I was heartbroken, in between jobs, fresh out of a live-in relationship, and doing that very glamorous early-20s thing where you pretend you’re ‘figuring life out’ but are actually another minor inconvenience away from bursting into tears.
Two suitcases! That was my life for a while. Them, a few boxes dumped at a friend’s place, a temporary apartment situation, one deeply confusing relationship, a job that felt like a social experiment, two freelance gigs, and one brain (cell) that would not stop asking: Why the hell do you keep making wrong choices?
You know that phase where life doesn’t gently transition? It just picks you up by the collar and says, ‘New chapter, bi*ch!’
Yeah. That.
Staying in the same city felt like it was killing my soul. If you’ve ever broken up with someone and had to exist, roaming the same cafés, roads, and grocery stores, and breathing the same air, you get it. The city starts feeling like a shared Google Drive you no longer have access to but somehow still keep getting notifications from. So I went back home, to a small town called Katni, in Madhya Pradesh. Not in a dramatic ‘I’m healing in my childhood bedroom’ way. More in an ‘I cannot afford an apartment in Pune alone, and also I don’t know what I’m doing with my life’ way.
I needed space. I needed to clear my head. I needed a job. I also needed to not spend metropolitan-city rent unless I was actually making metropolitan-city money. Very spiritual. Very practical. Very Indian-daughter coded. And then, within a month, I landed two jobs. One was back in Pune, the same city I had just run away from. The other was in Mumbai. Naturally, like a woman committed to character development and questionable plot twists, I chose the job in Pune. I know. You can judge me.
But in my defence, both jobs were paying the same, and we all know Mumbai is adorably more expensive. Romance may make you stupid, but rent makes you practical.
So I went back.
I started hunting for an apartment near my new office in Camp, and the area is… let’s just say it has the emotional texture of a bad decision. It felt like a huge step down, as I had lived in Baner for a year. Not ‘quirky old neighbourhood’ down. More like ‘will I become a true-crime headline?’ down.
There was one apartment I really liked on SB Road. Better neighbourhood and a better chance of me not texting my friends, ‘if I go missing, start here.’
The only problem? It was a good 10 km from this office and was going to be under renovation for the next month. Anyway, because I still needed a roof and could not rely on potential, I kept looking around Camp. And despite the general energy that made up the neighbourhood, I did find another place there. Just more immediate and only slightly shady.
I was about to pay the token amount. Then life, being life, dropped a LinkedIn message into my inbox. It was from an editor at one of my favourite magazines. They were looking for someone like me.
Someone like me.
Do you understand what those three words can do to a 22-year-old girl with a dream, a breakup, and no stable address?
I didn’t pay the deposit. Obviously. The selection process would take nearly a month, so I continued with the job. I didn’t commit to my apartment either and waited to see if this dream opportunity would turn into something real. Except now I had a new problem. Where was I supposed to live? Who gives a 22-year-old an apartment for a month? Who trusts a girl with two suitcases, unresolved emotions, and hope that came in the form of a LinkedIn message?
Drumroll.
My ex enters. Yes, that ex. God bless him (lol). How he re-entered the picture is a story for another time, because that relationship had its own syllabus. For now, all you need to know is that he helped me find a temporary apartment.
The flat was his best friend’s investment in Narhe, a far corner of the city, an area I was hearing about for the first time in my life. It was not ideal for so many reasons, but desperate times do not care about your standards.
Seeking that help was killing me a little. My self-respect was standing in one corner with a clipboard, judging me. But I also couldn’t afford to self-respect my full-time accommodation plan. So I took the help. Not because it was uncomplicated, but because sometimes survival is not aesthetic.
A nervous system running on vibes and Google Calendar.
AND THEN the job I had moved back for started showing its real face.
While it had a decent setup, a coffee machine, and some sense of freedom, within days the company moved us into a bare room with white walls, white desks, white lights, and the emotional warmth of a government waiting room. I had moved cities for this job, and suddenly I was wondering if this was character-building or just a bad decision. But the office was only part of it. I had joined to write but was suddenly handling client communication I hadn’t signed up for, while being micromanaged over every message, line, and piece of research.
And then there was the politics. ‘Let’s take a walk’ never meant fresh air. It meant someone was about to tell me who to avoid, who was ‘too slow’, and how I, the junior-most person there, should manage conflicts between people twice my age.
It felt less like a workplace and more like high school with invoices. Then my appointment letter arrived with a salary lower than what I’d been promised. If they couldn’t get that right on paper, how was I supposed to trust the magical three-month hike they’d sold me?
There were some perks, though. I made a great friend there who was also being professionally tortured like me. There is nothing like trauma bonding in a corporate office. But the setup? The workflow? The toxicity? The fake promises about hikes? The way juniors were used as pawns?
It was, and I say this with editorial restraint, F*CKED UP.
I was trying to act like this was all part of a plan. It wasn’t.
It was a pickle.
Actually, not even a pickle. It was the entire achaar jar falling off the shelf.
And through all of this, my brain’s (last) cell was doing what anxious brains do best: turning every inconvenience into a full-blown investigation.
‘Should I have stayed home? Should I have chosen the other city?’
‘Should I have made the relationship work? Should I have taken the apartment?’
‘Should I have thought more carefully? Oh shit, I have not been eating healthy!’
‘Should I have become a person who makes better decisions and drinks more water?’
But somewhere in the middle of all this, one Sindhi saying kept coming back to me: ‘Na waqt kha pehro, na naseeb kha zyada, kehke kuch milan do aahe, na milando.’
What it meant was that everything in life comes in its own time, and what’s not meant for you will never arrive, no matter how tightly you hold on.
The phrase is annoying when one is anxious but useful when life is held together by suitcase zips. The saying is not asking you to sit down and wait for your future to arrive via Swiggy. It’s about understanding the difference between effort and obsession.
Effort is sending the assignment. Obsession is refreshing your inbox every seven minutes and deciding your entire future is over because no one replied by 4:12 p.m.
Effort is looking for apartments. Obsession is deciding that one bad neighbourhood means you’ve ruined your life forever.
Effort is applying for jobs. Obsession is mentally punishing yourself for every decision that didn’t immediately turn into a Pinterest board.
Well, I kept doing what I had to do. That saying gave me something I badly needed at the time: surrender. Not the kind where you give up, but the kind where you do your part and stop trying to control everything with anxiety.
Slowly, things shifted.
The apartment I had liked earlier on SB Road? Far better neighbourhood, under renovation! Ring a bell? It became available. Because, of course, the month I spent floating around in chaos was the same month it needed to come together.
I quit the shitty job and found another one just two kilometres away. Two kilometres. No, this was not the one with my favourite magazine; I never heard back from them. But still! After all the drama, life handed me a commute that was basically a warm apology. Around the same time, I found a roommate. I had heard enough horror stories to expect another plot twist, but she turned out to be an absolute gift. We found each other surprisingly quickly, moved in, and ended up living together for the next three years. That could have been another disaster waiting to happen. Instead, it became proof that maybe the hard part was finally over.
I continued with my freelance gigs and jobs.
AND THRIVED.
And I stopped feeling like my life was a badly edited draft. Now, it’s easy to make it sound neat. Like everything happened for a reason. Like the chaos had a clean little moral hiding inside it the whole time.
But when it was all happening to me, it felt unstable and embarrassing… as if everyone got a well-stitched rulebook, while I got a PDF forwarded multiple times, and that too with missing pages. I didn’t know that the job I moved back for wouldn’t be the best for me, or perhaps that the apartment I almost gave up on would become my home. The Sindhi saying came as a reminder, not blind faith. Because things take their own time, and all I could do was my part. I can do everything in my power and still not control the final shape of things. I can apply. I can move. I can leave. I can try. I can make the call. I can send the email. I can pack the suitcase. These few months weren’t about giving up on effort but about learning when effort has done its job and anxiety has started doing overtime.
Confused, semi-homeless, overworked, underpaid, and still somehow being carried by a timing I couldn’t see yet. I didn’t know the temporary mess was buying me time to land somewhere softer.
