November 2025 – fortuitouspurpose

The Fine Line Between Humour and Hurt

If I died today (don’t worry, I’m not planning to), I know in my heart I’ve lived a full life. I’ve seen enough, felt enough, survived enough for at least three lifetimes. The highs, the lows, the absurd plot twists — I’ve experienced life in 360 degrees.

And one thing has always carried me through it all:

Humour.

Humour has been my most loyal companion. It softened the blow when life got harsh. It helped me stay afloat when the weight of everything felt unbearable. If survival was an art, humour was the paint I used to colour the darkest parts of my story.

Humour has been my oxygen mask in the airplane of life — except I never waited for the turbulence. I’ve been putting that mask on since take-off.

People who know me will tell you I can find comedy in almost anything.
Pain? I can turn it into a joke.
Heartbreak? Give me 10 minutes and I’ll have you laughing.
Life falling apart? I’ll add a punchline.

Humour made me lovable. The life of the party. The person who “has it all together.”

But here’s the plot twist no one saw coming — not even me:

I was coping, not healing.

Humour helped me survive, but it didn’t help me feel.

The Joker Mask –

For the longest time, my humour wasn’t a personality trait, it was armour.

A beautifully sequined, sarcastic, quick-witted suit of armour that made everyone around me comfortable, while I slowly bled underneath.

On the outside:
Witty. Charming. Resilient. Strong.

On the inside:
Exhausted. Numb. Holding back tears with a smile.

The Joker metaphor isn’t accidental. His character wasn’t about comedy — it was about the tragedy of concealed pain. When your laughter becomes a shield, comedy turns into a coping mechanism. And coping mechanisms, when overused, become cages.

Matthew Perry is the one who comes to mind for me. He wasn’t just funny — he was funny to survive. The world adored him for his humour, but the humour was also his hiding place. Eventually, the hiding became too heavy.

I don’t know his personal story in detail. The media tells a version that suits them. But I know the feeling of being “the funny one.” I know the emotional cost of performing happiness while drowning quietly.

You can’t outrun your pain forever. At some point, the mask slips. And when it does, the fall is brutal.

When Humour Stops Helping

For a long time, I’d skip straight to the punchline because the alternative — sitting with the pain felt unbearable.

I thought:

If I can laugh at it, it can’t hurt me. But humour doesn’t erase pain. It delays it. It numbs it. And numbness always has an expiry date.

So lately, I’ve been re-evaluating my relationship with humour. Not abandoning it, just… evolving with it.

Humour is still one of my greatest gifts. But now, I choose to use it after I’ve felt the truth of what happened, not as a way to avoid it.

And that shift has changed everything.

My New “Humour + Healing” Timeline

If I were to map it out, this is what it now looks like:

1. Tragedy happens. Everything feels like a joke, except it’s not. Not yet.

2. Experience it. Really feel it. No laughing. No deflecting. No “I’m fine.” Sit with the discomfort. Bleed a little if you have to.

3. THEN laugh. Loudly. With friends, alone, in the shower, doesn’t matter. Humour is powerful medicine after the wound has been acknowledged.

4. Grieve again — this time consciously. There comes a moment when the laughter fades and the truth hits you. “This was actually messed up.” Don’t run. Feel it.

5. Finally, release it — with laughter. This time, the humour isn’t numbing you. It’s freeing you.

And here’s the wildest part I’ve noticed:

The more traumatic the experience…the funnier it becomes after you’ve truly healed it. Not because the tragedy was small, but because you survived something enormous, and laughter becomes your victory roar.

Why This Balance Matters

Humour without healing is escapism.
Healing without humour is unbearable.

But humour after healing?
That’s alchemy.

That’s turning darkness into light.
That’s reclaiming your story.
That’s laughing from the soul, not from the surface.

I still believe humour is sacred.
It has saved me more times than I can count.
But now I know it’s not the destination — it’s a stage of the journey.

Feel first.
Laugh second.
Heal through both.

Because the truth is:
Life will always give us chaos.
Humour makes it bearable.
Healing makes it meaningful.

On Temples, Miracles, and the Real Meaning of Prayer

I picked up a book from a temple here in India — a slim little volume filled with stories of deities performing miracles. People healed, wishes granted, losses restored. Page after page celebrated the gods for intervening at the perfect moment, as if the universe itself had leaned in to whisper, “Here, take this blessing.”

Beautiful stories. Comforting stories. But something about the entire framework made me pause. Because somewhere along the way, India took worshipping too far.

We treat gods like cosmic vending machines — insert coconut, donate ₹101, and request: a promotion, a spouse, a visa, a miracle.

But do gods even want to be worshipped? I doubt they’re sitting there tallying coconuts or adjusting interest rates on our prayers. They don’t operate on transactions. They don’t do it for the fruit offerings or the queues or the temple bells. If anything, God doesn’t need devotion. We do.

And that’s when it hit me:
Most people don’t go to the temple to connect.
They go to offload.
Vent.
Beg.
Plead.
Fear.
Bargain.

Connection is almost an afterthought.

But praying, real praying, is not a performance. It is not about bending the divine to your will. It is sitting with yourself and God in the same breath. It is emptying the noise. It is being brutally honest about what hurts.

Prayer is connection, not negotiation.

Temples only facilitate this because their vibration helps you drop into stillness faster. But the real connection can happen anywhere — on your bedroom floor, in the middle of a heartbreak, in a moving train, or even while brushing your teeth. God listens everywhere, because God isn’t in the idol; God is in the access point you open inside yourself. And here’s the part that deepened everything for me:

If destiny is already written, why do we pray?

This question tugs at me every time I walk out of a temple. Because philosophically, spiritually, astrologically, everything is written in the stars. Our timelines unfold exactly as they must. So if prayer does not change our fate…what are we really doing there?

Hope, maybe.
Comfort, maybe.
Habit, likely.

But look deeper and you’ll see something else entirely:

Prayer isn’t meant to change reality. It’s meant to help us understand it.

We don’t pray to manipulate outcomes. We pray to interpret them.
To separate desire from destiny.
To soften the anger around why things aren’t happening the way we want.
To gain the strength to carry what is already ours.

Because the truth is, God rarely gives us what we want, but He never fails to give us what we need. And needs arrive wrapped in strange disguises:

delays that protect us
heartbreak that redirects us
endings that make room
silence that forces clarity
losses that humble us
synchronicities that guide us

Which brings me back to the stories in that book.

People call these “miracles.” But what if the real miracle isn’t the event? What if the real miracle is our capacity to recognise why it arrived? That’s what prayer strengthens — the internal clarity to see meaning, not magic. And yes, maybe everything is predetermined. Maybe no prayer can change what the stars have stamped onto our timeline.

But prayer gives us something destiny never can:

Perspective. Surrender. Connection. Courage.

Hope takes us to the temple. Connection brings us home.

Hope whispers, “Maybe God will change this.”

Connection answers, “Maybe God will change me.”

We pray not to escape our fate, but to stop resisting the parts of it that hurt.

We pray to steady our heart.

We pray because the act itself unravels us, then gathers us again.

So no, I don’t think gods want worship. They don’t need it. But they do respond to honesty, to vulnerability, to the rawness of a human asking, “Help me understand.”

Because when you finally pray from that place without bargaining, without pretending, without performing, you don’t just feel heard. You feel held. And that, I think, is the real miracle.

When the World Changes but the Story Stays the Same

We like to believe that humanity evolves. That time softens our sharp edges, that society becomes more just, that we learn from history. But standing between the stories of Lucrece in ancient Rome, Sita in the Ramayana, and the experiences of women today, I can’t help but feel a strange heaviness: so much time has passed, and yet the patterns remain painfully familiar.

The Ancient Stories We Can’t Shake Off

In Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, a woman’s trauma becomes the spark that topples a monarchy and establishes the Roman Republic. In the Ramayana, Sita’s abduction launches a war that redefines notions of duty and dharma. Different cultures, different eras, different moral frameworks—but the same underlying script:

a woman’s pain becomes a political event
a woman’s body becomes a symbol
a woman’s voice becomes secondary to the men who act on her behalf

Both women were bound by ideas of purity and honor. Both were held responsible for violence inflicted upon them. Both became catalysts for the ambitions, decisions, or redemption arcs of men.

Behind every cultural veneer lies a stark truth: women have always paid the price for the moral failings of powerful men.

The Modern Echoes of Old Wounds

You would think thousands of years of progress—education, law, social movements, global awareness would transform these dynamics. But today, the forms have simply changed.

Victims still face disbelief.
Their character is still dissected.
Legal processes still retraumatize instead of heal.
Silence is still considered safer than speaking.
A woman’s body still becomes a battleground for politics and public opinion.

It’s Lucrece all over again.
It’s Sita, rewritten with modern vocabulary.
The same story, staged on a different platform.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

Because these patterns aren’t random—they’re structural.

They come from centuries of:

patriarchal power systems
cultures obsessed with purity
societies that protect perpetrators
communities that shame survivors
institutions built by, and for, men

You cannot dismantle in a few generations what was cemented over millennia.

But There Is Change—Slow, Fragile, Real

And yet, it’s not all despair. The story may be old, but people are rewriting it every day.

Unlike Lucrece, women today don’t have to die to be believed. Unlike Sita, they aren’t required to prove their purity to justify survival. The silence that once suffocated entire generations is now broken—loudly, publicly, unapologetically.

Movements like #MeToo, reforms in consent laws, trauma-informed practices, survivor-led advocacy. They are all signs of a culture shifting, even if slowly. Violence may not disappear entirely. Human nature makes that unlikely. But the way we respond to it can change and that is where hope lives.

Will It Ever Stop?

Not completely.
But will the story remain the same forever? No.

Because today:

women have language for their trauma
societies are more accountable
patriarchy is named, not accepted
education challenges old scripts
survivors are connecting, supporting, demanding
younger generations refuse to inherit silence

Change is not dramatic; it’s cumulative. And we are living in the middle of that accumulation.

The Story Is Changing, Because We Are

Ultimately, the world doesn’t move forward because time passes.
It moves forward because people refuse to accept old stories as destiny.

The fact that we can draw a line from Lucrece to Sita to women today and see the pattern clearly means we are already breaking it.

Awareness is disruption.
Naming is resistance.
Questioning is transformation.

And every generation that refuses the script writes a new one.

Everything Looks the Same, But Everything Has Changed

Coming back home to India after so many years has been a strange, beautiful kind of déjà vu. I decided to visit all the places that once shaped me — the neighbourhoods I lived in, the corners that knew my secrets, and even my old school. Some of these places hold memories I’ve spent years trying to forget, yet there I was, walking those same streets, noticing the familiar tea stalls, the same old guard, the same smell of dust after rain.

I caught myself smiling. Smiling at places that once broke me.

Standing at the gates of my school, the same gates I walked through every single day, dreading what awaited inside, I felt something shift. I used to walk through them misunderstood, judged, overlooked. I carried so much fear then, though I couldn’t name it. No one could.

Little did that girl know she was struggling because she has AuDHD — navigating a world that wasn’t built for her kind of mind, punished for traits she didn’t choose, expected to “behave” like the others when her neurobiology was wired completely differently.

And yet, here I was, standing in the same spot, looking at the same building, even the same paint color — thinking:

“Everything looks exactly the same… but everything has changed.”

The school is the same. The streets are the same. The children rushing out at 6 PM, the familiar chaos, even the tone of the evening bell — unchanged.

But I am not.

That realization stopped me for a moment. Time doesn’t heal through erasure — it heals through evolution. The pain I once carried through those gates gave birth to the person I’ve become: aware, grounded, and finally at peace with her own wiring.

It’s almost poetic how the external world stays frozen in time, waiting for you to return, only for you to realize it was never the world that needed to change. It was always you. Revisiting these old places taught me something tender: healing is not about rewriting the past, it’s about outgrowing the version of you who lived it.

Seeing my school again didn’t bring back the old fear. It brought gratitude for the distance between who I was and who I’ve become.

The girl who once trembled walking through those gates couldn’t have imagined the woman returning to them years later — calm, confident, self-aware, and finally understanding the language of her own mind.

And maybe that’s the quiet magic of life: we return to the same places, but if we’ve done the work, we never return as the same person.

Alive. Very Alive.

I was reminded of the book The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck by Mark Manson recently when I hiked up a mountain to catch the sunrise. The book ends with a chapter about him standing at the edge of the cliff, pulling himself back to the trail as the adrenaline rushing through his blood dissipates. A stranger sees him there, eyes wide, body still vibrating from the silence, the sheer nearness of death.

The stranger asks Mark:

“Is everything okay? How are you feeling?”

There is a pause. Mark responds:

“Alive,” he says. “Very alive.”

That part stayed with me.
Not the philosophy. Not the optimism.
Not the existential theory of life or death.

Just that moment:
Alive. Very alive.

Because that feeling does not come from safety. It comes from standing at the threshold, where your mind quiets, your body trembles, and your soul steps forward to speak.

I think everyone needs to stand there once. Not necessarily on a cliff but at their edge. Whatever edge life has placed for them. Because when you strip everything away —
the noise, the roles, the expectations — what remains is the truth of your life.

And here is my truth:

If today was my last day, I know I have lived. Fully. Chaotically. Messily. With every version of myself, even the broken ones, shining through. The choice to be alive was never half-hearted for me. Even my pain has been wholehearted. Even my joy has been loud.

Yes, I have unfinished dreams. But I have no unfinished living.

And maybe that is why, if I were on that cliff, I wouldn’t jump, not because I am afraid to die, but because I am not done living. The story is still happening. The threads are still weaving. The meaning is still unfolding.

The only tragedy, I think, is not death. It is reaching the end and realising you never really showed up. If you find yourself fifty years from now saying, “I could have lived more,” then the heartbreak is not in dying — it is in not having lived.

This is why the edge matters. Because the moment you look down, and everything goes silent, and your mind finally stops fighting, you will know exactly what remains.

Your truth.
Your life.
Your aliveness.

And stepping back from that edge, with breath still in your lungs, is the moment you return to the world very alive. Ready to live life to the fullest, because afterall, life is fragile. You never know when your last day on planet Earth will be.

Darkness

Our mind is capable of so much. The depths of our darkness can open doors that feel both unreal and unreachable. But once you cross that threshold, it becomes harder to turn back. You see the shadows for what they are—the parts of our psyche capable of destruction equal to the pain we once endured.

What makes us let this darkness consume us?
It all comes down to love.

In one of my favorite book series, The Passage by Justin Cronin, a man loses the woman he loves. What he does next leads to the downfall of humanity. He lets grief mutate into vengeance—his love turning to ruin. It’s not so different from Darth Vader, who brought down an entire galaxy mourning for what he lost. These are men who chose vengeance when love was taken from them.

The Taj Mahal was built by an emperor who lost his wife in childbirth. A symbol of eternal love, yes, but one built by enslaved workers, their hands cut off so they could never replicate its beauty again. Why is it so hard to think of examples where love inspired creation without cruelty?

Are we wired to choose the dark side? Maybe. Darkness offers a certain ease. I’ve done things in pain that felt justified in the moment—words I shouldn’t have said, decisions I wish I could take back. With the amount of heartbreak I’ve had, it makes sense that I have the thirst for it in me. I’m not going to lie, it creeps up from time to time. It gets stronger, especially when I’m hurt. So I understand it, it’s the mind’s way of protecting itself, a survival instinct disguised as power. But there’s always a line. And maybe the difference between those who lose themselves to the dark and those who return from it lies in that one fragile act of resistance.

I once read this:

“The love force is focused through the two great spiritual Lords of the Hierarchy, the Buddha and the Christ—one embodies the twelve-petaled lotus in the head, the other its counterpart in the heart. Few grasp this truth.”

You got it right—it’s faith.

Our mind can do unspeakable things in the name of self-protection. But faith, whether in God, goodness, or simply love itself, pulls us back toward the heart. It’s not religion; it’s balance. When the mind (the Buddha in the head) and the heart (the Christ within) coexist, light returns. The darkness no longer consumes—it teaches.

Even in fiction, this holds true. Thanos wanted to restore balance by wiping out half the universe. His intentions seemed noble. There was too much chaos, but he let the darkness guide his hand. He mistook himself for God. The moment ego takes the throne, destruction follows. Because anyone trying to play God is already lost to their own shadow.

But the universe has its own ways of restoring order. Natural forces intervene, sometimes through people, sometimes through moments so serendipitous you can’t explain them. Call it fate, divine timing, or just life correcting itself. Light always finds its way back, just as the sun inevitably rises after the longest night.

So, if you’ve ever found yourself walking through darkness, remember this: the fact that you can still recognize the light means it never truly left you. The mind may wander into shadows, but faith—quiet, unwavering faith will always guide it home.