I watched the film adaptation when I was 11, and that logic felt almost like a spiritual download. You see, I have always been the kind of girl who wants everything she sets her eyes on.

I used to think exactly like this.

For years, while I was in Delhi, I operated under the same logic. It made perfect sense to me because every month I’d buy a minimum of two pairs of shoes, lipsticks in the same family of browns, a blingy bag [I swing between a mini bag and a handbag, because you never know when the occasion to pull it out will arrive], and a cute top for special coffee runs.

To me, it wasn’t excessive spending; it was just variety. Each purchase was justified by the last, and each cycle was validated by the monthly ritual of it all.

I never budgeted in seven years of working. I was living the Carrie Bradshaw life from Sex and the City, under the delusion that the more I spent, the more I would earn. And I got away with it. Money was never an issue.

But then I moved to Mumbai.

Packing up, I had to look, for the first time, at everything I had accumulated, and it did not feel good. I felt like a pig gorging on food when I wasn’t even that hungry, stuffing things into my mouth and getting bigger with every bite. It reminded me of the scene in Spirited Away… [2001] where Chihiro finds her parents in an abandoned restaurant, eating mechanically and senselessly until they literally turn into pigs.

I was filled with stuff I didn’t particularly love: shoes I thought I would wear someday, clothes I thought I’d fit into when I got fitter, and, of course, the bags I could pair with all my ‘fits. TBH, if you had lowkey tossed it all away, I wouldn’t even have noticed. And the common factor was that I bought because it was trendy, or because an influencer I subconsciously wanted to be had bragged about it.

This was never a money problem. I never shopped to the point of thinking twice before buying a packet of milk by the fag end of the month. I certainly could have budgeted better, and I certainly did not need two of every piece “just in case”. But the feeling of achievement I chased with every purchase was clearly helplessness. I tried to fill a void every time I swiped my card or entered an OTP, all while eagerly tracking the last parcel’s delivery.

So I did what my dad had been telling me to do for seven odd years: I decided to finally budget. A new city requires new discipline, I thought. Maybe the problem was my location and not my soul.

One month after moving into my new place, I spent a small fortune on home decor, which I could easily have spread over the following months. I bought a floor lamp, a chandelier, a bookshelf, and a floor-length mirror, none of them necessities. I would find myself clicking Buy Now at 2 AM, and then it would arrive: what I call post-purchase clarity, which hits like cold water. Once the order was placed, the desire for the piece would vanish, replaced by a crushing wave of guilt.

That was when I realised I wasn’t spending carelessly. I was spending in a pattern that couldn’t work for me.

Desire Is Never About the Object

This is what took me years to understand.

When I buy a pair of earrings, the same pair I already own, I’m not really expanding my jewellery collection. I’m buying an image, a promise that this object will make me more myself and make me feel more seen, when TBH nobody gives a f*ck whether I wear those earrings again. I’m buying the illusion that owning it will turn me into the person I want to be. What I’m chasing is a voyage, not a destination. At the click of ” Add to Cart”, the voyage feels intoxicating, but once I unpack the order, the destination always feels empty.

This is why post-purchase clarity slaps so hard. It’s as if someone woke me with a kiss to break a spell, and suddenly I see what I bought: no dopamine hit, no gateway to a better self, just the knowledge that I had believed a lie that lasted exactly seven minutes. If desire were an object, it would vanish the moment you got your hands on it.

People treat money as just currency; I really think it is not. It is alignment. It is the pull of the eyes when you see someone stepping out of a Porsche, or walking down the street to a Boojee Café carrying a vintage Dior bag.

I explain this in a materialistic way because when we feel the weight of our being, the fact that we will leave this planet, that we are specks of dust in the universe with only finite time in hand, we start chasing goals and levels that will outlast us. What we’re really chasing is a sense of immortality, something that lives longer than we ever will. We want to be remembered, and maybe the things we buy help us give that feeling a tangible form.

That’s why values, posed as questions, actually work. Before I buy something now, I ask myself three of them.

Will this serve me in the next two years, and help me become who I want to be? Not “do I want it today,” but will it still be part of my life when the excitement of newness wears off, or will it become clutter that weighs down my freedom?

Where will it go, and what will it cost the planet? Every purchase is a vote for the kind of world I want to live in. If I can’t bear the answer, I shouldn’t buy it.

Am I buying because I need it, or because I’m bored, envious, or influenced? This is the hardest to answer because it requires me to be vulnerable with myself. Am I buying because someone I want to be like has it? Because this algorithm knows my weakness?

When you filter your desires through real values, a lot of sense comes knocking. You stop seeing budgeting as deprivation and start seeing it as a doorway to less clutter, less anxiety, and more freedom.

Because here’s the truth: I don’t actually need anything materially. I have everything [in pairs] and more. I have a lovely set of family and friends, a job I love, a healthy body, and a place I like to call home in the city I have always wanted to be in. Everything beyond that is a choice, and that choice deserves only one test: does this serve who I want to become, or does it pull me away from myself? As Chuck Palahniuk wrote in Fight Club, “The things you own end up owning you.”

The crop-rotation logic made sense to me for years because variety is sweet and rotation sounds sustainable. But it’s just another way of saying, I don’t know who I am, so I’m trying on different identities through purchases. The real problem was never discipline or spreadsheets. I had never decided what I valued.

I think of those boxes in my new living room now. Each one held something I had once wanted badly, and none held the life I thought I was buying. I never wanted shoes, bags, or lamps. I wanted the person who would own them, the woman who is seen, settled, and sure of herself. An object can only ever be an object. The life it seems to promise has to be built through choices that matter, and that is the only thing worth unpacking.

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The girl falls in love. Screws up a little. Gets her heart broken. Cries in giant hoodies for three episodes straight. Then suddenly she’s in a new city, sitting in cafés alone, journaling near windows, developing a mysterious playlist, and becoming “herself again.”

Like Belly in The Summer I Turned Pretty, going to Paris after everything falls apart. Or honestly, every coming-of-age show where the universe watches your nonsense for a while and then goes: enough. Identity shift time.

Belly in Paris, The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3.

For the longest time, I thought this was fictional behaviour. Pretty lonely. Cinematic healing. A rich-white-girl-with-soft-lighting problem.

Then it happened to me. Not the Paris part. The horrifying “I can no longer peacefully exist around myself” part. And I think that phase changes you more than heartbreak itself.

I Had Three Apartments and Zero Boundaries

I don’t think I had ever truly been alone before I moved out.

Before that, there were parents. Indian parents specifically. Which means love, concern, protection, and someone calling you seventeen times if you don’t pick up once, because obviously you’ve either been kidnapped or died.

Even after moving out, I always had people around.

I lived with my high school best friend, let’s call her M. Then there was S, my oldest friend from school, who had re-entered my life after years and somehow became part of the ecosystem too. She lived far, and I travelled to see her constantly because her apartment had something ours didn’t: freedom. Her place felt airy. Warm. Like you could breathe there. Then there was A, from college, we went to college together, attended lectures, did our assignments, and clicked on aspects where she knew the pain of fashion college. 

And I was the common denominator between all these people. None of them initially knew each other properly, but slowly everyone merged.

Which meant someone was always with me.

Always.

And listen, it was fun. Truly. We were young and chaotic and constantly moving. At one point, we had three apartments between four girls. One day at someone’s place, another day at someone else’s. Sleepovers. Tea. Fights. Random boys. More random boys. Loud music. Louder conversations.

But here’s something nobody tells you about being the “easygoing” friend.

If you struggle to say no, people slowly start occupying your life without even meaning to.

And one day you wake up emotionally exhausted because you haven’t heard your own thoughts properly in months.

The Pandemic Said: Character Development

Then COVID happened, which honestly feels like the opening sentence to every Gen Z trauma story.

People drifted. Relationships changed. We all had to grow up very quickly and separately.

M got into a serious relationship and wanted to move in with her boyfriend. S and A wanted to move in with me. I agreed initially because that’s who I was. A human yes button.

But somewhere in between, things shifted. Friendships cracked in quiet places. The vibe became off in ways too complicated and boring to explain fully.

And honestly?

I was relieved when it fell apart.

I loved them deeply, but I knew I could not survive living like that anymore.

I couldn’t handle clothes permanently living on sofas (and that’s the tiniest of filth). Random groups of people enter the house every second day. Hair everywhere except people’s heads. Constant “let’s go here” and “let’s do this.” I couldn’t focus on my assignments. I couldn’t focus on college. I couldn’t focus on myself.

Their presence started giving me actual nausea.

Which sounds dramatic until you’ve experienced emotional overstimulation so intense your body physically rejects it.

And suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was alone.

Truly alone.

I Accidentally Fell in Love With Myself There

 

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At first, I cried.

I cried because nobody was around anymore.

Then I cried because I realised I liked it.

That part felt illegal somehow.

The second COVID wave happened, and I went back home for a while. But when things started reopening, I fought HARD to return to Pune. I convinced my parents by using internships as an excuse.

The internships were real, by the way. I was not a girlboss lying. Just emotionally motivated.

And when I finally came back, I hugged my apartment.

Actually hugged it.

That tiny apartment felt like proof that I had built something for myself.

And god, I loved that place. The rent was still cheap because post-COVID landlords were also going through emotional damage. I had flexible work timings. New friends. New routines. A cute guy I had started talking to during lockdown.

Life felt soft around the edges again.

I would come home excited.

Excited.

Do you understand how rare that feeling is?

I worked out in the hall. Built a Netflix nook. Watered my plants like they paid rent. Played music while cleaning. Took ridiculously long showers because I was obsessed with my bathroom. Rearranged corners for no reason except serotonin. Sat under fairy lights pretending I was in a Paris apartment instead of Pune with questionable plumbing.

And slowly, I started loving my own company.

Not in an “I have healed” way.

In a very ordinary, deeply personal way.

I liked knowing my friends existed somewhere in the city, but I loved coming home to myself.

There’s this thing psychologists say about solitude. That intentional solitude calms your nervous system because your brain slowly stops associating aloneness with danger.

At the time, I didn’t know the science.

I just knew peace had entered my body.

Woh kehte hai na, jab life mein sab theek chal raha ho toh chul machti hai

My apartment should have been enough.

But then life started nudging me elsewhere.

The commute to work (my first job, after internships) became horrible. Like genuinely soul-removing. I would leave early, come back around 9, exhausted, clean, eat, sleep, repeat.

Then came water shortages because old buildings apparently wake up every morning and decide which new problem to develop.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I started feeling guilty about my rent, because the landlord had never increased it after COVID.

But honestly? There was another thing quietly happening, too.

I had become too comfortable there.

Which sounds ridiculous because isn’t comfort the whole point?

But I had built such a perfect little cocoon around myself that suddenly the idea of being left alone inside it started scaring me.

My job was far away. My best friend at the time, N, had already shifted closer to my office area. The commute was exhausting me. And my boyfriend had started apartment hunting too. Somewhere deep down, I think I was scared that if everybody slowly drifted elsewhere while I stayed back in that apartment alone, the magic of it would disappear too.

 

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Everything slowly pointed toward one thing:
move.

Practical.
Romantic.
Financial.
Emotional.

Like life itself was nudging me toward the next chapter.

Then my boyfriend started apartment hunting properly.

And I did too.

We moved in together.

It felt romantic. Mature. Right.

Like the next chapter.

And for a while, it genuinely was beautiful.

Then Love Entered Very Politely and Ruined the Ecosystem

So yeah, the cute guy had become my boyfriend.

The boyfriend became my live-in partner. And slowly, so slowly, I didn’t even notice it happening, my life stopped belonging entirely to me.

Not in a toxic way. That’s what makes this harder to explain.

It happened lovingly. We cooked together. Cleaned together. Gymmed together. Worked together. Ate together. Travelled together. Napped together.

God, especially the naps. And here’s the thing about love nobody warns you about: dependency doesn’t arrive dramatically.

It arrives chemically. First, you lean a little.

Then someone starts helping with your commute. Then someone starts waiting for dinner with you. Then suddenly, all the rituals you built alone become two-person rituals.

And when someone keeps telling you “you don’t have to do everything alone anymore,” a part of you relaxes so deeply you don’t realise how much of yourself you’ve handed over.

I still liked being alone then.

But not the same way.

The girl who once cancelled plans because she wanted alone time was slowly disappearing.

And the scary part?

I didn’t notice.

Nobody Talks Enough About How Physically Horrible Heartbreak Is

We broke up once.

Got back together.

Then broke up again for real.

And this breakup destroyed me in a way I genuinely didn’t see coming.

Not because heartbreak was new.

But because I had unknowingly lost my ability to exist peacefully with myself.

This wasn’t relieving, like it had been when my friends left. I felt like I had ruined something, like something so good had been destroyed.

The first night after it ended, I had a panic attack.

I couldn’t sleep in my room because too much of him existed there. The night lamp started scaring me because its light reminded me of the conversations that ended us. I slept in the hall for days because my bedroom felt emotionally haunted.

And what made it worse was knowing he had found someone else emotionally before fully leaving me.

People love closure.

I hate it. I wish he had just vanished instead.

Some nights, I cried so hard it genuinely felt like someone had reached inside my chest through my throat and crushed my heart with their hands.

And the most terrifying part wasn’t losing him.

It was this:
I could no longer be by myself.

The same girl who once loved solitude now needed constant noise to survive.

TV sounds weren’t helping anymore.

Music wasn’t helping anymore.

Nothing was helping anymore.

The Night I Realised I Had Abandoned Myself Too

My office shifted to work-from-home around the same time.

Which meant no colleagues. No commute. No accidental human interaction. No distractions.

Then my friends got busy.

Then my flatmate left for a month.

And suddenly I was trapped alone with my own brain.

I know what you’re thinking.

Weren’t you the same girl who once loved people leaving so she could finally have space?

Yes.

That’s exactly why it scared me.

One night, I spiralled so badly that I started calling everyone I could think of just so I wouldn’t be alone.

Nobody picked up.

And then I did something deeply desperate.

I called a man I would never normally call because he constantly hit on me and made me uncomfortable.

He took me to a party.

And the worst part?

It worked.

Not because I liked him.

Not because the party healed me.

But because there were people around.

That night scared me more than the breakup itself.

Because I realised I had outsourced my emotional safety entirely.

So I Rebuilt My Nervous System in Cafés

Healing didn’t begin at home for me.

It began outside.

In cafés. In random communities. In awkward events.

In psychology clubs and salsa socials and aimless runs and stupid little meetups where sometimes nothing happened except proving to myself that life still existed outside my sadness.

I started working from cafés because being around people regulated me. Not interacting necessarily. Just existing near humans helped.

There’s this thing called the “solo table theory” online. The idea that sitting alone in public without desperately distracting yourself builds emotional confidence.

And honestly?

I get it now.

Because slowly, something shifted.

I stopped planning my life around who was available.

I started planning it around building a life I actually enjoyed living.

I romanticised my routines again. Bought scented candles. Rearranged my furniture. Met new people, even if it went nowhere. Forced myself outside. Planned trips. Joined communities.

I reversed the problem entirely.

Back in college, I had too many people around me and craved space. Now I intentionally filled my life with enough movement that coming home finally started feeling peaceful again instead of terrifying.

And one day, I physically felt it. Like a burden leaving my body. I got myself back.

I Let People Be, I Let Myself Be Too

People always tell you to “keep yourself busy” after heartbreak.

In my experience, it does work like a charm. 

So I did; I became busy being more present.

Busy enjoying myself.

Busy building routines I looked forward to. Busy trying new cafés. Busy going to salsa socials, psychology clubs and random events that may or may not become core memories. Busy romanticising my commute with good music. Busy organising my room. Busy finding new corners of myself again.

And because of that, I stopped obsessing over outcomes all the time.

If my friends were late, okay. I’d sit with a drink and people-watch. If traffic was bad, fine, more songs for the journey. If a date disappointed me, at least I still enjoyed dressing up and stepping out.

And weirdly, I became softer with my friends too. Earlier, if they didn’t show up exactly the way I wanted, I’d spiral a little. I’d get anxious, frustrated, tense. But slowly, their presence in my life started feeling enough. I stopped expecting people to carry emotions that I had to learn how to hold myself.

I stopped needing every experience to “work.”

Will this be good?

Will they disappoint me?

Will I feel lonely?

Will this be worth it?

Now I just let experiences happen.

Good, bad, awkward, beautiful, boring. Everything became part of being alive.

Because once you know you can be okay with yourself, disappointment stops feeling catastrophic.

I let people be.

I let myself be too.

And honestly, that kind of calm is a very powerful thing to get back.

I Think the Real Flex Is Becoming Emotionally Safe for Yourself Again

Not independent. Not detached. Not “I don’t need anyone.”

Actually, this whole experience taught me the opposite.

People matter immensely. Good people matter immensely.

My friends helped me survive this. Their existence helped me survive this. Knowing there were people I could call helped me survive this. But I also learnt something harder: People can support you, but they cannot build your inner world for you.

That part is your job. And honestly, I’m glad this happened to me.

The heartbreak.
The panic attacks.
The loneliness.
The rebuilding.

Because now I understand the difference between enjoying being alone and feeling lonely. I understand why your gut should be trusted the first time.

And mostly, I understand this: If you abandon yourself long enough for friends or love, eventually you will have to come back home to yourself anyway.

Now, if you leave me alone in a city, I know I’ll be okay. It’s even better at home or in Pune; I can happily enjoy alone and not feel lonely, because there are beautiful people around me who’d be available at second call if not first, haha! 

I’ll find a café.
Order a beer.
Open a psychology lecture.
Maybe make a friend.
Maybe not.

Either way, I’ll still enjoy the evening. And I think that’s the quiet kind of confidence every coming-of-age show was trying to tell us about all along.

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