Category: R-Z

Essays starting with RSTUVWXYZ

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The Roles We Play — Follow-Up Thoughts

    To read the original essay, click here: https://thoughtsden.com/the-roles-we-play-the-people-we-forget/

    Someone asked me after the previous essay, “What next?”

    And I think that is the real question.

    Once we understand that we have placed people into rigid roles and slowly stripped away their humanity in the process, what do we do after that realization?

    How do we become human again?

    How do we stop seeing people only as functions, labels, responsibilities, expectations, ideologies, or positions they occupy in our lives?

    I do not fully know the answer yet.

    But I do have a few thoughts I want to share.

    It cannot be solved without self-awareness. Unless you personally have a problem with something, nothing really changes.

    I think this is something I have learned through my own journey. It may sound obvious, but it really is not.

    Until something starts hurting us, until the discomfort becomes unbearable, until the pain of staying the same feels worse than the effort of changing, most people do not genuinely seek transformation.

    So unless our tolerance for that conditioning becomes lower, unless we begin to feel disturbed by it, it continues.

    And then comes another question entirely:

    How do we create that threshold collectively, at the level of society?

    Because change can move from the individual to society, but society can also shape the individual.

    That itself feels like an entirely separate essay.

    But one thing I keep thinking about is this: awareness of others may be one of the biggest catalysts for change.

    You may call it empathy.
    Or exposure.
    Or simply the realization that a different way of living is possible.

    Among a group of ten people, even if just one person is open to new ideas, new ways of living, or new ways of thinking, there is potential for a massive cascading shift.

    The reason could be anything.
    Maybe they are rebellious. Maybe they are simply exhausted.
    Maybe they are just unable to continue pretending.

    But that willingness to be different begins the process.

    Even if the other nine people do not want to change immediately, the idea still escapes into the world.

    Their children may hear it.
    Their families may absorb it.
    Their social circles may slowly start reconsidering things they once accepted blindly.

    What we often forget is that while the majority tends to follow existing structures, there have always been a few “nutcases” carrying the burden of change.

    We usually thank them later.

    Maybe it is some aunt in the family.
    Maybe it is your father’s colleague.
    Maybe it is someone quietly living differently within your own social circle.

    Some become famous. Books are written about them. Newspapers celebrate them.

    Others remain ordinary people with extraordinary conviction, moving through life with enough courage to make you question your own choices.

    Sometimes we simply call them “lucky” when it feels too late for us to change ourselves.

    Roles we play

    Now this awareness, this realization that something is flawed in the system that we are following can come from many places:

    The education system.
    Stories from history.
    Interviews with people living differently from you.
    Social media—the reels, the sarcasm, the shared trauma that slowly reshapes perspectives.
    Comedy and satire, which have always forced societies to confront their flaws.
    Blogs like this.
    Spirituality, empathy, soul-searching, the desire to become a better human being.
    Friends and social circles—because the more differing viewpoints we encounter, the more open we become to new possibilities.

    Now, some changes happen in a day.
    Some take a decade.
    Some may take generations.

    But as human beings, we have to believe change is possible.

    We are evolutionary creatures.
    We survive because we adapt.

    And over time, things that are kinder, more humane, and more beneficial for the larger collective tend to survive.

    If human beings were only meant for cruelty, we would have destroyed ourselves long ago.

    And despite how chaotic the world looks today, I still believe humanity, in many ways, is gentler than it once was.

    For a beginning, though—

    Be the change you want to see!

  • The Discomfort of Having a Friend

    I worry about having a friend.

    The discomfort of depending on them.
    The discomfort of relying on their presence to complete conversations you do not want to have alone.

    I can wait for years just to complete that conversation.

    The conversation waits within me.
    The grief holds itself carefully inside me.
    The pain stays safely stored in my heart, waiting for its release.

    Is my friend the place where I seek redemption?

    It started as nothing, and somehow became everything.

    In a world obsessed with defining love through the physical, this platonic crush became my holy grail for peace and fun.

    The urge to talk to them in the group while still remaining courteous.
    You cannot reveal that every conversation quietly seeks their emotional validation.

    The subchat.
    The side group.
    The secret extra details.
    The expressions you need to share with them before the day can end peacefully.

    I stay with the comma until I talk to them, and they become the period of peace.

    They turn the page for me.

    I did not know that my urge to add subtitles to every conversation was the kind of love I needed during this mundane life.

    Subtitles only they would understand.
    Subtitles you cannot say out loud, because others would notice.

    Love holds very little power when it comes to overly territorial friendships.

    You cannot cross that line.
    You cannot come between that bond.

    The closeness becomes territorial.
    Almost sacred.

    Where love sometimes comes with fragility, disturbed as easily as sand touched by waves, friendship feels carved in stone.

    Not a handmade carving, but something shaped slowly through time.

    Not just what waves do to underground rocks, but what a rope does to a stone wall after years of friction.

    Friendship endured what hurt the most.

    It saw your friend withering in pain, and still you stayed.

    It tests your stamina.
    Your appetite for love.
    Your ability to remain.

    Discomfort of a friend

    But sometimes, you have to cut this cord yourself.

    Untie this seemingly unbreakable knot with your own hands.

    To break a friendship, you have to break the stone.
    The very stone you carved your promises into.

    And while smashing it against the ground would be easier, you still want to be delicate about it.

    So instead, you break it on your own feet.

    While your friend cries, you bleed.

    But you still do it.

    Because staying hurts more.

    Yes, you will make new friends.

    But the piece of heart they took with them stays there forever.

    And eventually, you stop hoping to get it back too, because you would not know what to do with that piece even if it returned.

    Some memories are not erased.

    Only buried.

  • The Person I Post

    The way we exist on social media is different from real life, or so I believe.

    Social media is not just an extension of our social personality. It is also an extension of our internal world.

    It has quietly become a part of our resume, our biodata, our social life.

    Without meeting you, I can already assess you, put you in a box, admire you, judge you, or completely character assassinate you based on your profile.

    I can see who you are friends with, who you follow, who you admire.

    Based on your shares and posts, I can guess your political inclinations, your ideals, your idols, your value system.

    I can also see whether you are a loner or socially desired.

    Whether your life looks curated or chaotic.

    Whether your taste feels refined or whether we may never align at all.

    The strange part is this:

    Without ever truly knowing a person, we can build an entire story about them.

    And that makes me wonder –

    Is social media really the right place to start knowing someone?

    Is it an extension of personality, a mirror, or an aspiration?

    Is it who people are?

    Or who they wish they were?

    Are we presenting ourselves the way makeup presents a face – enhanced, edited, softened, strategically lit?

    Or are we quietly catfishing each other emotionally through aesthetics, captions, and carefully selected vulnerability?

    I remember a time when social media felt like everything.

    If something was not posted, it almost felt like it never happened.

    It was about how you arrived.

    How your life looked.

    Your online presence sometimes mattered more than your real one.

    Social media and me

    And now I wonder –

    Is social media slowly making me live a delusional life?

    Is it making me more aspirational, or more disconnected from reality?

    More authentic, or more performative?

    More expressive, or more aware of being watched?

    Can social media ever give me the courage to fully endorse the actual weird version of myself?

    And harder still:

    Do I have the courage to admit that a part of me genuinely wants to live like the person I present online?

  • You Become What You Fight

    There are people who make something inside you tighten. Your jaw, your chest, your thoughts, your whole being for an instant!

    People who don’t just irritate you, but make you want to correct them, fix them, defeat them, hold a mirror up to their face, make a movie on their behavior and show it to them in an iMax theatre to tell them how it feels.

    We like to believe they are the problem. And sometimes they really are!

    But what if they are also the mirror, mirror of our inner world?

    Carl Jung spoke about the “hero’s path”. It’s the conscious choice to remain good, to resist becoming what one hates. A quiet resistance against internal and external corruption.

    Yes, you are the hero (or heroine).

    And these people, you may call them enemies, are creatures that make you clench your teeth. You wish to change them, or send them to Mars, with no between!

    But they serve a bigger purpose.

    We can’t appreciate light without dark, good without bad, and in the same way, we can’t fully know ourselves without the people we despise.

    They remind us what we do not want to be.

    Joseph Campbell, influenced by Jung, said every hero must confront their “Shadow”. They are the darker, suppressed parts of ourselves. The real victory is not destroying them, but integrating it without being consumed.

    Because sometimes, anger rises fast. It asks you to stoop, to match, to return the same energy.

    But pause – even for a moment – and you’ll see:

    Competing with them makes you more like them, and less like you.

    The reason you hate your enemies is because they have hurt you. And when you try to hurt them in the same way, you become the very thing you despise.

    This is not a sermon. This is just honesty.

    I don’t want to be like my enemy.

    I don’t want to carry the same traits as the person I dislike.

    I want to remain different.

    My enemy tests my moral meter. My belief system. My boundaries.

    The people I dislike show me how firm, or fragile, I really am.

    The values I despise do something strange: they reassure me when I am drifting.

    They force me to check myself.

    If you’ve seen Star Wars, George Lucas built its core on this. The constant pull between becoming the evil you fight, or choosing something higher.

    We’ll talk about forgiveness and acceptance another time.

    You become who you fight

    For now, sit with this:

    Our anger is a psychological mirror.

    At the core of the hero’s path is a difficult realization: 

    We are not just fighting them, we are resisting the part of us that could become them.

    It sounds dramatic.

    But even small unkind choices slowly build the courage to become someone harsher than we intended.

    To become as mean as my enemy.

    To be unkind to those who have meant no harm.

    To be selfish when others are giving freely, without asking.

    To hurt those already broken into a thousand pieces, just to mend my own wounded pride.

    To stand and watch while someone’s world burns, because I had no water to save my own.

    To turn as cold as Antarctica, because warmth would make me vulnerable.

    I am scared to become all of this, just to put my enemy down.

    So yes, I want to thank the people who frustrate me.

    They have made me think harder. They have forced me to question my beliefs. They have given me ground to stand on.

    Even disagreement has shaped my voice.

    There are many versions of truth, many value systems. But being challenged has made me look deeper, why I believe what I believe, and where I still need to grow.

    It has also shown me how small my thinking once was.

    I don’t want a world where everyone is like me. It’s not possible, and maybe not even desirable.

    So the only way I can exist meaningfully in this world is by choosing, again and again, not to become what I cannot respect.

    Not out of superiority. But out of awareness.

    And in the end, as Friedrich Nietzsche warned:

    “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

  • The Piano We Never Touched

    Most people don’t refuse new things because they are certain they won’t enjoy them. They refuse because trying requires a brief surrender of certainty, of control, of the version of themselves that already knows how to exist. 

    New experiences don’t just offer pleasure; they threaten familiarity. And familiarity, even when it’s limiting, often feels safer than the unknown.

    The more you hide, the more joy hides!

    What people often don’t understand when they refuse to try new things, or ridicule others for trying them, is that they are not rejecting an activity. They are rejecting a feeling. An experience. A possible doorway to joy.

    If someone has already tried something and genuinely disliked it, that’s different. But to decide in advance that nothing new can bring happiness and joy, that everything meaningful lies strictly within one’s comfort zone; that is not wisdom. 

    It is a quiet waste of life.

    How can you know you don’t like something unless you’ve felt it?

    Why experimenting is the key to knowing more

    I’m not talking about drugs or anything risky or harmful to health or society. I mean very basic things. Simple things. New food. A new sport. A different kind of book. A place you never imagined yourself in. Sometimes even a version of yourself you never thought you could be.

    Imagine if the only instrument you had ever known was a pair of tongs, and you believed that was all music could be. You made do. You accepted it. And then one day, you discovered a piano. You wouldn’t just hear new sounds, you would realise how limited your definition of music had been all along.

    This is true of food. Of art. Of movement. Of relationships. Of joy itself.

    Unless you have experienced something, how do you know what it might awaken in you? You might discover a part of yourself, a joy bone, you never knew existed.

    Trying new things

    It may not completely be your fault

    Sometimes, this resistance to trying new things is not arrogance. It is fear. For people struggling with mental health issues, change can feel unsafe. Predictability becomes survival. Newness threatens the fragile sense of control they have built. Avoidance, in such cases, is not a failure of character. It is a nervous system doing its best to cope.

    But there is another kind of resistance. One that comes not from active pain, but from old, unexamined trauma, now fossilized in the form of projection.

    What is not processed stays like a bone in your body

    This trauma is so old and so familiar that it no longer feels like trauma at all. It has calcified. It has turned into a habit, into fixations and rigidity. Into a personality that prides itself on being “practical” or “settled” or “realistic,” when in fact it has simply stopped being curious.

    That’s where the real question lies.

    Are you losing your curiosity?

    When someone does something you haven’t – do you feel intrigued, or irritated?

    Are you genuinely uninterested, or quietly grieving a life you never explored?

    Judgment, more often than we admit, is grief wearing moral clothing. Labels give us a sense of superiority, but they also protect us from looking at what we might be missing.

    Awareness ,of both the life you have lived and the life you haven’t, is what slowly brings curiosity back. And curiosity, when paired with safety, leads to joy. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But steadily.

    An orange waiting to be peeled

    As long as you keep peeling away the layers you’ve built around the possibility of joy, you will keep finding it, sometimes in places you never thought to look.

    After all, the unlived parts of life don’t disappear, they remain veiled. 

    They wait.

    Carpe diem, hooman!