It’s mid-January 2023, and I’m walking my dog.

A question has been on my mind ever since I quit my job and sent my boy to college. Why am I living here? In the suburbs, all by myself, in a four-bedroom house among families and perfectly manicured lawns.

It’s not me. I know this now. I knew it then, too, when we first bought the house as a perfect family: my then-husband, my son, and me. I wanted my boy to have a picket-fence life, where he could ride his bike freely and go to school with the neighborhood kids.

Those days are over. Time to move on. I need somewhere with more energy. More friction. More opportunity for the unpredictable.

My son calls me from college every day or two, in his filler times: walking between classes, running an errand, grabbing food. I love that he remembers me. He tells me what’s going on in his life. I’m sure he’s holding back a few details, and I’m glad he does. I talk to him as my equal. I share what I’m living too.

When he calls today, I tell him what’s on my mind.

“I think it’s time for me to downsize and move,” I say. “Maybe LA. Or New York, closer to you.”

He breaks off to say hi to someone, then comes back. “Mm-hm.”

“I’ll still keep a room for you, and for the stuff you want.” The dog tugs toward the park gazebo. “It’s your home too. I want you to have a say.”

“Ma,” he says. “This is your life. As long as I can see my friends …”

I interrupt: “I’ll always make room for that.”

“Then you do you.”

I haven’t always been free to choose my own life.

Until my early twenties, my mother decided for me. Asking her for what I wanted felt like pushing against her will. Later, my first husband decided. I’d push back, but the big decisions rested with him. Asking for my way came across as nagging. He sounded rational and I sounded unreasonable.

I can now see the bargain I made again and again to belong: I’ll become what you need, and in return, you’ll want me.

During my second marriage, I had authority but took on most of the responsibility. The bargain didn’t end. It just changed currency. I worked hard at home and in my career, playing every role I could to make things comfortable for the household.

My love became my hard work. My hard work preserved our family bond. But it was costing me my ability to receive love. My ability to feel like a woman. And my ability to be vulnerable.

I couldn’t see that cost. After my second marriage ended, a friend sent me to an acupuncturist who, she said, was like Mother Earth. The acupuncturist took one look at my tongue and said, “Your yin is depleted. You’ve given too much.”

I didn’t realize I’d been giving. I thought I was succeeding.

My body knew what I did not.

Recently I tried an exercise I now offer others: plot the people and places you’ve tried to belong to across your life, and ask of each one: was I evolving or eroding pieces of me?

When I mapped my own, I instinctively plotted the places where I’d also built my identity: my relationships, schools, career. I suspect most of us do. The first thing I noticed was how much of where I tried to belong actually eroded me.

Some of the lowest points on my plot line were things I’d counted as successes: the architecture degree, the marriage everyone approved of, the vice president title. I was looking for belonging in many places that required me to give myself away. But you cannot earn belonging by giving yourself away.

On the other hand, my friendships were with me through all of it, and they were strong. But I never had to prove myself in them, so I didn’t think to count them on my plot line.

My aha was seeing where the map begins and ends. In childhood, I belonged through my friends and my school. And now, at the far right, the line rises to the same place: people and education. What lifts me are the places where learning aligns with my interests and the people who made room for me.

So what is belonging, when you stop trying to earn it?

I’m still figuring it out. But I know what it feels like now, because I keep finding it.

It’s my son on the phone between classes, saying “you do you.” I give him a voice, never a veto, and he hands the choice back to me.

It’s an artist who read something I’d written and emailed to ask if we could talk. She found me through a sentence I’d written that made her feel less alone. Today we’re building something together that neither of us could make by ourselves.

It’s the people who have found me over the past two years. Women and men who share pieces of my history, my interests, my convictions. I no longer arrive wondering whether I’m good enough for them. We meet as equals.

Belonging isn’t the same as being accepted. It wants us whole, and leaves us free to become who we are. I haven’t stopped being restless or driven. Nor have I stopped wanting to be loved. I’m simply learning not to lose myself in the process.

I live in Los Angeles now, and I walk into new rooms alone all the time. But I’m never really alone. I walk in with more than myself: my well-wishers, their strengths and their gifts. Some of them I see often. Some I rarely see at all. A few have become a feeling that flows in me.

There is no bargain anymore. Only a possibility: I’ll become who I am, and you will find me.

If you’d like to plot your own story of belonging, the worksheet is here.

I am a duck.

Butt out in one direction and tummy out the other. I exaggerate. But there it is.

I am a duck.

My first ever appointment with a physical therapist and this is the pronouncement. He doesn’t exactly say the word. He says “swayback,” but when I google it later, duck is the posture I recognize as my own.

My therapist asks me to stand up the way I normally do. He stands before me, then behind me, assessing my alignment. I am not quite sure how to hold my shoulders. Images of me as a hunched, dopey, mopey kid come to mind.

“Bend forward,” he says. “Now backward.” Then to the sides. I tilt as instructed, proud of my range of motion.

“My sore back does not keep me from being mobile,” I say. “I am able to do everything. I just feel like I have a monkey on my back all the time, especially when I sleep.”

There is a tiny doggy curled up silently on top of a crate just beyond his shoulder. It’s fast asleep on a soft pillow. My therapist doesn’t acknowledge the aww, so cute expression I have on my face. He’s scrutinizing me.

“I’ve had this sore back for over two years now,” I offer. I tell him that it feels a little better after a gym workout. “And also with human touch,” I say, a bit embarrassed as I do.

He does not flinch. “You’re hypermobile.”

I’ve heard this before. During my two hundred and fifty-plus consecutive days of yoga, my teacher had said this about my knees. But I like my stretchiness. It makes me better at all the bendy stuff.

I sit down and then effortlessly fold up into a cross-legged position.

“How long do you sit at a time?” he asks.

“I can sit for three hours. I work all day—ten, sometimes twelve hours,” I tell him.

“That’s not what I asked. How often do you get up?”

He goes on to tell me about the lifestyle changes I need to make.

“I’ve always loved how flexible I am,” I say, grinning widely. “But I’m older now.”

“I see your age on your chart,” he says. “I am older than you.”

He continues with a slight smile, “I want you to be less flexible, more rigid.”

Ooooh, I like this idea.

“No more stretching?” I ask.

“No more stretching,” he confirms.

That night, after ages, I go out for a beer and karaoke. I belt out Bitch with my hair down and my body rocking. My gang of newly acquired friends video it. When I finally get to bed, however, that damned monkey makes it hard to sleep.

The next morning, evidence of my performance is sent around by group chat. I cringe at the duck and instinctively pull my tailbone straight.

I set to work per my therapist’s orders. Contorting this way and that, I correct my desk arrangement, making sure to hide computer wires as I go. I hate when wires show.

I make plans to see someone I care for. I offer to fly halfway, then on second thought, change my mind. Maybe he’ll come to me.

In the evening, I go mattress shopping. I’m excited to get rid of the old mattress, the one I once shared with my ex-blech-husband.

“Mattresses last up to nine years, if you flip them,” my physical therapist had told me. Mine is nine. I hardly flipped it.

I lie down in swanky showrooms with strangers and sales reps chattering around me. Testing memory foam versus hybrids. Learning mattress vocabulary. Looking for what will hold me now. I close my eyes and pretend I have privacy. I find the one that feels just right.

My sore muscles weep into it and sing hallelujah.

The Structure of Support

Many of us are proud of how far we can bend: for work, for the people we love, for whatever is asked of us. Flexibility looks like strength, so we keep stretching, and we don’t notice the strain until it has settled in.

Support begins with a stop. Rigidity here doesn’t mean becoming hard. It means knowing where we end, so that something can hold us. Once we make room for it, we can finally rest.

---

For your own reflection:

Where do you bend past your natural stop and call it strength?

What does that bending cost you that you only feel later?

Can you find where you stop, and let that hold you?

“If you want to destroy the career of an incompetent person high up in a role, give him all the power of that role. He will perish in months if not in weeks.”

A friend shared this anecdote with me. It was said to him at an investors’ dinner party. It got me thinking. What kind of power is this—one that can undo the very person who wields it?

I think of it as conferred power: power that comes through a position, a title, class, wealth, or institutional access. It can grant authority, resources, protection, and a wider field of influence. But it cannot, on its own, give us the substance to put any of it to meaningful use.

What if we looked at power from another angle?

Instead of asking, “Do I have power?” what if we asked, “What can I power?”

I now see power as the agency to act and put something into motion. In physics, power is the rate at which work gets done—the rate at which energy is transferred.

I can put energy behind something and sustain it over time. I can power my body, my ideas, my creativity, my future, my dreams.

What is the substance from which we power things? Some of it comes from competence: our knowledge, wisdom, ambition, resourcefulness. Some of it comes from aliveness: our curiosity, humor, playfulness, joy. They are the things that make us capable, and the things that make us feel most ourselves.

The more we put that substance to work, the more we can build upon it.

Consider the chambered nautilus. What it builds becomes part of what carries it. As it grows, it builds a new chamber, larger than the last, then leaves the earlier chambers behind. Those chambers do not become useless. They become part of the structure that helps the animal regulate its buoyancy as it carries more of itself forward.

I find something extraordinary in that. What we build through the exercise of power—skill, discernment, courage, trust, a body of work—can increase our capacity to exercise it again. Growth comes from building the capacity to carry what comes next.

For two decades I prioritized conferred power. I was good at it. I accumulated titles, responsibilities, recognition. But somewhere along the way, I mistook those things for the source of my power. I had forgotten how much I could already do without them.

I have since realized that I have been powering things all my life. I just didn’t know I was.

“Can Sunaina come play?”

This was the after-school refrain from my friends. I was the one who created the make-believe worlds for them, making room for them to pretend and discover their own fun. I was making possibility from what I had: imagination, a love of stories, a mind inclined to structure, and, yes, more television than I might now admit.

At twelve, I was put down a grade when I moved to India from the U.S. and started seventh grade. I learned Hindi from scratch and earned a national merit in mathematics. I called it catching up. But I was doing something else: drawing on my mind, discipline, will, and hunger to learn to make a place for myself inside unfamiliar circumstances.

Years later, in my early twenties, I moved alone to Chicago with nothing but an intention.

“What’s the greatest risk you’ve ever taken?” my boyfriend had asked.

“Nothing,” I’d said. “I don’t take risks.”

“So you’re telling me you moved here with no job, no prospects, no money, and you don’t see that as a risk?” He was surprised.

I remember feeling surprised too. Yes, I guess it was a risk on paper. But not to me. I was not reckless. I was building a future from the materials I had: an education, ambition, roots, a dream, and the willingness to begin before the evidence arrived.

I had never thought of any of this as power. I was simply doing what I needed to do, with what I had.

We have all built things.
We have moved things.
We have made room for other people.

We have called it coping. Or luck. Or simply what had to be done.

That was power. Not the kind you hold. The kind you do.

That is Beautiful Power to me: the agency to build what you believe in from who you are, not who you are told to be. It is putting the substance of who we are to work in a chosen direction, over time.

What I have built since carries no title worth the name. I carry less conferred power now than I ever have. But I understand my own power better than I ever did.

Conferred power can amplify what we are already capable of doing. It is not the source of that capacity.

Perhaps that is what I most want you to see: you have been making, moving, carrying, and creating possibility all along—even before you had language for it.

The question is not whether you have power.

It is this:

What will you power now?

Her humming is lilting yet clear and strong. We all know the shape of the tune. Bonnie smiles, leans back, her humming giving way to words … “whisper, I love you” … We lean forward, caught in her reverie, swaying in the moment. Together in one breath, all seven of us join in the chorus, “dream a little dream of me.”

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” someone says.

Bonnie looks around and holds up the drawing she’s made of her memory—a few feathery line strokes framing patches of sandy blue tones.

“Kanpai!” I say as the others chime in. We clink our tasting glasses and laugh.

Everyone is gathered around a long dining table in a cozy living space. It’s like a playhouse on a hillside, a large oak tree canopying the window. Drawing paper, crayons and markers of all colors are strewn across a floral tablecloth. I’ve also laid out an array of essential oils to jog the senses—scents of fruits and flowers. Like a scratch and sniff sticker collection. There is a bottle of junmai sake sitting before me. Three other kinds of sake sit ready in the kitchen. I cannot wait to share them all.

I brought this group of mostly strangers together. They arrive curious yet unsure of what to expect.

“I don’t really like sake,” Bonnie says during her intro to the group. She looks at me a little apologetically, explaining how she used to watch her late husband sip sake when they went out for sushi. Then Tino shares that he really only drinks beer.

“I don’t draw,” says another.

A worry flashes through me. Is this tasting too creative? What if it all falls flat?

“Sake is what you make of it,” I tell them. “There’s nothing defined. No two are alike. You get to decide. If you tell me that you taste old rubber tires, then that’s what is true for you.”

I pour the first sake, one that smells like apples.

“Swirl,” I say.

They stick their noses into their glasses the way I do. “What do you smell?” I ask. “Remember, we’re not discussing it. We’re living with it.”

The woman who “cannot draw” picks up a rich red crayon and begins. Another madly scribbles swirly lines across a blank page. Everyone goes quiet. Pens and pencils scratch at blank paper.

“What if I smell nothing?” someone asks. “Go with nothing then,” I say.

Tino chooses a single lead pencil. He draws in detail and tells us his story. He’s a child in the back seat of his father’s car, driving from Germany to Italy to meet family. He is nervous in that back seat, worried that his father is driving too fast. He knows his father works hard and wants to relax. He is happy to be there yet not entirely comfortable. “I smell tobacco, and aftershave,” he says. “And tension.”

“You got all that from a sip of sake?” I ask. The others chime in, one with a joke, another adds their own memory. We continue in our circle.

Then Bonnie begins to hum and smile.

“The sake smelled like honey and the color reminded me of wheat.”

“Ohhh!” we say in unison.

We taste another, this one warmed. “Draw superpowers,” I say. With more flourish, bold markers and bright sketches come to life. We weave them spontaneously into a story.

Once upon a time, there was a giant Godzilla who came out of the ocean for some sushi. He slipped on a banana peel and fell on the beach where everyone was throwing coconuts and sipping piña coladas. He was so big that when he fell, there was a tsunami. The tsunami became a big blob, extinguishing all light in the world. The goddess of electric current joined with the goddess of love to shoot lightning bolts. This turned the big blob back into water, ending all drought and saving the world.

“Kanpai!” we cheer.

They call me the Sake Lady now. The one with the crazy idea.

I hang their superpowers together on the mantelpiece in the living room. The music plays on.

THE STRUCTURE OF IMAGINATION

To make something is to be seen, and doubt tends to arrive before the making does. But imagination doesn’t begin with the doubt. It begins with passion — one person’s, taken up so fully that the room fills with it and doubt has nowhere left to stand. In that cleared room, imagination wakes. We make what we didn’t know we had in us, and surprise each other with it. And what we make together, we briefly belong to.

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For your own reflection:

• When has your passion for something spilled over and pulled others in?

• When have you surprised yourself—made something you didn’t know you had in you—because you let doubt go?

• When has your passion caught on, cleared someone else’s doubt, and pulled them in?

I can’t believe this is my place. The door itself is so large. I’m like Jack who just found a castle at the top of a beanstalk. Only this is my house. All mine.

Inside, the foyer smells musty. It’s not an enormous space but it is so tall. I tilt my head way back to see how far the winding staircase goes. I squint a little. Light filters in from a skylight well above me. Walking ahead, I enter a grand drawing room. Windows stretch throughout and there’s a garden just beyond. I’m imagining what could be done with this space. Every room leads to another. It’s a maze of discovery.

I remind myself again. This is my house.

There’s a small, wood-slatted door at the far side of a very long lounge. It’s a minute-long walk just to get to it. I crouch down, open the door wide, and peer into a deeply dark crawl space. A cellar of sorts. Filled with antique furniture, mostly covered with plastic tarps and cobwebs. I shiver. This isn’t a space I want to disturb. I’ll live with it like it’s not there.

I return to the foyer. Only now I encounter a rather imposing tree growing straight through the spiral staircase. Straight up to the skylight. Dust is suspended in the streaming light.

I awaken, still wrapped in the aura of my dream. It’s an everyday Saturday. My dog sits beside me, ready for his morning constitutional. I pull on my t-shirt and jeans.

Drip, drip, drip. Drip, drip, drip.

Please don’t be in my apartment, I beg. Not again.

But it is. For the third time. In the same place. I open my hall closet. The washer and dryer are there, quietly accepting the beginnings of another leak. Water droplets seep through the ceiling, smacking themselves onto the washing machine with a metallic clang, tracing their way down its side all the way to my stone-tiled floor.

The drip is not too slow. Not too fast. It’s juuuuuust right. Nothing to panic about. I call the building manager. He’ll take control. I throw a towel over the puddle, call for my dog, and go on with my day.

Still, I’m dreading the drill. Weeks of repairs and calls to coordinate. At least I’ll get a thorough house cleaning out of it, I tell myself.

“Better if you move out for a few days,” my management company tells me. “The fumes from the treatment will be strong. I want you to be comfortable.”

They kindly set me up in an Airbnb. A nice townhome at the intersection of two busy roads. A gas station and a car wash for my neighbors. A short drive in the dark and three keypad entries later, I pull my dog into our new temporary quarters. Straight ahead are stairs to the two floors above. I remove my shoes, noticing the dust that coats my bare feet. It’s neat here, but unlived in.

At home, I am surrounded by myself and I love it. I have my belongings, my neighbors, the familiar streets. I wonder how this place might have changed with a companion by my side. Maybe more like a vacation than an exile.

I remember my old house. The one I used to own. I was standing at the stove, cooking a fragrant, spicy daal, quietly stirring the pot. I felt a drop. It wet my toe. Then another. I looked up. The ceiling was caving in. The culprit: a sewage leak from the toilet above. It had been collecting in the false ceiling over a lifetime. The ceiling had to be ripped out. Like my marriage.

Now I stand here as my dog bounds about, like a five-year-old kid discovering a secret hideout. I share his sentiment only slightly, more plagued by the question of which bedroom I should take. There are three.

I choose the townhome’s master bedroom, two floors up. This keeps my little nest higher above the street. I shall contain myself there. From the window, I can see directly into a laundry room. There is a man starting a load, his dirty clothes piled up high in a hamper. The moon is above us. Beautiful over LA’s palms.

I realize there’s yet another flight of stairs. I walk up expecting a rooftop but a sign on the door tells me “no access.” I can feel the intense heat from the day emanating from the other side. I turn around.

My dog is following me everywhere, fascinated by the stairs yet not willing to take them without me.

“Do you want to go potty?” I ask. He says nothing but I take that as a yes. He pees contentedly on a tree as though he’s known it all his life. There’s a terribly rotten smell on a side street. I quickly walk past what’s likely a dead squirrel. A family calls to my dog, waving brightly from their third floor balcony.

Five days pass. Every time I go downstairs, I try to carry whatever needs to go with me. Holding my coffee cup and cereal bowl, I think, What if I slip? What if I go hurtling down these steps?

I’d be a tree falling in a forest. And my cell phone would be two floors above.

Come Friday, I relent and call an old boyfriend. He knows companionlessness too. I want to remember what it felt like to have a someone. It felt good knowing there was fondness for me. We planned a trip together.

Whether it actually happens is yet to be seen.

THE STRUCTURE OF CONTAINMENT

Containment begins as self-possession: a world of my own, kept just so, where I’m surrounded by myself and I love it. Holding ourselves in can feel like both safety and autonomy—nothing gets in to flood us. But what we seal off doesn’t leave. It collects out of sight, the way a leak gathers in a false ceiling over a lifetime, until it caves. And a life kept fully contained can start to feel like a tree falling in a forest: self-sufficient, and unheard.

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For your own reflection:

• What do you keep sealed off and live around—a room, a grief, a need—while telling yourself it isn’t there?

• Where has staying self-contained kept you safe, and where has it kept you alone? Can you still tell the two apart?

• What would it take to let someone in without feeling like the ceiling might cave?

She already said yes.

I’d sent her a text. “I need a mentor now. Thought of you.”

We didn’t know each other well. But in the two times we had spoken, more than a year ago, we had vibed.

Promptly came her reply, “Looking forward to it.”

I was grateful. This is a woman I respect. Someone enterprising who inquires about truth, beauty, and courage while instinctively building a world of her own design.

During our first meeting, I wanted her to understand the substance of me. I told her about my ideas, my pursuits, and my ambition. I told her why it all matters and how it was inherent to my life.

She gently interrupted.

“You don’t need to explain so much.”

And then, “Talk as if it already is. Be the company owner that you already are.”

She was right. I knew the experience I carried and the meaning I could generate. I had the capacity to turn ideas into reality. Yet somehow I hadn’t been able to pull all of it toward me and inhabit it at once.

I had been so focused on the power I was reaching for that I hadn’t recognized the substance I was reaching from.

Our metaphors for power direct us almost exclusively upward. We climb ladders. Rise through the ranks. Break ceilings. Scale new heights.

We defy gravity.

There is good reason for this. The gravity being defied is often the system itself: the hardened structures, conventions, and expectations that make some forms of movement harder than others.

To defy gravity is to move against a field that was not organized for your ascent.

But resistance presents its own question. If I define my movement entirely in relation to the force I am resisting, whose gravity is still determining my direction?

The system has gravity. But so do I.

Everything with mass produces a gravitational field. A speck of dust, an apple, a bird, a boulder, a human being. Gravity is not reserved for celestial objects or external systems alone.

I see mass as the accumulating substance of who we are. It is our selfhood: our convictions, dreams, experiences, knowledge, personality, imagination, creations, choices. When we allow the substance of who we are to carry its own weight in the world, we too become gravitational.

The question is not how to resist other fields. It is how to orient among them without surrendering our own center. When another field becomes our center, we collapse into it.

A planet doesn’t perform gravity. It doesn’t persuade another object that it has mass. It shapes the field around it simply by virtue of being there.

We have a word for something like this in human beings: gravitas. From the Latin gravis, meaning heavy or weighty, gravitas signifies seriousness, dignity and importance. Someone with gravitas does not merely hold authority; their words matter, their judgment matters, their presence changes the room.

Perhaps we have been too narrow about what is allowed to constitute that weight. What if gravitas need not come only from heavy things? What if dreams carried more weight? Imagination? Playfulness? Creativity?

There is another architecture of power.

Selfhood is mass. Mass creates a field. We move through fields, ours meeting others. What we move, we answer for.

Ambition is not the enemy of gravity. Being grounded and going somewhere are not opposites. The Earth orbits the sun. It also turns on its own axis.

Margo Channing, the aging star played by Bette Davis in All About Eve, saw the cost of ascent:

“Funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder, so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman.”

What if some of what we’ve been dropping is our own mass? A desire that doesn’t fit the mold. A conviction that limits advancement. A way of thinking that isn’t quickly understood. A talent that has no apparent utility.

Imagine a CEO entering a room. People sit up straighter. Someone stops talking. She makes a joke and everyone laughs a little harder. A CEO carries structural weight: authority, decision rights, access to resources, responsibility. She may also carry tremendous experience, judgment, accomplishment and presence. Her gravity can be entirely real. It might even make us nervous.

But status and gravity are not the same thing. We know this because we’ve all encountered people with considerable status who require the title to establish their weight. And people with little positional authority whose ideas, judgment or presence alter a room.

A few weeks ago, I found myself testing this distinction without realizing it.

I went to an art show at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I’d never even been inside. I met the curator and an art dealer, who invited me to another show at Hotel Bel-Air. I went. They remembered me. We talked some more. I wasn’t buying anything nor was I pretending to.

Then I met the artist. I asked him about the meaning behind his work.

“Most people just tell me it’s beautiful,” he said.

We kept talking.

“Are you a reporter?” he finally asked.

I laughed. No.

He fist-bumped me.

I had no art-world credentials in that room. I wasn’t a collector, a critic, or a reporter. I had read the room without asking the room to tell me who to be. I brought what I had with me.

The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza offers another way to think about this. He understood power as a capacity to act. We are constantly affecting and being affected by other people. Some encounters increase our capacity, making more possible in us and through us. Others diminish it.

That makes gravity relational without making it dependent. We do not become gravitational by becoming impervious to other people. Other people will move us. Expertise should move us. Love should move us. Beauty should move us. A better idea should change our minds.

The question is what happens to our own mass in response. Do we abandon our own center and ask: Is what I know enough? Am I clear? Am I qualified? Am I worthy? What will they think of me?

Or do we orient in relationship to others while remaining centered in recognition of our own weight?

Gravity cannot be conferred. It follows from mass. What can be conferred is recognition. What we must assume is our own weight.

This is what my mentor had seen before I did. She had already said yes. I was the one who kept on proving.

The practice, then, begins with noticing what we are organizing around. We can enter other people’s fields and let them affect us. We can pursue ambition and acquire structural power. The danger begins when we arrange the substance of ourselves entirely around someone else’s center.

But holding our center is only half the practice. The other half is allowing what is there to move outward. An idea expressed. A conviction acted upon. A desire given direction. Something made that could only have come through us. Gravity is not self-containment. It is selfhood generating a field—having consequence in the world and taking responsibility for what it sets in motion.

Beautiful Power is power made gravitational. Our substance given form. More of ourselves allowed to have consequence from where we already stand.

We can reach for the stars without defying our own gravity.

Make a sketch that includes these elements: a tree, a bird, a car, and a man.

Well, that’s a huge relief. The last architecture entrance exam I sat for asked me to draw an elevation. El-ev-ae-shun? No clue what that was. Buildings don’t elevate. I had been stupidly unprepared.

This time I’d made sure to learn the technical terms that any student worth their architectural salt would know.

Truth is, I didn’t really want to be an architect. But I didn’t know what I wanted to be. If I went into humanities, I’d be labeled “not so smart.” Who goes into humanities after graduating high school with a science concentration? Only a dumb person. And I’m not freakin’ dumb. I worked super hard to make sure nobody could ever think otherwise.

Architecture needs both a scientific and a creative mind. I like that. Am I both?

Here I am, however, sitting for this exam, hoping to find my way into a very proper career. Dad is an architect. So is my mom’s cousin, who everyone thinks is brilliant (she is). But I’m a verbal person. Always have been. I don’t draw. I can’t.

Mom wanted me to be a doctor. Typical. But that meant two years of extra courses piled on top of all the studying I had to do for my high school board exams. And then there were the medical entrance exams. Those were All-India. All. India. With the most competitive, most brilliant students. What if I couldn’t make the cut? Better not to try.

I did really well on my board exams. Got my name stenciled onto the merit holder list that hangs above the trophy case outside the principal’s office. 98% in math. Yes! I’m all that. With my scores, I got into all the best general degree colleges. But Mom wouldn’t let me go to the cool ones that were far away. “It’s not safe,” she said. I don’t know if I agree. I ended up taking admission at a women’s college walking distance from home. My mom used to go there too. I was going to do a B.Sc. honors program in statistics. So smart. But so dull.

Now here I am. One final shot at getting into a professional degree program. A bird, a tree, a car, and a man stand between me and my honor. How hard could this be? Even a three-year-old could swing it.

I brought colored pencils. All sharpened. And 2B pencils too. I like how the 2B lead leaves a soft trail. It feels smooth on the paper. But my pencil isn’t gonna turn into a magic wand. How would I sketch this scene out? I imagine the talented people around me, masterpiece-level intensity on their faces, pencils flourishing across the page. I’m not artistic. Here’s an idea: could I make this witty? Could I make the admissions folks laugh? That would be clever. Maybe not drawing aptitude clever, but a sense of humor. A storyteller. Yes. That’s what I’ll go for.

I’ll start with the car. It’s the hardest thing. What if I made it look like it crashed into the tree? Then it wouldn’t have to be perfect. Here I go—a line here, another connecting line there. Where’s my eraser? Damn, I smudged the hood of the car. Should I erase harder? I’ll color over it in red. A red hatchback. That shape is easier for me.

Now the tree. Two lines for the trunk, and then—I don’t know how to deal with the branches. So I simply draw one big cloud to represent the leaves. A fluffy, comfy cumulus cloud. It looks silly. Very childish, but it’s what I know how to do. I’ll fill it with green. Nothing outside the lines. Wouldn’t want them to think I scribble. Ugh. I wish I could have majored in French instead. Become an interpreter and travel the world. I have a real knack for languages. But architecture is a respectable career.

Now for the bird. A branch poking out from the trunk with a small birdy on top. He’s laughing—a sadistic little guy he is, delighting in the man’s misfortune. And the man, I’ve got to have him too. He’s sad. Teary. His car has crashed into the tree. Oh dear. Poor guy. I’ll draw a speech bubble too. Like a comic strip.

“Oh no! My car!”

The drawing’s done. A funny, sorry tableau. I have a sneaky feeling that kooky scene will be an epic fail with the selection committee. (Oh no! My career!) But I have excellent scores. And good essays. Maybe they’ll overlook this drawing. Maybe I’ll get lucky.

I did get lucky. I got the call for an interview. Then I was accepted. Honestly, it must have been my scores. I can’t imagine how this happened otherwise.

Or maybe they made a mistake. What does it matter? I got in. And I’m going.

I carried the guilt of the kooky drawing with me. Let’s never speak of this again, I told myself. Shhhhh.

My first days of college were full of trees. Our professor of art made us draw fifty of them every week. “Go sit in front of trees and keep drawing,” he said. A nightmare. I couldn’t get away with fluffy tops anymore. So I went at it—again and again and again. The trees got better. They had actual branches. Kind of elegant, I’d say. Except trees have a lot of leaves. Hundreds of leaves. Times fifty. Towards the end of a fifty-tree marathon, at around tree thirty-nine, I threw caution to the wind and scratched out little jagged triangles in a hurry. My right hand really hurt. Everyone in class was hurting too, so at least I wasn’t alone.

I was used to being the one who did things best. Second rank in my high school class. Why did this professor scare me so much? He was on a power trip—we must have seemed pretty idiotic to him. At least I could draw a friggin’ tree now.

That kooky drawing eventually came back to bite me. Of course it did.

Our art appreciation professor was talking about some great artist when—the gods of my guilt must have whispered to her—a certain sketch came up. “In this college,” she said, “there will be no cloud-shaped treetops submitted. Someone did that in the entrance exam. It will not be tolerated here.”

I didn’t know where to look. But at least nobody was looking at me.

I wish I had that kooky drawing today. It would be funny to see it now.

THE STRUCTURE OF LEGITIMACY

Legitimacy asks one question under every choice: will this keep me inside the category I’m allowed to be in? For a long time that category was “smart,” and staying in it meant chasing the respectable path and using my real gift only in secret—then handing the credit to the badge instead of the gift. The trap isn’t ambition. It’s that we can spend years being carried by the very thing we refuse to count, because it doesn’t look like the kind of worth we were approved for.

---

For your own reflection:

• What’s the category you work hardest to stay inside—smart, capable, professional, good? What falls outside it that you quietly disqualify?

• Think of a time something “unofficial” about you — a joke, an instinct, a way of seeing—actually did the work. Who or what did you give the credit to?

• What would it cost you to let that gift count out loud?

“I’m talking about myself too much.”

“No, I love it! Please keep going.”

I was on a roll—bluetooth in my ears, feet up on my slim mid-century sofa, in my crumpled pajamas and socks. We talked for three and a half hours straight that evening, the longest I’d ever talked to someone I was only just getting to know. We were learning what we had in common, discussing what was interesting to us. We talked about our kids, our work, and our appetite for learning new things about the world.

I can’t remember most of what I told him. Only that I couldn’t stop.

When it came to sharing about ourselves however, I was doing more of the talking. I’d talk, he’d ask a question, I’d talk some more. I’ve always been proud of how I’ve lived my life. I’m a very open and honest person. This doesn’t always work in my favor. But he kept finding lessons to apply to his own life, so I kept sharing.

“The status quo is important,” he stated. “Even if it makes us unhappy.”

“Then I’m not like the people you know,” I insisted. “I don’t follow what everyone expects of me just because they expect it.”

“I like that …” he said.

But I wasn’t convinced I’d convinced him.

“No, it’s true.” And I’d pull stories—times I’d walked away, chosen my own path. I told him how it wasn’t easy and how it affected my career and my relationships. I told him everything.

It’s true we had chemistry. Not the laugh out loud kind. Conversation with him was fluid and yet, I sensed that I was offering life lessons more as his guide than anything else.

“I’d sign up for one of your cohorts if it weren’t just for women,” he said.

I’m helping him, I thought. That’s a good thing.

His own anecdotes were enthusiastic and forthcoming, yet I wished he’d tell me something more. Perhaps I’m too deep, I thought. Or too self-actualized?

I have a habit of searching for meaning in everything.

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Sunaina.”

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” I replied.

He laughed at the reference. He was a smart man. And he spoke French.

He lived for the moment. I lived for explaining it.

We hung up near midnight. I switched off the light.

It didn’t work out. I’d spent so much of me.

THE STRUCTURE OF USEFULNESS

Usefulness runs on a quiet trade: if I am helpful, I have a place. Being useful is a real gift—and it can also become the way we ask to be wanted without ever having to say so. We give, we call the giving love, and we may stop noticing whether anything comes back. The structure isn’t generosity. It’s generosity doing a second, hidden job: earning a belonging we’re afraid to ask for directly.

---

For your own reflection:

• Where are you the useful one—and what do you believe would happen to your place there if you stopped giving?

• When you give, do you keep any account of what comes back? What have you told yourself about not needing it to?

• What would it take to be known for who you are rather than what you provide?

I write alone. In my kitchen in the morning with a series of coffees. On the sofa in my study with my dog at my feet. In my bed late at night with herbal tea or a glass of wine. Seldom at my desk. Mostly within my little bubbles. My cocoons.

It’s one of those nights now. I’m half-lying, half-sitting in bed, two pillows cushioning my back as I push into the soft memory foam, my laptop propped on my thighs. My bed bubble.

My dog makes a sudden appearance, plonking his chin upon my arm as I keep typing and ignore the intrusion. Pet me, his eyes implore and his wet nose demands. He will not move until I slide the laptop to the side and scratch him vigorously behind the ears while he sighs and lolls. I smell the doggy shampoo on his freshly groomed fur.

I won’t push him away, but my mind is buzzing. My fingers still attempt to type the words emerging from my past.

I’m back in a cab on the way to O’Hare airport. It’s nighttime, driving west on the Kennedy Expressway. My boy is in his carseat, my husband by my side. We’re packed in here with our lives packed in the trunk. I’m straining for a last glimpse of the Chicago skyline. I never could get enough of those lights, those skyscrapers, those many windows where life was being lived. I used to sit at my own apartment window and just watch.

I’m twisting over my shoulder, watching the city get smaller. I see planes lined up in the sky, waiting for a turn to touch down. The L train is slowly passing to my left, clacking along the tracks. I’m thinking, Why did I let this happen?

I never trusted the decision to move to Delhi. Yet there I was.

I push up against my pillows and reach for my tea, letting lavender and honey soothe the tension behind my eyes. My glasses feel heavy on the bridge of my nose. I click into my cloud drive, hunting for photos of those last days in Chicago. There’s my boy in his diaper, a big silly grin and cherry yogurt on his face. He’s surrounded by moving boxes and misplaced furniture. Damn, that apartment was small. I had moved us there by myself. Two thousand four hundred square feet of life stuffed into six hundred square feet of temporary home.

There’s another photo—my little one is resting on my belly, still grinning. We’re tucked into a kingsize mattress on a metal frame, cuddling in a cloud of fluffy pillows and stuffed animals. For some reason he’s wearing pink. Look how young I was! Happy. And sad.

Sad happy.

I check the time. It’s 2 a.m. I’m wide awake with no will to stop. My AI companions are tired of me by now—one is out of tokens, the other tells me in every message that I should shut my laptop and go to bed. That I’ve earned it. But I can’t help myself. There’s a curiosity in me, about the scene, about the feelings it’s stirring, about my quest to write better by asking a machine how I’m doing.

I don’t want to let it go but I make myself go to sleep.

I move to my morning bubble. The kitchen table now. My dog stares. This time his eyes say, Walk me. “Two minutes,” I tell him.

I need to find relief in those past memories. Isn’t there something during those days that made me feel light?

I remember reaching Delhi and sitting at the foot of Mom’s bed. I am a guilty daughter there, who missed her mother’s quadruple bypass surgery to pack for the big move. “Don’t you think you should be here?” the doctor had said. He had taken the phone from Mom when I'd called to check on her.

Sad.

I should have been there for that surgery. But I was pleasing my husband and waiting for my hard-earned modest bonus check. Was I selfish?

I wrap my hands around my mushroom coffee. The mug is as big as my face, but the contents disappear too fast—rich and earthy, a dash of turmeric, a splash of almond milk. I put the kettle on for another.

I keep typing. I can see my boy, all of three years old, jet-lagged and perched on a white horse. He’s the sarbala in a wedding, the groom riding with him while people dance, sing, and light fireworks. I wanted him down so badly, and it did not matter. Everyone was celebrating. I had dressed to celebrate too. I could only watch my boy, so far from me, his little face dazed.

Nothing bad happened. I never needed to catch him.

Maybe I needed someone to catch me.

I move to the next bubble, my study couch — a mid-century blue number that matches Don Draper’s Manhattan living room.

I recall myself on a different sofa, sitting cross-legged in my cotton pajamas. A daughter-in-law in Delhi who was loved like a daughter. What a perfect family we must have been. We would start our mornings together, reading the paper, my nose buried in the Delhi Times as I solved the crossword from the New York Times. So much was unsaid during those mornings. But breakfast was always delicious, and the house was always clean.

I know how the story goes from here. Every compromise. Every tiny fracture. Every promise broken. By him, by them, by me.

This remembering is making me angry. The bones in my left hand feel stiff. It’s getting intense, but I keep going, breaking only to fry two eggs, sunny side up. My dog wants my toast.

Now I see us standing in our brand new bedroom. That same kingsize mattress resting on a cold floor. A floor that flowed into a sea of polished white marble. The whole flat feels too open, too empty.

“You have to compromise, Sunaina.”

“What have you compromised?” I asked back.

“I accepted your brother. And my father never got to have a samdhi.”

I stood my entire five feet two inches upright, bare feet grounded on that polished marble. I called him a mean. little. man.

“I really should stop writing,” I tell my dog, who now sits on the hardwood floor with a fixed stare and a toy cupcake dangling from his mouth. This time he’s saying, Throw this cupcake at me, lady. I throw it, and he faithfully brings it right back. Ten times.

I get up and head to the living room couch. Time to watch The Closer, my new favorite old show. I nap thirty minutes to the sound of Brenda Leigh Johnson’s Georgia accent. Television is my ASMR, but daytime naps make me grumpy. My back is tight. I really should go to the gym, but today is not that day.

I lean on Claude to read my memoir. It’s exhausting enough to live through the writing, let alone the reading. And yet the writing is the only thing I want to do with my time.

Later that day, Mom fills the gaps in my memories. It’s 5 p.m. in LA, 5:30 a.m. in Delhi. “Fucking hell, I can’t believe I allowed that to happen.” I say this as my dog walks me to the park. We’re on a busy street and I’m probably too loud. But who cares? I have my bubble on the street too.

“Sunaina, I know I wasn’t the best mom,” she says. “What will they think about me?”

“We all have our shit, Mom,” I tell her. “But I don’t hide mine.”

It’s always nice to talk to Mom.

At the park my dog steals balls that aren’t his. I can’t pry the big pink squeaky one from his mouth. A tall man who plays fetch shows me how it’s done. He fails too.

On the way home, I listen to the stories on The Moth and carry my dog’s new slimy pink ball.

Back in the bed bubble, I’m twenty-three thousand words into my own story now, and I can already see the tales that lie ahead. A mid-priced Bordeaux keeps me company.

I reach for honesty. It gets raw.

My dog snores ever so slightly.

THE STRUCTURE OF APPEASEMENT

Appeasement begins with something tender: the wish to keep us whole. To protect the bond, we yield—and we call the yielding love, and the quiet that follows peace. But a peace that needs our silence isn’t peace; it’s a war that’s moved inside, where no one can see it, slowly costing us our self-respect. The structure survives because we keep giving it a beautiful name.

---

For your own reflection:

• Where do you keep the peace by going quiet — and what do you tell yourself that quiet is? Love, maturity, being the bigger person?

• Is there a peace in your life that needs your silence? What would it cost to say the unpeaceable thing?

• What would a peace that included you actually look like?

Little drops of milk. Tiny drops squeezed from my breast into a teaspoon. Nourishing drops of milk.

Big teardrops.

I don’t know whether my drops ever touched your lips. But they were there. For you.

My baby girl. The one I named Leela. Named after your grandmother. The name she gave up when she married.

You arrived without a sound. Well before it was time. They rushed you to an incubator. I never saw your face then. Only later.

“The baby has a pretty nose, like its mother.” The doctor had smiled, winking as she pressed the wand to my belly, spread with ultrasound jelly. We weren’t allowed to know your sex. But I knew then that you were a girl. You were what I’d hoped for.

My boy would have a baby sister, I rejoiced. The one I would dress in floral dresses and ballet flat shoes.

I couldn’t wait to hold your little hand. I hoped you’d have ten little fingers and toes.

You did. You had all of them. I saw you in your box, behind the shields. But I couldn’t hold you until you died.

Two days in the hospital for me. Four days in the incubator for you. The call came when I was trying to express your milk. Your father looked at me in sadness, turning his grown-up thumb downward. His skin was the color of yours.

No funeral ground wanted you. You were born before your name had been blessed. You were Leela to me. No-name to the gods.

“The river will take her,” we were told. “Go to the river, and a fisherman will tie the body to stones and drop it there.” The Yamuna, my baby Leela, was swelling with monsoon rain. It would have taken you gladly. But the Yamuna, my baby Leela, was no place for a girl like you.

“I will not hand my baby over to a sewage drain,” I cried.

She cannot be burned. That’s what we heard. Again and again, echoing across the city. So we searched for a place to bury you.

Baby Leela, it was raining hard.

I held you wrapped in a tight shroud, from perfect head to perfect toe. I could not bring myself to look at you. But I could feel the shape of you in my arms.

“Bring salt,” they told us. The traffic was thick. We drove you to a ground that was wrapped in everyday chaos. Cars, people, concrete buildings, animals, burning. The air stuck to our skin—damp and heavy.

We stepped into the mud, through the gate, and into a cremation ground. Me carrying you. Your dad carrying the salt. The driver, an umbrella.

Where is the cemetery? I wondered.

The man met us beside the funeral pyres. They were awaiting the completion of another body’s rites. We waited to know where we would go. The downpour had quickened.

I was sick too, Leela. Not only with grief but with a cold and cough that would never leave me as long as you were with me. My body struggled to breathe. That is why you came early and without ready lungs.

I could not hold you anymore.

They finally led us to your resting place. Behind a gate. Into a wasteland. A dumping ground of ghee tins and trash.

“Take off her shroud,” they told us. “The dogs come at night.”

We didn’t listen. How could we?

We buried you with your cover, poured salt into your grave, placed a god on your chest.

Raindrops fell hard. We turned and walked through the mud.

Today is thirteen years to the day of your death, my baby Leela. I still pass by your grounds whenever I visit New Delhi. The traffic always takes me there.

But I cannot visit you.

And by now, you’re probably gone.

Leela
July 16–20, 2013

My life is of course a series of events. I can easily chronicle them. People who listen often remark, “You are really strong. Where do you find that strength?”

I’ve often stumbled at that question. Because while I may remember the events of my past, I see them as decades of climbs and descents that make me who I am today. But do I remember the feelings I felt? Can I really say what made me strong?

The truth is, I remember. But this refrain that we all march to—keep calm and carry on—had etched itself into my brain. It told me that the only way to survive and surpass is to dampen my feelings, to suppress them, to put them away in tiny compartments deep inside my body, far from my heart.

Is this ability to control my feelings what made me strong? Looking upon my life as a woman who has always forged her own path despite immense push back, I realize that I had been wrong. I wasn’t controlling my feelings, I was harnessing them.

I was twelve years old, standing in a field of dust in New Delhi. It was 1986, two weeks after my family left our home in Dayton, Ohio for a country that was supposed to be mine. A thousand students stood in lines at morning assembly, organized by class, separated by arm’s distance. The sun bore down and the heat of the earth seeped up through the soles of my shoes. The girl in front of me had long, neat braids that smelled of coconut oil, massaged in by a mother the night before. My hair was short and layered and wrong. The choir sang “We Shall Not Be Moved”—we’re brothers together, we shall not be moved—and the lyrics taunted me, because there was no we. I was standing alone, eight thousand miles from every friend I had, holding back tears, willing myself not to fall apart.

I felt everything then. I have felt everything since.

I have felt deeply, unknowingly knowing, in a manner that fired up direction and action. My feelings have told me I am so much more than what the world told me I could ever be.

If I had listened to the world, I would have been living a life of compromising contentment. I would have smiled through the hypocrisy and numbed up my desires. The world would have called me selfless, perfect even. I would have called myself a shell.

I know how to choose myself because of my feelings, not despite them. They carry me to places that call me, where I need to go to be my most whole, most honest self. I do not confuse integrity with holier-than-thou morality. My integrity lies in my ability to be authentically me.

I call bullshit on keep calm and carry on. I say—keep feeling and carry through—to a horizon filled with moments that nobody knows, not even you. I have chosen that horizon time and again. To many, it amounts to insolence. It’s a woman gone emotionally wild. To me, it’s a woman come alive.

The thing we were taught to suppress is the thing that knows the way. Choosing myself has always been my most graceful act of rebellion.

I am fifty-two years old now. I am sitting in my home with my dog staring up at me for treats. I sip my rather potent coffee while my eyes brim with tears. A force of love has found its way into me. I still feel everything.

Only now, I know this to be my power.

I live in the light. I can’t imagine another way to be.

I don’t say this to signal virtue. I say this because no matter who may judge me, I know my gut—and my gut gives me light. The source of this light is not some angelic halo. It is something stronger, more powerful and more dangerous than that.

It is fire.

I am driven to be all of who I am, even though I still have no clue what I am fully capable of being. That is the paradox of fire. It does not create something new. It reveals what was already there.

I’ve always been expected to live in the shadows—shadows cast by someone else’s looming definition of a meaningful life. Familial expectations. Corporate politics. Cultural mores. Luxury lifestyles. They are the stuff of success and aspiration with which not only do you prove yourself to the world, you prove that you matter to yourself.

But that cool shade, no matter how comforting, still means something is standing between you and your own light.

I recently had a conversation with someone I cared about that brought this into sharp relief. He told me that the status quo must be accepted, even if it makes you feel unhappy inside. In his case, that status quo involved luxury and wealth. This was the lifestyle he was surrounded by as a child but it was always out of reach. It was his mission to join it. And so he found a way.

“That’s just life,” he said. “That’s all there is.”

“People have a choice,” I tried to explain.

He didn’t understand.

With all his abilities and experience, he could not see that he had agency. Or maybe the truth is that he would not see. Moving into light meant walking into a vulnerable place and confronting his own intensity. It meant dismantling the house of cards he so carefully constructed over time.

It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that he chose the safety of the shadows. They were familiar. They were the devil he knew. They were his whole world.

There comes a time when that house of cards that shelters you becomes the life that confines you. The only way to become visible again is to introduce heat. And that is extremely uncomfortable. Because it will burn.

“You are rare,” he told me. “Amazing and beautiful on the inside and outside.”

I know he meant it. He saw my fire.

And maybe that revealed too much.

Sometimes we are drawn to the very light we are not yet ready to carry. Sometimes that light shines too brightly on parts of us that are hiding.

But sometimes, when we are ready, it reveals the power that has always lived within. Give that fire oxygen, and it begins to breathe.

When I feel the pull of romantic love, I become anxious.

I try to put them first, above almost everything else, even if they haven’t asked me to. I become who I think they need, mirroring back an image of the woman I sense they want, rather than seeing the beauty of who I am reflected in their eyes.

I give myself away—to their points of view, preferences, and rhythms. I quickly begin organizing myself around the relationship. It feels reasonable to me, even mutual. But slowly, without realizing it’s happening, I move myself out of the center of my own life.

It’s easy to lose yourself in love.

I’ve found myself in this pattern more than once. It led to two marriages that ended in divorce when I felt pushed too far. It once led to betrayal and shock. I had given so much of myself to what I believed was our shared world that I missed the signs of infidelity and deceit that were there all along. For ten years, I didn’t see them, despite warnings to the contrary.

For a long time, I thought the lesson was about choosing better partners. Now I understand it was about the story I had brought into love long before I met either of them.

I wanted unconditional love. The kind that exists in fairy tales and first glances. The sacred joining of two people who choose each other completely. I believed in love at first sight. I believed that sex and marriage belonged together. I believed that a good man was possible—that he could be everything—and that if I loved him well enough, he would be.

I gave up my name. Twice.

Looking back, I wasn’t just looking for a husband. I was asking love to rewrite my life story.

I carried shame about where I came from. Somewhere inside me, I believed that if I attached myself to the right man, I could leave that story behind. I wanted to inherit a different life. A different version of myself.

To many people on the outside, this doesn’t match the woman they know. They see someone confident. Independent. Someone who has built a career, started businesses, moved countries, and rebuilt her life more than once.

But confidence in the world isn’t the same thing as confidence in love. In love, I wanted to belong more than I wanted to remain myself. That was the real split. Love simply became the place where I hoped I could finally escape my past.

So I adjusted. I became easier to love—until that became unsustainable. Everything changed when the ground I had chosen to stand on disappeared. Again and again, I found myself beginning from nothing. Eventually, I understood that I had been building my sense of safety on someone else’s presence. I wasn’t just grieving the end of relationships. I was grieving the collapse of a future I had wholeheartedly entrusted to someone else.

I’m learning what healthy romantic love looks like now. I’m paying attention to my feelings. When anxiety appears—and it still does, strongly at times—I check in with myself rather than jumping to solutions. I ask: What am I afraid of losing?

The answer is rarely just “him.” It’s the time I’ve invested, the openness I’ve offered, the caring I’ve shown. It’s the idea of love that I still want so badly to believe in. Especially as time feels like it is moving faster and I am growing older.

Anxiety comes rushing in as those hopes cling to my chest. But then I pause, and I remember that now, I know myself. And this knowing grounds me more than anything or anyone ever has.

I have to be willing to lose love if keeping it requires losing myself ever again.

I’m standing in a circle of middle school parents at our private school introductory party. I don’t know them. Nor does my then husband. Yet he commands the room. And I live in the eclipse.

I never knew what to do with my face. How I feel is how I look — I have never been able to mask it. So I stood there, conscious of my own discomfort, hoping nobody could see my empty eyes.

There’s a volley of exchanges, small talk, some laughter. He can be charming with his witty tales, self-deprecating in ways that make him more endearing. I smile. I say a few things. But I find myself in a scene where I am part of the banter and yet somehow zooming backwards, drifting further back, like I’m not there at all.

I am lost in a crowd of strangers, without a real anchor. Saying to myself: why can’t you talk like everyone else? Why can’t you loosen up? Why are you unable to belong with these people?

All I want to do is go home.

Eventually I find one person to chat with and I am happy to take refuge. Relieved, I tell myself: I am a one-on-one person. I am not built for small talk.

This was my explanation, and I held onto it for a long time.

It took me years to realize it wasn’t true. It happened in a couple ways.

The first was two of my closest friends telling me separately, “When we first met, I thought you didn’t like me.” They found me reserved, even disinterested. I remember feeling anxious, almost lost in translation. Because all I had wanted was to make friends. My own wish to connect was not being perceived, let alone returned.

The second, and this was a big one, was entering rooms of strangers all by myself. There was no one to orbit, no star to fade into. Just me. A stranger too.

Those rooms felt awkward at first. My Parsons Paris cohort, where I was the ex-corporate executive among people much younger, whose lives I had to learn as peers. A passion for Japanese sake that took me to Tokyo to meet people from walks of life very far from my own. The move to Los Angeles to get closer to vibrance, and away from predictability. Dating on Hinge, community events and networks, volunteering. Some forums I eased into, others I just leapt.

Each room opened into another. Each connection led to a conversation that led to a friendship that led somewhere I could never have imagined. I didn’t find these portals. I created them — expecting nothing and discovering that there’s always something wonderful inside.

Somewhere in that unfolding I figured out: everyone has a story. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has depth. Everyone is seeking real connection. It can begin with a handshake. A side hug. Air kisses. An invitation. A meal. A message from a stranger who saw a post and thought: I want to talk to this woman. And recently, a chance meeting with a woman who saw me and said: I recognize you from LinkedIn.

I used to need someone to find me interesting before I felt invited to speak. I learned to be interested first. That changed everything.

I am largesse.

I am wide.

My every cell tingles.

I am alive.

It’s not merely because I am me.

It’s because, at last, I can feel my we in the world.

Even as I sit here writing this essay, my dog beside me and no one else, I feel the presence of my collective.

My collective is a growing tribe. Some I reach out to. Others find me. Some I encounter in rooms where we simply need to say hello. What strikes me is that many were strangers until only recently. I now count them among my closest friends, allies, confidants. How does this happen? It still amazes me. The pull is magnetic.

I am meeting people constantly just by putting myself into circles I’d never stepped into before. Not long ago, I was the outsider looking in. Now I am part of the arc. In the last week alone: I made friends with a sustainability strategist building a soft power index from Melbourne. A relationship coach in Mauritius who left her toxic relationship and took the stage. An Italian entrepreneur building something new far from family. A mysterious woman at an art opening who wrote to me the next day and said: your story stood out to me. I’d like to know the rest.

There are handshakes. And then there are hand holds.

It’s the holding that counts. I’m experiencing those embraces.

Something has shifted. It shows in small ways — how I dress, how I carry myself, what I choose to put into the world. More than that: my entire world came out of my own head and heart. My work, my title, my website, my raison d’etre. No system assigned it. No institution approved it. It is entirely, biologically mine.

I am a creative being. I am creating my life every day.

No matter how far I expand from my origin, I have never felt less alone. My center is with me, my orbits are flexing yet stable.

That expansion didn’t happen on its own. I designed my next. In three dimensions. It took a lot of work. I confronted my demons and dreamed anyway.

What I didn’t know then but I know now: expansion doesn’t feel like pain. It feels like joy. The kind that gives you goosebumps in a simple moment when you take it all in and breathe.

Last month, I moderated a panel of Women in Expansion — women who had each walked away from something that no longer fit. I asked them what had expanded.

Sejal Desai, who left a lucrative career to build altruistic work that was entirely hers, said it well: what expanded in me was joy. What expanded in me was alignment.

Tomide Awe, who was laid off while on maternity leave and realized her worst case was actually pretty good, said: I can see possibilities now when I couldn’t see them before.

Teresa Bailey, who walked away after being ignored for seven weeks after asking to go part-time, said: where I am today is not where I’ll be tomorrow. I just need to take one step and get to the next tomorrow.

Three women, three different walks with the same arrival. Energy returning to places that were once suppressed. The sense of knowing before certainty presents itself.

We talk a lot about the courage it takes to change. The unknown, the fear, the mess. All of that is real and all of it is worth talking about. But we talk less about how we feel when we pursue what we know to be true.

Joy is not a reward for doing the work. It is the signal that the work is right.

When Sejal said the more I moved toward that work, the more energy I noticed I had — she was describing exactly this. Energy returning. The body confirming what the knowing had been trying to say for years.

That mystery woman at the art event didn’t want to know the rest of a performance. She wanted to know the rest of a person. A person who had stopped editing herself to fit — and had become, in the process, impossible to ignore.

That is the joy of expansion.

Everything isn’t figured out. The path isn’t clear. But you are finally, fully, undeniably in it — and the world can feel your arrival.

During a recent podcast interview, life coach and host Sharlene Lee crowned me the Queen of Starting Over. I laughed because it felt both accurate and slightly absurd.

Nobody sets out to become an expert at starting over. We celebrate people who stay the course and build legacies that fit society’s parameters for success. Starting over is taken as evidence that we have failed.

But this title that Sharlene bestowed upon me got me thinking.
How does a queen remain a queen if she keeps starting over?

I’m a huge Cleopatra fan. Like many women in history, her story has been censored by the people who defeated her. Roman historians found it easier to portray her as a seductress than as the ruler, strategist, diplomat, and scholar that she was. Centuries later, the myth is still more celebrated than the woman.

“Cleopatra learned to marshal her thoughts precisely, express them artistically, deliver them gracefully.” - Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra spoke nine languages, including Egyptian, becoming the first ruler of her dynasty in three hundred years to speak the language of her people. She governed through revolt, famine, and shifting alliances with the most powerful empire in the world.

When the ground shifted beneath her, she carried her same essential self into each new reality. She continued by drawing on her statecraft, her grace, and her image as Isis, the goddess of magic and healing.

Kingdoms are fragile things. We build our careers, relationships, reputations, and companies in their name. When change comes for us, we lose more than a structure. We lose a story about who we are.

This is why starting over feels so disorienting. Not because we are losing the kingdom, but because we have mistaken the kingdom for ourselves.

There is a difference between commitment and self-abandonment. There have been many instances in my life when I committed myself to conventional standards, believing that loyalty and acceptance would grant me self-worth. But in every single instance, I have felt a nudge from within. A voice that made me uncomfortable because it told me the truth, first softly and then, over time, with a shout that left me no choice but to listen. Now, I pay attention to that voice. Because now I know that my ability to return to myself is really what keeps me strong.

Perhaps that is why Sharlene’s title lingered. When times are tough, the Queen of Starting Over does not reach for the kingdom. She reaches for herself. She knows her own power lies within.

Careers change. Relationships change. Plans change. Castles are built. Moats are dug. None of it stands forever.

What remains, if we permit ourselves to know her, is the queen who withstands it all.

The conversation with Sharlene Lee that started this reflection is on her podcast, Your New Chapter.

You can listen here: https://pod.link/1773411876/episode/QnV6enNwcm91dC0xOTI2ODg1NA

There is a Neil Diamond song that rends my heart every time I hear it. A man claiming himself to no one. Singing into the void of his own unwitnessed existence.

I am, he says. And somehow that is the hardest thing.

In my own life, that same declaration has lived mostly in silence. A silence made heavy by the weight of other people’s secrets. I was committed to protecting their stories — to save them from shame, embarrassment, or betrayal. But those secrets deeply affected me. This, I realized only recently.

I was on a quest to find my voice. And so I confronted secrets I’d felt compelled to hold onto for years. I named them. And in the naming, I began to understand what they had meant to me.

I stood on stage and told my life story, complete with its hidden shadows. I turned secrets into truths, with an audience of 200 as my witness. Someone asked me why on earth I would do such a thing. You are only hurting yourself and me, they said.

My response was clear: Your story isn’t yours alone. It’s become a big part of mine too.

When I stood on that stage, I became not the teller but the vessel — the instrument through which my story unfolded naturally. I felt a freedom that comes from channeling and transforming what was hard and weaponized into something so soft, it showed me light and became beautiful.

I am the giver, the receiver, the good, the bad. I am everything, and then some.

We have been conditioned out of who we are so completely that expressing it feels like defiance. Even to ourselves.

When my son chose to divulge one of my secrets in his college personal statement, I panicked. What would people say? But then, I realized it was his truth, and he had the right to claim it as his own.

Here is what I know now: when we voice our own story, we stop disappearing into other people’s.

Being yourself is not an act of boldness.

It is an act of power.

It begins and ends with you.

The opposition to my decision was strong:

You’ll be flipping burgers there! Why are you going back?”

“Your father amounted to nothing in America. What makes you think you’ll do any better?”

“Where’s the money to send you to America?”

“You belong in India. Haven’t we taught you that? Don’t you like our country?”

“America is NOT your home. Doesn’t matter that you were born there.”

They weren’t entirely wrong. I had no money. No college opportunity. No job waiting. Just a vision. One I had to manifest.

I wasn’t trying to be a rebel. I was grateful for the culture of my ancestors, for the family that surrounded me. In fact, I’d tried very hard to fit in. I’d even fooled myself into believing that I did. But the harder I tried, the less I actually did.

I wasn’t from an “acceptable” background. At 23, I was carrying the weight of being the daughter of a less-than-ideal father. And in my birth chart, I was a manglik, the bringer of difficulties, especially in marriage.

People now assume, “It must have been easy for you to come back.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, I was technically a U.S. citizen. I didn’t need a visa. But that didn’t mean I had a free pass.

My decision to return to the land of my childhood was about reconnecting with myself—with Christmas and Halloween, and all the things that shaped my formative years. I needed to find out what it meant to be me, all by myself.

So how did I do it? My family eventually relented and gave me their blessing—on one big condition: I’d have to save enough money to purchase my own plane ticket. On a meager salary, it felt nearly impossible.

Or so they thought.

I was determined. In partnership with a dear friend, I started a handmade wedding card business. (An ironic twist, given the circumstances.) We took orders, designed and printed everything ourselves, and pulled every entrepreneurial lever we could.

It’s true: Hard work makes us lucky.

Within a few months, I had saved enough for my one-way ticket to America. No looking back. It was my first time on a plane since that flight to Delhi when I was twelve, leaving my first friends behind. I can still hear the engines roaring. My heart in my throat. I can still taste the awakening jolt of that first sip of American black coffee in the air.

And so began my journey to myself. With one thousand dollars in my pocket—money that had been saved over years for an arranged dowry—and a single suitcase full of summertime clothes, I took the trip that altered my destiny.

That choice: To go. To begin. To step toward something no one could really see, not even me. To believe that everything I needed was already within me. And that it would rise to meet me, if I let it.

“Welcome home,” said the O’Hare immigration officer, stamping my passport as I held my breath, hoping he’d let me belong.

He had no idea what his words meant to me.

I was not standing apart. I was standing in my truth.

Others may see choosing yourself as rebellion. Maybe it is.
But my choice wasn’t confrontational. It was intentional.

Graceful rebellion, someone once called it.

I call it something else:
Independence.

It was February in New Delhi. Spring had just begun and the weather was warm. I sat in my maternal grandparents’ living room, having taken my place perched on the edge of an awkwardly large love seat. Dressed in a traditional churidaar-kurta, my hair undulating to my waist, a bindi dotting my forehead and a diamond chip adorning my nose, I felt appropriately pretty. I kept my hands folded and gaze demure, wanting so much for this suitable boy’s family to appreciate me and choose me for their own.

It was a scene straight out of a Bollywood flick. One in which an arranged marriage inevitably turned to romance, and romance to eternal family bliss.

“One or two teaspoons of sugar in your tea?” my mother asked our guests. Sounds of spoons clinking against teacups, and the exchange of sweets and pleasantries filled the room.

I was a freshly minted architect living with my mother and brother, raring to move on to a grown up life. Nobody was pushing me into a union. I had been the one to ask for a match. My friends were either marrying their romantic partners or heading abroad for further studies. There was no boyfriend in my life and a foreign university was out of the financial question.

At home, I’d sometimes lie in bed and envision my future—covering myself head-to-toe with a blanket, hands on my heart, absolutely still in the darkness. I called it my comatose pose—an escape pod providing solitude. I’d imagine my life as a self-sufficient woman, employed, living in her own apartment, and happily in a relationship. I could maybe find this freedom in America, I’d muse.

But, as my mother often reminded me, India was our homeland and where we belonged. Why on earth would I ever want to go back to a country of foreigners, even though I had been born and partly raised there?

The sounds of china and chitchat continued. My mother, her parents, brother and his wife sat to the sides. The suitable boy’s parents sat directly across from me. To my right, sharing that big love seat, was his sister.

She sidled up beside me and smiled, “So my dear, I was very impressed to learn that you are an architect. But … tell me,” her question carried a lilting cadence, “what are your hobbies?”

I smiled warmly at this complete stranger, eager to please. “So nice to meet you,” I said. “I love Indian classical dance, especially Odissi. I have learned a bit and I really love to watch recitals. I have started a wedding card business, I make glass paintings and design handmade stationery products as well.” That should open a nice conversation, I thought.

After a moment’s pause, she leaned in a little closer and probed more pointedly, “Ah! But … what about the kitchen?”

Aren’t you like, my age? I wondered as I made an effort to hide my surprise and be diplomatic. “Right now, my mother is queen of her kitchen at home,” I replied. “When I have my own kitchen, I will be queen too.”

She sipped her tea and pursed her lips. Either she didn’t like what she tasted or she didn’t like what I said. I sat with my hands tightly clasped, grappling with the insinuation that a lack of interest in homemaking could be a mark against me.

I was 23 at the time and had spent the past twelve years working hard to assimilate and embrace my Indian heritage. I’d proven that an American kid could come to India and graduate at the top of her competitive high school class, achieving a 98% score in Sanskrit and 99% in math. I had earned the admiration of my peers and elders and had finished college with distinction.

Arranged marriages, however, come with outsiders who pride themselves on finding fault. I glanced to my left at the suitable boy himself. He sat a bit arrogantly, surveying his surroundings. He must have sensed my look because he leaned across his chair to acknowledge my presence with a nod. Perhaps he is uncomfortable with all of this, I considered.

But his demeanor was deadpan and his eyes were critical behind his glasses. “Ya. Hi. So … what do you do in your spare time?”

I’d selected this gent’s biodata from the many that were faxed over in response to my matrimonial ad in the Hindustan Times’ Sunday edition. Nestled within a sea of bridal classifieds, some bigger than others, was my deceptively simple ask:

Beautiful, fair-complexioned, 5’-1”, Punjabi girl. 23 years old. Professional. B.Arch. Seeking groom with professional credentials. Caste no bar.

I chose his profile because he was a UK-returned engineer and therefore an eligible professional who might understand my U.S. upbringing as well as my career aspirations.

To answer his spare-time question, I once again rattled off the list that I’d shared with his sister. At least he will appreciate all the cool things that I’m up to, I figured.

But instead, pat came his dry assessment, “So you have no spare time.”

Did you want me to say that I knit for fun, you moron? I retorted in my head.

From the time he’d arrived, his lack of personality had let me down. His appearance did not help either. Though not heavyset, he slumped and seemed to be missing a waistline. Though he was of average height, he seemed to be compensating with thick-soled shoes. Yet here he sat in judgment of me for my full life because society had granted him the audacity as a man to have the upper hand.

Self-respect gripped my bones. You are second to no one, my gut growled. That’s when his father stood up, straightened his ill-fitting safari shirt and turned to my grandfather. “Sir,” he said. “Let us step outside.” The two heads of family took their conversation to the garden, an air of importance hovering in their wake. The rest of us smiled sheepishly and nibbled on those sweets and a few additional savories. We all knew what was transpiring on the other side of the screen door. A conversation on the realities of my life as a child of a “less-than-suitable” family—the social stigma of divorce smudging the halo that I’d tried so hard to keep steady over my head.

She comes with compromises, I could imagine them weighing my case. But the girl is very intelligent and a professional. Our family comes from generations of people in high places. The girl is a U.S. citizen.

The screen door clattered shut as the patriarchs rejoined our group. “It is time for us to take our leave,” announced the suitable boy’s father. Everyone obediently rose to their feet, politely saying namaste and shuffling over to the garden gate. I waved goodbye with mustered cheer as our guests departed. My family returned in silence to the living room, each deep in thought, the screen door again clattering behind us as we stepped inside.

I couldn’t imagine anyone in this room believing that the match was made in heaven.

“Good people,” established my grandfather. “The boy is well-educated and the family is respectable. Let us see what the boy has to say about his interest in her.”

The fans whirred rhythmically above us, stirring up some much-needed sound and circulation. It was my grandmother who spoke first. “You are placing a frog before a princess,” she jested in Punjabi, attempting to at once speak her mind and bring some levity to the mood.

Through most of her life, my mild-mannered grandmother had suffered the tyranny of her caustic mother-in-law. She had been forced to change her given name. She had been made to stand aside when her daughter, my mother, was married away at the age of 19. She bore many indignities through the years with kindness and joviality towards others. She also single-handedly taught me to read and write Hindi when I was twelve.

On this day, she spoke up for the potential she saw within me. I think she might have been my hero.

My grandfather asserted with authority what he believed to be the cold, harsh reality. “What is wrong with him? What better options could she possibly have? This is as good as it gets, if she’s lucky enough to get it. She has no other choice.” He posed this directly to my mother and grandmother while I hovered behind them, a bystander to my own fate.

There it was again. She has no choice. Was this to be the forever refrain of my story? I felt a rising fury against life as it was and a fire for life as I wanted it to be. I looked across at my mother and my grandmother, seeing their lives, each held at the mercy of other people’s diktats.

The promise of my best years was still ahead of me. It was my turn. Yet one wrong decision and it could all pass me by.

Ever since the move back to Delhi, I had not moved from the straight-and-narrow. Was my only viable choice to lean on a husband for purported safety and stability?

The phone rang, calling us to attention and a sooner-than-expected verdict. The call from the suitable boy’s father lasted not more than a minute. “A very good result,” my grandfather beamed towards me as he shared the news with satisfaction. “Their son would like to take you out to dinner. They want to see whether you two can hit it off.”

Which risk is greater? Leaning on a husband and defining life by his family’s standards? Or leaning solely on yourself with nothing but potential in your pocket?

I knew myself in that moment. I saw my childhood in America, my teen years striving to fit within India and then, my future as I wanted it to be. I stood up. Strong on my own two feet. What I was about to do would take courage and would come with consequences, possibly failure for me and embarrassment for my family. I’d be tested not only in that moment but in the many moments to come.

I stepped forward, knowing full well that my grandfather was not used to any form of defiance. “I am going to earn my way back to America,” I pronounced as respectfully as I could. “I am going to find a way to get there and survive. Self-belief is going to be my safety net. I will take responsibility for myself and take my chances.”

It felt good to challenge myself out loud. I hoped that the universe could hear me.

I sat at the far end of our awkwardly large dining table. Pushed up against the length of our distempered living room wall, there was barely enough space to wedge in its chairs. Countless hours were spent here doing homework, cross-legged in my jute-woven seat, surrounded by my neatly covered notebooks.

This evening was no different.

Like clockwork, his lumbering footsteps climbed the stairwell to our market flat in New Delhi. Briefcase in hand, he shuffled into our modest home, the screen door smacking shut behind him. He was a slouched shell of a man, hollowed out by bus rides, low wages, and a desperate need to escape into cigarettes and whiskey sodas.

“Hi Dad,” I said, half looking up as he slipped off his dusty sandals. My little dog gave a restrained half wag at my feet.

I was sixteen. By then, I had given up on any meaningful connection with my father.

I used to need him in the way every little girl needs a dad. I would try hard to hold on to that goodness in him. Standing in front of his impressive stereo system, I’d make impassioned daughterly speeches, accusing him of loving his eight-track more than me. I’d hide his Gold Flake cigarettes and his Johnny Walker Red. It would amuse him to see me try.

Whatever I tried, however, there was really no chance of his changing. How could he? He was a grown man who hadn’t grown up at all. But I didn’t know that then.

Dad missed America. This I did know. When we were living there, he would tuck himself into his pajamas after work, sinking into our faux leather couch, snug in a world tuned to his frequency. He’d look so happy, disco songs and wisps of cigarette smoke swirling around him.

“Dad, want a cookie?”

When I was seven, I remember serving him a plate of colorful Playdoh treats. Eyes locked on some action-packed Western movie, he mindlessly grabbed one and shoved it straight into his mouth. The absurdity startled us both.

Even in America, our family was tight on money. But Dad was an excessive collector with a charge card. He had two video cassette recorders and cabinets triple-lined with Bollywood movies. He indulged in candy so much that he got dentures in his thirties. He loved gadgets so much that he filled an entire room with all sorts of cool toys, much to the delight of my friends.

“‘Come to the parlor,’ said the spider to the fly…”

He’d rub his hands together in childish glee, saying these words as he awaited my inevitable landing on his Boardwalk property. Dad was good at Monopoly.

Those times together were over now. I was no longer showered with toys and candy. Instead, I huddled over my homework at that dining table, concentrating hard on shaving my geometry pencil down to a sharp point with a razor blade.

Dad had settled into a two-seater jute sofa a few feet away, an ashtray and glass by his side, a space heater scalding his calloused feet. He fingered the precious tarot cards spread before him, searching the occult for prophecies.

“Sunaina,” he said. I could hear the call of that spider. “My guru has read your birth chart.”

This so-called guru in plain clothes had been plying my dad with alcohol for months, poisoning him against my mom, and turning him into easy prey. This guru wanted our inherited property, the very source of our stability. My dad was inclined to oblige.

“Don’t listen to that fraud,” I said evenly, hoping to deflect any foretelling of my future by looking him straight in the eye.

Dad had big eyes. I’d first noticed how big they could get when I was six. I’d quietly monitor him as he watched climactic fight scenes in Bollywood movies. Bewitched, his eyes would bulge with excitement. At every exaggerated punch, he’d inch forward to the edge of his seat, fists clenched, body trembling, as if his insides were surging. I’d feel fascination and shame, sensing he wasn’t quite like the other dads.

His bloodshot eyes held a hint of that same excitement now as he moved to the edge of our jute sofa.

“Guru says that you are manglik. Mars is your birth chart.”

This next thing he said with extra relish, “You, my dear, are bad luck. Nobody will ever want you.”

Shock rushed my bloodstream, pushing tears to my unprepared eyes. Manglik. The word was new to me yet it validated my deepest fears. I felt exposed, placed at the mercy of gurus and pundits who, in one fell swoop, had the power to snatch away the love and belonging I craved.

I had grown up wanting my dad to protect me from evil things. Yet here he was—playing to the tune of the devil and joyfully cursing my fate.

Trapped in my study corner, I gulped in the haze of smoke. The clinking of ice cubes against glass amplified the numbness in my limbs. Dad appeared smug as he drank, sipping anticipation in this new parlor game.

I’d been here before—the hoping, the begging, the believing in the power of blood-related bonds. But this time, the need to find his goodness was gone. I was done with his drunken stupors. Done with his midnight rants. Done with his public displays of rage.

Yes, he had given me life but it was up to me to keep that life alive.

I was breathing deeply now. Steel in my spine, I perched higher in my chair. In that moment, I grew while I saw him diminished. It was a pity.

I decided then and there: I would never try to save my father again. I would save my fate from his self-destruction.

The tears receded, taking with them my burden to care. I picked up my pointed pencil and turned the page in my notebook. Moving on was easier than I’d thought. Manglik be damned.

“That’s just dumb,” I said.

There really wasn’t anything else to say.