https://www.facebook.com/1164662370070433/

Isha's Candids, Muscat (2026)

04/07/2026

FINDING MYSELF THROUGH THE CHAOS
6-DAY SERIES, DAY 06 OF 06.

The Beginning
Not a resolution. Not a happy ending. Something better than both — a door, cracked open, and a woman choosing to walk through it.
SREEJISHA S

I started this series with a question: Why am I paused? I did not know, when I wrote it, that the question was also its own answer. I was paused because something inside me had finally refused to keep moving in the wrong direction. The pause was not a failure. The pause was a gathering. Like water collecting behind a dam before it finds, at last, the one place it can flow through. I have been collecting. And now, on the sixth day, I am beginning to flow.
This is the post I was unsure how to write. Every other day in this series had a clear purpose — name the thing, examine it, hold it up to the light. But today there is no naming to do. The naming is finished. What remains is the hardest and simplest thing of all: to begin.
"I need to live — to rescue myself from this situation. Yes. And I am starting. Not tomorrow. Not when everything is in order. Now."
I have been waiting for the right conditions before beginning. I think many of us do this — we draw a little picture in our minds of what a beginning should look like. There should be clarity. There should be resources. There should be a plan. But I have learned — slowly, reluctantly, and with some grief — that beginnings do not arrive ready-made. You begin first. The conditions follow. Or they don’t, and you find a different way. But the beginning is always first.
· · ·
I have been thinking about what I actually mean when I say beginning. Because it is a word that can be inflated into something enormous — a new life, a transformation, a rebirth — until it becomes so large it paralyses instead of moves. I do not mean it that way. I mean it in the smallest, most honest sense.
Beginning means: I do one thing today that the woman from before this series would not have done. One thing. It does not have to be the violin or the solo trip or the karate class — though those things are coming, I believe that now, I feel it with a certainty that did not exist six days ago. It just has to be mine. A decision made by me, for me, without waiting for someone to hand me permission.
Maybe it is as small as buying a book I have been wanting without asking if it is the right time. Maybe it is walking out of the door alone for twenty minutes and choosing where my feet go. Maybe it is opening a browser and looking up what it takes to start something I have never started. Small. Ordinary. Mine.
"I have many things to do. I have many things I want. When can I do all these? The answer, I have learned, is: one at a time, starting now, in whatever imperfect and unplanned way I can manage."
· · ·
I want to say something to you — the person reading this. Because I have been writing, all week, as if I were writing only for myself. And in one sense I was. But in another sense, I have known, with every sentence, that you were here. That you are here.
Perhaps you found this series because something in the title caught you. Perhaps you read the first post and recognized something — in the pausing, in the puppet, in the inventory of small closed doors — that lives in you too. Perhaps you have your own list of things you have never been allowed, or never allowed yourself, or simply never gotten around to, because life kept arranging itself in the way of everything you actually wanted.
If any of that is true — this is for you.

To the woman who is still paused —
You are not broken. You are not behind. You are not too old, too late, too set in your ways, too far from where you thought you would be by now. You are exactly where you are, which is the only place a beginning can ever start from.
Your list of wants is not selfishness. It is evidence that you are alive, that you have an interior world rich enough to want things, that something in you has not given up despite everything that has tried to quiet it. That wanting is not the enemy. It is the compass.
You do not need to have it figured out. You do not need a plan. You do not need permission from anyone — not a partner, not a parent, not a society that has very specific ideas about what a woman of your age and circumstance should want and do and be. You need only to take one step, today, in the direction of yourself.
The door is already open. It opened the moment you started reading. Walk through it.
— A woman, 42, beginning.

· · ·
I began this series in the middle of the night, with a question and a refusal. The question: Why am I paused? The refusal: I won’t die for any reason. I respect my life. Six days later, I am still the same woman — same age, same situation, same practical constraints that do not dissolve because you write beautifully about them. The violin is not yet in my hands. The solo trip is not yet booked. The karate class has not yet begun.
But something has changed. Something that cannot be easily seen from outside, and cannot be unfelt from inside. I have named myself. I have claimed myself. I have looked at my life with the kind of honesty that costs something and found that I am still standing after the looking. And I have decided — quietly, completely, without requiring the world’s permission — that the next chapter of my life will be written by me.
Not for anyone else. Not to prove anything. Not to perform becoming for an audience.
Simply because I am 42 years old, and I am here, and I have not finished yet. Not even close.

★ SERIES COMPLETE — REINCARNATED REAL ★

“I was paused so I could see clearly. I saw clearly so I could choose. I chose — and the choosing is the beginning of everything. I am not waiting anymore. I am already on my way.”

COURTESY : TO MY PARTNER, who said,"I am proud that you cracked your shell of secureness, comfort zone, and to standing up for mem myself"

04/07/2026

FINDING MYSELF THROUGH THE CHAOS
6-DAY SERIES, DAY 05 OF 06.
The Turning
“I won’t die for any reason. I respect my life.”
Not a breakdown. Not a battle cry. Just a woman finally choosing herself — quietly, completely, without asking permission.

SREEJISHA S

A turning is not always loud. In films it is — there is music, there is rain, a woman is staring out a window at exactly the right angle. But in real life, the turnings are quiet. They happen in the middle of a sleepless night, or at the kitchen table while the tea goes cold, or in the middle of writing a sentence you did not know you were going to write until it was already there, looking back at you. My turning happened like that. Quietly. Without fanfare. A line that arrived like a breath: I won’t die for any reason. I respect my life.
I read it back, and I thought — where did that come from? And then I realized: it came from the part of me that had been watching, all this time. The part that never forgot who I was supposed to be, even when the rest of me was too tired to argue. She had been waiting. She chose this moment. She wrote that line as her opening act.
"I won’t die for any reason. I respect my life. And I need to live — to rescue myself from this situation."
I want to sit with that word — rescue. Because it is the right word and it is a hard word. No one wants to believe they need rescuing. But I am claiming it anyway, because the truth is the truth regardless of how uncomfortable it is: I need to rescue myself. Not from a villain. Not from a catastrophe. From a life that has slowly, gently, lovingly constricted around me until moving freely inside it has become almost impossible.
That is what needs rescuing. And I am the only one who can do it.
· · ·
The turning is not about anger. I want to be precise about this, because it would be easier — and much less true — to say that I woke up one day furious and that fury became fuel. That is a cleaner story. It is not mine. My turning is made of something quieter and more durable than anger. It is made of self-respect.
Self-respect is not the same as self-esteem, though people use them interchangeably. Self-esteem is what you feel about yourself. Self-respect is what you do for yourself — the decisions you make, the lines you draw, the way you choose to be treated. You can have very low self-esteem and still, in a single clear moment, decide: not this. Not anymore. That is the turning. That is where I am.
I am not psychologically abnormal.
I want to empower myself.
I want to become a self-esteemed human being.
My rights were my rights. They are. They will be.
I don’t want to prove anything to anyone. I need only to satisfy myself.
There is something sacred about writing your own rights down. Not arguing for them. Not explaining them. Just stating them, as simply as you would state your name. I have spent 42 years in a world that quietly, consistently treated my rights as negotiable — and I participated in that negotiation, because I did not know I was allowed to walk away from the table.
I am walking away from the table.
· · ·
This is what the turning looks like in practice. Not in headlines. Not in dramatic declarations. Just in the interior weather of a woman who has decided something:

● I stop waiting for someone to give me permission to learn something new. Permission is mine to give.
● I stop explaining my desires as if they require justification. Wanting is enough.
● I stop calling the cage by the name of the people who built it. Love and limitation are not the same thing.
● I stop telling myself that later is a real place. Later is where unlived lives go.
● I stop apologising for the size of my interior life. I am not too much. I am exactly enough.
● I start treating my own wellbeing as the first responsibility, not the last luxury. You cannot pour from an empty cup.
● I start taking up the space I have been quietly shrinking away from. This is my life. I live here.

· · ·
I am not going to pretend the turning makes everything easy. It does not. A decision made inside you does not instantly rearrange the world outside you. The same conversations will happen. The same dynamics will pull. The same voices — external and internal — will say: who do you think you are?
And I will answer, for the first time with something solid behind it: I know exactly who I am. I am someone who has decided to live.
"I am not doing this to prove anything. I am not doing it to show anyone. I am doing it because I need — at 42 years old, after all of this — to finally satisfy myself."
There is a woman on the other side of this turning. I can almost see her. She is not perfect. She is not fearless. She makes mistakes and gets lost and sometimes still doesn’t know the right answer. But she belongs to herself. She wakes up in the morning, and the first question she asks is not what everyone needs from her today — it is what she needs and how she begins.
I am walking toward her. One careful, determined, irreversible step at a time.
The turning has happened. I cannot un-turn. And I do not want to.

“I am not the woman I was at the beginning of this writing. Something shifted while I was finding the words. Something always does — if you are honest enough to look for it, and brave enough to write it down.”

02/07/2026

FINDING MYSELF THROUGH THE CHAOS
6-DAY SERIES, DAY 04 OF 06.
The Wanting
I have a list of dreams that have been waiting very patiently. Their patience is over.

SREEJISHA S

There is a question I wrote down in the middle of the night, in the middle of this pause, in the middle of everything falling still enough for me to hear myself finally: When can I do all these? It was not an angry question. It was not even a sad one, really. It was the question of a woman who has been holding a list of desires so long they have become part of her body — dreams she has carried so quietly, for so many years, that she almost forgot they were dreams at all. Almost. But not quite. The wanting never left. It just learned to be very, very quiet.
This essay is me permitting it to be loud.
"I have many things to do. I have many things I want. And for once — I am going to say them out loud, without apologising for wanting them."
I have spent years watching my desires from a careful distance. Not reaching and not claiming. Not saying out loud: I want this, because wanting things felt like a kind of greed, I had not earned the right to. Educated women from good families in controlled homes learn this early — desire is something you tuck away neatly. You make yourself presentable. You make yourself manageable. You do not take up too much space with your longings.
But I have been taking up very little space for a very long time. And I am done with it.
· · ·
Here, then, is the second list. Not the list of what was taken, or what was never given. This is the list of what I want — what has been living in me, sometimes loudly, mostly quietly, through every year of this contained and careful life.

🎻 I want to play the violin.
I do not know exactly when this entered me — this pull toward the violin. But it has been there a long time, this longing for something that produces beauty through effort. I want to be someone who makes music. Not for anyone else. Simply because music has always lived inside me and I have never given it an instrument to come out through.
🥋 I want to learn karate.
There is something about this that is not simply about self-defense, though that matters too. It is about learning what my body is capable of when it is trained and trusted. I have spent years in a body that was treated as something to be protected. I want to know what it feels like to inhabit a body that is strong, disciplined, and capable.
🚲 I want to ride a bike.
I know how this sounds. But I want to say it plainly: I never learnt. And I want to. I want the feeling of balance, of momentum, of moving under my own power through open space. I want to be a woman on a bicycle on an open road, going somewhere no one else decided for me.
💃 I want to continue my dance.
Dance is the one language in which I have always known exactly who I am. When I dance, I am not uncertain. I am not dependent. I am not paused. I am entirely, completely present in my own body — which is a rare and precious thing. Life interrupted my practice. I am going to interrupt the interruption.
📚 I want to buy my favourite books.
Not borrow. Not wait. Not ask. Buy. With my own money, for my own shelf, chosen entirely by my own taste. I want a shelf that is entirely a portrait of my interior life. Bought, owned, mine.
✈️ I want to go on a solo trip.
Somewhere. Anywhere. It needs to be mine. I want to sit in a window seat on a journey I booked myself, going somewhere I chose myself, with a bag I packed myself, and feel — for perhaps the first time in my adult life — that the next few hours belong entirely to me and no one else.
🎨 I want to return to painting.
There is a version of me — younger, freer, before the containment set in — who painted with a kind of reckless joy. I want to find her again. I want to set up a corner somewhere that smells of paint and possibility, and I want to make something that is beautiful for no reason except that it is.
· · ·
I look at that list, and I feel something I have not felt in a long time: hunger. Not desperation. Not grief. Pure, clean hunger — the kind that means you are alive and you know it, and you refuse to pretend otherwise.
Someone will say: these are just hobbies. These are just things. And to that person I want to say — carefully, and with great clarity — that you are wrong. These are not just hobbies. IT'S ME. I want to get me back. These are the textures of a life being lived on its own terms. A violin is not just a violin. A solo trip is not just a trip. They are evidence that you exist for yourself, not only for others.
"When can I do all these? I asked the night this question. The night, for once, gave me an answer: Now. Soon. The moment you decide it is time."
I have spent years telling myself that wanting things for myself was selfish. That a good woman does not put her own desires first. That there will be time later. That I will get my turn.
Later. Later. Later.
I am done with later. I am 42 years old, and I have been living in later for long enough. The violin will not wait forever. The road will not wait forever. The canvas will not wait forever. And most importantly — I will not wait forever.
· · ·
I am not asking for permission. This is not a proposal. This is not a request. This is an announcement — quiet and firm, directed at no one in particular and at the whole world at once:
I have things I want. I am going to go get them. One by one, in whatever order life allows, with whatever resources I can gather, starting from wherever I am standing right now.
The wanting is not the problem. The wanting, it turns out, is the beginning of everything.

“I have been carrying these dreams so quietly for so many years that I almost forgot they were mine. But they were always mine. And I am coming back for them.”

01/07/2026

FINDING MYSELF THROUGH THE CHAOS
6-DAY SERIES, DAY 03 OF O6, #
The Inventory
A list of small things. Each one a door I was never taught to open.

SREEJISHA S

When you decide to look at your life honestly — truly honestly, without the softening filter of “it’s not so bad” and “others have it worse” — you have to be prepared for what you find. I was not prepared. I thought I knew the shape of my limitations. But then I sat down and I started to list the things — the specific, small, ordinary things — that I do not know how to do. Have never done. Was never allowed to do. And the list was longer than I expected. Much longer. And each item on it felt, in the reading, like a small door nailed shut from the outside.
This is that list. I am writing it down because I believe that a thing unnamed has power over you. A thing named — written down, looked at squarely — begins to lose it.
"There are people around me. I am educated. I am 42 years of age. But still — I do not know how to get out of this insecurity on my own."
I am not performing self-pity. I am not writing this to make anyone feel guilty. I am writing it because I think there are other women — many other women — who have a list exactly like this one. Who have never said it out loud. Who have called it something other than what it is, because the truth of it felt too embarrassing to admit. This is for them. This is for us.
· · ·
Here, then, is the inventory of a 42-year-old educated woman who has lived her whole life inside the radius of someone else’s comfort:

01 . I do not know my mother’s bank account number.
I want to send her money. I have wanted to for years. But I have no income of my own, and so I was never given the number — because, in her love, she didn’t want me to feel the weight of not being able to send. She protected me from the knowledge so I wouldn’t feel the absence. But the absence is there anyway. And now the not-knowing feels like its own kind of wound.
02 . I have never made an online purchase on my own.
I am not allowed an Amazon account. Not yet. As if purchasing a book or a pair of earrings for myself is something I must be permitted to do — a privilege to be earned rather than a basic, ordinary act of living. Women twenty years younger than me navigate this without a second thought. For me it is a closed door with no handle on my side.
03 . I have never travelled anywhere alone.
There is always someone. Always. Because everyone around me is afraid I will get lost. And perhaps once, in a different version of myself, I might have agreed. But I am 42. A woman gets lost. A woman also finds her way. No one around me has trusted me with the second half of that sentence.
04 . I have never stepped outdoors entirely on my own.
Every outing has a companion attached to it. Someone to accompany, to guide, to make sure. I have come to wonder — when exactly was the last time I walked out of a door and went somewhere without first needing to tell someone, wait for someone, or be accompanied by someone? I cannot remember. That is its own answer.
05 . I have never experienced any paid premium platform.
I mention this not because it is large — it is not large — but because of what it represents. The right to choose what you watch, when you watch it, curled up alone with something that belongs entirely to your own taste. It sounds small. It is not small. It is the size of an evening that belongs only to you.
06 . I do not have a friend I can call for help.
There are people around me. And yet — in the moment when I most needed someone to simply talk to, I realized: there is no one I can call. Not because I am unlovable. But because I was never given the space to build that kind of friendship. Real friendship requires freedom of movement, unscheduled time, the ability to show up. I had none of these things consistently enough to build anything lasting.
· · ·
I look at that list; it's not the end, and I feel two things simultaneously. The first is grief. Quiet, specific grief for all the years in which these things were not available to me — not because the world refused them, but because the small world around me quietly arranged itself so that I never needed them. Never needed them, never used them, never built the muscle for them.
The second thing I feel — and this surprises me — is relief. Because now I know exactly what I am dealing with. A list is not a verdict. A list is a starting point. A list says: here is the territory. Here is where we begin.
"I realized, finally, it is my fault — I didn’t utilize my lifetime to empower myself. But fault and future are different countries. I am moving to the second one."
The people who surrounded me with protection were not enemies. They were people doing what people who love you do — they tried to keep you safe from everything, including, accidentally, from yourself. That is its own tragedy. But it is not a crime.
What I am responsible for is what comes next. For not making this list longer. For not letting it go on until I am 52 and then 62 and then looking back at a whole life lived inside someone else’s radius, wondering when I was going to begin.
· · ·
I am going to learn every single thing on this list. Not to prove anything. Not to show anyone. Not to perform independence for an audience. I am going to learn these things because a life fully lived requires them.
The bank account I can handle independently. The online order. The solo walk. The trip taken alone. The evening belonging only to me.
One by one. Each door, opened from the inside.

“This is not a list of failures. This is a list of things I am about to learn. There is a difference. And I am, finally, old enough to know it.”

30/06/2026

FINDING MYSELF THROUGH THE CHAOS
6-DAY SERIES, DAY 02 OF 06,
The Puppet
Educated, capable, intelligent — and still not free.

SREEJISHA S

A puppet does not know it is a puppet — not at first. It moves when the strings move. It smiles when the strings smile. And because the hands controlling it are gentle, because they smell familiar, because they have rocked it to sleep and fed it and called it precious — the puppet mistakes the strings for love. I understand this now, because I have been the puppet. And the strings, in my case, were never cruel. That is what makes this so hard to write.
I am academically educated. I have sat through years of study, earned the right to call myself learned. But there is a difference — a vast, quiet, humiliating difference — between being educated and being equipped to live. No one warns you about that gap until you are standing in the middle of it at 42, looking around, wondering how you got here.
"Is this what 21st century women do? Is it only because I don’t mingle socially? Is it only because I am not doing myself? Or is it because I am dependent — and not a self-independent woman?"
I have turned this question over so many times it has lost its sharp edges and become something smoother, sadder. Because the honest answer is: it is not one thing. It is not laziness. It is not lack of intelligence. It is a slow architecture — built brick by brick, over decades, by people who loved me and by a world that never quite expected me to need these skills for myself.
· · ·
Here is what nobody tells you about being protected your whole life: it starts to look identical to being limited. The two wear the same clothes. They use the same gentle voice. “Don’t worry about that, I’ll handle it.” “You don’t need to learn that, I’m here.” Said enough times, across enough years, by enough people who love you — and somewhere along the way, “I’ll handle it” quietly becomes “you can’t.”
I did not notice the moment it happened. There wasn’t one moment. There were a thousand small ones, each reasonable on its own, each forgivable, each wrapped in care. And yet here I am — a woman who can explain abstract concepts with ease, who has spent her life in the world of ideas, standing utterly unsure of how to navigate the practical machinery of an independent life.
"Yes, finally, it’s my fault — I didn’t utilize my lifetime to empower myself. I just feel like a puppet in the hands of someone in this chaotic, technologically developing world around me."
I want to sit with that line for a moment, because I wrote it in a flash of anger and I am not sure anger is the whole truth of it. Is it my fault? Some of it, maybe. I did not push hard enough, often enough, against the soft walls that were built around me. But blame is not really what I am after here. What I am after is understanding — because understanding is the first tool I need to build something different.
· · ·
I think about the women around me — friends, acquaintances, women I see on the street managing bank accounts and bus routes and online orders without a second thought — and I wonder what separates us. Is it confidence? Practice? Freedom? Probably all three, woven together so tightly that you cannot easily pull one thread without the others coming loose too.
I am not socially withdrawn because I dislike people. I think, now, that I withdrew because I learned early that the world outside my known circle felt unsafe to navigate alone — and no one corrected that belief. It calcified into identity. “I am not someone who does things alone.” And a belief like that, repeated long enough, stops feeling like a belief. It starts feeling like a fact about who you are.
But it is not a fact. It is a habit. And habits, however old, however deeply worn into the floorboards of a life, can be unlearned.
· · ·
I do not want to spend the rest of this essay blaming the hands that held the strings. They were not cruel hands. They were frightened hands, often — frightened of a world that can be unkind to women, frightened of losing me to misfortune, frightened in the particular way that love sometimes curdles into control without anyone intending it to.
But I am 42 now. And frightened hands, however well-meaning, cannot keep holding the strings of a woman who is ready to stand on her own. At some point, the puppet has to ask the question that ends the performance: what happens if I cut the strings myself?

“I didn’t become a puppet because I lacked a mind. I became one because no one — including me — ever handed me the scissors. I am picking them up now.”

29/06/2026

FINDING MYSELF THROUGH THE CHAOS
6-day series. First day streak
Why Am I Paused?
The moment I stopped moving — and finally started seeing.
- SREEJISHA S
There is a kind of stillness that has nothing to do with peace. It is the stillness of a woman who has suddenly stopped — not because she chose to rest, but because something deep inside her refused to keep going without an answer. That is the stillness I am in right now. And I am not afraid of it anymore.
Why am I paused?
I have been asking myself this. Not the way you ask a casual question — not the way you ask where the keys are or what's for dinner. I am asking it the way you ask something that has been waiting years to be asked out loud. The question sits in my chest like a stone. And yet, for the first time, I am not running from it.
"I won’t die for any reason. I respect my life. And I need to live — to rescue myself from this situation."
That sentence came out of me like a gasp. Like something I had been holding underwater finally broke the surface. It surprised me, actually — the fierceness of it. Not desperation. Not anger. Something quieter and stronger than both: a decision.
· · ·
I am in my 40’s. I am educated. I have read books that most people have not heard of. I can explain complex ideas. I can teach. I have cared for others with a depth that cost me parts of myself I haven’t fully found yet. By any external measure, I am a capable woman.
And yet.
I paused because I realized I do not fully know myself. Not the version of me that exists outside of others’ needs, others’ schedules, others’ permissions. Not the version of me that wants things — quietly, persistently, stubbornly — in the background of every day that passes. That version of me has been paused for a very long time. Longer than I’d like to admit.
"I feel like a puppet in the hands of someone even literate — in this chaotic, technologically developing world I was made to help navigate."
I do not write this with bitterness. I write it with the strange clarity that arrives when you’ve finally stopped pretending a thing isn’t true. I am educated. I am intelligent. I am also — somehow, still — dependent in ways that make no sense when I say them out loud. I haven’t done an online purchase on my own. I haven’t gone outdoors alone without someone afraid I’ll get lost. I haven’t sent money to my own mother because I don’t know her account number — and she will not tell me, because in her loving, protecting way, she doesn’t want me to feel the burden of not having money to send.
Every one of these small things is its own story. Every one of them is a door I was never taught to open — or was quietly steered away from. And I am only now realizing how many of those doors there are.
· · ·
I want to be careful here. I am not painting myself as a victim. I am not pointing fingers. I am doing something harder than that: I am looking honestly at a life that was, in many ways, built by love — and still managed to make me small.
That is the most complicated kind of situation to be in. When no one is the villain. When you are surrounded by people who care, and yet you are somehow alone in the most essential ways. When the cage is made of good intentions, and you have spent years calling it safety.
I am not psychologically abnormal. I want to say that clearly because I know how this sounds. A woman of 42 saying she feels lost, feels controlled, feels like she has never truly lived for herself — people assume the worst. But I am not broken. I am just finally awake.

“I don’t want to prove anything to anyone. I don’t want to show anyone anything. I need — only — to satisfy myself. And that, I am learning, is enough of a reason to begin.”

Isha's Candids

04/07/2026

04/07/2026

02/07/2026

01/07/2026

30/06/2026

29/06/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Listing takedown request