Taste feels personal, almost instinctive. But food, clothes, homes, and even the sarees that break our own rules often carry older stories of availability, repetition, culture, aspiration, and the small choices that slowly become a self.
Taste: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About What We Like Read More »
Some silences are taught as safety before we understand them as silence. They arrive as instructions, advice, concern, and protection, until one day you realise you are still walking through the world with your eyes straight ahead.
Silence: The Stories We Don’t Tell Out Loud Read More »
By the time you walk into the room, the introduction is already over.
A version of you, edited, shortened, passed along, has arrived first.
And you spend the rest of the time responding to it.
Reputation: The Stories That Arrive Before You Do Read More »
There are questions that open a conversation, and then there are questions that quietly replace it. They sound reasonable. They often are. But by the time you answer them, you are no longer where you started.
Questions: The Stories We Ask Instead of Answering Read More »
You think you’re noticing a person.
The clothes, the walk, the outline of a stranger moving through an ordinary evening.
But sometimes what you’re really noticing is a pattern your body already knows.
How to move without interrupting.
How to shrink just enough.
How to stay within the edges of space without ever testing where they actually are.
And once that recognition clicks, it’s hard to tell whether you saw them at all. Or just recognised yourself at a distance.
Posture: The Stories Our Bodies Tell Read More »
A post about a car service centre trying to steal parts from my car reached more people than anything I had written in over two decades. Not the pieces on motherhood, work, identity, or the slow work of figuring out a life. Just one moment of outrage. It felt like validation, until it started to look like something else entirely.
Outrage: The Stories That Distract Us From What Matters Read More »
We act as if saying no is harsh, so we wrap it in softer language and call that kindness. But the soft no does not remove discomfort. It simply hands it to someone else.
No: The Stories We Tell to Avoid Saying No Read More »
We grow up being told what is right. What is proper. What a good person does.
But watch closely, and the lesson is rarely in the story itself. It sits in the gap between what is said and what is done, in the way rules bend when they become inconvenient, and in who is expected to follow them anyway.
Morality sounds universal. It rarely is.
Morality: The Stories We Use to Govern Behaviour Read More »
“I’ll start tomorrow” doesn’t sound like a lie. It sounds responsible. Temporary. Reasonable. Until you notice how often tomorrow arrives and nothing changes.
Lies: The Stories We Tell Ourselves to Delay Ourselves Read More »
Something is said. It lands a little too cleanly. You feel it before you fully understand it. And then, almost immediately, it’s taken back. Just kidding.
Except nothing has actually been taken back. The words are still there. Only your ability to respond to them has changed.
Kidding, Just Kidding: The Stories We Tell Sideways Read More »
