2025: My Surrender Era 🪷

Dearest gentle reader, we are soooo back!!

This year, my intention is to write more and share more. I already write for hours a day, and I’m creating safety around being seen as my authentic self. So let’s do a lil catchup, shall we?

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Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I spent a lot of time these last couple years roaming around the world hoping there was somewhere better than I currently was. Somewhere people would be less people-y, somewhere life felt easier, somewhere I could be more myself. My life was one giant escape.

If I could just find them, I told myself, then I would be okay. If I could just be around the right people or in the right place, then I would be okay. If I did that, then the self-hatred inside me would be eased by being around people who were more spiritual, more elevated.

Spoiler alert: that place doesn’t exist. There is no place on earth where humans are “better” or “more spiritual.” People everywhere in the world are the same. People meditating at a yoga retreat in Bali are as gossipy as housewives in India are as mean-spirited as techies from the Bay Area are as kind as people from rural who-knows-where.

That was the hardest and softest lesson I learned in 2024. People gonna people, and there is no place where people are less people-y. Because humans are not one-dimensional good or evil beings. We are light and dark and everything in between.

When I allow other people the grace to be their entire selves, then I can let go of needing them to change for me to feel better. When I surrender, then being around the “right” people doesn’t matter. The right place is where I am right now.

I only realized a few days ago that I was conditioned my whole life to believe that some people are better than others, and everything just. made. sense. If I believe some people are better, then I would need others to change to fit my belief of what’s good enough. And vice versa, I would need to change to be accepted in the world.

And man, the world has no problem making you feel worse than others. Marketing and advertisements thrive on making you feel less than, so they can sell you stuff. Comparison is even taught in school, where your learning journey is graded in relation to others’.

But when I acknowledge and believe that there is no “better” place, person, etc. out there, then there’s nothing to prove. There’s nothing to do. There’s no need to punish, control, make anything happen.

There’s nowhere to escape to, no one to find, nowhere I needed to be one foot out the door of. I could relax, take a beat, and realize that I was living in a made-up world of fake judgments, perfectionism, and control.

So, my word of the year is surrender. Surrendering control of people, places, outcomes, situations. I no longer need anyone to be anything. And when I allow everyone else and everything else to be themselves, I give myself the grace and space to be myself as well.

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Here’s a list of things I’m taking into 2025:

• making things simpler rather than harder

• surrendering control over other people, situations, outcomes

• seeing the humanity in everyone

• taking care of myself first before anything else

• giving myself the grace to be a messy, imperfect human (and by proxy, everyone else as well)

• letting go of over-responsibility, hypervigilance, and anticipation for things that are not mine to bear

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Thanks for reading 🩵 If it resonated, please hit reply or shoot me a text! I would love to catch up and hear your intentions for 2025. Sending you love and blessings for the new year, all the way from India!

With love,
Abhas