I didn’t plant my Adenium.
It came to me already grafted — a rootstock from one plant, the flowering top from another. Someone, somewhere, decided which variety was worthy of blooming, and which was good enough only to hold it up.

I didn’t question it, rather I picked it. I was new to gardening and this looked pretty in the catalog. I just brought it home. I placed it where it would get plenty of sunlight, watered it, and waited.

The grafted part bloomed in pale, soft pinks — double-petaled, symmetrical, almost rose-like.
Delicate and ornamental. The kind of beauty you expect to find on display.

And for a while, that was enough.

But then the flowering slowed. The graft began to tire. And I noticed the original rootstock — the “host” — quietly putting out new shoots.
It didn’t ask for attention. It just grew.

People told me to cut it off.
“It’ll sap the energy. The graft will stop blooming. The host isn’t worth keeping.”

But I didn’t listen.
I let it be.

And eventually, that quiet, overlooked host bloomed.
Not with refinement, but with bold, vibrant, single-petaled pinks — unfiltered and alive. The kind of bloom that doesn’t need approval to take up space.

And then something remarkable happened — the host began putting out seed pods.

The graft, for all its curated beauty, never did.

— –

I think a lot about that plant.

About how it was pieced together — not unlike how I have often felt growing up.

My name is ‘Pratibha’. It means ‘talent’.
A name with a destination baked in.
Be good. Be impressive. Be something.

There was little room for who I already was.
There were expectations about how I should be, how I should look, even how I should simply “be” in the world.
And for years, I tried.
I bloomed the way I was supposed to — visible, articulate, successful.

But like the graft, I began to tire.
Somewhere under all the effort was a quieter self — one not curated for performance, one not bred for admiration.
She wanted something else.

— –

That something else found its way to the page.
In my student days , I started blogging — mostly poetry. The kind that burned with questions, with anger, with a voice that didn’t know how else to scream.

Prose felt like too much structure; poetry let me breathe. It let me bleed.
It let me ‘say things’ — especially when speaking didn’t feel like an option.

Even now, writing is how I make sense of myself.
It offers a clarity I can’t always find in conversation.
When I read someone else’s words and find my own experience tucked inside, I feel seen. Held. Less alone.
There’s camaraderie in that kind of recognition.

But the rage in my poetry has quieted in recent years.
Not because the world has become gentler — but because ‘I’ have.

The small hands of my nephews have softened the sharpest parts of me.
They look at the world without cynicism, and I find myself wanting to protect that — even in myself.

— –

My adenium reminds me that what we inherit doesn’t always have to define us — but it doesn’t need to be discarded either.
Sometimes, what we think of as contradictions are really just different aspects of the same truth, blooming side by side.

Yes, I was named with expectations in mind.
Yes, I’ve fought against them.
But I’ve also learned to hold both the rebellion and the tenderness.
To let parts of me that were once hidden — the host — grow and thrive in full view.

Not everything that’s wild or unexpected is a mistake.
Some things were never meant to be trimmed away.

— –

The graft still sits there, high up on the stem, its petals layered and gentle, rare in their own way.
And below it, the host blooms in unrepentant colour — vivid, raw, generous.

I think of my name sometimes, and how I’ve grown around it —
not to escape its meaning, but to live it on my own terms.

I am still blooming.
Still writing.
Still learning how to hold all of myself — even the parts no one grafted in.

And I am still ‘Pratibha’.
Not because I live up to anyone’s idea of the word,
but because I finally understand that I never had to.

— –