Perhaps!
It always begins with something simple—like a mug of Moroccan mint tea and a patch of sunlight slipping through the window. Somehow, in those first sips, the troubles shrink a little, as if they were never as big as they pretended to be. But still, there’s a weight I can’t quite name. I don’t know what I’m feeling; only that there’s too much of it. So much of everything, everywhere, that even lifeless things seem restless—worked up, bizarre, flawed. They say patience is power, not the absence of action. I know that. I remind myself of it. But when you’re in the thick of it, patience doesn’t feel powerful at all—it feels irritating, like a silence that refuses to break. Lately, one thought keeps circling me like a shadow: the way I was raised. Growing up in an Indian middle-class family meant learning that restrictions were a form of care, that the thin lines of patriarchy were actually expressions of love, of protection, of possessiveness dressed as warmth. I swallowed that les...
