Welcoming a face — and life — worn out by abundant joy — “Here comes her fake smile,” my parents would tease when it was time for picture-taking. They were talking about me. As a little girl then, I didn’t understand what they meant. As far as I knew, I was smiling the way all the adults did: with my mouth stretched wide…

Three things to help manage your Impostor Syndrome — Lately, I’ve been meeting my friends’ inner impostors. “I can’t help but wonder if I deserve this job at all,” impostor Nat confessed. As an aviation graduate, she never thought she’d find herself in media or PR. …

I look forward to peaking in my 50s — “I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” other writers would say. I always have mixed feelings when I hear this. One part of me is genuinely awed by their luck, by that rare sense of certainty over what one wants or is meant to do in life. The other part…

A life lesson from writing personal essays — Back when I was a dancer, the part I liked the least was learning new choreography. Of course, learning anything new always comes with some level of discomfort, but I think it’s telling that I always wished I could just skip it. (Obviously — and to my dismay — that’s…

It’s not every day you get excited by a job interview question — A former office crush once told me that I should actively go on job interviews, even if I have no plans on leaving my job. Apparently, it would be a good exercise. …

It is time to snap out of it — Do you sometimes tend to demand too much from your speck of a human self? Come, let us knock some sense into you. And me. (If you’re special and free from excessive self-expectation and thus probably not from this world, then k, congrats! we hate you! bye!) Now I know…

On realizing that steadiness is not a prerequisite to security — On our trip to New York, my friend and I decided to take a class in a Broadway dance studio — a heels class, my first ever. And the teacher said something during the warm-up that struck me. She had us stand with our feet together, do a relevé (the…

The four support system archetypes — If you’ve ever watched a cheerleading stunt, I can bet my dog’s life that your eyes were glued to the girl up in the air. This girl is called the flyer. And the people lifting her are called bases. Which of the two roles is more impressive? Visually, the answer…

And eleven other learnings that have made my life feel significantly richer — I believe that the best way to crystallize a nascent realization is to articulate it. Four years ago, I began this birthday tradition where I share twelve things that describe Ria at *insert age here* (Here’s Ria at 28, 27, 25 (26 was the year the pandemic started, so I’d…