In our early years, life arrives already narrated.
Love looks a certain way. Stability looks a certain way. Success too.
We inherit these ideas quietly through family conversations, cultural norms, what is praised, what is tolerated and what is never spoken about. No one tells you that most of what you believe in your twenties isn’t choice; it’s conditioning wearing confidence.
I believed I was choosing my life.
Much later, I realised I was complying with it.
I never imagined my life unfolding the way it did, though in hindsight, it followed a logic that made sense for someone who didn’t yet know herself. My early adult years were shaped less by desire and more by duty by the fear of disappointing others and the deeper fear of being alone without approval.
I grew up in Singapore, shaped by Indian cultural expectations that prioritised obedience over self-expression. Rules were clear; explanations were not. Emotions were managed quietly, often internally. Independence existed but within invisible boundaries. I didn’t question this growing up it was simply the air we breathed. And when you grow up learning how to behave before learning how to feel, you become very good at adjusting to situations that don’t serve you.
I met my first husband when I was 17. By 21, we were married. From the outside, it looked like decisiveness. From the inside, it was momentum. At that age, everything feels urgent love, belonging, adulthood. You confuse intensity with certainty. You assume discomfort is normal, that doubt is something mature people learn to silence.
On the day of my wedding, I knew I wasn’t happy.
That sentence took years to say out loud. Not because it wasn’t true, but because it felt disloyal to my family, to the effort that had gone into the wedding, to the version of myself that had already said yes. I didn’t have the courage to speak up. And at 21, the child in me didn’t yet have the language to understand why my body was resisting what my mind had already agreed to. The marriage was physically abusive and manipulative. What’s difficult to admit especially to myself is that I knew something was wrong before we got married. But knowing and acting are very different skills. One requires awareness; the other requires self-trust. I had the first. I did not yet have the second.
There were cultural layers to this decision. He was Sikh; I am Hindu. My father knew he wasn’t right for me. My parents were caught between concern and fear: fear that if they said no, I would rebel harder, choose more recklessly, hurt myself further. They didn’t know how to protect me without controlling me. I don’t blame them. They did what they knew. But I was already wired to equate resistance with danger and compliance with safety.
The marriage lasted a year.
It ended publicly. Violently. One night, he dragged me out of a nightclub on the street while passers-by watched. No one intervened. That moment marked me more than the marriage itself. It taught me something early and cruel: pain can happen in full view, and still be invisible. After that, something hardened in me. A quiet resentment toward men settled in not loud enough to be called anger, but persistent enough to shape how close I allowed anyone to come.
That was my first experience of intimacy.
It set a template I didn’t yet know how to dismantle.
For a few years afterward, I lived in reaction. I survived, I functioned, I moved on. People often assume survival looks dramatic, but more often it looks ordinary going to work, showing up, smiling when expected. Inside, I was wary, closed and emotionally untethered. I didn’t trust men, but more importantly, I didn’t trust my own judgment.
By the time the second relationship entered my life, I believed I had learned my lesson. I met him at 24, through a close friend. He was steady. Kind. Dependable. We married when I was 27. This time, there was no chaos, no violence. My parents were relieved. He earned well. He was a “good person.” On paper, it made sense.
I thought safety was love.
What I didn’t realise then was that I had swung from one extreme to another choosing stability not because it aligned with who I was, but because I was afraid of repeating pain. I was still making decisions based on avoidance, not self-knowledge. The inner child in me still unheard, still unexamined was now quiet but present, shaping choices from the background.
By 33, that marriage ended too.
This ending was quieter. No scandal. No visible rupture. Just the slow erosion that happens when two people are living parallel lives without knowing how to meet in the middle. I stayed longer than I should have, not because I believed in the relationship but because I didn’t want to disappoint my family again. I had mistaken endurance for commitment. And when it finally ended, people struggled to understand why.
What they didn’t see was that through all of this, I still hadn’t figured out who I was.
Every major decision had been filtered through external approval of family, culture and expectations. I had never learned how to locate my own authority. When things fell apart, I didn’t grieve just the relationship; I grieved the version of myself that had hoped this time I’d gotten it right.
Lost doesn’t always look lost.
Sometimes it looks functional.
My inner world was changing faster than I could keep up with. The beliefs I had grown up with no longer held, but I hadn’t yet replaced them with anything solid. When reality shifts that quickly, it becomes hard to tell what’s true. I began avoiding stillness. Avoiding reflection. Avoiding questions I didn’t know how to answer.
And like many people in that space, I reached for intoxicants. Not just substances, but anything that softened the edges like distraction, movement, noise, escape. It wasn’t recklessness; it was self-preservation, clumsy and imperfect. I didn’t want to feel how unmoored I was.
The patterns repeated because I hadn’t yet changed the framework.
The people I spoke to were well-meaning, but often just as confused in their own lives. Advice has limits when it comes from unresolved places. Friends did their best, but many were unavailable not out of malice but because their lives had moved into different containers.
There’s a quiet social truth no one prepares you for: when your marriage ends, your social world often rearranges itself without explanation.Friendships that once felt stable begin to feel conditional. Have you noticed how many social circles are built around couples? Brunches, holidays, shared routines. And then one day, you’re no longer included. Not because you’ve done something wrong, but because your presence disrupts the symmetry.
People don’t want to interfere. Or they form conclusions in silence. Or your pain simply doesn’t fit neatly into their lives anymore.
I don’t say this with bitterness. Today, it’s almost laughable. Because you eventually see that this too is an illusion, the idea that community is permanent by default. Even couples are replaceable if relationships aren’t actively tended to. Replacement isn’t just professional; it’s personal. And that realisation forces an uncomfortable question:
If belonging is conditional, what does it actually rest on?
Family, of course, is the first ecosystem we know. They are often still there at the end, even without boundaries, without language, with all their complications intact. A different dynamic entirely. Not always easy. Not always safe. But present.
And yet, even within family, I hadn’t learned how to be myself. I had learned how to be acceptable.
The truth is, the inner child in me had never been explored. She had adapted early learning when to speak, when to stay quiet, when to comply, when to endure. She was resourceful, resilient and deeply misunderstood. I didn’t yet know how much of my adult life had been shaped by her need for safety rather than fulfillment.
At this stage of my life, I wasn’t healing.
I was coping.
I hadn’t yet learned how to sit with discomfort without escaping it. I hadn’t learned how to listen inwardly. I hadn’t learned how to distinguish between fear and intuition. All I knew was that the structures I had relied on marriage, approval, social belonging had fallen away. And without them, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be.
But something subtle had begun.
Not clarity. Not peace.
Just awareness.
A sense that the life I had entered had been built without a map that belonged to me. And that continuing the same way would only lead to quieter forms of the same pain. I didn’t yet know what healing would look like. I didn’t even know what questions to ask.
But I knew one thing:
The old way of living no longer worked.
And while I couldn’t yet name it, this was the beginning not of fixing, but of listening. Not of answers, but of learning how to stay present long enough to hear what had been buried.
That understanding didn’t arrive in my twenties.
Or even immediately in my thirties.
But it started here.
To be continued……
Dr Sadhna Upadhya is founder of Shunya and co-founder of Spaceholder, with a professional doctorate in healthcare management, focusing on movement, mind–body awareness and emotional wellbeing in midlife. Contact her at contact@shunyaapp.com and quote PRIMEMIDLIFE.
