Journey with me through FifTY-Something years in ninaland

I arrived at Columbia University convinced I was a writer.

Then came harsh critiques, a manic episode, depression, self-doubt, and a mentor who changed everything with a single observation.

This is the story of how I found my voice—and why sometimes the person who changes your life doesn't give you anything new. They simply help you recognize what was there all along.

Sometimes there are questions that never quite leave us.

Questions for the Internet. For our younger selves. For anxiety. For the people we've lost. Even for God.

This week, I decided to write a few letters and see what happened.

We spend so much time trying to figure out which version of ourselves is the "real" one. The confident one? The anxious one? The person who makes everyone laugh, or the one crying alone in a grocery store parking lot? What if authenticity isn't about consistency? What if all of these selves belong? My latest post explores the many versions of who we are—and why none of them are impostors.

After seventeen years of blogging, I had a brief panic that I'd been writing the same post over and over again. Then I remembered: we don't move through life in straight lines. We spiral, returning to familiar questions with a little more humor, a little more tenderness, and better stories to tell. Still wondering. Still laughing. Still here.

Sometimes it feels like life forgot to tell us something important.

These three poems started with that feeling and wandered through questions about God, identity, loneliness, and connection. I don't claim to have found any answers, but I found a few interesting questions.

Did God Block Us? is a trilogy of poems:
A Note in the Margin, Borrowed Language, and Part of What I Am Is Your Name.

Sometimes life isn't exciting. It's not a crisis, it's not depression, and it's not joy either. It's just the quiet middle. Lately I've been learning that balance may not feel as exhilarating as passion, but it might be just as important.

Mental illness used to be something people kept hidden. Today, it is part of a much larger public conversation. As someone living with Bipolar Disorder, I've witnessed firsthand how openness can reduce stigma and create understanding. But while we've become better at talking about mental health, many people still struggle to access the care they need. Awareness matters—but action matters too.

I don't know exactly what happened that morning. Was it mania? Was it a spiritual experience? Was it both? Years later, I still don't have a definitive answer. This is the story of the first time I heard a voice in my head, thought I was in Heaven, and began a journey that would eventually lead to a bipolar diagnosis.

If my body had a customer complaint department, it would be flooded with tickets. My knees are protesting, my memory is unreliable, and my back has apparently joined a labor union. A humorous look at the increasingly complicated relationship between me and the aging body I live in.

Some people run marathons. Some people climb mountains. I spend my time imagining worst-case scenarios, replaying awkward moments, and preparing for conversations that may never happen. If overthinking were an Olympic sport, I'd be bringing home gold.

Have you ever wondered about the person you might have become? The therapist, the lawyer, the New Yorker, the parent, the version of yourself who made different choices. A reflection on alternate lives, unexpected paths, and finding contentment with the one life we actually get to live.

We are constantly told to be better, healthier, more productive, and more healed. But what if the endless pursuit of self-improvement is keeping us from appreciating who we already are? A reflection on wellness culture, therapy talk, and the freedom of accepting ourselves as imperfect humans.

Why do we keep listening to songs we’re tired of, watching one more episode, or scrolling long after we’ve stopped enjoying it? In this personal reflection, I explore our obsession with unfinished business, the comforts we chase, and the growing sense that technology can’t replace real human connection. Somewhere between a song and a scroll, I found myself longing for something much older: friendship, nature, and the simple comfort of being together.

Somewhere between the music, the food, and the inevitable questions about my marital status, I found myself reflecting on culture, identity, and what it means to belong. This essay explores the joy, pressure, spirituality, and pride woven into the experience of an Indian Sikh wedding.

My body clicks, creaks, and occasionally injures itself for no apparent reason. Young people think I'm old, all blankets are now my favorite, and somehow I have wrinkles and pimples at the same time. Welcome to aging and the many humiliations that come with it.

Happiness is complicated. Sometimes it feels impossible, especially when life becomes grief, exhaustion, and survival. In this piece, I reflect on caregiving, depression, healing, discipline, and the quiet realization that happiness can still exist beside pain. Maybe happiness is not something we find, but something we slowly learn to notice again.

What possesses someone to interview themselves on their own blog?

Apparently… me.

This repost is equal parts confession, philosophy, ego, insecurity, humor, creativity, and complete emotional chaos. I talk about writing, Bipolar Disorder, meditation, attention-seeking, God, privacy, and why creating sometimes feels less like a hobby and more like survival.

Welcome inside my brain.

“Some of my best stories cannot be put on the page. They play in my heart.”

Three poems about identity, divinity, and what it means to exist inside a universe that feels both endless and deeply personal.

These pieces explore the loneliness of being human, the possibility that we are all made of the same essence, and the strange idea that death may only be another transformation.

The Shape of What We Are is a meditation on selfhood, connection, and the quiet search for truth beneath everything we pretend to be.

The smallest acts of kindness can stay with us for decades. A cashier’s patience, a stranger’s encouragement, a student wanting to protest for you, a person who makes you feel seen for five minutes in the middle of an ordinary day.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how disagreement does not erase humanity, and how kindness may be the only bridge we have left.

This piece is about the people I still remember because they were kind to me — and the kind of person I hope to become.

Sometimes comfort comes in the form of melted cheese, oversized lattes, and desserts we know we probably shouldn’t eat. This is a reflection on emotional eating, modern food culture, and the complicated relationship between health, pleasure, guilt, and carbs. Funny, honest, and slightly hungry.

Have you ever met someone who made you question who you were becoming?

New excerpt from The Patient Sikh: “Who Are My Real Friends?” — a story about friendship, jealousy, identity, and the dangerous allure of becoming someone else.

Dating apps reject me, Netflix judges me, streaming services exhaust me, and somehow I still have 1,100 apps on my phone. This is a deeply personal investigation into how technology has emotionally manipulated me into subscriptions, scrolling, and questioning my entire existence through a weather app.

Lately I’ve noticed I can’t sit with a thought for very long before I reach for my phone, music, or some kind of noise. Maybe I’m overstimulated. Maybe I’m lonely. Maybe we all are. This is a reflection on attention, modern life, and what happens when we stop fully inhabiting our moments.

I spent years serving food, selling bras, overpriced children’s clothes, and aggressively unnecessary knives while slowly realizing I was not built for retail capitalism. This repost is a collection of employment disasters, customer service trauma, awkward sales pitches, and the slow spiritual unraveling that happens when you’re forced to ask strangers, “Can I help you find anything?” every thirty seconds. If you’ve ever worked with the public, this one is for you.

Meditation didn’t turn me into a perfectly calm person. I still overthink, get irritated in traffic, and rehearse conversations in my head. What it did change was my relationship with my thoughts.

Somewhere in the silence, I met the version of myself that exists underneath performance, anxiety, and distraction. The person I am when nobody is watching.

This piece is about meditation, identity, loneliness, inner peace, and learning that you are not your thoughts — you are the one observing them.

We were supposed to gather around fires, play outside until dark, and talk to each other without checking notifications every six seconds. Instead, we created passwords, dating apps, stress-tracking watches, and a society where everyone sits together staring at separate screens.

This piece is about modern life, loneliness, childhood nostalgia, technology overload, and the suspicion that maybe our brains never evolved for any of this.

Somewhere between awareness and self-preservation, I lost the ability to tell whether disconnecting from the world is healing or selfish. This piece lives in that uncertainty.

Modern adulthood feels less like maturity and more like repeatedly proving you’re not a robot while carrying an emotional support beverage and forgetting all 32 of your passwords. A humorous spiral into technology, pharmacies, identity verification, AI friendships, and the growing suspicion that none of us were designed for this level of nonsense.

A woman can spiral from coffee creamer to existential dread in under ten minutes inside a grocery store.

This piece is about suburbia, loneliness, frozen dinners, microwaves, aging, ego, therapy, vibrations, razor blades locked in security cases, and the strange desire to have someone to do boring errands with.

Basically, a normal Saturday morning in America.

Invisible Lines

Three poems about silence, identity, emotional distance, and the strange ways people try to reach each other without ever fully arriving.

Sometimes we speak in metaphors because the truth feels too large to say out loud.