Dear gj,

If it’s not possible for you to move out of your house and live in an apartment by yourself, as I don’t understand the culture ramification of a female living alone in Indian’s culture, then the next best thing to do is to find a place that you can call your own.

Right now, you are living with a lot of people so from the moment you wake up to the moment where you lay down to sleep, you are constantly interacting with people in some way. And that is very tiresome because that means you don’t much time to yourself to do whatever. Or even if you do something, someone might be watching or interrupting, which disrupts your time alone and can make it seems like you can’t even have your own private time. And your own private time is the time for you to breath and think about things and just relax without having to observe social decorum.

Social decorum means listening to your mother talk, being careful around your work mates, possibly avoiding your grandmother and seeing your sister and father. Do that constantly without break and you become burnt out. Do what while also being influenced by the opinions of those around you and you begin to lose yourself, or at least never have much time to form your own thoughts.

Right now, you are still immerse in your mother’s and father’s expectations for you, especially your mother’s. You are still listening to her thoughts and opinions, which will unconsciously influence you which will in turn make it seems as if her expectations is decent and only following the guideline of your culture so there’s little need to question it. But that also makes it really easy for you to tell yourself that you are a failure for not achieving any of the goals your mother had set out for you, marriage for example.

But that emptiness of yours comes from the fact that you are following your mother’s expectations without ever creating any expectations for yourself. You went to school and got a job in engineering because your mother told you to support yourself with a good job. You are now looking around at marriage because your mother told you that the clock is ticking so you better hurry. You are following someone’s else time-line which is go to school, get a job and then eventually get marry. And after that, you might be following your husband’s time-line of maybe quitting your job to having children. You have not seriously try to create any expectations for yourself, you have only listen to your mother’s time-line. And that’s empty, because that’s not your dream. That’s not just what you might want out of life. That’s not what you are willing to endure suffering to grab hold with your own hands.

So first and foremost, go find a space that is safe that you can allow yourself free thoughts. A space of your own that you can use to go/sift through every thing that had happened to you so far. You need to examine all the teachings that you’ve learnt so far; from your mother, from your culture, from your peers. You need to examine with a critical eye the underlying ‘why’ to these teachings and why exactly you are trying to fulfill these expectations. You need to ask yourself if these expectations are yours? Are these expectations aligning with what you might want out of life? Are these expectations aligning with the person you want to become in the future? Are these expectations serving you personally or are they chaining you to something you don’t like, but feel you have fulfill? And if you feel anything, name them. Be it anger, sorrow, regret, etc. Name them. And if you start telling yourself that you are not good enough to be doing this, then quietly examine that too. Examine these thoughts, examine where they are coming from and question them why you can’t be enough.

You need to start examining and questioning these thoughts. You need to start asking why and what and whom. These thoughts come from somewhere, but it might not be coming from you. Before taking any actions, understand your why. Understand why you want something or not want something. It could be as simple as you don’t like it or it’s just not you. That’s fine. That’s enough of a reason to do something about your situation. If you’re unhappy, you’ll stay unhappy unless you actually do something. So take action by understanding your unhappiness, understanding your environment and understanding yourself. It will take a long time to do this, so it’s okay if you only have a few small thoughts to go on this journey of understanding yourself. It’ll probably take your whole life, but at least you’ll understand some things about the current you. From those small understanding, you can start something from that, one small action. You just have to decide to do something, you don’t need all the answers.

And above all, don’t fear failure. Don’t fear failing at knowing who you are, what you want, why you do what you do, and more. No one is ever completely sure of themselves, but they do things because they hope to make a difference in this world and often, it’ll fail more than succeed. Yet they still keep at it until they do succeed or they stop, depending on if they realize it’s not what they really wanted. And you don’t really know that you wanted it/wanted something until it either fail or succeed. You don’t know so let yourself fail as often as you need to fail. It’s not a failure on your part, rather, it’s a sign of strength that you know yourself well enough whether to keep going or stop. So fail, then ask yourself what fail, then ask yourself if that failure had given you perspective on whether what you’re doing is something you want to keep doing despite the failure. You’ll endure a lot of suffering trying to reach your goal yet if your goal is worth that suffering, then you have a reason to keep going.

So find that space, find that place and let yourself breath.