My informal bio!

After I wrote my formal bio for my website, I felt something inside that was slightly troubling me. I want my website to reflect my true personality because for me, that is the how I wish to find my tribe and people who are aligned with the type of work I am passionate about. And while all of what I wrote in my bio is true, it is only a part of the truth. Sitting with this over tea today, a part of me that felt unseen and invalidated revealed itself to me. And I allowed that part to spill out and describe itself. And it goes like this:

I am a girl awestruck by life. I have come to a point where I feel moved by the little things more than the big ones. Little things give me joy and it is also the little things that shatter my heart. I live by “it is the little things that matter.” I enjoy drinking tea when I feel like it. And nothing warms my heart more than a nicely brewed cup of tea. And affirmations of abundance flow out of me, as I sip my plenty (plen-tea). Similarly, a badly made cup of tea can make the world look a little pale too. I love sipping my tea watching the crooked Christmas tree out of my window. It stands proudly reminding me that things don’t have to be straight for them to be adorable. I love ceramics for some unknown reasons. Surely, one of them is because of the cracks that they develop! I am fascinated by the concept of Kintsugi (which you might know by now). I have a newfound love for plants too although I am still a novice at caring for them. And recently I chose a ceramic pot for one of my plants not minding a crack on it. And the shopkeeper who told me to choose another in place of this “defective one,” surely didn’t know about my love for kintsugi! I came home and filled the crack with my gold paint (not that it was any less beautiful without it). And this, is exactly how I can go on talking about the things that move me.

Give me a bowl of comforting food and some warm heart to heart conversations and as they say, I am a happy woman. I lose track of time when such conversations flow. Somehow, it doesn’t feel quite the same over a telephone though. I am quite old-school in loving books and travelling. Solo travelling has become something I look forward to these days. I have grown to enjoy my company as much as that of my loved ones. I feel deeply when I am attuned and can empathise with people’s emotions seamlessly. I am sensitive to energies of people, places, and things. I feel a strange pull towards the starry night sky that somehow gives me a sense of finding my “way back home.” And a select few people give me that uncanny sense of familiarity too. Dissociating or zoning out at times, as I recently learnt is one of my defences and strangely feels so good to me that I do not feel like overcoming it, at least not yet.

I am grateful to life also for having given me reasons to call myself a nomad. I have lived in different parts of India and have embraced different cultures and languages as my own. These for me are more like things that unite us than differentiate us, because I have come to see that underneath all the different identities, we are all simply people who want to be loved. I enjoy listening to Rabindra sangeet as much as I like old Hindi classics and Sufi songs. I am not a very movie or OTT person and have a poor aptitude in it as much as in politics and economy. I love when every once in a while, I stumble upon a book that captivates me. Over the course of the few days or weeks of reading the book I feel like I have lived another life. And recently, I have begun looking at people too as books waiting to be read.

And whether I like it or not, being the human that I am, I have had my fair share of ups and downs. I have had a taste of anxiety, depression, insomnia and a few other mental health issues at different points and navigated my way out with the help of some wise people who also showed me how to tune in to the wisdom within me. And having said that, bad days and sleepless nights are still my friends who do come to meet me occasionally. I have things that I am still figuring, relationships that I am still working on, parts of me that I am not really proud of, things I wished I had done differently and those I wish I hadn't done or said. But I have learnt to embrace these as a part of the human experience. It is an onward journey. And lastly, I never imagined that I had the courage to give up, at least partly, my full-time job, (which, by the way, I did not hate) to pursue something more meaningful. And the biggest reason for that I believe, was that I was afraid that I might reach a stage where I would no longer be able to listen to the whispers of my soul.

And now I feel content that I have done justice to my bio and can sleep peacefully. And if you find this bio too pollyannaish, then you are welcome to go back to my formal bio in the “about me” section. :)