self-doubt and self-love

I returned to my parents’ home a few days ago around 6 pm after a 26-hour trip that took me from Chennai to Paris to New York and finally good ol’ Richmond, Virginia. I left India on January 4th and landed in the States on the same day. It’s as close to time travel as we can get right now. Trippy.

Temperatures for the most part over the last month in India ranged between 60 and 80 degrees depending on if we were in the Northern or Southern part of the country. We explored nine different cities. So it’s safe to say I familiarized myself with the surroundings.

The weather hovered around freezing upon arrival that Thursday evening. Experiencing the brisk, cold breeze was genuinely refreshing after spending a month in a warmer climate with anything but fresh air. Enjoying the cold is cool now, right?

Minus the fact that my internal clock was in a frenzy, it felt much later than 6 pm as I settled back in that evening with my Chick-fil-A meal. I then realized this had to do with the fact that it was oddly quiet outside.

Quite peculiar, considering my time in India. I only experienced such silence at 3 am, which was usually because I had been awakened by a mosquito bite.

We were constantly on the move this trip as stated with the aforementioned nine cities in thirty days. Commuting in India is no joke and would make driving on the 405 or getting through LAX a breeze.

Be it navigating through a crowded airport or constantly maneuvering through traffic while hearing a never ending cacophony of car horns, moments of silence were hardly found.

Our New Year’s Eve journey was no exception. Our 90-mile commute from Chennai to Pondicherry took about four and a half hours. You’re familiar with the feeling if it took you the same time to drive from LA to San Diego or LA to Palm Springs. Throw in the chaos that is driving in India and it’s a bit of a challenge to endure.

However, I had become accustomed to this and the commuting time gave me an opportunity to see the country through the car window. My eyes saw city streets and vast farm lands as we shared the roads with cows, buffalo, and other animals on their morning commute.

We were especially looking forward to today as we were spending New Year’s Eve in Pondicherry. Pondicherry had been a French colony for a considerable part of its history. The French East India Company established a settlement in the region in 1673, and over time, it developed into a French trading post. Even though Pondicherry is no longer a French colony, the French influence is still visible in the city’s architecture, culture, and lifestyle.

Pondicherry plays neighbor to Auroville, an experimental and intentional community. It aspires to be a universal town where people from diverse nationalities and backgrounds coexist harmoniously, transcending political and cultural boundaries. It’s centered around the Matrimandir, a golden spherical meditation chamber, and is dedicated to the vision of human unity and spiritual consciousness.

Our first stop in Pondicherry was a pizza joint a few block away from the Bay of Bengal. As we were walking towards the beach my Mom stopped and bought all of us two balloons each.

The queen loves to shop, but I was quite puzzled by this impromptu purchase.

My Mom handed us the balloons and said we are going to walk to the beach and perform a New Year’s Eve ritual – we would each think of one thing we would leave behind in 2023 (release balloon #1) and then visualize one thing we would bring into our life in 2024 and release balloon #2.

Earlier in the car, I noticed the trend of people sharing their ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ for 2024 on Instagram. Not bad, but I liked this version better.

Well played, I told my Mom as we strolled to the beach passing locals setting up for the night’s ball drop.

I usually take some time for these kinds of thought experiments. But two words instantly popped in my head.

What am I leaving behind in 2023?

self-doubt. A beautiful benefit of traveling falls in its ability to expand our peripheral vision. Figuratively, of course. I say that because in a simple google search of peripheral vision, I found out you could improve your actual peripheral vision through various exercises. I’m sure Andrew Huberman has 90 minutes on that somewhere.

At times, we find ourselves stuck in tunnel vision, stuck in our community bubble, or stuck in our echo chamber of the content we consume within our iPhone screens. We become stagnant in our ways of thinking – this belief pattern can then bleed into how we think about ourselves.

In Rolf Pott’s book, Vagabonding he describes vagabonding as,

People have the opportunity to explore and redefine their identify, values, and mindset through travel. I spoke to facing fears in Bali and my aversion to running over Thanksgiving. My learnings from these fears not only nurtured my inner child but also slowly chipped away at the self-doubt I had cast onto myself over the years.

These belief patterns traverse our minds like billboards on the interstate. By facing these obstacles, the billboards that read, “There’s no way I could surf” or “I could never run a race” slowly flipped over into “You can ride a wave by yourself, literally, and figuratively” and “when’s the next race?”

Rest assured that self-doubt billboards won’t entirely vanish, but leaving self-doubt behind in 2023 puts myself in more control within the driver’s seat. If I pass billboards that feel self-limiting, there’s always an opportunity to change course. Let’s ride.

What am I bringing into my life into 2024?

self-love. I spoke to a friend a few days before my India trip. She has consistently encouraged me to be more curious about myself and has a gift in finding purpose in patterns. In our conversation, she helped me realize all of the self-reflection, writing, fear facing, travel, and adventures in 2023 all pointed to working on self-love and what it means for Chirag, to love himself.

For better or worse, in all of my relationships, I tend to focus on how the other person feels and how I can best/better serve them. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but that in-balance hinders my ability to answer those questions for myself.

As I enter 2024, I will continue to act authentically in the service of others, but I know now that I want to do the same for myself. How am I feeling? What can I do to better serve myself? These will be some of the questions I pose for me as I start to redesign my life in terms of where I live, what I do, and who I spend my time with.

In the words of Brené Brown,

Time to be brave.