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. Something you’ll tell people at parties for the next ten years. And you’re supposed to pick it while you’re still figuring out basic things about yourself, like whether you’re actually ambitious or just anxious and calling it ambition, whether you like the job or just like being good at something, whether the version of success you’re chasing is even yours or if you inherited it from a parent or a group chat or some influencer’s morning routine.

You’re supposed to fall in love too, somewhere in the middle of all that. Not the easy kind either. The kind where you have to keep choosing someone on the boring Tuesdays, not just the nice dinner ones. Where you have to let yourself be known, actually known, the unfiltered version, and hope that doesn’t scare them off. And sometimes it does. And you survive that too, somehow, even when you were sure you wouldn’t.

You’re supposed to let go of things. People who said they’d stay and didn’t. Friendships that expired without either of you saying it out loud. Versions of your own future that you’d already started decorating in your head, a certain apartment, a certain job title, a certain someone, and then one day you have to just close that tab and grieve something that never technically existed.

You’re supposed to move, maybe. Pack your whole life into boxes that never quite fit in the car, land somewhere new where you don’t know which grocery store is good or which train gets you home faster, and call it home before it feels anything like one. You’re supposed to build an entire life out of guesses. Nobody hands you a blueprint. You’re just doing the best impression of someone who knows what they’re doing.

And then you’re supposed to start over. Sometimes because you wanted to. Sometimes because everything just fell apart in that unremarkable way where there’s no single moment you can point to, it just slowly stopped working, and one day you woke up and knew you couldn’t keep living like that.

And through all of this, you’re supposed to keep going. Even on the days you’re tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. The kind of tired where you’ve done everything right and still feel behind. Where you smile through the small talk and then sit in your car for ten minutes before you can actually drive home.

Here’s the part that gets me though. While all of this is happening, while you’re being pulled in every direction at once, everyone around you has an opinion about who you should become. Your parents have a version of you they’re hoping for. Your friends compare their timeline to yours without meaning to. Even strangers on your phone seem to have decided what your twenties, your thirties, your whole becoming should look like. Everyone’s got advice. Everyone’s got a five step plan. Everyone knows exactly what you should be doing with your one life.

But almost nobody ever stops and asks what you actually want.

Not what looks impressive. Not what would make a good caption. Not what your family would brag about at dinner. What you want, honestly, if nobody else was in the room to witness the answer.

So ask yourself that. Actually ask. And then sit there long enough to hear the answer, because it won’t come immediately, it never does, it usually shows up late at night or on a long drive or in the middle of doing something completely unrelated.

Take the trip you keep talking yourself out of because the timing’s never perfect and it never will be. Change your mind, even if you already told everyone your plan, even if it makes you look indecisive, because deciding again with more information isn’t failure, it’s just being honest with yourself. Spend actual time alone. Not the kind where you’re alone in the room but still scrolling next to yourself, still performing for an audience that isn’t even there. I mean the kind of alone where it’s just you and your thoughts and it’s uncomfortable at first and then it isn’t. Start something just because you want to, with no five year plan attached to it, no metrics, nothing to prove, just because some small part of you lit up at the idea of it. Leave what stopped feeling like home a long time ago. A job you’ve outgrown. A city that never quite fit right. A relationship you’re maintaining out of habit instead of love. A version of yourself everyone else prefers but that you don’t recognize anymore.

You’re going to get some of it wrong. You’ll pick safe when you meant to pick brave. You’ll stay too long in something you should’ve left months ago. You’ll leave something too soon out of fear dressed up as clarity. That’s allowed. Nobody’s doing this cleanly. Anyone who tells you they had it figured out the whole time is either lying or forgetting the parts that didn’t make it into the story.

But somewhere along the way, maybe not this year, maybe not for a while, you’re going to look back and realize that most of your life up to that point was spent becoming who everyone else needed. The reliable one. The one who always shows up. The one who adjusts, adapts, absorbs, figures it out, makes it work, makes everyone comfortable.

And that person is worth something, genuinely. But don’t let them be the only person you ever build.

Don’t forget to also become someone you’d actually want to live with. Someone whose own company feels good, not just tolerable. Someone you’d choose to sit across from on a quiet night with nothing planned. Someone you respect not for what they achieved but for how they treated themselves while trying to figure it all out.

The world’s going to keep asking things of you. It doesn’t stop, not really. But every once in a while, in between all of it, ask yourself something back.

*****

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

~ Devika

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

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?

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

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