Author: Neha Sharma

  • The Space Between Surviving and Living

    People often ask what healing looks like.

    I don’t think it looks like standing in the light without fear.

    At least, not at first.

    If you have lived in darkness for a very long time, your eyes learn its language.

    The darkness is where every possible danger lives. Where expecting disappointment feels wiser than hoping. Where dreaming a new dream almost feels dishonest.

    You know every corner of it. You know where to step, where to hide, where danger usually comes from.

    Darkness stops feeling like darkness. It simply becomes home.

    So when healing begins, it doesn’t feel like someone opening a door to sunshine.

    It feels like someone asking you to leave the only home you’ve ever known.

    If you’ve lived on one side long enough, you’ll recognize the strange feeling when you begin moving toward the other. Something inside you knows that the world is changing before your mind can explain it.

    People call it healing.

    I’d call it a tunnel.

    At first, the journey feels like walking through a tunnel where you cannot see the end.

    Behind you is the darkness you know.

    You have started to believe you know it so much that you can win in it. You have struggled with it so much you think you can overpower it. You think you know all the dirty tricks of the dark world, you know you can outsmart it.

    You think if you’re careful enough, vigilant enough, prepared enough, you’ll finally outrun it.

    But darkness has a way of convincing you that surviving is the same as living.

    And now ahead of you is a light you’ve only heard stories about. You feel you’ve been there before, but so long ago that your body remembers it more than your mind does.

    The darkness is painful.

    But it is familiar.

    The light is beautiful.

    But it is unknown.

    And the unknown has always frightened a nervous system that survived by predicting every danger.

    So you walk.

    Sometimes you crawl.

    Sometimes you simply sit down in the middle of the tunnel, wondering if you should go back.

    You want to run toward the light everyone keeps talking about.

    But the moment you try, it feels as though someone has cut your legs from beneath you.

    The body refuses.

    Not because it wants darkness.

    Because it has only ever known darkness.

    Healing journey

    As you continue, you begin hearing voices.

    Sometimes they comfort you.

    Sometimes they frighten you.

    Sometimes they sound like fellow travelers somewhere deeper inside the tunnel. You want to call out to them, but uncertainty keeps you silent.

    Every unfamiliar sound feels like another possible danger.

    Then there are days when the light seems closer.

    You become hopeful.

    “This is it,” you tell yourself.

    Until you round another bend and discover the tunnel stretches far beyond what you imagined.

    You feel defeated.

    Maybe you’ll never reach the end.

    Maybe everyone else found a shortcut.

    Maybe you’re simply not made for the light.

    So you stop hoping for a while.

    You decide you’ll live here instead, somewhere between darkness and daylight, belonging fully to neither.

    And strangely…that becomes enough.

    Until one morning something shifts.

    You don’t know why.

    Nothing dramatic happened.

    Yet suddenly it feels as though the ground beneath you has become a slope.

    You aren’t dragging yourself anymore.

    You’re moving.

    Effortlessly.

    You cover distances that once seemed impossible.

    You cover more ground in a week than you thought possible in a year.

    You wonder if you’ve finally arrived.

    Then the slope levels out. The speed disappears.

    But something else remains.

    Trust.

    You understand now that some days you’ll learn.

    Some days you’ll simply walk. Some days you’ll rest.

    And resting no longer feels like losing progress.

    Nothing you’ve learned disappears because you paused.

    Along the way, you meet people who seem as though they belong to the light already.

    You wonder why they’re still inside the tunnel.

    You want to tell them they’re walking the wrong way.

    You want to tell them how terrifying the darkness can become.

    You want to warn them not to chase it.

    But then you realize something unexpected.

    To them…

    you look like someone who has always belonged to the light.

    They cannot see where you came from.

    They cannot imagine the darkness you survived.

    They cannot see the darkness you carry with you.

    Some believe your story.

    Some dismiss it.

    Some look at you with confusion.

    And slowly you understand that convincing people was never your journey.

    Walking was.

    Then one day you notice something you hadn’t noticed before.

    The tunnel hasn’t ended.

    Perhaps it never will.

    But there is more light here now than darkness.

    Enough light to recognize your own face.

    Enough light to stop mistaking every shadow for danger.

    Enough light to breathe.

    The tunnel no longer feels like a prison.

    It feels like a bridge.

    It still sways sometimes.

    You still hold its ropes tightly, afraid of slipping back into old abysses.

    But now, when you look ahead, you can see people laughing in the light.

    And instead of wondering whether you’ll ever belong there…

    you simply keep walking.

    Because somewhere along the way, healing stopped being about reaching the end.

    It became about no longer fearing the journey.

    And then you realize something else.

    The tunnel didn’t change.

    You did.

    You no longer mistake every step forward for a reason to turn back.

    Healing was never about escaping the darkness.

    It was about becoming someone who could keep walking toward the light without needing to know exactly when they’d arrive.

  • Strong Children Don’t Grow From Fear

    One thing that puzzles me about parenting is how much suffering is normalised in the name of building resilience.

    There is very little evidence that chronic harshness builds healthy resilience. Most research points toward the opposite.

    Developmental psychology consistently finds children build resilience through secure attachment, responsive caregiving, and gradually increasing challenges.

    Research comparing gentle, authoritarian, and helicopter parenting consistently shows that chronic harshness does not build resilience. Rather they grow with chunks in their armour, with a lot of coping mechanisms and anxiety towards life.

    From the physical to mental suffering, we humans have faced it all. We have stood after falling hard, fought very hard tangible and intangible battles, and won.

    Yet the thing which we picked, from fascist and slave culture is to start them young. Start to trouble them young, start to discipline them young, start normalising living in pain young, normalise a life of suffering young.

    The research in the area of child development has supported targeted building of resilience in controlled environments, not treating kids like drying mangos for pickles in the harsh sun.

    One can study examples from all fields, from medicine to military, from sports to dance, from singing to astronomy, the training is intentional and controlled. There is support, physical and mental, throughout the process. Extra care is given to those who are finding difficulty in learning and proper help is provided when there is any injury. 

    Mental therapy is always provided to support trainees and even professionals whenever there is a mental block, more than physical limit to performing better.

    Basically, one can observe that hard sports with intensive physical and mental training are treated with a controlled pace instead of rapid brainless hitting like a hammer on a nail.

    We understand progressive training everywhere except parenting.

    Imagine you start deadlifting 100 kg on your first day. You keep trying to lift till you lift it, we surely know the answer what would happen to you. You probably would end up in an emergency room.

    All the gymbros know, even when you are a pro, you deadlift very carefully lest you injure yourself.

    Now imagine we think about children, who I emphasize are not mini-adults. They are called children for a reason, and are asked to just hustle like they have to fight tomorrow, when probably they won’t be. 

    We are preparing our children for battles and a difficult future, which probably doesn’t exist or at least the training we are giving them is not in the right direction. We are passing on our battles to them, instead of giving them hope for a better and a different future. 

    children need support

    Every generation prepares its children for the dangers it survived. But children don’t grow into our past. They grow into their future.

    We accept very harsh environments for our children physically and emotionally, because older generations fed us that being comfortable is for the weak.

    Our parents raised us with the knowledge they had. We have access to far more developmental research today.

    Even without reading a single research paper, we can simply look at ourselves. 

    How resilient are we?

    How much pressure can we actually tolerate?

    How calm do we remain when life gives us no room to breathe?

    We are struggling, we all know. Did our parents not train us well then?

    No, it is because we were prepared for a battle that was in our parents’ head, but the present is very different from our past. In the same spirit, our kids’ future will be very different from ours.

    Now, we have talked about what is not working, but what will work then?

    Well, I am not sure. I’m also exploring as you are. But one thing I have established is seeing kids for who they are instead of what we think they should be is one way to start.

    We have to understand that unnecessary, unsupported adversity is not good teaching. To make our kids resilient, a balanced approach which doesn’t involve any bit of harshness is very pertinent.

    In retrospect we could even thank god for our misfortunes, but it is only reserved for our god. In the case of parents, it is only bitterness and a lot of therapy sessions for the grown up kids when they grew up in the harshness that made no sense to them.

    It is important to work with a child’s body and brain in age-appropriate ways. It is important to understand how their thermostat, cognitive abilities, and musculoskeletal system work instead of just pushing them assuming they have a brain of a 40 year old unused.

    Children are not unused adults.

    They are children. They grow according to the environment and the stimuli around them.

    Be kinder. Be more thoughtful while raising your tiny humans. We don’t raise resilient children by making life harder than it already is. We raise them by helping them discover that they are capable of meeting life’s challenges – one supported step at a time.

    There is a reason everything about them is tiny except their feelings, which are as big as Jupiter.

    As parents, perhaps the real question is this:

    Are we raising children to become cacti…

    …or to learn how to bloom like roses among thorns?

  • The Self We Hide

    “उड़ान वालों उड़ानों पे वक़्त भारी है

    परों की नहीं अब हौसलों की बारी है”

    Bashir Badr

    Meaning- Oh you flyers, times are tough for flight. It is no longer a test of your physical wings, but a test of your inner courage. 

    We tend to believe there is an original self hidden beneath everything else, something that was always there. We call that our authentic self.

    It could be partially true.

    There may be a part of us that has always existed beneath the conditioning, expectations, and fears.

    But I don’t think our authentic self is fixed.

    I think it is in a constant state of flow.

    It keeps changing with every experience, every lesson, every relationship, every value we choose to keep, and every belief we decide to let go of.

    So when we chase authenticity, I wonder if we are chasing the wrong thing.

    I think all we really have to do is pause for a moment and ask ourselves,

    “What does my heart truly want right now?”

    Whatever that answer is, that is your authentic self in that moment.

    Tomorrow it may want something different.

    And I think that’s okay.

    The hidden self

    If your authentic self does not want to do something, but you still choose to do it only to please others, that is people-pleasing.

    If your authentic self wants to stop a toxic behavior, leave an unhealthy relationship, or speak a difficult truth, but you keep choosing politeness instead, then that politeness is no longer kindness.

    It is harm directed towards yourself.

    I also find it interesting that we spend so much time trying to protect our authentic self that we end up hiding it.

    Maybe authentic living is less about protecting yourself and more about slowly stopping the habit of hiding.

    Hiding what troubles you. Hiding what excites you. Hiding what you truly want.

    Because I don’t think a meaningful life comes from pretending to be okay. I think it comes from being honest enough to admit when you’re not.

    That honesty may require moving away from certain people.

    It may require finding people who help you grow instead of helping you stay the same.

    It may require choosing yourself in healthy ways again and again, and stopping the habit of sacrificing your deepest desires simply to fit into someone else’s expectations.

    I also think we build moulds around ourselves.

    We start believing that changing is self-betrayal.

    When, more often than not, staying inside that mould becomes the real betrayal.

    It becomes self-sabotage.

    We are living beings.

    Every cell in our body is repairing itself, dying, and renewing itself every moment.

    We don’t notice it because it happens quietly.

    But change is happening every second.

    So why do we expect our identity to remain untouched?

    Why do we expect our values, dreams, and desires to stay exactly where they were ten years ago?

    I don’t think authenticity is about staying loyal to the person you once were.

    I think authenticity is about staying honest with the person you are becoming.

    And I leave you with these words from Henry David Thoreau (Walden):

    “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

  • Rules & Roses – On Building a Compassionate Society

    Tulsidas wrote:
    परहित सरिस धर्म नहि भाई।
    पर पीड़ा सम नहि अधमाई॥

    There is no virtue greater than helping others. There is no sin greater than causing suffering.

    Centuries later, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote:
    “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”

    Imagine a person, X, who has never felt sadness, grief, loneliness, or heartbreak. Yet somehow, they have learned to recognize these emotions perfectly in other people.

    They can identify pain. They can read your face. They can predict what is happening inside you. They can understand when someone is struggling.

    But they have never personally experienced those emotions.

    Now compare them to the rest of us.

    Most of us learn emotions the traditional way. We feel them first. We are helped to name them while experiencing them. We are taught by our elders what circumstances create what emotions.

    We suffer. We grieve. We get rejected. We get abandoned.

    We experience joy, shame, envy, fear, and love.

    And because we have lived through those experiences, we begin to recognize them in others. We try to predict how someone might feel based on the circumstances they are going through. And sometimes we are surprised when they do not respond the way we expected.

    The more we live, the more we learn.

    The more stories of pain we encounter, our own or borrowed from others, the more we understand what brings suffering to ourselves and those around us.

    Our empathy often comes from memory.

    We know what hurt feels like, so we become sensitive to it. But does that necessarily make us better at caring?

    Or does it simply make us more familiar with suffering?

    I am not entirely sure.

    Because feeling an emotion, understanding an emotion, and acting because of that emotion are three very different things.

    In fact, sometimes our own emotions make us worse observers.
    We project. We assume other people feel exactly what we would feel. We mistake our story for theirs.

    Sometimes the same projection that makes us dismiss our own pain also makes us dismiss the pain of others.

    Sometimes our emotions become noise. We become so busy relating that we stop listening.

    In this situation, someone who understood emotions purely intellectually would be less biased.

    Less reactive. More objective.

    Coming back to our person X.

    If someone could perfectly understand emotions without ever feeling them, would they actually care enough to act?

    Would they comfort someone? Would they sacrifice for them? Would they protect them?

    Or would emotions become nothing more than information?

    A set of data points to be analyzed.

    Rules and roses

    This leads me to another, even bigger thought experiment.

    Imagine a world where people could only feel their own emotions.

    They had no ability to sense the feelings of others.

    No empathy. No emotional resonance.

    Instead, they were given a book of rules.

    Follow these rules, and you will never hurt another person.

    Would that society be better than ours?

    In some ways, perhaps it would.

    Rules are predictable. Rules are consistent. They do not depend on mood.

    But something important would still be missing.

    Compassion.

    Because compassion is what often motivates us to go beyond the rules.

    Sympathy is feeling concern for another person’s suffering.

    Empathy is understanding their emotional experience.

    Compassion is the desire to relieve that suffering.

    When I have compassion for someone, I want to do something about their pain.

    A rule may stop me from harming you. Empathy may inspire me to help you.

    A rule tells me what I must not do. Empathy often tells me what I can do.

    And that is why emotional understanding matters so much.

    Not because it makes us morally correct. But because it connects us.

    Yet I am not convinced empathy alone is enough either.

    People can deeply understand suffering and still cause harm. They can recognize pain and weaponize it. They can read emotions perfectly and use that knowledge to manipulate others.

    Maybe what creates a healthy society is neither emotion nor rules alone. Maybe it is the combination of both.

    The heart reminds us that other people matter.

    Rules remind us that our feelings are not always reliable.

    Empathy without principles can become chaos. Principles without empathy can become cruel.

    Empathy is not valuable because it makes us moral. It is valuable because it prevents us from treating people like abstractions.

    Rules tell us,”Do not hurt people.” Empathy reminds us,”These are people.”

    Perhaps humans need all three.

    Principles to guide us. Empathy to understand suffering. Compassion to act. Being human is the lifelong challenge of holding all three together.

    This reminds me of something Maithili Sharan Gupt wrote:
    वही मनुष्य है कि जो मनुष्य के लिए मरे।

    A true human is one who lives, and, if needed, sacrifices for fellow humans.

    I hope none of us ever has to die to prove our love for another human being.

    The greater challenge is to create a world where people do not have to suffer to experience compassion.

    A world where living itself becomes a little more beautiful because we choose to understand, to care, and to act.

  • Mirror and Tango

    Marriage is a maze.

    No matter how much you prepare for it, you still find yourself standing in situations that make you wonder whether you prepared at all.

    The first decade of marriage is particularly interesting. Most couples face some of their toughest storms during the first five years. Many go on to build healthy marriages, but those early years can be surprisingly difficult to navigate.

    Becoming a parent during this period is like facing a tsunami in itself.
    But marriage, with or without children, is already enough of an event.
    It is not just a meeting with another person. It is an intervention with yourself.

    The most amusing characters in this entire story, according to me, are the parents/elders of the couple.
    Typically, anything good about their grown up child is attributed to the family. Any uncomfortable change, however, is attributed to the child’s partner.

    It is exactly how things worked during childhood.
    Anything kind, intelligent, or impressive the child did was credited to the family. Anything rude, rebellious, or unkind was blamed on a new friend.

    It is as if the child has no nature of their own. And to some extent, that is true.

    Children borrow heavily from the world around them. They imitate behavior before they develop a personal understanding of it.They are still forming their perception of the world.They observe, absorb, and experiment.

    A friend, a movie, a teacher, a sibling, or even a brief interaction can influence how they behave, be it temporarily.

    But while behaviors can be copied, feelings usually aren’t.

    What children often imitate/notice is the attention surrounding a behavior. They notice what gets rewarded, what gets punished, what gets a reaction, and they learn from that.

    But marriage is where this explanation starts becoming less convincing.

    There is a general perception that adults become someone else because of the company they keep. After marriage, parents may think their child’s spouse changed them.

    Partners often tell each other:
    “You bring out the worst in me. I haven’t seen myself behaving like this before.”
    I have a slightly different understanding of it.

    I think marriage brings out what was always there. It just never had a vent.

    From the kind of partners we choose to the ways we push our loved ones away, the things that shock other people were often present long before marriage. Nobody created them.

    Marriage simply lowers the energy available to maintain a facade.

    The demons were always there. Now they are sitting on the porch, giggling!

    What I’m trying to say is that marriage is rarely something entirely new behavior wise on an individual level. Especially in its early years, it is a reflection of who we already are and the childhood and the family history we carry with us.

    Marriage brings our vulnerable self to the surface. And to protect that vulnerable self, we do all kinds of strange things.

    We become controlling, avoidant, defensive or critical.

    The healthier we are emotionally, the healthier those reactions tend to be. The more wounded we are, the more dramatic they become.

    So if you think your partner is being irrational, strange, or difficult, spend some time observing their relationship with their primary caregivers.
    You will find a lot of answers there.

    If they were never allowed to express their feelings as a child, they may now express them with overwhelming intensity, because this relationship finally feels safe enough to do so, or they want to define that boundary somehow.

    Sometimes what appears as anger is fear looking for protection. They are frightened on the inside, so they become louder on the outside.

    Some people even thrive on chaos and drama because chaos feels familiar. Peace feels foreign. Predictability feels suspicious. The nervous system often mistakes familiarity for safety.

    If childhood taught them to shrink themselves around money, resources, or opportunities, they may carry that scarcity mindset into marriage and unintentionally pull their partner into it too.

    Sometimes the opposite happens.

    The more restricted they were growing up, the more expansive they became as adults.
    The more silenced they were, the louder they became.
    The more controlled they were, the more fiercely they protected their freedom.

    The point is not to excuse unhealthy behavior. The point is to understand where it came from.

    When you learn to trace a reaction back to the life that shaped it, many things begin to make sense.

    That is why I think one of the most valuable things you can do in the first decade of marriage is to understand your partner’s life before you enter it.

    Not because the past determines the future. But because it reveals the patterns that are most likely to show up in it.

    Marriage

    The longer I observe marriage, the less I see it as a union of two people and the more I see it as a meeting between two histories.

    Two childhoods.
    Two nervous systems.
    Two sets of fears, hopes, wounds, and coping mechanisms.
    The relationship simply becomes the place where they finally meet.

    Marriage is the mirror.

    Some people spend years trying to fix the reflection standing across from them. Others become curious about why that reflection exists in the first place.

    Then the real questions begin.
    Do you feel equipped to hold the wounds that still exist?
    Do you have the patience to keep offering a mirror?
    Are they willing to look into it?

    All these questions can help you decide whether your partner can match the level of awareness you are at.
    Because the most important question of all:
    Are you willing to do the same with your own patterns?
    Because marriage is not just a mirror for your partner.
    It is a mirror for you too.
    And sometimes the hardest reflection to face is your own.

    If both of you are interested in finding and figuring out your own patterns, the chances are you will grow together but if only one of you is taking the burden of growing with changing times then it will look like driving a car with one tire bigger than the others, a marriage that is wobbly.

    This is not a guide on how marriages work, but a nudge on it is more than what looks on the surface. It requires work.

    The real work starts when we are ready and it may require professional help. Whether you do it for this marriage or the relationship that comes later (divorce or another romantic relationship or parenting), that’s a personal choice. But it will always help to learn how much of your behaviour is intentional and how much of it is a response to something at which you had no control.

    In the end, marriage is a lot like a tango. It takes two people to create the dance, but each dancer is responsible for learning their own steps. We are not burdens waiting to be dragged across the floor. We are individuals learning our own rhythm, hoping to find someone willing to learn theirs too.

    And when both people are willing to do that, the dance becomes beautiful.

  • The Lesson I Could Not Rush

    I don’t know why, but one feature in the human behavior manual seems to be this: we learn late.

    Not according to our timelines. Not according to our plans. We learn when we learn.

    And when we truly learn something, it stays.

    So why do we rush the process so much?

    What are we afraid of missing?

    Is it death? Age? Opportunity? Regret?

    Why is timing so important to us?

    I keep coming back to love.

    I think it is love that makes us rush.

    Love for a dream.

    Love for comfort.

    Love for security.

    Love for the people we care about.

    But perhaps fear plays an equal role.

    Maybe we are not only running toward something. Maybe we are also running away from something.

    Love creates the desire to reach a goal.

    Fear creates urgency.

    I can think of many examples.

    I want to build a home for my loved ones. I want them to feel secure. I want them to have comfort. I want to bring that comfort to their life as soon as possible.

    At the same time, I fear the instability that comes from not having a home of our own.

    So I chase.

    Partly because of love. Partly because of fear.

    And somewhere in that push and pull, life keeps trying to teach me faith.

    Perhaps that lesson is being thrust upon me.

    Or perhaps I am secretly looking for it.

    Either way, I have slowly realized that I want peace more than I want speed.

    Because the chasing was exhausting me. Running or chasing both are not sustainable after a point.

    While I was running from fear, I grew tired of running.

    While I was trying to create comfort for my family, I was sometimes creating tension around them.

    The dream was good.

    The urgency was not.

    And slowly I realized something uncomfortable:

    I had become the center of the very tension I was trying to eliminate. I was choosing comfort for them, over the negativity and pressure I was bringing to their life everyday.

    That realization forced me to change.

    Or at least begin changing.

    Maybe that is how lessons are learned.

    Not when life explains them.

    Not when someone wiser tells us.

    But when the consequences of not learning become impossible to ignore.

    For me, the discomfort I was bringing to the people I loved became unbearable.

    And that pain taught me what advice never could.

    It makes me wonder whether the pain we create for others is sometimes life pointing toward what we need to correct.

    And perhaps the pain we create for ourselves serves the same purpose.

    Maybe both are invitations.

    A lesson waiting to be noticed.

    Of course, not everyone learns from pain. Sometimes people simply collect more wounds, more resentments, more triggers.

    Learning is still a choice.

    But humans do learn.

    Slowly.

    Repeatedly.

    Often reluctantly.

    We often think understanding comes first and change follows. More often, suffering accumulates first, and understanding arrives later to explain what our heart already knows.

    Life keeps asking the same question in different forms until we finally answer it.

    And when the answer truly settles into your heart, something changes.

    The chase becomes quieter.

    The fear loses some of its power.

    The lesson stops feeling like information and starts feeling like wisdom.

    Lessons take time

    Perhaps that is why lessons take time.

    Not because life is withholding them from us.

    But because some truths can only be understood when we are finally ready to stop running long enough to hear them.

    Keep searching for your answers.

    Keep engraving your learnings into your heart.

    One day, the peace you spent years chasing may arrive quietly and decide to stay.

    And when it does, perhaps you will be able to help someone else find their way too.

    All in good time, my heart!

  • When Faith Feels Like Music

    Worshipping God should feel like having a favorite musician.

    Think about it.

    You have a favorite band. You love their music. There is that one song you play whenever you are feeling low, and somehow it makes you feel better. When they release a new song, you get excited. If they perform in your city, you attend the concert. You find other people who like the same music, and suddenly there is a community around something you love.

    You enjoy talking about the band. You enjoy discussing their songs. And when you see someone wearing their merchandise, you feel a strange excitement. This person likes something you like too.

    You like deep-diving into the lives of the band members, what they were going through when they wrote a particular song, what inspired a certain lyric, or what heartbreak gave birth to an album.

    Their stories inspire you, bring you comfort when you are down, and sometimes even make you shed a tear in silent support of struggles you never witnessed yourself.

    But here is the interesting thing about being a fan.

    You do not hate people who listen to different music. Typically.

    You do not think less of people who have never heard of your favorite band. You do not spend your day worrying about why they are not listening to the same songs as you.

    You simply think, “I like this music. This is my favorite band. Not everyone has to like it.”

    A song does not become less beautiful because someone else does not enjoy it.

    You wait for the next album. You continue listening to the music. Your relationship with the songs remains untouched.

    Even if nobody else in the world liked that band, you would still listen to it.

    You are perfectly capable of being the only fan in the room.

    That is how devotion should feel. Ideally.

    song of god

    You may talk about God. You may share what you love about Him. You may enjoy being around people who worship the same way you do. But your love for God should not depend on whether everyone else loves Him too.

    As long as you are allowed your space, and others are allowed theirs, love can exist peacefully.

    As a fan, you buy merchandise. You wear the T-shirt. You put up posters. You collect little things that remind you of the artist because they bring you joy.

    Perhaps prayer beads, temples, books, pictures, and rituals are meant to do something similar. They are reminders of someone you love.

    And there is another thing I find fascinating.

    When you listen to a song you love, it often feels as though the artist is speaking directly to you. Rationally, you know they wrote that song for millions of people. Yet somehow it feels personal.

    It feels like they understand something about you.

    Many people struggle with God because they think, “Why would God speak to me? I am not special.”

    But if you think of God the way you think about your favorite musician, something changes.

    The song was not written only for you, yet it still reaches you.

    The book was not written only for you, yet a sentence suddenly feels personal.

    The prayer was not spoken only for you, yet it comforts something inside you.

    Maybe devotion is not about being special.

    Maybe devotion is about feeling understood.

    And perhaps that is why people keep returning to God, just as they keep returning to their favorite songs.

    Not because they are forced to.

    But because every time they return, they feel a little less alone.

  • One Life. Many Truths.

    Humans are rarely one thing at a time.

    We love people we resent. We stay loyal to things that exhaust us. We believe in honesty while still lying to protect ourselves.

    We are systems built to hold contradictions, contrary to popular moral belief.

    You may love your parents, yet you can still be angry at them for something till death. You are annoyed by your best friend, yet you show up every single time they are in trouble while muttering, “Here we go again.”

    We know a particular political leader or party is a nuisance, yet we still go and vote for them. We hate not being able to express our true anger, yet when that creepy boss walks in, we put a smile on our face because that is what diplomacy teaches us.

    We are tired of explaining to our spouses or partners how irresponsible they are, yet we are ready to clean up after their mess every time, both physically and metaphorically.

    We constantly hear our parents complain about their siblings, and eventually we begin disliking our uncles and aunts too, to the extent that we do not even want to see them anymore. Yet when we ask our parents to stop entertaining them, we are the ones scolded for being hard-hearted.

    All these examples reveal a strange dichotomy in human behavior, one that even we fail to understand within ourselves. When others do it, we are quick to call them hypocrites. We believe one feeling cannot exist if another feeling is stronger.

    We pressure people, especially those close to us, to choose one difficult truth over another. Yet we ourselves continue to exhibit contradictory emotions of love and hate without even recognizing it.

    This leads to an interesting truth about the nervous system: human beings find peace not in perfection, but in their ability to hold two conflicting feelings at once.

    Yet humanity is constantly taught in absolutes. Absolute morality. Absolute goodness. Absolute honesty. Absolute loyalty. We are told the ideal human is clear, certain, and unwavering. But if you observe the human mind closely, it begins to crumble under the pressure of perfection.

    The brain is full of conflicting thoughts, mistakes, impulses, imperfections, and moral dilemmas. The more we fight this truth, the more difficult it becomes for us to grow.

    We place chains upon our moral flexibility. Instead of arriving at our own understanding through mistakes, experience, and reflection, we demand that people display only one acceptable behavior and belong to only one school of thought. This creates pain inside us.

    The pressure to choose one truth slowly damages our ability to make better choices. It creates distance in relationships. It pushes us toward only those people who validate every contradiction inside us. And when that validation is absent, it can freeze us emotionally or push us toward addictions, numbness, escapism, or paralysis. Sometimes, it may even create an artist.

    one life many truth

    The behaviors and emotions within humans can be contradictory, but the values imposed upon them are often rigid and singular. We are told we cannot hold conflicting beliefs, even though the human brain naturally does. That is probably the biggest coping mechanism that the human brain has.

    And this contradiction reveals something deeper to me. This conflict of wanting to be a certain way but behaving in a different way reveals something about our inner world.

    I believe the values we cling to the hardest are often born from the places where we were hurt the most. The thing you judge others for most intensely is often the thing that frightens you the most internally. A kind of projection.

    If someone is deeply against theft, perhaps something precious was once stolen from them, emotionally or physically, and they never recovered from it.

    If someone aggressively pushes a healthy lifestyle, maybe they have witnessed an illness destroy someone they love. Maybe they are scared of being dependent on someone one day and rejected while going through a difficult illness. They are scared of being vulnerable. Maybe they took care of someone close and got so deeply hurt in the process that now they don’t want to inflict the same pain of caretaking on their loved ones.

    If someone insists on stable jobs over artistic careers, perhaps they once watched a person struggle financially, or perhaps they themselves were denied the freedom to pursue what they truly wanted.

    Sometimes the values we defend most passionately are not just principles, they are protective walls around old wounds.

    And I experience it is important to give ourselves and others the freedom to discover our truths without shaming contradiction or emotional complexity. Conversation helps us understand that many people behave the way they do to protect themselves, avoid fears they are not ready to face, or survive truths they do not yet have the courage to confront.

    Grace could guide this journey in a gentler way.

    Humans exhaust themselves trying to become morally pure. Is it worth it? Perhaps. But can the journey be gentler? Absolutely.

    We often mistake healing for certainty, as if maturity means becoming unwavering and untouched by contradiction.

    But maturity is not the absence of conflicting feelings. It is the ability to hold them without tearing yourself apart , I believe.

    To love and still feel anger.
    To leave and still miss someone.
    To forgive and still remember.
    To fear becoming your parents while slowly understanding them too.

    The mistake we make with humans is demanding certainty from people who are still trying to understand themselves.

    Contradiction is not always confusion. Sometimes it is evidence of an internal negotiation between fear, morality, survival, desire, love, and experience. Sometimes it is growth in motion.

    Healing is not about becoming emotionally absolute, but about questioning your inherited beliefs, your rigidity, your projections, and your fears until you slowly arrive at a truth that genuinely feels your own.

    Not borrowed.
    Not imposed.
    Not fear-driven.

    But understood through living.

  • Building a better past- One memory at a time

    Memory has always been my nemesis.

    My perception of my childhood memory is like living in a house surrounded by monkeys. The moment you start to think something good about that house, you remember one dangerous encounter with that big red-faced monkey! Suddenly you are 6 again, being chased, alone and scared.

    You don’t want to go back to that house again.

    I envy those with good childhood memories. I hear these lucky people reminisce about the good old days, about how they would always want to relive their childhood. I sit there tasting the bitterness of relationships, the swelling of my cheek my childhood brings me.
    I wonder how they hate today. I wonder how they are not scared of being tiny again, when someone else decides how your day went.

    How are they not worried about whether they will be served a slap or food for dinner. Also, whether they miss the game night at their friend’s place, or only remember the weird brother who tried to touch you inappropriately when nobody was watching.

    Nobody would believe that story, especially because I haven’t told anyone. I don’t want to be held responsible for my 6-year-old self now, you see. I am not sure if I somehow invited it with my flat child body wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

    I was ugly according to my family.

    We don’t talk about that memory ever, yet it pops up every time I see a child playing with an adult. It must be my brain’s fault, tainting anything good it sees.

    I listen to those with beautiful memories with wondrous eyes, just like a child thinks about unicorns. Yet it is very rare for me to encounter those who want to forget as much as I want to. We still remember everything too vividly. It doesn’t seem like something that happened a long time ago.

    The people in my memory may not exist anymore, maybe not even on this Earth or just not in my life anymore, but I have to live with those faces till death. I remember their eye color and even their gait, yet I am uninterested in learning new faces now.

    What if I would have to strive to forget them too?

    The burden of memory, especially the bad ones, is immense. You are combing your hair and bam! You remember how your grandmother oiled your hair when you were young. There is a smile erupting at the thought of those fingers on your scalp. And then suddenly this memory becomes a ghost, and you remember how your hair was pulled when you made the tiny mistake of rubbing shoe polish on the floor. Maybe the oil strengthened the hair and the spirit too.

    Today I don’t let anyone control what I paint with my shoe polish.

    Eventually, I started taking matters into my own hands. I made my money and made new good memories the first chance I got.

    Better past

    The moment I learnt I am not automatically blessed with good ones, neither memories nor people, I decided to find new people for my new and better past.

    I was born cursed, but I can bless myself too.

    When I embarked on my journey of owning my life, I was made to feel ashamed for those attempts. But I have tried to live because I have stopped trusting anyone else, especially time. I’m scared of giving that control to anyone now.

    I find my people and my resources. My time has to keep up with me. I will not let them disappoint me again.

    I only want to indulge in good and meaningful moments, making memories with only those who are worthy of it. I want to invest in memories for my old age.

    I want, in my final moments, when the movie of my life plays in my head, no matter how painful the start is, for my final memories to be full of love and warmth.

    I may be the weak child, but I shall not remain so.

  • Not a Mirror, But Water — The Opposite of Trauma is Safety

    To calm the chaos, the nervous system needs steadiness.

    It needs predictability.

    It needs someone who stays the same, like there is a tomorrow.

    Someone who is not conditionally there.
    Someone who does not leave because it becomes too difficult to stay with you.

    Someone who understands that being present matters more than being right.

    It needs someone whose presence does not constantly shift.
    Someone who does not make you toss a coin again and again.

    Someone like a parent, but what a parent could not be.

    Someone like God, except I treat Him the way I learned to treat my parents:

    with hesitation, with doubt, without complete trust.

    And yet this person stays.

    To prove me wrong.
    To build trust brick by brick.

    Trauma healing

    Trauma takes away the agency to choose.

    To choose what to feel.
    What to express.
    How much of yourself is safe enough to reveal.

    Safety brings expression back.

    It gives you the freedom to become who you truly are, no matter how messy that may look.

    Trauma is fast.
    Trauma is lightning.

    Safety is slow.
    Safety is the sun rising quietly until it becomes midday.

    Trauma feels like standing on a tiny, shaky wooden plank in the middle of an ocean with violent waves around you.

    You could fall any moment.

    Safety is childish.
    Safety feels magical to those who never had it.

    It feels like jumping into a puddle on the road, knowing you are going to get dirty, but also knowing it will be fun.

    You do not worry about falling.
    Nor do you worry about who will pick you back up.

    Because you can handle both.

    You own your body there.

    Trauma takes away that feeling of ownership.

    So I want someone solid as a rock.

    Not a mirror.

    More like water.

    So calm that I can finally see myself in it without hating what I see.

    And even when the ripples disturb the reflection, my flaws no longer scare me.

    When I cry, this person—this water—washes my tears away with softness.

    Even when I immerse myself in it, I do not get lost.

    It gently pushes me upward and leaves me on the shore of sanity when I am ready.

    Being safe feels like walking on the beach.

    You are no longer trying to survive the waves.

    You are finally able to listen to them.