writing – fortuitouspurpose

Closing Chapter: Fortuitous Purpose

Some years are meant to be survived.
Others are meant to be understood only after they pass.

2025 was not loud. It did not demand proof. It did not ask me to become someone new by force. Instead, it arrived like a quiet alignment—where effort dissolved and intention finally caught up with action. Even in moments of uncertainty, I could feel it: every difficult season before this one was converging into something whole.

This year did not need explanation.
It needed recognition.

Each morning, I woke up slightly altered. Not unrecognizable, just refined. The girl I have been, year after year, kept growing into a more powerful version of herself. Not through resistance. Not through struggle. But through inevitability.

There is something in me that keeps rising. I don’t know where it comes from, or how deep it runs. I only know that no amount of pain or sorrow has ever managed to keep me from standing back up. That force—quiet, relentless, unromantic—is my truest inheritance.

Maybe one day it will run out.
Maybe that day will come when my work here is complete.

Until then, I don’t count life in years.
I count it in selves.

How many versions of me are still waiting to live.
How many lives remain folded inside this one.

Fortuitous Purpose was never about having answers.
It was about trusting that meaning reveals itself through motion—through living honestly, choosing consciously, and letting truth surface when it’s ready.

This chapter closes not because the journey is over,
but because I no longer need to explain why I walk forward.

The rest will unfold in its own time.

The Art of Un-Reading: Why We Must Question the History We Inherited

Paulo Freire once nailed it: true literacy isn’t just about reading the word, but reading the world. That means looking beyond the text and into the systems, the power plays, and the hidden agendas that manufactured that text in the first place.

And let’s be honest, this kind of intellectual excavation is most urgently required when we crack open the accounts we lazily call “history.”

The Lies We All Agreed Upon

Napoleon Bonaparte famously declared, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.”

It sounds like a cynical, high-level tweet. But the more you sit with it, the more ominous it becomes. Because when the folks with power write history, they aren’t writing a mirror for you to learn from. They’re writing a memoir—a meticulously edited, self-flattering, career-justifying memoir.

Napoleon proved this point on St. Helena, where he spent his final years mythologizing himself as a tragic hero, a visionary crushed by global fear. And the world? We just shrugged and accepted it. His version became the nation’s framework, and his self-portrait was adopted as their identity.

This is where Freire’s warning hits hardest.

When we inherit a compromised story, the lie becomes the foundation. We stop seeing history as a record and start treating it like a ghost map—a map drawn by the conqueror that shows only the boundaries they want you to respect, not the messy reality of the land itself.

The Problem With Hand-Me-Down Propaganda

The real punch in Napoleon’s quote isn’t that he lied, but that we collectively agreed to call it the truth.

History filtered through the powerful is a subtle, pervasive tool for control. When people—especially those historically marginalized—inherit the tales written by their oppressors, they unconsciously absorb the worldview that justifies their own limited position. They grow up unable to tell the difference between objective patriotism and high-budget propaganda.

If the history we start with is distorted, the lesson we pull from it is corrupted. And if the lesson is corrupted, the future we build is structurally flawed. This is precisely why entire societies keep repeating the same spectacular failures, just in trendier outfits. When the story is broken, the cycle is inevitable.

My own obsession with memory and truth comes from this very tension. Memory is always edited. Identity is always curated. History is always a negotiation. A nation remembers what makes it look good and conveniently forgets what makes it accountable. And wherever collective memory has a blind spot, future generations are left carrying inherited delusions as if they were established facts.

We Owe Honesty to the Future

Freire argued that liberation starts with critical consciousness—the willingness to question every tale, to unlearn every inherited illusion, and to “read the world” beneath the tidy surface. If we don’t do this work, we aren’t remembering history; we’re just running the script again.

The main imperative, then, isn’t to track down the elusive, perfect historical truth—that ship probably sailed—but to rigorously commit to the truth right here, in the present moment.

We don’t owe perfect clarity to the past. We owe honesty to the future.

If our children are going to build a smarter world, they can’t use our myths as blueprints. They deserve analytical clarity, not heroic self-narratives. They deserve a history that isn’t afraid to name its own shortcomings.

To “read the word and the world” is to hold both warnings at once: the stories we agree upon shape our societies, and only a commitment to truth keeps us from reliving the cycles we pretend we’ve outgrown.

Let’s commit to leaving behind fewer lies than we inherited. Only then will the next generation read the world not as it was edited for them, but as it actually is.

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.

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.

Missing Someone

Missing someone isn’t one emotion. It’s a spectrum — quiet, wild, and sometimes cruel. It shifts depending on what part of the past it clings to, what kind of love it remembers, and what kind of silence it leaves behind.

1. Missing the Memories

The most familiar kind. You think you miss your ex — the late-night calls, the shared experiences, inside jokes that once made ordinary days feel cinematic. You miss the relationship, however messy or imperfect it was, because it held a version of you that believed in love a certain way — wildly, recklessly, without knowing better.

And maybe that’s what you’re really missing — her, the old you. The one who kept showing up, even when things didn’t make sense. Loving that past version of yourself is necessary. Because as we grow, that part of us, the one that loved so fearlessly dies a little. What remains is her ghost, whispering reminders of who we once were.

So perhaps it isn’t the person or even the relationship you miss. It’s that echo inside you, the memory of your own innocence, the hope that once burned bright before it learned the art of self-protection.

2. Missing Someone “Just Because”

Then there’s the kind that arrives uninvited. No song, no photograph, no reason at all. You just find yourself thinking of your friends from when you were in college (young, wild and free), the ones who made you laugh until your stomach hurt, who held your secrets without judgment, who made you feel safe enough to simply be. With them, there was no need to edit yourself or explain your silences.

You don’t miss one particular moment; you miss the energy of belonging. It’s not sadness, it’s remembrance. A quiet gratitude for what was. Your heart still hums their frequency, the familiar vibration of genuineness, even if your lives have drifted apart or your cities no longer overlap.

3. Missing the Person

This one is quieter and deeper. It’s not about what you did together, it’s about who they were. The way they made you feel grounded, seen, alive. You could have every photograph, every message, and still feel the hollow of their absence. Because this isn’t nostalgia, it’s knowing that something irreplaceable once existed. It’s missing what no one else could ever be.

4. Missing Through Love

I once came across a quote:

“You cannot miss someone as much as you love them.”

The depth of your missing will never exceed the depth of your love. You feel it most when you think of family — your parents, your roots. You miss them even when they’re right there, sitting beside you. You miss the versions of them that existed when you were small, the safety of their presence before life’s complexities took over. This kind of missing isn’t about loss; it’s about continuity, love echoing through time, changing shape but never fading.

5. The Kind That Feels Like Longing

And then, there’s the rarest kind. The missing that refuses to fade. The kind that feels like longing — sacred, eternal. It’s what you feel for a true love, the one who touched your soul in ways you can’t unlearn. You move forward, you live your life, but something in you still turns toward them, like a flower bending to the light. You can’t explain it. You can’t quiet it. It doesn’t ask for reunion. It simply is.

It’s love without demand — pure, patient, infinite.

There are many ways to miss someone. Some are fleeting; others stay for years. Some ache; others heal. But maybe the truth is this, missing isn’t always pain. Sometimes it’s a quiet way of remembering love in all its forms.

Because sometimes, the missing is the love.

Shakespearean Love

Shakespeare’s tragic love stories didn’t dress up love in roses. He treated love with a seriousness we often shy away from—messy, dangerous, transformative, and sometimes absurd. That’s why centuries later, we still see ourselves in his stories. He didn’t write love as fantasy. He wrote it as it is: contradictory, fragile, and fierce.

But then why does it feel like every great love story ends in death? Were Romeo and Juliet doomed from the start? Couldn’t they have fought harder, endured, found a way? Maybe. But Shakespeare makes their demise feel inevitable because their love wasn’t just affection. It was rebellion. It was defiance. It was lust, destiny, and devotion tangled together.

Their love itself wasn’t the failure though. What destroyed them was everything around it—family feuds, pride, society’s rigidity. Shakespeare understood something we still struggle with: love may be pure, but people, society, and circumstance corrode it.

Look at Othello. He didn’t stumble into jealousy on his own. The seed was planted. Iago, with all his venom and cunning, represents the voice of society—the envious whispers, the jealous eyes, the forces that can’t stand to see love in its truest, most powerful form. Left to himself, Othello might never have believed Desdemona capable of betrayal. But once society’s hand reached into that sacred bond, twisting love into doubt, the poison spread too fast to stop.

Isn’t that what so many of Shakespeare’s tragic loves are really about? Romeo and Juliet undone by feuding families. Desdemona and Othello undone by Iago’s schemes. Love itself isn’t the flaw, it’s the world around it, with its pride, politics, and envy, that refuses to let love simply exist.

And this isn’t just a lesson for the 16th century. We still have our Iagos. They show up as gossip, as cultural expectations, as voices telling us who we should or shouldn’t love. The methods are different, but the effect is the same: outside forces planting seeds of doubt where trust should live.

That’s the caution Shakespeare leaves us with: it isn’t enough for love to be strong within two hearts. It must also be guarded fiercely against the noise of the world. Without that vigilance, even the most genuine love risks being undone, not by what’s inside it, but by everything trying to tear it apart.

How?

This is where the sacredness of love comes in. True love, the kind Shakespeare wrote as life and death, is not casual. It carries responsibility. If you are given the gift of such a bond, you don’t squander it on ego, lust, or convenience. You honor it as something rare, something that transcends lifetimes.

Shakespeare revered too much to take it lightly. He wrote its danger because he believed in its power. And maybe that’s the real question for us today: in a world that treats love as fleeting, are we still willing to carry it as something sacred?

And maybe that’s what he was showing us all along: love doesn’t always live in two people holding hands forever. That kind of love can break under pressure, or even die with them. But love itself outlives the lovers. It lingers as memory, transformation, legacy. Love endures, not always in the way we want, but in ways that ripple outward, changing everything it touches.

Gryffindor

“You might belong in Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart. Their daring, nerve, and chivalry set Gryffindors apart.” — Sorting Hat

I’ve always known, deep in my bones, that I’m a true Gryffindor. Even when fear clung to my skin, I somehow managed to rise. Bravery didn’t always feel like a roar—more often, it arrived quietly, wrapped in trembling hands and uncertain steps. But I showed up. Again and again.

Still, there comes a time when being too brave, too often, leaves the pot of courage bone-dry. I remember those years when I lived on the edge. I flirted with risk, danced with chaos, and mistook recklessness for resilience. Every decision pushed a boundary. Every choice felt like I was testing the limits.

Until one day, the pot was empty. And I finally sat myself down. Body tired, heart heavier than I cared to admit. I realised how much I had been burning through myself just to prove I was brave.

That’s when the doubt crept in. Not all at once, but through quiet whispers of “what if” and a lingering fear of the unknown. That combination held me hostage. Kept me safe, but small. It made me wonder—was the pot truly empty, or did I convince myself it was? Maybe I was trying to protect myself from everything that felt too big, too fast, too uncertain.

In those moments, I lost her—the truest version of me. The one who once dared without second-guessing. I shrank into the shadows of hesitation, even when something inside me knew the unknown might be a good thing. But it wasn’t the world I was afraid of. It was the storm within.

So, I stayed. I didn’t run this time. I met the inner demons I had spent a lifetime avoiding. I didn’t fight them, I listened. And after many moons of letting the tides of memory and emotion crash over me, I found my footing again.

And now, when I speak of bravery, it’s not the loud, performative kind. It’s the kind that grows roots. The kind that allows space for softness. The kind that whispers—you’re safe now.

So yes, Sorting Hat, go ahead. Place me in Gryffindor. I no longer wear courage like a mask. I carry it quietly, but deeply. I feel brave from the inside. Brave at heart.

Diary Entry Day 7: Rebirth at 33

In the midst of remembering all that I’ve lived through, I’ve forgotten to actually live.

I recently turned 33. Growing older used to feel terrifying — not because of age, but because of how many years I felt I had already lost. I survived my childhood, endured my teenage years, and stumbled through early adulthood. I grew up too fast. I had to.

When I was talking to someone recently, I told them that this birthday feels different. I want it to be a rebirth. A reset. A conscious beginning.

For the first time, I’m starting to imagine beautiful things. Not just the life I escaped from, but the life I want to create. I’m not losing my youth. I’m growing into a version of myself that finally feels like home.

The best things in my life haven’t happened yet.
There’s love to be discovered, the kind that grows deeper with time.
There’s the possibility of becoming a mother, of raising children with awareness and tenderness.
There’s meaningful work ahead, work that feels aligned with who I am.

Even thinking about these things brings tears to my eyes. Because for so long, I couldn’t. I didn’t dare to hope. It felt too risky. Too far away. Too unsafe.

But now, I do hope. I do dream.

Yes, I’ve lost a lot. Yes, trauma shaped my path. But it didn’t break me. I’ve lived. I’ve gathered stories and strength. And I know, deep down, that the version of me who walked through all that darkness has earned her joy. Not as a reward, but as a right.

I’m proud of myself. Truly proud. That’s something I haven’t said often enough.

Will I still get triggered? Yes. Will fear visit me again? Probably. These things don’t disappear overnight. They live in the body. They resurface. But now I know how to face them.

I used to hope I’d one day forget everything that happened. But I’ve learned that forgetting doesn’t free you. It only delays the return. So I’m done running. This happened. These are the cards I was dealt. And still, I’m here. And still, I get to live a beautiful life.

Today’s Truth:

I’m not healing to erase the past.
I’m healing to remember the future I still get to have.
This is my rebirth — not in spite of what I’ve lived through, but because I chose to keep living.