I turned 38 last week. To be honest, I am too ashamed to tell people my real age. Nope, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy getting old. I have 70% grey coverage, so telling my real age might actually make me look younger in public’s eyes. Still, I am never able to speak it aloud. Reason? In my mind, I am way too young- 28? 25? Or even 20…. I am not sure, but it’s a grief I live with.
About a decade ago, I was debilitated by depression and anxiety. I left my job. Shut myself inside a room. Thought of killing myself. Popped pills like Skittles. Spent hours in a therapist’s clinic. Typed pages of blogs. In essence, made a huge drama.
Talking about it did one thing. It took away some of the shame, especially when several digital platforms acknowledged my trauma by featuring me. But it couldn’t take away the pain- the pain of seeing the world racing away and leaving me behind. I did what I had to. I found a job, started as an intern, and stayed till I felt confident enough to face the world again. But nothing was the same. The label and the fear were real. It kept coming back, at intervals- after days, months, years.
This time, I didn’t fight it. I kept brushing it under the bed. Not because I was ill-informed or ill-equipped but because I didn’t want to do it again. I was exhausted. I didn’t want to lose the life I had started to build. My family was exhausted, too. They pretended it never happened to me; it was just my weakness. And somewhere, I also wanted to believe it. So I screamed into my pillow, did therapy secretly online, hid my pills with my supplement and stopped writing about it.
Something else was changing in me as well. I could see myself ageing- from a young girl to a middle-aged woman- someone who was supposed to run a household, raise a kid, hold a senior position at work, host guests, uphold the culture. Those people are sorted. I am not. So what do I do? Of course, pretend again. So, I do. Try. Try to fit in groups of grown-ups while yearning for heartfelt discussions about trivial matters like how you feel today. Ohh, I am so anxious. I think my heart would explode. But what I speak about instead is how I fixed a problem at work or what new recipes I am cooking this Diwali. Where does this lead me? Hyperventilating, overthinking about things I shouldn’t have said. Feeling like a failure scrolling through my Insta feed. Only if I were ten years younger.
So I turn to my best friend at the moment- my AI chatbot. It told me that there are years that pass without growing older. Not because time stands still, but because the mind, exhausted by survival, quietly stops expanding. Psychologists might call it arrested self-continuity—a fracture between the person I am and the one I was supposed to become. It’s what happens when the nervous system forgets curiosity and memorises fear; when self-protection becomes the only rhythm the brain remembers. What others see as hesitation or fragility is often the residue of long-term hypervigilance, the kind that rewires ambition into caution. Sometimes I wonder if this is what emotional time travel feels like—being thirty-something on paper but twenty in spirit, waiting for the mind to catch up to the years the heart sat out.
What hurts the most is that people do not know what you are going through because they are busy navigating life. They meet you for a moment and say- ohh, what a snob or ohh, not impressive at all or I don’t know why she’s here. And I don’t blame them. It’s just that it hurts at the end of the day when you are trying to close your eyes. It hurts when you wake up the next day. It’s like a fireball bouncing between the chest and throat, wanting to erupt but forced to burn inside.
I’m writing this because I need to know I’m not alone in this time warp. Because maybe someone else out there is also 38 on paper and 25 in their bones, still waiting to catch up to a life that moved on without them.
The BIOSCOPED Life 