graphic violence, murder, cannibalism, captivity, grief, racism, homophobia, Covid-19, and disturbing descriptions of human remains.

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And you go quiet. Not because they’ve solved anything, but because you’ve just learned something about the distance between you. They think there is a switch. They think somewhere behind your eyes is a small lever marked THINKING, currently jammed in the ON position, and that you have simply been too lazy or too dramatic to reach over and flip it. You know there is no switch. You’ve been looking for it for years. What’s behind your eyes is closer to a tide, or a song stuck on repeat, or a room where the light stays on no matter how many times you hit the wall.

The strange, almost unfair truth is that both of you are half right. Overthinking really does hurt you the research on this is brutal and unambiguous. But the instruction to stop it is, mechanically speaking, one of the worst pieces of advice a human being can receive. It’s not just unhelpful. In controlled conditions, it actively backfires. Let me show you why.

The bear you were told not to think about!

In 1987, the Harvard social psychologist Daniel Wegner ran an experiment so simple it sounds like a children’s game. He sat participants in a room, asked them to speak their thoughts aloud for five minutes, and gave them a single instruction: do not think about a white bear. If a white bear crossed their mind, they were to ring a bell.

The bells rang constantly. On average, participants thought about the white bear more than once a minute despite trying not to. But the more revealing part came next. When those same participants were later told they could think about the white bear, they thought about it more often than people who had never been asked to suppress it at all. Wegner called this the rebound effect, and he built from it his theory of ironic processes: when you try to push a thought out of your mind, part of your mind must keep checking whether the thought is gone. That checking mechanism keeps the thought warm, accessible, alive. The act of suppression becomes the engine of intrusion.

This is what your partner is asking you to do. Not to think differently to not think. And the harder you comply, the more your brain must monitor your compliance, which means holding the very worry you’re trying to drop in a state of permanent readiness. Wegner found the effect worsens under stress, fatigue, and time pressure, which is to say: exactly the conditions under which people are usually told to stop overthinking in the first place.

There was one wrinkle in that 1987 study worth remembering, because it will matter later. Wegner added a third condition where participants were told to think about a red Volkswagen whenever the bear appeared. It didn’t stop the bear from showing up during suppression, but it did erase the rebound afterwards. Not suppression. Redirection. The mind cannot be emptied on command, but it can be given somewhere else to stand.

Why the loop feels like work!

The cruelty of overthinking is that it doesn’t feel like a malfunction while you’re inside it. It feels like diligence. It feels like the responsible thing to do like you are preparing, protecting, solving.

There’s a reason for that. The late Penn State researcher Thomas Borkovec spent decades studying chronic worry and arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion: worry is largely a verbal activity. It happens in sentences, not images. And because it stays in language, it partly mutes the body’s emotional response to whatever is being feared. Borkovec’s cognitive avoidance model holds that worry is negatively reinforced it dampens the vivid, felt, physiological experience of dread, so the mind keeps returning to it like a hand to a bruise it prefers over the wound underneath. When he and Lizabeth Roemer surveyed people with generalised anxiety disorder about why they worried, the beliefs were consistent and sincere: worrying helps you find ways to avoid bad outcomes, helps you prepare, helps you solve problems. People with and without anxiety disorders both endorsed these beliefs. Overthinking has excellent PR.

But the accounting doesn’t work out. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema’s response styles theory, first proposed in 1991 and tested for the next three decades, showed that people who habitually respond to low mood by turning inward and analysing it why do I feel this way, what does this say about me don’t emerge with answers. In a longitudinal study by Just and Alloy, people who were not depressed at baseline but reported a ruminative response style were significantly more likely to experience a depressive episode over the following eighteen months than people who reported distracting themselves. Nolen-Hoeksema’s 2008 review with Wisco and Lyubomirsky summarised the accumulated evidence bluntly: rumination deepens depressed mood, amplifies negative interpretations of ordinary events, impairs problem-solving rather than improving it, delays action, and this is the part nobody warns you about erodes social support over time.

So, the loop advertises itself as preparation and delivers paralysis. Your partner has watched this happen. That’s the part of their frustration that is real.

Not all thinking is the same, and this is the whole ballgame!

Here is where the research stops being depressing and starts being genuinely useful because the answer was never less thinking. It was a different kind.

Edward Watkins at the University of Exeter spent years teasing apart why repetitive thought sometimes helps and sometimes destroys. His processing mode theory identifies two modes the mind can run in. The abstract mode is generalised, evaluative, and detached from specifics; it lives on why questions. Why does this always happen to me. Why can’t I be normal. What’s wrong with me that he took six hours to reply. These questions feel profound and go nowhere, because they have no floor every answer opens a trapdoor to a deeper, more damning one.

The concrete mode is anchored in specifics: what happened, in what order, what you felt, what you could do next. It lives on how questions. How did this unfold, step by step. How exactly am I feeling right now. How would I handle the first ten minutes of the conversation.

Experimental work bears this out with unnerving consistency. Compared with concrete thinking, abstract processing has been shown to reduce people’s ability to solve social problems (Watkins and Moulds, 2005) and to increase emotional reactivity to stressors (Moberly and Watkins, 2006). Watkins and Moberly’s concreteness training study in 2009 found that dysphoric individuals trained to think more specifically showed reductions in depressive symptoms. And in a 2011 randomised controlled trial published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Watkins and colleagues added rumination-focused CBT a therapy that targets the style of thinking rather than its content to treatment as usual for forty-two people with medication-refractory residual depression. Remission rates in the group receiving the rumination-focused work were reported at around 62 per cent, against roughly 21 per cent for treatment as usual, with the effect statistically mediated by change in rumination itself.

Read that again, because it reframes everything: the intervention that worked did not ask anyone to stop thinking. It taught them to change gear.

What “just stop” actually does to the person hearing it

Now the relational half, which is the half that hurts.

In 2011, Chad Shenk and Alan Fruzzetti published a study in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology that should be taped to the inside of every couple’s front door. They put participants through a stressful maths task and then gave them either validating responses that makes sense, I can see why this was hard or invalidating ones. They measured not just self-reported feeling but heart rate and skin conductance. Participants who received invalidating responses showed significantly higher negative affect, higher heart rate, and higher skin conductance over the course of the session. Those who received validating responses showed a decline in heart rate.

Invalidation is not a mood. It is a physiological event. When your partner tells you to stop overthinking, your body responds the way it would to a threat which means the very state they were trying to talk you down from is now measurably worse than before they spoke.

The pattern replicates and extends. A study by Greville-Harris and colleagues in 2016 found that after being invalidated in an experimental setting, around eighty per cent of participants declined to take part in further research invalidation doesn’t just raise arousal, it produces withdrawal. Research using the Perceived Invalidation of Emotion Scale has found that feeling your emotions have been dismissed predicts psychological distress even after controlling for your own emotional reactivity, your own regulation strategies, your self-compassion and your emotional intelligence. In other words, how the people around you respond to your feelings predicts your distress over and above everything you’re doing internally to manage it. And a 2024 dyadic study of 240 couples found that perceived emotional invalidation from a partner was associated with psychological distress for both men and women, with knock-on effects for relationship satisfaction.

Which means the sentence stop overthinking is not neutral. It is a small, well-meant act of erasure, and it lands in the nervous system as one.

But your partner is not the villain here

If I stopped there, this would be a comfortable essay, and comfortable essays are usually lying by omission. So: the person on the other side of this is not simply insensitive.

Amanda Rose’s work on co-rumination, beginning with her 2002 paper in Child Development, identified a genuine paradox. Extensively rehashing problems with someone close to you going over them repeatedly, speculating about causes, dwelling on the feelings makes the relationship feel closer. It also predicts higher levels of depression and anxiety in the people doing it. Closeness and corrosion, delivered in the same conversation. Talking it out endlessly is not automatically therapy; past a certain point it is rumination with an audience, and the audience is being metabolised by it too.

There’s a further mechanism worth naming honestly. Research building on Nolen-Hoeksema’s model has found that rumination predicts excessive reassurance seeking the repeated need to be told you are loved, that it’s fine, that they’re not leaving and that reassurance seeking in turn predicts the generation of new interpersonal stress. The loop doesn’t just imagine relational threat. Given enough time, it manufactures a modest amount of the real thing. If your partner sounds tired, it may be because the two of you have had this conversation forty times and it resolved on none of them, and they have concluded wrongly, but understandably that the problem is the talking.

Both of you are trying to end the same suffering. You’re just reaching for opposite tools, and neither tool works.

What to reach for instead

None of the evidence points toward a switch. All of it points toward redirection, specificity, and distance three things you can do.

Start with distance, because it’s the cheapest. Ethan Kross’s lab at Michigan has spent years on what they call distanced self-talk: silently referring to yourself by your own name or as you rather than I while thinking through a difficult experience. In a 2017 study by Moser, Kross and colleagues in Scientific Reports, this shift reduced a neural marker of self-referential emotional reactivity within the first second of viewing distressing images and, crucially, it did so without recruiting the effortful cognitive-control machinery that most emotion-regulation strategies burn through. Thinking Sara is scared that she said the wrong thing rather than I am scared moves you into the position of someone advising a friend, and we are all reliably wiser about other people’s lives than our own.

Then change the gear. When you catch the loop running, notice whether the question you’re chewing on begins with why. If it does, translate it into how or what: not why am I like this, but what specifically happened, in what order, and what is the first small thing I could do about it. Watkins’s entire clinical programme is built on this substitution, and it is learnable rather than innate.

Then, if the thinking still needs somewhere to live, give it a room instead of the whole house. Borkovec’s stimulus control technique validated as far back as Folensbee and Borkovec’s 1984 work and still used in CBT for generalised anxiety asks people to postpone worry to a designated half-hour at a fixed time and place, and to return to the present when it arrives outside that window. This is not suppression, which is why it survives Wegner’s critique. You are not telling the thought it cannot exist. You are telling it that it has an appointment. That distinction is the difference between a white bear that rebounds and a red Volkswagen that redirects.

And for the person watching someone they love to disappear into their own head: the alternative to stop overthinking is almost embarrassingly simple. Name the feeling as legitimate before you touch the content of it. That sounds exhausting. I get why that landed badly. The validation research suggests this measurably lowers arousal heart rate, skin conductance, the actual body and a settled body can think concretely in a way an activated one cannot. Then, only then, offer a gear change: do you want to work out what you’d say to her, or do you want to go for a walk and leave it for now? Both are real help. Neither requires a switch.

Overthinking is not a character flaw, and it is not a choice, but it is also not a life sentence. It’s a habit of mental gear-selection that the evidence says can be retrained slowly, unglamorously, and never on command. If someone tells you again tonight to just stop, you might try telling them the truth: that there is no switch, but there is a dimmer, and you would very much like some company while you learn to find it in the dark.

If the loop has become constant, or is pulling you toward hopelessness, this is worth taking to a therapist rather than a comments section. Rumination is one of the most treatable targets in modern CBT, which is a genuinely hopeful sentence, and I’d rather leave you with it than with a tidy ending.

Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that humanity had never created different religions.

There was no Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism or any other religious identity.

Not because one religion had defeated the others.

Not because someone had erased them.

They simply never existed.

Instead, humanity had one shared belief:

Earth is sacred.

The rivers are sacred.

The forests are sacred.

The people around you are sacred.

Your body is sacred.

The person praying differently from you is sacred.

And your temple?

It is everywhere.

The soil underneath your feet.

The person sitting beside you on the bus.

The ocean.

A hospital.

A kitchen.

A forest.

A child's laughter.

You don't have to travel thousands of miles to find God.

You don't even have to enter a building.

Your temple is never far away.

Would we have become kinder?

Would we have become less divided?

Or would human beings simply have found another reason to divide themselves?

Because perhaps religion isn't the only thing humans use to create “us” and “them.”

Caste proves that.

What if you were born without a social category?

Imagine being born into a world where nobody told you that your family was higher or lower than another.

Nobody looked at your surname and decided your worth.

Nobody decided which work was “pure” and which work was “dirty.”

Nobody told you whom you could marry.

Nobody decided that touching someone's food, entering someone's home, or sharing someone's well was unacceptable because of the family you were born into.

You would simply be born.

Human.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

For millions of people across generations, however, caste has not been an abstract concept. It has shaped occupation, marriage, social status and access to resources.

The Indian Constitution explicitly abolished “untouchability” through Article 17. Yet the fact that a practice can be legally abolished does not mean its social consequences disappear overnight.

And that raises a difficult question:

If two children are born with exactly the same capacity to dream, why should the accident of their birth determine the respect they receive?

We like to believe we choose who we become.

But how much of our lives are chosen for us before we are even old enough to choose?

And then there is religion.

Religion has given humanity some of its most beautiful things.

Art.

Music.

Architecture.

Charity.

Community.

Philosophy.

Hope.

It has helped people survive grief and find meaning when life felt unbearable.

But religion has also been used by humans to justify exclusion, persecution and violence.

And this is where the thought experiment becomes uncomfortable.

What if there were only one religion?

Would there be less discrimination?

Perhaps.

But perhaps not.

Because humans have always been remarkably creative when it comes to deciding who belongs.

If religion disappeared tomorrow, would racism disappear?

Would caste disappear?

Would nationalism disappear?

Would class disappear?

Would sexism disappear?

Probably not.

We might simply invent another hierarchy.

That is perhaps the most frightening part of this thought experiment.

Maybe humanity's biggest problem has never been that we have too many gods.

Maybe it is that we keep finding reasons to believe that some people are more worthy than others.

What history tells us

Consider the caste system.

Despite constitutional protections and decades of social reform, caste-based discrimination continues to appear in areas such as marriage, housing, education and employment.

Inter-caste marriage remains relatively uncommon in India, and research has repeatedly shown how strongly family and community expectations can influence marriage choices.

Ask yourself:

If love is supposed to be personal, why does society feel entitled to approve the caste of the person we love?

And then consider another example.

In the United States, racial segregation was legally dismantled through major civil-rights reforms, but the effects of generations of segregation did not simply vanish when the laws changed.

Economic inequality, residential segregation and unequal access to opportunity continued in different forms.

The lesson is uncomfortable:

Changing the rule does not automatically change the mindset.

So if we created one universal religion tomorrow, would the world instantly become peaceful?

I doubt it.

Because the human tendency to create boundaries would still be there.

But imagine if Earth were sacred.

Imagine teaching children:

“Don't litter because the Earth is your temple.”

“Don't hate someone because their ancestors prayed differently.”

“Don't humiliate someone because of their caste because the person you're humiliating is part of the same sacred world as you.”

“Don't destroy a forest for convenience because that forest is not separate from you.”

Imagine if the greatest religious pilgrimage wasn't a journey to a particular city.

It was restoring a polluted river.

Planting a forest.

Feeding someone who was hungry.

Protecting a child.

Caring for an elderly stranger.

Cleaning the street you walk on every morning.

Imagine if our most sacred places were the places where we cared for one another.

Would our priorities change?

Would there still be discrimination?

Probably.

Because discrimination doesn't require religion.

People discriminate because of skin colour.

Caste.

Gender.

Nationality.

Language.

Class.

Disability.

Appearance.

Education.

Money.

Even accents.

Humans can turn almost anything into a hierarchy.

So perhaps the question isn't:

“Would one religion have solved everything?”

Perhaps the better question is:

“Why do we keep needing an ‘other’?”

Why do we need someone below us to feel above someone?

Why does another person's difference threaten our identity?

Why does belonging sometimes require exclusion?

And why, after thousands of years of philosophy, scripture, science and civilisation, are we still struggling with the incredibly simple idea that another human being's life matters as much as ours?

What if God had never asked us to separate?

This is where I find the thought experiment most beautiful.

What if every religion had somehow contained the same central message?

Love people.

Feed people.

Protect the vulnerable.

Don't exploit the weak.

Care for the Earth.

Forgive.

Be kind.

Don't make another person's suffering invisible.

Would we still have fought over whose version of God was correct?

Maybe.

Because humans are complicated.

We don't only inherit beliefs.

We inherit identities.

And sometimes we defend those identities even more fiercely than we defend the values those identities were supposed to teach us.

Perhaps that is the paradox.

We created religions to help us understand something bigger than ourselves.

And then sometimes we became so attached to the labels that we forgot the thing that was supposed to be bigger than us.

Maybe the temple was always here.

Imagine a world where a child doesn't learn:

“These people are different from us.”

They learn:

“That's another human being.”

Imagine growing up knowing that the Earth doesn't care about your surname.

The ocean doesn't ask your caste before giving you rain.

The sun doesn't ask your religion before giving you light.

A tree doesn't check your passport before giving you oxygen.

Nature has never participated in our hierarchy.

We did.

And maybe that's why I keep returning to this question:

What if Earth were the only religion?

Would we finally understand that we were never separate?

Would there be less discrimination?

Would caste lose some of its power?

Would religious violence become impossible?

Would people feel less threatened by difference?

Would we become happier?

Or would we simply create another hierarchy and give it another name?

I don't know.

And perhaps that's the point.

This isn't really a question about whether one religion is better than another.

It's a question about us.

About our instinct to divide.

About the identities we inherit before we are old enough to question them.

About the categories we place people into.

About how easily “different” becomes “less than.”

And maybe, just maybe, the most radical thing we could believe isn't that everyone should worship the same God.

Maybe it's this:

You don't have to worship the same God as me for your life to have the same value as mine.

Perhaps the temple was never supposed to be a building.

Perhaps it was never supposed to belong to one group.

Perhaps it was always the Earth beneath us.

And perhaps we have been standing inside it the entire time.

What do you think?

If humanity had one religion or no religion at all do you think caste, discrimination and religious conflict would genuinely decrease?

Or would human beings simply find something new to divide themselves over?

I genuinely want to know what you think.

-Bansi

There was a time when I was the girl who could walk into a room and somehow leave with five new friends. I talked too much, laughed too loudly, told people everything, made plans, showed up, checked in, remembered little things, and loved people with my whole heart.

I was an extrovert.

And I still am.

I think.

Because somewhere along the way, friendships ended. People I thought would be permanent became people I had to learn how to live without. Some friendships didn't end dramatically. There wasn't always a final argument or a clear goodbye. Sometimes people simply became strangers after knowing the most intimate versions of you.

And somehow, those endings changed me.

Not completely.

But enough.

I became more comfortable being alone.

I stopped telling everyone everything.

I started thinking twice before getting attached.

I learned that just because I would show up for someone at 2 a.m. didn't mean they would do the same for me.

I learned that some people can know your entire story and still decide they don't want to be part of the next chapter.

So I became closer to myself.

And honestly, there is something beautiful about that. I know myself better now. I know what makes me happy. I know when something doesn't feel right. I know how to spend an entire day alone and still enjoy it. I can go somewhere by myself, eat by myself, travel, sit with my thoughts, and not feel like I need another person to make my life feel complete.

But sometimes I wonder if becoming close to yourself is also what happens when you're tired of being misunderstood by everyone else.

Because I'm still the same girl.

I still get excited when I like someone.

I still care too much.

I still remember tiny details people probably forgot they ever told me.

I still replay conversations in my head.

I still notice when someone's tone changes.

I still wonder if I did something wrong when someone becomes distant.

I still give people more chances than they probably deserve.

I still love loudly in a world that has taught me to be careful.

That's the complicated part.

You can become more independent without becoming less sensitive.

You can learn to enjoy your own company and still desperately want someone to stay.

You can have boundaries and still have a soft heart.

You can know your worth and still cry when someone you loved chooses not to see it.

I think that is what nobody tells you about healing.

Healing doesn't always turn you into someone who doesn't care.

Sometimes it simply teaches you how to care without completely abandoning yourself.

And I'm still learning that.

There are days when I wish I could be one of those people who can just let things go.

Someone doesn't reply? Fine.

A friendship ends? Life goes on.

Someone misunderstands me? Whatever.

But I'm not built like that.

I feel things.

A lot.

Sometimes embarrassingly a lot.

A friendship ending can make me grieve like I've lost a piece of my life because, in a way, I have. When you love people deeply, you're not just attached to the person. You're attached to the memories, the routines, the inside jokes, the future you imagined, the version of yourself that existed around them.

So when they leave, you don't only miss them.

You miss who you were with them.

And maybe that's why I've become so close to myself.

Because when people left, I was the one who remained.

I had to learn how to sit with myself after the phone stopped ringing.

I had to learn how to make plans without waiting for someone else.

I had to learn that being alone isn't the same thing as being unwanted.

I had to learn that losing people doesn't automatically mean I wasn't enough.

And perhaps most importantly, I had to learn that my softness isn't something I need to punish myself for.

For the longest time, I thought feeling everything was my weakness.

Why do I care this much?

Why do I get attached?

Why do I remember everything?

Why can one sentence stay in my head for days?

Why can someone else's absence change the mood of my entire week?

But maybe there is another way to look at it.

Maybe feeling deeply means I experience life deeply too.

Maybe the same heart that gets hurt easily is the heart that notices sunsets, remembers someone's favourite snack, gets ridiculously excited about a new place, cries over a sentence in a book, gets attached to songs, finds meaning in tiny moments, and loves people in a way that makes them feel seen.

I don't want to lose that part of myself just because some people didn't know how to handle it.

I don't want heartbreak to make me cold.

I don't want failed friendships to convince me that everyone leaves.

I don't want disappointment to turn me into someone who never lets anyone in.

I want to become wiser without becoming harder.

I want boundaries without walls.

I want independence without pretending I don't need anyone.

I want to remain the girl who laughs too loudly.

The girl who talks to strangers.

The girl who gets excited easily.

The girl who loves too much.

The girl who feels everything.

Just with a little more wisdom about where she places that love.

Maybe that's what growing up has been for me.

Not becoming a completely different person.

Just learning that my heart deserves discernment.

Not everyone deserves access to it.

Not everyone who enters my life gets to stay.

And not every goodbye needs to become proof that something is wrong with me.

Some people are chapters.

Some are lessons.

Some are homes for a while.

And some are simply people we loved, deeply and genuinely, who weren't meant to walk all the way with us.

I am still an extrovert.

I'm just an extrovert who has learned to enjoy her own company.

I'm still sensitive.

I'm just learning not to make every change in someone else's behaviour a reflection of my worth.

I'm still someone who feels everything.

I'm just trying to stop apologising for it.

So, to the girls who feel everything too deeply:

Please don't become smaller just because someone couldn't hold all of you.

Don't convince yourself that caring is embarrassing.

Don't confuse being soft with being weak.

And don't let the people who hurt you become the reason you never experience the people who will love you gently.

You don't have to stop feeling deeply.

You just have to learn where your depth belongs.

Because one day, someone will meet that softness and not make you regret giving it.

And until then, there is nothing wrong with coming home to yourself.

After all the people who left,

you are still here.

And maybe that is the most beautiful thing you've learned yet.

-Bansi

Is it okay to crave your mother's love when you're twenty-four?

I think it is.

Because no matter how old you become, there is a part of you that will always remember what it felt like to be someone's daughter. And there is another part of you that remembers what it felt like to wish you weren't.

I don't have one dramatic story that explains everything. It was a thousand little things. And sometimes, I think the little things hurt more because they happened so often that they became normal.

I grew up hearing things about my body.

About how fat I was.

About how dark I was.

About how ugly I looked.

Things that were supposed to be jokes, perhaps. Things that could be dismissed with “I was only saying it” or “I'm your mother, I can tell you the truth.”

But when you hear those things repeatedly from the person whose opinion matters most to you, eventually you don't need anyone else to call you ugly.

You learn to do it yourself.

You look into a mirror and hear their voice before you hear your own. Even food became something I felt watched over. She would notice how much I was eating. She would check whether I was eating more. There was always an awareness of my body, my weight, my appearance, my plate. It made something as ordinary as eating feel like something I had to justify. And that's such a strange thing to carry as a child:

to want to eat without thinking about whether somebody is watching.

to exist in your own body without feeling like your body is constantly being evaluated.

to look at yourself without immediately wondering what's wrong with you.

And then there was the work. I was expected to do so much at home. I would work and work and work, doing household things, while she could sit there and somehow, at the end of it, I would still hear:

“You don't do anything.”

“You're not good at anything.”

There is something uniquely cruel about being exhausted from trying and still being told that your effort doesn't count.

Because eventually you stop thinking,

Maybe I'm doing enough.

And start thinking,

Maybe I'm just not enough.

That's the part that stayed.

Not the chores.

Not the criticism itself.

The feeling underneath it:

No matter what I do, it will never be enough for you.

And then there was that dream. I once said I wanted to become a doctor. I don't even remember everything about the conversation anymore. But I remember her laughing. In front of everyone. “You? A doctor? Haha. That's not possible.”Maybe she forgot it. Maybe she didn't mean it the way I remember it. But I was a child who had just said, that this is what I dream of becoming. And the person I wanted to believe in me laughed. There are some sentences adults forget immediately that children carry for years. That was one of mine.

I think that is what makes this so complicated. Because when someone hurts you repeatedly, you'd think eventually you would stop wanting anything from them. But I didn't. I still wanted my mother. Not necessarily the mother I had.

The mother I needed.

The mother who would look at me and not immediately find something wrong. The mother who wouldn't make my body something to be ashamed of. The mother who would notice that I was working hard. The mother who would say, “Come sit down. You've done enough.” The mother who would ask me how I was feeling. The mother who would call because she missed me.The mother who would hear my dreams and say, “Go for it. I believe you can.” I wanted a safe place. And I wanted that safe place to be my mother.

That's why seeing other people's relationships with their mothers can hurt me in ways I don't always know how to explain. Sometimes I'll see a daughter and her mother laughing together. I'll see a mother fixing her daughter's hair. I'll hear someone casually say, “My mum called me today.” And something inside me aches. Not because I don't want them to have it. I do. I'm happy that some people get to have that kind of love. But there is a little girl inside me who looks at it and thinks:

What would I have been like if I had grown up with that?

Would I have been softer?

Would I have trusted people differently?

Would I have been less desperate to be chosen?

Would I have searched for love in other people so intensely?

Would I have believed I was beautiful?

Would I have believed I was capable?

Would I have stopped apologising for existing?

I don't know.

And maybe I'll never know.

I think this is why I have sometimes looked for my mother's love in other people. When the person who was supposed to teach you that you're worthy doesn't make you feel worthy, you start searching. You look for someone who will say you're beautiful because you don't believe it yourself. Someone who will choose you because you spent years feeling like you weren't chosen. Someone who will ask how your day was because nobody at home seemed interested. Someone who will hold you when you're falling apart because you learned to cry quietly. And when someone finally gives you a little of what you've been starving for, you can become terrified of losing it.

You don't just lose the person.

It feels like you're losing the proof that you're lovable.

I've cried about this.

A lot.

I've cried because I wanted my mother to ask about my life.

I've cried because I wanted her to be proud of me.

I've cried because I've looked at other families and wondered what it would have been like.

I've cried because sometimes I am angry at her and then immediately feel guilty for being angry.

I've cried because I know she is human too.

Maybe she has her own wounds. Maybe she was never taught how to love gently. Maybe she thought criticism would make me stronger. Maybe she genuinely believed she was doing what was best.

I can understand all of those possibilities.

But understanding someone doesn't erase what their words did to you. And forgiveness, if it ever comes, doesn't require me to pretend it didn't hurt.

For a long time, I thought saying these things made me ungrateful.

Because she is my mother. Because she did things for me. Because there are people who have experienced worse. Because at least I had a home. Because at least she was there. But pain isn't a competition.

I don't have to prove that my childhood was the worst childhood in the world before I'm allowed to say:

Some things hurt me.

I don't have to hate my mother to admit that I was hurt by her.

I don't have to call her a bad person to say that some of the things she said made me feel like a bad person.

Both things can exist.

She can be my mother.

She can have loved me in whatever ways she knew how.

And I can still grieve the ways she didn't.

Maybe that's what I've been grieving all these years.

Not just my mother.

The mother I imagined I would have.

The mother I needed when I was little.

The mother who would have protected my dreams instead of laughing at them.

The mother who would have looked at my body and made me feel safe inside it.

The mother who would have seen all the work I was doing and said, “I see you.”

The mother who would have made me believe that being her daughter was enough.

And the hardest truth?

I still want it.

Even after everything.

I still want my mother's love.

Sometimes I hate that I do.

Sometimes I wish I could become completely indifferent.

I wish I could say,

I don't need you anymore.

But maybe that's not healing.

Maybe healing isn't becoming a daughter who doesn't need her mother.

Maybe healing is becoming a woman who can finally admit:

I needed her.

And there is nothing shameful about that.

I was a child.

Of course I needed my mother.

I needed tenderness.

I needed encouragement.

I needed affection.

I needed someone to tell me that my body wasn't something disgusting.

I needed someone to tell me that I was capable.

I needed someone to believe in my dreams.

I needed someone to notice when I was hurting.

I needed someone to tell me:

“You are enough.”

Maybe one day I will stop waiting for that sentence to come from her. Maybe one day I'll be able to give it to myself. Maybe I'll look at the girl who was laughed at for dreaming of becoming a doctor and tell her:

You were never ridiculous for dreaming.

I'll look at the girl who was made to feel ugly and tell her:

Your skin was never something that needed an apology.

I'll look at the girl who was criticised for her body and tell her:

You deserved to eat without feeling watched. You deserved to exist without being measured.

I'll look at the exhausted girl who was told she did nothing and tell her:

I saw how hard you tried.

And maybe I'll finally tell her the thing she had been waiting to hear all along:

I'm proud of you.

Not because of the degrees.

Not because I moved countries.

Not because I survived difficult things.

Not because I became someone impressive.

Just because I am her.

And maybe that has to be enough now.

Because I am learning that I can grieve the mother I didn't have without spending the rest of my life believing there is something wrong with me for wanting her.

I can love her.

I can be angry with her.

I can miss her.

I can wish things had been different.

I can still crave her love.

And I can slowly learn to stop chasing it at the cost of myself.

Maybe that is what growing up actually means.

Not becoming someone who no longer needs to be loved.

But becoming someone who finally understands that being worthy of love was never something I had to earn in the first place.

And somewhere inside me, that little girl is still dreaming.

This time, I'm not laughing at her.

I'm listening.

And I'm telling her:

You can dream as big as you want.

I believe you.

• By Bansi