Tag: selfreflection

  • 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.”

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • My own words of wisdom- Running collection of some fleeting thoughts

    2.

    We learn by surrounding ourselves with people who are better than us. If we surround ourselves with those who lack understanding as compared to us, then we will have no inspiration to be better.

    It is not about who has more money or fame, who is stronger or smarter, but overall who has better values and skills in facing a certain type of situation.

    A child learn swimming faster by looking at people who know how to swim, as compared to those who are standing on the side.

    1.

    “Every day, it is a struggle to return to your thriving state when all you have managed to do is survive.

    Every time you struggle to keep yourself together, a part of you breaks.

    Why is all my strength used only to hold myself together?
    Why is the only mountain I am expected to move the one inside my mind, instead of the ones outside?

    Why can I not show my battle wounds to anyone and still feel like a winner, simply because my battle was with myself and not with an enemy the world could see?

    Every time life pushes me to my knees and I pull myself back up again, people only witness the version of me that fell.
    They never see the fighting.

    Why are all my battles fought alone?”

  • 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!

  • The Violence of Casual Words

    I saw my childhood friend standing on the other side of the road. We were meeting after almost two years.

    We both started walking towards each other hurriedly. We wanted to hug already. We had missed each other so much.

    The moment she saw me, she said,

    “Hey, you’ve become rounder!”

    My heart sank.

    I couldn’t say anything. I laughed, even though there was no joke to laugh at.

    If you pause for a moment, this probably reminds you of something familiar. Of how normal it is for us to comment on people’s bodies. How casually we highlight things that someone lives with every single day. We have played both these roles, many times in our lives.

    Acne. Pigmentation. Weight gain or loss. Greying hair. Balding head. Wrinkles. 

    The list goes on.

    What’s common about this list is that most of these things are not fully within someone’s control. They can’t be fixed overnight. They are constantly noticed, constantly judged, sometimes even by strangers. And you can almost always tell these are the very things someone already feels conscious about.

    Society makes sure you know when you don’t meet its standards. And sometimes, it does the opposite, it praises you excessively when you do. You can feel insecure for not fitting in, and strangely, insecure even when you fit in too well. As if having good skin, or the “right” body, itself becomes something to be evaluated. You are always under prying eyes.

    The point is not whether a feature is considered good or bad. The point is this: if something is already costing someone their peace of mind, then as a thoughtful human being, it’s important to stop commenting on it, as your sole right and responsibility to.

    A big no to unsolicited advice.

    A bigger no to pointing it out in public spaces.

    And an even bigger no if it’s the first thing you say to someone you haven’t met in a long time.

    Even if you believe you have an expert solution, pause. 

    Ask yourself – did they ask you? And if you genuinely want to help, ask for permission first. Make sure you are offering care, not discomfort.

    Don’t tell them how easy it is unless you can fix it in a minute.

    Don’t tell them to ignore it, because they already can’t.

    And if you feel an urge to share your opinion anyway, take it to the restroom. Say it to yourself in the mirror. Just because you have the ability to express doesn’t mean others owe you the emotional labour of listening to it.

    Now comes the more responsible and empathetic part.

    Without feeling loved despite their perceived flaws, people never feel safe enough to do something for themselves. 

    Safety is what allows growth, not shame. If the growth is made under pressure, then it leads to dissociation from your true self.

    You are not living then for yourself, you are performing for others. 

    And performers need a break too. You are you, not a performer, born to just get praises from others.

    Violence of words

    The most meaningful thing we can offer another human being is the assurance that they are worthy of happiness as they are.

    When people feel safe, something softens inside them. Not because they were corrected or reminded, but because they were met without judgment. 

    Safety doesn’t make people careless, it does the opposite. It gives them the space to listen to themselves, to notice what they need, and to care in ways that are self-directed rather than defensive. 

    Personal change grows best in environments where dignity is protected. And when care is offered without commentary, people don’t shut down, they show up. For themselves, and eventually, for the world around them.

    Something to remember:

    Most people are not failing at life, they are figuring it out in real time. They are carrying things they haven’t learned how to name yet, making choices with the tools they have today, not the ones they wish they had. 

    In such moments, kindness is not indulgence; it is orientation. 

    When we offer support instead of scrutiny, we give people the steadiness they need to find their own footing. And perhaps that is all care really asks of us, to walk alongside others while they learn, without rushing them, correcting them, or turning their becoming into a performance.

    After all the famous Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, said once,

    “Compassion is a verb.”