When I was a boy and something was wrong inside me, I never had to say it.

My parents would read it off my face at dinner. The way I ate. The way I sat. Next meal, my favorite food would appear on my plate. That was the whole conversation. Nobody said a word. The thing inside my heart got resolved with rice and love.

Even their fights worked like that. They would shout at each other, and in five minutes it was over, resolved with a cute smile. I grew up watching two innocent, good-hearted people love each other in a language with almost no words in it.

That was my world. And here is the part I have never written before. The single child part. Until 22, it was the only world that counted.

I am a single child. People assume a single child gets whatever he wants. My parents said no. Lovingly, firmly, no. Friends existed at school, but bringing them home meant so many questions that most of the time they did not come. Outside the family, people were Hi and bye. The numbers were saved. The chats were empty. I am saying the truth. One exception, and I will come back to him. I did not know the word for it then. It was lonely.

This Sunday a podcast about self growth made me turn around and look at the whole road. What I saw was this.

Somewhere out there, other kids were getting lessons I never got. How to talk to a stranger. How to keep a friend. How to trust someone outside your bloodlines. What love and feelings mean, what a body means, nobody was going to teach me any of it. Not their fault. Nobody had taught my parents either.

So everything most people just absorbed, from playgrounds, hostels, and college corridors, I learned on purpose. As an adult. One skill at a time, the way other people learn Excel.

My first job pushed me out of the room. I made myself go and talk to people. It sounds small. It was the hardest thing I had done. Coming out of a comfort zone is easy to say in English. Living it is different.

Then ISDM, my development management school, gave me roommates. The first roommates of my life. A man learning to share a room, a shelf, a joke, at an age when others had done it for a decade. That room became 404, the room that turned into my people. The first friendships I built myself were born there, years late.

Even this newsletter is a learned skill. Writing was my bridge to people, a shy person's way of talking to many at once. It worked. Communities came. Friends came.

Then, at one point in my course, I stopped talking to people for a while. On purpose. I went quiet to understand who I am.

Till 22, the silence was given to me. This time I picked it up myself. Same silence, opposite direction. That difference is the whole growth.

This is not a complaint against my parents. I wrote last month that both things can be true. Here is where I first learned it. Their no kept me safe and it kept me small, and both were right. What they gave me instead of the world was a heart that reads faces. Everything I know about care started at that dinner table, where the right food appeared without a word.

They gave me the method. The world outside, I had to learn alone. That is what self growth means in my life. Not podcasts and habits. Survival.

Am I done? No. Connecting with people comes easily to me now. Maintaining the relationship is what I am still learning. Some friendships I have dropped without meaning to, and I am learning to go back.

But today I can say this much honestly. I am ready to keep the people I find. Today. That is enough.

What most people picked up without noticing, I learned on purpose. That is exactly why I try not to take a friendship for granted. And if it all came to you easily, that is worth a look too. The things you never had to notice are the easiest to forget you are holding.

Be kind, help people, trust muruga.

Nami

I said the chats were empty, with one exception. Here he is. Karthi, from my school days. Every time I go back to my native place, we meet, and it is like no time passed. I did not know how to keep a friend. He made it easy. Maybe that is where keeping starts, with the one who kept you.

P.S. If this letter felt close, I write between letters on LinkedIn too. My last three posts: