healing

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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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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