To me

To Me,

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me.

Been a decade since you crossed your knees.

Been a little more time since Renee stopped calling,

I wonder if she’s been lost and maybe just wandering.

I came here to tell you: you’ve been doing good, all this while.

You’ve lost a dozen of dimes, indeed some were good times.

10, you were intoxicated with innocence.

You knew less and that was surely better,

that’s what Tame Impala says, something you’ll learn much later.

15, hey! You’ve experienced what it’s like to fall in love.

Till now you don’t understand the existence of rising in love.

It comes with growing, needs a bit of wisdom and ageing.

19, ah! you’re at your prime.

Or that’s what you thought.

You’ve fallen thrice and by thrice maybe a couple more times.

Numbers and people began piling up,

like weights on shoulders you hadn’t built in the gym.

Math you never solved, faces you never needed

all of them pressing down,

all of them shaping you into someone undefeated.

21, you’re a rebel child.

The years that will turn your whole life around.

You start to bloom in different ways,

ways your 25-year version now looks behind.

When it starts to rain, you sit in the balcony.

You read books to mom to distract her

from all the daily noise the pandemic brought.

You tell dad to break a sweat,

and he does. He loses 10 pounds,

maybe more of his worry than his weight.

23, that’s when the wisdom starts to kick in.

Slowly, but the voices start speaking louder.

They tell you: keep your eyes open and your mind wider.

Keep your heart closer and keep dreaming wilder.

I wish I could tell you that the voice was me from 2025.

But no, it’s just the echo of a night,

when dad asks you to resign.

And you do. You resign, take a flight,

and start your new life.

Oceans across, there lies a bed you make,

food you learn to cook,

money you begin to earn,

and new friends you slowly collect like seashells.

You start to like UK vibes, but you’re so desi you make the whites fall behind.

24, you learn shit and crib.

You stumble, you curse, you laugh.

By now it took you twice to fall in love to rise once.

You start to realise the mess is also the masterpiece.

And now, 25.

you have wisdom, you own your craft.

You don’t cry when people shout, you laugh.

You cut ties, you don’t let toxicity intertwine.

Now when it rains, you look out a little less,

but you’re still mesmerised.

You lift heavier, and you’ve come back to India,

where you realise home isn’t a place,

it’s the pulse in your chest when you finally feel aligned.

After all, it’s the butterfly effect. Not so bad like you thought.

So while I write to add one thing each year,

This time I write

Not to warn you or to guide.

Just to tell you:

you’ve been doing good, all this while.

By me.

–
What Remains

There are days i leave behind,
Shadows of agony,
And take the form of something supernatural.
With a face seeming to be faceless when you take a look closer,
But my heart not like that of a human.

I’ll reincarnate,
But i choose not the flesh and bones with so many emotions on the plate.
Where i eat things i burn alive.
Where i drink blood and have no mercy.

I do not want my life less than my death
But i choose to leave.

~rs

–
The Art of being Vulnerable

We live in a universe filled with billions of stars, galaxies that sound like fancy candy brands, and cosmic energy no one really understands but everyone likes to quote on Instagram. Which makes me believe: maybe each of us carries some of that energy too, the kind that binds us, annoys us, and occasionally makes us do karaoke when we promised we wouldn’t.

Now, imagine this: I tell you that you’ve got 25 days to live. Just 25. What do you do? Chances are, you’re not spending them doomscrolling or fake-laughing at your coworker’s jokes. No! You’d probably cling to the people you love, squeeze out every ounce of joy, and hand out kindness like free Wi-Fi. You’d basically become the best version of yourself, right before the curtain falls.

Which raises a rude question: if we’d live like that when time is short, why don’t we do it when we’ve got decades? Answer: because we’re human. And humans are…well, pretentious little liars. We say we’ll call, but we don’t. We say “let’s hang out,” but we mean “let’s never speak again.” We hide in crowds, slap on masks, sugarcoat truths until they rot.

The funny part? Vulnerability—the thing we run from like it’s bad Wi-Fi—is actually the thing that makes us most human. When we let our guard down, when we’re awkward, when we admit we don’t have it together, that’s when we’re actually bearable to each other. That’s when we’re real.

So maybe the art of vulnerability is less about crying into a journal and more about being shamelessly, stupidly honest. Saying “I miss you” without waiting for the perfect moment. Owning up when you messed up instead of inventing a PowerPoint excuse. Laughing at yourself before the universe does it for you.

Because here’s the secret: everyone’s faking it anyway. Vulnerability just means you’re the one brave enough to admit it.

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10 QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF BEFORE STARTING A BLOG

Okay. Am I ready? Like, I’ve already given quite a lot of thought.
By a lot I mean a couple hundred and one shots of it.
But now that I’m here, let’s just not make it a deal.
Whoosh. I’m already nervous.

I hope I’m not the only one who has taken every decision of their life thinking about it at least three times, and still wasn’t sure when the time came. Starting a blog feels exactly like that: exciting, terrifying, and weirdly anticlimactic at the same time.

So instead of spiraling (which I’m great at), I made myself a checklist. Questions to ask before you hit publish. Questions I wish someone had asked me when I was staring at the blank screen pretending to be a writer.

Here it goes,

1. Why do I want to blog?
Clout? Therapy? Oversharing? A secret hope that strangers on the internet will validate my brain? All of the above are valid. Just be honest with yourself.

2. What do I actually care about?
Because if you’re writing about productivity hacks when your real passion is baking cookies at midnight… you’ll burn out faster than your first batch.

3. Who am I writing for?
Your younger self? Random internet lurkers? Future employers? Your cat? (Honestly, your cat’s judgment-free eyes might be the best audience.)

4. Can I be consistent?
Not daily, not weekly. Just consistent. Even if that means once a month. Blogs die not because writers suck but because they ghost themselves.

5. Do I want to write or do I just like the idea of writing?
Painful, but worth asking. The idea of being a writer is sexy. The act of writing is messy, frustrating, and kind of lonely but that’s where the magic is.

6. Am I okay with being cringe?
Spoiler: your first posts will be. Probably your next ten too. And maybe that’s the point.

7. What do I not want to write about?
Setting boundaries is underrated. Just because everyone’s blogging about relationships, finance, or “morning routines” doesn’t mean you need to.

8. Can I handle silence?
There will be posts no one reads. Comments no one leaves. Traffic that looks like a deserted road at midnight. If that breaks you, fix that before you start.

9. What does success look like for me?
One loyal reader? A hundred? A career? Figure out your definition so you don’t chase someone else’s.

10. Will I still write if no one is watching?
That’s the big one. Because at the end of the day, blogs aren’t built on clicks, they’re built on the stubborn joy of stringing words together.

So, yeah. Am I ready? Not sure. But I’m showing up anyway. And maybe that’s the whole point..

–
I Love This Place

I love this place, just not the road I’ve taken

I might take the long route, feels better that way

I have been taught

bushes and bumps comes along with it

then, I stumble, a step or two

by a step or two I mean maybe a couple more to boot

I upsurged a bit, not almost there i know

but I might take the wrong turn, feels better that way

found blight here, blessed me with the light as well

taught me to let go, there’s no place like home

I belong to the warmth of the sheets my mother folded,

not the vicious hand I led myself to.

but I might perceive I made it here because of that one wrong turn,

the road I never wanted to take,

the longest route with all the bulges I leave behind

I might wanna stay here for a while, just feels better this way.

–
Back in time

We all had our share of happiness in indefinite places and moments. Some recall it from that one specific birthday that was so far the best they ever had and some reminds them of their first victory. Some experience it when holding their first paycheck and to some, it simply can be a fragrance which can bring back thousands of memories at once. Either way it is the feeling that is associated with such incidents that comes in our mind at the very first thought.

If you ask me, i’d like to take you to my childhood. I was always the average shy kind of a girl. The kind you know, who was not very fond of games and toys. My parents used to tell me that i never troubled them as a kid unless it was for bedtime stories because there was not a single day that i slept without listening to them. I would cuddle my mother and listen to her singing lullabies at times. They thought it was just a one time thing, or they could just buy me toys to play with instead. I did play with toys and barbie dolls but i usually got bored with it just in a matter of few days. There were days i remember when i’d just draw out the characters and happenings of the stories i listened to the night before just by imagining what they would look like. When my mother used to ask me what is it that i draw all the time, i never said a word and kept drawing. It was a few days back when we were sitting in our balcony watching the sunset and recalling some of my childhood stories, that i told her about my drawings and she told me, she still have some of them in our hometown. She just loved the fact that i was never someone who’d sit and wait for things to happen, instead i always made my own way to enjoy life, to find happiness in the little things. For me, they were never little but the innocence that made me feel euphoric. When i look back and think of the moments that made me immensely happy, it was always my childhood. I never felt that sense of satisfaction till date. It doesn’t mean i’m not happy, just the fact that i now think of myself as a little less of that version.

I would not change a thing about how things happened in a manner otherwise i wouldn’t be writing this down. There’s still a part of me that wishes to fetch feelings and moments and keep it forever and keep on living it just like the first time but I think it’s all for the good. There’s one thing I learned for sure is that we cannot go back in time, I could not bring that version of myself back. This is what is called growth and I think I’m evolving at my own pace and making peace with myself. For me it was the little things that mattered and it still does. I know for sure, I’d still find so much more happiness in life that will add to these moments to talk about. The last thing I would tell you is to always trust the timing of your life.

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Fear : Face It

You know what’s funny? When I was 12, I was absolutely terrified of stepping on stage. Not “nervous” terrified. I mean full-on existential crisis at age twelve terrified. Six months of practice down the drain because the idea of singing in front of strangers felt like I was about to perform open-heart surgery with a plastic spoon.

So there I was. My name gets announced. People clap. And what do I do? I take a step back. Like, literally backwards. Imagine a magician calling your name and you just, reverse out of existence. That was me.

But then the kid next to me pushed me forward. Probably out of spite, or maybe destiny disguised as peer pressure. Suddenly the spotlight hits me, and here’s the thing no one tells you: when you’re blinded by that one giant light, you can’t actually see the crowd. Poof. Gone. Just me, a mic, and my twelve-year-old panic attack.

And honestly? That was a relief. Because if I couldn’t see them, maybe they couldn’t see me either. (Spoiler: that’s not how physics works.)

So I open my mouth, clear my throat, and sing my first note. And it is…horrible. Like, so bad my ancestors probably covered their ears. But then something wild happened: the audience clapped. Maybe out of politeness, maybe out of pity, maybe just to speed up the torture but still, they clapped. And in that moment, I realized: I had survived. My worst nightmare had happened, and I didn’t die.

That’s the thing about fear. It’s this scam artist living rent-free in your head. It convinces you not to try, not to step forward, not to sing your first bad note. But here’s the punchline: once you actually do the thing? Fear doesn’t vanish, it just gets embarrassed. It sulks in the corner while you stand there, a little shaky but still alive.

For me, it was stage fright. Still is, honestly. Every time I step on stage, my brain screams, “We’re all gonna die!” But every time I ignore it, the scream gets quieter. And maybe that’s the real deal.

So yeah, the performance was terrible. The claps were probably charity. But you know what? I’d rather bomb under the spotlight than never step into it at all.

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