Reflections of a restless eccentric

I've really needed the catharsis of writing in the past three months, but this weekend has been the first instance where I've had the time and space to get to it.  I had mentally labeled 2026 as a year full of hope and dreams. 2025 had the seemingly impossible goals - finishing my PhD, finding a job, my dad staying relatively healthy, and all these happened. And so, I let myself dream about 2026. This would be the year where all my PhD papers would get accepted. This would be the year where my dad would come to my convocation and finally smile after all the pain he's endured. This would be the year where I run my half marathon and cover a total distance of 5000km. This would be the year when, after 8 years of learning music, I would perform on stage and finish my level exam. This would be the year when I could finally take vacations without worrying about a million things. And mind you, when I say "dream" I do not just mean imagining these things. I am talking abo...

 I write this in celebration of Amod, an incredible human being I have the good fortune of calling my husband. Wishing you a very happy birthday! I was reading this post I'd written in 2021 about how who you marry plays an outsized role in your career and life. Looking back 5 years later, I find myself supporting this belief even more vehemently. Let me start at the beginning. I met my husband in late 2018, soon after I finished my Master's and was working at my first full-time job. We got married 6 months later, and 2019 was a dream come true. We were both in well-paying jobs, our parents and families were in good health, we traveled somewhere every month, ate out and shopped to our hearts' content, celebrated festivals with family, and much more. Life was perfect. By the end of 2019, I decided that I wanted to pursue a PhD. This was a long-held dream for me, and being with my husband and hearing his PhD stories made me want that experience for myself even more. My husban...

 As always, I write this post on my birthday, reflecting on all that life has given me. This year has been utterly magical for me, and I watched many of my long cherished dreams come true. But the biggest change, something that I think of as the reason for all these good things, is my perspective shift. I look at life very differently from a few years ago, and that makes all the difference. As Wayne Dyer says, When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. But first, let me tell you about all the wonderful things that happened this year. The biggest of them all: I finished and defended my PhD. This has been a dream for me since high school, and I can't tell you how good it feels to finally see it in reality. But it is more than the research I did, the papers I published, and all of that stuff, even though those are pretty cool too. The process taught me so much about life. The uncertainty, the rejections, the darkness. Parts that we struggle so much with...