It was ten years ago today, on my 24th birthday, that I decided to change my life.
I was in India and already making a living with my writing by then, but I was beginning to get dissatisfied with the work I was doing. While I had fun assignments from technology magazines about how cellphones are designed and personal essays that were often very well received, my income largely came from health and fitness writing for women’s magazines. I was making good money, however, and getting to do the one thing I loved—writing—so I was largely okay with this.
I wasn’t okay, however, with the way my personal life was going.
When I suggested to my boyfriend at the time that once we got married in a few months, we move to Paris, get ourselves a one-room apartment and have some adventures, he looked at me with complete seriousness and replied, “But my mother won’t want to live in a one-bedroom apartment.”
My adventurous spirit was not the only thing his mother disapproved of.
It had been mentioned that this “writing thing” wasn’t sustainable and that I needed to find a respectable job instead, and so a few months earlier, like a good Indian girl, I had trudged to the local high school and applied for the role of English teacher. The only reason I didn’t end up getting that job was that the principal of my former high school—to whom I will forever be grateful—looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re the most qualified but I can’t give you the job because I know you won’t last. Can you truly not see that you are destined to be a writer?”
For the year leading up to my birthday, I had been desolate and morose. If I had known at the time what it was that I wanted, it might have been easier to fight for it, but I didn’t. Writing was the constant even then, but personally, I just knew that this wasn’t it. Not only did I not know what I wanted, I didn’t have much courage to change things either. I had always done what had been asked of me. I had always worked towards taming my free spirit. I had—and always wanted to—make my family proud.
In reading my journals from those years, I describe myself as a caterpillar that is not allowed to leave the cocoon and become a butterfly, and that therefore dies slowly inside the prison of its own making.
On my 24th birthday then, with my heart beating so loudly I could hear it, I did the most courageous thing I had ever done: I walked up the steps into the bedroom of my traditional Indian parents and told them that I had broken up with my boyfriend of four years, a boyfriend they’d only recently found out about, met, and liked very much. Then, before they could process that, I announced that I was moving out. That I had found a one-room place already, and that I could move in there within the month.
I swear, in the silence that followed, I heard their dreams shatter.
A few months later, in what can only be described as a one-room hovel, having severed relationships with my family and almost all of my friends, I started writing.
I was broke. I was isolated. I was already at rock bottom. I no longer had anything to prove to anyone. I still didn’t know what I wanted from life, but I knew that I wanted to write.
And so I wrote, not the health and fitness stories that would make me money, but the personal essays that would help me make sense of my life and the feature stories about human rights and women’s issues that I hoped would create change in the world, and in me. With every extra bit of money I had, I traveled all across the country bringing untold stories of women into the limelight and finding both joy and inspiration in my work.
I felt called to write, for that time in my life, in a way I had not experienced before or since.
In the weeks and months that I didn’t travel, I sat on my bed each and every day and sent out five pitches. Five query letters a day to anyone who’d have me. I sent my stories to publications everyone has heard of like the New York Times and the Globe & Mail and to publications no one has, such as local magazines in Delhi and regional newspapers in the US.
Five pitches a day. Every single day.
Two years later, I would start writing for TIME. Three years later, I would accept a position at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism as a Visiting Scholar. Four years later, I’d write for The New York Times. Five years later, I’d win two awards.
Somewhere along the way, I had my heart broken and moved back in with my parents, who despite my having left under less than ideal circumstances, welcomed me back with open arms, no questions asked. They ignored nosy neighbors who asked if the reason their daughter was back home and looking so frail was because she was suffering from some grave terminal illness. And they loved and nurtured me and my broken heart back to health. Deflated but not defeated, I then bought a one-way plane ticket to the only country for which I could get a visa– Ghana.
Through it all, I kept writing, I kept sending out my work. Sometimes I sent five pitches, sometimes I sent two, sometimes just the one. But writing is all I ever wanted to do and I did it.
It only takes one moment, one act of courage, for your life to change. And you’re in control of that moment because that moment happens when you decide that you’ve had enough, that you can no longer live in your current state, that you are done.
You decide—truly decide—that this no longer works for you and then you take the brave and tentative steps towards your new future.
Five, ten, twenty years later, your life is unrecognizable.
The 14-year-old me would be in awe of the 24-year-old I eventually became, and the 24-year-old me would be heartened to learn that the decisions she made at the time that led to such strife and pain would eventually not only bring her everything she desired and more, but strengthen her relationship with her family. That the clawing and biting out of the cocoon, while painful and agonizing at the time, had been necessary to become the 34-year-old she could respect.
Can the 44-year-old me be more fabulous than I could ever imagine? Will I be able to respect the person I am to eventually become? I don’t know who I’ll be at 44, I can tell you that. I can only hope that when I look back, like in the decades past, my life is better and not worse.
It doesn’t matter what your life has looked like in the past. You may be at rock bottom now, but that just means that there’s only one direction to go in now—up.
Our future is in our own hands. We have the clay to mold into any shape we like. Recognizing what needs to change and deciding to do it is the first step. Then, everything else will follow.
Who do you want to be in ten years?
What do you need to do in order to get there?