My life has been a series of lessons in letting go - people, places, dreams. All of them slipping through, as if my hands were never made for holding. I was running a race whose finish line kept moving; until the mountains taught me endurance. The ability to let everything be. - Yours Truly
Since the earliest I can remember, the narrative constructed around me was fixed: I was destined for greatness. I was fathomably boring - no interest in fashion, no warmth for courtesy. I scored well in most subjects except languages, which troubled my teachers in ways they never quite articulated. I won competitions and brought back hardware that filled the school's trophy case and my life with expectations I never chose. When they named me Best Student in the tenth standard, it felt less like recognition and more like confirmation of a role I'd been assigned before I knew myself.
What looked like discipline was mostly fear + manners : fear of disappointing others, wrapped in good manners as the one armour I knew how to wear. No one asked what I wanted to become. I didn't seem to matter. I was expected, or should I say ordained, to be a vessel carrying everyone's dreams but my own. If anyone had asked, I would have told them "all I wanted was to be happy, and to find my own way home". In a life where I couldn't count on others, I learned to talk to myself. Mostly, I told myself I was stupid. Slow. Always arriving at understanding on the third or fourth attempt. I served these judgments quietly, through comparison, through correction, through the register of contempt I used whenever thinking failed to come easily. My intelligence felt like something always in question, never something I could assume.
Distance changes things. Moving to a different city for college gave me what no attempts of forced conversation could take away : some space to breathe. I met new people, learned their stories, watched how they moved through the world with an ease I couldn't locate in myself. I remained cloistered and introverted, still badly dressed, still unsure how to build a personality from scratch. So I borrowed pieces from the people around me, ideas about privilege & travel, about reading & becoming. I stayed confused but often stubborn in my lack of understanding. I built an impressive resume while feeling like a stone among rivers, dressed in sadness I couldn't name. I was walking but asleep, aware but lost - a teacher's pet.
Here comes the part that froze me while writing this and still continues to do so occasionally. I had kind friends, though I wasn't always kind in return. They absorbed my eccentricities, my quirky superiority complex, my sudden misdirected rages - quietly, without complaint.
I carried guilt but didn't know what should follow it. An honest sorry maybe. We were all young, disadvantaged by age when it came to processing what hurt us. My own wounds made it harder still.
This hide-&-seek arrangement with my fractured self worked for a while, but the point of disruption appeared sooner than I'd anticipated. The burden grew too heavy to carry alone. Then, in late fall of 2024, I found myself standing before the Himalayas in Darjeeling. The air smelled of fresh pine; cold and clean. Through my AirPods, a sitar cover of "I Wanted to Leave" played as the sun rose over the mountains, painting the sky gentle gold & orange. The calm was naturally expected. What wasn't expected was the lightning realisation which the stark, snow-laden Kanchenjunga forced within me.
My affair with the mountains has always been quiet. No trysts, devoid of dramatic treks and Instagram-worthy hikes. Just a long admiration from a distance. That morning, I saw them as I always had - majestic, serene, full of fortitude. But this time, something shifted. I am usually egocentric, narrating the world around myself. Maybe it was the early light or the music, but I realized the mountains never move, they never did and never will. Although I am conscious about this comparison being unfair to them, but the mountains, like me, have had to endure everything the voyage of time has to offer. The winter winds, summer's melt, the glaciers departing as rivers, the morbid silence when something you thought was yours departs.
I understood then that I had become something like a mountain (as humanely possible). Not in grandeur, but in staying - letting life happen. Letting seasons pass without fleeing what feels safe. Letting seasons come and go, without needing to be the center of every storm. I look back at my younger self, the one shackled by expectations. I wish him calmer seas. A wish sent from the mountain I've become.
Life, I think, was always meant to be a trail through winter woods - misty, hazy, strangely hopeful. The path is not always clear, but there is warmth in knowing you don't have to move mountains to find your way home. You only have to stay, and endure, and let the seasons teach you what they will.