There, and Back Again
Can a life without self-compassion truly be one of consequence?
Schwab Residential Center, Stanford
November, 2015.
Thanksgiving Break of first year had come and gone. Officially in my “late” twenties, I stepped into the familiar terracotta room, filled with trinkets from the past, and immediately felt overrun with nostalgia about the decade I’d spent in this country.
First, I felt tremendous appreciation for a family that had given me so much more than they ever had to give. Then, pride, because I’d done everything I could, in return, to express gratitude for that gift of independence. After all, I’d thrown myself into work, maintaining a laser-like focus on my career, and emerged on the other side, with a crystal clear sense of professional identity and success. I’d even done some good along the way. Win-win.
But I’d also become addicted to using professional goalposts as excuses to deflect the many existential elephants in the room. And I’d simply convinced myself that those debilitating personal struggles — the insecurities around body image, brown skin, and belonging, the inability to let go of failed relationships and the people who left me behind, and the perpetual identity crisis and indecision around “settling down” — could wait. Or even worse, that they were inconsequential compared to the professional challenges to be faced, and the impact to be had.
So, though I came to Stanford accomplished and proud — like everyone else around me — I also came to Stanford somewhat broken, knowing that I needed to find out who I was and what actually mattered the most to me — far beyond the professional identity I’d handcrafted.
Thankfully, this community embraced me, and reminded me that there was much, much more to life than professional accolades. And, with that gentle nudge, I hosted many a dinner, created wine lists, and went on midnight walks. I fountain-hopped, jumped into lakes, and introduced TALKs.
With every conversation in Arbuckle, and every smile in Town Square, I realized that the friendships I was forming were, at once, exponentially more important than my career and predictably more linear than romance! So, I just let myself fall in friend-love. And the loneliness mostly vanished, at every small group dinner in Schwab, and on the dance floor at the Patio. What else could I possibly need?
GSB Prom, Domenico Winery
April, 2017.
Not long after midnight, I found myself on the sidewalk outside the venue. The blinding lights and glittering skirts had faded, and I wistfully looked back inside. It felt voyeuristic, as though I were watching a film — about smiles, laughter, and the understated beauty of true companionship. Out of nowhere, I experienced a brand of melancholy I’d never felt in business school, a crippling sense of being out-of-place.
So, when I got into the car, I threaded my fingers through a friend’s hand, as though to remind myself of all the amazing friends that surrounded me. But a voice chose that moment to whisper fiendishly:
“To feel so lonely when you’re alone can only mean that you’ve become bad company, Shruthi”
I found myself unable to silence that voice, and I just knew something had gone awry.
Because, two years into this journey, I’d developed many prized friendships, yes, but I had become bad company to the one person that mattered the most: myself. And in a lot of ways, though I was ready to step back into the real world, I’d forgotten why I even came.
The Wine Cellar, Palo Alto.
May, 2017
Soon after, I found myself in my dining room, yelling into the phone, trying to convince my parents that I needed to move to Johannesburg for a private equity internship.
My hyper rational brain came up with reasons to stay the course: it was unprofessional to renege on a commitment; this was my chance to finally work in South Africa; the offer I’d accepted was literally my version of a dream job post business school.
But they didn’t even come close to countering the uneasy feeling that I was merely creating another excuse to run away from the inner voices and personal demons I knew I needed to confront.
As the real world of pant suits and slide decks loomed, romantic love and affection inched farther away, because I kept uprooting myself from every place that had come close to feeling like home. And as the friends I’d fallen in friend-love with began to disperse, other questions I’d buried into the deepest recesses of my mind rapidly resurfaced, with no one else to keep them at bay.
And I staggered under the weight of certain realizations that emerged: that the family I had immortalized in my mind, was, in fact, very much mortal, aging more rapidly than I wanted to admit; that the excuses underpinning my prioritization of other life experiences were just cowardly manifestations of a deep-rooted fear of embracing uncertainty and letting go of control; and that life was not merely what one lived, but rather, how one remembered those life experiences in order to recount it.
Because, after all, the universe has always been full of dots. If we connect the right ones, we can draw anything, or be anything. But the most important questions were never about whether the dots we picked were really there; it was why we chose to ignore the rest. And I had simply chosen to ignore one set of dots for far too long; the ones defining my relationship with myself.
That needed to change. So, I told myself I deserved to not put myself on hold anymore, and bit the bullet. And in what was arguably my most impulsive decision yet, I picked up the phone and turned down summer plans in favor of reconnecting with family; in favor of learning how to become a person that makes me happy instead of finding others who might; and in favor of finally crafting a life that had room for self-compassion.
And while this epiphany might have arrived at the tail-end of this incredible journey, it has brought with it the start of an even bigger adventure: one of personal discovery.
I have no answers (yet) and no directions laid out in front of me, for the very first time in my life.
It is absolutely terrifying.
It is also utterly liberating.
