I have low vision. But this story isn't really about that. This morning my dad started telling stories about me as a kid.
One — I once painted my friend's entire house without him ever asking. Just decided it needed painting. So I painted it. His mom cried. We still don't know if it was happy or not. Two — I splashed a full bottle of cold water on a police officer. Not by accident. He looked hot. I was being helpful. Three — I slapped someone seven years older than me because I thought he was hitting my brother. I was probably half his size. He was so shocked he just — walked away. I think I scared him more than hurt him. We were all in the car. Everyone was laughing. My dad was laughing the hardest — the way parents laugh at stories they probably should have been more worried about at the time. And then my bhabhi — barely a few months in this family, still figuring out which shelf the glasses go on — said something so casually it almost didn't land. "He's the same, na. Same as he is now." The car went quiet for half a second. Then everyone agreed. Like it was obvious. And I just sat there by the window — watching the road I couldn't fully see — thinking about how strange it is to be known. Because she has no idea how hard that is to hear. In the best possible way. She joined this family after the storm had passed. She came in when the house was already clean — she never saw what the floor looked like when everything broke. She never saw the version of me that went missing for a while. The one that got quieter. That stopped painting houses uninvited. That learned to ask for permission before taking up space. That flinched a little — just a little — before laughing too loud in a room full of people who could see things he couldn't. My sight was changing. And something else was changing with it — something harder to name. When your body changes, your relationship with yourself changes too. Nobody prepares you for that part. There's no pamphlet. No one sits you down and says — by the way, you might lose yourself a little. Don't panic. You'll find your way back. The feeling of being at home in yourself — that went somewhere for a while. I looked for it in all the wrong places. Performed okayness so well I almost forgot what the real thing felt like. Smiled at the right moments. Said the right things. Became very good at being fine. And then slowly — without any single moment I can point to — like a colour returning to something that had faded — Rishu came back. Rishu is what people who love me call me. He went somewhere for a while. And the people who stayed through the quiet — the ones who kept telling the stories, who kept laughing at the memories, who never stopped seeing the kid who painted houses and splashed police officers — they knew he would come back. They just waited. Not the same. Not exactly. The paint became words. The cold water became wit. The slap became a sharp tongue and a quicker mind. The fearlessness — that stayed. That never actually left. It was just waiting for me to stop apologising for it. My bhabhi saw none of the middle. She arrived at the part of the story where Rishu was already back — fully, loudly, completely himself — and she looked at him and saw the kid from the stories like they were the same person. Because they are. Maybe that's the most honest thing — We spend so much time measuring the distance between who we were and who we became. Building timelines. Marking before and after. Trying to explain the gap to people who weren't there. But sometimes someone walks in fresh — someone who only knows the current chapter — and sees no gap at all. Just you. Continuous. Uninterrupted. Whole. The car kept moving this morning. My dad kept laughing. My bhabhi had already moved on to asking about lunch. And I just sat there quietly thinking — Rishu was always going to come back. He just needed to remember that taking up space was never something he needed permission for. Some people paint houses without being asked. That was always going to be him. — If this resonates, I share more of these stories on Instagram: @unscripted_rishabh_ Rishabh Gupta Raipur, Chhattisgarh -- Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list.. Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AccessIndia" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/accessindia.org.in/d/msgid/accessindia/CAOukPW_t2aRnrW_rVkZBFtJ2pco2iCXCE4n5GXB4PZyKbybX7Q%40mail.gmail.com.
