Body is Home

It's been over a year since I moved away from Mumbai, half in hope, half escaping. I thought I was running toward a call; the closer I chased it, the more it seemed like an echo. Its motivations felt fake, hollow & meaningless-  simultaneously- as purposeful and right. Because I was trying to do something for myself?

It's been 10 years since I kept chasing my dreams of being an artist, it's like mastering to grasp ether with my fingers and palms. Clearly, an escape from the realities of the responsibilities I took on since I was a teen?  This elusive, evasive identity forced and conformed my choices towards why? Because someone said I could, and because someone said I shouldn't.

I thought catapulting into career mode and seeking out the ladder would give me a sense of purpose. But the more I came closer to learning and knowing, the less I seemed to desire or need it.

I am an artist, just as everyone is. So what am I trying to prove? to the world more than my own inner voice?

I felt ungrateful, my mind focusing on everything that was wronging me. Friendships started feeling repulsive, old friends twisting and disfiguring and leaving. New ones are entering in a very tempered, unsure way. Distrust, Fear, and Lack. Problems a dozen. Leading me to chase cheap relief with the IQ of a naive schoolgirl. The focus of a headless chicken monkeying around at every little lack.

I began to unearth new reasons for leaving behind my Mumbai skin. Leaving behind my parents. Leaving behind not belonging. Leaving behind my failures. Leaving behind my failed friendships. leaving behind all the places where I embarrassed myself. Leaving behind the disappointments in my family. Leaving behind some difficult truths. 

Leaving behind things that seemed to be traps more than safe houses. Things that demanded conformity, devotion, obedience, less sensitivity, smallness, shame, everything that betrayed my core.

Things I perceived as asylum were in fact places that deformed and disfigured me. Environments that mistreated me. Places that pulled out and nurtured my victimhood. Disempowering energy. Escapes that seemed like superficial remedies were all draining me like a vampire.

Abandonment, a Lack of belonging, putting the other on a pedestal, invisibility, being used and never truly seen or appreciated. Bending over backwards to make it easy for everyone around me, I lost my own sense of preferences, identity, and purpose.

What do I love? What's my taste? How am I growing truly in really feeling and understanding my own inner truths? How do I see myself when no one is around? What are the hobbies that I practice for myself? FOR. My. Own. Self.

What I lacked was taking complete and total ownership of my life. You don't outsource your body, your energy, or your clarity to systems that profit from your dependency. You understand how your biology works. You take responsibility for it.

No shortcuts. No delegation of the fundamentals. No substances that make you weaker in the long run.
Because the unlived life starts the moment you hand the keys to someone else. And that's what I always wanted to do. Hand the keys to a driver so I could just ride along with ease?

My standards were nonexistent. I always felt I was competing with other humans and not competing with the version of myself that took the easy road. What you accept becomes your baseline.

So now I work 2 pink/blue-collar jobs and am searching for a third to keep up survival, navigate the slow game of paperwork, in a foreign country that is trying to keep you from staying in it. Embodying an immigrant identity is hard. Living in it is a constant face slap. The play it has on your sense of worth, you can encase yourself in an upgraded shell, but inside you are an outsider, and you will always know that. 

Loving from this place is so problematic. Fundamentally, I have an unformed identity and grieving through an older identity loss that was out of my control, my baseline nerves have been so raw and depressed. Recovery seems impossible. Low-stakes interactions to form new connections seem heavy. Social intelligence is suffering. My capacity feels depleted. No one really understands, even I myself don't. Am I happy, really? No. Does this environment help? I don't know. What is my honest truth?

Why, every single time, when the human I think I love leaves me, I beg, I plead for attention and love and importance and loyalty? everytime?

Why do I remember an older memory of wanting to attract the attention of my first crush through the purchase of a purple top from Levi's that had netting on either side to flash some pre-puberty waist skin? When did I learn that I needed to self-modify for attention?

In our work. In our relationships. In how we move through the world. Our life is the sum of what we refuse to compromise on. Move. Sleep Breathe Eat Think. The foundation of every human who has ever operated at full capacity. No biohacks, no 47-step protocols, no noise. No trends, no maxxxing. Just principles that have always worked when executed with intention. Simply returning to what has always been true.

Then again, we can have the body, the clarity, the standards, the fundamentals, and still be absent from our own life. Presence, I've learned, is the difference between living and performing.

Who am I when no one is looking? And who do I become when the person I love needs to look but doesn't?

How can I keep remembering that they are not responsible for how I feel, I'm not responsible for how they feel, and pay attention to what meaning I am concocting, carving out a belief about myself from their behaviour? Why do I keep allowing myself to be used, consumed, inhaled, digested and thrown away?

It's being there when your partner speaks, when your child looks at you. When the moment matters. Showing up for it. Love. Not the performance of it. Not the Instagram version. The non-conformative version. The real thing - messy, raw, chosen every day. Love for your children that shapes them. Love for your partner that deepens instead of fades. Love for your brothers & sisters that hold them accountable. We don't protect our hearts from love. We protect our capacity to give it fully.

IF our life is all output and no exploration. We're missing the juice. How do we play again and not lose our sense of adventure?

Peace, not the absence of challenge, not passive acceptance. Peace is the internal state I want to return to when the noise clears, the calm that comes from knowing who you are, what you stand for, and where you're going.

Peace is in knowing the Body is home, the body is where I belong, that is truly mine, that is on a literal deadline.

The point isn't optimization of capacity, it's living at full capacity. Physical Vital Mentally sharp. Emotionally grounded, fully alive. Not for validation. Not to prove anything for the final hour, when the only question that matters is  DID I FIND OUT WHAT I WAS TRULY CAPABLE OF or did I die with the unlived life still inside?


Cavour, Rome, 9th May 26