This morning I was cleaning the mirror. And then, out of nowhere, I looked at my own reflection and said,

"You're the best. I love you."

I didn’t plan it. It just came out of me naturally.

And then I just stood there. Cloth in hand. Mirror half-wiped. Something quietly settling in my chest.

Think about how often you talk to other people this way. You tell your friend she did a great job. You tell your mother she looks lovely today. You tell a stranger their outfit is nice, just to make their day a little brighter. It costs you nothing.

Now think about the last time you said something like that to yourself. Not “I did okay.” Not “could have been worse.” I mean actually said, out loud or in your head, “I love you, and I’m proud of you.”

For me, the answer was — I couldn’t remember.

I used to be someone who could list every flaw I had without taking a pause. Ask me what was wrong with my writing, my body, my career, my life, and I would have had an answer ready before you even finished the question.

Ask me what I had overcome, what I had learned, who I had become despite everything — and I would have gone quiet, with nothing to say.

That was me during my depression. Years of it.

And strangely, that very phase is what taught me self-love. It taught me how to talk to myself.

It taught me self-love isn’t a mood. It’s a practice. Something you build the same way you build any skill, slowly, and mostly when nobody’s watching.

But it also taught me something I carry with me now — that the way I speak to myself matters more than almost anything else in my life.

This is the strange thing about being hard on yourself. It feels like discipline. It feels like keeping yourself in check. But really, it’s just a habit. A very old, very tired habit that nobody ever taught us to put down.

So standing there with the mirror in front of me, I started wondering something.

The mirror got clearer as I wiped it. And so, somehow, did I.

No reason attached. No achievement to justify it. Just me, choosing to be as gentle with myself as I already am with everyone else.

I want to tell you why this mattered so much to me.

One of the things that slowly brought me back was learning to change the voice in my head. Not the voice I use with others — the private one. The one that talks to me while I’m getting ready, while I’m driving, while I’m standing in front of a mirror with a cloth in my hand.

That voice used to be my harshest critic. It said things I would never let anyone else say to me. Changing it wasn’t quick or easy.

And slowly, without a specific date I can point to, that forced kindness became real. It stopped needing to be forced. It started showing up on its own, like it did this morning.

That’s the part that actually matters. Not the big declarations you write in a journal because a book told you to. The small, unplanned ones that slip out while you’re doing something as ordinary as wiping a mirror.

Today I gave myself four words I don’t say often enough.

I love you.

I think, somewhere underneath everything else going on in my life, I really needed to hear it.

If you’ve ever felt like you have to earn kindness from yourself, if you’ve ever looked in the mirror and immediately started a list of what’s wrong, if you’ve ever complimented everyone around you but gone silent when it’s your own turn — I know that place. I lived there for a long time.

The mirror isn't just for checking your reflection. It's one of the few honest places left where you can finally say the thing you've been needing to hear.

You don't need someone else to say it first. You just need to be brave enough to say it to yourself.

Thank you for reading.

See you next Wednesday.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence

If this felt like something you needed today subscribe. It’s free. Every Wednesday. One honest letter, straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam. Just real words from a real person, showing up every week.

It’s August again.

Which means somewhere, someone is planning a surprise. Someone is drafting a text — happy friendship day, meet you at 6. Somewhere, a group of friends is arguing about which cafe.

I used to hate this month.

A few years ago, I was driving back home on Friendship Day.

Every cafe I passed had a table full of people. Every road had someone laughing into someone else's shoulder. And I was on my scooty, crying, because I had none of that.

No one had texted me “Happy Friendship Day” that day. No one was waiting for me anywhere. No plans, no gifts, no inside jokes, no late-night calls to look forward to.

I came home with a heavy heart. My father saw my face and knew right away. He didn’t ask too many questions. He just said,

“Come, let’s go outside and enjoy today. We’ll make Friendship Day together.”

I still remember that evening. Not because it fixed everything. But because it taught me something I didn’t understand yet — that love doesn’t only come in the shape you were expecting it in.

It’s been years since that day. And somewhere along the way, without even noticing it happening, I stopped feeling sad on Friendship Day.

Now, I celebrate it with myself.

I go on a solo date. I eat what I love. I drive alone. And I actually enjoy it. Not in a making peace with loneliness way. In a genuinely happy, this-is-mine way.

I don’t wait for someone to make my day special. I make my day special.

Friends are important. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. There is something in a shared laugh, a person who remembers your order, a voice on the phone at midnight, that I don’t think anything else fully replaces.

But I’ve also learned this — life can be beautiful without them.

No one will stay with you longer than you will stay with yourself.

So somewhere between the crying-on-the-scooty version of me and the one writing this today, I decided to become a good friend to myself. Not because I gave up on people. But because I stopped making my peace conditional on them showing up.

This Friendship Day, I decided to go out alone without waiting for anyone. But then my mom said she’d come along.

So we went shopping, had some amazing South Indian food, drove around, talked, laughed, and simply enjoyed being together.

It wasn’t the day I had planned, but it turned out to be a beautiful one.

This August begins with Friendship Day.

And this year, I hope to build a beautiful friendship — with my own life.

If you’ve ever felt unlucky for not having a crowd to celebrate with — I see you. You’re not unlucky.

Maybe you’re just being introduced to a friendship you’ll have for the rest of your life.

Be a good friend to yourself. That one relationship, you can never lose.

Thank you for reading.

See you next Wednesday.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence

If this felt like something you needed today subscribe. It’s free. Every Wednesday. One honest letter, straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam. Just real words from a real person, showing up every week.

Hi.

In January 2020, I picked up a pencil for the first time in my life. I had never sketched anything before. I was never the “artistic” kid in school — that category never felt like mine.

But one day, I picked one up anyway and started drawing.

I picked up a pencil with no plan. It quietly became the start of everything.

A few days later, I tried sketching faces, just out of curiosity. Then it became a habit. Then it became obsession.

I sketched every morning. Faces, mostly. Expressions I couldn’t stop thinking about. Somewhere in that process, something in me shifted. I started seeing differently — the way someone’s eyebrows move right before they say something they don’t mean, the way curtains glowed, the way they moved when the wind passed through the window, and the world outside it.

I started sketching everything in my mind before I ever touched paper.

Sketching didn’t just teach me how to draw a face. It taught me how to look at one.

The Quote I Didn’t Know I Was Writing About Myself

In March 2020, I wrote my very first quote:

I didn’t know it then, but I was describing exactly what was happening to me. That line wasn’t really about sketching at all. It was the first line of my writing career — I just didn’t know it yet.

I thought I was learning to sketch. I was really learning to observe.

And observing is the entire job of a writer. Notice the small thing. Sit with it. Then say it in words instead of drawing it. The observations didn’t stop when I put the pencil down — they just changed form. Sketching became sentences.

That’s how my writing journey actually began. Not with a laptop, not with an intention to “become a writer.” Just a pencil, a blank page, and no expectations at all.

Yesterday, I found one of my old sketches. Nothing special — a face I don’t even remember drawing, half-finished. But looking at it, something clicked.

Not every passion becomes a career. Some just teach you a skill you’ll carry for life.

Sketching didn’t become my career. Writing did. But it wasn’t wasted — it built something I still use every day. Sometimes life isn’t preparing you for what you’re doing today. It’s quietly preparing you for something you’ll only understand years later.

If you’re following something right now with no plan, no five-year goal, and no idea where it leads — that’s okay. I didn’t know either. I picked up a pencil because I was bored and curious, not because I thought it would lead anywhere. It led me here — to writing, to putting words to things I used to only notice and never say out loud.

Sketching taught me how to notice. Writing became my way of sharing what I noticed.

I don’t know yet what all of this — the essays, the late-night writing, the slow and uncertain process of building something out of words — is quietly preparing me for. Maybe I won’t know for years. But I’m learning to trust that it’s for something.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence

If this felt like something you needed today subscribe. It’s free. Every Wednesday. One honest letter, straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam. Just real words from a real person, showing up every week.

I started YouTube channel many times. Different topics. Different versions of myself, filmed in the same room, with the same nervousness. Every time, I told myself — this time it will work. This time I’ll stay consistent. This time people will notice.

They never did.

100-200 views. Not even 100 followers. I would post and wait. And every time nothing happened, I had a story ready for why.

I’m lazy. I’m not consistent enough. I don’t know how to hook people in the first three seconds. Everyone else figured it out. Why can’t I?

I blamed myself again and again. But I never once thought of the simplest reason.

I never wanted to make videos. I only wanted permission to stop.

Somewhere along the way, people told me writing has no future. That people don’t read anymore, they watch. That if I want to be seen, I need to be on camera, because that’s where everyone is now. And I believed it, the way you believe something said with enough confidence by enough people.

So I performed. I stood in front of a camera and tried to be someone who belonged there. I edited, uploaded, waited. Did it again. And again. Each time, a little more of me went quiet.

Writing was never like this.

When I write, I don’t wait for permission. I don’t perform. I don’t need lighting or a script or three seconds to hook anyone. I just open a page and I am already home. I feel safe when I write. I heal when I write. This never happened with videos.

That sentence, when I first wrote it down, stopped me. Because it was the truest thing I had said about myself in a long time.

Here is what I understand now, slowly, after years of trying to be someone I was never meant to be:

The tough task for me was never making videos. The tough task is writing what I want to write, in a world that mostly stopped reading.

Following the world is easy. Everyone is making videos — so making videos is common. Expected. Almost invisible because so many people do it. But real writing, the kind that comes from your own honest self and not from a trend, is rare now. Rare because so few people are willing to do something slow. Something quiet. Something that won’t give you a hundred thousand views within days.

I am not saying this to convince myself writing is the smarter move. I am saying it because, for the first time, I am not calling myself lazy for loving the thing I love.

I used to think procrastination and disinterest look the same from outside. They don’t. Procrastination is avoiding something you actually want to do. What I had was something else — a part of me that simply refused to keep performing a role that was never mine.

Following the crowd is easy. Staying yourself is hard. That’s why so few people actually do it.

I pushed myself so many times for videos. I blamed myself for being lazy. But I was only tired of forcing myself into a shape that was never mine.

No one tells you this — “not enjoying something” and “being bad at discipline” can look the same from outside. But they feel completely different inside. One is a flaw. The other is your body telling you the truth before your mind catches up.

So here is where I have landed, for now.

I am not going to force myself into videos again. Not because I have given up, but because I finally believe I never needed to be there.

I love writing about my story, my thoughts, my ideas, my lessons — my honest self. That has never once felt like performance.

Writing, for me, is not the backup plan. It is not what’s left after video didn’t work out. It is the only place where I have always fully shown up as myself — unedited, unfiltered, uncut.

I still don’t know what the future of my writing career looks like. I don’t know what will happen next. Will it grow? Will anyone read? Will it ever pay my bills? I have no answers to any of this.

But for now, I will keep writing. Because it heals me.

Maybe writing has no career for me, the way everyone says. Or maybe the career was never the point of starting. Maybe the point was always this — a page, honesty, and the quiet relief of doing the one thing that was never a performance.

I love to express myself through writing. That love does not need proof yet. It does not need numbers yet. It just needs me, showing up, one page at a time.

If any part of this found you — especially if you have ever blamed yourself for not loving the thing everyone said you should love — I would love to hear from you in the comments. You are not lazy. You might just be standing in front of the wrong camera.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence

Last week, at midnight, someone from my CA coaching days texted me.

We hadn’t spoken in a long time. Last March, I had asked him — just a simple, ordinary question. “How are you? What are you doing these days?”

He didn’t reply.

I let it go. People get busy.

Then last week, out of nowhere, I got a message at midnight.

“Sorry, I had knowingly ignored you. I was too embarrassed about my career — still am. So I almost cut off all my friends.”

I read it twice.

He told me he’s been dealing with generalized anxiety disorder. That he’s on medication now, seeing a psychiatrist, hoping it gets better soon. That he left CA a long time ago and still doesn’t know what to do with his career. That the not-knowing got so loud, he decided silence was easier than facing anyone who might ask.

I know that silence. I lived inside it for four years.

When I left CA, I didn't vanish because people mattered less to me. I vanished because I mattered less to myself.

I disappeared because I couldn’t bear the question. “So what are you doing now?” Such a normal question. It cracked me open every time.

Shame doesn't announce itself. It just makes you feel unfit to be around people — until you have an answer. A title. A plan. A "figured it out." So you hide instead.

So I understood him completely. Not as advice. As memory.

I told him:

“You are not alone. I’ve also been through a lost and depressed phase for years. It’s okay to feel this. It’s okay to be lost.”

I meant every word. Not as something I read somewhere. As something I lived.

Here’s what nobody tells you when you leave the “safe” path — CA, engineering, the job your family understood without needing it explained:

The hardest part isn’t the uncertainty itself. It’s the loneliness the uncertainty creates. You start believing you’re the only one this confused, this behind, this embarrassed. So you go quiet. And the quiet convinces you further. It becomes a loop.

But almost everyone I’ve spoken to — the ones brave enough to be honest — is somewhere in that loop too. Just usually with better filters on their Instagram.

We don’t talk about being lost because we’ve decided lost is shameful. It isn’t. Lost is just the space between who you were and who you’re becoming. Nobody skips it. Some people just hide it better.

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If you’re the one who went quiet — on a friend, on yourself, on the version of your life you thought you’d have by now — this is for you.

"You don't have to earn your place by having everything figured out. You're already worthy of being here."

Text the person you’ve been avoiding. Not with an update. Not with an answer. Just with the truth.

Somewhere, someone is waiting for exactly that — not your success story, just your honesty.

You are not alone. None of us know exactly what we’re doing.

We’re all just figuring it out, one midnight text at a time.

Thank you for reading.

See you next Wednesday.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence

If this felt like something you needed today — subscribe. It's free. Every Wednesday. One honest letter, straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam. Just real words from a real person, showing up every week.

I want to tell you something I’ve been sitting with all week.

Most cages don’t have bars.

They have familiar walls, known faces, and just enough comfort to keep you from leaving.

I understood this properly for the first time while watching a 1998 film alone in my room.

I watched The Truman Show last week and somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped watching and started recognizing.

Truman Burbank lives inside a television set without knowing it. His town is a studio. His neighbors are actors. Every sunrise is engineered. And he walks through all of it believing — this is just my life. My ordinary, nothing-special, going-nowhere life.

The part that wrecked me wasn’t the big revelation.

It was how normal his cage looked.

Pleasant street. Familiar faces. A life that from the outside appeared completely fine.

Not because the cage was locked. Because he had stopped noticing it was a cage.

I started thinking about my own room.

The honest answers came first — family, money, the very real weight of circumstances that don’t move just because you want them to. All true. All heavy.

But I kept sitting with the question.

And underneath all the practical answers was something quieter. Something most of us never say out loud.

What if I step out and the loop comes with me? What if the city was never the problem?

That thought is uncomfortable. I know. I sat with it for a long time.

Because it’s so much easier to blame the place. The circumstances. The people. The timing. And sometimes, yes, those things are genuinely in the way.

But sometimes, if we are honest, we have also learned to make a home inside the waiting.

There is something most of us do that we never quite name.

We make a quiet agreement with the familiar — even when the familiar is suffocating. Because the unknown is terrifying. Because starting over is exhausting. Because at least here, we know the shape of our disappointment.

So we wait. For the right moment. For enough money. For life to give us a sign clear enough that we can’t ignore it.

We keep waiting to feel ready. As if ready is something that arrives before the door — and not something that only makes sense after you’ve walked through it.

Truman’s final moment isn’t dramatic the way films usually make things dramatic.

He finds the door — a plain door, cut into a painted sky and he stands at it for a long time. Scared. The director speaks from above and tells him the world outside is no better. That at least here he is safe. Loved. Known.

It isn’t entirely wrong, what the director says.

Truman opens the door anyway.

Not because the fear disappeared. Not because he had it all figured out.

Because staying — consciously staying, choosing the cage after you have finally seen it — was the one thing he could no longer do.

I think many of us are standing at some version of that door right now.

The life that looks fine from the outside but costs something we can’t name from the inside. The dreams we’ve been quietly shrinking to fit the space we’re allowed. The version of ourselves we keep performing because everyone around us has gotten comfortable with it.

We are not stuck because we are weak.

We are stuck because we are human. Because somewhere along the way, waiting became a lifestyle. Because the loop, after long enough, starts to feel like identity.

But here is what I know — about myself, and about the people I walk alongside:

You don’t have to have the whole plan. You don’t have to feel brave.

You just have to stop pretending you don’t see the door.

That’s where it begins.

Not with a grand exit. Not with a perfect plan. Not with waiting for the fear to leave.

It begins with one honest question —

“What is one thing I have been postponing because I am waiting to feel ready?”

Not ten things. Just one.

Maybe it’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding. A city you keep almost moving to. A version of yourself you keep saving for later. A dream you’ve been treating like a rough draft.

Whatever it is — write it down today. Say it out loud. Tell one person.

Because the loop doesn’t break with a dramatic moment. It breaks with a small, deliberate act of honesty.

You don’t need to have it all figured out before you move. You just need to stop lying to yourself about which part of it isn’t working.

Truman didn’t leap. He walked.

Shaking, scared, uncertain — he simply chose the door over the comfort of the known.

That choice is available to you today. In something small. In something real.

Stop waiting. Take one step.

That is enough. That is everything.

If this found you at the right moment, share it with one person who needs it today. And if something in here moved you — I’d love to hear it. Reply, leave a note, let me know.

Thank you for reading.

See you next Wednesday.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence

If this felt like something you needed today subscribe. It’s free. Every Wednesday. One honest letter, straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam. Just real words from a real person, showing up every week.

Hi.

I turned 25 on the 14th of June, 2026.

People keep asking me the same questions this week. What did you do for your birthday? Did you cut a cake? Did you get any gifts? What was the best part?

I didn’t have a good answer for them. Because the truth is, I didn’t plan anything.

No cake. No countdown. No photos. Just a Sunday that I let unfold on its own.

And somewhere underneath that question — “what did you do” — is a question I’ve been asking myself for years: “what am I supposed to have by now?”

By 25, I was supposed to be financially independent. Supposed to have things figured out. Supposed to know exactly where I’m going.

I have none of that. And for the first time, I’m okay with it.

From wanting everything, to wanting nothing but peace

I don’t know what to call this shift. Maybe you have a word for it. All I know is that I spent years wanting more — more achievement, more certainty, more proof that I was on track. And somewhere in the last year, that wanting just... quieted down.

Not because I gave up. Because I got tired of chasing something that never actually arrived.

Life is not meant to be chased. It’s meant to be lived.

Those are not the same sentence, even though they sound close.

So this birthday, I didn’t make resolutions. I didn’t promise myself I’d be somewhere different a year from now. I just decided to be where I already was.

What I actually did

I woke up. A few people called to wish me, and I felt genuinely glad for those small, real connections. I went to a garden with my family. I watched the sky and simply enjoyed being with nature. I waved at birds flying overhead, which felt a little silly and also exactly right. We had a great dinner together.

I was so present that I forgot to take a single photo.

And somehow, that absence of documentation felt like the whole point. I wasn’t performing the day for anyone. I was just in it.

Because here’s the truth underneath all of it:

That’s it. That was the whole plan.

The days you don’t document are sometimes the days you actually lived.

By the end, what I felt wasn’t excitement. It was something quieter — peace, and a kind of satisfaction that didn’t need to announce itself.

I think that’s what I’ve actually been chasing this whole time, without knowing it.

The part I don’t usually say out loud

Here’s what I want to be honest about, because I think a lot of us carry this in silence: this birthday wasn’t just about slowing down. It was about looking back at years that held real darkness — days when staying alive felt like the hardest thing I’d ever done.

I’m not going to pretend that part wasn’t there. It was.

There was a time when I thought about ending my life for days, weeks, and months. And today, I caught myself realizing I’d almost forgotten I ever thought that. It felt like a new birth.

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Some years, surviving is the achievement. This was one of those years.

So when I say 25 feels like a new birth, I mean it literally. Turning 25 isn’t just another year added on. It’s a marker that I made it through years I genuinely wasn’t sure I would.

The best thing that happened to me this year is simple:

I’m still here today. I didn’t choose to end my life, even on the days the thought kept returning. I chose courage instead. I chose to keep moving forward.

Becoming my own best friend

Four years ago, I wouldn’t have believed I could feel this comfortable in my own company. Now I enjoy my solitude. I feel safe and comfortable being with myself.

I never imagined I’d become my own best friend. But somewhere in the slowest, hardest stretches, that’s exactly what happened.

I stopped waiting to be chosen by someone else, because I’d already chosen myself.

I learned to be kind to myself when no one else was watching. I learned that I could sit with myself, fully alone, and not feel lonely at all.

That might be the actual achievement of this year — not a milestone I can put on a resume, but a relationship with myself I no longer have to fake.

Letting go of the deadline

I think I’m finally learning what it means to let go. Not of ambition, exactly, but of the grip I’ve had on how things are supposed to go.

Don’t plan everything. Don’t expect life to follow your blueprint. Don’t get so attached to a person, a place, a timeline, that you forget to actually live inside the version of life you’re in right now.

I still want financial independence. I still want to build something real and meaningful with my work. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the attachment to the outcome and the constant checking of whether I’m behind.

It’s not the goal I’m releasing. Just the grip on it.

No deadline. No societal script that says I should be a certain kind of “arrived” by a certain age. Just this year, this version of me, accepting where I actually am.

I’m grateful for these twenty-five years, all of it, the parts that hurt as much as the parts that healed. I accept myself fully, the person I was, the person I struggled to become, the person I am right now, still figuring things out. I’m grateful for every situation that shaped me, even the ones I wouldn’t choose again. Because I am, in this exact moment, exactly who those twenty-five years built me to be, and I accept that completely.

If you’re in your own version of this

Maybe you’re not turning 25. Maybe you’re 30, or 40, or somewhere else entirely. But I’d guess you know this feeling — the quiet pressure of a life that’s supposed to look a certain way by now, and the exhaustion of trying to make it match.

I don’t have a tidy lesson to hand you. I just have this:

It’s possible to stop chasing and still be moving forward.

It’s possible to do nothing on a birthday and still feel like you did everything that mattered.

Maybe 25 is a reset button for me. I don’t know the full reason yet. But I trust that I will, in time.

For now, I’m just going to keep living slowly, on purpose, by being more — one ordinary, unphotographed, fully-felt day at a time.

Thank you for reading.

See you next Wednesday.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence

If this felt like something you needed today — Subscribe. It’s free. Every Wednesday. One honest letter, straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam. Just real words from a real person, showing up every week.

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Hi,

Can I ask you something honest?

When you were younger, did you have a version of yourself you were certain you’d become?

I did. I had her completely figured out.

She was confident. Successful. Living alone in some city far from her hometown, maybe somewhere no one expected. Running her own business. Financially independent, laughing loudly in rooms full of people who loved her. I had her whole life mapped out in my head.

I grew up watching some truly inspiring women like Muniba Mazari, Sudha Murthy, Priyanka Chopra any many more. I would listen to their interviews for hours. Something in me would light up. That’s going to be me someday. I was so sure of it. I would imagine myself travelling, meeting new people, building something of my own, enjoying my life, really enjoying it - in my twenties.

I’m turning 25 this week.

And that woman is nowhere to be found.

What I have instead is this:

No stable income. No city of my own. I’m still at my parents’ house, still figuring out the most basic questions about myself and my life. The friends I imagined having — gone or drifted. The people I loved most - I’m losing them too. Slowly. Emotionally.

Some days I stand in front of the mirror and genuinely don’t recognize the person looking back at me.

“What have I become?”

I’ve asked myself this question more times than I can’t count. Sometimes crying. This was never part of the plan. Losing her — the happy, playful, dreaming version of me — was never something I prepared for. You don’t plan for that kind of loss. It just sits with you, quietly, in the background of every day.

Society, of course, has opinions about all of this.

At 25, you should be settled. Earning well. Maybe engaged or married. Building something visible. Society likes visible things. Milestones it can count and compare and congratulate.

Society does not ask if you are happy.

It doesn’t sit with you at night when you feel lost. It doesn’t notice the years you spent fighting silent battles inside your own mind. It just keeps its scoreboard and waits for you to catch up.

I’m not caught up. And some part of me has stopped trying to explain that.

Because here’s what I’ve quietly understood — adulting is genuinely hard. Not Instagram hard. Not motivational post hard. Actually hard. The kind of hard that doesn’t make for a good caption. The kind that shows up at 2am when you’re questioning every choice that led you here. The kind that doesn’t resolve in a single breakthrough moment, no matter how many self-help books you read or spiritual practices you follow.

Nobody tells you this part. Or maybe they do, and you just don’t believe them until you’re living it.

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And yet.

Here is also what is true:

I know myself more deeply than I ever have. I have sat with myself — really sat, in the uncomfortable silence — and I have not looked away. I have questioned everything I was taught to want. I have found, somewhere underneath all of it, a voice that is genuinely mine. A way of seeing the world that belongs to no one else.

I write daily on Threads and Substack. About my life, my thoughts, my mental health, this long messy process of figuring out. Honest views on what it actually feels like to be human right now. And slowly, quietly, people are reading.

People are writing back to say “this is exactly how I feel and I couldn’t find the words.”

That means something.

The happy, playful girl I thought I’d lost — I think she’s still here. She just went somewhere deeper. She became more honest, more real, more human. Less polished. More true.

I’m still finding her. I won’t pretend otherwise.

So what do I feel, turning 25?

Honestly — I don’t fully know yet.

I don’t feel like celebrating in the conventional way. I don’t feel like performing joy I haven’t fully found. But I also don’t want to let the day pass as just another heavy one.

Maybe 25 doesn’t have to be a verdict. Maybe it’s just a page turning. Maybe the story I thought I was writing got replaced by a stranger, messier, more interesting one — and I’m still in the middle of it, not the end.

If your twenties look nothing like you planned — if you’ve stood in front of a mirror and asked yourself the same question I have — then this is for you.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence

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Hi,

Have you ever had a day where everything broke down — and it turned out to be exactly what you needed?

This happened last week. May. Peak summer in my city.

The storm came without much warning. By 5 PM, the sky had turned dark and purple. Then the wind hit. Then the rain — not the soft kind, but the kind that bends trees sideways and breaks them like they were nothing. Lightning struck so close there was no time to count. No gap between the flash and the sound. It was all one thing — loud, wild, and relentless.

By 6 PM, every light in my locality went out.

Power cuts happen. We’ve all been through them. You wait an hour, maybe scroll on your phone till the battery dies, then sleep. By morning, everything is humming again like nothing ever happened.

But this time was different.

This time, the electricity was gone for 20 hours straight.

The Damage Was Real

No light. No fan. No TV. No Wi-Fi. No refrigerator keeping things cold.

Outside, the damage was everywhere. Trees that had stood on those roads for years were snapped and lying across them. Electric cables were down, tangled and defeated on the ground. Street vendors had lost their entire evening. Birds had scattered. Stray animals wandered in the wet with nowhere to go.

The loss was real and visible — in broken branches, in dark shop windows, in the faces of people standing at their gates looking at the sky like it owed them something.

We delayed dinner, thinking the electricity would be back any minute.

It didn’t come.

I Was Prepared for a Miserable Night. I Was Wrong.

It’s May. It’s hot. Sleeping without a fan in Indian summer is its own kind of suffering.

But the storm had changed something in the air.

Around midnight, a real breeze came through my window — carrying the smell of wet mud and fallen leaves. I pulled a blanket over myself. In May. I couldn’t believe it.

I slept better than I had in a long time.

Before I closed my eyes, I told myself: by the time you wake up, everything will be back to normal.

I was wrong about that too.

The Morning Everyone Was Waiting — Except Me

Morning came and the street was quiet in the way that only happens when electricity is missing. No background hum. No distant TV. No Wi-Fi router blinking in the corner.

Everyone was waiting. Checking phones. Watching battery percentages drop. Speculating about when it might come back. The collective anxiety was almost funny — all of us helpless.

And then, at some point — I just stopped waiting.

I don’t know exactly what shifted. Maybe I was tired of the anxious energy. Maybe some part of me realized that none of us staring at the sky was going to bring the cables back faster. But something quietly said: “this is the time you have right now. use it.”

I pulled a chair out to my balcony. Went to my bookcase. Picked up

“Show Your Work” by  — a book I’d started before and left unfinished, the way I’d left too many things unfinished lately.

I sat down. I opened the first page.

And I just… kept reading.

I Read an Entire Book. In One Sitting.

Here’s something I genuinely haven’t done in a long time: read a book from start to finish in one sitting.

I finished it that morning. The whole thing. No notifications pulling me somewhere else. No guilt about the work I wasn’t doing online, the posts I wasn’t publishing, the numbers I wasn’t checking. Just a book, a pen, a few blank pages for notes, and the cool post-storm air on my face.

It’s the first book I’ve completed in all of 2026.

I’d actually read parts of it before — but sitting there on that balcony with no Wi-Fi and no pressure, it felt like I was reading it for the very first time. Every idea landed differently. I took notes the slow way, pen on paper, where your hand forces your brain to actually think before writing.

I wasn’t consuming content. I was absorbing something. There’s a difference. I’d forgotten that difference existed.

The Thing I Lost Somewhere in the Hustle

I’ve spent the last few years doing the exact opposite of what I did yesterday morning.

Chasing the algorithm. Studying what performs. Posting at the “right time.” Reading things that would make me better at producing more things. Measuring everything. Optimizing everything. Living in the gap between where I was and where I convinced myself I needed to be.

And somewhere in all of that — the hustle, the consistency, the strategy — I lost something I can’t fully name. I only know it was missing because yesterday I found it again, and the relief of finding it was almost overwhelming.

It's strange how we never allow ourselves to slow down — until something forces us to.

Too Much Information Is Making Us Suffer

There’s a particular kind of suffering that comes from knowing too much.

We know what everyone else is building. We know what’s trending. We know what we should be doing. We know the gap between our current numbers and the numbers that apparently mean we’ve made it. We carry all of this information around constantly — not because it helps us live better, but because we simply can’t turn it off anymore.

Yesterday, the storm turned it off for me.

And in that silence, I heard myself again.

I wrote freely — not for an audience, not to grow something, not to prove anything. Just for myself. And the peace I felt was unlike anything I had felt in years.

This is what I’d been missing. Doing something just because it matters to you. Not because it will perform. Not because it fits the story of who you’re trying to become. Just because it’s true, and yours, and that’s enough.

Life Is Not Meant to Be Chased

Life is not meant to be chased. It’s meant to be lived.

We’ve flipped this somehow. We chase futures that keep moving further away while the present sits right here, asking for nothing except a little attention.

Yesterday reminded me of that.

The broken cables, the dark streets, the cool May breeze, the open book on my lap — none of it was planned or optimized or scheduled. And yet, without any doubt, it was one of the best days I’ve had this year.

If this found you at the right time — I'd love to know. When did life last force you to slow down? What did you find in that quiet?

See you next Wednesday.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence 

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Hi,

Have you ever felt brave without feeling strong?

Not the loud kind of brave — the kind that looks like confidence, bold decisions, visible progress. But the quiet kind. The kind that just... gets out of bed anyway.

Four years ago, I walked away from Chartered Accountancy studies after investing three years into it. Not because I had a plan. I left because something in me couldn’t continue.

Some days, courage looked nothing like confidence. It looked like staying in bed a little longer, staring at the ceiling, and wondering how I would face another day of uncertainty.

For a long time, I believed courage had to be loud. I thought it meant clarity, direction, money, progress — something visible to prove I was “doing well.”

But that kind of courage never came to me.

Instead, my life became a quiet lesson in a different kind of bravery.

There are days I don’t want to get out of bed. Not because I don’t care — but because everything feels heavy all at once.

I am jobless. I am not earning. There is no steady income, no clear career path, no certainty about the future.

That reality alone carries a deep frustration.

Some days, I try really hard — planning, thinking, imagining a future, searching for direction. Other days, I feel exhausted from trying and just want to do nothing. And both states come with guilt.

Sleepless nights follow. My mental health feels fragile on many days. My career confusion has stayed with me for years. Financial stress is constant.

Home isn’t peaceful. There are ongoing family conflicts. I grew up in a dysfunctional environment shaped by narcissism and emotional chaos.

I don’t want to stay here — but I do. Not because I’m comfortable, but because sometimes leaving isn’t possible yet.

Marriage pressure exists too — spoken and unspoken.

All of this sits with me when I wake up.

Some days, I don’t feel like talking to anyone. Not because I don’t love my family — but because I’m tired of explaining myself, tired of justifying my pace, tired of being asked questions I don’t have answers to.

And still, people talk.

They comment. They taunt. They say things casually — without realizing how deeply those words land.

They don’t see how many things I’ve tried. They don’t see the inner battles, the self-doubt, the constant pressure to “figure life out.” They only see that I’m still here — still not earning.

And sometimes, they say, “You haven’t tried enough.”

That sentence hurts more than failure ever could.

For four years, I’ve felt broken — physically, emotionally, mentally. Days when my head hurts, my chest feels tight, and my thoughts won’t slow down.

Still, even on those days, I try.

I try to decide what small action I can take today. I try to plan something for my career. I try to believe this phase will not define my entire life.

And then there are days when I don’t feel like waking up at all. Days when giving up feels easier.

But I don’t.

I wake up anyway. I sit with the discomfort anyway. I take one small step — or sometimes no step at all — and allow myself to simply survive.

That’s when I understood something important.

Courage didn’t come to me as a big decision or a bold move. It came quietly, through small and unseen moments.

Courage was getting out of bed when I didn’t want to face the day. Courage was living inside uncertainty without knowing when it would end. Courage was staying alive when I didn’t feel strong.

I used to underestimate small things. Now I know they matter the most.

Getting up matters. Trying again matters. Allowing myself rest matters.

Every day I don’t give up — even when I want to — counts.

The world often makes me feel like I’m not enough. Like I’m late. Like I’m behind. Like others are doing better.

I’m learning to stop listening to the world.

Truth isn’t what society measures. Truth isn’t what people expect.

Truth is what I feel inside.

I’m learning to listen to myself. I’m learning to respect my pace. To stop measuring my courage against someone else’s timeline.

If all I did today was survive — that is enough. If I stayed when I wanted to disappear — that is courage.

Looking back, I realize this now:

The bravest moments of my life weren’t loud. They weren’t impressive. They weren’t visible.

They were the quiet days. The uncertain mornings. The moments I chose not to give up.

And if you are reading this and feeling the same way — I want you to know, you are not behind. You are not broken. You are just in a quiet chapter. And quiet chapters count too.

See you next Wednesday.

With love,

Siree

Words and Silence

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Hi,

Today was not the day I imagined writing to you.

From the moment I woke up this morning, my mind was already arguing with itself.

Should I even write newsletter today? Will anyone read this? Why am I doing this? Will people subscribe? Am I making the right decision starting this newsletter?

Just question after question. No answers. Just noise.

Then the day decided to make things worse.

I had to run for groceries. Then out of nowhere the sky went dark, storm came, rain everywhere. Electricity cut off. Wifi gone. Phone data so slow it was barely working.

Every single time I thought okay, now I’ll sit and write — something. Always something.

But here’s what I noticed. And I’m being honest with you here.

A part of me was relieved.

Because now I had a reason not to write. The circumstances gave me a perfect excuse and I was ready to take it. I was already confused, already tired, already looking for a way out — and the universe just kept handing me one after another.

So I gave up and took a nap.

And that’s where it got interesting.

Somewhere in that quiet space between sleeping and being awake, I heard something. A voice. One line. Soft but clear. Repeating again and again.

“Subscribe to my life”.

I woke up at 5 pm. Stared at the ceiling. Just sat with those words.

Now for the last few years something has shifted in me. I’ve started paying attention to signs. Earlier I didn’t believe in any of this. But slowly, through experiences I can’t fully explain, I started noticing — the universe actually talks to you.

Not loudly. Not dramatically.

Through a song that hits different on a specific day. Through timing that makes no logical sense. Through a dream. Through a single sentence a voice speaks to you while you're half asleep that stays with you long after you wake up.

Once you start noticing, you really can’t stop seeing it.

Today felt like one of those moments.

I’ve been asking all week:

“Will people subscribe to my newsletter?”

But lying there after that nap, I realized the universe was asking me something else entirely.

“Are YOU subscribed to your own life?”

Are you present in your days? Are you choosing yourself consistently? Are you actually living your life — or are you just watching it happen, waiting for better conditions, waiting to feel more ready, waiting for some invisible permission to finally begin?

That question sat with me for a long time.

Because today I wasn’t subscribed. Today I was waiting.

I was waiting for the electricity to come back. Waiting for the wifi to work. Waiting to feel less confused, more clear, more sure of myself before I sat down to write. Waiting for something outside me to make it easier to begin.

That’s not living. That’s just waiting dressed up as living.

We do this so much. We put our own lives on hold waiting for better weather. Literally and otherwise.

The storm didn’t come to stop me.

The power cuts didn’t come to stop me.

The doubt didn’t come to stop me.

I think it all came so I could choose to show up anyway. So I could prove to myself — before proving anything to anyone else — that I’m actually committed to this. To writing. To showing up. To my own life.

Because a newsletter is just an invitation into someone’s world.

And before asking others to enter mine, I have to fully live it myself.

So here I am. Writing this with no electricity. On a painfully slow connection. On a messy, stormy, confusing Wednesday.

Not perfectly.

Just honestly.

If you’re reading this today, maybe this is your reminder too.

Maybe you’ve also been waiting.

For the right time. The right mood. The right circumstances. The right sign.

Maybe this is the sign.

Don’t just watch your life happen.

“Subscribe to it.”

Show up for it the way you wish others would show up for you.

See you next Wednesday.

With love,

Siree

Words & Silence

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I want to tell you something I haven’t said out loud enough.

For four years, I didn’t feel like myself.

Not in a dramatic, obvious way. From the outside, I was functioning. I was showing up. I was getting through the days. But inside — I was running on empty. Overthinking everything. Feeling hollow in a way I couldn’t explain to anyone, including myself.

This is that story.

And I’m telling it because I think you might need to hear it.

Can I Tell You Something I Rarely Say?

I was a CA student for three years.

Chartered Accountancy. One of the most respected, most certain paths you can choose. The kind of path that makes your family proud. The kind that gives you a title, a future, a plan.

Everyone around me thought I had it figured out. I let them believe that.

Because the truth — that I felt completely purposeless inside — was harder to explain than to just keep going.

Three years in, I looked at the life I was building and didn’t recognize myself in it anymore. The path was right. The people around me were proud. But I was hollow inside. I was studying hard, checking every box — and feeling emptier with every passing day.

I left not because I failed. Not because it was too hard.

I left because staying felt like slowly disappearing.

So I stopped. Until I couldn’t keep going anymore — I stopped.

With no plan. No backup. No idea what came next. The only thing I knew in that moment was: I cannot keep doing this.

I thought that decision would set me free.

Instead it dropped me straight into four years of feeling lost.

What Those 4 Years Actually Felt Like

I wish I could tell you that leaving CA led me somewhere beautiful right away.

It didn’t.

What followed was four years of a different kind of weight. The weight of having no answer when people asked “so what are you doing now?” The weight of watching everyone else move forward — careers, clarity, purpose — while I stood completely still.

I was functioning on the outside. Empty on the inside.

My mind never stopped. The overthinking was relentless — replaying every decision, questioning if I had made a terrible mistake, dreading a future I couldn’t even picture. I smiled when I was supposed to smile. I said “I’m figuring it out” when really I had no idea.

The loneliest part wasn’t being alone.

It was feeling unreachable — even to myself.

The Turn

I wish I could tell you there was a single moment when everything changed. A book that saved me. A conversation that cracked me open. A morning I woke up and felt okay again.

It wasn't like that.

It was slower. Quieter. Almost invisible at first.

I stopped filling every moment with noise — with scrolling, with distraction, with anything that kept me from sitting with myself. I just sat. With the discomfort. With the uncertainty. Without trying to fix it immediately.

And then I started writing.

Not for anyone else. Not polished or pretty. Just honest. Just real. I wrote down what I was actually feeling — the messy, unresolved, ugly parts I had never let myself fully acknowledge. And something about putting words to the pain made it smaller. More survivable.

But the thing that changed everything — the thing I didn’t expect — was learning to talk to myself differently.

I had spent four years being my own harshest critic. Asking why can’t you just be okay instead of what do you need right now.

Self love, I used to think, was soft and surface level. I was wrong.

Self love is the hardest, most radical thing I have ever practiced. It means choosing gentleness when everything in you wants to give up. It means being your own witness — kind, patient, present — when you have nothing left to give.

That shift — from self criticism to self compassion — was the real beginning of coming home to myself.

Where I Am Today

I finally feel like myself again.

Not a perfect version. Not a version that has everything figured out. But a version that is grounded, present, and real.

I know who I am now in a way I never did during those three years of CA. The lostness, as painful as it was, gave me something I couldn’t have found any other way — a relationship with myself that is honest and unshakeable.

I came back to myself through words and silence. Through learning to slow down. Through choosing, again and again, to be gentle with the person I was still becoming.

There Is So Much More To This Story

I have only scratched the surface here.

There is so much I haven’t told you yet — about what those four years really looked like up close, about the specific moments I almost gave up on myself, about what self love actually looked like on the hardest days, about how I found my way back when I had no map and no plan.

I’ll share all of it here. Slowly. Honestly.

Every week in Words & Silence I’ll write about emotional healing, overthinking, mindfulness, self love, and the quiet unglamorous work of coming back to yourself. Not from a place of having all the answers — but from a place of having genuinely been lost and found my way back, one word and one silence at a time.

If you’re in the middle of your own lost years right now — if you’ve left something behind with no plan, if you’re functioning but empty, if you’re watching everyone move forward while you feel frozen —

I just want you to know:

You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not too far gone.

You are just in the middle of your story.

And the middle is not the end.

With love, Siree

Words & Silence

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