Tag: raw reflections

Breathe

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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 classroom and understand why any of it matters. Then it is the college, because the college determines the job, and the job determines the life, and the life is the whole point, so pay attention, keep up, do not fall behind. And you try. You really try. You study for exams that feel like the end of the world and you wait for results with a kind of anxiety that is completely disproportionate and completely understandable at the same time, because everyone around you has confirmed that yes, this matters, yes, this is the thing that will define what comes next.

And then what comes next arrives and there is a new list waiting.

This is the part nobody prepares you for. You spend years working toward something, a grade, an acceptance letter, a degree, and there is a moment, brief and quickly buried, where you think you will finally be able to exhale. And then the exhale does not come, because by the time you arrive somewhere, the next destination has already been decided and the pressure has already shifted shape and the chase has just updated its terms.

The college becomes the career. The career becomes the salary. The salary becomes the lifestyle. And somewhere further down the road, when you are still running and already tired, it becomes the relationship, the marriage, the home, the children, the children’s futures, and then you are the one standing over a younger person telling them that the grades matter, that this is the thing that will determine what comes next and the loop closes on itself completely.

I think about this a lot. More than is probably useful, more than I can do anything about in the immediate sense, but I think about it because I am in it and I can feel it and I cannot pretend otherwise. I am at the stage where academics and grades and the pressure of figuring out a career are all sitting on my chest at the same time, not taking turns but arriving together, and on top of the expectations that come from outside, from family, from the world, from the very reasonable question of what are you going to do with your life, I add my own.

I set standards for myself that have no ceiling. I hold myself to a version of productivity and achievement that I would never in a thousand years hold another person to. And when I do not meet those standards, which is often, because they are impossible, I do not rest. I feel guilty for not doing more, and then I get back to work, because working at least feels like moving forward, and moving forward feels like the only acceptable mode of existing right now.
I know this about myself. I can see it clearly. And I am still doing it, which is the specific kind of frustration that comes from understanding something completely and being unable to stop it.

But here is what I keep coming back to, the thing that sits underneath all the noise and the lists and the pressure. When does the actual living happen? Not the achieving, not the performing, not the becoming, but the living. The kind that does not produce anything. The kind that cannot be put on a CV or justified to anyone or filed under progress. I am talking about a random Tuesday afternoon that you remember years later not because something happened but because you were happy in it. A conversation that went nowhere and meant everything. A stretch of time that belonged to nobody’s expectations, not your parents, not your future employer, not the imagined version of yourself who has finally arrived somewhere and can finally relax.

Because that version keeps moving. Every time you get close, the goalpost shifts, and not always because someone else moved it. Often because you did. Because the bar you set for yourself rises automatically the moment you clear it, and rest starts to feel like a thing you have to earn, and you have not earned it yet, and maybe you never quite will.

I do not think this is unique to me. I think most people reading this have felt some version of it, are feeling some version of it right now. We live inside a structure that is very good at telling us what the next thing is and very quiet on the subject of whether the next thing is actually what we want. The path is so clearly laid out, so thoroughly validated by everyone who walked it before us, that it takes a real act of will to stop and ask whether you are on it because you chose it or because it was simply there and you were moving and this is the direction everyone around you was already heading.

And most of us do not stop. Because stopping looks like falling behind. Because the world is not set up to reward people who pause to ask questions about what they actually want. Because the people who love you have hopes for you that are bound up in the list, and disappointing them is its own kind of weight, and carrying that weight while also carrying your own is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not felt it.

So we keep going. We keep our heads down and we keep moving and we tell ourselves that this phase will end, that there is a point ahead where the pressure lifts and the space opens up and life gets to be something you participate in rather than something that is happening at you. And maybe that is true. Maybe it is.

But I am tired of waiting to find out.
I am tired of the idea that living is something I have to schedule for later, after the degree, after the job, after I have become stable enough and successful enough to afford the luxury of a present tense. I do not want my twenties to be something I survived. I do not want to look back at this period of my life and see only a list of things I was trying to achieve, a blur of pressure and output with very little of myself actually in it.

I want to have been here for it. Even the hard parts. Even the uncertain, unresolved, not-yet-figured-out parts. I want to have been present for my own life while it was happening, which sounds like the most obvious thing in the world and is somehow the thing most of us are failing at completely.

I am not writing this from the other side of it. I have not figured this out. I am still in the middle of it, still adding pressure to pressure, still finding it almost impossible to sit still without the guilt arriving right behind me. But I am trying. I am trying to find the moments in the day that belong to nobody’s agenda but mine. I am trying to let a good thing be good without immediately scanning for what is still missing. I am trying to remember that the life I am waiting to live is actually this one, the one happening right now, in the mess and the uncertainty and the chase.

So if you are somewhere in this too, if you recognise the loop and you are exhausted by it and you cannot quite see your way out of it, I am not going to tell you to quit or to stop caring or to abandon the things you are working toward. I know it is not that simple. I know the pressure is real and the stakes feel real and the people waiting for you to succeed are real.

I will just say this.

Breathe a little.

Find something today that is not in service of the next thing. Not productive, not optimised, not moving you closer to anything on the list. Just something that is good right now, in this moment, for no other reason than that it is.

We have one life. Not one after we figure it out. Not one once the timing is right. This one, right now, with all its unfinished business and unanswered questions and pressure that does not let up.

It is already happening.

Be in it.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Still Becoming

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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 her brain already somewhere else, already planning, already composing, already three steps ahead of the moment she is actually standing in. She is consistent. She follows through. She does not start seventeen things and finish eleven of them and forget about the other six and then find them weeks later in her notes app, still waiting, still full of potential, a little accusatory.

I know her very well. I have been meaning to become her for years.

And then there is the version of me that actually shows up to the day. She is trying. That is the first thing I want to say about her, she is genuinely, constantly trying. But she is also scattered in the way that people are scattered when they care about too many things at once. She is late sometimes, not because she doesn’t care but because she was finishing something and then finishing one more thing and then suddenly time had done what time does. She starts too much. She feels too much. She takes on things with enormous enthusiasm and then discovers halfway through that she has also taken on four other things with enormous enthusiasm and now all of them are happening simultaneously and none of them are happening as well as they deserved.

The gap between these two people is something I have spent a lot of time being ashamed of.

Because from the outside the gap looks like a failure of discipline. Like if I just tried a little harder, organised a little better, wanted it enough, I could close the distance between who I am and who I meant to be by now. And some days I believe that. Some days the gap feels like evidence, like proof of something lacking, like a measurement of all the ways I have not yet managed to match my own expectations of myself.

But then there are other days. Days when I look at the gap differently and see something else in it entirely.

Because the gap only exists because the vision is real. You cannot fall short of something you were never reaching for. The version of me in my head, the consistent one, the present one, the one who finishes everything she starts, she is not a fantasy I invented to torture myself with. She is something I am genuinely moving toward. Slowly, imperfectly, with a lot of detours and restarts and days that look nothing like the plan. But moving.

And the version of me that actually shows up, the scattered one, the trying one, she is not the failure. She is the process. She is what becoming looks like from the inside, which is messier and more human and less linear than it looks from the outside or from the clean imagined future where I have finally figured it all out.

I think the gap is where I actually live. Not in the perfect version and not in the falling short but in the space between them, in the reaching. In the fact that I keep writing the to-do list even though I know it is too long. Keep starting the blog even though I might not finish it. Keep believing, without any particularly good evidence, that tomorrow I will be a little closer to the person I am trying to be.

Some days the gap feels like failure. I want to be honest about that because pretending it doesn’t would be its own kind of lie.

But some days it feels like the most alive part of me. The part that hasn’t given up on the vision. The part that keeps measuring the distance not to punish herself but because she still believes the distance can be crossed.

I don’t know when I will become the version of myself I carry around in my head. Maybe I will keep getting closer and the target will keep moving, which is its own kind of beautiful even when it is exhausting.

But I know this. The gap means I’m still going. Still trying. Still somewhere in the middle of a becoming that isn’t finished yet.

And on most days, that feels like enough to keep going with.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Who Are You When Nobody Is Watching?

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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 noise up. To fill every quiet moment with a scroll or a conversation or anything, really, that keeps the silence from getting too loud.
Because silence asks questions.


We are performing constantly. Not occasionally, not in high-stakes moments, constantly. The version of you that shows up to work, to relationships, to family dinners, to the comment section, to the carefully worded text you rewrote four times before sending. That is not you. That is the edit. That is the version that has been sanded down and shaped by decades of learning what gets you accepted and what gets you rejected. We started that process so young that we have no memory of a time before it. The performance did not begin. It simply always was.

So who is underneath it?
That is the question most people spend their entire lives running from. Full calendars and full feeds and full rooms. Anything to avoid sitting alone with yourself long enough to find out what you actually think, what you actually want, what you actually are when there is no one left to perform for.

And here is the thing about the people who do go looking. It is not always pretty. The self you find in the unguarded moments, in the 3am thoughts you would never say out loud, in the way you feel things you were taught not to feel, that self is not the polished one. It is the one that holds the contradictions. The ugliness alongside the tenderness. The pettiness alongside the depth. The fear underneath everything.

Nobody is just one thing. But we live like we are because it is simpler that way. Cleaner. Easier to maintain. A single consistent character is so much less exhausting than the whole complicated truth of yourself.


The people who have actually sat with that truth, who have looked at the full picture and not just the flattering parts, who have felt the specific discomfort of being known to themselves completely, those people have done something most will not. And they did it without an audience. Without validation. Without anyone handing them credit for the hardest part.

That is what makes it brave. Not the figuring out. The going to look in the first place.
Because you do not know what you will find. That is the part nobody tells you. You might find someone softer than you expected. Someone angrier. Someone more afraid. Someone who has been carrying something for years that they never had the right words for. The journey inward is not a wellness exercise. It is a confrontation.
Most people sense this and turn back.

They choose instead to be whoever the room needs them to be. To wear the expectations handed to them like a second skin until they cannot feel where the expectations end and they begin. This is not weakness exactly. It is survival. We are social creatures living inside systems that reward legibility and punish complexity. Of course we simplify ourselves. Of course we perform. The world made it very clear, very early, what it wanted from us.

But that clarity came at a cost.
The cost is this: you can go your whole life being very good at being who everyone else needs you to be, and still die a stranger to yourself. Respected, maybe. Liked, probably. But never fully known. Not even by you.


That should terrify us more than it does.
The ones who refuse that fate are not doing something noble or enlightened. They are just doing something necessary. Asking a question most are too comfortable or too afraid to ask. Sitting in the discomfort of not knowing and staying there long enough to find out.

Who are you when nobody is watching?
If you do not know, that is worth more of your attention than almost anything else in your life right now.

If you do know, and you are still choosing the performance anyway, then at least you are doing it with your eyes open.

And if you are somewhere in the middle, still looking, still circling, still catching glimpses and then retreating, that is not failure. That is just the work. It does not end. The person you are in private keeps changing as you do. The question stays the same.

Keep going anyway.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

The People We Become For Different Places

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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 with her legs folded under her on the sofa and didn’t feel even a little bit embarrassed about it. She was softer. She was somehow younger and more herself at the same time. I don’t know where she used to go when I left.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, the way places pull different people out of us. Not fake people, that’s the thing I want to be clear about. Not performances or masks or the kind of code-switching that you do because you have to. I mean something quieter and more involuntary than that. The way a city you love makes you walk differently. The way a room you grew up in makes you feel like your own problems have temporarily lost your address.

There is a version of me that lives in Jaipur and she is more serious, more efficient, more clipped. She knows exactly what she wants from a day. She has tabs open that she will actually use. There is another version that exists only on long train rides, who reads for four hours straight and doesn’t feel even a little bit guilty about not being productive, because what could be more productive than this, the whole city moving past outside the window and a book in your lap and nowhere you have to be for the next seven hours.

The interesting part is not that we change. Of course we change. The interesting part is that every single version feels completely real when you’re in it. You don’t feel like you’re pretending. You feel, if anything, more settled than usual. Like the place has made room for a part of you that was waiting for exactly that kind of permission.

I think some places give us permission. That’s the best way I can put it. My grandmother’s house gave me the permission to be unhurried. A train gives me permission to disappear. A city I visited once gave me permission to be curious in a way I rarely let myself be at home, where everyone already knows what kind of person I am and I have to keep being that.

That last one is the part that gets to me most honestly. At home, wherever home is, you are already known. People have already decided, with a lot of love and some amount of wrong assumption, who you are. And it is not that they are entirely wrong. It is just that you have expanded since they last checked and nobody has updated the file. So you walk around being slightly edited, slightly abbreviated, slightly smaller than what you actually are now. And then you go somewhere new and there is no file. You get to just be whatever you currently are. The whole thing. Unreviewed.

I wonder sometimes if that’s part of why travel feels so good even when the trip itself is objectively average. It’s not always the food or the view or the novelty. It’s the temporary suspension of your own reputation. You get to be interested in things without explaining why. You get to be quiet or loud or completely random without anyone reading it as something about your character. The place doesn’t have a theory about you yet.

And then there are places that know too much and still love you and those are somehow the most powerful of all. Because those places don’t give you freedom through anonymity. They give you freedom through acceptance. Which is a different thing entirely and honestly a rarer one.

I don’t think we ever become entirely different people in different places. I think we become specific parts of ourselves. Each place draws out something that was already there, something that just needed the right kind of light or noise or silence to finally surface. Some places bring out the version of you that knows how to rest. Some bring out the version that’s a little bit brave. Some bring out the version that misses people, deeply and without warning, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

What I’ve started believing is that all of these are real. The girl at her grandmother’s house was real. The person on the train is real. The edited, efficient, serious version at her desk is also real. None of them cancel the others out. They are all just different rooms inside the same person, and the places we go are just the keys.

I think that’s a kind thing to know about yourself. 

That you are more than one thing. 

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Things I Thought Were Cool At 13

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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 exactly the way I intended. Like I had it figured out. Like I was someone. I was thirteen. I had nothing figured out and I was absolutely no one yet, which is of course the whole point of being thirteen, but nobody tells you that while it’s happening.

Cool at that age was such a specific thing. It wasn’t about being loud or popular necessarily, though that was part of it for some people. For me it was more about having a certain energy. Unbothered. Like things rolled off me. Like I had seen enough of life to not be surprised by it, which is genuinely hilarious because I had seen nothing. I was a child with strong opinions about what music meant you were serious and what music meant you weren’t, and I delivered these opinions with the confidence of someone who had earned them through years of experience I simply did not have.

There were songs I loved like they were mine. Artists I felt like I had discovered personally even though millions of people knew them. A specific way I wore things, carried myself, responded to people. Little things that felt like they added up to something. And the strange part is they did add up to something, just not what I thought at the time. What they added up to was a person trying very hard to become themselves, which is both embarrassing and also, from here, quite beautiful.

Because underneath all of that performance there was this feeling. This intensity that I don’t think I’ve ever fully found the right words for. Everything just hit so hard back then. A song could genuinely change the entire shape of your day. A conversation you had with someone could sit with you for weeks. You could be excited, properly excited, about something completely small and ordinary and feel it in your whole body. Nothing bounced off. Everything got in. You were just completely open to your own life in a way that felt normal then and feels almost impossible to imagine now.

And there was this curiosity too, this constant low hum of what’s next, what’s out there, who am I going to be. The future felt enormous and wide open and full of things you hadn’t discovered yet, and that was thrilling in a way that’s hard to explain to your adult self who has since discovered quite a lot of things. 

Everything felt like it could be the beginning of something. A new song could feel like a door opening. A new person could feel like a whole world. You were so hungry for all of it, so awake to it, so genuinely thrilled to be alive and right in the middle of it, even when you were doing your best to look like you couldn’t care less.

I didn’t know that was rare. I thought that was just what being alive felt like.

And then life happens. Slowly, gradually, through the ordinary accumulation of time and experience and things that don’t go the way you hoped. You get a little careful. You learn, without meaning to, how to arrive at things slightly protected. You still feel everything but there’s a small distance now between you and the full force of it. A buffer. And it’s reasonable, that buffer. You built it for good reasons. But you built it without realising, and by the time you notice it’s already just part of how you move through the world.

Adulthood is better in most ways. Genuinely. You figure out who you actually are. You stop performing and it gets quieter and easier. You make real choices. You care about things that actually matter to you instead of things that just seemed to matter to everyone else. The confidence you tried to fake at thirteen starts to become something real, something that comes from actually knowing yourself rather than just deciding to act like you do. That’s worth a lot. I wouldn’t trade it.

But I do think about thirteen sometimes. Not with embarrassment, or not only that. More with this ache that’s hard to explain. I think about that version of me walking around so guarded on the outside and so completely unguarded underneath. Feeling things at full volume. Not yet cracked or worn down or made careful by anything. Just alive in this specific, impenetrable way that I didn’t know to pay attention to while it was happening because I was too busy trying to seem like I wasn’t paying attention to anything.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about growing up. It’s not that you lose yourself. You actually find yourself, slowly, which is the whole point. But something else goes quiet in the process. That feeling of being so open the world could just walk straight into you. Of wanting things with your whole chest before you knew enough to wonder if wanting them was worth it. Of being completely, totally, embarrassingly alive before life had taught you any of its lessons yet.

You can’t get that back exactly. But every now and then something catches you off guard. A song, a smell, a particular kind of afternoon. And for just a second you’re back there. Thirteen, ridiculous, performing cool, feeling everything. And you think, yeah. That was something. 

I didn’t know it then, but that was really something.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Outgrowing People Without Hating Them

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There is this one person I think about sometimes. We were inseparable for years, the kind of close where you stop needing to explain context because they already have all of it. They knew which version of a story I was telling based on who was in the room. They knew when I said I was fine that I was not, and they knew when I actually was. We had the kind of friendship that made me think, okay, this is one of those. This one is permanent.

And now we talk maybe four times a year. Warmly, genuinely, and then we hang up and weeks dissolve into months and neither of us panics about it. I am not sure when that happened. I have tried to find the moment and I cannot. There was no fight, no fracture, nothing to point to. Just life doing what life does, pulling people into their own separate currents, and one day you look up and realize the distance has become the default.

What I was not ready for was how much I would still love them through it. That is the part that messes with your head. You expect that if something is over, it should feel over. Clean. You expect the love to scale down to match the closeness. But it does not always work that way. Sometimes you can be sitting in a completely separate life from someone and still feel a rush of something real when you see them post about a good day. Still hope that they are okay. Still miss them in that way you miss a place you used to live in, not desperately, but with a familiarity that never fully leaves your body.

I spent a long time feeling guilty about the growing distance, as if I had let something precious slip through my hands by not holding tighter. I kept thinking I should call more, should try harder, should find my way back to what we were. But every time I imagined actually doing that I felt something in me go still, because I think some part of me knew that you cannot go back to who you were with someone once you have both moved. You can only meet each other as who you are now, and sometimes who you are now just does not need the same things from each other. That is not failure. It took me a while to stop treating it like failure.

The thing about people you outgrow is that they do not leave you, not really. They just stop being in your present and start living somewhere deeper. In the habits you picked up from them without noticing. In the songs that immediately make you think of a specific night, a specific version of yourself, a specific kind of happiness you had that you are not sure you have found again in quite the same shape. I still use a phrase I learned from them. I still order the thing at a restaurant that they recommended years ago. They are woven into the person I became even if they are not around to see who that is now. I find that more comforting than sad, most of the time.

What I am still learning is that love does not need a container. It does not need constant contact to stay alive. You can love someone across years of silence. You can love someone whose life has taken a shape you barely recognize. You can love someone and also accept, without cruelty and without drama, that the two of you have become strangers who share a history. That is a real kind of love. It just looks different from the kind they write about.

I think we put so much pressure on closeness to be the proof of love that we panic when it fades, as if the fading means the whole thing was a lie. But the whole thing was not a lie. Those years were real. That laughter was real. The version of you that existed inside that friendship was real and she mattered and she was not wasted just because she is not who you are anymore. You were supposed to grow. You were supposed to become someone that version of you could not have imagined. And so were they. That is not the end of something beautiful. That is actually kind of what beautiful looks like when it is honest.

I have stopped trying to make peace with it in a way that resolves it, because I do not think it resolves. I think you just learn to carry it differently. A little lighter each year. With more grace and less grief, until it becomes one of those quiet, tender things you hold without needing to look at too often. A warmth in the background. Proof that you have been loved, and that you have loved back, and that both of those things counted even if the story did not go the way you thought it would when you were laughing at 2am thinking, this is one of the ones that lasts.

Maybe it did last. Just not in the way either of you expected.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

What 2025 Left Me With

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I began 2025 in survival mode.

I just wanted to get through the year without messing things up. Without disappointing myself. Without making choices I would later wish I could undo. I moved carefully, overthought most decisions, and held on to people and situations tighter than I probably should have.

At the start of the year, I believed stability meant keeping everything the same. Same people. Same routines. Same version of myself. I thought if I tried hard enough, adjusted enough, stayed patient enough, things would stay intact. I was afraid that too much change would mean losing control.

But life rarely waits for comfort.

Things shifted anyway. People came into my life in unexpected ways, and some left just as quietly. A few stayed and became anchors. Others were only meant for certain moments. For a long time, I took every shift personally, like I had failed at holding things together. It took me a while to understand that not every ending is a reflection of effort or worth. Some are simply direction.

I spent a lot of this year inside my own head. Overthinking every step. Questioning my pace. Wondering if I was growing at all or just passing time. There were days I felt alive and capable, and days I felt completely behind, like everyone else had a clearer map and I was still figuring out the basics.

There were moments where I genuinely believed I had not grown at all. That I was the same person, just more tired.

Somewhere along the way, that mindset began to crack. Not all at once. Just slowly enough for me to notice.

I realised how much energy I was giving to things that did not deserve it. Every comment, every shift in behaviour, every small disappointment stayed with me far longer than it should have. Being bothered by everything never changed the outcome. It only drained me. Letting things pass, even when it felt uncomfortable, gave me more peace than holding on ever did.

By the end of the year, I feel different in ways I didn’t think was possible.

I am more aware of myself, my patterns, my limits. I trust my judgment more. I no longer feel the need to explain every decision or seek reassurance for every choice. I know what deserves my energy and what does not.

I am learning how to protect my peace through better choices. Better boundaries. Better habits. Better use of my time. I am building discipline into my days in a way that feels sustainable, not punishing. Showing up for my goals consistently, while still allowing myself to enjoy life.

That balance mattered more than I expected.

This year also guided me back to the things that genuinely make me happy. Real connection. Books that feel like company. Music that understands emotions I cannot always name. Moments of joy without guilt. Laughing more. Living more. Letting life feel full, not just productive.

I am ending 2025 more self assured than I began it. Not because everything worked out perfectly, but because I know I will be okay even when it does not. I am calmer. More intentional. Less afraid of change. More accepting of what stays and what leaves.

I am not closing this year with conclusions. Just clarity.

As I step into 2026, I hope for steadiness more than speed. I hope to choose alignment over urgency and depth over noise. I want to keep building discipline without losing softness, ambition without losing joy.

I hope I continue investing in what makes life feel meaningful. The people who feel like home. The stories that slow me down. The music that stays with me long after it ends. The balance between becoming and being.

I want 2026 to be a year of trust. In myself. In my timing. In the fact that I do not need to have everything figured out to be moving forward.

That is what I am carrying with me.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

I Poured My Heart Into That Post. And Crickets.

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Let me tell you what a Sunday afternoon looks like for me.

I have been rearranging the flatlay for forty minutes. The decorative pieces aren’t sitting right, the bookmark keeps slipping out of frame, and the light was perfect twenty minutes ago but now it has shifted and I have missed it. I start over. I find the light again. I take thirty photos to get the one. I edit it until it feels honest, not over-filtered, not flat. Then I sit with a blank caption box and stare at it because I have so much to say and none of the words are landing right. I write it. Delete it. Write it again. Add a line. Remove two. Finally something that sounds like me. Something real. I post it with that small flutter of nervous hope that never quite goes away no matter how long you have been doing this.

And then I wait.

And then I refresh.

And then… not much.

A few likes. The same beautiful, loyal handful who always show up and who I am genuinely grateful for. But the reach is flat. The new eyes aren’t there. The saves, the shares, the sense that something landed the way you hoped it would. Just silence where connection was supposed to be.

Here’s what nobody really talks about: it’s not even about the numbers, not really. It’s about what the numbers represent. Every post is a small act of vulnerability. You took something you loved and you tried to translate that feeling into something shareable. You tried to say, here, this mattered to me, maybe it’ll matter to you too.

And when the algorithm just… doesn’t show it to anyone? It doesn’t feel like a technical glitch. It feels personal. Even when you know it isn’t.

And here is the thing about that silence. It is not neutral. It does not just sit there quietly. It talks. It says things like, maybe you’re not as good as you thought. It says, maybe the books you love are not the right books, the aesthetic is not the right aesthetic, the way you write is not the way people want to read. It picks at everything you were proud of an hour ago and makes it feel small.

That is its own kind of loneliness. And I don’t think we talk about it enough.

Because bookstagram was supposed to be the place where you finally didn’t feel alone in how much you love this. You spent years being the person who read too much, who cried over fictional characters, who wanted to talk about a book long after everyone else had moved on. And then you found this corner of the internet and it felt like coming home. People who got it. People who understood why you needed to sit with a story for days before you could even talk about it. A whole community built around the exact thing that had always made you feel like a little bit of an outsider everywhere else.

So when that community feels suddenly far away, when your posts go quiet and the connection dries up, it does not just feel like a bad metrics week. It feels like losing something. Like the door to that warm room is still there but it is not opening the way it used to and you do not know why and nobody is telling you why and you are starting to wonder if it was ever really open for you at all.

And then on top of the loneliness, there is the burnout. Which is sneaky, because it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It creeps in slowly, disguised as productivity. You start posting more to compensate for the dip. You try reels even though you are a photo person at heart because everyone says that’s what the algorithm wants right now. You study the “best time to post” guides and the “content pillars” advice and the “here’s why your engagement is down” threads until your head is full of strategy and there is barely any room left for the actual love of it. The thing that started all of this.

You pick up a book and for a split second you catch yourself thinking about whether it would make a good photo before you have even read the first page. And that thought stops you cold. Because that was never what this was supposed to be.

The burnout is not laziness. Please hear that. It is what happens when you have been giving and giving, creating and showing up and trying, and the return feels so disproportionate to the effort that your brain and your heart eventually start to protect themselves. It is exhaustion with a creative wound underneath it. And it is incredibly common in this space and almost never spoken about honestly.

I have had nights where I didn’t want to open the app at all. Not because I stopped loving books. Never that. But because the gap between how much I feel when I read and how little seems to translate when I post had gotten so wide it just felt pointless. And feeling pointless about something you love is one of the worst feelings there is.

I have scrolled past accounts with half the effort and twice the reach and felt something uncomfortable move through me that I am not proud of. Not quite jealousy, not quite resentment, something more tangled than both. A kind of confusion about what is actually being rewarded here and why it does not seem to be sincerity or depth or the kind of slow, careful love of literature that drew most of us to this in the first place.

I have posted something I was genuinely proud of and watched it get twelve likes, then posted something throwaway and watched it perform fine, and felt my own instincts start to waver. Start to wonder if I should just make the content that performs instead of the content that means something to me. That is a dangerous road. That is where you lose the plot entirely. That is where you stop being a reader who creates and start being a content machine who occasionally reads.

And I refuse to become that.

Even on the weeks when it would be so much easier to just give in to it.

So where does that leave us?

Honestly, I don’t have a clean answer. I am still in it, same as you. Some weeks the connection comes back and someone leaves a comment that makes me feel seen in a way no like count ever could and I remember exactly why I do this. Some weeks the silence is just loud and I have to sit with it and not let it rewrite the story of why I started.

But I have been trying to hold onto something when I can see clearly: the work was never hollow. That caption I rewrote four times? It was real. That hour spent on the flatlay? It came from genuine love. The algorithm didn’t see it but I made it. And the two or three people who did find it, who commented something beyond an emoji, who sent a DM saying oh my god I felt the same way about that ending — those moments are so disproportionately full compared to the silence around them.

Two or three people is not nothing. Two or three people is someone’s commute becoming bearable because you told them what to read next. Someone picking up a book they would have walked past. Someone feeling less alone in what they are going through because you were honest about what a story did to you. That is not a consolation prize. That is actually the whole point.

Getting back to that truth is not easy and it is not instant. Some days I have to remind myself of it more than once. But I think the way through the burnout, the loneliness, the silence, is not to post more or try harder or crack some code. It is to read something this week just for yourself with zero intention of posting about it. To write a caption because you have something to say, not because the engagement window is open. To reach out to five accounts you genuinely love and just tell them so, with nothing to gain from it.

The community is still there. It is quieter than it used to be, more scattered, harder to find. But it is there. And so is the love that brought you here.

if you’re feeling the exhaustion, the quiet after the post, the creeping doubt — you’re not failing. You’re just human, making something real in a space that wasn’t built to reward that.

Keep going. Not because the numbers will definitely turn around, but because you are a person who loves books deeply and that is worth something that no dashboard can measure. You were that person before the account and you will be that person long after. Do not let a bad month make you forget that.

————

If this hit close to home, please share it with someone who needs to read it today. And if you are in the thick of this right now, I genuinely want to hear from you. Leave a comment. Send a DM. Let’s be in it together instead of suffering through it alone.

— Written at midnight with too many feelings and a book I haven’t posted about yet.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

If We Were Happy All The Time, We Wouldn’t Understand Happiness

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There is a specific kind of webinar attendee and I am embarrassed to tell you that I am exactly that kind. The kind who signs up with the best intentions, joins five minutes late, spends the first ten convincing themselves that having the window open is basically the same as listening, and then spends the rest of it existing somewhere between present and completely elsewhere. You know the one. You might be the one.

And yet. In the middle of one of those half-attended, half-forgotten afternoons, something found me anyway. Someone from the audience asked a question I don’t even remember, and the speaker replied with a single line that made me sit up straight and put down whatever I was doing and just stay with it for a moment.

“If we were happy all the time, we wouldn’t understand happiness.”

I opened my notes app immediately, the way you lunge for something before a wave carries it away, and typed it out. Then I closed the app. Then I opened it again just to make sure it was still there. It was. It is. It has been sitting there for months now, this little line, waiting for me to finally figure out what to do with it.

I think the reason it stopped me so completely is that it sounds simple but it isn’t. It sounds like something you’d find on a motivational poster next to a picture of a mountain, and yet the more you turn it over the more it reveals something almost uncomfortably true about the way we are built, about the way feeling anything at all actually works.

Happiness, real happiness, the kind that settles into your chest and stays there for a while, has always come to me after something. Not because the universe is dramatic and insists on a plot arc, though it does sometimes seem suspiciously fond of one, but because that is just the nature of feeling. Feeling is comparative. It is always measuring itself against what came before. Joy that arrives on an ordinary unremarkable day is gentle and sweet and easy to miss. But joy that arrives after a season of things being hard, after uncertainty, after loss, after the specific exhaustion of carrying something heavy for too long, that joy has edges to it. It has texture. You feel it in a way that is almost physical, like finally exhaling after holding your breath without realizing you were holding it.

I think about this and I think about night skies. You cannot see stars in the middle of the afternoon no matter how hard you look. They are there, they have always been there, burning away quietly in the middle of all that blue, but the light is too loud and the sky is too full and there is simply no room for them to show up. It takes darkness. It takes the absence of all that noise before they can finally come forward and be seen.

I wonder sometimes what we would be like if sadness were edited out of us entirely. If someone offered us a life with all the difficult parts removed, no grief, no longing, no 3am variety of thoughts that sit on your chest uninvited, would we take it? I think most of us would say yes without blinking. And I understand that. The hard parts are hard. They do not feel poetic when you are inside them. They feel like too much. But I think in saying yes, we would be agreeing to something else too, which is a life where happiness never quite lands. Where it hovers just above the surface of you, pleasant but weightless, never really sinking in. A life where you are fine, perpetually, boringly, unmemorably fine.

And fine is not what we are here for.

There is a version of happiness I have felt only a handful of times in my life and it is the one I am most grateful for. It is the kind that sneaks up on you in the most ordinary moments, sitting somewhere unremarkable, doing nothing especially significant, and you look up and realize quietly, almost shyly, that you are okay. That things are okay. Not perfect, not fixed, not resolved, but okay in a way that feels like enough, like more than enough actually, like something worth noticing. And when I trace that feeling back, really trace it, it always has roots in something difficult. It is always standing on the ground that the hard times made.

So here is what I think the speaker meant, or at least what I have decided they meant, which is essentially the same thing at this point. Happiness is not a destination you arrive at and stay. It is not a setting you reach and lock in. It is something that keeps revealing itself to you in the spaces between other things, something that needs the contrast to have any meaning at all. To be felt at all. The dark is not the enemy of the light. It is the thing that makes the light visible.

That speaker probably does not remember saying it. It was one answer among many, just a sentence they let go of and moved on from. They will never know that someone on the other side of a screen was only half there and then suddenly, unexpectedly, all the way there.

But that is the thing about truth. It does not wait for you to be ready. It does not schedule itself for a convenient moment when you are paying full attention and sitting up straight and prepared to receive something significant. It finds you in the in-between. In the half-attended afternoons and the idle scrolling and the moments when your guard is down and your notes app is two taps away.

It finds you exactly when it needs to, and it stays, quiet and patient, until you are finally ready to sit down and write about it.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Loving A Creative Dream Even When It’s Hard

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There is a specific kind of dream that doesn’t always look big from the outside, but it takes up a lot of space inside you.

The kind that keeps returning to you no matter how busy life gets. The kind that sits somewhere in the background of your mind while you’re doing ordinary things. Sometimes it is writing. Sometimes it is painting, dancing, singing, photographing, designing, building something from nothing. It can look different for everyone, but the feeling behind it is often the same.

You just love it.

That love is the reason you keep showing up for it, even when it’s hard to explain to people why it matters so much.

For me, a big part of that dream has lived inside the world of books and creativity online. Bookstagram became one of the places where I started sharing that side of myself. What began as simply talking about books slowly grew into something that felt more personal, more creative, and more meaningful than I expected.

But when you start building something creative, you also start seeing a different side of things.

There have been people who genuinely believed this space was not worth staying in. People who told me that it drains your time, your energy, your effort, and gives almost nothing back in return. They said it like a practical truth, like they were simply pointing out reality.

And sometimes those words stay with you longer than you want them to.

Because when you care deeply about something creative, you are already putting a vulnerable part of yourself out into the world. You are sharing your taste, your voice, your thoughts, your effort. So when someone questions it or doubts it, it doesn’t just feel like criticism of an activity. It feels personal.

There have been moments when people doubted what I was doing. Moments where it felt like others were measuring the value of it and deciding it didn’t really amount to much. There were times when the effort I put in felt invisible, like I was pouring hours of thought and care into something that most people would scroll past in seconds.

That kind of thing can slowly wear on you if you let it.

But at the same time, there have also been people who did the opposite. People who supported me in ways that felt genuine and warm. People who cheered for me, encouraged me, believed in what I was creating. Sometimes it was just a thoughtful message or someone telling me they enjoyed my posts, but those moments had a way of lighting up the journey again.

Support like that reminds you that your work is reaching someone.

Still, the most important shift happened when I stopped waiting for the outside world to decide whether my dream was worth continuing.

I started learning how to stand beside myself.

Because when you are building something creative, you cannot depend only on applause to keep going. Applause comes and goes. People’s attention moves quickly. But your relationship with your dream stays with you every single day.

So I learned how to trust my own reasons for being here.

To remind myself that I started this because I love books, creativity, and the feeling of sharing something meaningful. I stayed on days when the motivation felt thin. I kept showing up even when things felt slow or uncertain.

And slowly I realized something very simple but very powerful.

If you want a creative dream to survive, you have to be the person who stands up for it.

You have to believe in it even when others don’t fully understand it. You have to keep nurturing it even when the results are quiet. You have to remind yourself why it matters to you in the first place.

Because creative dreams are fragile in the beginning. They grow slowly, often in ways that are invisible to everyone else.

And this is not just about bookstagram or content creation.

This is about the person who stays up late practicing dance steps because they love how movement feels in their body. The person who sings in their room and dreams about one day sharing their voice with the world. The artist who keeps sketching even when their work doesn’t get noticed yet. The writer who fills pages because stories refuse to stay inside their head.

All of these dreams live in that same space inside a person.

If you have one of those dreams, you probably know how complicated the journey can feel. Some days you feel full of excitement and possibility. Other days you wonder if you are asking too much from yourself by holding onto it.

But here is the truth I keep returning to.

The world will always have opinions about what is worth pursuing and what isn’t. People will always try to place value on things based on how quickly they succeed or how visible they are.

Your dream cannot survive if you let those opinions decide its fate.

It survives because you keep choosing it.

You keep returning to it even when it feels uncertain. You keep working on it even when progress feels slow. You keep believing in it long enough for it to grow into something stronger.

And if you are someone who carries a creative dream inside your heart, I want you to know something very clearly.

I see you.

I see the effort you pour into things that others may overlook. I see the dedication it takes to keep practicing, creating, improving, and dreaming at the same time. I see the courage it takes to believe in something that doesn’t always come with immediate rewards.

That kind of commitment deserves respect.

Creative dreams are rarely easy paths. They ask for patience, resilience, and a lot of self belief. They ask you to stay when leaving would be simpler.

But they also give you something deeply beautiful in return.

They give you a sense that you are living honestly with the part of yourself that loves to create.

So if your dream feels small right now, if the road ahead feels uncertain, if you are wondering whether it is worth holding onto, I hope you give it another chance.

Stay with it.

Keep learning. Keep growing. Keep showing up for it.

Because sometimes the person who makes a dream real is simply the one who refused to walk away from it.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika