Returning to Love

On my journey from paranoia to pronoia

A moment recently when I felt deeply in love with life

My memories of my childhood are bittersweet. I grew up in a family that felt… confusing at best and deeply fear-inducing at worst. On the one hand, I was doted on by every single person in the family. On the other, I had a grandmother with severe mental health issues and I lived in constant fear, hypervigilant of her moods from hour to hour. She was one of my primary caregivers and my little mind was observing and absorbing what she put out into the world.

The hardest thing, though, was seeing my mother cry every single day. My grandmother had the tendency to see the negative in everything and everyone. Her favourite target was my mother, and she would heap criticism on her—the sort that crushes your spirit and makes you feel like you were fundamentally flawed, useless, and other fun things.

My mother got married fairly young, a marriage arranged by her parents (a.k.a. an ‘arranged marriage’) and had me by the time she turned 24. As is the case in a typical middle class Indian household, my parents lived with my paternal grandparents. So my mother was under fire from my grandmother every single day starting at age 23 until my grandmother passed after two long decades.

My mother is sunshine in human form—naturally kind, joyful, and empathetic. I can’t even imagine how hard being around my grandmother must’ve been for her spirit, especially after growing up in a loving, empowering family.

I was perhaps 13 years old when I started noticing how my inner dialogue was one of anger, meanness, and distrust. My mind would concoct elaborate stories about other people’s intentions, jump to all sorts of conclusions about them, and my behaviour towards them would reflect my internal narrative. I was angry and critical all the time and I remember my friends expressing that they felt scared of me and my reactions. To this day I’m not sure why they didn’t just ditch me as a friend—I was a handful, to say the least.

By the time I entered adulthood, it was clear to me that I saw the bad in everything, saw the negatives in people, and barely, if ever, saw what was positive and wonderful about them. My mental landscape felt dark, filled with lightning and shadows.

Ages 17 to 22 were excruciatingly hard because I started having mental health issues. I turned to self-harm as a way of getting some relief from my spiraling thoughts and emotions. During that time, I was both acutely aware of how dark my internal mindscape was and how helpless I felt about it. It was like watching a trainwreck while being the trainwreck at the same time. Truly, I wish nobody has to experience that kind of internal turmoil. It was dysregulation at its worst.

I don’t know when that exact moment was (or if there was an exact moment at all), but I did hit the point of, “I can’t continue to be this way”, despite my feeling of helplessness, despite my self-loathing, despite my mental health issues. What I do know is that it changed everything even though the journey that followed that decision was a difficult one.

I remember taking myself to a psychologist and letting her know that I was struggling. I remember starting to journal in earnest, trying to find a way out of my mental prison. I remember leaving my parents’ house and moving to a new city.

I remember swinging in the opposite direction and becoming almost subservient to others… outsourcing my sense of self because I didn’t trust myself to be a “good person”. I remember my friends in B-School telling me how I thrashed around in my sleep at night, screaming and drenched in sweat. I remember getting into unhealthy, abusive relationships because they felt familiar (because I expected love to come with a side of dysfunction and a large portion of fear).

I remember living in constant anxiety and having regular panic attacks. I remember life feeling stupendously hard and bleak every hour of every day. I remember thinking that if I were to die, it would bring me some much-needed relief.

The world is a giant mirror and reflects back to you exactly what you expect. As a child, my grandmother’s worldview and mannerisms had seeped into me unconsciously. I expected people to have ill intentions, for situations to be hard, for relationships to be erratic. I saw dangers, hardships, and negatives in everything and everyone. And that’s exactly what I experienced.

Thank God for the human spirit, though. I often think about this quote by Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer”.

I didn’t know it back then but year after year, I was deconditioning from my grandmother’s worldview. First in small, almost imperceptible ways, but later in giant, “wow, what just happened” ways. And every evidence I found contrary to what I believed became my talisman—protecting me and solidifying a more forgiving and gracious way of viewing life.

When I consider what specifically helped, a few things come to mind:

Firstly, therapy. I spent years doing talk therapy. After a point, its usefulness plateaued, but for the first couple of years it was very, very helpful. Having someone (my amazing therapist Natasha) who was unconditionally present to everything I shared, non-judgemental, objective, competent, safe, and compassionate was the exact medicine I needed at that time. I needed to talk through my life journey, unpack everything that had happened, and make sense of it all.

The biggest thing I got out of therapy was a feeling that I wasn’t fundamentally broken and that my life was redeemable. In hindsight, it feels like therapy brought me from the negatives to ‘ground zero’. It provided the foundation on which I could build my life from that point onward.

Secondly, travelling. Travel took me out of my city and country—away from the places where my life events had unfolded and my inner narrative had been forged—and into places where nobody knew who I was or what my story had been up until then. This brought the sort of freedom I hadn’t experienced in the first three decades of my life: a clean slate to be anybody I wanted to be.

It was the first time I considered who I was outside of my narratives, outside of what had happened to me. In many ways, it was the opposite of therapy in that I didn’t dive into what happened to me to find myself—I dove into the unknown, the white space outside my life story. I can’t begin to tell you how surreal, freeing, and life-changing that was.

Thirdly, plant medicine ceremonies. In 2022, my travels took me to Peru. I intuitively felt guided to participate in San Pedro and Ayahuasca ceremonies while I was there. It’s a story for another day—I’ll share it in a subsequent essay—but they truly rewired my brain. I went from “life doesn’t need to be so hard” to “life can actually feel good”. It was like transitioning from “life isn’t only bad things that happen to me” to “OMG, I’m actively starting to love life, challenges and all”. It was like my relationship with life got a massive trust upgrade. It was a BIG deal.

These three experiences built on each other in ways I didn’t expect—each one preparing me for the next, each one going deeper than the last.

Last but not least, the people in my life. Honestly, every single week I find myself pausing to reflect on just how incredibly lucky I am with the kind of loved ones in my life. Yes, life gave me some lemons, but it also fortified me with some of the best human beings on the planet as part of my friends and family. They were placed on my path by sheer providence and I’m so grateful.

They held me gently, lovingly, and with unwavering loyalty as I navigated some really dark moments. I’m not sure where I’d be without them. Life will do its thing… but I’m convinced that any phase can be navigated with relative calmness and groundedness so long as you have the right people around. People really are the secret sauce.

When I zoom out and look at my life, I can see that the path evolved from paranoia to pronoia. From life feeling dark and anticipating bad things at every turn to actively feeling like I am living in a benevolent universe. (A fun side note: The concept of pronoia—the feeling that all the forces in the universe are working in your favour—came to me through Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. It continues to be one of my all-time favourite books. Highly recommend.)

The path was far from easy, but the origin and the destination are unmistakable. And along this path, an overarching theme has emerged: A return to love.

Returning to love has meant returning to a sense of innocence, trust, and hope. To see every person and every situation with unconditional love, no matter how gnarly. To hold my own humanity as well as another’s, knowing that we are all here to walk each other home.

It’s taken me a lifetime of deconditioning to learn to see the good in people and situations. To go from paranoia to pronoia. Don’t get me wrong—I still fall into what I call “negative vortices” and it sometimes takes a huge amount of intentional work to get myself out of them and into a more forgiving, gracious way of viewing life. Plus, being human, I’m often holding the duality of unconditional love and whatever else I might be feeling in the spectrum of emotions, including anger, frustration, envy, competitiveness, dejection, fear, and so on.

But every single time, I emerge feeling like love has deepened further in my heart. A part of me believes this is the entire purpose of incarnating as a human: we’re presented with challenges so we can unlearn dysfunctional ways of being and return to love.

These days, I exist in the space of genuine joy, understanding, and compassion—for others as well as myself—more often than not. It feels like a privilege to be alive. Emotions feel like invitations to deepen my relationship with myself. I feel like I can hold the deep complexity of being human with empathy, gratitude, and levity.

It’s like… even when I’m sitting in a pit of despair, there’s a remembrance of love and the meaningfulness of it all. I feel like I understand, in my very bones, what Khalil Gibran meant when he wrote, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”. It’s all so worth it, all of it. The spiraling, the remembrance, the return to love.

It truly is a relationship with life. Couples often talk about going through rupture and repair and how, every time, their connection strengthens, their love for each other deepens, and they commit more firmly to each other’s happiness. That’s exactly how returning to love again and again feels.

It’s an adventure, even when it’s hard, with love being the destination. Love for self, love for the other, love for life itself.