What Life Takes From You
a rant
Life is a weird little thing. It’s slow and fast at the same time, we count down days passing by and suddenly it’s been months/years/decades. Life takes and takes until one day you realize you lost too much — too much of yourself, too much of your art, just, too much.
I lost myself too. I lost my writing to the everyday grind of corporate life, and slowly, all my words were spent in mails and Teams messages. In 2025, I realized that I had given too much of my words, and I was running out. Who am I if I cannot create art, in whatever form might it be?
I know I’m not the only one to lose myself. We give away our words and our emotions to jobs, friends, families, thinking we have a lifetime reserve of those. But sometimes, we are an exhaustible resource. Sometimes, we run out of ourselves.
How would we live, if we don’t have ourselves anymore? We live by taking ourselves back. We live by reclaiming words we spent, re-making our whole selves from scratch if need be.
You might not build yourself back to who you were, but who you were is just an idea in your head. You can be anything, all of them are you because all of them came from you. Because, like most things in society, our perception of ourselves is also arbitrary and made-up.
Life takes too much from us. But it’s our life, not the other way around. We can’t live it if we’re homesick for ourselves.
#prithurants
Self-Affirmations for the average homesick
i. We are who we are, and who we are is okay. It’s more than okay.
ii. We’re not the best, maybe at anything, but we’re okay at a lot of things. We’re good at some things.
iii. You are the art you create, not the art you don’t.
iv. Home is an idea, and it lives within you. You are your own home.
v. You don’t have to pick yourself up each day. Some days, let yourself be sad/mad/loud/angry.
vi. It’s okay to care about the opinion of others. We’re social animals, we cannot live like icebergs floating in isolation.
vii. Count your opinion of yourself as an “other” too. Sometimes, we may not value ourselves as much as we do “others”. Be your own “other”.
viii. The biggest paradox of life is that you can’t always be wrong. Even if you’re constantly wrong, you’re at least right when you think you’re constantly wrong. There is no singular state of being.
ix. It’s okay to rage against life.
x. Romanticize the shit out of your job, your art, your coffee, your breakfast. Romanticize it all.
sidenote: We’re on a floating rock in a space we don’t know anything about. You are the largest and smallest thing in your universe, and it’s okay to be both.
Life Moves On (Fanart)
i. “You always stand up.” — Sarah Rogers, Captain America Vol 7.1. Art by artgroves on Tumblr.
ii. not broken, just bent by HeyBoy: When SHIELD has to have an operative psychologically evaluated by a third-party medical professional, they do it for free by harassing Bucky Barnes. He's one of the few and the proud that agreed to let SHIELD purchase and forgive his student loan debt. He thought it was amazing at first. Then SHIELD started pressuring him to clear heavily traumatized and mentally ill agents for duty. He can recommend desk duty and they'll find some one-liner from his report to excuse anything.
This time, however, Bucky can't let that happen. This time, SHIELD wants him to declare the freshly revived Captain America fit for combat. But Steve Rogers considers himself broken beyond repair.
He isn't. And he doesn't need to work for SHIELD, anyway.
iii. United States v. Barnes, 617 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2015) by fallingvoices, radialarch:
The Associated Press @AP
Winter Soldier set to stand trial for Washington D.C. massacre and treason apne.ws/1og6SWE
(sidenote: this one is a true masterpiece)
Mag Calls/Hiring Alerts/Poetry Circle Alerts
My top 8 selections for this month!
Deadline: 28th February
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Deadline: Weekly submission, before Friday midnight PST.
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Accepting General Submissions all around the year
Open positions for Social Media Manager and Columnist
Unpaid/Voluntary
Deadline: April 30th
Theme: (Sub)liminal
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Open position: Assistant Manager Communications - Writer
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Open position: Editor
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The Poetry Circle by ayaskala
A regular poetry meetup started by Editor-In-Chief, Vaishavi, to encourage and inspire poetry-reading and writing. Sign up!
Headcanon Magazine’s Issue II Launch Party
A dynamic event in Delhi, with a great line-up of performances and discussions. RSVP soon!
Writing this revival edition was hard, so hard. It felt like pulling words from depths of my soul that didn’t exist. But, I’ll write another one, and another, till the words come easy.
As a parting note, I’ve been playing this playlist on repeat —
Special shoutout to Gauri for re-designing my newsletter. I couldn’t have done it without you.
Thanks for reading to my melancholy rants. Until next month.