For the days you are starting over. Essays about career gaps, identity and beginning again.
This is not a dramatic essay about crisis or collapse. It is about something quieter — the slow accumulation of small moments that eventually add up to a realisation. Dependency, even when it comes wrapped in love and good intention, is a trap. Even the loving kind.
The most unexpected thing astrology gave me was not a prediction. It was relief. For years I carried the question of my career as though it were a verdict on my character. Then I found a different explanation — and it changed something.
If I could give my daughter one gift — not a thing, not an experience, but something that would stay with her through every season of her life — it would be financial independence. Her own money. Earned by her own hands. In her own name.
I kept trying to photograph the yaksha. Every time I pressed the shutter, Devi appeared instead. It took me a while to understand that she had been there all along — and that I had been dismissing her because she was not what I came for.
After eighteen years of relocations, motherhood, caregiving, grief, and putting everyone else first, I began tracing the quiet thread back to myself — through writing, memory, and the parts of me that never fully disappeared.
I believed in the straight line. Graduate, work, build, grow. Life had other ideas — and it took fifteen years of starting over across three countries to understand that the detours were never wasted.
