#5: The One Where We Reignite the Flame
Sankranthi celebrations, a wellness retreat, remembering your why, and how my life changed thanks to Trevor Noah.
Hello from the other side - of viral illness and TDAP vaccine side effects, that is! Sometimes I can’t believe that we landed on our heads as children with a 105-degree fever, bounced back up, and wanted to play again…while as an adult, putting on Chapstick crackles every joint in my body and pulls a muscle so I look like this for the next week.
Anyway, I am on my feet again. And I will get back to Monday issues soon.
Substack tells you how long, approximately, each issue is - and mine have gotten longer and longer. First, 9 minutes. Then 10. 11. 12. Between the lengthy issues and wonky schedule, this week is a recalibration of sorts. (I can practically hear all of you exclaim, “Thank God!”…honestly, I might be joining you!).
We spent the weekend back home for Sankranthi, the Telugu celebration of a new harvest year and the movement of the Sun into a new Zodiac. Various parts of India celebrate in different ways and call it different things, but we did a small religious pooja, and ate an inhuman amount of food. My mom warded off the evil eye and gave us blessings by circling pennies, Gummy Bears (the American touch), flower petals, and cranberries around each of our heads, a custom she hasn’t done for us since we were little but that we’ve renewed now that a tiny one is in the equation. I look forward to the future when we can create a bommala koluvu (if you’re a fan of Never Have I Ever, Tamil speakers call it a golu) - shelves set up in a stairstep formation, showcasing regional toys and dioramas of Indian life. It’s funny how you don’t think about certain rituals or customs as adults, but when a child is involved, the nostalgia comes back with a vengeance.
Being home was a blast from the past for more than Sankranthi - a change of setting can light a spark in even the most uninspired person. But it was also a reminder of my why and the path it’s taken to get here…and that’s what we’ll focus on today. No long advice pieces. Just a reminder about how far you’ve come.
Annika’s Scattered Post-It Notes
It’s official! The Power of a Pause retreat will be on February 4th at the Broome Street Temple. Come join us from 1-4 PM as we push back on hustle culture, and experience sessions in Meditative breathing, Reiki, Writing a Mission Statement for Your Life (led by me!), Ayurvedic Food for Healing, and Sound Baths.
If you’re a book blogger or reviewer: Sugar, Spice, and Can’t Play Nice is available for request on Netgalley!
Love, Chai, and Other Four-Letter Words is currently $1.99 on Kindle!
I recorded a couple of Reels on the pros and cons of having an agent!
Stay tuned for:
Mental health and coaching workshops coming from That Desi Spark, geared toward South Asians and aimed at arming them with tangible tools to cope with health, wellness, and career unique to people in our diaspora. If you know someone who conducts meaningful workshops in mental health or life, please feel free to reach out so we can chat!
The Writing Edit & Cultivating Creativity
When the job situation was at its worst, I remember thinking my flame was on its last embers. The force driving me to wake up and feel purpose, even if it was after my 9-5 and only with my side hustles, was faint and getting dimmer by the second. As it doused itself, even the podcast and writing were going dark.
I was losing my why. And I was so stuck, my entire life was a series of wrong choices (in my head. Not actually.).
In the first 4 issues of this Substack, I’ve been transparent about my lessons and the techniques I’ve implemented on this creative adventure. I hope there’s some value for anyone pursuing their own passions. But between social media and the hustlers around us, the focus is always on the lists of things to remember, the new action items, and to-do’s to be the most efficient person ever. Self-improvement is always needed. Pauses are discouraged.
Today is a reminder: to breathe in your why. To take a moment to remember what drives you from the inside before you change how you operate on the outside. To relish the ride, to taste how far you’ve come and savor the victories that pushed you forward and the losses that held you back until the right time. To take breaks as you need so you can refresh and not drown in self-improvement.
I had a few chances to do the same…which is why it was top of mind as I wrote this today. Firstly, That Desi Spark was accepted into a podcast accelerator program last week! One of the questions on the application was a standard, “Tell me a little about yourself,” kind of query. I wrote about the usual: M.Ed, MPH, writing, and podcast…and I found myself recounting my why: that storytelling has been a common thread in every role I’ve played in my life, every success I’ve had, and every reason I’ve chased something down…and that every day, I wake up wanting to use it to make the world brighter and less disconnected, including with the podcast and with my writing. Writing it pushed me further back in my memories: to high school, when my senior speech talked about how confused I was about my Indian-American identity and how I grew up in a white college town. How I never thought I’d lead anything South Asian because I never felt South Asian enough…and now, I was here, applying for an accelerator with one of the biggest brown podcasts out there.
Then, at home, I wrote, sitting at the same table I wrote my first book on 8 years ago. And I got to take a second and think about the journey that led me here, tonight.
My point: allow your why to fill you. Consider every stop you’ve made on your journey - even the ones that may feel like mistakes (they weren’t). Picture telling your younger version of yourself all of the highlights of your current life - and all you learned from the bloopers.
And when you feel the flame get smaller, bring the conversation back with the old you. Recap your wins and your learnings. Your success rate for waking up every day and continuing forward is 100%, so your journey is as perfect as it’ll ever be, even with its bumps.
And don’t forget the most important part about creating art from scratch, the match that reignites the flame on even the dampest, darkest day…Your art pours out from you. You are a sum of all your broken and beautiful parts. You are already a masterpiece.
Fresh Reads
Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah: Are you all fans of audiobooks? I’m not going to lie, I was never a listener until I married Sanjeev, who loves them. During the pandemic, between our engagement and wedding, our drives between New York and PA were filled with audiobooks and they grew on me. While I have watched Trevor Noah as a host and as a comedian, I had a new appreciation for his narration of his story…it was one of the best, most profound commentaries on race I have ever witnessed in any format, anywhere, ever. In between laughing at his storytelling and being educated about South African history (an area I am woefully uninformed in besides the very basics of apartheid), I can genuinely say I’ve never learned so much from a memoir. Ever. His narratives on being Coloured vs. White vs. Black in post-Apartheid South Africa, identity politics, SES, and more, are, arguably, lifechanging. Read this book.
Three Wishes, by Liane Moriarty: Liane Moriarty’s writing is amazing and I do enjoy her books. This one, about triplets who deal with sibling rivalry and secrets, revelations and relationships, unfaithful husbands and unthinkable decisions, and the fabulous, frustrating life of forever being part of a trio was no different. I have noticed, however, that in heavily reading books by authors of color with characters of color, my analysis and appreciation of books that don’t have much color (like this one) has transformed. Maybe that’s a conversation for another day since I’m valuing brevity in today’s issue.
And in other news, for the first time in my life…I am zapped with the royal family and its drama.
I’ll see you here, next Monday. Thank you for being so patient over the last two weeks of my immune system taking a joyride. If you have questions, suggestions, or comments, you’re always welcome to email me, comment below, or DM me on social media.
Until next week,
Annika