Someday, I want hobbies that never have to become a side hustle
I miss learning things nobody is waiting on. A book I read just because the first page hooked me, a film I argue about afterward, a recipe I ruin twice before it works, a language I speak badly in public and laugh at myself for trying.
I still want to be ambitious in life. I also want a part of me that stays amateur in the best sense: curious, a little undignified, not asking whether it looks good on a profile. Someday I want whole stretches of time that belong only to that version of me.
Someday, I want to live in Mumbai instead of only rushing through it
I grew up around this city and it still surprises me: the noise, the light after monsoon rain, how many human stories fit on one train. Too often I move through it on autopilot, already somewhere else in my head.
I'd like slower evenings: looking up when I walk, calling someone without half my brain on a screen, going to bed tired because I actually showed up for the day, not because I burned out staring at one.
I don't need a cabin in the woods. I need to feel like I chose to be here, in my body, in this place, more days than not.
Someday, I want to forgive the Mumbai monsoon
Every year, the same lie. The first rain is magic, the city smells like wet earth, everyone posts the same shot out the same window. Then week two arrives. The road becomes a river, the potholes turn into traps you can't see until you're already in one, and a twenty-minute commute becomes two hours in a dead local with a stranger's umbrella draining down your collar.
Four months of damp. Shoes that never dry, a ceiling that grows its own weather, everything smelling faintly of a shut cupboard. The trains flood, the flights sit on the tarmac, and the whole city agrees to be late and calls it spirit. I love this place, and the monsoon still audits every bit of that love.
And yet. There is an evening, usually in August, when the rain finally eases and the light turns gold and the air smells rinsed and new, and I forget the other version completely. Someday I want to hold both at once: the romance and the sludge, without pretending either one isn't real.
Someday, I would like to live in San Francisco
I have wanted that for as long as I can remember turning the future into something concrete. Not as a rejection of Mumbai or of home, but as a city I have always pictured holding a real chapter of my life, not only a vacation story.
Fog off the Pacific, the hills, the blunt mix of idealism and industry: I want the Bay Area as routines, errands, and ordinary Tuesdays. I have pictured stepping off a plane at SFO and eventually not needing directions every time; someday I want that to be a chapter I lived instead of a loop in my head.
Paperwork, timing, and luck all get a vote. Someday the photo from SFO will have no caption. It won't need one.
Someday, I would like money to be boring in the background
I'm not chasing yachts. I want enough stability that I can help the people who helped me, choose where I put my time without doing panic math every time, and sleep without running numbers in the dark.
I've thought about that since I was young: what it would feel like if rent and fear stopped steering so many decisions. I'm nowhere near the full picture, but the direction is about peace, not flex.
Until then I'm honest that worry still gets a vote. Naming that feels better than pretending I'm above it.
Someday, I don't want strangers on the internet to feel like the jury
I still catch myself caring whether people online think my life looks impressive. I know it's thin. The feeling doesn't always listen.
I want the voices that matter to be the ones who've seen me tired, boring, wrong, and kind. Someday I hope my sense of self weighs more than whatever is trending, or than a number under a post.
The dream is small: this site, my email, a handful of threads that outlast any phase, and less performance in exchange for being known as a full person.
Someday, I want the people I love to get more than my leftovers
The people closest to me deserve attention that isn't scraped from the bottom of the barrel after I've already given the day away. They get patience I don't always deserve. I'm grateful for that.
I picture a life where home isn't only a place I crash between obligations: a table where conversations stretch, birthdays I don't half-remember, years that don't blur because I was never really there.
I'm not there yet. Saying it out loud is how I keep from acting like the tradeoffs don't cost anyone but me.
Someday, I want to answer the emails I used to send
I got here on the patience of people who had no reason to reply. Cold emails, DMs at strange hours, a maintainer who reviewed my terrible pull request like it deserved dignity. None of them got anything out of it. A few of them changed my whole year.
Someday I want to be on the other side of that inbox and actually behave like it. Not the founder who means to reply and never does, but proof that the ladder still has rungs: a reply costs me five minutes, and I remember exactly what five minutes from the right person used to feel like.
I don't answer everything now, and the excuses will only get better as things grow. Naming this early is how I argue with them before they win.