I was 27 years old when I lost my friend, my brother, and my family member, and as the world knew him my dog ‘Casper’. Casper had been a part of my life for almost a decade and losing him was not only emotionally shocking but also disoriented my life in ways I can’t describe. After a few months after that incident, I quit my job in the banking sector and moved back to Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. Shimla the queen of hills is my hometown, my birthplace, and my nightmare. Growing up I hated that place to the core as I had a lot of bad memories or at least those were the only ones that stuck by me. I had to begin again in that hell hole from which I had escaped.
Looking back my life was a mess, there was no planning, no goals, and no light to set me free. I just knew that I had to escape again and that is what became my motivation. At the time, I didn’t know what was wrong with me and what was needed from me to be able to succeed in anything and everything that life threw at me. So, I did what most of us do in the situation foreign to us and that is dive head first into the world full of problems hoping I would find my way somewhere down the road. It was all for naught as all I did was sunk deeper into the world of no return.
This was the point where I had zero hope of ever crawling my way back to the surface. Then like a blessing from up above, like a touch of god, I was introduced to self-improvement books. Credit to my sister who let me get indulged in this part of the novel world from which I somehow was eluded before. The first book that I came to read was a life-changing experience for me and the book was called “Atomic Habits by James Clear.” This book ignited something in me that provoked my inner primitive self to never give up and it told me that there was light for me as well at the end of the tunnel.
This is where I started my journey to self-improvement. Of course like any other normal human being, I too faced a lot of obstacles, some of them came from external sources but most of them were self-induced. This was the chance that me the beginning, the change that I was in desperate need of, and the conquest that I am still trying to trounce over. All I know now is that when I die, on my deathbed, I would not allow myself to die full of regrets. I want to be happy, fulfilled, and courageous, and I will embrace it as if I had given it my 100%.