healing

I Didn’t Forgive Them. I Outgrew the Need To.

My grandmother used to say, “Forgiveness is good for the soul.” But when I was thirty-two, crying into an old T-shirt on my bedroom floor, her voice felt about as useful as a paper umbrella in a storm. Because what do you do when forgiveness doesn’t feel holy? When it doesn’t feel healing? When it just feels like another item on the already insufferable to-do list of being “the bigger person”? I wasn’t interested in grace. I wanted quiet. Not peace—quiet. The kind that sits inside your body like a weighted blanket. The kind where you …

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The Stories That Cost Me Something Are The Ones I Can’t Abandon

There was a winter morning in Uttarakhand when my fingers wouldn’t stop trembling. I hadn’t eaten. My face was windburnt. The room I was in smelled like wet wool and eucalyptus balm. But I had to write. Not because it was a good idea. Not because anyone was waiting.Because if I didn’t, the story inside me was going to rot. It wasn’t a “content plan.” It wasn’t strategic. It didn’t start with a hook and end with a takeaway. It was a raw, blood-tinged truth that had been pulsing behind my ribs for days. I remember staring at the screen …

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Love Isn’t a Negotiation—But Sometimes, It Feels Like You’re on the Auction Block

There’s a quiet kind of grief that builds when you realize someone likes you just enough to keep you close, but not enough to let you in. It doesn’t arrive dramatically. It drips. It seeps in slowly, washing away your clarity until you can no longer tell the difference between affection and ambivalence. They don’t harm you outright. They just don’t feed you emotionally. And so you wither while convincing yourself that you’re full. We are so skilled at rationalizing absence. Especially when the idea of someone—the version we’ve created in our …

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I Didn’t Trek to Heal. I Trekked Because I Was Done Disappearing.

Some mornings, I’d wake up and sit on the edge of the bed, toothbrush in hand, wondering if I had it in me to pretend I was fine again. The pretending was heavier than the silence. It didn’t look like a breakdown. I still showed up. Smiled when expected. Hit deadlines. But under the surface, it felt like something essential had slipped through a crack and I didn’t know how to ask for it back. So I started walking. First out of habit. Then out of restlessness. And then—without knowing why—I signed up for a trek that scared me. Not …

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Losing Is Not an Art. It’s a Fight Club Nobody Signs Up For.

I thought I had become good at losing.Keys. Mugs. Tiffin boxes. Emails I meant to reply to. Friendships I thought were solid until they weren’t. A version of my life that existed only in my head but still left behind a ghost when it dissolved. The little losses added up until it started to feel like muscle memory—like I was supposed to take it all with a quiet smile and an overused quote about letting go. People seemed to admire the calm. “You’re so strong,” they’d say. Which really just meant: “You’re not making us uncomfortable with your …

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Forgiveness Isn’t a Group Project

There’s something strangely comforting about planning what you’ll say to someone who hurt you. You rehearse it in your head—maybe in the shower, maybe while pretending to listen during a work call. You imagine the shock on their face, the guilt finally catching up to them. You picture them saying, “I had no idea I did that to you. I’m sorry.” And just like that, your pain is validated, softened, maybe even erased. Except that’s rarely how it goes. More often, the pain sits untouched while you wait for an apology that may never come. You …

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This Is What It Looks Like to Be the First Woman in Your Line to Heal

Today, I made my mother cry.Not from pain.Not from disappointment.But from something gentler. From something I had written for her. A letter. A reckoning. A love note. A surrender. It’s strange—how when you begin the hard, ugly, necessary work of healing yourself, you start to see your parents not just as the people who raised you, but as the people they were before that. The people they were never allowed to be. Her tears weren’t loud. They didn’t need to be.They said: You see me.They said: You value me.They said: I didn’t even know I …

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The Weight of What We Carry

For a long time, I didn’t think of myself as an angry person. Frustrated? Sure. Irritated? Occasionally. But anger? That felt like something that belonged to other people—louder people, reckless people, people who hadn’t mastered the art of keeping things together. I convinced myself I was past all that. Turns out, anger doesn’t disappear just because you ignore it. It waits. It sinks into your muscles, stiffens your jaw, shapes the way you shrink yourself to keep the peace. It turns into exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix. It …

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