They Call It Adulting

Trigger Warning! Please do read if you have been going through some hard time, please understand that what seems endless today will in fact end someday. Don't take things to heart, even though its just a story, it can also be someone's life and we have to live it all.

Love💜

Copyright © WD, 2025 All rights reserved.

I think midlife will be too late to have a crisis, so I took some special grants from God to have a quarter life crisis. And to update you on that I am frantically enjoying it. After miraculously saving my right eye by five centimetres, and my life by another six centimetres, I am still alive, I guess. The beauty of that night was that I was happy, or maybe I faked it too well I actually believed I was happy. I was happy for people, not for myself. Bad mental health can be a mirror to bring out the worst things around in the environment. A day before my perspective to life shifted again; I was crying curled up for hours and asking the reason for the tears flowing, sadly when we live alone only ghosts and God can answer you in these circumstances, and an answer from either was not really a good idea, you see it would mean to be in a dead or a dead kind of situation.

After 50+ micro stitches, 28 injections, 6 anaesthetic injections which could have left half of the face paralysed or brain dead, a dysmorphic face slowly coming back to place, I can tell you with the absolute grace I was born with, that life my friend is a precious part of the journey. And it’s a scarce resource, it can be snatched from you at any given moment, and you won’t have a say. They lie when they say life’s most precious 7 minutes play in your head when you are dying, I say it because I have been there. The load of knowing things was very heavy on me, the heavier load was not being able to do anything about it. It functioned as two hundred tonnes of rock tied to my feet and I am left in the open sea. But it was Dead Sea I couldn’t drown because of its density, but I couldn’t break free either. 2020, when I tried to end it all, my legs slipped and what could have been my last 7 minutes became my struggle to live. My thoughts were only about my mother, who was waiting for me to get out of the washroom so that she could serve the lunch, I just couldn’t let her be starving without me, so I got up, dried myself and dressed, removed the towel from the mirror after 5 months to see myself for the first time in months wiped my face to its usual smile and got out of the washroom. Had lunch, then dinner, then everything on and on. I had to live, no, I gave myself a reason to live, with the load still in me. You know what I am a heavy weight lifter now. I have made my core so strong in these years I could actually participate in mental health Olympics.

Every year since, I have had some extreme testing time, few years back, was the fight to find a job, the fear of unemployability and the feeling of confusion and helplessness to pursue what I thought I would be great at, I chose to get a job and support myself financially, to support my family in time of their need, wise of me, wise of so many of us who could be poets, authors, painters, bakers, florists, singers, dancers, actors and what not but chose to choose the safer path and get a job. Then, when the weight of leaving my safe space for the first time was already kicking in, the struggles of creating a name in an unknown city and among unknown people the 2^nd day of my joining office I was hit by my worst nightmare, when the part of my heart, my strong little brother, underwent an emergency surgery after he had intense internal bleeding, his health has been a problem since before that, and still continues to drain us all mentally, physically and financially.

Next, I was juggling between hospital and job for him and with that I had to shift spaces as I was feeling toxicity in the place I lived. Happened so, my hunch was absolutely right, it was not just any other thing, all the times I felt being watched in that shared flat, every time I felt being followed, or I saw someone roaming outside of my room’s door in the night, or felt absolutely disgusted on someone keeping tabs on the minutes I spent in my washroom bathing and listening to songs, turns out I was in a psychopath’s den. I know the feeling of packing everything in the bedsheet, crying because my parents saw me helpless in that video call when my safety, my personal space was compromised by someone unknown, angry, because I made my parents feel so powerless, I heard them shout when my phone was snatched away from my hands, when I had only two options to fight or run for myself, and I chose to stand my ground. Red and clouded vision I can only imagine my face when I shouted with my cracked voice, snatched my phone back and locked the door, and not get scared by the fanatic banging that followed, till the people I know arrived. I know the uneasiness it creates to still see the same faces everyday like nothing happened, I know the feeling of being stalked randomly by the people who were warned to stay away. I know how it feels when after few months the world comes back to normalcy and any reaction you create becomes exaggeration and is tagged as overthinking. I know how angry one might feel when all the people around me could do was to stand with me and tell that one single person to not dare to look at me, but instead they told me to not bother. I know the feeling when someone’s gaze remains fixated at you, no remorse, guiltfree as if he got the pass from the world who yet again waited and buried it all because a girl was not dead and fine on the outside. It took me some time to get over the unease, it’s not that I don’t get bothered now, I do, I look behind me when I walk, when I leave office I make sure I leave in the day light, when I enter my new house’s vicinity I make sure no one’s around me stalking me, for so many months I did not tell my locality’s name to anyone fearing the possibilities of the worst. How I made sure my social media does not give out my photos because months later I was stalked on all my nameless faceless social media, where no one except the only select few ones know my real identity and yet again I was just suggested to block and ignore. I know it all, and I still can’t do much but just write about it. To anyone who has faced this in life or even worse than any of this, you have my respect and hugs. This is a problem that no one addresses but there are people who will listen to you and understand you and comprehend the depth of your pain. It might not really reduce it much but it will surely help you heal, but on that choose people very wisely, either you should be so powerful yourself that them knowing about the depths of your darkness shouldn’t come in your way, or they should be so good as human that you standing stripped with your emotions shouldn’t make you feel any less powerful. I recommend to have both in place and then open up about yourself.

A year and half ago, time came as a professional learning curve when the blanket of happy professional life was taken away from me and I was asked to sleep on the ice bed. Day in day out I was struggling to prove myself all because I chose to work for myself and not to satisfy someone’s ego. Turns out power dynamics is really a thing, and I was definitely someone who learnt it practically and the hard way, it drained me, made me lose composure, and worst of all my confidence. All because I tried to take decisions of my own career. “Earn Trust” is used very blatantly in the organisation where I work, it is considered very important that the employees fixate themselves to certain phrases as this, to function efficiently in the organization. No one cares about the paradoxes that comes with the vague phrases and somehow what should be a two-way thing becomes only a higher power to below flowing entity, just like earn trust, simply said, I should earn my manager’s trust but they should also earn my trust right? Ideally yes! Reality, well trusting your manager doesn’t exist, and the manager somehow never trusts people because they live on perceptions and having a logical opinion creates a perception that you are a “negative”, “pompous”, “immature”, not trust worthy individual who should probably be left unattended. But they also know that they can’t let go of such reality seeking employees so they set a trap. Two years in a row I have been set bait in the trap, I know it but again I can’t do much about it but write in an encrypted manner just so no one guesses who I might be. Perks of being in a corporate, I guess.

To think of it, I have had it all, in the mid of my teen age, I had massive anger and hysteric issues, which eventually changed to persistent depressive episodes, and the flashes of it still exists, the roots of it started from the time I was assaulted, multiple times, multiple different people, as a kid who was not even ten, absolutely unaware how to comprehend the things happening into words and explain it to elders, specially to my parents, I was already aware that whatever I would have said would break them into pieces, so I did keep quite. I really took fifteen years to get over the fact that whatever happened was not my fault. And now when I talk about it, I feel empowered. No wonder I took over to writing and bleeding my emotions on the paper as if my life depends on it, no wonder I am always aware of the environment I am in. Now if I just sit back and see things, family, friends, people, life, it seems kind of enough to have a quarter life crisis, but if I logically see things again after I have taken all of my “why me?” questions, the anger, probable hate, tiredness, helplessness, “only if” statements, and my plans and keep it aside; I see the reality. There was no way I would have any chance to control anything that happened. So the divine sitting above me placed things in such manner that I was able to manage everything one thing at a time. If I would have gone to do my higher studies, there could have been two problems, I would struggle to come back to my family when they needed me, and there could have been a major financial crisis. If my office became a problem in those crucial initial few days I might not have developed the power to withhold the silent bully, the part of which also came from the time back in school when a fifteen year old was sexualized and mocked because she used to force feed lunch to her nine year old brother, or the time she was locked in a room when she was about to go get a role in the school’s play, anyways I also very strongly see the pattern, the problem remains same it just expands in its intensity like the Fibonacci series. Had I not undergone an absolute zero confidence phase in a grown ass age and build it up brick by brick without letting anyone know I was battling extreme existential crisis; I wouldn’t know how to come back after a scarred identity. For someone who took enough time to start self-love it was a huge blow to look at a face that was absolutely not I fell in love with, a new level of self-love unlocked as I felt the power I had within, to literally smile through the pain. And the most important part. I wouldn’t know the absolute pretend show I put forward as an anti-romantic. The first thing I cried my eyes out after I was told I have to get a surgery was on how my mother is going to take this all, the second thing was “how sad it is that my partner might not get a chance to see my natural features”. Silly me is still just waiting for love! That being said, life’s too crazy to handle, my bones they actually pain like I have lost all the calcium and my head pounds like hundred squishy babies are jumping for food inside them, but still, I can’t deny the fact that I am very much alive, quite over the past, little too much in the future, and trying my best to be in the present. Taking things one at a time, not controlling but managing, not struggling but navigating, not denying but accepting, not blaming but forgetting (I am no saint, I can’t forgive sorry). Frustrated, tired, sleep deprived, not too rich, not too healthy and definitely not in love with anyone. But in absolute alignment with the idea of being healthy, wealthy and in a position to keep all the promises I made to myself, most important one being able to get back on track after whatever breaks the track. Hoping that we all get power from all the positive people around “You water me, I water you and we grow together” kind of relationships, rest everyone can respectfully get their arse out of the way.