“It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you have to do it every day, that’s the hard part.” ~ bojack horseman
If you had told me, an eighteen-year-old girl, where she would be at twenty-eight, she would have laughed nervously and changed the subject.
Well, that was his move. Laugh it off. To alienate. Eat another biscuit.
She was the girl who cried in bathroom stalls and called it “being sensitive.” The one who said yes to everything but also found no too dangerous. The one who Googled “how to be more confident” at midnight and then did nothing about it.
Surely he had plans. Big, vague, scary plans. But most of the time she was worried and her relationship with her phone was very bad.
I don’t say this to be unkind to him. I am saying this because I know him better than anyone. I Was His.
He thought this was what growing up would feel like.
Like someone was flipping a switch. Like a moment later she could point and say-There. That’s when I changed.
She was waiting for the dramatic montage. turning point. The wise guru who will sit him down and explain with great clarity what his life means.
Instead, he got Tuesday.
Unnatural, Unnatural Tuesday He made his bed even when no one was coming. Where she chose salad – not every time, let’s not get carried away – but sometimes. Where she responded to an email she had been avoiding for three weeks and learned that the world would not end as she had feared.
Nobody clapped. There was no montage.
And yet, something was changing.
The changes came so quietly that she almost forgot them.
He stopped apologizing for his food order at the restaurant. Small, yes. Revolutionary for him.
She started going to the movies alone, which she once thought was the saddest thing a person could do, and discovered that it was actually wonderful. No one to talk to. Popcorn all for yourself. Relive the emotional breakdown during animated movies entirely on your own terms.
She took a solo trip – just a weekend, nothing heroic – and spent the entire train journey convinced she’d made a terrible mistake. He didn’t do that. She came home nicely calm, as if something had settled inside her that she didn’t know was unstable.
He learned to sit in a room without filling every silence with noise.
She learned that some friendships are seasonal, and letting them go wasn’t a failure – it was just honesty.
She slowly and somewhat reluctantly learned that she was allowed to take up space.
What no one tells you is that growing yourself is mostly just… maintenance.
not change. Not a revelation. Performing the small and simple acts of being a person over and over again.
She almost canceled therapy appointments. She stumbled across boundaries before she learned to articulate them. She would wake up in the morning and try again in the evening which she wanted to forget.
There was a version of him – the eighteen-year-old version, the one carrying out his plans – that needed development to look impressive. Which needed a story worth telling.
What he got instead was a life worth living. Which, it turns out, is better.
That’s what I would tell him if I could.
You will be fine. Not in that vague, dismissive way that people tell you to stop worrying. In a specific, earned way – because you will do the work, even when it’s boring, even when no one is paying attention, even when you’re not completely sure it’s working.
You will not wake up one day certain. But you will wake up one day and realize that the things that once haunted you are no longer as accessible as before. He is nothing. That’s really all there is to it.
You still think too much. I wouldn’t lie to you about this.
But now you treat it with a kind of endearing disappointment for yourself – the way you would treat a friend who keeps making the same endearing mistake. You have stopped waging war with the way your brain works. Mostly. On good days.
You still don’t completely know what you’re doing. But you’ve made a kind of peace with that too.
She showed up anyway.
The girl who used to cry in the bathroom and google confidence at midnight and laugh so hard that she didn’t realize how scared she was.
She appeared on those Tuesdays that asked nothing of her and on those days when everything was asked of her. She appeared uncertain, incomplete, still a bit of a work in progress.
And at twenty-eight years old, sitting here, I want him to know:
This was enough.
This, it turned out, was absolutely enough.
About Kalyani Abhyankar
Kalyani Abhyankar is an Assistant Professor of Law at Christ University with six years of teaching experience. He believes that the courtroom and the written word have one thing in common – both, at their best, tell the truth. She writes to inspire, connect, and remind people that growing up quietly still matters.
