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.
fortuitouspurpose 