The Road Less Trodden

I’ve always believed I was different in a slightly inconvenient, hard-to-place way. My mind has always leaned toward rebellion. It questions, resists, imagines a world that doesn’t quite exist, and then refuses to settle for the one in front of it. For the longest time, that made me feel like an outsider. Like I was speaking a language no one around me fully understood.

And then I came to Goa. My “too much” became just enough. My way of thinking didn’t make me difficult anymore. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I had to shrink or explain myself into belonging. I just… did.

And it was beautiful.

That quiet, persistent insecurity; the one that told me I was alien, misplaced, slightly off, began to dissolve. By the end of 2025, that fire had almost completely burned out. And I thought I would finally feel a sense of peace.

But as it turns out, when one fire dies, another one begins - or I subconsciously light one?

Somewhere around my birthday this year, something inside me shifted. The kind of shift you don’t see coming. The kind that rearranges things quietly until suddenly, nothing feels the same. What followed was not clarity. It was turbulence.

Mornings where I woke up with my heart racing, so fast I couldn’t tell if I was running toward something or away from it. I kept wondering where I’d gone wrong, how to fix what I was feeling, how to return to some version of steadiness.

But nothing “fixed” in the way I expected. And slowly, I began to understand what was really happening. My sense of belonging had given me permission. Permission to want more. To try more. To build, to question, to disrupt - even my own life. So I did. I started things. Explored ideas. Took risks I would’ve talked myself out of a year ago. Some worked - small, quiet victories. Some led nowhere. And some collapsed entirely into chaos and confusion.

And now, here I am. At another crossroads.

My work feels uncertain. The ideas I was once so sure of seem to be slipping through my fingers. Even my physical space - my home, which has felt like a dream come true from the start is something I’m going to give up in the next couple of months.

There’s grief in that. In watching something you believed in, not quite become what you imagined. But there’s also something else. Something harder to name. Because this isn’t just things falling apart.

I’m wondering if this is what it looks like to choose the road less trodden. No one really tells you this part -that the unknown is deeply unsettling. That stepping away from a formula means accepting you might never really arrive. That freedom and fear often walk hand in hand.

I used to think the goal was to find the greenest grass. But maybe I'm already standing in it? Or perhaps I have to plant the grass where it doesn’t yet grow...