The Weight We Carry

This collection began as a series of blog posts.

It became, in the writing, something more: fifteen pieces — essays, short stories, and one narrative that sits between the two — that together make the argument that each piece alone could only approach. That the things we carry in private are the things that connect us most deeply to each other. That the weight of a human life, fully lived, is not a burden to be minimised. It is evidence of having been here.

The pieces are arranged in three acts. Act I: The Mask asks what we hide and why. Act II: The Damage asks what that hiding costs. Act III: The Return asks the only question that remains: what do we do now?

Each act contains essays and stories. The essays speak directly. The stories speak obliquely. They are designed to be read together — the essay opens the room, the story moves you further inside it.

The characters are fictional. The conditions they inhabit are not.

Read it in order, if you can. The pieces were written to accumulate — each one adding to the weight of what came before, so that by the time you reach the end, you are carrying something. Something you may not have had words for before you began.

That is the intention. That has always been the intention.

— Dr. Sonia Sharma

“The mask, worn long enough, stops feeling like a mask. It starts feeling like your actual face.”

— Dr Sonia Sharma

Every morning, millions of people stand in front of a mirror and put on a face that has nothing to do with what happened the night before.

The argument that ended at midnight. The child who cried until three. The diagnosis they haven't told anyone about yet. The marriage that has been, for some months now, conducting itself in a language of logistics — school pickups, grocery lists, whose turn it is to call the plumber — because the language of feeling has quietly, without announcement, gone out of use.

They look at the mirror. They arrange their face. And they go.

I did this for twenty-three years.

As a professional, my face at work was a specific instrument. Calibrated. Reassuring. Precise. Patients needed to believe I was in complete control of what I was doing to them — and I was, professionally. But there were days when I walked into that clinic carrying something so heavy that the act of setting it down at the door felt like physical labour. And nobody, not a single patient, ever knew. Because that is what professionals do. We perform competence so consistently that eventually, we forget it is a performance.

What I didn’t understand then — what I understand now, having spent years inside the heads of the characters I’ve created — is what that performance costs. Not visibly. Not immediately. But over time, in the way that a building settles: slowly, imperceptibly, and then all at once with a crack you didn’t see coming.

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Psychology has a name for this split. It is called surface acting — the deliberate management of outward expression while the internal emotional state remains unchanged. Research consistently shows that surface acting is significantly more exhausting than deep acting, which is when we actually shift our internal state to match the role we’re playing. The irony is that most of us don’t deep act. We don’t transform ourselves. We simply suppress ourselves, hour after hour, day after day, and call the suppression professionalism.

But I am not here to cite research. I am here to talk about something I’ve observed, in patients, in people I’ve loved, in characters that started as fiction and ended up feeling uncomfortably real: the cost of the mask is not paid at work. It is paid at home.

This is the part that nobody talks about.

We put on our best faces for strangers. To colleagues. To clients. To the woman at the reception desk, we’ll never see again. And we come home and give whatever is left to the people who are supposed to matter most. The people who have seen us without the mask — and who, over time, begin to feel the absence of any face at all. The partner who stopped asking how your day was because the answer was always fine.The children who learned not to need too much of you in the evenings because evenings were when you disappeared into the couch, into the phone, into the particular exhaustion that has no name because nobody has given us the permission to name it.

I’ve been told this is not a problem. That this is simply adulthood. That, this is how life works. And, for years, I told the same to my younger cousins and lately to my children till I realised, all the while we were broadcasting wrong information, wrong advice and carrying on wrong precedents which needed to be tinkered with. 

So, I disagree, starting now. I think it is one of the quietest crises of our time, and I think we have collectively agreed not to look at it directly because looking at it would require us to admit something uncomfortable: that we have, in our relentless effort to function - Stopped living.

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There is a specific kind of loneliness that lives inside full houses.

It is not the loneliness of the single person eating alone, which at least has the dignity of being legible, of being something you can point to and say: this is what it is. 

It is the loneliness of the person sitting at a dinner table surrounded by their own family, who feels, if they are honest — and most of us are only honest at three in the morning when the house is quiet, and there is nobody left to perform for — entirely unseen.

Because the mask doesn’t just hide us from the world. Over time, it hides us from ourselves. The best example of it if I can quote from a movie, is a scene from a Hindi movie titled Bala. The most iconic scene that I found was when you see Ayushman Khurana looking into his bathroom mirror, top of which is covered so that even in his most private moment, in his isolation too, he didn’t want to look at his bald head. We all have that bald spot on us that we refuse to see day after day.

When you spend long enough managing your expression, suppressing your reactions, archiving your authentic responses away for later — and later never comes — you begin to lose access to what you actually feel. You know what you are supposed to feel. You know what is appropriate to feel. But the raw, inconvenient, often irrational thing that is actually happening underneath? You’ve buried it so efficiently that you’d need an excavation to find it again.

This is what I mean when I say that the professional mask has a domestic cost. It is not just that we bring our tiredness home. It is that we bring our disconnection home. Our numbness. Our inability to be fully present in the one place where presence is most needed.

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I started writing fiction because I needed to go somewhere I couldn’t go in my professional life.

In fiction, you cannot manage your expression. The characters will not allow it. They insist on feeling things completely, on being contradictory and difficult and raw in ways that would be entirely inappropriate in a dental clinic. Writing them forced me to remember that I, too, had access to that register — that underneath all those years of professional surface acting, the person who felt things intensely and thought about them obsessively had not gone anywhere. She had simply been waiting, quietly, with the patience of someone who has learned that her time will come eventually.

When she came back — and she came back through writing, through the first stumbling pages of Afterlife, through Anna’s grief and her hunger and her slow, difficult return to herself — it was not a comfortable experience. Uncovering yourself after a long suppression is not joyful. It is disorienting. It is a little like coming out of a dark room into bright light: the first response is not relief, it is pain.

But on the other side of the pain is something I did not expect. Not happiness, exactly. Something better than happiness. Presence.

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I am not suggesting that we tear off our masks and weep publicly at our desks. That is not what I mean. The professional self is not a false self — it is a real part of who we are, and it matters.

What I am suggesting is this: that we find, somewhere in the architecture of our days, a space where the mask comes off. Not forever. Not even for long. But enough that the person underneath it can breathe, can be witnessed, can remember that they are more than the role they play between nine and six.

For me, that space is the page. For you, it might be something else entirely. The point is not the form. The point is the practice of returning to yourself — deliberately, regularly, before the distance between you and yourself becomes so vast that you have forgotten the way back.

Because the mask, worn long enough, stops feeling like a mask. It starts feeling like your actual face.

And that is the most dangerous moment. Not when you put it on. But when you forget you’re wearing it.

Short Story 

She had the kind of marriage everyone photographed.

Not in the intrusive way, not strangers stopping them on the street, but at every gathering there was always someone — a cousin, a colleague, a woman from the building next door who hardly knew them — who would look at Priya and Rahul standing together at a party and take out their phone. They were, objectively, a beautiful couple. Tall and well-dressed and seemingly in possession of a private warmth between them. They laughed at the right moments. They touched each other’s arms. He brought her a drink without being asked. She finished his sentences in the way that seems, from the outside, like intimacy.

This was Priya’s greatest achievement, and she thought about it sometimes with a pride that she immediately felt ashamed of.

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It had started — she would not be able to tell you exactly when, if you asked her — as a small, manageable thing. A slight withholding. Not a lie, not exactly. More of an editing. The things she didn’t say because saying them would require explaining, and explaining would require revisiting, and revisiting was a country she’d decided not to hold a visa to anymore.

She stopped telling Rahul when she felt afraid. This was the first thing to go. 

She had always been afraid of things — of failure, of being insufficient, of the specific terror of having wanted something very much and watching it slip from her reach — and early in their marriage she had told him about this, curled into him at night with the words coming out of her like water from a pressure release valve. He had listened. He had said the right things. But over time she began to notice that the fear did not diminish by being shared — if anything, it gained a certain weight from being witnessed. Her personal failures, she assumed, felt like a reflection on her parents, who sometimes might have been instrumental in instilling those fears or at the other, didn’t know how to address them. And so she stopped sharing it, initially out of being ashamed and later as an act of indifference and finally learned to move through it alone, and called this progress.

To be fair to Rahul, when she didn’t talk about it, he strangely felt satisfied by the fact that she’d probably conquered her fears and felt safe with him. No one broached the topic because the topic was controversial with no easy answers. And when life is moving smoothly without any apparent consequences, people settle into the status quo.

And about his fears. Well – who talks about men having fears or of them being afraid of anything? At least, the men don’t and especially to their wives. 

Then she stopped telling him when she was unhappy. 

This was easier to justify. What was the point, she reasoned, of manufacturing conflict from moods? Unhappiness was the weather. It passed. Why make it architecture? 

Because, for Rahul, like most men, unhappiness wasn’t a state of mind. It was anger. It meant excessive drinking and shouting at people for no apparent fault of theirs. It meant saying mean things that hurt to the core, to the person it has been said to and even to him, when he got back to his senses. 

So Priya leaned to buy silence for the cost of an exaggerated reaction.

Then she stopped telling him when she was happy, because somewhere along the way she had trained herself out of the spontaneous expression of anything, and now even joy had to be assessed before it was communicated, run through a filter of is this appropriate, is this the right moment, will this require a conversation I don’t have the energy for — and by the time it cleared the filter it had lost most of its heat. 

This was the biggest casualty of the broken communication, which neither of them knew at that time was going to cost them dearly going forward in their relationship.

So, what remained was a fluency in performance. She was very good at the marriage, for all of four years she was married. She just wasn’t sure she was in it anymore and it went on uninterrupted.

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It happened on a Tuesday in November, the kind of Tuesday that has no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. She was at the dinner table, and Rahul was telling her something about his office — a problem with a colleague, a meeting that had gone sideways — and she was looking at him with the expression she had perfected over fourteen years now, the expression that communicated attention and interest and warmth, and she opened her mouth to respond.

Nothing came out.

Not a pause. Not a silence while she collected her thoughts. Simply nothing, as though the mechanism responsible for producing an appropriate response had, without warning or fanfare, stopped working. She sat there with her mouth open and the words simply not arriving, and for one terrible, clarifying moment, she understood that she had been translating for so long — translating her real responses into acceptable ones, her actual feelings into manageable ones — that she had lost access to the original language.

“Priya?”

She closed her mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was just — what were you saying?”

And he said it again, and she responded, and they finished dinner, and she cleared up the kitchen, and he watched something on his phone, and they went to sleep. And from the outside, from the vantage point of anyone who happened to be watching, it looked exactly like a marriage.

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She began, after that Tuesday, to pay attention in a different way.

She noticed that she could not remember the last time she had said something to Rahul that she had not, in some part of her mind, rehearsed. She noticed that the conversations they had were efficient. Functional. They covered the necessary ground — the children, the finances, the social calendar, the small logistics of a shared life — and moved on. She noticed that she had not cried in front of him in four years. Not because nothing had moved her to tears — things had moved her to tears, fairly regularly of late. She had found a refuge for them in the shower, in the car, once inexplicably in the stationery aisle of a supermarket when she came across a brand of water colours her aunt Smita who was no more, had bought her when her mother had refused to buy her as a child because they were messy— but because crying required an explanation, and the explanation would open a conversation, and the conversation would require her to articulate something she had not yet found words for, and the attempt to articulate it would make it real.

She was not ready for it to be real.

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It was her mother who finally named it, in the careless, direct way that mothers have of saying the one thing you’ve been most carefully not saying to yourself.

They were sitting on the veranda of her parents’ house on a Sunday afternoon, the children napping inside, and her mother was looking at her with the particular expression — eyes slightly narrowed, mouth neither smiling nor not smiling — that Priya had been the subject of for as long as she could remember.

“You look tired,” her mother said.

“I am tired,” Priya said. “The children—”

“Not that tired,” her mother said. “The other kind.”

Priya looked at her hands.

“Is everything all right with Rahul?”

“Yes,” she said. And then, because she was in her mother’s house and the light was falling a certain way and she was suddenly and completely exhausted from the effort of the answer she had just given: “I don’t know.”

Her mother was quiet for a long moment.

“Do you still talk to each other?”

“Of course we do,” Priya said. “We talk all the time.”

Her mother looked at her with the patience of a woman who has been married for forty-two years. “That’s not what I asked.”

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She drove home in the early evening, the children asleep in the back seat, and she thought about what her mother had asked.

Do you still talk to each other?

Not: do you speak. Not: do you communicate the necessary information? But: do you talk — in the way that talking used to feel, in the early years, like the best possible use of two people’s time. In the way that they had once sat in a car very similar to this one and talked for six hours straight without noticing the time, without running out of things to say, without the careful management of what was appropriate to feel.

She thought: when did I stop being a person and become a photograph?

The streetlights were coming on. In the back seat, her younger daughter shifted in her sleep and made a small sound of comfort, settling back into herself. Priya watched her in the rearview mirror — the complete, uncalculated abandon of a child sleeping — and felt something move in her chest that she hadn’t felt in a very long time.

She didn’t name it. Not yet.

But she drove home, and she put the children to bed, and she sat down at the kitchen table across from Rahul, and for the first time in longer than she could honestly remember, she said something unrehearsed.

“I think we need to talk. Not about anything specific. Just — I think we’ve forgotten how.”

Rahul put down his phone. He looked at her for a long moment.

“I know,” he said. He said it quietly. Without surprise. With the tone of a man who had known this for some time and had been, in his own way, waiting for her to arrive at it.

“When did it happen?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Slowly. And then all at once.”

The kitchen was very quiet. The children were asleep. There was no performance to give, no cousin with a camera at the door.

It was not, by any measure, a beautiful moment.

But it was the most real thing that had happened between them in years. And in the morning, when she tried to find the word for what it had felt like to sit there with all the masks off, neither of them quite knowing what to do with their actual faces — she found, to her own surprise, that the word she kept coming back to was relief.

THE END