“It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day, that’s the hard part.” ~ BoJack Horseman
If you’d told eighteen-year-old me where she’d be at twenty-eight, she would have laughed nervously and changed the subject.
That was her move, by the way. Laugh it off. Deflect. Eat another biscuit.
She was the girl who cried in bathroom stalls and called it “being sensitive.” The one who said yes to everything because no felt too dangerous. The one who googled “how to be more confident” at midnight and then did absolutely nothing about it.
She had plans, sure. Big, vague, terrifying plans. But mostly she just had anxiety and a very unhealthy relationship with her phone.
I don’t say this to be unkind to her. I say it because I know her better than anyone. I was her.
She thought growing up would feel like something.
Like a switch flipping. Like a moment she could point to later and say—there. That’s when I changed.
She was waiting for the dramatic montage. The turning point. The wise mentor who would sit her down and explain, with great clarity, what her life was supposed to mean.
Instead, she got Tuesdays.
Unremarkable, undramatic Tuesdays where she made her bed even though no one was coming over. Where she chose the salad—not every time, let’s not get carried away—but sometimes. Where she replied to an email she’d been avoiding for three weeks and discovered that the world did not end as she feared it would.
Nobody clapped. There was no montage.
And yet, something was shifting.
The changes came so quietly she almost missed them.
She stopped apologizing for her food order at restaurants. Small, yes. Revolutionary to her.
She started going to the cinema alone, which she once thought was the saddest thing a person could do, and discovered it was actually wonderful. No one to negotiate with. Popcorn all to herself. Complete emotional breakdowns during animated films entirely on her own terms.
She took a solo trip—just a weekend, nothing heroic—and spent the whole train ride convinced she’d made a terrible mistake. She hadn’t. She came home quieter in a good way, like something had been settled inside her that she hadn’t known was unsettled.
She learned to sit in a room without filling every silence with noise.
She learned that some friendships were seasonal, and that letting them go wasn’t failure—it was just honesty.
She learned, slowly and somewhat reluctantly, that she was allowed to take up space.
Nobody tells you that growing into yourself is mostly just… maintenance.
Not transformation. Not revelation. Just showing up, again and again, to the small and ordinary work of being a person.
The therapy appointments she almost cancelled. The boundaries she stumbled over before she learned to say them cleanly. The mornings she got up and tried again after the evenings she’d rather forget.
There was a version of her—the eighteen-year-old version, clutching her plans—who needed growth to look impressive. Who needed a story worth telling.
What she got instead was a life worth living. Which, it turns out, is better.
Here’s what I’d tell her, if I could.
You are going to be okay. Not in the vague, dismissive way people say it to make you stop worrying. In the specific, earned way—because you will do the work, even when it’s boring, even when nobody notices, even when you’re not entirely sure it’s working.
You will not wake up one day fixed. But you will wake up one day and realize that the things that once hollowed you out no longer have the same reach. That’s not nothing. That’s everything, actually.
You still overthink. I won’t lie to you about that.
But you do it now with a kind of fond exasperation for yourself—the way you’d treat a friend who keeps making the same endearing mistake. You’ve stopped being at war with the way your brain works. Mostly. On good days.
You still don’t fully know what you’re doing. But you’ve made a kind of peace with that too.
She showed up anyway.
That girl who cried in bathrooms and googled confidence at midnight and laughed too quickly to cover how scared she was.
She showed up on the Tuesdays that asked nothing of her and the days that asked everything. She showed up uncertain, imperfect, still a bit of a work in progress.
And at twenty-eight, sitting here, I want her to know:
That was enough.
That was, it turns out, exactly enough.
About Kalyani Abhyankar
Kalyani Abhyankar is an Assistant Professor of Law at Christ University with six years of teaching experience. She believes the courtroom and the written word have one thing in common—both, at their best, tell the truth. She writes to inspire, to connect, and to remind people that growing up quietly still counts.
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