What Most People Don’t Know About Me

What Most People Don’t Know About Me

(from “About Life Choices and Potholes”)

Most people who meet me now think I have it all figured out.

I write. I tell stories about life and choices and, yes, potholes — both metaphorical and the ones outside my lane in Mumbai. I have this calm, almost “zen” way of talking about chaos, like I’ve somehow transcended it.

But here’s what most people don’t know about me:

I wasn’t always this centered.

In fact, for a good part of my life, I was running — literally and emotionally — from everything that made me who I am.

A few years ago, I was living in San Francisco. I had a “respectable” job in tech, the kind that made my LinkedIn sparkle. My friends thought I was living the dream: a high-rise apartment, brunches on weekends, a passport full of stamps.

And I believed it too — until the morning it all came crashing down.

A layoff email. A visa countdown clock.

Two suitcases and a future that suddenly didn’t exist.

Most people don’t know that when I landed back in Mumbai, I didn’t even know how to explain what I did anymore. My father, a retired civil engineer, looked at me blankly when I said I worked in “data storytelling.”

“Storytelling?” he repeated, frowning.

“Engineers build bridges, not bedtime stories.”

And I remember thinking — if only he knew how many bridges I’ve been trying to build all my life.

Coming home after years abroad felt like stepping into a time capsule that no longer fit.

My room had been repurposed.

The city smelled like ambition and exhaust.

And I — I just smelled like jet lag and confusion.

There was this one evening when I found myself standing in the balcony, watching the rain beat down on the tin roof. My parents were arguing over dinner logistics, the dog was barking at imaginary intruders, and I — I was just wondering who I had become.

Was I still the girl who coded her way through Silicon Valley? Or the woman who now spent afternoons writing about life and spirituality while battling an existential headache?

That’s when I started to write again — not because I wanted to, but because I needed to.

Most people don’t know that my writing began as therapy.

Pages filled with rants, questions, unfinished prayers.

About love that didn’t work out. Jobs that didn’t last. Friendships that faded somewhere between time zones and WhatsApp silence.

Eventually, these fragments turned into reflections — and those reflections became my book, About Life Choices and Potholes.

It wasn’t meant to be a “self-help” book or a memoir of triumphs. It was simply a map — of detours, delays, heartbreaks, and small miracles — that somehow all pointed home.

People assume transformation happens in grand moments — a new city, a new career, a big “aha.”

But mine happened quietly.

It happened in the kitchen when I first learned to make vegetarian soup in a house full of meat lovers.

It happened on the road, stuck in traffic, where I realized that potholes make better philosophers than podcasts.

It happened in the silence between my father’s sighs and my mother’s gentle, resigned wisdom.

And most of all, it happened in the messy middle — between ambition and surrender, logic and faith.

Most people don’t know that I used to measure my worth by my output — how much I produced, achieved, accomplished.

Now, I measure it by how much peace I can hold while doing nothing.

It’s funny, isn’t it?

The same people who once asked, “So, what do you do?” now ask, “How did you find this calm?”

And I tell them the truth — it wasn’t through success.

It was through stumbling.

Through falling face-first into life’s potholes, and realizing that every time I stood up again, I was someone new.

There’s a chapter in my book about the absurdity of career reinvention — about applying to Google one month and selling holistic herbs on Amazon the next.

At the time, it felt like failure.

Now I see it as freedom.

Most people don’t know that the version of me they see today — the writer, the “philosophical” one, the dog mom with spiritual metaphors — was born out of pure chaos.

And maybe that’s the point.

You don’t find yourself in the perfect plan — you lose yourself enough times that you finally stop pretending to be someone else.

So what most people don’t know about me is this:

I’m not a success story.

I’m a survival story.

A collection of missed exits, unplanned detours, and potholes that showed me who I was when everything else fell apart.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned — it’s that maybe we’re all just trying to write our own versions of “home.”

Sometimes it’s a place.

Sometimes it’s a page.

And sometimes, it’s the person we become after all the plans fail.

💭 If you’ve ever found yourself between destinations — in your career, relationships, or identity — my book “About Life Choices and Potholes” might just feel like the conversation you’ve been needing.