Proudly Off-Script
On roads less travelled, lives uncategorised, and the peace that nobody warned you about 💫
A few years ago, a Robert Frost poem broke the internet.
Lines from The Road Not Taken flooded every timeline. Everyone performing wistfulness about choices unmade and lives unlived. Millennials will remember. Most people posting it had probably never read the full poem. I had. It was on my college syllabus.
So when I shared those lines, it wasn’t to chase a trend. It was because they hit differently for me.
Now, two decades on, I think about the actual roads not taken. Not the romanticised version, the real ones. The ones you don’t so much choose as stumble onto, alone, with no map and no company.
Looking back, I’ve taken multiple alternate paths. Not at some dramatic fork in the road, but quietly, incrementally, without fanfare. There was no moment of choosing. I didn’t always come to any crossroads with a poet’s luxury of contemplation. I only realised I’d been on an alternate path when I was almost through the other side, and noticed I’d been walking alone the whole time.
Twenty years later, the life I’ve built defies every definition of “normal” that the world handed me. Some of it was chosen. Some was handed to me by fate, without consultation. But the result is a peaceful existence that society doesn’t quite have a category for. Not that it makes any difference. Why should everything be categorised and compartmentalised?
Indian woman. Middle-aged. Never married. Not in a relationship and haven’t been for years. Absolutely at peace with it.
This isn’t performing peace nor “making the best of a bad situation”. My life is actually, genuinely, structurally at peace.
I chase dreams. I build a career. I live for myself, for my family, for a close-knit circle of friends who have become something like a foster family. The people who chose to stay. 🤍
Wondering why my socials and some books are called The Social Misfit? Because that’s exactly what I am. What I always was. The round peg in the square hole. The awkward one who couldn’t understand why everyone else’s life looked so effortless while I was working overtime just to appear normal.
The difference is that somewhere along the road, I stopped trying to squeeze myself into a shape I was never meant to fit, and started owning the shape I actually am. 🦋
This morning, I woke up and sat with that thought for a while.
Frost wrote that he would tell his story “with a sigh, ages and ages hence.” I don’t need ages. I know it now. My road was less travelled in India, in my forties, as a woman, alone by choice.
And that has made all the difference. Not the kind people pity.
🌸
