Hello rockstars,

Right now, it is 1:46am on November 4, 2022. I’m going to skip through the “wow it’s been so long” commentary and go straight to the point! I was reading this book, “The Island of Missing Trees” through recommendation by my lovely mom, and so far, I love the writing style and I’m not quite far enough to understand what’s going on yet, but I’m quite optimistic.

But while I was reading this one paragraph, my mind started to wander, and I had the sudden urge to start blogging. I’m not sure what about, but here I am. I don’t have a specific theme or message in mind… I just felt that it had been a while since we chatted, and I missed talking to all of you. So here goes:

My life is chugging along — I’m working at a law firm now and am finally getting the lay of the land (kind of!) and getting the hang of things. All the people in my life are the same and they’re all doing well! Daylight savings on Sunday which is always an experience…

I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of traveling lately: San Francisco (August) Victoria, BC (September), New York for Orientation (September) New Delhi, India (September/October), Rhode Island (October), and then in December going to Sarasota, Florida. I calculated, and out of the 30 days in September, I was only home for 10 of them. Traveling can be both exhausting and really incredible, and this time, it was really incredible, and I felt like it added to my personality.

And I wish I had time now (and the energy) to talk about these trips, but I’ll put a reminder in my calendar to talk about them early next week — a quick rapid fire of my travels!

But alas, now I’m back in Maryland for the time being!

Truth be told, there have been a lot of moments in the last month (especially since coming back from India) where I’ve been trying to figure out if I’m doing what I want to be doing, if I’m doing the things that make me happy, if the people I spend my time with are people who make me happy and I enjoy spending time with, and if there’s something “more” that I want. I go through this thought process increasingly often, and chances are, if you’re reading this and wondering, “Oh has Sandhya been feeling this way about me??” the answer is most likely, yes.

But what do you even do with a feeling like that? All you can do is try to figure out what makes you happy and try to tune out the noise and figure out what you want and what you want to be doing and who you want to be doing it with.

So, what have I been doing? All I can really do is question myself, be honest with myself, ask myself the tough questions, and push myself to be brave, and encourage myself to do things that make me happy.

I recently started volunteering as an Usher at the Strathmore Music Center, and even though I’ve only done it twice (and will do it again tonight), it’s already one of the most fulfilling experiences of my extracurricular life right now. To be surrounded by fellow ushers who are living completely different lives from me and are choosing to dedicate what little free time they have, to volunteer multiple times a week at a show and be surrounded by arts, music, theater, and amazing talent? That’s a blessing in itself. When we spend so much of our time focused on the “productive” side to everything, and not on things that we actually want to do, I think we lose a bit of ourselves.

There was this fantastic instagram post I read today, and I’m going to share a portion of it here:

We're all so obsessed with self-improvement that leisure and fun have been turned into productivity hacks on TikTok - simply walking to your destination is now a Hot Girl Walk, drinking water a competition with a special-bottle to boot, capitalism is so entrenched that its practices have become something to romanticize. - cholegracelaws  

Literally how true is that. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, courtesy of Josie Santi, I don’t want to be my best self, I want to be my favorite self.

My favorite self is fun, and messy, and real! That version of me writes blog posts in the middle of the night, records podcast episodes where I trip over basic words because I’m so excited to talk about something, takes pictures with people where I throw my head back laughing and can’t stop because being in that moment is just so funny, spends hours and hours at Barnes and Nobles surrounded by books that make me feel calm, volunteers with 15 different organizations just because I want to get involved with different things and I want to help people and I want to do something that adds to my personal wellbeing.

Sometimes my hair is flying all over the place, sometimes my eyeliner is smudged because I rubbed my eyes without thinking, sometimes I roll out of bed late and walk over to my desk because I have 45 seconds before my next meeting, sometimes I skip meals and coffee-substitute, sometimes I make more egregious mistakes or deliberate choices for when I’m trying to save a few minutes of my time, or I sacrifice my sleep to stay up and write a post to all of you, sometimes nothing that I’m wearing matches with each other and I’m just wearing it because it was comfy or because — truth be told — it was dark in the morning and I didn’t feel like turning on the closet light and I just picked up two random things that I thought were different colors but actually don’t match at all, sometimes I laugh too hard at not-so-funny jokes, or I awkwardly say something out loud that I probably shouldn’t have thought about at all, sometimes I fudge my numbers for how long I’ve meditated to feel good about myself, sometimes on my to-do list I add a list of tasks I already completed so I can cross them out and make myself feel better about my productivity, sometimes I talk to inanimate objects like my car Evelyn who is the best car in the world, and other times I talk to my plants and make paper hats for them so they can grow in style, sometimes I’m a flake, sometimes I just feel lazy and don’t want to do things, sometimes I get angry even though I logically know I should probably meditate and calm down, sometimes I’m so frustrated that I want to throw my laptop out the window, sometimes I’m so happy that I feel like skipping, sometimes I roll down my windows and create dance moves to different songs while I’m waiting at the red light, sometimes I take burning hot showers and sometimes I take freezing cold showers, and sometimes my behavior makes zero sense because humans are complicated and I just don’t care what other people think.

But all of those things are me, and only a small part of me. And the people who matter, will love me because of it. And you know what, I love me because of it. Obviously, I have flaws — who doesn’t? — but I rather be 100% real than focused on the “fakeness” of it all.

So, about the earlier questions I asked, I still don’t have any answers. Sometimes I think that it would be nice to get some sort of sign from the universe giving me these answers… and maybe the universe is trying to give me signs and I just haven’t noticed them. I’ll keep my eyes peeled tomorrow. But ultimately, I’m the only one that can answer these questions.

So I guess this is my journey to happiness, and I invite you all to join me on whatever journeys you want to go on – to confidence, to love, to ambition, to happiness, or, just to become your favorite self, whatever that looks like.

That’s it for my 2 am rant. I don’t actually know if anything in my post made sense, but I guess we’ll find out in the morning.

For now, it’s time to turn off my laptop and get back to reading The Island of Missing Trees.

Until next time,

xo

Sandhya

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