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...

 Ever have one of those days where everything seems to go wrong on multiple fronts? I've been having a few of those lately. Actually, if I'm being honest, it's been a few weeks now. And I haven't been too nice to myself through this phase. Many times, I relentlessly point out all the things I should have done better. Needless to say, this doesn't help me feel any better. Sometimes I'd wish, if only I had a compassionate friend who knew all the minutiae of my life and could point out all the things I'm doing right instead, it would feel so much nicer. While I'm blessed with many such people in my life, today, I'm trying something different. I'm trying to be that friend to myself and reduce all the negative inner chatter. So humor me, dear reader, and come along on this highlight reel of my life with me. This is really hard to write for me because I'm so used to criticizing myself ! :) I remember you from three years ago. In fact, I particularl...

Dear Stranger, I don't know you, and probably never will. But I have gone through periods of intense darkness in my life, and maybe you are going through one right now. I know it can feel very overwhelming, with no beginning or end in sight. Maybe you feel that your life is horrible, or don't see a way to make things better. First of all, I am really sorry that you are going through this. I really wish you didn't have to, because you deserve good things and happiness.  I hope you have someone who loves you very dearly, and helps you through these dark days. I struggled to talk to my loved ones through these phases, so I understand if you haven't yet reached out. Even if you feel you don't have anyone who really cares, you have me. It may feel strange to you that I care about a person that I don't know and have never met. But weirdly enough, I do. I feel deeply connected to you because I have gone through a lot of ups and downs in life (more downs than ups in rec...

 Acceptance is something I have struggled with a lot in the past 3.5 years after my Dad's stroke. Somewhere around last year, I fully accepted this event in my life. I made my peace with it. I even saw it as a blessing. I was able to appreciate how this seemingly catastrophic event forced me to take a long hard look at my life and make changes. It was the beginning of a new life for me, and as difficult as the journey was, I feel truly grateful for all of it. To say that it has been transformative is an understatement. I have grown into a much kinder, wiser and peaceful human being, and I see that it is not possible to get here without going through what I went through. However, the other side of the acceptance coin still haunts me. How could I accept this event for my father? He was a strong, able, happy person before. And after, it was like the light went out in him. He became a chronically ill, depressed, anxious person, constantly screaming, struggling and in pain. One of my fu...

 I have burrowed my head in self-help books for the past couple of years, and the one theme I found in several of them is this: taking responsibility for whatever shows up in our lives. I found this very hard to accept or internalize, and I often found myself saying:  But this is not my fault! It was so and so who was so awful. Taking responsibility for this means condoning their behavior, and why should I do that?  After my Dad's stroke, I felt that life had been extremely unfair to me. Here were all my friends and peers, enjoying the prime of their lives, traveling, celebrating, and surrounded by parental and familial love. Contrast that to my life: I already had a grueling schedule with my PhD program, and now I had to deal with hospital visits, logistic, and financial woes, not to mention the huge emotional toll. Even when I slept, I had nightmares. I was at the lowest point in my entire life, and I couldn't see how things would get better.  And so, when I first ...

It has been three years since that fateful evening in 2021 when my father had a stroke. It is not the stroke itself that I struggled with, but all that it unearthed. It felt like a churning of the seas, and so much good and bad came out of it. Things I had never known, things I had never been aware of, things I had taken for granted, and so much more. As more and more stuff surfaced, I felt overwhelmed by the furor. It was almost as if I couldn't breathe, as if I was drowning in the turbulence. I felt an intense need to work on myself, to understand who I really was, and what I was meant to do in this world. It has been three years since I embarked on that quest, and it has changed how I look at the world in so many ways. As one of my favorite poets T. S. Eliot says:  We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time. Today, I write about one of the things I have struggled with the most i...

December happens to be my birth month, and I take this time to reflect on all that life has brought my way. This year, like so many recent ones, has felt like a total roller-coaster. I have been through the lowest of the lows, and the highest of the highs. This post is my attempt at chronicling my experiences and perspective. The first thing I am grateful for is always my family. I spent an entire summer abroad, away from family for the first time in my life this year, and this made me realize how lucky and blessed I am to have these people around and so close by. My husband is the first person I think of in this inner circle, and his presence in my life has transformed it in so many ways over the past six years. He makes me want to be the best version of myself, and at the end of the day, he is what adds meaning to my life and all its struggles. My parents have always been there for me in their own way, and I owe my strength, independence, and resilience in large part to their very un...

 I met Ginger and Pepper 6 years ago in November on my first visit to my in-laws' place in Mysore. I'd always loved dogs but had never had any of my own, and these two instantly won over my heart. Ginger was in the prime of her life, a brown indie with soulful eyes and an insatiable need for belly rubs. I was initially skittish around her, but gradually I let my guard down. She would excitedly pounce on me the moment I stepped in, and after a couple of minutes of running and jumping, would promptly plonk down at my feet asking for a belly rub. I delighted in petting her, in the deep rumbling noises of contentment she made, and the happy licks she gave me. Pepper was around the same age, a border collie mix with the softest fur and the sweetest temperament, and she greeted me with the same enthusiasm. Spending time with these two dogs was always the highlight of my visit to Mysore, and I always thought of them as part of my family. Although I did not know then, my time with Pepp...

 The past three years have been the most difficult years of my life. I've been navigating a demanding PhD program with an entire universe of ups and downs, watching my dad go through a stroke, sink into being paralyzed and bedridden, and then inhabit the universe of chronic pain and illness. Last year, my grandfather joined him in the chronically ill world, and I look back and see a blur of health scares, hospital admissions and grief. My parental home resembled a hospital, with sick people (two) outnumbering the healthy (one), and my Mom as the primary caregiver to both her husband and her father. We lost my grandfather a few months ago, and now my father seems to be teetering on the edge of sanity. I won't even get into all the other things that have been going on in the family. This alone is enough to shake and uproot a person and drive them insane. If I am here today, still continuing my PhD and holding on to my sanity and health, I have primarily one person to thank. My am...

Over these past three years, anxiousness has been my almost constant but unacknowledged companion. It never felt too severe to hamper my functioning, and I always brushed it off. It's been a stressful week. Maybe I've had too much caffeine, it's just jitters. I have had too little sleep for a while now, my nervous system is shot. Given my schedule and life, all these are very plausible and likely explanations for how I felt. And so, I continued on, finding coping mechanisms to deal with the bad days - no caffeine, meditation and breathing exercises, long walks.  A few months back, in May, I was preparing to leave for a summer in Amherst. This would be my first time living alone abroad for a few months, and I was definitely nervous about it. My husband had to travel ahead of me, which meant that I also had the responsibility of cleaning and winding up the house before I left. Added to this, I had a paper deadline a few hours before I left, which meant I would get little to n...

 Grief is a very non-linear journey, and I have known this for a very long time. Yet, each time I inhabit one of those black holes of loss, sorrow, worry and gloom, I forget this fact. Today is one such day, and I am writing this to remind myself and anyone else who may need this.  I woke up today, feeling an intense sorrow. It took me completely by surprise, because nothing had "happened". I'd gone to bed last night feeling pretty normal, and yet I woke up feeling utterly sad. I racked my brain. Did I eat too much sugar? Was I having a delayed reaction to something that happened a while ago? I couldn't find a logical reason for my sadness, except that everything that had been going on suddenly added up and descended upon me today. I sighed and sat down. I thought about my grandfather's death, my dad's continued illness for almost three years now, and so many other tragedies before that. The tears started rolling down.  This has been a very familiar experience...

 I am woken up at 4.25am by a phone call. Initially, I think that it is someone from India who is not aware that I'm in a different timezone. I groggily take a look at my phone. It is my husband. My heart skips a beat because I know too well what it likely means when a loved one calls you in the wee hours of the morning. He says Thatha is no more. I'm driving over to your parents' . I am numb, still waking up, and only shock registers. So many questions come to mind. When? How? Why? The answers reach me from a distance. He passed away in his sleep in the morning. Around 11am. And thus begins the horror of losing another loved one. The last grandparent I had. The one I knew the most. And the one I shared a house with for more than 20 years. And then the aftershocks hit me. I am continents away, and the logistical issues in traveling back home are too many. I will not go, and I will never get to see him again. I will never get to say goodbye. And so, I turn to writing, hopin...