-
Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes
A few weeks ago I caught myself saying a sentence out loud and had this strange feeling of déjà vu. I was telling a friend how tired I was of my routine, how I felt stuck, how I needed to change something. She nodded the way people nod when they have heard it before. Then…
-
‘What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?’
When I was 10, I said I wanted to be a doctor. I said it with total confidence, the way you say things when nobody has yet asked you to explain how. A doctor was a job that sounded important and made adults nod approvingly. Nobody asked what kind of doctor or why. I just…
-
The Years That Ask Everything Of You
I keep thinking about how nobody actually prepares you for this part. The stretch of life where it feels like everything is being asked of you at the exact same time, and you’re supposed to just handle it, because apparently that’s what being an adult means. You’re supposed to pick a career. An actual direction.…
-
Breathe
There is a list. You know the one. It starts early, earlier than you are ready for, and it does not stop. First it is the grades, because the grades determine everything, or so you are told at an age when you are still figuring out how to exist in a body and navigate a…
-
Still Becoming
There is a version of me that exists entirely in my own head and she is, I will be honest, a lot. She wakes up at a reasonable hour and does not immediately reach for her phone. She responds to things on time. She finishes what she starts. She is present in conversations without half…
-
Who Are You When Nobody Is Watching?
Who Are You When Nobody Is Watching? Most people will never know.Not because the answer is hidden or complicated or requires some kind of spiritual excavation. But because looking requires a particular kind of courage that most of us, if we are being honest, do not have. It is easier to stay busy. To keep…
-
The People We Become For Different Places
There is a version of me that only used to exist in my grandmother’s house. She didn’t know that, of course, but she had met a girl who spoke a little slower, laughed more freely, and didn’t once check her phone at the dinner table. That girl ate two extra rotis without guilt and sat…
-
Things I Thought Were Cool At 13
I thought being quiet was a personality. Not shy quiet, not awkward quiet but cool quiet. The kind where you say just enough and let people wonder about the rest. I had this whole thing going where I’d walk into a room and not try too hard and I genuinely believed this was coming across…
-
A bookstaversary, an algorithm, and the community that never lets you down
There is a particular kind of dread that builds when you have been posting into what feels like a void. You make something with care, you hit share, and then you watch the numbers sit still, not moving, barely breathing, as if the internet has collectively decided to look the other way. That had been…
-
The Thirty Second Fix
There was this one day, genuinely one of those days where everything just felt heavy for no single reason you could point to, and I put on a random episode of FRIENDS. Not because I thought it would help. Not because I was trying to feel better. Just because I needed something on in the…
Sync With Ink
Words for everything in between.
