The Shooting Star: A Girl, Her Backpack and the World

by Shivya Nath

It didn’t occur to me that solitude is like a mysterious drug; at first, you fear it and reject it. But when you finally try it, you begin to crave the way it makes you feel.

It would be a few years before I could begin to acknowledge the privilege of my upbringing and feel genuinely grateful for it; before I could learn that not all parents support their offspring, especially the female ones, to move to another part of the world in pursuit of a dream that’s not their own.

We tend to make big changes only when tragedy strikes. We tend to look for alternative paths only when we feel we’ve hit rock bottom. We tend to ask existential questions about happiness only when we are at our most miserable.

I admire their grit to pick themselves up and do something extraordinary in the face of tragedy. But what about the tragedy of a mundane, average, unfulfilling life?

That’s the thing about our comfort zone—we tend to get trapped in it without realizing it. The longer we remain trapped, the more fears and insecurities we accumulate and the harder it becomes to break free.

We live in transit, he said. We think we can control our circumstances, but really, what we can control is our spirit.

You can’t start a business unless you’re really passionate about a concept, but you can’t sustain a business unless you’re equally passionate about the revenue it generates—and that is the conflict I began to hate.

Once in a while, a big wave swept away the sand from under me, a playful reminder that I shouldn’t hold on to this feeling, like any other feeling.