Childhood Memories: Finding Your Strengths

I’ve been trying to trace where this all began.

Not the paintings but the need to make sense of things.

One of my earliest memories is of my parents arguing about money. I must have been around five. I didn’t understand what was being said, only the weight of it. The kind that sits in your chest before you have the language to describe it.

A little time later, or at least that’s how it feels in memory, we were leaving England. Our home was being sold. I remember a woman coming to see the house with her child. I remember feeling something unfamiliar then, jealousy, maybe. Not of the child, but of the idea that someone else could live inside what I thought was ours.

Soon after, we arrived in Delhi. Everything felt louder. Less certain. As though life had been reset without asking us first.

My father began rebuilding his clothing business. My mother started teaching theatre to children. There was no clear plan, only movement. Looking back, I think that was my first real exposure to creation not as expression, but as survival.

Growing up in that environment, stability became the ultimate goal. It was spoken about like a destination that, once reached, would quiet everything else.

So I tried to move toward it.

School, however, didn’t come easily to me. I struggled in ways I couldn’t fully articulate. At one point, my teachers suggested I might be dyslexic. I remember resisting the idea completely. Not because I understood it, but because of what I thought it meant.

To me, it felt like a label that placed me outside the world I was trying so hard to belong to.

A world that seemed to reward clarity, precision, and correctness, things I couldn’t consistently access.

My mother didn’t give up. She stayed with me through it. We worked through the basics, slowly, repeatedly. Enough to get by.

And that became a pattern, Getting by.

Not quite failing, but never fully arriving either. In academics, in friendships, in the way I saw myself.

“I learned to hide my weaknesses. But in doing so, I never really discovered my strengths either.”

What surrounded me, however, was a constant reminder of what success was supposed to look like.

In India, it was clear, stability, profession, structure. A life that made sense on paper. Anything outside of that felt uncertain, almost irresponsible. Creativity wasn’t seen as a path. It was seen as a risk.

Something you did on the side, if at all.

I remember being drawn to expression early on. Acting, creating, imagining things beyond what was in front of me. But those instincts didn’t always have space to exist fully.

They were questioned.

Sometimes dismissed.

Sometimes made to feel smaller than they were.

So I did what many of us do.

I moved in the direction that made sense.

Not because it felt right but because it felt expected.

And for a while, that was enough.

Or at least, it looked like it was.

But somewhere underneath all of that, something stayed.

Not loud enough to interrupt.

Not clear enough to follow.

Just… present.

Waiting, maybe.

I didn’t fully understand it then. I’m not sure I completely do now. But looking back, it doesn’t feel like I was lost. It feels like I was moving through things without yet knowing what I was holding onto.

The instability.

The expectation.

The resistance.

None of it really left.

It just settled somewhere quieter.

Not as clarity

but as something that stayed,

even when I didn’t know I needed it.