A lot of people find themselves here at some point. You finish college and haven’t figured out your career yet. You leave a job, move away from home, end a relationship, or simply reach a point where the routine that once gave your days structure disappears. Nothing is necessarily wrong, but everything feels slightly unfamiliar.

The hardest part is often the loss of routine. When you have work, classes, responsibilities, places to be, and people depending on you, your days naturally have some structure. Even the things you used to complain about gave you something to move toward. When that structure disappears, having free time sounds wonderful until you actually have too much of it.

You wake up without a clear plan. Hours pass without much happening. You have things you could do, but nothing you have to do. After a while, that freedom can start feeling strangely empty.

Even friendships can feel different during these periods. You stop calling people as often, not because you’ve stopped caring about them, but because life no longer gives you the same little opportunities to check in. There are no shared classes, no lunch breaks, no work stories to exchange. Everyone is busy moving through their own lives, and suddenly the conversations that used to happen naturally require effort.

Then the smallest things start getting under your skin. A delayed reply, a cancelled plan, too much noise, a day that feels completely unproductive. Things that normally wouldn’t bother you can feel much bigger when there’s already a lot of space in your head.

And sometimes you notice that you’re simply not as happy as you used to be.

Not necessarily sad. Not necessarily unhappy with your life. Just less content. You start missing things you once considered ordinary: having somewhere to go, talking to a friend during the day, finishing something and feeling tired afterward, knowing what tomorrow is going to look like.

Being in this phase doesn’t mean you’ve fallen behind. It doesn’t mean everyone else is moving forward while you’re standing still. Life isn’t always a straight line where one thing ends and the next begins immediately.

Sometimes there’s a gap.

Gaps feel uncomfortable because there’s nothing obvious to measure. You’re not quite who you were before, but you haven’t become whoever you’re going to be next. There’s no clear milestone telling you that you’re making progress.

Still, something is happening.

You’re adjusting. You’re figuring out what you actually miss, what you want to carry forward, and what you don’t want anymore. You’re learning how to exist without the structure you once relied on, even if you haven’t figured out what will replace it.

Eventually, another routine will appear. New people will enter your life. You’ll find places to be and things to care about. Some of the things you’re waiting for will arrive, and others will turn out differently than you expected.

Until then, it’s okay if life feels a little empty.

It’s okay to miss your old routine. It’s okay to feel restless, uncertain, or even a little lost. You don’t have to turn this period into something productive just to prove that you’re moving forward.

Sometimes you’re simply between chapters. And eventually, you’ll turn the page.

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Usually, there’s something in the back of my mind: a conversation, a memory, something I noticed during the day. I can usually find a thought and follow it until it becomes an idea. Today, there was nothing. I stared at the blank page, typed a sentence, deleted it, thought of an idea, decided it was terrible, and went back to staring.

The more I tried to think of something, the more blank I felt. And that’s the frustrating part. Being blank doesn’t always feel peaceful. Sometimes it feels tense and uncertain, like your mind is moving constantly but somehow going nowhere.

I’ve noticed I do the same thing outside of writing. I think about college, career, moving, the future, and all the things I haven’t figured out yet. I think about them so much that eventually I don’t even know what I’m thinking anymore. I just know I want an answer.

Maybe that’s what makes being blank so uncomfortable. We feel like we’re supposed to always know what comes next. We want a plan, a direction, something we can hold onto. When we don’t have one, we assume something is wrong.

But an empty page isn’t a failed page. It’s just a page that hasn’t been filled yet. And not knowing what comes next doesn’t mean there isn’t a next chapter.

Sometimes your mind simply needs a break from being asked to figure everything out. You don’t have to force an idea, a decision, or an answer just because you feel like you should have one. Step away for a while. Go outside, eat something, talk to someone, do absolutely nothing productive for an hour.

The page will still be there.

Being blank happens to everyone. We just don’t talk about it because we’re so used to acting like we always know what we’re doing. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you have nothing to say. Sometimes you just need to step back, breathe, and let your mind be quiet for a while.

And that’s okay. Not every empty space needs to be filled immediately.

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I think one of the hardest parts of starting something new is not knowing how it’s going to turn out.

It sounds obvious, but I don’t think we realize how much we depend on knowing the ending. We want to know whether the college we choose will be right for us, whether the career we’re working toward will actually make us happy, whether moving somewhere new will feel like home, whether the people we meet will stay, and whether the decisions we’re making now will still make sense a few years from now.

And when we don’t have those answers, we start overthinking.

At least I do. I’ll think through every possible outcome, imagine everything that could go wrong, and somehow convince myself that worrying about it now will prepare me for it later. Then, after spending hours inside my own head, I’ll eventually pretend I’m completely fine and carry on with whatever I was supposed to be doing.

The funny thing is that nothing has actually happened yet. I’m just scared of possibilities.

I think that’s what makes a fresh start so uncomfortable. You’re leaving behind something familiar without knowing what you’re going to get in return. Even when the change is something you genuinely want, there’s still a part of you that wants to hold on to what you already know.

College can feel like that. So can choosing a career. So can moving to a new place, meeting new people, or simply realizing that your life is beginning to look different from the one you imagined a few years ago. There’s a strange pressure to make the “right” decision, as if every choice is permanent and one wrong move can send your entire life in the wrong direction.

But we give our decisions too much power.

A choice doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth making. You can choose something, discover that it isn’t for you, and choose again. You can move somewhere and miss home. You can start a career and realize you want something different. You can meet people who become important to you and later become strangers again. None of those things automatically mean you failed. Sometimes they simply mean you lived long enough to find out what you wanted.

I think that’s the part we forget when we’re standing at the beginning of something. We look at people who seem like they have everything figured out and assume they must have known what they were doing from the start. We forget that every person we think is settled once had a day when they had no idea what came next. They didn’t have a map showing them exactly where their decisions would lead. They just took the next step and figured out the one after that when they got there.

I’ve also realized that a lot of my fear isn’t really about failure. It’s about everything failure could mean. It’s the fear of being alone, making the wrong decision, disappointing myself, or ending up somewhere I never expected to be. Those possibilities feel much bigger when they’re sitting inside your head because your mind can create an entire future out of one unanswered question.

The goal isn’t to become completely fearless before starting something new. If that were the requirement, most of us would never begin anything. The goal is to stop letting fear decide for us. You can be nervous and still move. You can be uncertain and still choose. You can miss what you’re leaving behind and still be excited about what’s ahead.

Eventually, you’ll find out how things turn out. You’ll meet people you haven’t met yet, live in places you haven’t seen yet, make mistakes you haven’t made yet, and have ordinary days that will eventually become memories. Some things will work out better than you expected. Others won’t. You’ll change your mind, change direction, and probably surprise yourself along the way.

That’s the part we can’t control, and honestly, that’s probably for the best. Knowing exactly how everything will turn out would make starting easier, but it would also take away the discovery. You wouldn’t get to find out who you become along the way.

So if you’re standing at the beginning of something right now — college, a career, a move, a new relationship, or simply a new phase of your life — you don’t need to know whether everything will work out. You don’t need a guarantee that you’re making the perfect decision. You just need enough courage to take the next step without demanding that the future explain itself first.

And one day, you’ll probably look back at the thing that scared you so much and realize that you spent far more time worrying about it than you ever spent actually living it.

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I was scrolling through my camera roll the other day, looking for an old photo, when I noticed something I hadn’t paid attention to before.

It was filled with beautiful places. There were sunsets from trips I’d taken, mountains that made me stop and stare, lakes that looked almost unreal, and endless pictures of skies that seemed too perfect not to save. If someone looked through my gallery, they would probably think I spend most of my life chasing beautiful views.

What surprised me wasn’t what I found. It was what I couldn’t find.

There wasn’t a single photo of my mom cooking dinner, even though I watched her do it thousands of times. There were no pictures of our family eating together on ordinary evenings, no photo of the road I travelled almost every day, and no photo of me sitting in front of the television with a bowl of snacks after school. The moments that shaped my life the most were almost completely absent from my camera roll.

I started wondering why.

When we travel somewhere beautiful, we know the moment is temporary. We know we’ll be leaving in a few days, so we're photographing everything. We capture the sunset because we may never see that exact sky again, and we take pictures of the mountains because they are different from the ones back home. Beauty announces itself, and our instinct is to preserve it before it disappears.

Ordinary life is different. It repeats itself so often that we mistake repetition for permanence. We don’t photograph our parents making dinner because we assume they’ll make dinner tomorrow. We don’t photograph another family meal because there will probably be one next week. We don’t take a picture of the familiar route home because it feels as though it will always be there. The problem is that ordinary life doesn’t stay ordinary forever; it simply changes so gradually that we rarely notice it changing.

Looking back, I realize that many of the moments I miss most were never dramatic while I was living them. They were quiet and repetitive and easy to overlook. The smell of food coming from the kitchen, the sound of the television playing in the background, the way everyone sat in the same places at dinner, and the small habits of the people I loved felt so normal that I never imagined I would one day wish I could step back into them for even a minute.

If someone asked me today which photograph I wish I had more than any sunset or mountain view, it wouldn’t be from a holiday. It would be a picture of my mom feeding me when I was too young to remember it clearly, or a picture of me watching television with a snack in my hand while nothing important was happening. Those moments weren’t extraordinary in the way a sunset is, but they were extraordinary in the way life usually is: quietly, repeatedly, and without asking for attention.

We’ve been pointing our cameras in the wrong direction. Not because sunsets don’t deserve to be remembered, but because ordinary life does too. A beautiful place is easy to recognize; a beautiful life is much harder, because it often looks like another Tuesday evening while we’re living it.

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A childhood friend reminded me of someone I’d completely forgotten.

That someone was me.

We were catching up when he started laughing about how I used to say whatever came to my mind without thinking twice. Apparently, I had absolutely no filter, and everyone around me knew it. I laughed too, but mostly because I couldn’t remember being that person at all.

For a moment, it felt like he was talking about someone else. He wasn’t

He was talking about a version of me that still existed in his memory, even though it had disappeared from mine.

That conversation stayed with me because it made me realize something I’d never thought about before: every person who has ever known us remembers a different version of who we are.

• My parents remember the child who couldn’t tie his own shoes.

• My teachers remember the student who sat in their classroom years ago.

• My cousins remember the kid who spent entire summers playing outside.

My childhood friends remember jokes I’ve forgotten, stories I no longer tell, and a version of me that disappeared so gradually I never even noticed it leaving.

None of them are remembering the same person. And that’s because there has never been just one version of us.

We spend so much of our lives trying to figure out who we are, yet the truth is that our identity has never belonged entirely to us. It’s scattered across the memories of everyone we’ve ever met, with each person quietly holding on to a chapter we’ll never be able to see through our own eyes.

Perhaps that’s why meeting someone from your past can feel so strange. While you’ve spent years becoming someone new, they’ve been carrying an older version of you all along, one that feels familiar to them but almost foreign to you.

We’ve all lived multiple lives without ever moving anywhere.

The child your grandmother remembers, the teenager your best friend remembers, and the person your colleagues know today are all real. They belong to different moments, different people, and different memories.

We often search for the “real” version of ourselves, as though there’s one fixed answer waiting to be discovered. But there isn’t. We’re constantly changing, and the closest thing to a complete picture of who we are exists only when all those memories are placed side by side.

It’s comforting, in a strange way, to think that even after we’ve forgotten parts of ourselves, someone else still remembers them.

And that’s what growing up really is—not becoming one person.

But leaving little pieces of yourself behind in everyone who knew you along the way.

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Do we really need closure, or have we just convinced ourselves that we do?

For the longest time, I believed every ending deserved one final conversation. A chance to explain, to apologize, to acknowledge the mistakes that were made. Not because it would change what happened, but because it felt incomplete without it.

Sometimes that conversation never comes.

Not because someone doesn’t care, but because life moves on. People move on. And silence slowly becomes the only answer you’re ever going to get.

For a while, that silence feels unbearable. You replay conversations, imagine different endings, and wonder if one more message or one more conversation would finally give you the peace you’ve been looking for.

But maybe peace was never waiting on the other side of someone else’s response. It was waiting on the day you stopped expecting one.

We often think closure is something another person gives us, as if healing begins the moment they explain themselves or admit they were wrong. But the truth is, some people will never apologize. Some relationships end without a reason that satisfies us, and some questions never get answered.

Looking back, I don’t think I was searching for another conversation as much as I was hoping my pain would be acknowledged. I wanted someone to say, “I know I hurt you,” because somehow that felt like it would make everything easier to carry. But not everyone who changes your life will ever recognize the impact they had on it, and learning to accept that is, perhaps, the hardest part of moving on.

Healing was never about changing the ending; it was about accepting that the story had already ended. Maybe closure doesn’t exist the way we imagine it. Maybe some doors never really close; we just stop standing in the doorway long enough to realize we’ve already walked away.

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I never really thought about that until a conversation after football practice.

I was dropping a 12-year-old home when he asked what I studied. “Psychology,” I said.

He looked at me for a second and asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s about mental health.”

His response came almost immediately.

“Oh... so it’s about the mad people?”

I didn’t blame him for saying it.

In fact, it made me wonder where that idea came from.

Nobody is born believing mental health only belongs to people with disorders. Somewhere along the way, we learn to associate it with something that’s broken, embarrassing, or only worth talking about when something has gone terribly wrong.

So I explained it to him differently.

I told him that mental health is something every single person has, just like physical health. Some days it feels strong, some days it doesn’t, but it’s always there. You don’t have to be diagnosed with something to take care of it, just like you don’t need a broken bone to care about your body.

He nodded.

The conversation lasted only a few minutes, but it stayed with me for much longer.

We teach children how to brush their teeth because we know healthy habits should start early. We remind them to wash their hands, eat well, and exercise so they grow up taking care of their bodies.

But when it comes to their minds, most of us wait until there’s a problem.

Maybe that’s why so many people grow up believing mental health is something you only think about when life falls apart.

By then, the conversation has already started too late.

I wonder what would change if children grew up hearing that feeling anxious, overwhelmed, lonely, or even asking for help wasn’t unusual, but was simply part of being human.

Maybe they wouldn’t wait until they were struggling to believe their feelings mattered, and instead they’d grow up knowing that taking care of their mind isn’t a sign that something is wrong. It’s simply part of taking care of themselves.

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When was the last time you genuinely couldn’t wait for something?

As kids, it felt like we were always waiting for something, and strangely enough, that was part of the fun. We waited for birthdays, counted down to summer vacations, rushed through school days so the weekend would arrive sooner, and sat in front of the television a few minutes early because missing the opening song of our favourite cartoon somehow felt unacceptable.

Birthdays were my favourite. I’d count down the days on the calendar, imagining everything about them long before they arrived. The excitement would last for weeks, while the birthday itself was over before I even realized it. Now they seem to appear out of nowhere, and sometimes I don’t even realize it’s only a few days away.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped waiting, and without realizing it, we also stopped looking forward to things the way we once did.

Almost everything we once had to wait for is now only a click away. Movies are available the moment we want them, food arrives within minutes, and even a message reaches someone almost instantly. We gained convenience in ways we could never have imagined, but somewhere in the process, we lost the quiet excitement that came from simply having something worth waiting for.

The best part was never getting what we wanted. It was having something to look forward to.

Maybe that’s why childhood feels so different when we look back on it. It wasn’t perfect, and it certainly wasn’t easier, but it was filled with little countdowns that gave everyday life a sense of excitement. There was always another birthday around the corner, another weekend to count down to, another cartoon waiting to start, and somehow that was enough.

Convenience made life faster, but it also quietly stole something we never thought we’d miss: anticipation.

Maybe we don’t miss waiting at all.

Maybe we just miss having something that felt worth waiting for.

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Have you ever realized you don’t remember the last time you spoke to someone who once knew everything about you?

Not because it was forgettable. Because neither of you knew it would be the last. I think that’s how most childhood friendships end.

Not with a fight. Not with a goodbye. Just one less phone call, one less plan, one less message... until one day, you’re strangers with years of memories.

That happened to me too.

We grew up together and spent countless afternoons playing games, shared everything, and never imagined we’d drift apart. There wasn’t one big reason. Life moved on, and somewhere along the way, so did we.

For a while, I kept trying. Eventually, I stopped. What surprised me wasn’t the loss of the friendship. It was realizing I never actually noticed when I lost it.

I don’t think most of us miss the person as much as we miss the version of life that existed with them. The inside jokes, the effortless conversations, having someone who understood your stories without needing any context.

Maybe that’s why these friendships are so difficult to grieve: there’s never a clear ending, just a quiet absence that slowly becomes part of your life, until one day you realize you’ve been missing someone you never actually got to say goodbye to.

I still think what we had was real. I just never imagined something so real could end so quietly.

Maybe that’s what growing up is.

Realizing that not every goodbye sounds like one.

Every once in a while, an old photo or video catches you off guard. You expect to notice how different you looked, but instead, you notice how different you felt.

A few days ago, I found an old video of myself laughing. I watched it more than once, not because something funny happened, but because I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed like that. There wasn’t a single thought behind it. I wasn’t wondering how I looked or who was watching. I was just... happy.

Maybe that’s what so many of us miss. Not childhood. The version of ourselves that came with it.

Growing up happens so slowly that you never really notice it. One day, you’re playing in the rain without a second thought, and years later, you’re wondering if people are judging you for laughing too loudly. Somewhere in between, we all become a little more conscious of ourselves.

Back then, happiness didn’t need much. Cycling until it got dark, counting down to birthdays, or spending the whole evening outside with friends was enough. We weren’t trying to make memories. We were living them.

I don’t think most of us want to be kids again.

We miss the version of ourselves that worried less, laughed more, and trusted that things would somehow work out.

I almost missed my bus once.

I was running as fast as I could with a huge backpack on my shoulders. The bus had already started moving, and with every step, it felt farther away.

That’s when I thought, “Great, I missed it.”

Then, out of nowhere, a bike stopped beside me.

“Hop on,” he said. That was it. No questions. No hesitation.

Within a minute, we’d caught up to the bus. I got off, said a rushed “thank you,” and jumped on before it pulled away again.

I remember sitting by the window afterwards, catching my breath. It took me a minute to realize what had just happened. Someone I’d never met had gone out of his way to help me, and all I’d managed to say was a quick “thank you” before disappearing into a bus he’d probably never think about again.

I don’t know his name, where he was going that afternoon, or whether helping me made him late. I don’t even know if he’d remember that moment.

But I do. Not because he gave me a ride. Because he didn’t have to.

I think we underestimate how much the smallest acts of kindness can stay with someone. It makes me wonder how many times we've unknowingly been that person for someone else.

We hear a lot about how people are becoming more selfish and more distant. Maybe that’s true sometimes. But now and then, someone reminds you that kindness still exists in the smallest ways.

I’ll probably never see him again, and he'll probably never know that years later, I'm still grateful for something that took him less than two minutes to do.

If you could thank one stranger from your past, who would it be?

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You meet someone on a train, a bus, or a flight.

Two hours later, you’re talking about your childhood, your relationships, or the thing that’s been bothering you for months.

And somehow... it feels completely normal.

It was early in the morning, and I was talking to a guy I’d met at the hostel just a day before. Somehow, the conversation went from where we were from to what we wanted from life.

He smiled.

“Yeah... me too.”

It’s funny how someone you’ve known for less than a day can make you feel understood on a deeper level.

Maybe it’s because strangers don’t come with expectations. They don’t know your past, they don’t know the version of you everyone back home expects, and even if they judge you, it doesn’t really matter.

You’ll probably never see each other again.

Maybe that’s why some of the most honest conversations we ever have are with complete strangers.

Have you ever told a stranger something you've never told anyone else?

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But honestly, that’s not what I remember first.

There were 29 of us. Five days before the trek, we didn’t know each other.

Somewhere between the long climbs, chai breaks, and sitting in our tents after dinner... we just started talking.

One question that kept coming up was,

Why did you come on this trek?

Everyone had a different answer.

Some wanted a break.

Some wanted to challenge themselves.

Some just wanted to get away for a few days.

One guy looked at me and said,

There’s only one life. You might as well take the chances.

Nobody really reacted. We just carried on walking.

I don’t even know if he remembers saying it. But for some reason... I do.

Five days later, everyone went back home.

Back to work. Back to college. Back to whatever life looked like before that week.

I still look at the photos sometimes. And they always make me smile.

But they’re not really what I miss.

I miss the random conversations, the constant "How much longer?", and doing absolutely nothing but vibing in our tents.

I thought I’d come back remembering the mountains.

Turns out...

I came back remembering the conversations.

15 seconds.
30 seconds.
Maybe a minute if you’re lucky.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I had more to say than would fit into a reel.

This isn’t going to be a travel newsletter.

Or a food newsletter.

Or a mental health newsletter.

It’ll probably be all of those, depending on what life looks like that week.

I don’t know what the next post will be about.

It could be a mountain I climbed, a café I stumbled into, a conversation with a stranger, or a thought I can’t stop thinking about.

If it’s worth remembering, it’ll end up here.

Thanks for reading.

— Prad

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