Part 1- Rishtas I threw on the Rocks.

At fifteen, I stopped talking to my mother. A slow, deliberate shutting of doors, a retreat into headphones and sarcasm. I would hear her calling me for dinner and pretend I never heard her. I told myself she wouldn’t get it — this heaviness in my chest, this unfamiliar anger pulsing through me like a second heartbeat. I began to believe there was something wrong with me. I had everything to smile about, and still my heart felt like a broken cathedral — echoing with grief I hadn’t earned. It was as if parts of me had been chained in some forgotten dungeon of my mind, screaming, and I couldn’t find the keys. So I chose the easiest thing: I shut her out. My first best friend. The woman who steadied my hands when I took my first steps.

Sometimes I wonder if she ever regretted teaching me how to walk, because I used those very steps to run from her. I unclasped her fingers the moment life started to tremble and vanished into the shadows of myself, leaving behind the ghost of a child she once knew.

At sixteen, I lost my best friend — not all at once, but in little moments we never noticed. Our love turned into a rotten fruit forgotten in drawers, I had sketched with his favourite colours and my laughs at his jokes. Missed calls, snapped replies, jokes that cut too close to the bone— what had we become? We were once inseparable, and then suddenly I couldn't stand the way he laughed too loudly or asked too many questions. I told him he was annoying. He told me I’d changed. Maybe we were both right.

But if I’m honest, I had always envied him. The way he lit up rooms with his warmth, like he’d swallowed the sun and made peace with it. The way he had his life mapped out — ambition stitched into his smile. When people asked what he wanted to be, he answered with pride. And me? I stood beside him like a cracked mirror, reflecting nothing but confusion and a dumb little teenager who was meant to be just another girl in the crowd.

There was a time I looked at him with something nameless — a sharp, aching thing lodged in my chest. Envy, maybe. Or love twisted too tightly to breathe.

The last time I saw him, he didn’t yell. He just looked at me like I was a stranger wearing the skin of someone he used to love — and then he left.

I always grew up hearing I was a splitting image of my father, and I think that’s when the storms of doubt began. My father was a man of principle, he stitched our house from each broken piece of the dream he had shattered under the weight of becoming who he is today. I looked at his smile, and saw something behind, a tired little kid who just wanted to breathe without the weight of his beautifully adorned home crushing his shoulders, splintering each bone into a million directions. I was terrified of becoming him.

Terrified that one day I’d wear the same smile, hiding the same fractures. That I’d build a house so solid it would crush me beneath its own perfection. That I’d silence my dreams the way he must have silenced his, stuffing them into dark drawers and calling it maturity.

They told me I looked like him. Walked like him. Thought like him.

And all I could think was — what if I grow into his regrets? What if I become a man so strong, he forgets how to feel?

So I flinched from mirrors. I flinched from growing up.

Growing up is supposed to be beautiful. But no one warns you about the casualties — the friends you ghost, the parents you wound, the younger self you bury without a grave.

PART TWO- Reflections in Shattered Glass — The Inner Storm

There were nights I’d stare at the ceiling, wishing I could unzip my skin and step out of it. I felt everything too much — and still, not enough to explain why I was hurting the people who tucked me into bed for years. I didn't know then that hormones could be like ghosts — invisible but capable of wrecking homes, breaking glass, slamming doors. They haunted me, made me say things I didn’t mean, made me feel things I couldn't name. And the worst part? I knew I was slipping, but I couldn’t stop. I was the arsonist and the ashes. I was holding the tiny, fragile flame, and I was the one drenched in fuel. And no matter who screamed, turning into dust felt like the only way out.

Schools felt like a battlefield where every student was an enemy, every little step you took was constantly evaluated, then compared and finally disgraced, upon like trying wasn’t just enough. I looked around and even as a kid understood how fucked up our system was. All it cared about was being top of the world, never creating their own world.

It drenched a kid with the ability to rote in red ink of As, and the ones who drew forts out of broken stars were called average. The kids who could score much higher if they actually tried- the average students.

The tag scared me more than the idea of growing up. It left a ghost in my brain, constantly whispering to drop the ink I loved, the pages of poems I adored, the stories that gave me a reason to live and run to the numbers I was scared of. It hissed that if I didn’t trade my passions for the language of formulas and equations, I would be swallowed whole by a faceless crowd, lost, invisible, forever the average one.

So, I ran. Aimlessly, hungry for grades and validation. A simple ‘good work’ scrawled on my paper hit me like a jolt of caffeine straight to the veins — a sharp rush of adrenaline flooding my limbs, making me feel momentarily alive. Recognition became my drug, a fleeting high I craved, and the teacher with rimmed glasses — the one who often forgot my name — was the reluctant dealer in this shadowy exchange.

But when the applause faded and the school bell’s echo died, I was left alone with my reflection staring back at me. Suddenly, the curls at the end of my hair started making me anxious, the freckles on my nose started feeling like blobs of ink on a piece of crumbled paper, every little splash of red acne felt like a knife plunging into my skin twisted mercilessly. I became obsessed with the faint hairs above my lips, tracing the uneven edges of my eyes as if I could fix it by piercing them just enough. I began to hate the fullness of my cheeks, the way my body sagged under layers of skin and curves, as if my very flesh was betraying me.

My hands would wander unconsciously, pressing, pinching, pulling — as if I could sculpt away the parts of me I didn’t like to look at. I started to flinch at compliments, unsure if they were pity or lies. I walked through hallways with my eyes on the floor, like I was scared of seeing mockery in the honey-dripping brown eyes around me.

My body no longer felt like a home. It became a mausoleum, filled with echoes of cruel comments, half-glances, and imagined judgments.

I wore sleeves in summer, suffocating beneath fabric that hid the sins of skin. I tugged at clothes in changing rooms like I was peeling off parts of myself, ashamed of what they revealed. I began to calculate how much space I took up — in photographs, in rooms, in people’s perception — as if shrinking myself could earn me forgiveness.

I started holding my breath when speaking to someone new, terrified that even my voice might be too loud, too much. I abandoned my glasses, choosing the blur of the world over the sharp clarity of feeling seen. I scrubbed my skin raw, drowned my face in powders and creams, hoping to erase myself into something palatable.

What if my stomach were flatter? What if my skin weren’t this shade? What if my eyes weren’t dull, forgettable black? What if my face weren’t mapped with the ghosts of old scars?

The what-ifs came like a storm — relentless, thick, and choking. They clung to me, fogging my reflection until all I could see was the silhouette of someone I thought I had to become. My body was no longer a vessel. It became a sum of flaws, a cruel equation.

Subtract. Hide. Erase.

And still, it was never enough.

Even silence began to feel like a scream. I could hear it, always — this hum beneath my skin, this quiet voice saying: ‘you are not right, you are not enough, you are not loved unless you are less.’

PART 3- A conversation with the Darkness

The mirror didn’t stop at my skin. It dug deeper. It whispered things I wasn’t ready to hear.

“You are never someone’s first priority”, it grinned against my ears and I felt a jump in my heart.

“What do you mean? I am my mother’s first priority!” I screamed, turning back to him, a shiver scrambling down my spine.

“The same mother you buried in silence the moment life started to feel like too much?” he said, his voice low, almost sounding like pity, like he was mourning her. “The woman who still waits in doorways, clutching half-finished sentences and cold dinner plates, praying for the sound of your laughter again? Do you even remember it — that laugh that used to make your house feel like home? Because she does. Every single day. And all she asks herself is: What did I do so wrong to lose my child while they were still living under my roof?”

“I’m still my father’s little girl!” I protested, the words tasting like rust in my mouth.

“Are you?” he whispered. “Weren’t you so terrified of turning into him, you began mirroring his every mistake—just in reverse? You called it rebellion, but it was mimicry with different scars.”

He stepped closer, “In your frantic escape from becoming him, you shattered him instead. You carved distance where there once was devotion. And now? You’ve lost him. Not to death, but to confusion. A father still alive, still loving, but left wondering what he did so wrong to become a ghost in his own daughter’s life.”

“My best friends…”, I didn’t even have the courage left to continue, the words vanished in my throat.

“You pushed them away,” he said gently, almost too gently. “You started laughing a little less, loving a little quieter. You turned your jokes into daggers and your presence into an apology. And when they tried to stay, you made it hard for them—not because you stopped caring, but because you didn’t know how to be seen in the mess you’d become.”

The unread birthday messages. I declined the calls with trembling fingers. The sleepovers I skipped, the promises I never kept.

“They didn’t leave,” he said, softer now. “You just forgot how to stay.”

I swallowed the lump rising in my throat.

“I wanted love, but I built walls. I wanted to be understood, but I spoke in puzzles. I thought if I left first, it wouldn’t hurt as much. But all I’ve done is bleed alone. Do you think they’d even recognise me now? Do you think I’d recognise myself?”

A heavy silence hung in the air, sharp enough to cut through the faintest hope.

“It’s time for me to go now. You don’t need me anymore,” Darkness said, smiling for the first time — a smile I had known all my life but never felt was truly mine until now. It felt like home, unsettling and yet comforting in a way I hadn’t expected.

“No…” The word escaped me before I could stop it, a sudden surge of panic crashing through my chest. What am I without my darkness? Without him whispering in the quiet, who would be there to catch me when my thoughts threatened to push me off the edge?

“Are you sure you want me to stay?” Darkness asked, his voice low but certain. “Because if you choose me today, you lose everyone who ever held your hand, fighting against me.”

In that breathless moment, it felt like I was standing at a crossroads — torn between the shadow I thought defined me and the light the world expected me to embrace. But instead of choosing one or the other, I closed my eyes, swallowing the tears threatening to spill, and whispered, “I choose me.”

As the word left my lips, the weight pressing down on my chest began to ease, as if a long-held breath was finally released. The darkness wavered, no longer a looming presence but a fading shadow at the edge of my vision. When I opened my eyes, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before — the faces around me, steady and warm. My mother, with eyes full of quiet hope; my father, shoulders relaxing; friends who had never stopped caring, even when I pushed them away. They were here, real and waiting, not perfect, but enough.

I realised then that choosing myself wasn’t an act of rebellion or courage. It was a quiet burial. A laying to rest of every ‘not enough’ I had worn like armour. The darkness wasn’t defeated. It lingered in corners, in memories, in mirrors. But it no longer ruled. I had peeled its voice off my skin, and in its place, stitched a quieter truth — I am still becoming. And I am still mine.

PART 4- Fighting the darkness- You are not alone

They don’t tell you that being a teenager feels like bleeding in a room full of mirrors — where every version of you is watching, judging, wondering if you’ll make it through the day without cracking in half. No one warns you that some days, you’ll want to disappear into the corner of your bedsheets, or that your chest might feel like it’s caving in under the weight of a math test, a missed call, a zit on your chin.

Here’s something that I wish I could tell myself if I were back to being 15- growing up is not a coming-of-age montage — it’s ugly, raw, and lonely. That the monsters don’t always hide under the bed — sometimes, they speak in your voice, look through your eyes. But listen closely: You are not broken. You are becoming. The ache in your bones, the war in your head, the silence in your screams — they’re not signs of weakness, they’re proof that you are alive and fighting. And no matter what anyone says, your softness, your struggle, your survival — they are all valid. You’ll realise one day that healing doesn’t mean erasing the darkness — it means learning to hold it without letting it devour you. That self-love isn’t loud or glittering; sometimes, it’s just brushing your hair, replying to a message, choosing to stay another day. You’ll outgrow the need to prove your worth in marks or mirrors. You’ll stop shrinking yourself to fit into spaces that were never built for your wild, aching, brilliant soul. One day, you’ll wake up and the war inside your chest will be quieter — not silent, but softer. And maybe that will be enough.

You’re not too much, or too little — you are exactly enough to begin again.

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