Damselz-In-Sanity

Hello hello, and welcome back to today’s blogzo! This blog's been sitting in my drafts for a while because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to convey - until I realised that was kind of the point. This blog started out as a 14-year-old teenager, bored out of her mind, trying to do something apart from watching Brooklyn 99 for the 99th time. I'd like to believe that in the past 5 years, the blog's refined itself ( just slightly, maybe?) I had no blueprint, no “brand voice,” and was (I'm) just a girl with a laptop and a vague sense that writing might help. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I kept going anyway, and somewhere along the way, it started to make sense. Because I kept learning . I knew almost nothing about psychology—not in any formal way at least—and I definitely wasn’t reading academic papers ( still struggle with those, tbh ). I just had a lot of feelings and a lot of questions, so I wrote. And over time, I began to see patterns emerge: something a friend sai...

I started this blog without really knowing what I was doing. No plan. No structure. Just a vague sense that I had thoughts I needed to put somewhere that wasn’t the Notes app. At the time, it felt small. It mostly comprised typing out late-night rants (a questionable number of my posts are 2am thoughts), weird analogies (from Cockroaches to Chicken Nuggets ), and half-baked reflections. But looking back now, it’s one of the best things I've ever done. Not because it went viral. Not because it got a ton of views.  But because it gave me something way more valuable: practice. Writing regularly helped me structure my thoughts better. And when your thoughts start to flow better, everything else follows. You start becoming clearer when you speak. You start noticing how people express themselves. You even start catching yourself mid-sentence thinking, “Wait, that actually makes sense.” That shift helped in more places than I expected. From presentations to class discussions, even cas...

 Freshman year, I was invited to a One Direction dance party.     Was it the wisest decision just the weekend before finals? No. Did I mask it as a "stress buster activity" and go anyway? A-wee. If you knew me when I was 11, you'd know that I was one of the biggest fans of the boy band; I'm talking themed-birthdays, fan accounts, merch and random facts that still remain ingrained in my brain 8 years later (Yes, I still remember Louis loves girls who like carrots and KEVIN!) But this post isn't about my teenage fever dream (though you'll notice a few  references creeping through the post) It's about what I realised midway through rage screaming to No Control. As my teen years evolved, my fangirl self for 1D kind of faded. It never became a zero, but took a backseat, becoming more of a nostalgic memory of my tweenhood.  But being in a room full of people, at the end of their teenage ( dirtbag ) or midway through their 20s, reminded me of what the band meant...

 Hie and welcome back to this month's bloggo! If you're an ardent Brooklyn 99 fan (you know I love <3), you're probably familiar with the term 'Pmuls'. If not, it's simply the word "slump" written backwards. Why backwards? Because that's what this post aims to convey! (How do you come out of a slump) Slumps happen to the best of us.  You just get stuck - it feels like you aren't making any progress while everyone around you seems to be doing swimmingly.  Your motivation disappears, your thoughts feel foggy or stuck on a loop, and there’s this low-key heaviness that follows you around—like your spark is dimmed but you don’t know why. You're throwing darts everywhere without realising that the dart board is actually lays 10 feet diagonal to you. But the worst part isn't going through a slump - it's coming out of one. As someone who's gone through various cycles of this, I thought why not share a few tips that help me come out ...

I remember being 9 years old when I saw Inside Out for the first time. Eight years later, in the same movie theatre, with the same popcorn flavour, I sat down to watch its sequel—only with a different frame of mind. If you've watched the film, I think it's fair to assume that there was something that resonated with everyone's inner child. So I thought, why not make today's blog on why what the protagonist Riley experienced was so important to us? Without further ado, let's get to it! Words matter The way you talk to yourself matters. The way we speak to ourselves shapes how we see who we are and what we can become. The things we tell ourselves repeatedly affect how we relate to others. Your inner voice can be your biggest supporter or your scariest critic; this is why it becomes so important to introspect on the things we tell ourselves repeatedly, whether positive or negative, to determine the way we carry ourselves and how we interact with the world around us.  Se...

Hello hello and welcome back to today's blogzo!  So...it's Valentine's today. Some of us are single, some of us are dating; some of us have it "complicated" and some of us are married (hopefully no one from this blog's target demographic!) Truth be said, I had no idea what this blog was going to be up till a week ago. Do I write it about How to be a better person to your partner? How do you open up about your relationship?  But then I realised, that this isn't a "Love" blog, but rather a Mental Health one. Valentine's is the day of love - showing, giving and receiving.  But as much as you do the above to someone, it's also important to do that to you. I'm talking about Self Love. Whenever some of us hear this word, we often associate it with selfishness. The truth is that it's far from that. Self - Love is about accepting and acknowledging you. Narcissism is about putting yourself above others. We all get caught up in the hustle a...

 Hello hello and Happy New Year everyone! It's been a while since I wrote a blog (about 4 months), which is around the same time when I left for college.  Getting ready to leave meant mentally accepting that I'd miss out on some of Mumbai's delicious foods, comfort, and weather for a while. What I did not anticipate was missing one of the most basic human needs: a hug.  We can all agree that hugging someone you've grown up with and really love, wraps you in a comforting blanket of warm embrace. It makes you feel wanted and loved. It makes you feel happy. And when you're surrounded by unfamiliar faces, it takes a while to find "your people" and accept that warmth.   As children, we instinctively understood the language of hugs. Think back to the hugs we shared with our parents before heading off to school, or a friend if they hurt themselves running in those corridors: these moments weren’t merely routine; they were succinct expressions of love and security...

Recently, I was talking to a bunch of people and ranting about the Hindi syllabus of ICSE . For those who went through the system, you and I both know the struggle of reading Sukhi daali and Deepdan. For those who didn't, just be glad. The thing that irked me the most about that conversation was that they kept referring to the chapters as "traumatic." And I realised that this wasn't the first time such an incident occurred in front of me. By introspecting my conversations with people, I realised the term was trivialised, simply because they didn't know what it meant . Google defines Trauma as an emotional response caused by severe distressing events that are outside the normal range of human experiences. Take a second to read the underlined words: severe, distressing, outside normal. Trauma is a strong word. Unfortunately, it has become ubiquitous in our lexicon, applied liberally to describe an ever-widening spectrum of experiences. When you use this word in ...

  Some days rule: You feel like the most productive person in the world, everything seems to go your way and life feels good; you're on Cloud 9. Some days suck: They make you feel sad and all you want to do on those days is curl up into your blanket and wait for the day to end. And some days, are simply, blah: The middle ground. Blah days are ones where you don't feel your best - something just feels off; things don't seem to snap into place and the very idea of getting it into place leaves you with lethargy. But why are they important? Why do most of us experience it, regularly? Because these, unexpectedly, are the "scariest days": they make you question your current lifestyle, your environment, your life. I don't like the above thought. Instead, I like to look at them as perspective days. Blah days are those which help you realise what you're doing with life and what your goals are. See, when you're in a state of enjoyment or morose-ness, chances are...