she leaves home every morning, hoping she doesn’t get dragged into another senseless conversation about how hot the weather has been recently, or how that celebrity did that at that award show.

she wakes up switching through four different apps, being exposed to a list of bad news, of why the world was falling apart while she was sleeping without worry. so the next day she decides to sleep a little later, maybe just to keep a watch on the world. if she slept a little past her bed time maybe things won’t be so bad next morning.

two weeks later, she’s up at 1 am. she’s staring at the ceiling, wondering if she had that coffee too late in the day or was it the over exhaustion that isn’t allowing her to sleep.

girl in room, decorates her walls with a mountain of books she promises to read but when it comes to it, she has already found a new hobby. it’s painting one moment. when she realizes she isn’t as good as bob ross, and that her acrylic is drying way faster than those on youtube, she discards it away.

then she buys a drawing book to scribble in. but the lines are too repeated too often. the texture isn’t right, the shadows aren’t working. it’s a joke.

discard.

she found air dry clay this one time. when she started making a little trinket and realized it’s not as fun as pottery and doesn’t require just as much water, it bored her out of her mind. and she had to paint it after it dried?

drag.

girl in her room craves human connection but ducks the first moment someone creeps over to have a conversation.

girl in her room notices the subtle sneer on that guy’s face when he asks how she did on that test. is he stupid? aren’t we all here to work hard and make something out our lives?

she pretends to like to cook. but she’s just hungry all the time and nobody asks what she’d like to have. she picks up the keyboard wanting to haul it across the room. but she bought it. she replaced the funky one with the jammed keys.

the ceiling used to be white with intricate details carved on it. it had an overhead fan which turned and turned and turned. did it not get tired? she switched it off sometimes even in the mid summer heat. it must be tired and not know it . what a stupid little thing tiring itself to no end.

this one time in third grade, she remembers reading along in class. a silly little story about a man trying to escape prison not knowing it was on an island. beautiful prose. when he finally escapes through the tiny little window in his cell, he’s found himself in a new prison. this time without food or water, or a bed to sleep in. should have stayed in his room. she remembers thinking to herself what an idiot that man was.

she then got distracted by few higher class students playing in the field. she looked out the window of her classroom on the fifth floor, the image broken by the window bars. she should’ve been out there instead.

girl in room hates being approached so she keeps a stoic face, too conscious of her actions. her friends inadvertently break her character. now she looks like a broken cassette. when someone looks at her with shock after seeing how loud her laugh is, she wants to ask them just one question. “are you an idiot?”

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Part of ‘dear almost everything’— a series of letters on becoming.

old women need to chill. not all of them, of course, but at least those who’ve absorbed the hatred they have received from everyone around them.

i used to love spending my vacation in my mother’s hometown. it was a small village with open sewage system and narrow alley ways. the stars shone bright at night when we would sprawl on the beds laid down on the terrace under the night sky.

during the day, the oldest woman of the house, who also was widely respected in the family, would send fresh mangoes upstairs for the city folks. we would run around in the two tiered ancient house with old architecture and a questionable foundation.

i would love to meet all the extended family cousins i would see once in a year or two. it was a big family fare for two weeks straight.

until i grew older, that is. slowly, but surely, i was asked to stop mingling with the male cousins, which i didn’t mind because half of them were growing up to become creeps. i was no longer met with kind hellos and harmless questions about school and friends.

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i was asked to talk less, laugh quietly and was downright shamed for wearing jeans. a man i had never met before had the audacity to question if i was allowed to wear jeans in public.

naturally, he was met with my mother’s fuming rage and a curt ‘mind your business’. that was the summer i realized i had grown out of my mother’s lovely hometown. the sun still shone on the underdeveloped streets, the corner store vendor still sold my favored tamarind candy and the old uncle in the opposite alley still made fresh ‘ponganalu’ early in the morning.

but the innocent admiration for my extended family had vanished. i didn’t understand then what was so unbelievable about a piece of clothing for them. i didn’t understand why they needed me to disappear in the background when they could teach their sons to behave.

i was too naive to understand where they came from. then, it was many years since i had last visited the hometown. and many years still since their musical accents graced my ears. i sure did miss the happy feeling i got as a child.

15 years later when that ‘oldest woman of the house’ visited us for my sister’s wedding, i was elated. she was well known for her kind nature and was naturally respected.

so when i was berated by her in front of a room full of people i was shocked. see, i was being pulled in all directions. everyone needed something and the house was a chaos. so when she had asked me to get something for her earlier i never got a chance.

she very tactfully taunted me about it later. i looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. to add on to my shock, they had taken it lightly.

‘ah, aapa you’re so funny.’

i had to brush it off assuming i was over reacting. the night went on and we were taking photos. when my mother asked me to put a different set of sunglasses for a picture, i jokingly told her i didn’t want to.

are we shocked that miss ma’am had something to say about that too? i was furious. because i had never experienced such unexplained scrutiny from anyone let alone someone i was meeting after over a decade. i pushed down the anger and smiled at my mother, ignoring the old retard sitting next to me.

everyone was enjoying the silly photoshoot with the silly glasses i had made. someone passed a compliment or two, and i thanked them in excitement.

the ‘oldest lady of the house’ couldn’t digest it. she turned to me and grabbed my face to turn me towards her, ‘let me see’.

then came the waterworks. i hated her. i had decided. i couldn’t sit next to someone so filled with disgusting hatred towards a girl she knows nothing about for the sole reason that i was in fact just a girl. that i was probably too lazy for her liking, too smiley, too happy.

i got up and left.

what happened next didn’t harm her. no one stood up to her. and it wouldn’t shift her world an inch if i admitted to hating her.

i always read about people being filled with rage for not getting what the newer generations so easily enjoyed. i never believed it because of my unshakeable faith in humanity, of course.

but i got to experience it first hand.

when i try to make sense of it and apply some well researched social psychology concept like the fundamental attribution error, i could say she was just tired from travelling so far. or that she was dealing with something very personal.

but my heart said, she’s a bitch.

so there it goes, some old women need to chill.

some adults treat children as their own personal pet projects. they think they can dictate everything a child does and invent a brand new paul rudd.

trial and error is great. i’m sure there are well meaning parents and most of the time it all works out. but the people who are not ‘the parents’ and are just there by the direct result of sharing the same blood, need to sit down.

asian culture has their own ‘Karen community’. these are the people who sip on their tea at the back of the function, gossiping about every single piece of clothing and the innocent glances shared, about not being invited on the stage or not being shown any attention.

while in actuality, we can all benefit from finding happiness in the happiness of others. it’s not a shocker why communities are dying down and why people want nothing to do with big fat weddings anymore.

love does not grow in the dark hearts of envy and suspicion.

how hard is it to tell someone you’re happy for them and really mean it?

everyone wants to wear jhumkas on their jeans, and add duppattas to elevate their outfit for OOTD for social media. but when it comes to it no one actually wants to adopt the asian culture.

growing up i believed asian culture meant respecting your adults, helping out a family member in need, and that hard work leads to success. this new old generation has made it out to be something that cannot be questioned.

nobody deserves respect who in turn can’t show respect themselves. there’s a popularly accepted idea of subservience which is actively preached to today’s society.

i’m not asking everyone to leave their houses and run up and down the streets yelling, ‘death to culture’. let us however recognize that we are the future of our society. we decide if we want to perpetuate this cycle of hate or cultivate love and closeness among our neighbors.

we should discard this tradition of teaching shame and self-hatred under the facade of humility.

so, girl, lift your damn pen. we’re rewriting the culture.

thank you for taking the time to read this. your support means a lot to me. if you liked this article, please consider subscribing to ‘dear almost everything’ for twice weekly posts. <33

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i read ‘the hunger to be everything’ by while sorting a few personal things, it felt like a fresh breath of air. to know that someone somewhere a few thousand miles away felt the same way too. highly recommend reading it.

odetoapoet

the hunger to be everything.

“ Oh, to wake up grateful for the pulse in my neck; to meet the mirror without dread…

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a year ago · 128940 likes · 1613 comments · amber.

i love, love, LOVE ‘no one is coming to save you’ by (you’re an icon). it felt like pages from my journal, pls give it a read for the nostalgia and warmth in your heart.

Devashi’s Substack

No one is coming to save you

Through books, movies and other forms of entertainment, we have always been sold this idea that someone, somewhere along the way, will come and fix us – or fix things for us…

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a month ago · 24 likes · 37 comments · Devashiii

Part of ‘dear almost everything’— a series of letters on becoming.

This piece is also available in audio, if you prefer listening over reading. :)

i sometimes leave the toilet seat up. i don’t feel regret over it in the moment, or even several days later. but when it’s subtly brought up in the family meetings i feel angry.

‘right, like berate the one person who has done like one mistake in the entire week.’

the same week i forget to refill the bottles i’ve used from the refrigerator. i sometimes use my brother’s charger to charge my ipad while my phone is charging on mine. would i let him anywhere near my charger? that’s debatable.

on the other hand, my brother says he’ll do something and then forget about it an hour later. it fills me with rage watching him sprawled on the couch when i asked him to help me with putting away the heavy suitcase on the top shelf. my mind calls him lazy and irresponsible.

but when i do the same things, my mind argues, ‘i’m tired. can someone else do it? am i the only person in this house?’

there’s a term for this type of bias. in social psychology it is called Fundamental Attribution Error. Big words, big phrases. It was coined by Lee Ross after a 10 year experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris in 1967.

What it says is that, we tend to attribute personality flaws to another person’s mistakes, like calling someone lazy for being late while the person might have been stuck in traffic. Or saying the cashier was rude while he had been dealing with difficult customers all morning.

i hate shopping in local shops in charminar. a historical shopping hub in between the old city of hyderabad. while it is a great experience for people with unimaginable patience, i find it exhausting. the shopkeepers are rude, dismissive and some even out right roll their eyes at you. not joking one bit.

it’s like they are actively trying to decrease their shop sales.

Fundamental Attributive Error would make me wonder why they were so bad at their jobs. But in reality they might have been struggling with the harsh summer heat, having to sit all day long in their shops hoping to take enough back home, while customers bargain to the sinch.

same goes for us in our lives. when a friend doesn’t show up for us when we need them, we can be quick to attribute certain characteristics to their behavior. we start plotting a whole story in our mind with whatever little information we have and subconsciously start distancing ourselves from them. in reality they might have been dealing with their own personal demons.

i learned i was infact a problem in the thick of social prosperity. i was not only doing very well in my education aspect but also somehow had learned to balance my social life with my demanding degree.

i thought i had it figured out what i needed to do in order to keep my friends happy. have a quick anecdote or two, make them laugh a lot, smile when i see them, you know the drill.

but what i had mistaken as a curtesy friend of a friend interaction was mistaken for friendship by the other person. so when i heard something and said something, for the fear of using the word ‘gossip’ and be branded as the devil’s incarnate, they were deeply hurt.

i’m not absolving myself of the crime, of course. it taught me how my behavior can affect people and that i’m not just a product of all successful social interactions combined. the fall out was hard. and confusing. because i never was really treated as an exclusive friend. i just sort of happened to trudge along, as a friend of a friend.

but i was the villain. and it was a painful month of being put in this role for the first time in my life. it made me fear social interactions of any capacity because i clearly hadn’t understood anything about them. i remember vaguely writing in my journal, ‘i used to be a cunt, now i’m painfully quiet.’

two people can perceive a situation very differently. a thousand lives are being lived in a person’s mind at any given second. they could be replaying fights from their past life, regrets playing in the background of their mind, reminiscing in the nostalgia of an old love.

we see life through the lens of our experiences which results in a kaleidoscope which we call ‘reaction’. the phrase ‘hurt people, hurt people’ still holds good for this argument.

i’ve had a series of friendships i was all alone in, taken advantage of, and talked about behind my back. which i would argue and put it away as human nature at the age of adolescence. i was the girl who was shared glances about and in reaction i shared glances about someone else.

because i didn’t know how else to react. i absorbed the hatred around me and threw it out to the world. the first person to catch it was one unlucky bastard.

when you go through long periods of your life being betrayed by the one person you called your best friend, you adopt this ideology that you have to prove your worth to them. that you have to change their mind somehow.

so in the past, when i was stood up, used by her admirers as a plus one to make fun of, lied to, and had my texts ignored while someone else was being vent to, i came to the realization that i didn’t deserve this hurt.

when i could receive a hurt i didn’t deserve no one should stop me from passing it on to some other innocent bystander. this was the belief i was carrying within me. now that i look at my past self, wondering what she did to deserve a typhoon of a friend, and to be turned into a person seething with hatred, i feel sorry for my past self.

growing out of hurt is not an overnight journey. its not snapping your fingers and expecting that person to be hurt just as they hurt you.

it’s sitting at the carnage of your lost friendships over the years and wondering which exact events led to the one painful ‘friend of a friend situation’.

see, i had it all wrong. i was looking for absolution in my relationships. i was expecting raw honesty and commitment from someone i was still hiding parts of myself from.

people can smell that. when you hold back, hide your self behind the walls of shame and regret, they will smell it on you.

i was being mirrored in my friendships. i was getting exactly what i was giving out.

when this realization hit me like a truck, i had to sit myself down and recalculate. i knew this was not the type of life i was picturing in my mind.

i was the girl that wanted brunch dates with girlfriends, doing quality checks on cups of coffee we just spent an absurd amount of money on, to help each other out, and build a community.

all this time, i was not fully capable of giving what i expected from people.

so i retraced my steps. became quiet. spoke less often, dissolved in the background. hoped nobody was looking at me for too long or they’d notice the sneer on my face or the baring of my teeth.

i busied myself in books and hobbies that sometimes didn’t give me the satisfaction i expected after seeing people enjoying it so much. i avoided eye contact, held back a smile or two, ducked when someone was looking for me.

i’m sure my friends noticed. even if they did they didn’t make me feel bad about it. i still laugh with them in the morning sunlight of our little cafe in our college campus. i still get texts from them when we’re having a combined panic attack over exam weeks.

i’ve made my circle small to teach myself how to love people and not hurt them in the process of building a community. i’m teaching myself to not be ashamed of myself and to find a sliver of self-love and hold on to it.

this is a poem i came across by from one of my ‘dear substack’ notes, i’m so glad i found it.

A library of thoughts

As i grow older (a poem)

As i grow older, a sheet is slowly pulled from my eyes…

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a month ago · 86 likes · 28 comments · dae

LMAO this was one of the first articles i had read on here and it’s safe to say it rewired me.

Her Half of The Story

Stop Trying to Be an Influencer. You’re Not Interesting Enough.

It was a Saturday evening, and I’d just poured myself a tall glass of water after dinner when my phone buzzed. The girls’ group chat, which had been silent long enough to be forgotten, lit up with a message…

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2 months ago · 218 likes · 64 comments · Apoorvaa S Raghavan

Thank you for being here. If you like my work please consider subscribing to get free such articles once a week directly in your inbox. <33

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Part of ‘dear almost everything’— a series of letters on becoming.

i was once hung dry on the pole of shameful misery in front of the entire class 11 batch, almost 10 years ago. it was a battered little school, proud of it’s weak ideals, teaching its students, especially its girls, to speak when they are spoken to and to dress appropriately (which i’m not against but shouldn’t we focus on all the dress codes, and not just my bangs which were frankly growing out and it was a phase, i would have started hating it eventually too).

so picture this, freshly transferred to a new school, with hopes high as a rocket, to learn, find friends, build a life and grow in my favorite subject that gave me a god complex, English literature. but turns out one specific teacher has it out for you. you don’t understand why. it’s fresher’s day, there’s a ramp walk and a speech and a shameful ritual of making girl students stand up against each other trying to win the already rigged competition of who is the best up and coming student of our school?

so i gave my speech, a forced anecdote about feminism as a teenager knew it, it was not rehearsed and half assed and i was too loud and too excited and frankly too alive. my friends were in awe. my heart was beating out of my chest and i no longer had the prize in mind. i was looking forward to having the best day yet.

when round three came and we were made to line up on the battered little stage with terrible lighting looking over gleeful students who thought it was a no brainer win, the one question per student game was on.

the judges, which in my opinion was a biased little group who would most definitely favor their own students, looked at us with an expression i couldn’t quite place in that moment. one teacher, let’s call her The Devil, as i’m seething in rage while i write this. So The Devil pauses the entire event, drones into her mic about passing the microphone to me first. I knew this game, I had experienced this multiple times before and I couldn’t say I didn’t know what was coming.

She asked me a question. About feminism. Which I know I wasn’t qualified to answer, and she knew too, but she had to pin it on me. When i stumbled and stuttered and paused while my heart was in my mouth, guess what she said? “Right, that’s all.” Bitch.

The mic passed on to the previous girls, and they were asked about, ‘so what is true inner beauty to you?’ and some drag about god knows what. And I stood there, ashamed, thinking I had done something wrong. Mind you, this woman was well in her 40s, nearing the end of her life, forgive me i don’t believe that, but for the rage to go on and to make a point, she knew what she was doing.

Guess who one then? It wouldn’t be a shocker, I’m guessing you’ve already figured that one out. It’s a no brainer. No hate to her, she’s beautiful, outstandingly intelligent and I frankly didn’t stand a chance. But I would’ve liked to keep my dignity, thank you very much.

So I trudge down the podium, because calling it a stage is something out of a misery, and i hide in my seat. Everyone turns around, some with smug looks, some with satisfaction, some looking at me with a sympathizing gaze. I wasn’t sure which one I preferred.

When the show was over and the crowd was trickling out of the hall towards the free refreshments, some kind girls came over and told me not to feel bad and that i was the ms. freshers in their mind. it was like salt to the wound. albeit very kind. a kindness i was not expecting in a foreign environment.

i had decided to stir clear of The Devil for the rest of the school year, but as fate would have it she transferred schools. I hope the other school was called Hell, or not, maybe she was just trying to teach me something. A something nice, but i’m sure she wouldn’t put her own daughter in that position or like it if someone else did it either. Either way, bottom line, I never had to interact with the devil.

For the remainder of the two years until high school graduation, I went on to win multiple awards, bringing a cash prize of 30 thousand with my best mates at the time (shout out to pineapple, if you’re reading this, love you. [i was called ames, from pineapple and ames, b99] and i know where you are guitar, thank you for befriending a weird girl.) I won multiple MUNS, again alongside pineapple, and went on to even win awards for overall second best performance, twice until graduation.

Naturally, I never went to collect the last two and had pineapple pick it for me. I couldn’t imagine myself on that small little stage amongst people who were sure they hated me.

But all in all I had some common sense.

So why is everyone always trying to over explain life to teenage girls? Do they think that their minds are less capable of understanding the subtle nuances of life, or that the man across the street is staring at them, or that their very own friends talk behind their back sometimes?

i would never want to be fifteen again. or thirteen. or heck even eleven. during a seemingly rough year for my parents, we were behind school fees for a year. i’ll give you three guesses on who the villain in this story is going to be.

You guessed it right!
My sixth grade teacher. She had curly hair and a fair face, and she was beautiful. From the outside. From the inside, she loved harassing school girls about their ponies being too high, or their hair being too long, or their shirts being too tight. In my case she loved to shame me about my difficulty in understanding mathematics. or was it physics? I can barely remember. I’m so close to graduating medical school.

All I remember is her parading me around in front of our class and shouting at me during tests. ‘Read the questions properly.’ she would scream in that terrible voice of hers after towering on me while I was struggling in exam.

She never once attempted to know why I was having a hard time understanding the material. Me, a previously average, above average student, doing miserably in class.

So forgive me for not being the biggest fan of authority figures. Because they have been shit in my life. It contributes to the fact that I will never be befriending my professors and mentors, because frankly half of them don't deserve to be in that position. They could be very qualified, worked really hard to sit in their chair, but they might not be good people.

When 30% of the class was late to a test that was not supposed to happen at 8 am, one particular teacher made us stand at the door. Parading. Ashaming. She would laugh at the other students, crack a joke or two. When my turn came, I got a cold ‘weren’t you the one that cried for marks?’. Again, our respectful teacher didn’t attempt to know why I, miss ice veins, was able to cry in front of people she would rather slit her thr*at in front of than admit to any emotions.

She took the easy route. The superiority route. The ‘I’m standing here out of sheer discipline and intelligence that you cannot manage’.

When a girl would talk a little louder than others, she was labeled as doomed and to be someone who would never succeed in life. They went on to become doctors, lawyers and chartered accountants.

When a girl talked to a boy, friendly conversation- they belonged to the same class for god’s sake, the heavily intelligent and kind teacher would pass a look of disgust to the girl. Did I tell you there were two people in this scenario?

I’m not saying teenage girls are saints. They’re hormonal, rude, make risky decisions and are just starting to like the color pink.

I’m saying, potentially, if one of the sections of this age group is being reprimanded constantly, are we expecting them to grow up with love or seething rage in their hearts that makes them churn out a substack article out of sheer hate at 9 pm?

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“oh i was busy,”

“i thought it was the next day,”

“you know me, always mixing up the dates.”

so who are these people who are remembering? every gesture, every big day. who remembers how you like your coffee? who remembers to turn down the tv because it might trigger your migraine.

must be a really pathetic group.

in reality these are the people who give more than they receive and are okay with it too. they do not keep score. they’ll drop by your apartment with flowers and takeout because they know you’ve had a rough week. these are the people who will turn down the music because they know you hate that artist.

when andie anderson showed up to her friend’s door with a newspaper in hand ready to drag her out of her misery, she probably was not calculating whether or not it would be returned. similarly when elle woods stood up for warner in front of the mean girls she wanted to help out someone she knew.

showing up is tiring. showing up despite receiving less and less effort in return is exhausting even. time and again social media sells the idea that friendship or any kind of relationship is transactional.

‘relationships are 50/50.’ trend on instagram that blew up in 2024 stirred up a controversy among philanthropists. counter tiktoks and reels were trending everywhere trying to debunk this new ‘threatening’ ideology on an app where of course people posted to make sense.

countless people started coming out and admitting why they’d never do 50/50 in anything in their relationships. there’s never the concept of: ‘dishes are your thing, laundry is mine’.

it’s never about meeting the other person in the middle. the foundation of any successful relationship is laid on ‘hey, i know it’s been a rough day for you, i got the dishes and i made you hot chocolate the way you like it.’ it’s about noticing the small things and doing the small gestures.

people who notice everything do not make a loud announcement about what they bring to the table. they quietly lift the weight off of someone they love and pour into them effort, love and kindness.

what do they get out of it? a sense of superiority? maybe. but i believe they do it for reasons they are too embarrassed to admit. one of the main reasons could be that they are well aware of the pain of handling big things and big emotions by themselves.

i once saw an important assignment lying alone on one of the tables, unattended, and very ‘easy to steal’ looking. so i picked it up in panic and searched if it had a name written on it. when i found the person it belonged to and i asked if i should put it in their bag, that they could lose it so close to exams.

they looked at me like i was crazy and nodded regardless with a small ‘thank you’. i wasn’t worried for that person in that moment. i was worried for myself. i instantly saw myself in them and thought of the pain that would come if i were in their place, to lose my assignments when i worked so hard on it.

people who remember everything are doomed to roam alone in the world they want to build. one where they receive the flowers for once.

their past never leaves them and keeps coming back to them on a seemingly pleasant afternoon, leaving behind a sick feeling in their stomach. they hear the words on repeat in an eerily accurate tone that was used, how the light fell on the marble, or how hostile the environment around them had always been.

I read this quote several years ago and it stayed with me. when i talked about it with people in my life, they said they don’t remember their childhood mostly. that it’s only a wave of feelings passing by. but to sit here and reliving every moment, is that a blessing, or am i all alone in my childhood home?

say you cannot move on from a major life event that altered the course of your life. but for someone who lived that same moment with you, it was a random tuesday.

the train is always missed, the room is always crowded and the people have moved on and you stayed. with memory in tact. remembering the kindness of that stranger. the pencil they let you borrow.

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Part of ‘dear almost everything’— a series of letter on becoming.

Same time, next week?

<3