The Night After the Celebration

“Relief didn’t come from answers. It came when my body stopped treating every question as a threat.”

In March 2011, I moved to Bengaluru for a job at a U.S. multinational. It was the kind of transition that reads as progress when listed out: a new role, a new city, a new routine beginning to take shape. That day, I took delivery of a car, signed a lease on an apartment, and ordered enough furniture to make the place functional.

That evening, we went out to dinner to mark the change.

I woke up in the middle of the night feeling restless. Even before the questions fully formed, I recognised the familiar unease. Where am I heading? What am I doing? And why?

Sleep didn’t return easily. Sitting with those questions was harder, because I had no answers — and no obvious reason to be asking them. Everything around me suggested that I should feel settled, even satisfied.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened.

The first time was right after my PhD ended. There had been celebrations, relief, a sense of completion. And then, later that night, a quiet crash. The structure that had organised my days and given me a reason to move forward had disappeared. I didn’t know what came next. More importantly, I didn’t know why I was supposed to care.

That pattern repeated itself over the years. The questions surfaced after moments that were meant to feel conclusive — after transitions, achievements, visible signs of having moved ahead. Each time, they arrived without answers. And each time, I kept them to myself. From the outside, my life looked fine. More than fine.

There was no socially acceptable way to articulate this kind of unease without sounding ungrateful.

I stayed in that corporate role until 2013. Life moved on, as it does. I worked, adjusted, accumulated experience. The questions never disappeared, but they learned to wait. They showed up late at night, or in the quiet after something ended, or in the gap between one version of myself and the next.

In 2016, I started working on my own. It wasn’t a dramatic exit or a reinvention story. It was a slow uncoupling from structures that had once felt necessary. I gained flexibility, but not clarity. Freedom, but not relief. The questions were still there — just less muffled.

In 2019, I started a garden.

At first, it felt incidental, almost recreational. But gardening has a way of insisting on attention. Depleted soil doesn’t respond to ambition or urgency. It responds to time, consistency, and care. Nothing grows faster because you want it to. Stability, I began to understand, is not something you declare — it’s something you create conditions for.

Around this time, I also began paying closer attention to my gut health. Not as a performance upgrade, and not as a productivity experiment, but as a form of listening. What foods left me calmer. What rhythms made my body feel less reactive. As my body steadied, my thinking changed too — not sharper, not more decisive, but quieter.

I became an aunt somewhere along the way, and that changed the texture of my attention. Watching my nephews grow made me aware of how early the world teaches urgency, shame, and self-surveillance. It also made me more deliberate about what I wanted to interrupt. Stopping generational trauma, I learned, isn’t a single moment of insight. It’s a long practice of choosing differently — especially when no one is watching.

In August 2023, I began working with a coach. The work extended through most of 2024. There was no instant breakthrough. What shifted slowly was my relationship to discomfort. I stopped treating restlessness as something to eliminate and began staying with it long enough for it to soften.

Not answers.
Orientation.

Over time, many of the external markers I had relied on fell away. There was no designation to introduce myself with, no neat hierarchy to locate myself inside, no predictable pay cheque to signal progress. I was left without the scaffolding that had once told me who I was supposed to be.

What remained surprised me.

There was relief — not the euphoric kind, but the quiet relief of a nervous system no longer on constant alert. There was stability, felt physically rather than intellectually: deeper sleep, fewer spikes of anxiety, a steadier internal pace. And there was sense-making — not as conclusions, but as alignment. A growing coherence between how I lived and how I felt.

The work I’m engaged in now is recent. It’s still taking shape. In December 2025, I ran my first two workshops with students — tentative, grounded, more exploratory than declarative. They weren’t about solutions so much as about noticing: what steadies us, what agitates us, and what becomes possible once we stop bracing against ourselves.

I still don’t have a tidy explanation for where all of this is headed. But I haven’t woken up restless in a long time. I know I’m moving toward something that is healing me, even if it resists being summarised cleanly.

These days, I’m content going by just my name , and by the names my nephews call me. For the first time, that feels sufficient.

These days, my attention keeps returning to the quieter mechanics of change — the way relief often precedes understanding, how stability takes root in the body before it shows up in decisions, and how sense-making begins not with answers but with regulation. I find myself drawn to noticing patterns, naming what usually goes unspoken, and creating space for others to recognise their own. It’s slow, largely invisible work, difficult to compress into outcomes — but it feels honest. And for now, that feels like enough direction to keep going.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.