We keep making lists of desirables and non-negotiables when we choose our partners. But once we choose someone, we realise these lists stop mattering because there could really be nothing in the person we love that is non-negotiable anymore. After wandering in the deserts of modern dating in our generation, the one truth I've learnt that could finally quench my thirst is this — love someone when you're able to love the worst in them.

It is human to be greedy and get attracted to someone for their hundred amazing qualities, only to realise eventually that all that glitters might be gold, but gold can't buy you love. What about that one dark streak in them? Will I be able to drink the poison of their inadequacy and keep it in my body forever? Will I be able to embrace the one part in them that is even slightly grotesque, with my arms open?

Someone could be super-charismatic, kind, sweet, rich and well-spoken, but have serious commitment issues. Someone else could be head over heels in love with me, extremely caring and affectionate, but lack the intellect to understand what I'm trying to convey in a conversation. Yet another person could be perfectly in tune with me on an emotional and intellectual level but live on another continent. Basically, there's always going to be a part of the sentence that comes after "but", which is going to be an undeniable part of my existence.

So, I've learnt to love the wreckage in them.

Now, when I meet someone, my eyes and mind both instantly start scanning for any lacunae. I begin to imagine a life amidst that wreckage, sans the sheen of perfection they cover themselves with. Mind you, I do not try to pick up the broken pieces and mend them together to make them whole again; I am too deeply flawed to even attempt to fix someone else. I merely try to exist in a room the same as the broken pieces and occasionally try to hold them gently.

It's like scuba diving to the ruins of an ancient shipwreck. You're stupid if you try to bring the rusty remains to the surface and build the ship again. But if you're able to admire the wreckage for how beautiful it is even when broken and imperfect, and how it took nothing short of a miracle for it to have survived the ravages of time to greet you here in its entire glory, a hundred feet beneath the surface — then you're probably doing it right.

Maybe I have lost myself to my ambition and I need someone with nary a care in the world to pull me out of my ocean of monotony. Maybe I need someone too straightforward and blunt to see through all the layers of gloss I have applied to my personality in order to stand out. Maybe I need someone dealing with serious emotional baggage to make me realise my problems aren't really the biggest in the world. Maybe the overthinker in me needs a simpleton to learn not to mull over every single micro-event every night.

Maybe I need to love the wreckage in you, and not the sheen — to be really worthy of being loved back by someone as exquisite as you.

I want to live in the Colosseum in you, broken and beautiful.

An 80 year old woman told us how harsh her childhood had been; having to migrate downhill every winter and live together in a community house with people from other villages, planning their whole year around storing whatever vegetables they grew (mainly potatoes and peas) for the winter ahead. A young married woman told us how she'd finished her schooling in another town (the only one nearby with a higher secondary school), with great difficulty, but couldn't complete her graduation because she had to come back home to continue farming, like the rest of her family. She said she wanted her three year old daughter to finish college one day. Her daughter had the same rosy glow on her cheeks as most of the local children we saw, and she taught me a few steps of their local dance. We both danced together, not divided by age, language, or culture, just for those few minutes.

A middle-aged man told us how much the locals loved their small, remote village, so much so that even those who left for education and well-paying city jobs always returned home after a few years. His wife told us the secret behind everyone's natural fitness- nobody drives in the mountains; the only large vehicles you see belong to the tourists.

Our young local driver told us that the last crime here happened four years ago, because nobody felt they truly lacked anything, be it wealth, happiness or love. People spoke of praying at the monasteries, playing games with the young monks there, and celebrating week-long festivals twice a year. They told us they too have castes, and are expected to marry within their caste, as their religious leaders decree. And most importantly, all of them told us that tourists like us had improved their lives beyond imagination by giving them a steady income, and that they were happy to welcome us into their villages and feed us food they'd grown with their own hands.

On the last day of the trip, I read something written on a wall outside a monastery:

"भ्रमण से ही मिटे भ्रम", meaning "Travel dispels illusion."

It made me think a lot about our lives in the cities. How we constantly feel the need to chase certain goals, almost all of them tied to some monetary gain in the end.

How we endure hours of traffic every morning, how the smell of burnt petrol makes us roll up the windows of our cars and our minds, as we try to feel content in the prison built by our own ambition, without even a sliver of ventilation to breathe through.

How most of us no longer have time to dance or celebrate festivals with our community. How we pay more for organic food and feel like we've somehow defeated the city's pollution, that we caused in the first place. How we drive our cars to a gym to cycle there. How we no longer make time for spiritual self-discovery. How, more often than not, having guests over feels like an obligation dictated by our tight schedules. We might make some time for them, but whether we actually look forward to sitting with them for hours, without any agenda, is a different question altogether. How differently hospitality functions here in cities, where receptionists ask for your credit card before they even look at your face, and tell you only two bottles of water are free per day.

I also thought about how we get access to education so easily here, how we get to go to colleges and build a life for ourselves. How women have built entire industries from scratch through sheer will, not bending to the rules of patriarchy. Ambition is what fuels our ability to carve out a place for ourselves in this world. It's also what gave me the tools to be able to write this article.

So in the end, I have this bittersweet feeling as I leave the valleys to return to the humdrum of my city life, where I'll go on to perform surgeries to heal people, with the skills I've built and sharpened here, while wondering what life could have been, had I been born in the valleys.

Would it have been "enough"?

I can't give you an answer to that. But what I can offer are the lyrics of "City Life" by Raghav Meattle -

“While we all chase the love

We all chase the cars

We all chase the good life

With broken hearts.

I can sing to the clouds, sing to the rain

It won’t mean a thing in these packed trains.

I close my eyes to begging kids and their cries

I wonder why I can’t see the stone that I’ve become

I close my eyes to honey bees and butterflies

I wonder why they fell trees and how they aim to breathe."

The golden opportunity for self-growth any such experience offers you may not be easy to perceive. How the fights which turn rather ugly, help you learn to self-soothe your nervous system. How the coldness and the emotional distance teach you the value of heartfelt connections and emotional intimacy. How you eventually learn two people can speak the same tongue and yet have entirely different love languages. How that one fight to sort everything out before going to bed prevents ten subsequent. How you realize looks, wealth, ambition and status are an easy tradeoff if it's a burden on your own self-worth.

Most importantly, you learn that only the tides of insight hold the power to pull even the most turbulent waves of self-destruction away from the shores of a relationship that is on the verge of unraveling.

20+ years of the highest quality of education, and yet, you often feel you are so lost and unaware when it comes to what the must-haves, good-to-haves and the absolute-don't-haves in your partners should be.

But, you meet one bad fish in the sea, and somehow miraculously become a marine biologist.

Your romantic pursuits become more intentional and you make up your mind to never go down the spiral of low self esteem again. You realize the whole idea of “falling” in love (with the wrong person) is a big glorified lie, and that you'd rather walk into it mindfully with the right person. And if it means being alone till then, so be it.

The constant pathological need to be in a romantic relationship is outweighed by how abysmal the loneliness of being with the wrong partner feels, and you are forced to learn to belong to only you and yourself. Solo movie dates and shopping sessions become a usual part of your routine, as do sitting by the window and penning down your thoughts when you're feeling particularly gloomy, or making your favourite hotpot noodles with an old, indie acoustic guitar song in the background. You learn to enjoy your own company in its truest sense, which in reality means you are ready to open yourself up to love again.

And so, as Miss Grande famously said, “Thank U, Next!”

Expect nothing different from me, I am but a mere addition to the long list of creative souls burnt on the pyre of a successful career.

Mistake me not, I am a surgeon today only because I've always wanted to be one. I was, and I still am, obsessed with the whole idea of being able to put my hands inside someone’s body and being able to repair (excuse me for my crudeness) whatever's wrong inside. I have fantasized this for the longest time.

But, I've also fantasized about baking ten different types of bread, with minor tweaks in the kneading and proofing techniques that would lead to completely new textures and tastes. I've also been obsessed with how they play with sound in rock music and how alt rock, prog rock and grunge are all a part of it and yet, so unique.

The cost of attaining what society calls success, for me, was slow relinquishment of all my other fantasies and sticking to just one- the one that would earn me money.

Man, survival does take up a lot of your energy. In the beginning, the sense of fulfillment it gave me, made up for the chunks of me I was losing.

I felt guilty to even think about the meadows that my imagination would wander, were it allowed to run free.

Now, this guilt, if any of you has ever felt it, tastes like slow poison. It stops you from feeding your soul and yet enables you to consistently strangle it bit by bit.

It tells you that every single thing that you do in a day should amount to some measurable outcome in your career path. Creativity is a myth, and it will take away time and energy from your daily hustle.

It took me many years, a gnarly surgical residency and the selective loss of the beautiful part of my vocabulary that I previously possessed, to realize- I need to open myself up to life again.

It's gonna be a tough journey, but writing this article brought back glimpses of the little child-me, unafraid and carefree, and maybe she was no less than a surgeon in her own way.

The span of the smile on a friend's face when our eyes meet,

Tears I never wept,

The gratification I get from petrichor,

The meeting of the two edges of a wound I sew,

Nights I feel like a lost star in the galaxy,

The courage I once lacked to say those words,

The comfort from an old worn out pair of jeans,

A morsel of food fed by my mother,

My fear of the future unknown,

The vehemence with which I argue for things I believe in,

Days spent thinking about a lover long gone,

An epiphany that changed my life,

The power my temper holds over me,

Chunks of my heart they take away when they leave,

The delight I find in the aroma of freshly baked bread,

Burns on my soul from my own regret,

Clothes sodden with rain and my satisfaction of dancing in it,

The devotion in my love and,

The devastation in my heartache