I pause when I’m asked the simplest question.
What do you do?
The question arrives lightly, almost carelessly, over tea, in passing conversations, between
polite smiles. It expects a clean answer. One word. One lane. A life explained without
footnotes.
I do not have that answer.
My life does not move in straight lines. It circles. It slows. It disappears for a while and
returns changed. It grows sideways when forward feels dishonest. My career has bends and
breath-holds, long silences mistaken for stagnation.
I wear many hats. Sometimes all at once. Sometimes none of them fit long enough to be
claimed.
I build a home daily with invisible labour, meals shaped around moods, care folded into
routine. Does that make me a homemaker?
I see symmetry where others see repetition. Tilings locking into place, patterns negotiating
balance. I see fractals unfurling in ferns, infinity rehearsed in green. In a world where null is
mistaken for nothing, I see power in zero. I know it as potential, as origin, as a quiet
beginning. Can I claim myself a mathematician?
Words follow me stubbornly. They wait when I step away. They gather in drafts, half-finished,
unfinished, and breathing quietly in the margins. Does that make me a writer?
Water has taught me how to endure. How to listen to breath. How to move even when the
body resists. Does that make me a swimmer?
My hands keep reaching for scraps, textures, colour, and form. Meaning made from what
remains. Does that make me an artist?
I am all of these. And yet, when asked to be the only one, my voice falters.
It is not absence that makes me pause. It is abundance.
Too many selves speak at once.
I think of a pupa – still, unremarkable, clinging quietly to a branch. From the outside, it
appears paused. Finished. Forgotten. Easy to question its stillness, easier to misunderstand
it.
What cannot be seen is the work of becoming.
Inside, everything is rearranging. Old forms dissolving. New ones learning patience. Wings
taking their time.
In a world that worships completion, I exist in drafts.
An undone piece of writing. A book marked halfway through. A hobby left behind, only to
return in another season. A chapter saved as ‘Draft’ and never reopened; not out of failure,
but because life asked me to become something else first.
Almost finished. Almost brave. Almost there.
We treat almost like a flaw. Like evidence of quitting. Like proof of inadequacy.
But what if almost is a form of truth?
What if maybe, if, and but are not the ends of sentences but doorways?
I am learning that pauses are not empty. That detours carry their own wisdom. That an
identity does not need singularity to be valid.
I am learning to stay with the in-between. To let my many selves exist without hierarchy. To
nurture a home, follow words, trust water, gather scraps of beauty, appreciate null and
infinity in one breath, and still refuse the pressure of a single label.
Perhaps I am not meant to be one thing.
Perhaps I am meant to be a movement.
Everything. Nothing. And the quiet, unseen magic in between. Like a draft gathering ideas,
revising itself quietly, learning how to be ready for its own publishing.