Somewhere between this sunset and today, I found my way back to myself.

I broke long before I fell apart.

Some people lose their childhood in a moment. I lost mine slowly enough to watch it happen.

This is a serious one.

I usually hide behind humour.

A bad day becomes a funny story.

A disaster becomes a lesson.

A dead gas cylinder somehow becomes a blog.

This one doesn’t.

Because this story starts with my mother.

And I think a part of me broke the day she got sick.

I was in Class 11 when my mother suffered paralysis.

People often talk about grief as if it arrives after loss.

Mine arrived before it.

Because although my mother was still there, life as I knew it wasn’t.

I don’t remember one specific moment.

I remember a hundred little ones.

Hospital visits.

Conversations whispered behind closed doors.

Watching adults look worried.

Realising that everyone was scared but nobody was saying it out loud.

And somewhere in all of that, I stopped being a child.

I don’t think I ever got that version of myself back.

Not intentionally.

Life just had other plans.

I became the eldest daughter.

And if you’re an eldest daughter, you probably know that isn’t a title.

It’s a job description.

I became a support system for my father while secretly wishing somebody would be one for me.

I tried my best to take care of my younger sister.

I looked after the house.

I looked after my studies.

I looked after everyone.

And somewhere in the middle of doing all of that, I forgot to look after myself.

The thing nobody tells you is that responsibilities don’t always make you stronger.

Sometimes they just teach you how to survive while everyone mistakes it for strength.

Years passed.

Life moved forward.

Or at least it looked like it did.

I gave my Class 12 boards.

I topped.

I cracked a national level entrance examination.

I got into one of the best colleges in the country.

And for the first time in years, life felt generous.

My first year of college genuinely felt like a movie.

The kind where everybody finds their people.

Friends.

Societies.

Events.

New experiences.

The freedom of being away from home.

The excitement of becoming someone.

For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t surviving.

I was living.

Or at least I thought I was.

Then came my second year.

And if my first year felt like a movie, my second year felt like somebody turned the lights off halfway through it.

I was diagnosed with depression.

I hate how casual that sentence sounds.

Because there was nothing casual about it.

Depression is not sadness.

I wish it was.

Sadness still lets you feel something.

Depression makes everything feel distant.

Food tastes different.

Conversations feel heavier.

Days become harder.

You stop recognising yourself.

And that was the scariest part.

Not feeling sad.

Not feeling broken.

Not knowing who I was anymore.

The girl who could manage everything suddenly couldn’t manage herself.

My academics slipped.

My responsibilities slipped.

My relationships suffered.

I suffered.

There were days getting out of bed felt impossible.

Days replying to a text felt exhausting.

Days where I would stare at the ceiling for hours because existing felt like enough work already.

Looking back now, I don’t think depression was the first thing that broke me.

It was just the thing that finally finished the job.

All those years of holding everything together.

All those years of pretending I was okay.

All those years of carrying things I never unpacked.

Eventually something had to give.

And it did.

For a long time, I mistook survival for living.

And maybe that’s what happens when you’re constantly putting out fires.

You become so focused on getting through the day that you forget life is supposed to be more than endurance.

I wasn’t living.

I was surviving very efficiently.

There was a phase where my demons knew me better than I knew myself.

And the scary part was that I started believing them.

A phase where I genuinely believed this was who I was now.

That the happy version of me was gone.

That maybe she wasn’t coming back.

There was a phase where every sad song felt like it understood me better than people did.

Not because of heartbreak.

Because pain finally sounded familiar.

There is something cruel about depression.

It doesn’t just take your happiness.

It takes your memory of happiness too.

You forget what feeling okay feels like.

You forget that there was a version of you before all of this.

A version worth finding again.

I lost friendships during that time.

Some drifted away.

Some ended.

Some simply couldn’t survive what I was becoming.

I don’t hold resentment towards any of them.

But there were people who stayed.

People who knew me when I didn’t know myself.

People who sat with me in versions of myself that I could barely tolerate.

People who loved me through silence.

I don’t think they’ll ever fully understand what that meant.

For the longest time, I thought nobody could help me.

That this was my fight and mine alone.

I was wrong.

Nobody can fight it for you.

But nobody is supposed to fight it alone either.

Therapy helped.

Medication helped.

Time helped.

Not dramatically.

Not all at once.

Just enough for me to keep going.

And then something happened that I didn’t expect.

I started liking myself again.

Which sounds small until you’ve spent years unable to do it.

Everyone talks about self love like it’s a motivational quote.

For me, it felt more like meeting an old friend after years apart.

Awkward at first.

Then familiar.

Then necessary.

I’m 21 now.

And I don’t think I’m healed.

I don’t think healing works like that.

I still have bad days.

I still have days where my mind is louder than I’d like it to be.

I still have days where depression tries to convince me that it knows me better than I know myself.

But I fight back now.

Not perfectly.

Not gracefully.

Just enough.

These years taught me something I wish I had learned earlier.

Mental health matters.

Kindness matters.

You genuinely do not know what battle somebody is fighting.

The funniest person in the room might be carrying something heavy.

The most successful person you know might be exhausted.

The strongest person might be one bad day away from falling apart.

For the longest time, I thought I was falling behind. Then I realized I was recovering.

Nowadays I see people racing ahead.

Building careers.

Following timelines.

Achieving milestones.

And good for them.

But honestly, who decided what the timeline for success should be?

Because right now, I feel like I’m learning how to walk again.

Emotionally.

Mentally.

As a person.

And rebuilding takes time.

And if you’re reading this while feeling stuck, please know that healing is rarely dramatic.

Most of the time it looks like replying to one text.

Getting out of bed.

Taking your medication.

Showing up to therapy.

Making it through a difficult day.

The small things count far more than we give them credit for.

For a while, my demons won.

They did.

I think this story deserves that honesty.

There was a period where they won.

But they didn’t stay undefeated.

And that’s the difference.

I’m not completely okay.

I’m not perfectly equipped.

I don’t have all the answers.

But for the first time in a very long time, I think the fight is fair again.

I’m still learning how to be okay.

Some days I do it well.

Some days I don’t.

But if these last few years have taught me anything, it’s this:

The goal was never to become the person I was before.

That girl had been carrying too much for too long.

The goal was to become someone kinder to her.

And for the first time in a very long time, I think I’m getting there.