Numinous is an adjective that describes something having a strong spiritual or mysterious quality that instills a feeling of deep awe and wonder.

The first numinous experience I remember came unexpectedly when I was studying a book on physics as part of my school homework. I was in my late teens, and the topic was the nature of light. I read about its dual nature – sometimes wave and sometimes matter – and about cosmic microwave background. It is the light that has been traveling since 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That’s when the universe cooled just enough for photons to finally escape the hot fog of particles trapped inside a universe too dense and too excited to let anything travel in a straight line. This light was released finally like a pent up breath let out in a huff, and has been traveling ever since, detected in every direction a physicist could point an instrument.

My idea of spirituality at the time came from an ideal, specifically in Eastern philosophies, of detachment and blissful contentment. The Buddha, the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, are all portrayed in a state of tranquil repose, seemingly indifferent and untouched by the ups and downs of a mundane life. With that textbook in my hand I felt something different – awe in the face of something vast and inexplicable, a feeling of being small but connected to the infinite. It was to me – without doubt – a deeply spiritual experience.

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I have been seeking that feeling ever since, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unconsciously.

I was a material girl in my twenties. Though I glimpsed a glimmer of the understanding that life is more than I can understand with just my mind, I ended up completely disconnected from my body and emotions. Unsurprisingly, I chased peak experiences – money, success, achievement, status, sensual pleasures.

It was fun in a way that a merry-go-round is fun. A cycle of anticipation, then exhilaration, then adaptation, and then reaching for more, again and again until I ended up feeling slightly nauseous. The periods of no movement were when I tried not to notice that I was slowly suffocating. I was always waiting for something – the weekend, the vacation, the next achievement, the next obsession. Next, next, next.

I got a degree, and another, fancier degree. I built a career in tech and consulting in India and the USA. I got married. I had a daughter just as I turned forty, to the great relief of her grandparents. I was “normal” and “successful”. There was no catastrophe to justify my suffering. But something felt wrong about living a life where I wished so much of it away.

String of Saturdays was a goal …. no, a promise I made to myself, more than a decade ago. A BHAG – Big Hairy Audacious Goal, in corporate speak – of curating a life that I love to live in the here and now. I wanted a life charged with a sense of mystery and adventure. I wanted to be as uncurated and sincere as possible in my relationships. String of Saturdays gave me purpose, a personal exploration of the neuroscience and psychology of fulfillment and joy, a study of philosophy and self-actualization, a series of experiments on myself that needed all of my commitment and courage.

In the beginning I did what I was already doing, which meant chasing peak experiences, except of a spiritual flavor. Hundreds of books. Courses, workshops, retreats. Studying Jung, Advaita philosophy and near death experiences. Intense breathwork and meditation deep in the New Age spiritual communities in the USA. Plant medicine deep in the jungles of Ecuador.

As I journeyed deeper into myself, I found the greatest surprises not in the teachings and traditions I gathered, but in my own evolving mind. In the way I was learning to see. It was then I understood my early fascination with light and the numinous. Every tradition I encountered had turned light into a metaphysical metaphor. In Vedic cosmology, light is jyoti – consciousness itself, the thing that makes it possible to see and to be. In Greek mythology, light is fire, divinity stolen by humans audacious enough to seek illumination. Jung turned it inward: individuation as a kind of dawning, the slow, often unwelcome process by which what is unconscious becomes lit by consciousness.

This is where String of Saturdays is now. A persistent reaching for what I would brazenly call enlightenment, using the word in its most literal sense. It is not acquiring something new but illumination where there was previously only fumbling and guessing in the dark.

There are accessible tools for this work. Psychology, neuroscience, interpersonal dynamics, Jungian methods. T-Groups. The study of dopamine, narrative practices and archetypes. These are used not as belief systems but as instruments to study what’s unconscious in us, what’s unknown to us, to bring light into our shadows and into how we relate to ourselves and each other.

But information alone doesn’t provide the power to change a life. What moves us, what gives us the energy to push against our own inertia and the dulling pull of a hedonic world, is the numinous.

You see, what I ended up learning in the last decade is so cliché, but it is true so hear me out. The numinous is not somewhere up above, some place outside of us. It is within. It is the magic already inside life, accessible only when we are present to it.

Chasing peak experiences always resets us back to wanting. That’s just how dopamine works. It is a loop that needs a “next” to survive. The numinous does the opposite. A single moment of numinosity, like being truly witnessed in a circle — without flinching, with tenderness — grounds a person in that moment in a way that lasts. It can rearrange how a person sees themselves in a way that no book or course can. The numinous is in the inexplicable things that move us — our passion and compassion, love, curiosity, friendship. The numinous makes things matter to us.

I am not a mentor. I am not a coach. I am in no way “ahead”. My credentials are that I have thrown myself whole-heartedly in the pursuit of self-discovery. I have learned a great deal and have probably failed more times than most people I know. I have been practicing doing something very simple and very hard. Being alive and present to my life. I am practicing not waiting. Light doesn’t wait. At the speed of light, time does not pass. We invented time and waiting. Light just is, everywhere along its path, all at once. I try living like that.

I am expanding String of Saturdays beyond me. Today it is an invitation for others who are also searching and seeking. This isn’t work you do once and finish. It is a practice, and practice only works through repetition. It is showing up again and again until presence becomes less an act of will and more a way of being. Using art and writing as a side door into the parts of ourselves that logic alone can’t open. And it is the numinous that turns the learnings into insight. That turns a routine into a ritual full of reverence.

We don’t have to do all this alone. We can do this in community – through building trust and recognizing parts of us in others, through friends who can show us what we can’t see by ourselves, through the precious, simple experience of feeling safe enough to be witnessed.

I hope you will join us.

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Everyday, I work in a cafe after dropping N off to daycare. A nice cafe, with luxurious plants clustered next to bright glass windows, and smiling servers who remember how I like my tea. The place smells like roasted coffee beans from small careful batches grown in local plantations. On every table is placed a glass bottle of water that no one drinks despite the Hyderabad heat. The smiling servers will bring you unlimited quantities of filtered water in sparkling glass tumblers if we ask for it.

Six months now I have sat at the same table and looked past the same bottle. It has a small dent in the silver cap, the kind a bottle gets on a conveyor belt somewhere before it ever meets a person. On this cap is a printed legend that emphatically states that this bottle of water was manufactured precisely on January 28th of 2026 and will expire on January 27th of 2027. Because of that dent I know it is the same bottle, ignored today the way it was ignored in February, in March, in April, in every month I did not touch it.

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The age of water

This is what we know about the age of water. It is, at the very least, four and a half billion years old, about as old as Earth. But it is entirely possible that water on Earth was not formed here at all.

It is speculated that Earth was born bone dry, in a solar system that was at the time too hot for water. For the longest time, scientists believed that water on Earth was born through primordial hydrogen and oxygen atoms that joined to make ice crystals in deep space clouds many billion years before the Sun ignited. For eons they swirled and drifted in cold, black nurseries between the stars, and were delivered to us in comets and asteroids and other wandering space travelers. A hundred million years after the sun caught fire, water flowed on Earth. That is fast on the clock the universe keeps.

Then in 2025 – practically yesterday in a cosmic sense – someone cracked open a 4.5 billion year old rock, and the tidy story cracked a little. Maybe Earth made water for us from its own hydrogen-rich body.

The reality is probably a hybrid of both theories. The water on Earth is not isotopically uniform. We probably drink and clean and bathe in two kinds of water. Some home grown right here on Earth, and the rest as ancient as the universe itself, borrowed from very far away. The two are indistinguishable now, mixed forever in every body, in every bottle.

The memory of water

In every culture on our planet, there persist myths about water carrying memory and emotions.

In ancient traditions, water was considered a foundational element, one of the four roots of existence – earth, water, air, fire. Aristotle assigned each element qualities. Water is cold and wet. Water is malleable, formless, and has the capacity to take the shape of whatever contains it.

The elements were mapped onto the zodiac. The water signs – Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces – are characterized by receptivity, depth, attachment, and intuition. Water signs are changeable and emotional, unlike the intellectual detachment of air, the assertive drive of fire, or the patient groundedness of earth.

In Vedic traditions, water symbolizes purity, the natural flow of life towards divinity, and the surrender of ego. It is the medium through which the living honor the dead. The river Ganga specifically is understood as the portal through which ancestors pass safely after death. The sipping, sprinkling, and pouring of water, the bathing, cleansing, and dipping in water – these are not just symbolic rituals, but rehearsal for the absolute inevitability of impermanence: practicing, drop by drop, both the taking in and the letting go, until one day we have to let go of everything all at once.

Carl Jung explicitly picked the water symbol as the universal archetype for the unconscious itself. Across the world, across cultures and nations, dreams of oceans, wells, rivers, or floods represent emotional material rising up from below conscious control.

French immunologist Jacques Benveniste ran a study where he “proved” that water once dissolved with a substance contained a “memory” of the substance, a theory that is foundational to the practice of homeopathy to this day.

Then Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto made the leap from “water remembers substances” to “water remembers emotions”. In the 1990s, Emoto claimed that water crystals could change shape based on words, music, and images. His famous water and rice experiment is immortalized in pop culture. He kept three jars of rice and water, where he spoke “Thank you” to one, “You idiot” to another, and ignored the third. The water that was shown kindness allegedly structured itself into beautiful shapes, while the water in the ignored jar was made jagged and ugly.

So it is hardly surprising that the idea of water holding emotions is imprinted in modern culture. In the movie Frozen 2, the idea that water retains the history of everything it touches and everyone it passes through is a major magical plot point.

Of course, none of these myths and theories have any scientific backing. None of it holds up. Not one page of it. The memory of water is a stubborn, persistent myth that no one believes, even though we live our lives drowning in grief, flooded with relief, boiling with anger and hacking ourselves into flow state.

The life of water

We believe ourselves to be proper, modern materialists. We don’t believe in magic and in spirits. Maybe we did, when we were little, but we know that the universe is impersonal, governed by impartial laws of physics that remembers no one and nothing. And yet we treasure old handmade things, have relationships with and attachments to homes and cars. We are sure a machine hates us when it refuses to serve us, a half conscious belief that its behavior is intentional.

Whether we like it or not, we are creatures built from feeling and myth-making. We reach for magic the way a plant reaches for light.

It took millenia of thinking and advancement to find water’s chemical formula, but we never had to learn to find awe at the sight of the ocean. Millennia of us, standing at the edge of water, saying nothing, feeling something that has no words. We need water to keep us alive. And being what we are, we need it to mean something too.

This particular bottle of water has been on my table everyday for six months. I have ignored this bottle for six months. It is stamped with the assertion that in the next six months, this primordial thing, at least four-and-a-half-billion-year-old, will expire. The way milk does, the way a body does. Does the water know about this judgement? Do its molecules become ugly as I sit next to it, day after day, ignoring it?

Today I am overwhelmed with the irrational, animistic sensation that this particular bit of water is restless. It has touched ancient lands, flowed in the veins of millions of our ancestors. It was forged in the scorching fires of ancient Earth, and crystallized in the boundless void of deep space. It flew and flowed to find a feeling creature and live in it and churn within it and rush out in spurts through a beating heart.

Today I invite this particular piece of cosmic fluid into myself for the price of 90 rupees, just a little less than a dollar. Today it will know what it’s like to be me. Today it will dissolve with the caffeine and sugar from a cup of tea I will nurse as I finish writing this piece. It will taste the metal in the gym dumbbells, and hear about S’s day when I get back home, and watch N’s antics at the park, before she nestles into me before she turns in for the night, and flow into her through my breast, and finally, finally, it will feel something.

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It is a muggy Thursday evening and N and I are walking to the park. It is the axis her whole day spins on, the appointment she would keep through fire or flood. The air is thick and oppressive. It squeezes into the lungs and sits heavy like a sodden washcloth.

We turn the corner toward the walkway to the park and stop dead. The ground is dusted in a layer of white. It looks like snow peppered improbably across the swell sweltering landscape, but it is styrofoam, hundreds of thousands of tiny white beads, on the street, in the grass, filling the planters, little white rivulets of them threading through the gutters. The air is still and dead, but the smallest waft and the beads leap up into a shivering, glittering frenzy. They dance and chase each other, each ball light as air.

N loses her mind. She is captivated. Everyday she is usually welcomed by a swarm of neighborhood kids of all ages and stages. Everyday she wants to go on the slide and the swing and the seesaw on her belly, on her back, upside down, or whatever new contortion the older kids perform that she wants to imitate. She is the youngest kid in the park, and is granted more tolerance and gentleness. Everyday her friends humor her and let her win at everything out of a fond and slightly patronizing love, and N takes full advantage of it.

But none of that today. Today there are beads. She drops to her haunches and begins gathering them by the fistful, chasing the eddies down, releasing them from her grasp and watching them drop softly through the air. For the first time she flatly, cheerfully ignores every friend she has in the park.

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The next evening someone diligently swept the walkway clean. But if you are one and a half years old, or willing to pretend that you are, you will find the stragglers. Little white grains clustered in corners, concealed under a leaf, wedged behind a crushed juice box. N finds their hiding places and evacuates them. The styrofoam balls are sanctified by scarcity into treasure.

At first I assume a fresh source of the errant balls — a burst beanbag somewhere, a container of party supplies ripped open. But then I look closer at a nearby congregation. Some are stained the color of weak tea. Some are still sodden from last night’s rain. There is a strand of hair and aa a translucent scrap of onion skin tangled in with them. My daughter is reaching for this with her small grubby starfish hand and I experience, briefly and overwhelmingly, the specific parental horror of watching your child treat a piece of garbage like a communion wafer. I snatch her back. She screams. For the rest of the evening she wants nothing else in this world but the dirty little thermocol balls.

They are there the next day and the next. I try distraction, bribery, a game invented on the spot, even enlisting the older kids as diplomats. Nothing works. So I do what every parent eventually does, which is surrender with conditions. Fine! Pick them up. But don’t eat them, and we wash your hands the second we’re back home. I can only assume that N agrees to this treaty, since she ignores me and continues, but does not ingest any of her treasures.

The other children are bemused by the ferocity of N’s quest, and everyday some of them crouch down and hunt beside her. N has lately discovered the fierce toddler grip of mine over her toys, her water bottle, the trinkets she finds strewn around. But she hands her beads out freely, picks them one by one out of her clammy hands into the outstretched grasp of her friends. The older kids get bored in minutes. N stays. N stops and tends to the styrofoam balls for quite a while.

Eventually I stop with her too. I realize that nobody taught N that these beads were worth anything. Nobody sold her on styrofoam. No influencer, no beautifully lit unboxing, no older cousin declaring them cool. Her love for them is manufactured entirely on-site, in her own small body and heart, out of nothing but her own attention. The whole neighborhood’s collective shrug of disinterest and my disapproval rolls off her like rain off a duck. She loves the balls because she does.

I think, watching her, of what I love the same way. There are books, big ones with serious titles, that I genuinely love. I loved my hard earned career that I bled into for two decades. I love food, plates and bowls with unpronounceable names that you have to fly to reach. But I also perform loving them, hold them up to be admired. Look at the things I love! Look what this says about my mind, my taste, my life!

I do love things that are sustained from an interior tap nobody else can handle. The sky, and its whole reckless cache of lights, its unproven meanings, its overwhelming infinity. Loved for no better reason than that it hangs there, existing. New stationery, the smell of it, its blank, expectant potential. An old cotton t-shirt that was once white, now a memory of cloth. Things I don’t bother to defend out loud, because their worth only works from the inside of me.

Weeks pass. More than a month. Time now is measured in styrofoam. There are far fewer beads on the walk, but N still finds one or two every evening, a faithful trickle from a source that should be exhausted. She runs back to me holding her prize aloft like a tiny drunk Statue of Liberty and demands, with the full weight of her limited but burgeoning vocabulary, “Potek!”. She means pocket. I hold my pocket open like a priest holding open the door into a temple. She deposits her treasure inside, gravely. She never asks for it again. She is not interested in the having. She is interested in the finding, in holding them for a moment, squeezing them between the finger and thumb, and sharing if anyone would take it.

Only much later, ambling home sweaty and heavy-limbed with the day, do I stop and empty my pocket. I wait until she is not looking and let the little grimy beads fall back out into the grass and the gutter and the dark. I am not throwing them away, exactly. They are simply released and returned. I am setting them out again for tomorrow’s harvest, like a farmer scattering a handful of just threshed seeds, so the crop will be there again at dawn.

I do it for N, my little priestess of the park, and the sacred garbage that is the object of her devotion. I do it so she will be able to find the small, white, worthless, radiant, endlessly renewing styrofoam balls, before the world gets its hands on her and starts telling her what’s allowed to be precious, what’s allowed to be loved.

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I studied engineering in college. There was some family pressure to go into medicine instead, but I’d been around enough of my doctor relatives to surmise that I probably didn’t have the stomach for it. I rebelled. I chose engineering. I thought myself very bold at the time.

It took me a couple of decades to notice that I never considered an option outside of doctor and engineer.

In a country of a billion people (now 1.5 billion and counting), all of them seemingly chasing the same dozen seats at the top engineering colleges, scoring in the top 1% didn’t even get you in the building. You needed the top 0.1%. The remaining 99.9 percentile – millions of us – had to contend with fighting over the leftovers among ourselves.

Like everyone else I knew, I joined one of the coaching centers that had sprouted in any available square inch of the city. Words are too paltry to describe how depressing it was. Fifty students were packed into every classroom for hours at a time. Air conditioning was an unaffordable luxury — we were air-fried by two fans ineffectually pushing around the heat in unventilated concrete rooms. We studied on rows of hard wooden desks warped by decades of use and graffiti. Every room was seeped in the smell of sweat, feet and stale food.

Boys and girls sat in different rows, let out at different times, to minimize any chance of co-ed socializing. I don’t know what they were worried about. We were a bunch of gangly, pimpled teenagers with stunted social skills. Teachers and janitors prowled the corridors to tell off anyone caught chatting, laughing, or in any way looking like they were having fun.

A month into this drudgery, out of sheer boredom and desperation, I eavesdropped on the teachers talking urgently among themselves. Our chemistry professor was missing. I picked up hazy details about a property dispute and violent relatives. The police were calling it a possible kidnapping.

I was ecstatic. At last — entertainment! Our chemistry professor was a petty and sadistic person who liked to smack the boys at the back of their heads, and make sarcastic, humiliating observations on the clothing of the girls. Now he was kidnapped! A free period and gossip!

My classmates were an anxious, burnt out bunch. Most kept to themselves, deep in books and notes in preparation for the impending examinations. We were still kids though, and I eagerly anticipated some speculation, maybe the beginnings of a covert investigation. Even sadness would have been a welcome change from the deadening routine. I ran to my classroom to deliver the news to my classmates, their heads bowed over lunch and textbooks. I announced the headlines, bracing for some long-overdue shock and awe.

They stared at me in silence.

Until one bespectacled girl, eyes magnified behind thick lenses, hair in two neat plaits, spoke up, earnestly:

So who’s going to take our chemistry class today?

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All of us, still just children really, were overwhelmed. The competition was brutal, and the pressure relentless.

We were told, again and again, that this time was crucial. Excelling in education was the only way to remain free of the poverty our ancestors had very recently clawed their way out of. The scores we got now would decide the trajectory for the rest of our lives. Curiosity and creativity were distractions. What we needed was discipline and hard work.

If we fail, we bring shame on ourselves and our family.

If we fail, life was over.

What fueled us looked like ambition. How we showed up looked like commitment. But any curiosity and genuine interest that had possibly been present was long gone. By the end, in reality, it was mostly fear.

Decades later, I’d hear Americans say Indians must be smart, look how many of them are doctors and engineers. I’d laugh. We weren’t smarter than average. We were just scared. Medicine and engineering were the only two exits that we were aware of that could deliver us from constant fear.

A Neurological Hangover

Pre-industrial life was not easy, but it was self-paced and afforded agency.

The work of a farmer, a craftsman, a trader was seasonally varied and embedded in social relationship. There was little standardization, knowledge was tribal, and the market and environment were frequently disrupted by natural and social factors. Problem-solving and improvisation were a part of the job. Work had the satisfaction of visible completion and tangible outcomes. The young learned primarily through apprenticeship.

Then came the Industrial Revolution that led to the expansion of the middle class – a higher standard of living for the average person. Industrial specializations and rapid technological advancements created new job opportunities. The economy grew. Consumer goods were mass produced.

But the factory system didn’t just aim to reorganize labor. It aimed to – and succeeded in – reorganizing the human nervous system. It did so deliberately.

The factory required the suppression of self-directed attention in favor of externally directed, repetitive, timed activity. It required that the worker not be curious, not explore, not improvise, but execute the same motion within the same window, reliably and indefinitely.

Horace Mann, the Father of American Education, revamped the template for the public education system in light of the post-industrial requirements with an explicit goal: to produce reliable, punctual, obedient workers for the industry.

Today, in my city in India, the billboards for schools are everywhere. There’s always a child, never older than six or seven. She has her arm raised to respond to a question only she seems to know the answer to in a sea of identical peers. She’s engrossed in a book, pencil in hand, smiling. Winning. The words are always some arrangement of the same four: Future. Potential. Leader. Success.

She spends a large part of her childhood responding to a bell. She has to ask for permission to use the bathroom. She has to wait for a mandated time in order to eat. She learns to parrot specific things at specific times. Her natural curiosity is curbed in service of a syllabus. She internalizes that learning and knowledge is only worthwhile if validated by a higher power.

She is rewarded for her obedience with a promise of financial stability, societal approval and a consistent sense of progression as she passes through grades and milestones. There are real consequences, though, if she fails to comply.

Every grade, every report card, every parent-teacher conference is a record of her compliance. It follows her, filed away in institutions and in her own body. The constant surveillance and threat of expulsion from a system with no visible alternative becomes, over time, indistinguishable from the fear of not existing at all.

The fear settles into her nervous system as baseline. It is a hum she can no longer hear, but it directs her choices every day for the rest of her life.

This system works beautifully — for large organizations, and for capitalism itself. Her motivation, her drive, her curiosity is efficiently rerouted into a single output. Employability at corporations.

For most of us — even the artists, even the rebels — genuine curiosity gets systematically trained out into the reflex to perform for someone watching.

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The worst thing that has happened to you

Jaak Panksepp, a pioneer of affective neuroscience, spent decades mapping the basic emotional systems shared by all mammals, the operating system of animal behavior. He capitalized the names of the primary emotional systems – SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY – to distinguish between the deep, instinctual brain networks present in every mammal from the culturally ambiguous, baggage ridden usage of the words in everyday human language.

SEEKING is one of the most ancient and conserved neural circuits in the mammalian brain. It is directly related to dopamine. “Dopamine” has become a buzzword, mostly because social media companies figured out how to hijack it for profit. But Panksepp went deeper than the pop-science version.

He argues that SEEKING – the drive to explore, investigate, and engage with the world in pursuit of resources, novelty, and meaning – isn’t just a feature of consciousness. It’s the foundation of it. And unlike most neuroscientists, he took phenomenology – the study of subjective experience – seriously as real data.

Here is the description for all mammals of what it actually feels like to be in SEEKING state:

Heightened alertness – you’re tuned in and eager.

A pull forward toward the world and its experiences.

Curiosity without anxiety.

A sense of aliveness, of being animated and potent.

Time opens up.

Obstacles feel interesting, and elicit curiosity.

No external reward required. The state sustains itself.

The SEEKING system can be activated in the complete absence of reward. Children and animals at play are in a SEEKING state. Scientists in the early stages of a fascinating problem are in a SEEKING state. Artists in flow are in a SEEKING state. It is the state in which humans explore, discover and create.

SEEKING is an automatic state when animals are in “well-being” mode – not in danger or chronic stress. But it can be shut down by –

External rewards, even for things you already wanted to do. You used to cook for the joy of it. You started posting reels about it that found a following. Now you only bother when someone’s watching, or there’s a plate to post.

Unpredictable punishment. You stop raising concerns or ideas in meetings. You got wrist-slapped a few times for being “disruptive”,

Outcome over process. You always loved writing. You finally started sharing your words and you find yourself fixated on views and likes and engagement and subscriber count. You feel invisible and irrelevant. You only write about trending subjects now.

Shame. You stop asking questions in class after the one time you were laughed at for asking the “wrong” one.

Look at this list again. It reads like a design spec. And it is.

It is the ways in which our SEEKING got rerouted into a performance of conformity.

It is the design of the system we live. It produces exactly what it was built to produce: total control over human motivation and desire.

Here is the trap: the system is not something done to us. It is made of us. Our labor, our compliance, generation over generation. And it runs on the very fuel it was designed to extinguish. It needs our aliveness to survive. It cannot get an ounce of work, real innovation, or GDP out of numb zombies. So it doesn’t kill SEEKING outright. That would be suicide. Instead it borrows SEEKING, spends it, and hands back burnout instead of renewal.

We become people who declare in our resumes that our passion is optimizing processes, increasing the bottom-line and maximizing shareholder value. And we actually mean it.

Burnout is the flattening of motivation, the inability to feel pulled toward anything, the loss of interest in activities that were once enjoyable. This is the SEEKING system going offline. Nothing feels interesting or compelling. It is not sadness exactly. It is the loss of the basic orientation-toward that makes engagement with the world possible.

So we numb it with substances. Or greasy food eaten in front of a screen. Or obsessive productivity. Status games. An endless scroll into oblivion.

We are an entire society standing around, exhausted, complaining of burnout, riddled with mental health issues, and yet unable to stop it.

We tell ourselves there’s no alternative. We hobble along, competent and hollow, mistaking the absence of collapse for the presence of a life. There is rent to pay, groceries to buy, a lifestyle to keep from sliding backward. Falling behind is humiliating in a way that falling apart, apparently, is not.

Falling behind feels like the worst possible thing to happen to us. It’s not.

A mind that never enters a genuine exploratory state, that doesn’t remember playing with nothing at stake but its own joy, loses the ability to make novel connections, to produce insight, to experience depth. We lose the capacity to adapt, to learn, to experiment.

Which leaves us in a paradox: the only faculty – SEEKING – that could build something better than where we are stuck is the exact faculty this system has spent our whole lives training out of us.

This is the worst thing. Not the burnout. Not the money that stopped mattering. The fact that we were born with the tool that could save us, and we let it atrophy.

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The reality

The economy, the industrial machine, the whole “study hard, get a stable job, retire in peace” contract can’t keep its promises forever. AI is upending our most basic assumptions about education and the future of work. Even the people who did land the golden handcuffs are wondering if the juice was worth the squeeze. Systems are buckling under their own weight. Nobody knows what comes next.

This is, inconveniently for us, exactly the kind of moment where an open, curious, fully operational SEEKING could help us thrive. And it does, for some.

People find their way. Entrepreneurship is up. Portfolio careers, side quests, people stacking three half-jobs instead of chasing one whole one. Quiet quitting. Financial independence movement. People opening coffee shops, growing their own food, baking, becoming completely unqualified life coaches. All of it chaotic, all of it very SEEKING-coded.

For many of us, the reflex is still just: update the resume, apply to two hundred more jobs, chase the paycheck and the gold star that comes with a white-collar title.

I keep harping upon careers because that seems to land more often. I actually don’t think that money and its pursuit has to extinguish SEEKING (more about this in Part 2). But the reality is that we are self-destructing now in our inability to extricate ourselves from burning the the one bridge that can save us from our own collapse.

But the real tragedy is a world full of people living half a life. A life actually worth living needs some curiosity that doesn’t report to anyone, some play that produces nothing, some wonder with no possible application. We are people. We are not just functions.

We’ve been neurologically trained to dismiss how we feel and value only how we appear. We are infected with a chronic baseline fear of not-enoughness. We have forgotten how to want. We simply strive for things that provide aspirational or social value. It’s so pervasive we don’t notice it, the way fish don’t notice water.

Scientists like Panksepp are finally treating subjective experience as real data, worthy of the same rigor we’ve historically reserved for what can be measured, scored, and ranked. We need to start doing the same for ourselves.

SEEKING is not a mood. It is not a personality trait some people have and others don’t. It is as essential to the nervous system as breathing is to the lungs, as fundamental as sleep. Starve it long enough and the consequences are not abstract. They show up in the body and in our mental health.

A suppressed SEEKING can be recognized in the rigidity within – the white knuckle grip on a person, a job, a role, a script — an idealized thing you can’t live without, or a demonized inconvenience you can’t escape. It is in the low hum of dread that you attribute to work pressure, a bad boss, a Monday, or increasingly, most mornings. You call it adulting.

The fear was installed before any job, any boss, any Monday existed to blame. And this fear — chronic, patient, generationally inherited — has been suppressing the essence of your aliveness.

What would it feel like to finally put it down?

Follow for Part 2.

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I stared at the piece of paper in my hands. There was writing sprawled across the page in green, blue, red and black. Hastily scribbled letters in ball point pens and coloring markers meant for children. The direction given to us was simple – write a few words to describe the person whose name is at the top of the page. A piece of paper for each of us was passed around in a circle. I wrote my impressions the best I could for the dozen pages that came to me, until finally I received mine back. Quickly I skimmed through it.

Too expressive

Uses too many words

A longer note, kind words that said not everyone might have the patience to listen for so long.

I was attending an experience based learning workshop called T-group, said to develop self awareness and an understanding of one’s impact on others. I had already been given this feedback in the sessions in the days before. I was also informed in those sessions that I enjoyed the spotlight, that I intellectualize my feelings, and that I tend to try to diffuse tension.

I received all this with some heaviness but mostly gratitude. After all, feedback is what I was here for. But something about seeing how I am perceived by those around me written down on paper by virtual strangers felt … too real. Like there was nowhere to hide.

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The T-Group

It’s hard to describe what happens in that room.

A group of strangers volunteer to put themselves through this experience together. They sit in a room, hour after hour, day after day. There are only a few constraints. Speak in the here and now – what you see, what you observe, what you feel, in this room. Talking about the past is discouraged. It introduces bias, preconceived notions, the comfortable architecture of a self already explained.

The second constraint surfaces more gradually: stay with feeling, not thought. Thoughts are time-bound, prone to hypothesis and escape. Feelings require you to be attentive to your body. Feelings insist on the present tense.

At first it feels forced and strange. There are a lot of uncomfortable silences. There is no agenda, no topic, no task, no goal, no assigned role. Every crutch we normally use to regulate interaction with strangers has been removed. Small talk starts up, loops back to work, to the outside world, to who we are out there. We are redirected. Stay here. Stay now.

The nerves begin to crawl. The body monitors everyone for cues.

What the structure is actually doing, beneath the discomfort, is creating conditions for sustained presence in an unfamiliar and uncertain environment. The group begins to examine itself, in real time. As it turns out, this feels dangerous. In ordinary social settings we are protected from being fully seen by distraction, by performance, by the noise of status and role. In a T-group, those protections get noticed and called out. They get examined by the group. We can resist, we can pretend, we can deflect.

We will be seen.

In a T-group, we experience actual human contact in a disproportionately short period of time. It is an intimacy born out of being real with the people in the room, not the rehearsed version of yourself meeting the rehearsed version of someone else.

We become a room of mirrors.

It hurts to be seen

I thought, and believed, that I am good at receiving feedback. I was not told anything I was not at least a little aware of. I know I ramble. It is the way my mind works – the associative leaping, the layering, the way I build meaning through accumulation. I know I like attention, the good kind. I have a performer in me. I like being looked at with affection and admiration. I like making people laugh. I like being liked. And yet, it was exquisitely painful to realize that these childish, vain parts of me are so obvious to strangers within a mere handful of hours.

I put myself out there, participated the best I could, and found out something about myself that I already suspected. These were not unkind observations. They still hurt.

The experience of seeing the impact of who I am and how I act in real time wounded me.

You see, I do want to be seen fully. I want to see people fully too. But the sad truth is that there are parts of me that are probably difficult to live with. And I am afraid that those parts of me are unpleasant enough that it becomes unbearable, or even impossible, to love me.

Don’t flinch from these words. You know what I mean. You too love people who have parts like these. We are told that to love someone is to love all of them. But we don’t love all of them, do we? We love them, but we also judge, even hate, some parts of them. It would just be so much easier if they were less self conscious. If they had a better grip on their anger. If they got rid of their bad breath. If they worked harder on their addictions. If they were kinder.

Love has limits. We live in fear that there is a line beyond which we will become unworthy of love. If we let go, if we stop performing, we might somehow cross it and never find our way back.

Mirrors

Something else happened in that room.

When I put myself out there, the group reflected back what they saw. They saw me using words to manage feeling exposed. They saw me wanting to be seen, while I was afraid of it at the same time. They pointed out when I intellectualized an experience to a concept, so I wouldn’t have to experience it in my body. When I used humor to manage the cost of being present through pain.

And I watched them too. I saw their faces crumple at the difficult things they were being told about themselves. I saw things in them that held them back, and I told them what I saw — hesitantly at first, then with increasing directness, and increasing tenderness. Every day, my affection for them grew. For their quirks and foibles. For their resilience. For how hard they were trying.

And something became obvious to me about how love actually works.

We don’t have good or bad qualities. We have qualities that affect people, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad ways. What binds us to each other isn’t the absence of those difficult parts. It is the willingness to keep trying. It is the persistence in showing up anyway.

I saw my own fears and defensiveness mirrored in them, and loved them for it. I saw the exasperation I felt at them, reflected back to me. I felt something close to grief that any of them would ever believe they needed to be smaller, easier, less.

What I wanted for them wasn’t that they become more pleasant to be around. It was something simpler and harder than that.

I wanted them to stop being so afraid of themselves.

To fear love more than pain

There were other things written on that piece of paper with my name on it. It said that I was open and honest, loving and supportive. I was told that I am spontaneous and that I take the risk to put myself out there. I skimmed past those words to get to the ones that cut, because that is where I believe I would find the edge of where love for me could end. It was imperative for me to find those edges.

I wonder if it is the same for others. If everyone believes that love is conditional on their worthiness. If we all hide from love in some way to avoid being found lacking. To avoid facing the possibility that love can be withdrawn.

These words said aloud in that sacred room stay with me.

दर्द से ज़्यादा प्यार का डर है

I fear love more than pain.

But I am starting to wonder if the fear is the proof of love. That I am only afraid of losing the love I already have.

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Recently, a ten-year-old girl named Kaela wrote a letter to NASA pleading for Pluto to be called a planet again. Her argument was simple: making Pluto a planet again would make a lot of people very happy. Therefore, this dwarf planet deserves to be a planet. A picture of the letter was posted on social media and went viral.

My heart melted when I saw that letter. Then I shook my head, because NASA was the wrong address. The International Astronomical Union – a body most people have never heard of – is the organization with formal authority over the classification of celestial objects. It was the IAU, not NASA, that voted to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status. NASA, in fact, doesn’t even necessarily comply with the decision. The New Horizons mission, NASA’s billion-dollar spacecraft sent to explore Pluto, was led by principal investigator Alan Stern, who has publicly refused to accept the IAU’s ruling and continues to call Pluto the ninth planet. New Horizons launched in January 2006. It left Earth to visit a planet and arrived, nine years, a billion dollars, and five billion kilometers later, at a dwarf planet. That has to feel personal to someone like Alan Stern, who spent a significant part of his career with his mind on Pluto.

But it is not just Alan and little kids like Kaela who care about Pluto’s exclusion from our solar system’s planet list. They are part of a crowd that has been gathering since the night of August 24, 2006, when the IAU General Assembly in Prague passed Resolution B5 and the solar system lost a member.

What followed was a public response that built into an uproar. Since the demotion, online and offline petitions have circulated continuously to restore Pluto’s status. There is a Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet, with a mission statement, a social media following, and the particular vibe of a community that knows it is right and is ready to fight. The verb to pluto entered the English language: the American Dialect Society named it 2006’s Word of the Year, defining it as “to demote or devalue someone or something.” Across the internet, in forums and comment sections and dedicated blogs, thousands of people have spent genuine hours picking apart the exact wording of IAU Resolution B5.

This one is my favorite though. Fifty-four elected officials of the California state legislature — people with roads to fund and wildfires to manage — found the time and conviction to pass a resolution calling the IAU “mean-spirited,” and declaring that the decision would “cause psychological harm to some Californians who question their place in the universe and worry about the instability of universal constants.”

All of this might seem a bit excessive. I count myself among the Pluto faithful, but I too find it more than a little funny — the depth of feeling we have for an object billions of miles away that none of us will ever visit.

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The public reaction to Pluto’s demotion is, at its core, a kind of grief. A cold dark rock was discovered and named. It was given a place in the human world, woven into mythology, taught to children, featured on classroom posters and in the opening lines of science documentaries. And then it was suddenly declared to be something other, something lesser, than what we thought it was. Of course people responded as if something had been taken from them. Because something had.

Pluto was named in 1930 – by an eleven-year-old girl, incidentally – for the Roman god of the underworld. The mythological Pluto began as Hades, the most feared figure in the Greek pantheon, so dreaded that people refused to speak his name aloud. Hades was the god of last resort, called on when all else was lost. The logic was that as long as you didn’t say his name, he wouldn’t look up. The Romans softened the terror and called him Pluto – the giver of wealth and abundance – and made an appeasement of his name. They renamed fear into richness.

Pluto the planet arrived into human awareness in the 1930s at a time when many believed the world was ending: the rise of fascism, the discovery of nuclear power, the long shadow of men like Hitler and Stalin. The most destructive element humanity has ever synthesized was named plutonium, after this newly found world. In astrology, Pluto became the symbol of the taboo, the hidden, the terrifying underside of civilization, the thing with the capacity to annihilate. And then in the same breath, Mickey Mouse’s dog was named Pluto to capitalize on the excitement surrounding the discovery.

This is the full arc of what we do with things in the physical world. We anthropomorphize. We fold them into our fears and our mythologies and our objects of endearment. We build them into the furniture of our inner lives. And then, when someone announces that the thing is something different than what we thought, we don’t say oh, that’s interesting. We grieve. We fight.

Here is what the IAU doesn’t take into account when classifying celestial objects. We do not live in a world of stones and bones. We live in a world of meaning.

The philosopher Ernst Cassirer described it this way. Animals perceive the world through instinct and direct sensation, but humans perceive through a symbolic net between themselves and reality, woven from language, myth, art, and science. We do not experience the world raw. We experience it interpreted. Every civilization, every cathedral, every elegy, every childhood bedroom with a poster of nine planets on the wall – all of it built not from what the world is in physical form, but from what we have decided the world means.

In J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Tinker Bell is dying. She is dying because children have stopped believing in fairies. Peter Pan turns to the audience and asks them to clap if they believe in fairies. The audience claps and Tinker Bell revives.

This is, in the world of rationalists, a deeply embarrassing resolution to a crisis. The fairy is saved not by evidence but by feeling. And yet we understand it without protest. Because we know, in some register below argument, that there are things in the world that require our participation to be fully real.

Pluto is not a fairy. It has a diameter of 2,377 kilometers. It has a centre of gravity outside of its physical body, in empty space, shared with a very large moon. It has a blue atmosphere. It has cryovolcanoes – ice volcanoes, erupting cold instead of heat – which is either the most poetic or the most unsettling geological fact in the solar system. It has a heart. Literally. A vast nitrogen glacier in the shape of a heart, visible from space. The New Horizons spacecraft found not the dead, featureless ice ball the textbooks had implied, but a world of profound and baffling complexity. The team described it as a scientific wonderland. Alan Stern said they got an A for exploration and an F for prediction.

Let us consider the discovery that caused all of this trouble.

Eris – the massive dwarf planet whose identification in 2005 forced the IAU’s hand – is named after the Greek goddess of discord and strife. In mythology, Eris threw a golden apple inscribed for the fairest into a wedding banquet, setting off a chain of vanity and rivalry that ended in the Trojan War. Eris does not destroy things directly. She exposes the fault lines that were always there, and lets the structure collapse under its own weight. In astrology, Eris is the archetype of the disruptive outsider and the force that challenges invisible hierarchies simply by arriving.

A body named for discord, Eris, arrived and caused discord. The thing named for repression, Pluto, got pushed underground. Carl Jung says that what we resist, persists. Pluto, pushed underground, became more culturally alive than it had been in decades.

You could call this coincidence. I call it synchronicity. It is the stories the universe tells us if we pay attention, if we care.

We are, all of us, walking around in a three-dimensional Rorschach test, a physical world draped in projections. Humans are, before we are anything else, meaning-making creatures. We forget, most of the time, that we are metaphysical creatures. We live as if measurements are reality and meaning is decoration. But it is the other way around. The measurements tell us what a thing looks like from the outside. The meaning tells us what it feels like from the inside.

Consider money. There is no object in human life we treat as more concrete, more objective, more fact of life. And yet money is nothing more than a collective agreement. It is a shared fiction so widely believed that it functions as fact. A piece of cotton paper is worth a hundred dollars because enough people agree that it is, and continue to agree, every day. The moment that agreement collapses – as it has, historically, in moments of hyperinflation, revolution, or financial crisis – the paper becomes paper again. Money is real because we collectively make it real. Its value is not in its physical properties. It is in the believing.

The authority and legitimacy of institutions, laws, borders, all of it rests, ultimately, on collective agreement. The IAU is not a government. It has no enforcement mechanism. It cannot compel anyone to use its definitions. Alan Stern’s New Horizons team simply declared non-compliance and nobody could stop them. The Illinois state senate passed a resolution calling Pluto a planet whenever it passes over Illinois. The IAU’s authority is entirely consensual. It rests entirely on whether people agree to accept it. Just like everything else.

Shared agreements are how civilization works. But it is good to periodically remind ourselves where power actually lives. It is not in institutions and positions of authority, not really. It is in the people who decide whether to accept it.

Kaela wrote her letter because she wanted people to be happy. The IAU would say that happiness is not a criterion for planetary classification. They would be right, and also missing the point entirely.

The word planet is more than a technical container for physical characteristics. It is a vessel for meaning. For nearly a century, the word planet has held Pluto: the underworld god, the cartoon dog, the heart-shaped glacier, the blue sky at the edge of the solar system, the small cold world that a billion-dollar spacecraft traveled nine years to finally see because it is the farthest, most mysterious part of the solar system. That is what the vessel contains.

By this measure Pluto is a planet. It has been a planet for most of a century. It is a member of the family we made when we looked up and decided the lights in the sky were ours to name.

Clap if you believe.

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The meditation is simple: wake up, say the words, contemplate them before you rise. Today is not guaranteed. I read that this is how monks begin their days — with death consciousness. It is supposed to be the surest path to presence and gratitude.

The day after a new moon. A good day, an auspicious day, for new beginnings. So I decide to try the meditation practice. I will say the words, first thing in the morning.

Today is not guaranteed.

Day one begins — when, exactly? At 1 a.m., when N calls for me minutes after I’ve finally fallen asleep? At 4 a.m., when she wakes again to nurse? It is a ritual that usually knocks her out in minutes, but today she drinks and drinks and drinks from me, but cannot sleep. She drinks and plays and drinks and sings and talks her endearing gibberish, her mouth full of new teeth wrapped around my sore elastic nipples, until I nearly carry out my threat of putting her in the crib in the next room. I don’t. She finally falls asleep against me.

I will declare: the day begins when I open my eyes and decide to get out of bed.

And there the words are, almost before I intend them — Today is not guaranteed.

Am I doing it right? What is supposed to happen next? Is this where gratitude rushes in? Is this where I feel suddenly awake to the miracle of being alive?

I roll out of bed and N dashes out of the bedroom into the kitchen. Nothing feels different. But the curious thing is that the words don’t stay etched in that single moment of contemplation. They spread. They stretch out as I move through the day, like not enough butter over a wide slice of bread. They are running beneath everything, a liminal consciousness, a quiet observer of my day : today is not guaranteed, today is not guaranteed.

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N is happy and sticky. She has procured a tube of condensed milk, opened it, and applied it in improbable places. Now she climbs the swiveling dining chairs to climb the table, to reach the salt shaker, to salt the entire world. Or as much of it as a few tablespoons allow.

She climbs everything now: tables, railings, stairs, walls. I am living the cliché about motherhood. Every moment is wonder at her resilience and terror at the world’s capacity to hurt her. She is my heart outside my body. To parent her without dissolving into constant anxiety requires an unreasonable amount of faith that I renew a thousand times a day: faith in myself, in her, in the world. A thousand times a day I stop myself from sprinting to her. I let her fall. I watch her dust herself off and continue.

I let her put in her mouth paper, crayons, lint, food from the ground, bathwater, baby toothpaste, coconut oil, ghee, the salt she has triumphantly spilled. I no longer stop her from climbing the slide in the park that is too big for her. It is the one with metal steps and a seven-foot drop. For two months I have hovered and created distractions and said no. Today she is sixteen months old and grasping the rails with her tiny hands and pulling herself up like a mountaineer. The other adults watch us with undisguised judgment. I keep my tense arms at my sides. I stay close. I swallow my fear and gently remind her to pay attention.

It is on the walk back from the park that she falls, unprovoked, on flat ground, and bites through the inside of her lip. There is blood – sudden, bright, too much of it. She screams and I carry her home, wipe her face, press an ice cube into her mouth. I search frantically through her first aid kit for something that might help. I find a teething ointment, still sealed. I bring it to her and ask her to show me the ouchie.

She doesn’t offer me her mouth. Instead she offers me the crook of her elbow. It is an old scrape, healed weeks ago, barely a mark now. The first time I’d seen it, the blood had barely dried, and I had kissed it. She remembered. She has pointed it out every few days since, and I have kissed it every time.

So I do it now again. I bend awkwardly low, press my face to the hollow in her arm, feel the small warmth of her skin on my lips. My head presses against her tiny ribcage, and I breathe in her scent of salt and sunshine. She smiles wide, unmindful of her bruised, bloody lip.

It is the end of the day and I sit in the swing on the balcony and do nothing. A fluorescent blimp bobs in the distance against a skyline crowded with half-built towers. There are too many empty buildings in this city. Thousands of dark unoccupied windows. Empty holes where homes should be. I can’t explain why they unsettle me. They look like dead bodies, an army of them, a field of them.

There is loud and insistent music whose location is impossible to determine. Someone is celebrating. There is always someone celebrating. A birthday, a first blood, an engagement, a birth. Gods and saints, anniversaries of ancient victories. Most nights loud music blares from several directions at once, a competition of joy, dholak drums and shrill trumpets and Bollywood DJ mixes pushing through closed doors and white noise machines, because the city is crowded and festive and there is apparently no place for happiness to go except outward, with loudspeakers, late into the night.

N sleeps through it all every night.

Tonight too, N is asleep. S plays his guitar in the room behind me. I watch him through the doorway, head bent over the instrument, face turned away. His fingers find a tune that sounds like raindrops pattering on a lake, and then it turns pensive. He hasn’t played in a while, and it shows – there is a slight suspicion in his fingers on the string, a minute hesitation in the timing. Somehow this makes the music more poignant, like a pause before a kiss.

I am here and only here. It is a moment and also an eternity. I am a blip in the duration of the expansion of creation, a dot in the universe. This is all I get. And it is so much — too much.

We are born with death written into us, and not one of us knows how long we have. It is a heavy weight to live with, so we forget. We have to forget, a little, to keep living. But when we forget death, life becomes small. And that is so much worse.

So this is the price. I must live in anticipation of loss, in full knowledge of its inevitability and its irrevocability. The sweetness is inseparable from the sorrow.

Today is not guaranteed. I said the words this morning, first thing, before I rose.

I think I am doing it right.

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I used to have a fantasy about disappearing from my life. I pack up a couple of bags, taking only just enough money to build a new life in another country. I am a bohemian soul. I am independent. I take care of my simple needs. I am surrounded by a community of artists and intellectuals. I take lovers, eventually, carefully, with no conditions of commitment and expectations. I am free.

It is a fantasy life where nothing is at stake. Where I can never be wounded by other people.

I used to consider myself self-aware. But my self-proclaimed self-awareness was mostly self-observation. I could narrate my patterns with precision. I could state the label given to my wounds. I studied frameworks, analyzed my thoughts and feelings and spun elaborate histories that could have been the seeds of my dysfunctional patterns.

My self-awareness did not translate to relationships, not in conflict. I’ve always had good friendships. I have a great number of people with whom I banter, share interests and socialize. But there is a threshold of closeness beyond which we find ourselves blurring into each other. And that is where the intensity of conflict overwhelmed me.

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Hell is other people

They have unfair, unrealistic expectations. They are cruel. They have reactions disproportionate to the matter at hand. They are needy. They are avoidant. They blow hot and cold. They are selfish. They are envious and dismissive and dramatic and secretive and pompous … but will not admit to it. They justify it, stubbornly convinced about the truth of their version of reality.

I would retreat, withdraw into silence. I didn’t need them. I was better off alone. But sometimes the grief and rage I suppressed leaked out into a storm. There were heated arguments that almost ended things. There were unregulated outbursts and sharp words. There was guilt and fear and shame after.

It was years before I realized that the conflict was a mirror. A harsh one, held at an unforgiving angle. But a mirror nonetheless.

I was terrified of their unrealistic expectations, of their cruelty and intensity. Of being seen as selfish, of letting people down, of love as a slow reduction of myself. What I understand now is that I was trying to see myself through them — and I needed what I saw to be coherent. I wanted a still reflection. But the people I loved were not static. They kept moving.

I too am needy, and avoidant. I too blow hot and cold. I am selfish. I have decided that intimacy is a thing that makes me smaller. That it is not safe to be envious and dismissive and dramatic and secretive and pompous, and I am resentful that I have to bear it in others.

I too am convinced of the truth of my own version of reality.

The value of relationships

I used to have this idea that I could self-care, self-grow and self-develop myself into perfection. The plan for the perfect me looked like this.

Go to therapy. Write in journals. Read the right books. Meditate. Identify the issues, name them, trace them back to their origins, and fix them. Then step out into the light — clean, resolved, coherent. Done.

There is a lot of talk about surrounding yourself only with people who have Done The Work. I wanted to be one of them. I pictured the serene, boundaried, and emotionally fluent version of me moving through the world without leaving wreckage. I was convinced it was a place I could arrive at.

But there is no Done.

Real life necessarily consists of other people. And other people will undo these simplistic views. Other people will call you callous when you think you are being pragmatic. Other people will take advantage of your good intentions. Other people will betray you, show you unexpected kindness, make you change your mind.

Other people are messy, contradictory and imperfect. And so am I.

I can commit to honesty, but I get undone not in my commitment, but in the way that truth rearranges someone’s face. I can determine my boundaries, but the boundary might not survive contact with the eyes of someone who is wounded by it. It is in the presence of other people that the fantasy of myself is tested against the only evidence that counts.

There is no resistance when we are doing The Work alone. We can only know ourselves through others. We can only see things fully when we borrow the eyes of others. The Work can only be Done in relation to another. All the rest is preparation.

We think we see reality. We think we understand the people we love. We build the world around us in our minds by piecing together our perceptions through our narrow aperture. But what we have built is an approximation. A model – of reality, of people, and even of ourselves – assembled from the fraction we are able to witness, solidified into subjective truth.

We are so limited by our separateness, by our stories and worldviews. We are so blind to our own contradictions and our stubbornness. We so deeply underestimate how much we need and are needed.

Sometimes we need a kind of violence to shock us into a new perspective. Sometimes only pain and rupture can provide the required intensity for a transformation in perspective.

The difference between resolution and repair

John Gottman, a psychologist and researcher focused on divorce prediction and marital stability, termed a concept called the emotional bank account. He postulated that healthy relationships had more positive interactions than negative ones. His research landed on a ratio: roughly five positive interactions for every one negative, as the baseline for a relationship that can last. It is a satisfying number that quantifies the undefinable nature of human bonds. It gives us a goal to work towards.

In his hypothesis conflict is costly. A single rupture draws on everything that came before it. If the account is full, it absorbs the loss and the relationship survives intact. If the account has been depleted, the same rupture can become the thing that ends it.

I think there may be something missing in this theory. The act of repair after a conflict in intimate relationships are alchemical. We come out on the other side with more than we had before.

Resolution means the conflict is over. Repair means something was tended to. They don’t always coincide. You can resolve a conflict, reach an agreement and move on. It doesn’t necessarily mean that either person leaves feeling seen. But you can have a rupture with no logical resolution but where the repair is so tender that the relationship deepens anyway.

What creates the feeling of being valued isn’t always the outcome of the conflict. It’s whether the other person can tolerate witnessing their own role in it.

When someone holds themselves genuinely accountable, what they’re doing is confirming your reality. They’re saying: what you experienced was real, and I was witness to it. This is distinct from an apology, which can be entirely self-focused. Accountability is other-directed. It requires the person to momentarily de-center their own defense of themselves and look at what the conflict cost you. This act of looking is a profound form of intimacy.

There is a concept in customer service research called the service recovery paradox. A customer who experiences a problem, and then receives an exceptional response to it, ends up more loyal than a customer who encountered no problem at all. The resolution, handled well, creates something that seamless service never could.

Before it has been tested, trust is a theory. After it, trust is a fact.

A rupture followed by genuine accountability doesn’t just repair the balance — it revalues the relationship. You come out the other side with more than you had before.

But building these relationships requires patience. It requires an unearned faith in the other person. It is a risk.

Finding the edge

Sometimes it shocks me what I have been willing to endure in relationships. I have regrets about what I have tolerated, even in relationships that I now consider healthy. There are instances in my past where I have allowed myself to be humiliated and ignored, where I have made myself smaller and meeker than I can stand. But in so many of these relationships, my loyalty, my persistence, and my forgiveness have paid back a thousand fold in love, respect and intimacy.

But I think Gottman’s emotional bank account hypothesis is entirely correct about one thing. Conflict is expensive. Every time I have swallowed my feelings, my words and my pride to prioritize connection over ego, it has cost me something.

There is a particular exhaustion in holding the door open. Not the exhaustion of crisis, which at least has eventful drama. It is the slow expenditure of being the one who reaches first, who translates, who absorbs. It is the tired weight of holding broken things, of keeping faith as you try to love someone into a larger version of themselves.

There were people I loved, whom I have chosen to distance myself from, either emotionally or in proximity. Sometimes the distance lasts for a season, other times it stretches into permanence. There are a host of labels that I try to place on these relationships — grey rocking, no contact, low contact. None of them encapsulate what it actually feels like. The sorrow that runs in the background. The guilt that circles back dressed as doubt. The doubt that circles back dressed as grief.

I have asked myself in the long aftermath of my decisions whether I gave enough. Whether I held the door open long enough, or too long. Whether patience was the right word for what I was practicing, or was it simply fear. Whether it was love, or is it still love.

I don’t always know.

What I have come to believe is that the edge of love is not a fixed line. It is not a policy. It is not something you can decide in advance and laminate and refer to when the moment comes. It is arrived at, slowly, in the accumulation of what you have given and what has been returned, of what you have survived together and what you have endured alone, of what you know about yourself now that you did not know before.

The question I began with — when do I choose rupture over loyalty — turns out not to be the right question. Rupture and loyalty are not opposites. Some of the most loyal things I have ever done have looked, from the outside, like abandonment. Some of the most violent things done to me have been done in the name of love.

The real question is – have I been present enough, honest enough, accountable enough, to know the difference?

This might be the great tenderness at the center of love: that it asks for persistence in the face of fundamental unknowing. That we reach toward each other across the unbridgeable interior distance and the reaching itself becomes the bond.

Before it has been tested, trust is a theory. After it, trust is a fact.

The same is true of love. And of the self is revealed by love, over time.

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Music came to humans before language.

Humans were exposed to birdsong, whistling winds, and the sounds that erupt from old hollow bones before they could comprehend words. So they were cooing to babies and vocalizing their love and their hurt before they said a single word. Structured language came later as a more precise tool for conveying information. A well-accepted hypothesis is that language is better understood as a special kind of music. Humans learned to say I love you, and Your beauty is overwhelming, before they learned to say You owe me eight goats by Monday.

Today all we ever talk about are goats and Mondays.

Archeologists find surprisingly sophisticated musical instruments in prehistoric human settlements as far back as 60,000 years ago. The rock art made by ancient humans was not randomly placed. It was found in the parts of caves with the best acoustics — chambers that produce strong low-frequency, chest-filling vibrations and a long decay, much like the acoustics in a modern concert hall. Cave art was not a lonely doodle scratched into a wall. It was part of a ritual display, complete with a flickering fire that animates the art, drumming, singing, and perhaps a flute made of bear thigh bones.

There is also prehistoric art that documents the night sky. There were practical reasons for reading the stars — navigation, tracking seasons, keeping time. But these people had a view of the Milky Way that few humans alive today can see. They watched the universe turn around them as they sat around their campfires, timing celestial events with the seasonal behavior of plants and animals, recording shooting stars and the waning moon. The night sky was more than information. It was awe.

There is consistent archaeological evidence that the people who sat around these fires were capable of extraordinary empathy, altruism, and social cooperation. Skeletal remains of children with Down’s syndrome, brain defects, and spina bifida show evidence of sustained care and protection by the group. A 45,000-year-old Neanderthal man with a severe limp, a crushed arm, and partial blindness lived into his forties. He could not have survived alone. Someone — many someones, over many years — kept him alive.

These people were equal to modern humans in cognitive ability and emotional depth. They figured out how to survive in a world they knew almost nothing about. They persisted through famine, disease, and death. So much death.

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900,000 years ago, our ancestral hominin population collapsed to fewer than 1,300 fertile individuals. This was not a brief crisis. This was the total global population for more than a hundred thousand years, through prolonged drought and extreme environmental instability. These were not yet modern humans, but the research supports that it was during this period that they developed the capacities that make us human today: complex social bonds, theory of mind, a disposition for storytelling. Every person alive today descends from those 1300 survivors.

There was another near-extinction 74,000 years ago — the Toba event. A supervolcanic eruption in what is now Sumatra triggered a volcanic winter lasting years. Genetic evidence suggests the human population may have crashed to as few as 10,000 individuals. This period coincides precisely with when what we call behavioral modernity seems to consolidate in the archaeological record. Symbolic thinking. Complex tools. Long-distance trade in materials.

Each time humanity was pushed to the edge, something essential crystallized in us.

We are the descendants of the survivors of multiple catastrophic filters spread across millions of years. We carry in our genes the compressed memory of every time we almost didn’t make it. We also carry, coded into us, the resilience and the creativity and the capacity for love and beauty that sustained us while we persisted through impossible circumstances.

Art, beauty, and community were not a hobby on the side of survival. They were the mechanism of survival.

The cave paintings documenting the night sky were navigational records for migrations across thousands of miles. The ability to see beauty and value in the sick and the injured — to collectively care for them — is what brought us out of near-annihilation. Pitch, melody, and rhythm carried the emotional information that language had not yet evolved to carry. The ritual, the gathering, the shared resonance of a chest-filled chamber: these were the technologies of cohesion that kept small terrified groups from dissolving into nothing.

We know this because we keep finding the evidence. And because we keep looking for it — in them, and in ourselves.

Today we are consistently fed and sheltered, at a price. We are stacked on top of each other in cities designed for efficiency over beauty. We commute for hours to perform jobs that feel paradoxically both stressful and meaningless. We spend the majority of our waking hours making enough for rent, groceries, and a stream of stuff that overtake whatever mental space is left. We return home to devices that reward comparison and manufacture conflict.

There is no reverence in our daily rituals. There is a pervasive disconnection, even within families. Mystery and creativity are treated as indulgences. Net worth, follower counts, weight, daily steps — the things that can be measured have become the definition of a life.

For a long time, mystery and measurement, faith and observation, were not in competition. The sacred and the scientific could not be separated because people did not think to separate them. The person mapping the stars was also inside an experience of awe. Both were real. Both were true.

Then came a hinge point. A moment when the way we understood the world shifted permanently toward the quantifiable. Galileo made a philosophical claim that would slice reality into two halves: that the real properties of the world were the ones you could measure. Size, shape, mass, speed — real. Everything that could only be felt — the resonance of a gong in the chest, the ache of a minor key, the brief experience of eternity when looking at a sky full of stars — was merely the mind’s reaction. Subjective. Secondary. Not quite real.

And so knowledge and experience were parted.

We’ve been enormously productive since. We made physics, chemistry, medicine, satellites, the ability to predict what falling into a black hole would be like. We cured diseases that had killed millions. We connected every person on earth to every other person. These are important things. These are things that should make us proud.

We also, without intending to, devalued inner experience. Creativity became a luxury. The result is a particular kind of emptiness and loneliness. It’s not dramatic. Just the low hum of something necessary going unmade.

Our inner experience has a formal name in philosophy: qualia. These are the what-it’s-like dimensions of being alive — the redness of red, the sweetness of a child falling asleep on your chest, the ache of longing. Galileo excluded qualia from scientific description precisely because they resist quantification. They cannot be summarized. They can only be transmitted through direct experience.

So while we can predict within inches where an asteroid will be a hundred years from now, we still need a novel to explain what it feels like when a parent dies. We need a film score to carry the bittersweet weight of young love. Because qualia are not transferable through any other means. There is no formula for grief. There is no instrument for the specific quality of missing someone. You can only recreate the conditions under which another person might feel their way toward something adjacent to what you felt.

Art is the technology we built to describe the only data that science cannot touch.

Which brings us back to the ancient caves.

Their tribe has been reduced to just about twenty people. Their medicine man, older than memory, has a rattling cough that keeps getting worse. They are all gaunter than they have ever been.

A baby died today. The only one born in years.

They gather in the cave after the burial, depleted and lost, unable to bear the horror of the day. They light a fire. It doesn’t help. They sit around it in silence.

A woman makes a sound, a tremulous tune that breathes through a bear thigh bone that she found years ago. She has carefully whittled holes into it, learning its pitch and cadence until it feels like an extension of her body. Tonight, grief pours out of it and fills the cave. It is punctuated by the sobs of the mother who was catatonic throughout the burial. A cousin brings out a drum made of animal hide stretched over a coconut shell. He keeps time with her.

The flute’s grief rises thin and searching, and the drum meets it from below — steady and patient, like a heartbeat. They do not blend. They braid. The sound shifts. They are still sad. But they are sad together, which is a different thing entirely.

They are surrounded by the sketches of their hunts on the walls around them, reminding them that the land has provided for them before, and will again. A man starts to hum along, a song he half remembers from childhood. Others join in, the melody a memory of an innocent time.

They step out again and look up. The stars are there. Grief and loss are there still, but tinged with something that is not quite hope. Not yet. Maybe faith.

The person standing in that chamber 40,000 years ago, feeding the bone flute with her lungs, was not doing something separate from survival. She was doing survival.

She was keeping the group coherent. She was transmitting what could not be said. She was locating herself in something larger than fear, and taking everyone in that chamber with her.

Humans need to create. Rational thought takes us far, but it deals in what can be verified — true and false, measurement and projection. Large portions of human experience — grief, belonging, dread, and longing — resist this form entirely. We need to channel what’s inside us. A feeling, a pressure, a confusion, a joy we can’t quite hold. We need to find a form for it in the world. So there is a chance that someone else recognizes it, and it, briefly, doesn’t belong to only us.

Humans need beauty. Beauty is the mind’s way of recognizing coherence. A face, a proof, a sentence, a skyline that feels like it fits. It interrupts the ceaseless self-maintenance of the thinking mind and draws attention outward. For a moment, something outside the self takes up space. This, philosophers across traditions have argued, is pretty important. Really seeing something that you are drawn to — paying close, patient, honest attention — is the same capacity required for genuinely seeing another person. Aesthetic attention and ethical attention share a common root.

Humans need community. Not group chats and curated feeds. The kind built through physical presence and shared friction and the slow accumulation of being known. The kind that kept a limping, half-blind Neanderthal alive for decades because his community could not abandon him.

We need art, beauty, and community the way we need protein and sleep. It is basic maintenance of what we are. We evolved into these minds and psyches across millions of years of survival that depended on them. We cannot simply graze and optimize and commute and scroll and expect to remain intact. We will not collapse dramatically. We will just slowly hollow out, in ways we can feel but struggle to name. Listlessness. Disconnection. Unplaceable rage.

Each time humanity was pushed to the edge, something essential crystallized in us.

We are at an edge now. It does not announce itself like a volcanic winter or a hundred thousand years of drought. It arrives in the specific texture of modern life. A man on a train, headphones in, surrounded by a hundred people, completely alone. A child who has never been bored. The feeling that comes on Sunday evenings that no amount of productivity or entertainment quite reaches. We reach for our phones. For a drink. For another delivery, another distraction, another optimization of the hours. It is not working.

What crystallized in our ancestors was not strength in the way we usually mean it. It was not resilience as self-improvement. It was the discovery that what makes the darkness survivable is not endurance alone. It is the turning toward. The making of something. The sound one person starts and others, helplessly, join.

So let’s find our way back to it. Not as self-improvement or content. But as the thing our ancestors reached for when everything else was stripped away and only the essential remained. Let what is inside you find a form in the world. So there is a chance that someone else recognizes it. So it, briefly, doesn’t belong to only you.

That is what we were built for. That is what brought us here. That is what will carry us forward, if anything will — not the next optimization, not the next productivity system, not the next distraction from the hollow feeling, but the oldest technology we have.

The tune. The drum. The hand pressed against wet stone.

I was here. I felt this. Does anyone else?

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Friedrich Kekulé, a German chemist in the 19th century, revolutionized organic chemistry by proposing a cyclical structure for benzene and other aromatic compounds. While working on the problem, he dozed off in front of a fire and saw atoms dancing, chains of them twisting like snakes, until one bit its own tail and whirled, mocking him. He woke and went immediately to work. By morning he had the structure of benzene.

It is the deepest form of worship I can imagine — to love a question so completely that it finds you in your dreams.

I have been thinking about that snake eating its own tail. The thing that completes itself. That needs no reason outside its own motion.

Years ago, I met a nuclear physicist near retirement — decades spent in research and administrating atomic power plants. He looked like a scientist: Einstein-esque salt and pepper hair, dark unruly brows, a look of perpetual annoyance etched into his features.

He seemed willing to talk about his work, but it turned out to be mostly a vent. Power struggles, nepotism, politics. A decades-long rivalry that ended with him deciding to retire early rather than report to a man he had come to hate.

He didn’t mention atoms, or fission, or voltage. The science had disappeared from his account of a scientific life.

So I asked what drew him to the field. His voice softened. He talked about a childhood spent reading about scientists and their discoveries, about being adamant — against the advice of mentors — about studying nuclear physics. The years of preparation before he qualified for his first job.

I asked if he wished he had stayed in research. Done what he dreamed of as a child.

A flicker crossed his face. Surprise, and something that looked a little like hurt.

That was just a childish dream. There is no money in research.

He had given forty years to science. But before the forty years was something else: a child feeling a specific pull he didn’t yet have words for. That pull is its own kind of knowing. It precedes credential and justification.

Somewhere down the line, it was lost. It is the tragedy of countless careers.

Mine too.

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When I first joined the company that I recently quit, I was ecstatic. It was a place well known for its great culture. The work and the people genuinely excited me. I came in with high expectations. Those first few years exceeded those expectations.

I loved my job. I don’t mean that I never got tired or bored, or never had to deal with people I didn’t like. There were plenty of shitty clients, pointless presentations and other corporate bullshit. What I mean is that I felt connected to what I did.

The cynical part of me says that I drank the KoolAid. I was a staunch supporter of the products we built. My manager was the best leader by far I have ever worked for. I was surrounded by interesting and genuine people who felt the same way. The place was cool and fun in a way I couldn’t have imagined in a workplace.

But it was the mission of the teams I worked with that inspired me — connecting people to achieve a common goal. It was what called me to work there, what sustained me through rough times. I was proud of what we were doing. I was proud of my contribution to such a monumental mission.

This job shaped my personality. It expanded what I notice about the world and how I inhabit it. It is where I learned to trust myself and persuade others to trust me. I learned how to lead without a title. To listen to the flow of power and read the subtext in a room.

Years passed and times changed. Like many other tech companies, this one too was recently affected by volatility and challenges. But the morale came down long before the stocks did.

At first I thought it was the pandemic. Instead of blunting my ambition, the growing apathy around me fueled me. I scrambled up the ladder, determined to be the change. In the control room, I got to watch up close how something beautiful and full of life dies, rotting slowly from within.

I was finally in the rooms where decisions were made. Every decision was a trade-off. The people in these rooms were accomplished and careful. They cared about the business, and they also genuinely cared about the people. What I learned, watching them trying to reconcile the dissonance of doing right by both, was this. Caring is not enough when the system you are operating inside has its own logic.

Profitability edged out culture. Efficiency edged out trust. Creativity was valued less than obedience. Curiosity became an inconvenience. There was more secrecy, less honesty. More power, less inclusitivity. People left. People were let go.

Every rationale was reasonable. That was the most disorienting part — how reasonable it all was, and how the cumulative effect of all those reasonable decisions was something that felt, from the inside, like suffocation.

For a minute, I was fierce about fighting to preserve what I once loved. But I fell in line from the pressure soon enough.

I became part of the problem.

I wrist-slapped innovation. I over-architected cumbersome processes. I submitted poor performance reviews to people who were excellent and couldn’t toe the line, which amounts to the same thing in a bureaucracy. I stayed silent when people were ridiculed for their differences.

I did my job.

Near the end, my manager told me I seemed checked out. People noticed. I was already planning to leave. The money was good, the benefits excellent, the LinkedIn profile impressive. They were reasons to stay. That was precisely the problem.

When the stocks crashed along with the culture, I told myself the story I needed: hat I was leaving a place that had changed beyond recognition. And that was true. But it was not the whole truth.

I had changed too.

My primary motive for joining this company had not been money. It was a deliberate departure from the way I had made decisions before. By an accident of great timing, it turned out to be the most financially significant job I ever had. The money changed my life in real and lasting ways.

The pride I once felt in the mission had grown abstract. The pride I felt in my compensation slip felt concrete, measurable, mine. The shift had happened quietly, over years, and I hadn't noticed it because it felt like success. Because it was success — exactly what they promised would happen if I followed my heart.

What they didn’t mention was that success, once it arrives, starts doing its own work on the heart.

There is a name for what happened to me, to the scientist, and very likely, to you.

The over-justification effect. The phenomenon by which an external reward for an intrinsically motivated behavior erodes the intrinsic motivation itself. It sounds clinical because it is clinical — it has been documented on children, artists, athletes, scientists. It is not a personality flaw. It does not require weakness or greed or bad faith. It requires only that you be consistently rewarded for something you once did for its own sake.

We are told to follow our passions. To monetize what we love. To turn the personal into the professional. We are given frameworks that promise convergence — do what you love and the reward will follow. What an incomplete sentence that turns out to be.

The reward, once it follows, may change the nature of the following.

I have never been able to let go of the notion that one must love what one does for a living. The idea of spending the largest portion of my waking life on autopilot — doing what I have to, with indifference or resentment — feels horrifying.

What I want to build now is harder to explain than what I want to leave behind. Still formless, still more feeling than blueprint. A space where people can remember how to be themselves. Not perform. Not optimize. Just be, in the presence of others who are trying to do the same. But I do know that it is an embodiment of the inescapable sensations of my own wanting, my own longing. I am figuring out what it looks like in the world outside my head and my heart — a retreat, a workshop, a circle. But the impulse is this: to create a container where it is safe to put down the reasons and just be what is underneath.

That is what I want to tend. This is what drives me right now. What if I fail? What if it all comes to nothing? The question haunts me. I have learned not to deny it or hide from it, but to accept it as a possibility.

But there is another, stranger fear underneath that one. What if I succeed? What if what I build finds an audience? What if it makes money? What if I become known for it?

What if the succeeding helps people recover their wanting, while slowly, in the building of it, I lose my own.

The over-justification effect does not make exceptions for people who have read about it. It does not care that I left a good salary to avoid exactly this. It is patient. It waits for the moment the reward arrives — the full retreat, the glowing testimonials, the income that finally makes this feel legitimate — and then it begins its work.

I am watching it happen in miniature, right here on Substack. Writing this to you. There is a version of this newsletter that I tend the way I tend a question — because something in me will not leave it alone, because the particular shape of my inner world needs an outside to press against. And then there is a version where I check how many people opened the last one. Where I notice which sentences got shared. Where I begin, almost without meaning to, to write toward the metrics rather than toward the feeling that made me want to write at all.

Here is where I am practicing the return back to the pull. Back to the thing I was trying to say before I started wondering how it would land. The views and the subscriber count stays open in another tab. I am learning to look at it the way you look at a clock when you are doing something you love — occasionally, and with mild surprise that time still exists.

Because the mechanism requires that you trust the external validation more than your own experience of wanting. The reward overwrites the intrinsic signal only when you have already begun to distrust that signal — when the inner voice has grown quiet enough that the outer voice drowns it out.

This is not a personality flaw. It is what we were taught.

My daughter wakes up every morning in what I can only describe as astonishment — that the world is still there, that there are things to touch and taste and climb. She wakes up wanting to switch on the lights, wanting to taste watermelon, wanting to climb the railing. She wants and wants and wants, and moves toward what calls her with her whole body, the way water finds a slope.

She will one day be asked to justify her wanting. She will learn that desire without a destination is self-indulgence. She will learn what we have learnt. To wait for permission — from institutions, from markets, from the approval of others — before we allow ourselves to move toward the things that move us.

I don’t think this is recoverable in a single decision. I don’t think you quit your job and wake up the next morning with your wanting intact. I think it is slower than that and more deliberate — a practice of returning, again and again, to the question of what you would do if no one was watching. What you would reach for if there were no reward waiting. Not as a fantasy, but as a compass.

I have no idea how to actually do this – stay connected to my wanting. I am making it up as I go. I am documenting the journey on Substack. I am slowing down, deliberately, guarding myself against compulsive schedule-making and rushing to meet punishing self-imposed deadlines. I am letting my mind wander. I am dreaming. I dream until I am bursting with the need to act on my wanting. And then I let that need drive me.

I worry sometimes that I am naive, or worse, entitled. The circumstances that made this leap possible are incredibly fortunate — a STEM family, good timing, the option to relocate to India, the benefits of geo-arbitrage without the machinery of immigration. I know I am privileged to be able to even consider building a career in something I feel deeply about.

This is why my new venture carries more weight for me than a new career. It is a wager. Not just on whether I can build something people want, but on whether I can build something people want and still want it myself. To find out whether it is possible to hold your livelihood and your longing in the same hands without one crushing the other. Whether sustenance and meaning can be the same motion, or whether they always end up, over time, in competition. I keep returning to Kekulé’s snake. A thing that feeds on its own energy. No gap between the motion and the meaning. No outside required to justify the turning. That is what I am trying to build. That is what I am trying to be.

Your desire is data. The oldest data you have. It has been there longer than your resume, longer than your doubts, longer than anyone’s opinion of what you should do with it. It is the most reliable information you have about who you are.

Tend it accordingly.

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I step into a house that is unfamiliar.

I need to ask where the washroom is. I don’t know which cabinet contains the plates and bowls. I can’t tell if the balcony receives the morning light, or if the evening glare makes it impossible to sit outside.

And yet I recognize it immediately.

There is a colorful bedcover folded carefully across the couch to protect it from spills. The lampshades wear their thin plastic wrapping clinging to their rims to guard against dust and fading. The shelves are crowded with little novelty objects. Curios. Small Ganesha idols. A tiny string instrument I recognize but cannot name. Two large wooden dolls with liquid-black eyes and painted handlebar mustaches stand shoulder to shoulder facing the front door, weapons in hand, guarding the threshold.

Incense and jasmine hang in the air, briefly interrupted by the mouthwatering aroma of a coconut-based stew drifting from the kitchen.

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I hand N over as soon as I enter into the eager arms of doting grandparents and their friends, people she will soon call aunty and uncle. I am left holding the debris of toddlerhood: slings, bags, bottles, snacks. I crouch to unload them in a corner, trying to keep them out of sight in the pristine space.

My husband and daughter are instantly surrounded. They tickle N, pull at her cheeks, ask S about his job. Is he adjusting to working nights? Is the Indian water and food suiting him? It takes time, they say wisely. It will take time.

There is a flurry of introductions and updates.

A few doctors, their specializations complex enough to resist pronunciation. A “big shot” in an IT company whose name I vaguely recognize. Four thousand square feet carpet area. Attached staff quarters. Children scattered across Europe, the U.S., Australia. A new BMW.

The details are offerings. Evidence of status.

I am overlooked.

So I join the circle and introduce myself.

I have decades of practice inserting myself into unfamiliar groups. Moving cities. Consulting. Writing groups. Ignoring the dull, anxious burn in the pit of my stomach and stepping forward anyway. Shoulders back. Low voice. Strong handshake. Confident.

Hi, I’m Archana.

I stand beside S and our proximity makes our marriage legible. N stretches toward me from the arms of a new admirer, her small body bending toward mine like a sunflower toward the sun.

Oh yes, this is Archana. She is …

There was a pause.

N’s mother.

I flinch visibly. Their granddaughter is the most precious thing in their orbit, the axis around which this gathering turns. So I am introduced as her mother. To them, it is the most meaningful fact about me.

I see the subtle recalibration in the room. They will not ask what I do. They will not bring up politics or economic policy. They will not be curious about my writing or my ventures. Those are trifles here. Frivolities for the unserious.

I feel small and invisible.

I feel the urge to deepen my voice. To showcase my intelligence. To signal, without appearing to signal, that I am not only this.

I am in the vortex of my most ancient fear.

Years ago, I stopped to watch a herd of deer along a coastal highway in the Pacific Northwest. They were grazing, young ones darting in and out, mothers resting in loose huddles.

Then, in complete synchrony, every head snapped up. They stared into the forest. Bodies rigid. Tails trembling. Nostrils flared.

After a long, suspended moment, they relaxed.

They must have sensed a bear. said a man standing beside me.

He was probably right. Those forests hold black bears. Shy creatures, rarely aggressive. When I first began hiking alone, I memorized the instructions on how to respond if I walked up to one.

Stand straight. Make yourself look large. Speak in a deep, confident voice. Don’t turn your back or run. Be assertive but don’t be threatening. Unless the bear attacks. Then fight back. Aggressively.

I followed the rules the few times I encountered a bear. It was terrifying, trying to appear formidable to a creature that could destroy me with a swipe of its paw.

But I have long practiced looking bigger than I am. More confident than I feel. Less scared.

In conference rooms. In classrooms. At parties. At dinners like this one.

There is a tension that hums beneath so many adult gatherings. A buzzing undertone you only notice if you slow down and pay attention.

Our shoulders lift. Our voices change. We enunciate more carefully. We reference achievements. We omit uncertainty. We are poised to defend ourselves.

But from whom? No bear is present. We are not facing mortal danger.

We are facing one another.

Humans have built a world in which everyone is bracing with each other all the time. Avoiding judgment. Preening and bragging. Deflecting blame. Concealing weaknesses. We are born into herds where trust must be earned. Where vulnerability is risk. Where to ask for real connection is too much, and one must settle for admiration, or at the very least congeniality.

There need be only one person in the room who is defensive, angry, or insecure. We pick up on it instantly. We may not know the source of the danger. But our millennia-old limbic systems recognize it. And we react.

Fear doesn’t stay where we put it. It leaks. It spreads. Like an infection moving through a crowd that doesn’t know it’s sick. One person’s unprocessed dread becomes everyone’s low-grade unease. Until it becomes a baseline state.

Because when I tighten, you tighten. When I perform, you perform. When I withhold, you withhold.

We signal danger to each other in an endless loop, waiting for catastrophe.

I was quiet and pensive all evening. I could not get myself to stop brooding over what felt like the biggest mistake of my life. I had quit my job and moved across the world, much to the delight of my family. Though I was happy for their joy, my decision wasn’t just for them. It was for me too. But the vision I had for myself — more unstructured time, more autonomy, my own business — felt a million miles away.

I felt trapped, surrounded by people I had nothing in common with, but whose validation I craved just the same.

I tried. I really did. I had a glass of punch and attempted to pay attention to the conversations around me. But my mind kept drifting back to the moment of introduction, caught in a loop I couldn’t exit. I could not be here now, tangled in the dread of my own insignificance. I breathed through the tightness that kept rising in my chest and throat. All I could manage was tight-lipped smiles and a slow simmering silence.

They picked up on it. They walked on eggshells around me, though not one knew what was wrong. The gathering grew awkward and guarded wherever I was. My family was tentatively solicitous, and sometimes impatient, trying to draw me out.

It was only later, after N was asleep and the house had gone quiet, that I could see what had actually happened.

The fear that arrived at that dinner wasn’t about being introduced as N’s mother, or being overlooked by strangers. It was older than that gathering, older than my decisions, older than the version of myself I’d spent a decade carefully constructing. It was the fear that without a title, without a paycheck, without the external scaffolding of a career that impressed other people, I might not be able to justify my presence in a room.

I had walked off a cliff, voluntarily, with great intention. And I was terrified I might fall.

The truth is simple: I have taken a risk, and I am scared. Building something from nothing in a field where I have no formal credentials, no ready network, no proven track record requires a particular species of delusion. A willingness to believe in a version of myself that doesn’t yet exist. Most days I manage it. I lay the bricks. I show up at the blank page. I do the work.

But to take a risk is to accept failure as a possibility. And that night, surrounded by people measuring a person’s worth by what they do and what they own, I could not look at that possibility directly.

So I looked away. And in looking away, I tightened.

And the room tightened with me.

My unprocessed dread became everyone’s low-grade unease. The room adjusted around my silence the way a body adjusts around a wound. Carefully, tentatively, trying not to press too hard.

I had become the bear.

Not predator, exactly. But a signal. A source of danger that nobody could name. Every head snapped up. Bodies stiffened. Voices changed. The evening calcified into something guarded and joyless around me. I told myself the room had done that to me. But I had done it to myself, and to them.

I want to be careful to not be too hard on myself. I am not the only one who walked into that gathering carrying baggage. The room had its own performance already underway. In a different season of my life, S and I would have caught each other’s eyes across the room and smiled. We would have giggled about it later, affectionately, without malice. I would have remained untouched by the blatant displays of material success.

But that was when I had my own career as armor. My own title to scaffold my ego. My achievements holding their own with the ones being brandished around me.

I don’t want that crutch anymore.

That night, I hadn’t yet learned to stand in a room without it.

I have learned something unsettling about myself. Something I didn’t want to know. There is a distance between what I believe and what my body feels. This gap between believing and embodying cannot be crossed by thinking. I do believe my worth is inherent. And yet in the wrong room, the wrong moment, the wrong season of my life, my body doesn’t believe a word of it. It tightens and performs. It signals distress to everyone around me before I have consciously registered the threat.

I don’t want to be the bear in any room. The presence that makes everyone quietly recalibrate. That turns an ordinary evening into a performance I didn’t audition for.

What I am building in myself is something more than confidence. I have confidence, and courage. What I need more of is something closer to faith. In the bodily conviction that I can see myself through to the other side, no matter where it takes me. I might fail, but I’ll still be whole. A room full of strangers wielding measuring tapes cannot tell me something true about myself. I am allowed to take up space, even if I cannot justify it in a currency anyone here trades in.

This kind of faith is not declared. I will practice it in small, unglamorous moments – like here, on this page, in the middle of a risk that might not pay off. I will practice it in other rooms, where no one knows my name, or thinks to ask.

I believe that if I keep practicing this faith in myself, it will accumulate and solidify into a trust in life that can be shared. It can ripple out to the people around me.

Until one day, I walk into a room and mean it when I say, without words:

It’s okay. I’m safe. You’re safe. We can be here together.

No bear. Just us.

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Tickets booked. On January 14th, I’ll board a one-way flight to India. The journey feels both momentous and mundane. It is the culmination of a decade of planning and dreaming, a defection from the American dream and corporate climbing into an uncertain, exciting, and unfamiliar future. And yet it is also simply us going home.

When S and I first decided we would return to India and work for ourselves, I imagined I’d miss the obvious things: smooth roads, orderly lanes, beautiful bridges. The easy access to natural beauty. The dependable bi-monthly paycheck. The conveniences that—despite my criticisms—I’ve always enjoyed.

But now that the moment is almost here, it isn’t the infrastructure or the salary I’m grieving.

It’s the people.

It’s the friendships that somehow formed in adulthood against all odds. The connections that persisted across states, years, and major life events. The writers who know versions of me I’ve never spoken aloud. The plant-medicine circles, the covid pods, the colleagues who became confidants. The small handful of people I text pictures of funny bumper stickers to, who help me dissect a spicy meeting at work, who listen—patiently, endlessly—as I process my wounded feelings out loud. People who care enough to tell me when they think I’m wrong.

It takes time, commitment, and a lot of luck to build these relationships. It takes courage to admit their significance in our lives.

I arrived in this country thirteen years ago knowing no one. I am leaving behind people who truly see me. And the thought of rebuilding that kind of community again feels exhausting.

When I shared my update in a few long-dormant WhatsApp groups—scattered remnants of school, college, and early work years—one response surprised me. Many of these groups are graveyards of New Year and Diwali forwards. But a few still carry the ghost of something more: a birthday remembered, a burst of messages after months of silence. Each time they come alive, I feel myself briefly slipping into the person I once was with them—a version I barely recognize but can still inhabit for a moment. These are people who remember me as I was.

One of these groups is my college friends. After I shared the news, a sudden momentum took shape: plans for a reunion mere days after I land, even a hiking trip to Dehradun a few months later—a revival of a trip we took nearly twenty years ago. We’ve made similar plans over the years—Goa, Europe, South America—and none of them materialized, dissolved by work, schedules, and children. But this time feels different. There is a rare coincidence of us all being in the same country at the same time by chance, and a sudden urgency to rearrange our lives and show up.

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These were the women I spent all of undergrad with. We found each other in the first tentative weeks, awkwardly orbiting different groups until we landed, finally, with one another. We were barely adults—children, really—full of bravado and insecurity, rehearsing futures we couldn’t imagine.

We spent four years shaping one another, witnessing each other’s first shaky steps into adulthood. We tried on identities, traded clothes, coached each other through first dates, first heartbreaks, first everythings. We stayed up talking until absurd hours. We did impressions of our professors. We analyzed budding romances with forensic intensity. We mourned our bodies and then admired them in the next breath.

Slowly, in weighted, halting moments, we reached deeper: our plans for the future, our first experiments with belief and philosophy, the vulnerable confrontations when we disappointed or hurt each other. We built each other up when we couldn’t do it alone. We shared our adventures and misadventures with such dedication that sometimes the retelling felt more real than the event itself.

We knew each other better than anyone else. We entered adulthood side by side, witnessing the unfiltered becoming of who we were trying to be.

It was a heady intimacy, rooted not only in how inseparable we were but in how unflinchingly we told each other the truth.

We stayed in touch after college, connected across continents and wildly different life trajectories. But slowly—imperceptibly—I drifted. I reached out less. I updated them less. Our friendship thinned into something between obligation and nostalgia.

We used to pride ourselves on our low-drama closeness. But time brought complexity. There were betrayals and grievances, moments where we let each other down. Things were left unsaid. We stepped around those fractures, folded those moments and let them calcify into the growing distance between us. The unsaid things embedded themselves quietly, settling into the walls between us.

There is a slight awkwardness now. A faint stiffness in our banter. We carry the heavy history of knowing each other’s origins, of being witnesses to versions of ourselves we’ve long outgrown. When we talk now, I can feel us reaching for old shorthands that no longer quite fit.

I know the shape of their adult lives. They know mine. But it feels like looking at a photograph of someone you once knew—recognizable, but missing the motion and nuance of true intimacy.

One used to be my fellow philosopher, our midnight discussions breathless with excitement over books and ideas. We’re still spiritual seekers, but she has traveled further into the mysteries of the mind and soul than anyone I know. Now we speak different dialects of consciousness, needing constant translation to reach each other.

One was my soul sister, the first person in my life who offered unconditional acceptance. Our closeness sometimes veered into possessiveness. Her vulnerability and authenticity shaped the standards by which I’ve measured connection ever since. And yet today, I know almost nothing of her inner world.

One was the quiet mother of our group—soft-spoken, but ferociously strong. Her room, and later her home, was our haven. The place we gathered for our daily rituals of connection. Our lives have oddly mirrored one another: motherhood, alternative careers, writing. And yet now we connect only in outlines.

One was my creative partner in crime, my co-conspirator in every ridiculous adventure. We lived together for a time after college. But new friendships, new romances, and new commitments stretched our connection thin until it snapped.

None of this is anyone’s fault. If anything, I’m the one who ghosts and screens calls, who gets overwhelmed by all the chatter, who forgets to reply. But forgetting to reply is not the same as forgetting. These women live in me still. They populate my stories. They flash into my mind when I hear a joke they would’ve loved, or when I see a group of girls clustered in front of a mirror in a changing room.

I also see, in these women, an unexpected mirroring of my own transformation: a quiet shedding of inherited expectations, a loosening of the old scripts that once told us how to live. All of us, in our own ways, have stepped off the well-lit path—turning away from mindless consumption, from conventional careers, from the pressure to blend in or stand out. We have wandered into unnamed territories with unassuming courage. I want to honor this parallel unfolding between us, but the truth is I still don’t have the language for its depth.

A few months ago I watched this scene from The White Lotus—a rare moment of sincerity amid sarcastic chatter—and I cried. Not because of the scene itself, but because of the shock of hearing someone articulate the quiet truths of friendship: love and regret, ambivalence and longing, the grief of growing apart. The fear that reunions might reveal we have nothing left in common except the past. The subtle comparison and competition adulthood brings. The risk that the version of the relationship we remember no longer exists.

Maybe—like Carrie Coon’s character—I’m expecting too much.

Maybe what I want from these women now has less to do with who we were, and more to do with my own fear of leaving behind the life I built here. Maybe my longing is simply grief wearing nostalgia as a disguise.

And yet—despite the awkwardness, despite the distance, despite all that has changed—I find myself hopeful.

Because for the first time in many years, we are choosing to sit at the same table again.

Maybe we will honor who we once were to one another and dare to say the quiet parts out loud.

Maybe we will move past the choreography of polite updates and once again become witnesses to each other’s becoming—a new, stranger phase of individuation, subtler than our leap into adulthood but just as transformative.

And even if we don’t—if all we do is hover at the edges, tracing the old, familiar orbit until gravity draws us close—then we are simply repeating the oldest pattern we know.

We are doing what we once did as teenagers: circling, searching, hoping we land beside each other once again.

It is a risk, yes—but one worth crossing an ocean for.

At least we will try.

Maybe that is enough.

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I did not know that babies have to learn how to poop.

Of all the things I expected postpartum life to demand of me, coaching a baby through the existential crisis of bowel movements was not on the list. And yet there we were, a few weeks into postpartum, flummoxed by N’s heartrending, nerve-shredding screams a dozen times a day. Every pediatrician, doula, and parent-with-intact-memory insisted this was normal – a rite of passage for babies learning not to fight their own bodies.

S and I tried everything: belly massages, leg-bicycles, soothing noises, prayer. Nothing changed. Her tiny body twisted and clenched in what looked like agony. And to make it worse, she despised a dirty diaper. Even after she had done the deed, she protested loudly until she was in our arms with a clean, dry butt and what we hoped was forgiveness for our poor service.

At some point – likely due to sleep deprivation and reckless exposure to Instagram Shorts – we tried early potty training. Sparing her tender skin from endless wiping felt like a noble mission.

So there we were one morning, bleary-eyed, straight out of bed, holding a wailing baby over a pink plastic potty. My ears rang. My nerves buzzed. My postpartum body reacted to her screams like they were an alarm wired directly to my bones. This is too much, I thought. Every misgiving I had ever had about being a mother rushed through me. I felt like a terrible mother. I snapped at my dog, who was only trying to figure out what all the fuss was about.

Maybe it was the disappointment in his eyes.

Maybe it was a rare pause in the hormonal storms.

Or maybe it was the years I’ve spent coming back – intermittently, imperfectly, stubbornly – to mindfulness.

But something settled in me.

Something widened.

For a moment, I saw the scene without drowning in it. S crouched holding N over the squeaky-clean potty, face scrunched in concentration as he asked urgently, “Was that a poop or a fart?” I stood beside him like a nurse assisting a neurosurgeon in a medical drama, armed with wet wipes and a diaper. And completing the circle was my entirely unhelpful eighty-five-pound pitbull, watching with grave concern.

It took everything in me not to burst out laughing.

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The moment – tense, loud, cortisol-drenched – suddenly felt absurd and tender and strangely joyful. The shift didn’t change the situation. It changed how I witnessed it. Without that shift, this morning would have been another chaotic blur. With it, the moment became something else. Something I could inhabit rather than survive.

And it made me wonder:

How many moments in my life did I miss simply because I couldn’t see through the fog of my own overwhelm?

There were other moments – not sweet, not tender.

A few days after our wedding, I landed in Los Angeles from India after the busiest two weeks of my life. I had wrapped up assignments, taken exams, survived the endless rituals of an Indian wedding where I was the exhausted, smiling protagonist – and then packed my entire existence into two suitcases to begin my immigrant life with S.

On my first day, I felt like a fish out of water… in Burning Man. S hauled our suitcases up to the quaint, fussy home he shared with a kind middle-aged roommate. She and I had spoken on the phone twice during the 2.5 years of our intergalactic long-distance engagement. But suddenly I was here – and S was already leaving for a work trip.

He scribbled down the Wi-Fi password, gave me directions to the grocery store, told me that my phone should be delivered by the weekend when he would be back. He dashed out the door to catch his flight.

His roommate took me on a walk to the beach. I was grateful. With no phone, no driver’s license, and the sense of direction of an over-caffeinated sea turtle, I was stuck at home all day. At lunch, I insisted on paying with the credit card S had given me. She relented and said, kindly and casually, “Say thanks to S for me.”

It landed like a punch.

I didn’t show it, but inside I crumpled.

I was unemployed. In debt with an exorbitant education loan. I had swaggered into my new country with the confidence of the entitled. But my few contacts hadn’t replied back to me, and no one recognized or cared about my brand name education that was so coveted back home.

I felt like a child relying on S for my day to day sustenance. The immigration status on my visa was “dependent.” The very status I’d sworn, before, I would never inhabit.

Thirteen years later, I remember that moment through a haze. It has become an origin story: I scraped out of debt, built a career, built a life. S and I discovered parts of each other we hadn’t yet met – cheerleader, partner, nemesis, friend. A story that allows me to bypass my pain and vulnerability, into something that resembles an epic ascent into personal power.

It is the aerial view of a fragment of my life. It is untouched by its sensations.

Back then I didn’t know how to stay with myself. The panic and the wonder of a new world. The shame and the courage. The fear of invisibility – they swept me away. I didn’t meet the moment; I dissolved into the stories that protected me.

Reframing. That’s what the language of therapy calls it. It makes sense of the depth of human experience in a world that remains inexplicable. It can bring meaning and order. But it can also act like a shortcut — a way to skip the rawness of the moment and fast-forward to the triumphant ending.

I was barely twenty when I told S that I wanted to live on every continent in the world. Not visit on a vacation. Actually live in every continent. S persuaded me to relocate with him all those years ago by reminding me of exactly this sentiment. But the experience of it was so much more than the travel and cultural explorations I anticipated. It was starting from scratch. It was having to prove myself, build a life. It was uncertainty and risk and constant mental conversion between Fahrenheit and Celsius, and Dollars and Rupees. There were high highs and low lows.

And that’s what I understand now:

A moment is one thing.

It can be messy, underwhelming, gritty.

The story we tell about it – later, from far away – is another.

We can live in the moment, or we can live in the story.

Most of us choose the story without even noticing.

A decade later, there I was with a screaming baby, a frantic husband, a concerned pitbull, and a pink potty – and suddenly I wasn’t drowning. I was aware. I was wide. I could feel the stress, hear the shrieks, smell the… ambiance – but I wasn’t lost in the plot.

Presence didn’t erase the story.

It simply kept the story from swallowing the moment whole.

And in that little gap – the space between experience and its interpretation – life happened.

Natalie (A Substack author you should follow because she is awesome) articulated this perfectly in her piece-

“I used to think the goal was to close the gap, to elevate your reality until you’re living the dream. But I’m starting to think the gap is the whole point. It’s the initiation. The mundanity and the disappointment offer proof that you’re in it, that you’re no longer imagining your life but actually living it. That’s where the fantasy becomes something with weight, something that can exist in the world, not just in your head.

That’s the only way. You become the person who steps, again and again, toward the life you want.“

I notice now that S empties the dishwasher while chatting with his friends. I notice N’s comical grit as she pushes out her daily deuce. I notice emotions rising with requests to be acknowledged rather than banished. I’ve named the hummingbirds in my yard Rebecca Chang and Unniprasad.

These moments don’t need narration.

They don’t need meaning.

They don’t need to lead anywhere.

Not bliss.

Not enlightenment.

Just a widening of the aperture.

A way of seeing that lets gratitude slip in even when nothing is ideal.

It is to be — and to feel, in some quiet corner of my chest — that being alive is already enough.

Presence hasn’t made life easier.

But it has made life larger.

When I meet a moment fully – diaper blowout, immigration identity crisis, late-night self-doubt – something softens. The fear loosens. The irritation becomes funny. The shame becomes human. The story becomes a cloud in the sky of my life. Transient. Shifting. Sometimes even beautiful.

I keep wondering:

How many moments did I rush past before I learned to stay?

How many pages of the book of my life did I skip just to reach the end of the chapter?

I can’t get those back.

But I can meet the next one.

And the next.

And the next.

In the end, that’s what presence gives us:

not a perfect life —

but a life we actually get to live, in the breath before the story begins.

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My daughter N is learning that she has agency in the world. It isn’t always pleasant.

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Babies are persistent creatures. They labor for weeks over skills that look hilariously simple to us.

When N started blowing raspberries, it demanded total focus: lips pursed just so, breath controlled just enough. It was adorable—until it wasn’t. She thhrrrppp-ed through three-quarters of every waking moment, perfected spit-bubble techniques at three a.m., and kept herself from sleeping because she couldn’t stop practicing.

Last month, her mission became climbing the couch. She cried with frustration the hundred times she slipped. But she returned again and again until, one day, her pudgy foot found a foothold, her sticky hands leveraged her weight, and she pulled herself up.

Technically, it was a disaster—our “safe space” now held the possibility of a cracked skull. But I couldn’t help myself. I burst into applause, proud of her grit. She looked up, startled. My praise broke her trance. She ignored me, scrambled down from her freshly earned perch, and began climbing again.

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Nursing was its own battlefield. I had a hyperactive letdown—every feeding a torrent of milk, her tiny body sputtering in protest. We eventually figured a quiet snuggly rhythm together. Until she got teeth.

Six of them. All at once.

The first bite drew a sharp “no.” But a recent bite felt like I was being chewed in half by a shark. A jolt of pain coursed through me as I yanked away from her. She looked up, beaming—all six teeth gleaming with triumph – delighted at my reaction. With barely suppressed rage, I set her down too roughly, said “no” too loudly. Her smile faltered. She let out a questioning squawk.

I felt another pain, unrelated to the bite, centered not in my own body, but in the confusion that clouded her eyes.

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Here’s the truth: N doesn’t perform oral and physical acrobatics to show off her athleticism. She doesn’t bite to hurt me. She acts on raw impulse, in real time, without a story attached.

She doesn’t yet know that a fall could hurt her, or that her bite could pierce me. It’s our job to teach her the rules of the world—to guide her as she learns that her actions ripple outward.

Like all of us, she must look outward first: to parents, then eventually teachers, friends, colleagues—to learn how the world works. That’s our necessary occupation of the first half of life: learning to fit in.

We begin knowing exactly how we feel, and nothing of gravity or grammar. A toddler may not grasp she has toes, but she’ll wail at scrambled eggs and beam at boiled ones. No consistency, no self-consciousness. Just honesty.

But something falters.

When I was first asked what I wanted to be, I confidently declared “a fairy.” Then “an astronaut.” Eventually, a software engineer—the thing I was best at, the thing that won approval.

“Don’t touch that, it’s hot,” becomes “She’s such a good girl; she always listens.”

“That’s his ball; give it back,” becomes “Jealousy is bad.”

We learn physics and politeness, and how to weave our impulses and impressions into a narrative of ourselves that is palatable to the world.

Humans crave belonging, and will trade authenticity for approval. We slowly disconnect from our inner experience, swapping our pulse for performance. We tell ourselves that we must follow the rules, must feel only the appropriate range of emotions. And the texture of our inner world is replaced by the near constant attunement to the demands of our environment.

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As N learns gravity, I’m learning autonomy.

My finger hovers over “Send.” My laptop hums. My pulse answers. I’m staring at my resignation letter.

I have slowly pieced together the brightest, most tender offerings I have for the world, into a nebulous vision for a business I can call my own. It’s stitched together late in the night after all the Zoom calls and the “shoulds” are done. I’ve squirreled away a nest egg, a decade long exercise in delayed gratification. And I feel as ready as I can practically be for taking a leap that feels both deliciously insane and hauntingly fitting.

I have a choice now.

There’s another offer: more money than I can spend, a title that sparkles on LinkedIn, the kind of stability that muffles fear. It makes sense. I just had a baby. I’m moving continents. I can always start the business later.

When I picture this job, I see how proud others would be of me—my family, acquaintances, the world. I imagine being perceived as someone smarter, more important, than I feel about myself now.

When I visualize my business, I think about the things I could build, the people who could partner with me. I feel the fear of stepping into a life without the comforting monthly cha-ching of a paycheck. I feel the excitement, and also the tension and doubt of creating something that exists only in my mind. I steel myself for the inevitable failures and humiliations that I know are part of the journey.

I have made my decision based not on the never ending lure of stability, not even on the growing death-consciousness that beckons me to acknowledge the steadily shrinking time I have left in this world. My decision comes from the shape of my visions.

In my fantasy of the first, more practical option, I am not even there. All I see are the projections of how I will be seen.

I won’t picture myself in the multitude of late nights in the glare of a laptop. I won’t imagine the annoyance rather than concern over my daughter’s shrieks that filter through closed doors. I watch for the world’s response, not my sensations.

I am choosing the option where I see myself.

Afraid. Imperfect. Present.

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We adapt to the world until our reflection becomes our only reality. Promotions, vacations, curated family portraits—they dazzle, then dull. What remains is our lived experience. The rest is projection.

After decades of striving, I’m relearning how to listen inward. Maybe that’s what a midlife crisis really is: not a rebellion, but a remembering.

It feels like stepping outside my life to watch myself choosing approval over truth, amiability over connection, performance over pulse.

And with that distance comes clarity.

I can question myself and others. I can change my mind. I can do what I think is right.

Carl Jung called this process individuation—becoming who we actually are, beneath all the conditioning. Finding our inner compass, the raw immediacy of our inner world, long muted, resurfacing against society’s script of an ideal life.

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Here lies the paradox of growing up: we trade dependence for autonomy, but real agency demands self-knowledge. We master the outer world, yet abandon the inner one. We learn to obey gravity and grammar, but forget how to feel.

Fear, anger, grief—they’re not problems to solve, but experiences to meet.

All our wisdom and learning cannot guarantee whether we will succeed or fail, whether love will endure or vanish. Every choice risks rejection or ridicule. We lose ourselves in the process of seeking approval and avoiding fear, anger and grief. We remain children in a sense, substituting our parents for authority figures and public opinion.

Individuation doesn’t mean rejecting the world; it means living in both registers at once—the world’s rules, and our own truth.

When we don’t answer the call of individuation, the cost shows up everywhere. The disproportionate rage at a missed email. The empty alcohol bottles hidden in paper bags in the recycling bin. The strain in our voice when we answer our mother’s phone call. The paralysis at the start of a simple task. The emptiness. We think we are dealing, but really we are suffering from disconnection—from ourselves.

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Maybe growing up is coming full circle. A return to our body, to sensation, to what it feels like to be us. To reclaim what children know instinctively: what we like, what we want, what we feel.

Not with the innocence of not knowing the world’s cost—but with the maturity of knowing it, and choosing anyway.

To know water’s chemical formula—and still pause to feel the rain.

That immediacy, that thread to our own aliveness—it’s still there.

To return to it is the work of a lifetime.

To honor it is to finally grow up.

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S and I met when we were nineteen, circling each other for a year in a coy game of chicken where neither wanted to admit how much the other mattered. I could sense his attraction but couldn’t decode the mix: his easy warmth, his affectionate style of courtship, his intense drive, his vanishing acts into friends and hobbies.

When we finally began, we had so … much … fun. Long nights of music and conversation, sky-gazing on hostel rooftops, bodies humming with the thrill of being chosen. Still, a whisper followed me: Who is he really?

I fell in love the first time I saw him play guitar for a scrappy campus metal band. I was in a band too — me on vocals, him on drums and sometimes guitar. I’d always had a thing for musicians, but with him it wasn’t polish or swagger. He stayed himself onstage. No aloof coolness, no mask. After each song he’d glance out questioning: Was that okay? He looked right at me and grinned sheepishly when he messed up. He lit up with delight when he nailed a complex solo. That mix of earnestness and joy disarmed me.

Years later, when he teased that I only agreed to date him after he got a job, I smiled, but inside I winced. The joke wasn’t cruel, but it reduced my attraction to a cliché on my gender I’d spent my life resisting. It poked at the old misgiving: Did he truly see me?

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After five years of dating, we did the hard thing: two years of long-distance. Scratchy Skype calls at 3 a.m., mismatched time zones, me finishing grad school in India while he started in the U.S. When we finally married, we were desperate to close the distance and begin in our new country.

The next decade we built, brick by brick: careers, cars, mutual funds, mattresses. We merged bank accounts and calendars. We agreed kids weren’t required. Instead we bought last-minute plane tickets, hiked cliffs, danced at festivals with friends who seemed to spring up wherever he went.

But there were cracks. His eye for extravagance — cathedral ceilings, impossible beach access — pressed against my budgets, spreadsheets and careful calculations. He was magnetic and spontaneous, but also impulsive, dismissive of my need for security.

And then there was parenthood. He was vague, open to “someday.” I carried a stubborn dream of adoption, one that I shared with S right after we met. Bloodlines didn’t matter to me. I wanted a family shaped by choice.

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Through those years we dreamed of our future in technicolor. A boat in Belize where I’d teach yoga and he’d guide reef tours. A Thai homestay with beachside meditation. A culinary tour of India, weaving a community of food-loving travelers. Each dream a prism for our shared hunger for freedom, for a vocation built on joy instead of client dinners.

But as our mid-thirties neared, our dreams collided with reality. Friends bought houses in good school districts, upgraded SUVs, had babies. I was content to delay; without a ticking biological clock, adoption could always wait.

For him, delay felt like drift. He felt stuck in his life. Our tiny rental apartment, second-hand cars, childfree weekends were no longer luxuries but reminders that we were falling behind. Our fights repeated like scratched vinyl. My contentment sounded like indictment to him; his restlessness felt like rejection to me.

And then came the child question. Nearing forty, he wanted what had once been vague: a home, a child who looked like us and would call him Dada, a wife who wanted the same. His sudden clarity gutted me. It felt like the cruelest rejection: not just a divergence of plans, but a denial of me. My earliest misgiving roared back — perhaps he had always wanted a traditional life, and I had been a placeholder until he was ready for it. Avoidance and silence were the only languages I knew in conflict.

I gave up. I saw no way forward. Not together. But he — he saw something else. And he led us there.

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It feels like a miracle that we are here now. A daughter we both adore, whose birth was one of the best experiences of my life. Months away from relocating across the world, to a home we’ve built together — a room for music, a garden for butterflies, a private, eclectic space for me to write. A vocation we’ve sketched together, impossibly fitting, miraculously real.

I won’t romanticize those grueling months of reckoning. They were an excavation: chipping away at layers of fear and pride, uncovering the roots of each other’s longings. Some truths were jagged, hard even to admit to ourselves. But slowly, the silence cracked.

I live in my head, in plans I can inhabit like alternate worlds. I can be rigid, clutching at security shaped exactly to my design. I come from a lineage where silence was a strategy, where shared lives were carefully partitioned. Where the years of mothering babies meant isolation and drudgery. I learned to see material indulgence as frivolous, wealth only as a means to autonomy.

He lives through touch, through anchors — home, family, roots. His desires came from generations who prized possessions as proof of success. I dismissed them as mimicry, weakness. It took time to see they were no less valid than my own hunger for freedom. For both of us, our desires were our compass — and our burdens.

For years I kept a ledger: his spontaneity versus my pragmatism, his spending versus my saving, his neutrality versus my conviction. I underlined his faults in red ink. But ledgers blur when you only tally one side. Eventually, the numbers turn back on you.

In that reckoning, I saw him again. He offered to me his whole self, including his missteps and mistakes, asking the same of me. His exuberance saved me from calcifying. His expensive tastes opened me to beauty I would have denied myself. His friendships carried us into communities I could never have built.

The day I gave up was the day he stepped up. Once again he was that boy on the stage, unguarded, earnest, fully himself. He didn’t renounce his desires, but he chose me first. He promised: nothing unless we both wholeheartedly agreed. Then he asked the question that changed everything: What would it take for this to be possible for you?

We never bought the suburban house with a giant mortgage in America. But we built one in India, fully ours. We didn’t adopt. I gave birth instead, despite my resistance, once I knew I would be supported in every way. He is a spectacular father, dad and dada, developing his own rituals with our daughter. Their bond is one of my life’s deepest pleasures.

Only now do I see: I was never fully in this marriage until recently. Psychically, one foot was always out the door. I didn’t trust he would meet me as a true partner. But he has. And so have I.

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We won’t end up with the lives we once imagined. He never claimed his American dream. I never held the child I once thought I’d adopt. What we did get was each other — unedited, twenty years on. A life textured by detours, softened by compromise, luminous with love.

Thirteen years is a long time. In some ways, I am still the girl who loved music and the night sky, and he is still the boy who looked up from the stage, grinning, asking with his eyes if it was enough. But we are not who we were. We’ve been forged into new selves — through the warmth of our love and respect, through the fires of the battles between the ghosts of our ancestors, through choosing each other again and again, even when our dreams diverged.

Getting exactly what you want is sweet. But walking through life with someone who loves you, who grows with you, who sometimes saves you from yourself — that is sweeter. Being carried, and carrying in return, through doubts and disappointments and years of love — that is sweeter still.

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I usually only wanted my eyebrows threaded. But watching her haul that heavy trunk up three flights of stairs always left me vaguely guilty, so I would add a pedicure or a hot oil head massage, just to make it feel worth her trouble.

She had a gift for memory. She never asked “How are you?” as a formality — she remembered. She asked how my exam went, whether I’d made up with the friend I’d argued with. Over time I learned her story too: recently divorced, raising a little boy on her tiny income.

Estranged from her family, shunned for her divorce. She got full custody of her son in exchange for zero alimony from her wealthy ex-in-laws. “I have my son. I have everything I need,” she told me once, with a conviction that made me ashamed of every complaint I’d ever had about my life.

So when Lata called one day in a panic, desperate for money to cover the treatment for her son’s broken arm, I gave it to her. She was extravagantly grateful, calling me “an angel of God” and “a gift from heaven.” She insisted she would repay me with her services.

At first, she showed up diligently. But soon, she began rescheduling. The stories that once bonded us turned into sighs about her sore back and bitter complaints about traffic. After she missed two appointments in a row, I gave up and embraced my unruly eyebrows.

Months later, I saw her across the street and called out. She turned, glared, and walked away. I felt hurt, then angry. The words flashed across my mind: after everything I have done for her.

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All relationships are transactional

It can be argued that all relationships are — at some level — transactional. The expectation of giving and receiving is implicit. There are the more overt exchanges: money, sex, opportunities, apprenticeship, service. Then there are subtler ones: emotional presence, companionship, validation, associative status.

In a healthy relationship, both people have a shared understanding and appreciation of the value exchanged. In business, the contract is explicit. In friendships, marriages, or families, the contract is implicit, and therefore more fragile. In intimate relationships the terms of the contract are unsaid. Often there are unexamined expectations and roles.

The quality of a relationship lives not just in what is exchanged, but in the felt perception of the value of that exchange by both people. When that perception drifts apart, disappointment creeps in.

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A different model of giving

Years ago, a man arrived at our door when we lived in a small town near the deserts of Rajasthan. His rickety old motorcycle had run out of fuel, and he asked for help to make it to the nearest station.

As we spoke, he told me about his village — a few dozen families who had lived deep in the desert for centuries. They tended cattle, grew meager crops, and traveled great distances for trade. Every childbirth, marriage, and death was shared by the whole village.

They also had a community pot, where everyone dropped their spare change. The pot funded school fees, medical emergencies, or repairs when someone’s bike broke down. That day, he was on his way to sell leather shoes and textiles his family had made to honor the birth of his son. He hoped to contribute to the pot with the earnings.

“Doesn’t it make you resentful?” I asked. “Your family worked so hard, and then someone else might use the pot.”

He looked puzzled. “Why would I be resentful? By God’s grace, my family did not need the pot. We have enough. I have a son. This is how I give thanks.”

In his world, giving to the pot was not charity. There was no question of reciprocation. It was a celebration, a marker of social belonging.

In our world, giving often carries power. We are taught to maximize what we bring to the table — our appearance, our competence, our capacity to give. It makes us overextend. It makes receiving complicated, even humiliating. Gratitude is unevenly distributed: we can accept help from one with grace, but from another it feels like a debt.

We live in this soup of exchanges, often unaware of our discomfort, exhaustion or guilt. Many times we are disappointed, but we don’t actually know what it is that we expect. Sometimes we know what we want, but don’t want to say it. I want them to want to give to me, we think and proceed to live in silent resentment. To be at the receiving end of the disappointment is even worse. It makes us walk on eggshells, withdraw and avoid, and diminish and invalidate the others contribution to protect ourselves from shame and blame.

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The emotional ledger

Any long relationship has an emotional ledger - an invisible account book we keep in our minds. What we gave, what we got, what went unacknowledged, what felt unfair. The time they came to our help, the time they let us down, the time they went out of their way, the time they betrayed my trust. These ledgers are rarely spoken aloud, but they quietly determine whether we feel loved, valued, or disappointed.

But the ledger isn’t just about this relationship; it carries our history and inheritance. We carry baggage from our past together. Our family histories around money, time, care, and attention get written in before we even know we’re keeping books. Trauma burrows beneath needs, fears braid into hopes.

There is no objective judge of balance. Barring instances of deceit and gaslighting, the only truth we know is our own perception. The closer the relationship, the messier the interdependency. Which is why the only real work we can do is to examine our own motivations and expectations — and to draw a clearer map.

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The Relational Map

When we ask ourselves why we give or receive the way we do, two questions matter most:

1. Where is my motivation coming from?

2. What am I expecting in return?

These are simple questions, but in actuality the answers rarely stay in neat boxes — they shift, contradict, and blur. We can love deeply and yet feel resentful. Fear and guilt can masquerade as duty. Even if we pause and look within, we might resist admitting to our true motivations. But naming them helps us step out of autopilot.

At the top are the drivers that bring us fulfillment: love, joy, purpose, commitment. Acts rooted here feel inherent to our sense of self, even if they’re difficult. A simple test is that the act of giving here often feels like a reward in itself. It simply feels good. At the bottom are the drivers that drain: obligation, guilt, shame, fear. These acts often feel heavy; they may look generous but are often powered by external pressure. It is not possible to avoid these completely. If we live in functional societies, we end up acting in obligation or fear at least sometimes. But the longer we live here, the more our relationships feel empty and joyless.

On the other side is expectation. Sometimes all we need is internal validation — the quiet sense of satisfaction in living our values. The joy in another’s face at our gift, the sweet warmth in our hearts when we give with love. The steadfastness with which we stick to our commitment, even when the work is hard.

Other times we want an external response — acknowledgment, reciprocation, or repayment. The expectation sits there between the two people, waiting for resolution.

Between the two sits our patterns — the often unconscious habits and values that shape how we give and receive.

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Under the hood

With Lata, my motivations were layered.

On the surface: joy at being able to help. I liked Lata. I wanted good things for her and her family. I was newly adult and delighted by my independence and disposable income. To give my money a purpose that could make a tangible difference to her life felt good.

But beneath: guilt about my privilege, fear of being thought selfish, and a deep pattern around debt. In my world, owing money meant a loss of power, a giving away of sovereignty. So I agreed promptly to her promise of repayment, believing I was giving her the opportunity to restore her dignity.

But my privilege blinded me to an obvious truth. She had unwittingly saddled herself with a year’s worth of unpaid labor promised in a dire moment. A year of bus rides through heat and monsoon, hours away from her son. A detour from the livelihood that keeps her out of a kind of poverty that was unimaginable to me, one day at a time.

My unconscious pattern turned what could have been a clean gift into a muddy transaction. I assumed my pattern to be universal – I expected that Lata, like me, would be anxious to clear the debt. Lata probably would have been relieved by the chance to provide for her son without endless toil, probably expected me to waive away her offer of repayment. When she turned away from me on the street, it crystallized the truth: I had given with conditions I never named, from a pattern I was barely aware of, and she had carried the weight of them until it broke.

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Choosing Conscious Giving

Patterns are not good or bad. They are simply automated operating procedures. They live in us like old footpaths, worn deep by repetition and inheritance. Mine — a resistance to financial dependence, a need to prove autonomy — came from a lineage of women who lost autonomy for financial security. Becoming conscious of it doesn’t erase the pattern. The pattern may even be functional, offering a decent default model of relating. But becoming conscious of it, naming it, gives me a choice.

And that is what healthy relationships ask of us: not perfection, not ledger-keeping, but awareness. The ability to pause and ask: Where is this act coming from? What am I expecting? In that pause lies the chance to give unconditionally, to receive gracefully, or to decline with clarity.

The work is not in the speculation of another’s inner motivations or eliminating disappointment forever — that is impossible. The work is in refusing to let our unconscious patterns write the story of our relationships for us.

Disappointment becomes inevitable when we don’t ask these questions. But when we do, even if the relationship ends, at least we know we did not hand the pen to our unconscious ledger.

Sometimes, that clarity is enough to keep us from being disappointed — or disappointing — again.

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A Framework for Relational Mapping

When you find yourself tangled in giving and receiving, here is a map to return to:

1. Identify the Driver

   1. Ask: Am I giving from love, joy, or purpose? Does the giving and receiving fill my cup? Does the relationship feel healthy?

   2. Or: Am I giving from obligation, guilt, shame, or fear? Does it leave me tired or disappointed? Is there fear, resentment or even contempt hiding in here?

2. Name the Expectation

   1. Ask: Do I feel internal validation? Do I feel aligned with myself?

   2. Or: Do I want an external response — acknowledgment, repayment, or reciprocation? These are natural expectations and should be named and articulated.

3. Spot the Pattern

   1. Ask: Have I acted this way before? Is there a familiar script here? Am I often disappointed in relationships? Do I often give more than I am comfortable with? Do I often minimize the contribution of others?

   2. Notice the inheritance: Is this how your family gave and received? Is this learned behaviors?

4. Reframe with Clarity

   1. If the act is rooted in love and joy, anchor it there: This is a gift. It asks for nothing back.

   2. If it is rooted in fear or obligation, ask whether a clear no would honor you more than a resentful yes.

   3. If there is an expectation - say it, without heat or rushing.

5. Act Cleanly

   1. Give from freedom, not pressure.

   2. Receive with grace, not shame.

   3. And when you decline, let it be firm but kind.

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Every act of giving and receiving writes into the emotional ledger of our relationships. When we act unconsciously, that ledger grows heavy with disappointment. But when we act with awareness — naming our drivers, clarifying our expectations, choosing our patterns rather than being ruled by them — the ledger lightens.

What remains then is not balance, but freedom: the freedom to give without resentment, to receive without shame, and to let love and purpose — not fear or guilt — be the ink that writes our story with others. All we need is awareness.

Not too long ago, a woman on my team talked to me about her struggle with constantly being overlooked at work. She confessed: I’m not the kind of person who can brag about myself.

I knew exactly what she meant. Talking about our own accomplishments can feel awkward, even make us cringe. And yet I had colleagues who made visibility look graceful. They worked in public, shared progress without fuss, invited others in, and carried quiet authority. They didn’t identify as “good at self-promotion.” They simply acted from a different story – the unshakeable value of their contribution and ownership of their visibility.

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Some identities are easy to wear with pride: intelligence, beauty, talent. We claim them as birthrights, even if luck stacked the deck in our favor. We work to maintain and highlight these traits. But notice how we phrase them. We want to be called “beautiful”, not skilled at makeup. We want to be known as “intelligent”, not good at test taking. We want to be seen as “talented”, not lucky.

Others we bury – privilege, inherited wealth, social advantage. We prefer the story of being self-made, even when we aren’t.

And then there are the identities we clutch like excuses:

I can’t plan meals because of my ADHD.

I’m not a leader; I’m a behind-the-scenes type.

I’m too old to start something new.

These stories of victory and victimhood – whether triumphant or self-sabotaging – narrow the range of who we believe we can be. Human beings are situational, not static. We all carry tendencies, but at some point we start choosing which ones become the “I,” discarding the rest as unfitting.

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The Perils of Too Much Self

In my twenties, my self-worth narrowed to a razor’s edge: my career. I evaluated jobs by only two measures – money and title.

Work-life balance? Fulfillment? They were luxuries for the unserious. Credentials were currency, and I chased them with religious fervor. My people-pleasing worked well in teams; I was hungry to prove myself, to contribute, to succeed. By my late twenties, with a brand-name postgraduate degree in hand, I felt unstoppable. Maybe CTO one day. Why not?

It worked until it didn’t.

A series of wrong turns left me unemployed or underemployed for years. Without the title and paycheck, I felt annihilated. It wasn’t just failure. It was the collapse of the “I” I had built my worth upon.

But in that wreckage, I stumbled into myself. I was still someone who loved teamwork, building, fixing, helping. But there were other selves too: an amateur drummer learning Metallica songs from YouTube tutorials, the reader devouring fantasy novels under the cover of career books, the student of physics, astrology, psychology – subjects with no ROI except my own curiosity.

That detour was brutal, but it cracked the mask. It forced me to rebuild a life that felt real. A life where I cared less about how I was seen, and more about how I actually felt. The collapse of my self-concept turned out to be liberation. What I thought was “me” was only ever a story – and it had become my cage. I needed that external failure, the collapse of who I thought I am, to release the narratives that bound me.

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The Perils of Too Little Self

But the opposite – no clear identity at all – is just as dangerous. I once traveled with an acquaintance who seemed effortlessly agreeable. At a saint’s shrine, I watched her transform from a staunchly secular skeptic to lifelong devotee, parroting back the beliefs of strangers. Later, in private, she reversed again.

I began to notice how often she mirrored others – books, hobbies, opinions – anything to fit in. Despite my pity, I felt a wave of revulsion at her shapeshifting. And then, uncomfortably, recognition. I too have performed – affecting a French pronunciation to sound sophisticated, or pretending to be knowledgeable about sports and cars I couldn’t care less about, just to fit in with the boys. We all do this in places we lack conviction, patching ourselves together from borrowed opinions.

The ego may be demonized, but it is necessary. It is the bridge between our inner world and the outer one, giving us enough shape to navigate a dizzyingly complex life.

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The Making of a Human

Every interaction is a projection of how we want to be seen, and in that projection a gap opens between who we are and who we perform. We balance two basic needs: to be accepted by others and to feel coherent within ourselves. The wider the gap, the harder it is to keep our story intact.

But identity is never fully our own. It is a relational choice, forged in the friction between inner authenticity and external pressure. Our decisions emerge from a web of forces – situational context, upbringing, cultural narratives, old wounds, and unconscious desires. When every choice becomes a declaration of “this is who I am,” we trap ourselves in patterns. When we abdicate our choices to the altar of approval, we are adrift. Identity can be as addictive as any substance – we keep returning to the roles we’ve claimed, even when they no longer fit.

But maybe there is another way. Maybe we can practice holding identity lightly – choosing moment by moment, one day at a time, without the need to build a monument out of every decision. I can believe in animal rights and still want leather boots. I may admire someone and still disagree with them. I can be both.

We can sleepwalk through our lives garbed in the identity we unconsciously adopted. We can contort ourselves into shapes that are acceptable to the herd. Or we can recognize that our ego is a construction, and we are allowed to play with it. We can choose how we show up. We can inspect our roles and masks without confusing them with the whole of who we are, and dissolve them if they have become limitations.

Beneath all crafted identities lies an awareness that does not change. We become ourselves, fully human, not by clinging to one fixed self, but by allowing contradiction, by widening the range of who we can be. The story is never final. The “I” is still being made – moment by moment, breath by breath, as unassuming and essential as the blood moving quietly through our veins.

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There are two truths to being a mother.

The first truth: You are not replaceable. Your baby needs you. All the research will tell you this, but the experience is piercing. This is not an abstract concept – it is hormonal, physical, and visceral. It is both intoxicating and terrifying.

The second truth: You are a full-spectrum human being.

You are worthy of joy, fulfillment, and expansion. Not one day. Not when they grow up. Now. Your value is not measured by how much of yourself you give away. You are not just a mother. You are still you.

This tension lives in every mother I know.

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Human babies are particularly useless.

Other newborns can walk, swim, survive. Ours arrive undercooked. Soft-headed. Helpless. It seems like a disadvantage – and it is. But there’s a strange evolutionary gift buried in that vulnerability.

Because so much of our development happens after birth, we don’t just grow – we co-regulate. We finish developing in relationship.

Our nervous systems tune themselves to the caregivers around us. Mirror neurons don’t just teach us how to mimic actions – they teach us how to inhabit the world. Before we learn language, we internalize a worldview, an emotional blueprint. If our caregivers are anxious, we learn that the world is unsafe. If they are numb, we absorb the message that our emotions should be suppressed. If they are joyful – we learn joy.

We are not just born into the world. We are born into its beliefs.

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My mother is a science teacher. She taught me the entire syllabus for each grade before I even walked into class. She encouraged ambition. She stressed financial independence.

And yet, days before I married S – someone I had known for years, my classmate in engineering college – she asked, “Will he… allow you to work?”

That’s the contradiction we inherit.

We are raised with both wings and cages. We are taught to expand and shrink in particular ways. We internalize boldness and limitation in equal measure. I swallowed these beliefs too young, and only now am I learning how many of my limitations are inherited, not structural.

I am tempted to ignore the challenge of questioning my foundations, until I notice what my daughter sees when she sees me.

When I criticize my body, my daughter learns her appearance is up for judgment. That her body has an aesthetic function more important than its ability to eat and climb and read and express love.

When I say I can’t write because of her schedule, she learns dreams are limited by obligations.

When I swallow my rage, she learns that anger is shameful.

She sees herself through me — my beliefs, my mood, my presence. I am her mirror. My self-respect isn’t just about me. It becomes her inheritance.

So I try to change. Because I love her. But can she know how to set herself free if I am caged? Shouldn’t my love be extended to the one she is watching – me?

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I’m not saying this to tell you to “get it together for the children.”

I’m saying: You matter.

You are not less valuable than your child. You deserve a life that feels good to live. There are no prizes for suffering.

We all want better for our children. But we come from a culture that glorified maternal sacrifice.

• Self-neglect is noble.

• Love must be earned.

• Your needs are too much.

• Prioritizing yourself is selfish.

We grew up inside these ideas. And we suffer for them.

Previous generations didn’t always have a choice. Marriage and motherhood were implicit expectations, even inevitabilities. Birth control was limited. Remaining unmarried or childfree was considered subversive in most cultures.

The deliberation we can now afford is glorious – but disorienting. It is something we as a society are learning to navigate.

There is no map for a woman who honors both her children and herself. There is no map for men to support women. We are all drawing it as we go – through guilt and blame, desire and hope.

And guilt? It’s just a signal. Not a stop sign. Sometimes, guilt is only proof that you were trained to abandon yourself.

You alone can know when to give and when to grow.

Your children don’t need mothers who disappear. They need you to trust yourself.

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I have two degrees, a fulfilling career, a partner I love. These are gifts paid for by generations of women before me. My grandmother was a nurse and single mother of three. My mother is an engineer who fixed our electronics by hand and built a tutoring business from scratch. They carved the path I now walk.

And yet I want more.

I want emotional intimacy and creative freedom. I want to write, make music, travel, speak my truth. That hunger used to feel selfish. I used to joke I wasn’t fit to be a mother because I wanted too much.

But every generation breaks a taboo.

The generation before me lived in quiet sacrifice. I want to live my life in its fullest expression. I want the freedom to explore and make mistakes. And that is a step too far from the path that has been laid for me. My parents are baffled by how boldly I express my needs. How blithely I defy societal norms. Just as many in my generation are baffled by the fluidity and freedom our children are reaching for.

We hear their laments for what seems like an older, simpler time.

Things used to be better.

Men were men. Women were women.

Everything made sense.

They mourn the comfort of certainty. The complexity of truth is terrifying.

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My daughter is not yet a year old. I cannot begin to imagine the structures she was born to challenge.

But I know this: I have a better chance of supporting her courage if I have known something of it myself.

Maybe she will blame me one day. Maybe she’ll resent the hours I took for myself. But I hope – I believe – she will feel in her bones that she is loved. She will know a mother who is patient and silly, who makes up songs and plays with her in the dirt. A mother who loves her fiercely – and also loves her solitude, her career, her books, her writing.

When I am less, I have less to give.

When I am full, I love her with my whole heart.

I hope in my selfishness, she will find her own becoming.

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Self care is actually self love. Loving yourself is not just some vague ephemeral feeling. It means believing in yourself enough to reach for the life you want. The real marker of self love then, is a life you enjoy because of the care and effort you have put into building it.

Choosing yourself does not make you a lesser mother.

It makes you a truer one.

A mother who honors her own desires gives her children the permission to do the same.

And that is the mother every child deserves.

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I can’t describe how excited I am to have been nominated by for the Sunshine Blogger Award. I’m beyond grateful to for this delightful surprise.

The deeper — slightly embarrassing — reason I’m so thrilled is because… I’ve always wanted to give an award acceptance speech.

But before I launch into my Oscar-winner monologue, I want to talk about Sonal. She has no idea the impact she’s had on me, and I know she’ll be surprised by this story.

A few days before I launched String of Saturdays, I was quietly scoping out the Substack world through a reading-only account I’d made. I was just lurking, observing, trying to get a feel for the place. Call it kismet, but I stumbled upon a publication called . The post was titled Confession of a Mother Who Thinks She Failed Her Child.

The simplicity and vulnerability of that piece struck me. Partly because I had just become a mother too, and that thread — motherhood — bound us. But it wasn’t just that. There were other parallels between this internet stranger and me.

I too grew up an Army kid, moving every two years to my dad’s new post. Like Sonal (and her absolutely adorable little boy), I struggled with the constant switching of schools. Like her, I was navigating anxiety and overwhelm after a big move — this time with a baby and a dog in tow. Like her, I’ve carried that aching hope that my child never has to “protect me from the very thing I was meant to hold.”. And also, we both love our dogs with a slightly inappropriate intensity.

Reading her piece taught me something important about writing here. It showed me that I could share my inner world, even when it's messy, unfinished, and uncertain – and could still be held. That I didn’t have to have everything figured out before I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

Substack is a strange place. We call it a community, but it’s unlike anything in the real world or even other social platforms. We share pieces of ourselves with strangers. Thoughts too private, too nuanced, too much for casual conversation in our day-to-day lives. But here, in this quiet corner of the internet, we are received. Celebrated, even. And yet… sometimes we don’t really know if we’re touching anyone. What’s behind the likes and the views and the subscribes?

I don’t think I even “liked” Sonal’s blog post at the time — sorry! I’ve forgotten the password to that account and can’t go back to check. But I did like it. In fact, I loved it. Her 4-minute read kickstarted my own journey here.

So thank you, — not just for the nomination, but for lighting a small flame that helped guide me to my own voice.

And now that I’ve taken up more space than I meant to in the “thank you” section, we can officially say the acceptance speech portion of this post is complete.

Let’s move on to the rules of the award…

The Sunshine Blogger Award Rules:

• Display the Award’s official logo somewhere on your blog.

• Thank the person who nominated you.

• Provide a link to your nominator’s blog.

• Answer your nominator’s questions.

• Nominate up to 11 bloggers.

• Ask your nominees 11 questions.

• Notify your nominees by commenting on at least one of their blog posts.

Time for what I imagine is my celebrity interview!

1. What is the one thing people often misunderstand about you?

   1. In real life, I come across as goofy and easy-going. In my writing, I tend towards intensity, and sometimes darkness. Sometimes people who know only one side of me are taken by surprise.

2. If you could move to any place for an year, where would you go and why?

   1. Ladakh! A gorgeous place in J&K in India which is unfortunately disputed land. I have dear memories from childhood of living here for a few years and keep wanting to go back. I would love to stay in a cottage in Ladakh with a view of the mountains and read and write and drink yak chai for a year.

3. What’s something from your childhood that still makes you smile?

   1. I was the president and only consistent member of an organization called the Super Smashing Secret Society. It was a for-profit detective agency, solving crimes and finding missing items (mostly things I had misplaced).

4. If you had an entire weekend to yourself, with no responsibilities, how would you spend it?

   1. I would love to go to a scenic writers retreat, preferably somewhere in the mountains, with good food and wine.

5. What is the most ordinary part of your day that you secretly love?

   1. I make coffee for my partner and I and we just sit and chat and watch our daughter as she vibes to the neo soul music playing on the speakers and feeds our dog her teething crackers.

6. Have you ever taken a risk that changed your life?

   1. I came to the United States after getting married on a dependent visa, a student loan and no job. I have no idea what I was thinking. I am relieved to say it worked out. In fact, it turned out to be a great adventure! I wrote about some of it in my first post.

7. What’s a memory that feels like a warm blanket on a cold day?

   1. The first time my daughter smiled at me as I sang to her.

8. What did your 10 year old self think your life would look like by now?

   1. I thought I would be a CTO by the time I was thirty, lol. I don’t think ten year old me could comprehend forty.

9. What is the one thing that you used to love but somehow outgrew?

   1. Super Smashing Secret Society.

10. What is your favourite way to show love to others or show that you care?

    1. My complete attention and silly songs that I make up myself.

11. What do you want more of in your life right now?

    1. Unstructured time. I would love to have time to simply dream and play.

My nominations

1. I cannot believe I found such a great writer who -

   1. is an ex-consultant

   2. with nuanced opinions on AI

   3. quit her traditional career to go rogue in creative endeavors. The universe just keeps giving.

2. It is touching and heartwarming that there are leaders in the corporate world who have so much heart. Who display resilience and vulnerability that inspires me to go that extra mile at my own workplace.

3. I have to be honest, I enjoyed their work so much that I kind of pestered them during their examinations to make sure they keep posting. Their insights and turns of phrases, like “I would always be, in her eyes, an instrument of her degradation.”, keep me coming for more. I highly recommend you subscribe and share some of the load of pestering them to keep writing.

4. ‘s work in this publication is essentially Buddhism 101 for people who want it straight from the sources. Really great work!

5. The name says it all. These posts get me into a fluid, introspective mood. There is wisdom without being preachy. There is depth without too much intensity.

6. This publication is written by the published author . He writes hilarious pieces about parenthood. But it is his posts about anger that I find the most impactful. I am in a season of life where I am honoring my usually abandoned emotions like anger and envy, and this content is very validating.

7. A voice of reason and nuance in the exhausting and shrill chaos of gender politics. There are gems in here that everyone needs to read, men and women alike.

8. Seriously gorgeous prose. The anatomy of anger really took my breath away in the visceral description of rage in the chronically repressed.

9. I have a particular weakness for essays about the texture of life, that helps discover depth in the mundane. Posts like What My Morning Sounds Like fill my soul.

10. is a newer find. He writes about exactly my kind of spirituality. Unself-conscious and practical, with a distinctly Hebrew flavor that I enjoy. Check out this beautiful piece about Prayer. I have to share that I have a spotty Yod Hey Vav Hey meditation practice that I revived after reading this piece.

11. I found her because of . She mirrored how i feel about my Moose here, and how I have felt about every dog to whom I have ever said goodbye.

Questions for my Nominations

1. What are your top three favorite things about yourself?

2. Describe one fundamental assumption you have about life. Examples - Trust needs to be earned, to love is to give, the universe is essentially good/indifferent etc.

3. What’s an old dream or ambition you have let go of?

4. If you didn’t have to work, what would you do with your life?

5. What are the top three qualities in people you are attracted to?

6. What is the most impactful thing you have learned over the course of your life until now?

7. Share your writing process. What are the things that you do or think when you create a piece?

8. Describe any one memory from your childhood that you treasure.

9. If you choose to have a superpower, what would it be?

10. What does friendship mean to you?

11. What in life do you consider sacred?

And that’s the end of my 15 seconds of fame! Thank you for reading, and thanks again , for giving me this opportunity to share.

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I hate her.

Hands shaking. Chest burning. Breath coming in sharp, staccato bursts. Blood pounding in my ears.

It was, in essence, a simple misunderstanding. My words were misheard, twisted. So slight, so trivial, that it would have taken just a single question to clear the air. What did you mean by that?

But words escalated. Assumptions calcified. The temperature rose with our voices. Mine placating. Hers accusing.

We’ve known each other for years. We’ve shared meals, clothes, memories. I held her as she wept. Our messages would be incomprehensible to anyone else – inside jokes, shorthand, rich with context.

Which is why her rejection felt like betrayal. A sharp splintering that hollowed me out.

It doesn’t matter what we said. Which illusions were punctured. What matters is that I saw her clearly.

And I hated her.

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She is fun and funny. Sweet and loving.

Until she isn’t.

When angered, she transforms.

The perennial victim in every story. Always suffering, always wronged. She perches atop her pain like a throne, convinced of her own rightness. Dismissive of sincerity. Allergic to nuance. Screaming injustice at every imagined slight.

She sees no other minds. No inner worlds. The universe revolves around her. People are low-resolution caricatures. She is the only beacon of truth in a sea of liars.

She lies. To others. To herself.

She is selfish. She throws epic tantrums when denied what she wants. She is impulsive, cruel, immature.

And beneath all that, weak.

I have known her for a long time. Intimately. I have loved her.

I have seen the wounded child beneath the chaos. I’ve defended her, soothed her. I softened when she cried. I told myself she was doing her best.

It was never safe to disagree with her. To tell the truth. I didn’t mind. I’m good at keeping the peace. At swallowing my tongue.

Until the day I became her target. The day her incoherent rage turned toward me.

I should’ve known. I had seen the pattern.

She idealizes. Floods you with attention and exaggerated praise. You find yourself bewildered, echoing her performance. Then, suddenly, eventually, it's over. You no longer fit her self-serving fantasy. You become the villain in her drama. Demonized and discarded.

I know that explanations won’t reach her. Apologies won’t placate her. She will implode at the slightest whiff of disagreement, lash out performatively, call an audience to witness my humiliation. My loyalty, my love, cannot fill the howling hollow in her heart.

So here we are. A stalemate. The air between us thick with the coagulated sludge of the unspoken.

I’ve hated people before. The cruel, the judgmental, the hypocrites. But that hate never stuck. Even when they had power over me, my heart remained untouched.

This hate is different.

It calcifies. It festers. A venomous wasp, circling endlessly, whispering justification on loop.

I question — why her? Why does she haunt my mind like a reality show I can’t turn off, while the others faded into indifference?

I remember the story of a girl named Nirbhaya. That wasn’t her real name. It was the name they gave her after she died. It means the one who is fearless. She was raped and brutalized by a group of men on a moving bus. One of the rapists, the youngest, was tried as a juvenile. He was eleven when he ran away from home to look for work. He was not fleeing abuse or cruelty. He was trying to escape starvation. For years he sent money back home, so his family could eat. After his capture, they found his mother.

When they asked her about him she wept. “He was a good boy,” she said. “A gentle boy.”

What he did was unforgivable. What he is has no absolution. Yet when I read his story I felt something else beneath the righteous rage. Something I didn’t expect. A spark of tenderness. And shame. That I live in comfort, consuming endlessly, while ravenous little boys become monsters. Did we fail this boy? Did we owe him a childhood?

Why did my heart crack open for him, but not for this woman who simply broke my trust?

Why does the stranger whose actions are irredeemably monstrous stir my curiosity? While this person in my life, who suffers from her own mild form of brokenness, makes me recoil?

I know why. I just don’t want to admit it.

The boy doesn’t remind me of me. He’s an alien. A creature of circumstance. I know I will be unable to understand his actions and motivations even if I spend years in his company. He is a gaping void to me, a placeholder for any meaning I project on to him. I can imagine what he might have been if he’d had food and books and friends. A mother who found him, spanked him, and brought him back home and gave him a childhood.

But her? Her I understand too well. Once she turned on me, I deemed her irredeemable. I despise her because I recognize her in me. Because the traits I list with surgical cruelty are the ones I most fear in myself.

Selfish. Weak. Dramatic. Childish.

I know them intimately. I have banished them, locked them in the attic of my soul. I keep them on a very tight leash. And now they are baying in resentment.

So why does she get to parade them freely?

Why does she get to scream, sulk, lash out?

Why does she get to abandon restraint while I white-knuckle my way through decency?

My demons rage at the performance. They snarl at me.

You too are angry. You too are selfish. You too want to throw a tantrum.

My demons are sick of breathwork and radical compassion. They want vengeance. They want chaos. They want blood.

My therapist calls it parts work. Meeting the fragmented selves within. The performer. The perfectionist. The liar. The victim. The tyrant.

The one who lashes out.

The one who walks away.

The one who lies to be loved.

I keep trying to exile them. Punish them into silence. But they cannot be cast out. They hide in my voice, tinging my words with disdain. They slip judgment into my gaze. They act out when I’m cornered. And I always regret them.

I wish I could wash myself clean of my demons. I wish I could be consistent and good all the time. My demons watch my striving, but they have no patience for these self-sacrificing ideals of perfection.

They are mean. Vindictive. Petty. But also – they are loyal. Feral. Fierce.

They are not here to please and comply. They are here to protect me. They are, and have always been, my guardians.

So this one time, I listen to them.

I watch as they bare their teeth and unsheathe their claws. In their crude language they hiss: You’re not safe here. Get out.

So this one time, I let them walk beside me as I leave what no longer serves me, no longer sees me, no longer deserves the softest parts of me.

Their vile words steady my steps as I walk away. Their rage gives me spine as I make unfamiliar choices.

I don’t call her back. I don’t apologize. I don’t make peace.

This time, I choose myself. I thank my softness and light, these parts of myself I hold so dear, who serve me so well. I ask them to take a step back, just for a moment. I finally let my darkness off the leash.

Even as I know, it was never really about her. Or me.

It was my demons. And hers.

And they are at war.

Have you met your demons?

Or have you only ever glimpsed them in others?

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