Who is your therapy friend? 💕

Takeover #2: Yashika Doshi

and

Nov 07, 2021

In case you missed the announcement or are new here, I will be sending 2 emails a month until March 2022. One will be my regular newsletter and the other will be a creator takeover. This is our second takeover, I hope you enjoy it!

About the writer: Yashika is an economist by profession and a writer by passion, currently based out of the UK. She believes that the smallest act of kindness takes one a long way and that magic does exist, in falling stars as well as in the calmness one feels by being around loved ones. Yashika is the literary columnist at The Remnant Archive.

Dearest reader,

I would like to begin this letter with thanking Soumya for this opportunity, who was kind enough to give me a small space in her community of readers, and by saying how much I am looking forward to interacting with you all. ‘The Human Condition’ Takeover Series will always be special to me, as are Soumya’s newsletters.

But before I get ahead of myself, a little about me – I am an Economics major, and a writer by passion. Yes, I think that this way of introducing oneself is a tad bit boring too!

So let me try again, I am someone who can be found curled up near a window, lost in a book on a rainy day.

I started writing because to me, it felt like coming home and exploring a different world of stories at the same time. Some of my other favorite things include handwritten letters, the smell of old books, baby animal GIFs and comfortable silences. Tell me some of yours as well?

Life is a blur nowadays. But still it can be measured in slots of time - 27 new poems written, 10 new shows watched, 5 presentations made, 2 friendships forgotten, 1 jar of coffee beans is empty etc. Tick, tick, tick, tick and tick. It seems that so much has changed throughout all these years, but somehow so little matters.

Last month, I shifted to a whole new country to finish my masters’ program. It’ll be apt to say that I left my whole world behind to find a new one, and in that, to maybe find myself again.

“Why this urge to change countries?”, I kept asking myself, while I was struggling to come to a conclusion. Since then, every day that I wake up here, I’m in a dilemma of happiness, anxiety, excitement and long distance syndrome.

It's just like that strange feeling you get when you know that you'll not only miss the people who make up that place and the beauty of the place itself, but more so, you'll miss the person you are in that place, carefree, tender. And days when you can't find a way back to yourself, your closest friends will remind you.

A while back, I read something by Jonny Sun (‘Goodbye, Again’) where Sun talks about something called ‘therapy friends’. He says that ‘therapy friends’ are people you talk to or confide in without any hesitation because they are never too close to your life.

These are the people who are not a part of any of your friend circles, or family, or any other group. So they are automatically distanced from all your so-called situations. This is why it is super-easy to pour your heart out to them. You know… safe vault, fresh perspective, all of that. Is that as relatable to you as it is to me?

Back to happier times, tell me about those times when you’ve been at your lowest and the most unexpected person/people has/have lifted your spirits up?