The Girl Inside

 Nobody tells you about the quiet calculations.

The ones you make before you say yes to anything. Before you say yes to a date, a pilgrimage, a spontaneous road trip with a friend, a 5 km run at 6 AM. The math happens fast now, almost without thinking. Crowds, terrain, distance, how many steps from the parking lot, whether there will be somewhere to sit, whether anyone will notice if you can’t keep up. And then you smile and say, I have other plans that day. And life moves on without you. And you let it.

She has been letting it for a long time now.

She came from the kind of upbringing that does not produce small dreamers. Her parents did not raise a girl who looked at ceilings. They raised someone who looked at horizons. She went to colleges that have a certain weight to their names, the kind that makes strangers at parties lean in a little closer when you mention them. She built friendships that felt like homes. She had her heart broken the right number of times. Enough to know what love feels like, enough to know she is capable of it. The opposite gender has always liked her for her eyes. For the way she talked. For the specific electricity of her presence in a room.

She has never, not once, felt lesser than anyone else.

That is important to say. It is also, somehow, the most exhausting part.

Because here is what nobody prepares you for.

Think of a random Tuesday when your cousins are leaving for a pilgrimage and your phone lights up with their excitement and you already know, before the conversation even finishes, that you will not be going. Reason? Calculations. You have already run the numbers. Crowded queue. Uneven terrain. No accessibility. No washrooms. Nowhere to rest. 

And so you will say something warm and wave them off and spend that weekend inside a life that fits within your body’s radius. And on the outside, everything will look fine.Because you have become very good at fine.

Her friends are married now. Most of them. Some have children, or are expecting, or are planning. She is thirty-two and she is single and she has made her peace with both of those facts on most days. But peace is not the same as ease. There is a particular ache in learning to love your best friends differently, in the small, careful way you now have to. You don’t call at 2 AM anymore. You think about the spouse before you post them on social media. You factor in two families now, two schedules, two comfort levels, before you ask for an evening. The friendship is still real. It has just become….considered. And consideration, however loving, is its own kind of distance.

Her brother moved out. The house is quieter. She accepts this too. She accepts most things.

She has built a business with her own hands. She has worked with a ferocity that deserves more recognition than it has received. She knows that her visiting card does not define her. She knows that the people who love her, love her completely, without needing the card. She knows all the right things.

And still. She is tired.

Not of life. That is not what this is.

She is tired of the gap. The permanent, uncloseable gap between the girl she is on the inside, full, ambitious, hungry, heartbroken in the normal ways, capable of great love and great work and great longing, and the body she has been given to carry all of that in. 

A body that is not a villain. A body that is simply, quietly, consistently, not enough of a collaborator.

She does not want pity. She has never wanted pity. She wants what everyone wants. To move through the world without calculating the cost of every yes. To go on the trip. To ride that roller coaster at disneyland. To run the 5 km not because fitness, but because her friend asked and the morning looked beautiful and why not. To be spontaneous in the way that people who live inside cooperative bodies get to be spontaneous, without thinking about it at all.

She is not asking for a different life.

She is just, tonight, exhausted by this one.

And she will wake up tomorrow and do it all again. The calculations, the smiling, the building, the accepting. She will show up for her work and her people and her dreams, all of which are real and alive inside her, untouched by any of this.

But tonight she is allowed to be tired.

Tonight, she just wants someone to know. The girl inside is so much bigger than what you can see. And carrying that, quietly, every single day, is the heaviest thing she has ever done.

But here is the thing she realised, in the middle of all that exhaustion.

She is not the only one.

Perhaps this is the oldest human condition. To live in two realities at once. The one your soul insists it deserves, and the one your life has handed you.

Somewhere, there is a traveller who has never left her city. Because the money never came, or the permission never came, or life arrived with its responsibilities before the passport ever did. Somewhere there is a person with the soul of an artist living inside the schedule of a caretaker. A person with the heart of someone free, tethered to a circumstance that does not care how free they feel on the inside.

For her, it is her body. For you, it may be something else entirely. Something that looks invisible from the outside. Something you have also learned to smile around. A financial wall. A family that needs you more than your dreams do. A society that has already decided what your life should look like before you had a chance to imagine it yourself.

Two realities. One soul trying to live in both.

This is not a problem to be solved. It is not a mindset to be fixed, a habit to be built, a morning routine to be optimised. Nobody is coming to close the gap for you. And you already know that. You have always known that.

What you may not have known is this.

You are not the only one standing in it.