healing

You Don’t Owe the World a Performance

In a grocery store checkout line, I apologized to a woman who hadn’t even acknowledged me. Not because I was in the way—just because I was there. That reflexive "Sorry" didn’t come from manners. It came from habit. A quiet, conditioned surrender. This is what it means to perform: to constantly manage your presence so you don’t offend by existing. Not to gain praise, but to avoid being seen as too much. Anxiety doesn’t shout. It edits. It rewrites posture, tone, even silence. You can breeze through the day—emails done, meetings handled, …

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Nobody Teaches You How to Come Back

Growth is an oddly quiet affair.Not silent like a mountain top or a spa commercial.Quiet like a room after someone has left. You think you’ll feel lighter, but what shows up first is the echo—of old roles,of things unsaid,of laughter that now sounds rehearsed in your memory. The real shift isn’t when you start saying no.It’s when you stop over-explaining the yes. Suddenly, people don’t know where to place you.You’re no longer the cushion they leaned on or the backstage manager who kept everyone else's chaos in check. You’re not …

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Reclaiming Self: The Quiet Revolution

The first time I stood in my kitchen and didn’t rush to answer a text, something shifted. The stove was on. My tea was boiling. My name wasn’t being called, and no crisis had arrived. But my phone buzzed, and I didn’t flinch. Not because I was being strong or strategic. I was just... tired. The kind of tired that doesn’t come from lack of sleep, but from always being reachable, always available, always rearranging life like a Rubik’s Cube that only ever made other people happy. That morning, I watched the steam rise from the pan like a …

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When Full Price Feels Fair, But Discount Feels Familiar

Reconciling self-worth with the messy truth about love and effort It didn’t end with a bang. It ended like a slow leak. Not with a betrayal, but with a shrug. A tired sigh followed by: "It’s fine." It wasn’t. I knew it. My body had known it longer than my mouth was willing to admit. The sigh was just a placeholder for all the things I didn’t feel safe enough—or maybe brave enough—to say. It wasn’t one big thing. It was a hundred little ones. Another casual plan that included me on paper but excluded me in practice. A conversation …

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The Courage to Sit with Yourself

Not every breakthrough looks like a summit. Sometimes it’s just staying still. Silence doesn’t always feel calm. Sometimes it presses in. The kind of silence that arrives when plans fall through, when your phone runs out of battery, when the day ends too early and you're not ready to face yourself. No screens. No background noise. Just you. We aren’t taught how to handle that kind of stillness. We’re trained to chase momentum, to measure meaning in milestones. Ordinary moments get treated like filler—as if life is a waiting room and …

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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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