every time i’ve had a major breakdown in my life that felt like it was the end of the world, the core feeling was always ‘i feel unsafe,’ whether it be emotionally, financially, physically or mentally. and every single time i’ve sat on the bathroom floor with swollen eyes and a runny nose with an intense migraine from all the crying, i’ve made a promise to myself with all the rage my body can accommodate that was along the lines of ‘i will NEVER be in this position again.’ here’s a compilation of all the actionable points that might save you one of those intense sessions.
know your exit number.
i’m not a finance guru. i’m not telling you to save up for a birkin or a pink porsche 911 you saw on instagram. this is about survival money, the kind that keeps you alive and out of situations you can’t get out of. this is mostly the money you aren’t even concerned about right now because parents take care of it. the electricity bills, the salaries of househelp, groceries, petrol, whatever you need to survive and maintain your current lifestyle.
sit down and actually do the math. write out what you spend right now, every single number. figure out what rent would cost in a city you could survive in on your own. figure out what it would actually take, today, to buy a place with your own name on it someday. start putting away money for an emergency fund this month, even if it’s a small amount. sit with your real number, the amount you’d need to just exist and be okay, not the amount that would impress anyone watching your life from the outside.
then figure out how you’re actually going to get there. maybe that’s a job. maybe it’s putting some of what you earn into investments. maybe it’s just saving whatever you can, slowly, in an account nobody else touches. honestly it’s probably going to be some mix of all three, and that’s fine, just know which one you’re leaning on and why.
invest in yourself.
not only money, knowledge too. take the course on personal finance. take the one on nutrition and health if that’s what you actually need. learn something that has nothing to do with getting a job and everything to do with understanding your own body, your own money, your own head. education was never supposed to be a backup plan for if the marriage falls apart, or a way to end up matched with someone equally qualified. it’s how you find out what you’re actually capable of.
learn about interest, credit, and debt before you ever sign anything under pressure. stop letting your father or anyone in your family quietly handle all of this on your behalf for the rest of your life. being clueless about your own money isn’t cute or innocent, it’s a weak spot, and you can start closing it today.
understand what a prenup actually is before you ever need one. understand how money actually works inside a marriage where you live, who owns what by default, what’s automatically shared and what isn’t. talk to the women around you about how they manage their own money day to day, and be honest with yourself about whether that’s how you’d want to run yours. know exactly which assets are yours, in writing, not just in conversation. do not let anyone control your money for you, a parent, a partner, a brother, anyone. having access to money is not the same thing as having control over it.
a lot of us were handed gold the day we were born, sitting in a locker somewhere with our name on it, and never once saw a bank statement with that same name on it. know what’s actually yours on paper and not just what people call “yours” out loud. if you don’t have your own bank account yet, open one. if you’re still waiting on your parents to open one for you, ask them today. every rupee, every dollar, every cent you earn needs somewhere to go that’s only yours, that you check, that you control.
and PLEASE keep a savings account nobody else knows exists.
know exactly where your important documents are kept, and get your own copies of everything. your certificates, your property papers, your id. there are women out there who have the money to leave, who have somewhere to go, and still can’t move because their own passport or their own papers are sitting in a drawer that someone else controls the key to. don’t let that be you.
know your rights.
learn the actual laws that protect you. know what power you have on paper, not just what you assume you have. know what to do if you’re in an abusive household, or a relationship that’s turned violent, or a cop is trying to invent some offense just to squeeze a bribe out of you. know your rights well enough to actually use them when it matters.
protect your digital life the same way you’d protect your physical one. do not share intimate pictures of yourself with anyone, no matter how long you’ve been with them or how much you trust them right now. this has nothing to do with not trusting the person. it’s about the platform. disappearing messages still get screenshotted. instagram, snapchat, whatever app it is, none of it is as private as it looks. you genuinely have no idea who else might end up seeing it, on their end or years down the line.
you’ve probably noticed how you’ll say something out loud near your phone and an ad for that exact thing shows up an hour later. it’s not the only way you’re being watched. there are people who can do real damage with information that feels completely harmless sitting in your gallery. don’t even keep pictures like that saved on your own phone. privacy the way we like to imagine it barely exists anymore. everything leaves a trail. live like you know that. even if you didn’t, now you DO.
choose safety over being a ‘nice person’.
you were raised to be sweet. to smile at the man making you uncomfortable so he doesn’t get pissed off. to sit through a conversation you want to leave because walking away feels rude. to step into an empty elevator with someone who gives you a bad feeling because backing out feels awkward and weird.
fuck being nice about it. be rude if you have to. hurt someone’s feelings. make it awkward as hell. a stranger’s fragile ego was never worth your life.
know who you are.
most of us were never asked who we wanted to be. even if we didn’t explicitly get handed a role, we were always softly subverted into what an ideal daughter, wife or mother would be like. and we spend years perfecting those roles instead of becoming an actual person of our own. stop bending over backward for a version of you that your parents will love more, and long enough to figure out what you actually want. it will feel like betrayal the first few times. it promise you, it isn’t.
the cool girlfriend. the accommodating wife. the agreeable employee. you picked it up yourself. put it down.
i don’t blame our mothers for the version of womanhood they showed us. a lot of them survived worlds that punished a woman for leaving. they adapted, and that adapting kept them alive. but surviving something is not a parenting philosophy. don’t become good at suffering. so many women get exceptional at enduring things they should have walked away from. we praise the woman who stayed and took it. we barely notice the one who left before it got that bad. get good at spotting misery early and getting out, not at enduring it quietly.
curate who’s in your corner.
don’t isolate yourself, even when it feels easier. being alone with your own thoughts all the time isn’t the same as being at peace, and when nobody around you really knows what’s going on in your life, you end up in exactly the spot where it’s easiest for someone to control or manipulate you without anyone around to stop it. when you’re the one slowly being convinced that something wrong is normal, you need people close enough that if you forgot who you were for a while, they could hand you back to yourself without ever using it against you.
and if you want somebody like that in your life, understand you have to be exactly that for someone else too. it’s a two way street.
if the idea of being alone genuinely scares you, pay attention to that, because almost anyone can sell you their company if you’re desperate enough for it, and that’s one of the oldest traps there is.
know your own mind.
learn psychology, negotiation, power structures, mental models, compounding, learn to actually think critically instead of just reacting. go to therapy if you can. spirituality personally has worked wonders for me. if that’s not your thing, find what is. actually do the work of healing instead of performing it online. this is on you. your parents aren’t going to sit you down one day and apologize for everything, so you’re the one who has to do something about it.
pay attention to how manipulation actually sounds, because it almost never sounds like manipulation while it’s happening. it sounds like “after everything we’ve done for you.” it sounds like “if you loved us, you would.” it sounds like “good daughters don’t do that.” it sounds like “you’re breaking your mother’s heart.” the stuff that’s actually dangerous usually sounds exactly like love in the moment. you have to learn to tell the difference while you’re inside it, not just after.
trust your anger.
society loves calling angry women crazy, or bitter, or dramatic, mostly because it’s an easy way to get you to stop trusting your own feelings. feel your anger instead of shutting it down. when you’re angry, something in you is telling you a boundary just got crossed, or something happening to you is genuinely unfair, or you’re being treated badly and some part of you already knows it. stop swallowing it just to keep a room comfortable for everyone else. sit with it. listen to what it’s actually telling you. let it push you to burn down whatever needs to go.
stop being rewarded for disappearing.
pay attention to how often the people around you praise you for the wrong things. you swallow what you actually need to keep everyone else comfortable, and somebody calls you mature for it. you put up with disrespect for months, maybe years, and somebody calls you patient. you stay somewhere that’s slowly wearing you down, and somebody calls you strong. none of those compliments are going to pay your rent or your therapy bill.
be selfish about this. stop putting somebody else’s happiness above your own peace. say no without writing a whole essay to justify it afterward. “no” on its own is already a full sentence. and drop the whole “low maintenance” thing too, the idea that wanting nothing and expecting nothing makes you the fun, easy one. mostly it just makes you easy to overlook. say what you actually need out loud, and anyone worth keeping around won’t treat your basic standards like some huge demand.
pay attention to your body too. the knot in your stomach around a specific person. the exhaustion that only shows up in one house. the relief that hits you the second someone cancels on you. your body usually figures out something’s wrong long before your brain gets around to explaining it away.
think hard before you marry for security. if you do get married, do it because it doesn’t wreck the life you’ve already built for yourself, not because it fixes something you were scared to face alone. if you’re being honest with yourself and a relationship would leave you worse off financially or legally than just staying single, that’s worth sitting with before you sign anything.
stop dating potential.
you cannot build a life on who someone might become someday. you’re not a rehab center nor a life coach. you’re a person. if you have to squint to see someone’s worth, or wait years hoping they’ll grow into everything they promised you, be honest that you’re in love with an idea of them, not who they actually are right now. date the person standing in front of you today, or don’t stay. this may not always apply to potential in a monetary or career way. i’m only referring to potential in how they are as a person. their fundamental qualities. emotional intelligence. they won’t just grow into empathy over the years.
recognize weaponized incompetence.
“you’re just so much better at this than me” is not an excuse from a grown adult who can’t cook, clean, or run their own life. it’s a strategy, quiet and deliberate, to turn you into the full time manager of your own household. if he can run a career or grind out a hobby he actually cares about, he can figure out a washing machine. do not raise another grown man.
know that leaving needs no one’s permission but yours.
practice leaving. leave conversations that bore you. leave bad dates. leave jobs that use you up. leave friendships that cost more than they give. leave the group chat. leave the room. the more you practice leaving the small stuff, the easier it gets to leave the thing that could actually save your life someday.
it shouldn’t have to require a nasty fight or for you to be extremely overstimulated. one day you just decide, quietly, on your own, and that decision changes everything that comes after it.
if you get a real shot to leave, take it. for college. for a job. for a scholarship. for a city where nobody knows your last name. distance shows you who you actually are when nobody’s around to tell you who you’re supposed to be. homesickness eventually goes away, regret usually doesn’t.
take a fucking stand.
not tomorrow. not after the wedding. not after your career finally settles down. today. every year you put off choosing yourself is another year somebody else gets to decide what your life looks like.
build your own money. build your own mind. build your own name. build a life nobody can revoke with a signature or a vote at some family meeting.
become impossible to own. impossible to trap. impossible to shut up.
i’d rather die than spend my life playing someone else’s idea of a good woman.
yours furiously,
Nush.
Yes. Know who you are.
She won't need a knight, you've handed her a sword forged from your own fury and sharpened it with the kind of love that teaches a woman to walk out of a burning building while it's still just a spark. she has her exit number, the keys, and the quiet, unshakeable knowledge that no one gets to tell her who she is, She will be impossible to own because you already made her free.