Wow hi it’s been a brief minute since I published anything. July 2025 has to have been one of my all time favorite months so far. Like in life. It was full of the most wholesome, special moments with family and friends, and every time I thought about pulling myself away to write, I decided nah. Leave the laptop alone. It’s quite a privilege to have a life that you don’t want to pull yourself out of, and while all seasons of life aren’t that way, when they are, I choose to soak it up.
This essay is a little different from my usual stuff. Most of the time, I’m looking at the world, picking something apart, trying to make sense of it in a way that’s hopefully useful to other people. This one is more tangled. I’ve had versions of it sitting in my drafts for the last four or five months. I kept coming back to it, adding a paragraph here and there. I was never quite sure if I’d be able to land the whole thing.
Part of why it’s taken so long is because I hate the feeling of telling people what to do or how to live. That’s not my lane. The internet already has more than enough people declaring what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s moral, and what’s idiotic.
So instead, I’ve tried to write this more as an essay to myself of things I’ve noticed, patterns I’ve caught in my own thinking, lessons I’m trying to hold onto. They may not hold up forever, but for now, they feel worth writing down. Some of the early examples are about parenting, but I promise this essay wasn’t written with only parents in mind.
It all started with a conversation with a few friends around the start of the year. All of us were in slightly different stages of raising little kids, and we were talking about how MUCH we used to panic about things. Missed naps, screentime, what they’re eating, whether it’s a bad thing to feed them to sleep. Now, a couple of years later, the general approach was: eh, they’ll live.
One of us (I promise it wasn’t me) said something about how parenting gets so much easier once you just learn to… chill out. And everyone agreed. And while “chill out” has never been helpful advice in the history of human conflict resolution, I realised maybe it should be. Only because it’s true
For those who know me personally, “chill” has never been a dominant personality trait. I’d been okay at hiding my neuroses, but that was only until I was pregnant. That’s when I became painfully aware of just how non-chill I really was. That’s when I truly let out the crazy.
I’d heard about moms who think they’re better than everyone else. The kinds who have something to say about your birth plan, brag about their natural deliveries, or judge you if you formula-feed. I remember thinking, with absolute certainty: I will never be like that.
I told myself I understood that people made different choices because they had different circumstances. I’d even say it out loud if the topic came up: Every parent has to find what works for them, there’s no one right way to do it. I was proud of that stance, it made me feel reasonable and fair-minded. I thought it made me immune to the weird competitiveness that seems to come free with life in general, not just parenting.
But then the actual baby arrived.
Life became a constant decision tree, and every choice felt weirdly high-stakes. Unlike most choices, you didn’t get a week to think things through. There was no time to “do the research.” Sometimes you had thirty seconds while the baby was screaming. Would I push through another breastfeeding attempt or give the bottle? Spend my one free hour pumping, or take a nap so I could survive the day? Put her down in the crib and risk her waking instantly, or keep holding her until my arm went numb? None of these questions had universal answers, but in the thick of it, they all felt urgent. And whichever one I chose, I knew I was trading off the other.
It’s worth saying out loud that a lot of these early decisions DO cost you something, whether it’s time, sleep, or sanity––parts of yourself you didn’t think were negotiable.
For me, it started with breastfeeding, where pretty much from day one, when you have ZERO idea how to do any of it, you have to push through incredible pain to persevere, and feed your baby.
Unlike most things, breastfeeding actually gets a good deal harder before it gets easier. You and your baby both have to learn how to do it, and neither of you has the faintest idea of what’s right or wrong. There’s pain, struggle, kicking, crying, fussing, and that’s just you. The baby’s also having a bad time.
So what do you do? Push through the pain and hope it gets better? Switch to formula so you can breathe? Pump? All of these choices are valid, but you have to choose one.
I struggled with feeding for about six weeks, at which point I decided to contact a lactation consultant and fix things. In the thick of recovery and postpartum, six weeks is a long time to struggle with a newborn.
That’s over 5-6 feeding attempts per day, across a span of 40 days. I don’t know how I did it, but I know why. It’s because I’d made up my mind that I wanted to give it my best shot. So I persevered, got help, learnt how to do things right, and managed as best I could.
With all that effort, I finally got to the point where I was successfully feeding my daughter, and it felt “normal.” There was no pain, no struggle, life was brilliant. I’d done it!!!
And suddenly, I felt something I didn’t expect. I felt better than other people.
This is distinctly different from feeling proud of myself. I felt like I’d proved something about my character that other people hadn’t.
Like the fact that I’d stuck it out meant that I was tougher, more committed, maybe even more selfless. Now obviously I didn’t say any of this out loud because I didn’t need to. I still said all the right, non-judgmental things in conversation with other parents. But inside, I had decided there was only one right way to do it, and I had done it.
And before you decide I’m a terrible person, you should know, everyone does this. Not all mums. Every one.
One of my all-time favorite writers, Haley Nahman, calls this the “purity vortex.”
The purity vortex is what happens when you’ve made a hard, high-stakes choice, especially one that cost you something. In order to live with your decision, you need to decide that it’s the ONLY correct choice. It’s not enough that it was right for you, it has to be universally right. Because otherwise, what did you put yourself through all that for? You can’t just say, it was one path of many. That would mean that your suffering wasn’t strictly necessary. And if the suffering wasn’t necessary, then you might have been wrong to choose it. And who wants to be wrong? Nobody. So instead, the alternative has to be wrong.
“In the face of these choices,” she writes, “we often painstakingly construct worldviews that support the choice we’re trying to make to get us over the hump of our own resistance. And we do this so well that we temporarily render any other choice ridiculous.”
It happens across all kinds of big, identity-shaping decisions: quitting your job, starting a new eating habit, staying in a difficult relationship, leaving a difficult relationship, becoming sober, leaving your hometown.
When you make a choice that feels risky or painful, you have to psych yourself up to take the leap. For a while, you have to believe “there is only one thing to do.” That conviction is what gets you through. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing. But if you hang on to it for too long, it can morph into ongoing certainty not just about your own life, but about everyone else’s.
The purity vortex makes your choice not just yours, but THE BEST possible choice. That makes you the kind of person who makes the best possible choices. That keeps your self-image intact.
In less than three years of parenting, I can already look back and see how many of my “firm positions” have shifted. I feel incredibly stupid sometimes when I realize how much of my life has been driven by arrogance I didn’t even recognize as arrogance because it was hiding behind words like values and principles.
Of course with the purity vortex, once you start noticing it, you can’t un-see it. It’s everywhere.
The friend who left India and now can’t get through one meal without explaining why anyone who stayed is wasting their life.
The colleague who joined a new kind of company and now thinks everyone else is making a huge career mistake by not quitting.
The friend who stopped drinking and doesn’t understand how others still do.
The person who decided to quit social media and now thinks everyone else is brain-dead and boring because they’re on it.
Or conversely, someone who decided to post more on social media and assumes those who don’t are just too self-conscious or not brave enough.
The sleep-training parents who think the others are cruel, and the anti-sleep-training parents who think the same thing right back.
The person who went on some great diet that worked for them and thinks everyone else is eating wrong now.
But that’s the thing, most of these people aren’t wrong. Their choice probably is right for them, given their circumstances and limitations.
The trouble is how quickly “this worked for me” turns into “this is what works.”
It’s easier to believe there’s one correct path than to sit with the idea that life is mostly a series of trade-offs, and that different people can make different decisions without one of them being wrong.
We like to think our beliefs come from calmly weighing the facts. More often, it’s the opposite. We start with the story we want to tell about ourselves, then collect the facts that fit. We want to be good, competent, reasonable people. We want to know we’re doing life right. And when someone makes a different choice, it pokes at that self-image in ways we don’t even want to admit. Especially if their choice seems to work.
I don’t want to paint us out to be horrible people, because that isn’t the case. What’s humbling and also kind of gross is realizing how much of this is just self-preservation. We NEED to hold onto these beliefs for ourselves. It’s hard to make hard decisions otherwise. It’s even harder to stick with them.
For what it’s worth, I’ve worked hard to chip away at some of my own rigid ideas about parenting. I have a lot of respect for people who’ve made choices different from mine, because I know none of them have it “easy.” Parenting doesn’t really offer that option to anyone.
I’ve already walked back plenty of my own “absolute” life decisions.
I once swore I’d never leave Bombay. It was my city, my identity, my whole network. And now I live in Goa. I’ve swapped proximity to everyone I love for a slower life. I had decided I’d hire help if I needed it so I could focus on my work, but now, my husband and I manage our daughter ourselves while I work from home.
I told myself I’d never work for certain kinds of clients or in certain industries, but I have, because saying yes was the only way to move forward at the time. I said I’d never give up hobbies that felt core to who I am, but some of them haven’t been touched in years.
When people ask my husband and I what it’s like to have left Bombay for Goa, I tell them the truth: It’s great. I like the pace of life here. I can go to the beach on a Tuesday just because I feel like it. I don’t have to factor traffic into all my decisions when I leave the house. But I don’t want to sell it like some fairytale.
The internet loves that narrative: Burn it all down, move somewhere beautiful, and your problems will fade into the sunset. It’s naive. Leaving Bombay was good for us, but it came with its own kind of loss. We miss the people we knew there and the ways our lives overlapped without effort. I miss walking down Colaba Causeway with no agenda. I miss revisiting the restaurants where we had our early dates and sitting at the same tables. I miss hoping into little cafes during the monsoon and shaking the water out of my umbrella.
I miss seeing hundreds of new faces every day, the churn of people that makes the city feel alive. I even miss the pointless things like the highways, the street corners, the building gates. All the stuff that formed the background of my life without me realising it.
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I interrupt this essay for a little bit of reminiscing via Canva-made picture collages
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Leaving was the right call for us, and leaving hurt. It gave us a better life in some ways, and it shut the door on a version of life we loved. That’s how most big decisions are. Not wins or losses, just trade-offs you learn to live with.
The purity vortex isn’t a lifelong condition for most people. It’s easier to fall into when you’re younger, before your decisions have been tested in wildly different circumstances, when it still feels possible to have found The Right Way to do things.
Of course then life happens and you watch some of your certainties crumble and you change your mind and alter your stance and negotiate your way into adulthood and then what happens? What comes after the purity vortex? Enlightenment? Maturity? Perfectly rational adults making calm, well-informed decisions?
Yeah, no.
I’m gonna call the next one The Halo Complex.
It’s the shift from defending your actions to defending your character. You can’t always defend what you did, but you can almost always defend why you did it.
If you’ve ever watched Breaking Bad, you’ve seen the halo complex in its purest form. Walter White starts out as a mild high school chemistry teacher with a terminal diagnosis, and he starts cooking meth to leave his family money before he dies. It’s a monstrous plan, but you can follow the logic, and so can he. “I’m doing this for my family” becomes his line, repeated for years, to everyone around him and to himself.
But the money stops being the reason pretty early on. He keeps building his drug empire long after his family has plenty of money because he needed to feel powerful. He knows this. On some level everyone around him knows it.
And still he repeats the line, because “I did it for my family” is a story he can live with, and the real reason is not.
That’s the halo complex. The belief that no matter what the evidence says, you are still fundamentally good. Your intentions were good, you had your reasons, and as long as you can hold onto that, you never have to consider whether those reasons were self-serving, or whether you’ve been using them to dodge the truth.
FYI, the halo complex is also why you can watch someone who hurt you carry on completely unbothered. You keep waiting for some sign that they feel guilty about what they did, and it never comes. Instead they seem genuinely certain they behaved reasonably, and that anyone looking at the facts would agree. You might find it baffling, even a little enraging, that they get to feel fine about the whole thing while you’re still turning it over months later.
But this is how. They’re not lying, exactly, or at least not the way you think. They’ve landed on the one account of what happened that they can stand to live with, the one where they had good reasons. And once that version sets, it becomes the truth to them.
The thing is most of us can’t stay with the guilt of a bad choice for very long. It’s hard to admit you were wrong, and harder still to admit you fell short of what you expected of yourself. So your brain steps in before the spiral and walks you back to a version you can live with.
When I sit too long with the possibility that I’ve been wrong, it starts to eat me alive, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that.
The best you can hope for is a brief window where the excuses drop away and you see the thing for what it is. Usually those windows get forced open: someone confronts you, or the consequences do. Or you watch someone else make your exact mistake. Or you end up on the receiving end of a choice like the one you made.
I’ve been trying to actually use those windows, because they don’t stay open long. Usually it’s just admitting to myself that I messed up, or that I need to climb down off my high horse a bit. Sometimes it’s an apology that’s embarrassingly overdue. And sometimes it’s changing the thing that got me there in the first place, instead of feeling bad about it and carrying on exactly as before.
I think that’s what makes the purity vortex so seductive when you’re young. You believe moral clarity is the thing that’ll save you. If you can just be right (right about how to live, right about who you are), then you’re safe.
But clarity on its own makes you brittle. You’ve built the whole self on not being wrong, so the first time you are, there’s nothing underneath to hold you up, and you snap.
I know all this because I’ve been screwing things up my whole life.
You’d probably never guess it from the wise, insightful essays, but the person writing them is neither of those things most of the time. I’m someone who wants badly to get things right, and mostly does, right up until the day I catastrophically blow the whole thing up.
Grace is what saved me, though maybe not in the way you’d think. It didn’t make me stop making mistakes. What it changed was what a mistake meant. Before, getting something wrong felt like proof that I was a lost cause and a fundamentally irredemable bad person who is no good to anyone. Grace took that part away.
But conviction is the other half. Conviction is the thing that lets me believe I can do better next time. Or that getting better is even possible for me. And shockingly, it has worked. I actually can do better, and be better.
All this to say, I’m writing as someone who has spent a long time living inside this exact thing.
There’s one good thing all of this has given me. It’s made it much harder to hate people for the way they behave.
When you know from the inside exactly how a person builds a story they can live with, you can’t fully cast them as the villain anymore. I still might dislike them, or think they were wrong. They might have genuinely hurt me, and I don’t have to pretend otherwise.
But I’ve stopped lying awake wondering how they manage to live with what they did, how they carry on like it was nothing. I already know how. It’s the same way I do it.
I really don’t know how an essay that started with me feeling superior about breastfeeding ended up here. This is why I’m scared of writing sometimes. You pull one thread and everything comes apart.
Let’s point fingers at others instead. Walter White. One of the best things about how the show ends (without spoiling it) is what he finally does with all his excuses.
For most of the five seasons, Walt insists to everyone, including himself, that everything he did was for the people he loves. It’s the story that lets him keep believing he’s a good man who just got dealt a bad hand.
And right at the very end, he drops it. He looks at his wife and finally tells her the truth: he didn’t do it for them.
Finally, he isn’t lying anymore.
I think that’s a decent place for the rest of us to start. And the good news is you don’t need a terminal diagnosis or a meth empire or a full villain arc to get there. You can just try being slightly less full of it than you were yesterday.
Start small.
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