Day 1

1. Denial 

2. Anger 

3. Bargaining

4.  Depression 

5. Acceptance. 

When my parents told we were going to move, I denied this idea, finding ways to act like it didn’t exist. I walked away every time the conversation arose and I rejected my dad’s advances to have a chat. I isolated myself from the very thought of this even happening. I couldn’t leave my home ground. This was my turf, and I couldn’t fight my first battle for success on a terrain I didn’t know. Anger was a little more difficult, I had weight in my house. I knew how to get people to do things that I wanted them to do. I knew this well, so I did what any teenager would do: I threw bouts of attitude, picked up fights with my sister and my friends. I rejected all the plans my counselors and family had for me that summer and I sulked. That only lasted a week though. I took the longest time to pass through the stage of Bargaining. Everybody always said that I was a good bargainer. That’s why I usually got things my way. I pulled all the cards, used every trick. I was going to get things my way, whether it hurt my family or not. I began to pull out ideas- my grandparents could stay here with me while my mum and dad lived there. I could handle the stress, and I wasn’t my sister; I was responsible. I could go to boarding school or I could live with somebody else. We could hire a driver or whatever; my grandparents didn’t need to worry, I was going to be fine. The depression hit me at an odd time. I was in the middle of an incredibly stressful yet exciting program, and reality had hit me; I was no longer going to be in the city that I had grown up in. Bangalore was not just a home, it was a part of me, I had moved to Bangalore, a scared and shy five-year-old girl and twelve years later, I was everything but that. To me, Bangalore and NPS is life; I morphed my whole existence around these two factors, and suddenly, they were going to be taken away from me. That week was miserable for me, my soul would take any excuse to cry. It didn’t want to accept the idea that I was moving. Then, something changed, I began to realize something that I heard almost every day of my life but truly never comprehended. “Change is the only constant.” My dad was a firm believer in the importance of change. He once told me that nothing could teach to be better than change. That, for me, was my tipping point, I realized that the depression that I pulled myself into was pointless and that if I didn’t move now, I never would. I would be stuck in the rut that everyone on the planet feared but lived in anyways, the fear of breaking the cycle. I knew deep down that this was not me, I was not destined to live in a cycle. I was destined for greatness and overcoming my fears was the only way I could get there. But to overcome your greatest fear was to forget the former purpose of your existence and challenge yourself to find a new one. I needed to find a new purpose, and sometimes it starts by starting over; I am ready, at least that I think that I am.