On Returning Home
Finding your Self often involves losing your self first.
See the girl here from more than 20 years ago?
She wrote every day.
She loved writing.
She carried a journal & pens everywhere.
She read every day too - books, magazines, hoardings, shop-soiled newspapers folded into carry-bags for savouries. Receipts. Anything.
She stared out of windows.
A lot.
She loved long train rides. The steady clickety-clack and the blurry landscape passing by transported her into a dreamy space of possibilities.
In a heartbeat, she could slip out of this world and into the gloriously imaginative world of words.
She finished reading all the books in the campus library halfway through one summer. Then started again, re-reading her favourites, this time copying quotes into her journal. Adding her own thoughts. Tasting and savouring words and phrases, turning them this way and that, faithfully recreating delicious idea recipes and trying a few experiments of her own.
By consuming vast varieties and revisiting what struck a chord, she developed a distinct taste.
Years before this decades-old pic, she sat on a garden chair in her lawn, under the shade of her sprawling mango tree swaying with young fruit, the warm fingers of Bengaluru’s April sun teasing the nape of her neck while she half-dozed, half-dreamed verses into existence.
In the dawn of the internet, she stumbled onto a global online writing community.
The community opened whole new literary worlds for her, & she grew to love the people & the playground.
Tight-knit.
Generous.
Creative.
Electric with sparring.
Surprising.
Expansive.
She marvelled at how the Word-Jedi around her bent the shape of words, kneading & coaxing them into unfamiliar but enthralling forms.
But life took an unexpected turn.
She traded her dreams of being a writer and donned the corporate uniform, not knowing that this next journey would take her far from her soul-center.
She was loaned into that world for decades, growing from young adulthood to young parenthood - her creative free-spirited Being encased in layer upon layer of concrete, the process labeled ‘growing up’.
She still tried for years, she would make a start and then the momentum would die, her energy pulled into something more urgent, more tangible. She learnt, stepped up, delivered value.
She ‘grew away’.
Slow erasure of the interconnected, grounded, imaginative Self, in service of the egoic, titled, derivative self.
Soul-famine.
During the pandemic, something shifted - cracks appeared in the concrete.
Being still, she heard the muted cries of her creative Being. Wordless at first, she was drawn to watercolours and cocktail-making - sensory arts full of colours, textures, flavours & scents. In visceral experiences, she became aware of the distance she had travelled.
The cracks widened.
Light poured out.
And grief.
Then came rage.
And desire.
Longing.
Regret.
Restlessness & wanderlust.
Finally came the words, pouring out of her like frolicking streams from a mountain spring, bubbling up from deep inside and fed by a water table she’d forgotten lay deep within, connecting the ground of her being with the world around her.
She painted.
Created.
Wrote.
Dreamt again.
She moved & stretched & lifted.
Laughed more.
Worried less.
Played again.
Lay on the grass & felt the cool, slightly sticky blades fresh with morning dew brush her nape.
Dipped her feet in the flowing waters of a hill stream, sat in silent companionship with a new friend.
She woke early.
Smelt the sea spray.
Felt the warmth in the voice of an old friend she called out of the blue.
Settled into her 5yr old’s hug, not impatient to leave for anywhere.
Stayed in the moment.
Let the silence deepen.
Her conversations, with herself & others, once again stemmed from the deep ground of her being.
And just like that, she had returned home to herself.
Only this time, she knew the way back intimately.
Now, she marries her two worlds together - creative, soul-aligned work that delivers tangible, real-life impact. Measuring results in life-enhancing ways.
No paradoxes.
No erasure.
No fragmentation.
Just flow. Balancing of energies. And a return to the Self.
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Hi, I’m Abby.
I write about a more humane way of leading teams and organizations for break-through results and work with leaders across Asia Pacific to grow thriving, regenerative workplaces, starting from the living systems within.
Occasionally, I share anecdotes from my personal experiences and posts on things I am passionate about outside of work topics.
I was thinking about a way to introduce myself to new subscribers and followers here (thank you for reading!), while still keeping it fresh for those who’ve been reading along for a while. And this post happened.
If this strikes a chord, I would love to hear from you. DM me, reply back, comment on this Substack post or connect with me on LinkedIn.
"And just like that, she had returned home to herself." It's such the paradox that we can feel so lost when we are so close to ourselves. We're always just around the corner of who we are, and yet our view can still feel completely obscured, until it's not again. When opposites come in poetic form like this they never feel in opposition to one another, just partners in the whole. So good to see/hear you writing again.
I wonder how much of ourselves we have to silence (if anything at all) if once awake, we choose to “go back to work.”