She sat in the art room, coloring her book while the rest of the school was studying.

This went on for a week. Her mom was eventually called in, not by the class teacher who had scolded her, but by her favorite teacher. The one who always opened her arms when things got hard. She had decided, quietly and firmly, that she wasn’t going back to class. So she sat in the art room instead, all day, for seven days straight.

Then she changed schools, and that comfort was left behind.

At the new school, she grew close to the lady in the pantry. Always there, always helpful. Until she wasn’t. The lady left the job, and things shifted again.

College brought a guard she smiled at every single morning. And then she graduated, so bye to him too.

This year, while packing for college, her head was full of the people she’d miss. Family. Hometown friends. She was already mentally scheduling weekly video calls, planning how she’d stay active on the family group chat. The usual promises we make to ourselves before leaving.

But then her house help hugged her. And cried.

And something settled in her chest that she hadn’t expected. That your life is never just the people at the center of it. It’s also everyone orbiting quietly around it.

She thought about the uncle at her favorite dosa place, the one she visits at least twice a week, and who still breaks into a smile the moment he sees her walk in. And suddenly she was somewhere else entirely, tracing back through years. The rickshaw uncle who took her to school every morning. The dance teacher who got married and moved away. The auto uncle she’d see daily on her way to the library. The transgender she greeted at the same traffic light, every day, for almost a year while commuting to work.

People who were never friends, never family. But who were, for some stretch of time, a steady part of her days.

She had left all of them without a goodbye. No announcement, no closure, just the natural fade of a chapter ending. And now, bags packed and ready, she was about to do it again.

That version of me packs like it’s a celebration. Clothes get shoved in without folding because who cares, I’ll refold them at home anyway. I don’t check twice if I’ve packed my charger. I don’t care if my hostel room looks like a tornado passed through it, because I am leaving it behind, and leaving it behind feels like winning something.

And then there is the other version of me. The one who starts counting a different countdown almost the moment she lands.

Ugh, only ten more days left. Only two more home cooked dinners before it’s back to mess food and my own terrible attempts at maggi. Only a few more evenings of debriefing the entire day with my brother, the two of us just talking about nothing and everything till one of our parents tells us to sleep. Only a couple more nights of watching old Rajesh Khanna movies with my mom, her explaining dialogues I’ve heard a hundred times like I’m hearing them for the first time, and me pretending I don’t already know what happens next because I like watching her tell it.

And somewhere in there, always, there is a last Scooty ride with my best friend. We never plan it to be the last one. It just becomes the last one, the way things do when you’re not paying attention, and only later do you realise, oh, that was it. That was the one I’ll be replaying in my head at 2 am in a hostel room three states away.

Then the bags come out again. They always do.

This time the packing is scientific. Precise. I’ll need this jacket for the cold hostel corridors. I’ll need this specific spice mix because the mess food has no soul. I’ll need these photos, this one specific hoodie, this random thing my mom insists I take even though I roll my eyes at her for it. Every item gets weighed against the question of will I actually need this or am I just trying to take home with me in a suitcase. Spoiler, you can’t. I’ve tried.

And then the d day. The bags get loaded into the car. Everyone comes to see me off, or sometimes just my parents, or sometimes it’s just me dragging two suitcases through an airport that has seen me do this so many times it probably doesn’t even register me as a person anymore, just another girl leaving.

This is the part nobody prepares you for when you first leave home. Not the leaving itself, everyone prepares you for that, everyone tells you how exciting it’ll be, how much you’ll grow, how it’s the best years of your life. What nobody tells you is that once you leave, you don’t fully belong anywhere ever again. Not in the way you used to. You become someone who is always in transit, even when you’re standing still. Home doesn’t feel like home the same way once you’ve built a life somewhere else, and the somewhere else never quite feels like home either, no matter how many years you spend there.

You just become a person who lives out of bags. Who has gotten disturbingly good at folding a duvet into a cabin sized suitcase. Who knows exactly how many kilos she can carry before her shoulder starts complaining. Who has said goodbye so many times that she has run out of new ways to say it, so now she just says bye, see you soon, and walks away fast before her face does something she doesn’t want it to do in public.

And through all of it, I still don’t know how to act fine. I don’t think anyone actually does. We just get better at performing it. Better at holding the tears till we’re through security. Better at texting home the second we land so nobody worries. Better at unpacking in a room that isn’t really ours, hanging up clothes in a cupboard we didn’t choose, and calling it, for now, home.

The bags will come out again. In a few months, they always do. And I’ll pack with the same stupid precision, and count the days with the same stupid dread, and act fine right up until I’m not, and then act fine again anyway.

I don’t know when this stops feeling like a wound that keeps reopening. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you just learn to travel with it, the way you learn to travel with everything else you can’t leave behind and can’t fully carry either.

Not because someone told her to. But because teachers were the people she looked up to. They had this quiet kind of power. They knew things. They made people feel seen. She wanted that.

Then one day, she woke up and realized she had zero patience. Like, none. The idea of explaining the same thing five different ways to thirty different people made her want to sit down and breathe. That dream quietly packed its bags and left.

She did not cry after it.

Then came Kalpana Chawla.

I could not even spell astronaut correctly at the time, and yet I was completely convinced that space was where I was headed. I read everything I could find about the universe, planets, stars, black holes, things I could barely pronounce. It felt enormous and magical and I wanted to be part of it. Kalpana Chawla made it feel possible in a way nothing else had, a woman who looked a little like the world I came from, floating somewhere beyond the sky.

And then mathematics happened. Or rather, I happened to mathematics, and it was not pretty. One day I just looked at the equations and knew, quietly and without drama, that this dream was not going to work out. Not because the universe was not beautiful. But because I was genuinely, thoroughly, not a maths person.

A few years later, a teenager is standing at a national athletics meet, heart pounding, legs tired, and somewhere in that rush she thinks, what if I do this forever? What if this is it? There is something about the track, the noise, the feeling of your body doing exactly what you trained it to do. It felt like a dream worth chasing.

But life moves fast when you are not looking. Priorities shifted, circumstances changed, and that dream too dissolved without much of a goodbye.

In college, journalism called to me. I wanted to ask uncomfortable questions, write stories that mattered, hold a mic to the things people were afraid to say out loud. I was ready. And then I looked at the industry, really looked, and slowly, that fire dimmed too. The dream did not die dramatically. It just stopped feeling like mine.

Now I am doing an MBA. And if you ask me what I dream of, I will probably go quiet for a second too long.

I do not have a clean answer. Not yet. I am still figuring out what I actually want, hoping that at some point things will fall into place. I keep dreaming small and big things at the same time, and somehow being that constantly evolving, always-trying person has started to feel like enough.

What I do know is this. As I grow, the dreams I hold most carefully are not about titles or timelines anymore. I want to be happy. I want to sit in the lap of mountains more often, the kind of quiet that resets you from the inside. I want more mornings with my parents, more evenings with my siblings, more time for the hobbies that make me feel like myself again.

A fulfilled life. Not a perfect one. Just full.

Maybe that is the dream that was always meant to stay.

My first lunch without my brother was…umm…weird. Not sad exactly. Just off. I sat with my plate and kept waiting for something, someone, that wasn’t going to show up. I had my lunch alone for a week straight, and then I started eating my lunch with the rest of the team…if used to be fun.

Then I moved again and somewhere between different cities, my table became empty, because I stopped finding table with other. I started eating alone, not in a lonely way but in a good way. Like a quiet migration nobody warned me about.

At first, it was uncomfortable like, is it pathetic that I am eating alone, are people looking at me, why do I have no one to enjoy my meal with. But slowly the voices in my head went away, I stopped eating fast, I stopped looking here and there consciously, I stopped looking at the empty chair.

Something strange happened when I stopped looking at the empty chair and eventually my phone. Meals got slower and meaning full, I started observing my surroundings, started noticing the colors of the flower, the wings of the birds, and my thoughts. I noticed that I had thoughts I had been meaning to have for weeks, waiting patiently in the background, and that they would only surface in the quiet. There is a particular kind of thinking that only happens when no one is performing for, and eating alone, it turns out, is one of the few remaining places in modern life with no audience.

Sometimes it is absence, yes. Sometimes you eat alone because the people you love are far away and no number of phone calls fully bridges the gap between sharing a plate and watching a city you don't yet belong to pass outside a window. I won't pretend otherwise.

But most of the times, it’s just you with your thoughts, observing things, looking at the people around, and enjoying your company. I still think about those shared plates. The way we waited. The particular kindness in saying: I won’t start without you.

But I’ve learned that eating alone can be its own form of that same kindness, extended to you, toward a self that keeps getting put last. There is something wholesome about sitting with yourself and eating, in a city far from home, for no one but you.

You waited long enough. You can start now, without looking at the empty chair.

I was maybe eleven when I started doing this. Borrowing lives. Trying them on like clothes that didn’t quite fit but felt so good to wear.

There was something about fictional people that real people couldn’t give me then. They were cleaner. More certain. When Rory Gilmore carried a book into a room, I understood her completely. When the guy in Murakami sat alone in a bar and felt everything all at once, I felt it too, even though I didn’t have the words for what it even was.

Childhood is strange because you’re always looking for a map. Someone who shows you how to be a person. And sometimes that someone is not a person at all. Sometimes it’s a story.

Tamasha made me afraid of becoming someone who forgets themselves. YJHD made me want to feel things loudly, without apology. Murakami made loneliness feel like it had texture and beauty. Lara Jean made me think that loving quietly was still loving bravely.

I don’t know exactly who I am. But I know the stories that made me. These are the stories I found myself in, stories that were my escape, stories that became my safe space, whenever life got too much.

And maybe that’s enough of an answer for now.

The pile of laundry keeps shifting from bed to chair and back to bed, the pages of the book flip but not like they used to, the incomplete doodles keep waiting for me to come back, along with thousand other things.

I know exactly what I should be doing, and that’s the problem. I know the submission deadlines, I know the ideas in my head, I know about the pile of clothes but sometimes I just can’t. Then I realized I an severely stuck in this spiral and one night rather than despising myself and moving on, I actually sat with it for a minute. Why does the phone come up every single time? WHY? JUST WHY?

And it hit me. It’s not laziness. It’s not even bad habits, not really (maybe). It’s that the moment I feel even a small ounce of stress, or discomfort, or that low hum of anxiety that I can’t quite name, my hand just reaches for it. Automatically. Without asking me as if the hands have the brain of their own.

The phone doesn’t give me anything particularly good. I know that. But it takes away the uncomfortable feeling for just long enough. And that’s enough for my brain to keep going back.

So it was never really about screen time. The pile of laundry, the unread pages, the waiting doodles, they were never the problem. They were just what got left behind every time I ran from something I didn’t want to feel.

“I want to be a Teacher when I grow up.”

But now that I have grown up, what am I? Am I any of these? Am I me anymore? It’s not that simple. All I ever wanted to be was ME. To enjoy my favorite music the way I did, to feel the happiest while painting under the sun, to read a book while traveling in a metro without being called performative. But this whole idea of where I belong, comes with a whole lot of exhaustion. A constant pressure to be like everyone else in the room, to enjoy things that everyone else does. But you never really do. You take a second extra to laugh on the joke everyone else is already laughing at, you let one more line play to dance on the song when everyone else is already doing the hook-step. The problem with this is, you never know how much of yourself to bring to these room. Because it always either too much or too less but never right. Too intense in quiet rooms. Too quiet in loud ones. The longer you carry this exhaustion, the more you stop noticing the weight of it. When you've spent years editing yourself in real time, you forget that the editing is optional. You start to believe the unedited version is somehow the problem because you are always too much, too weird, too much to ask anyone to hold.

When does this end? When does this feeling go away? When do you finally fit in? Do you ever fit in? The answer is, the more you let go of yourself, the more your fit in but the feeling gets worse. Being unable to fit with yourself is worse than not being able to fit in a room. You can be in a room full of people who include you and still feel profoundly alone. The feeling goes only when you stop feeling the need to fit in, when you find people with whom you feel belonged, with whom you laugh the loudest, live the fullest, and feel the lightest.

I never did become a doctor. I never became a teacher. But somewhere between the rooms I tried to shrink myself into and the ones I quietly walked away from, I became something better: a person who knows the difference between a room that includes me and a room that belongs to me. And when I find that room, and I will, I won’t need a second extra to laugh. The joke will already be mine.

The need to fit in, will be no longer there.