commencing 23rd march 2026
you don't need me...and i kinda love it
it’s been kind of a whirlwind of a week, which i guess i expect with the winds of change and springtime in the air. i haven’t really remembered i exist all that much, which is always a complicated thing to feel. i haven’t known how to remember the edges of myself. thinking about self-care is complicated right now.
i have spent quite a lot of time in difficult-feeling board meetings where i’ve felt a bit like…argh, why am i the only person being realistic and honest here, even if that is a hard thing to do? i’m the youngest and least experienced and trained person here, and everyone knows it, and i don’t know if everyone else wants to entertain a delusion (they don’t, i think they’re just scared, but please don’t go along with things and make me be the one who has to speak up!). but that does mean that i’m getting better and better at being that person, although still not great at it. i don’t feel like i can dwell on this right now because i’m not at liberty to really talk about it in a public forum yet, and because i don’t know exactly what will come of it, but i do know it feels like it’s been a massive weight on me for a pretty long time. it’s been a comfortable weight a lot of the time, or at the very least one i’d resigned myself to for the sake of the greater good, it might take a very different shape. or it might leave a space.
but i don’t feel super afraid of a space anymore. my relationship with being needed has changed a lot over the past year since i burned myself out doing a job i had no business doing unpaid, and now there’s just not tons of joy in being indispensable left for me. like, yeah, not being useful feels like floating off into space, but it’s probably something i should explore a lot more.
speaking of space, will has been unwell, and that has been an experience for me in thinking about my relationships in general. a lot of my relationships are really self-contained and really positive because of that mutual independence, but i also wonder if this is how community is supposed to work sometimes (i guess it is, maybe? it’s how mine does). like, what does interdependence look like for me? i help someone move or buy new clothes or go grocery shopping, and that feels like a net positive because i love being the errand friend. no one is like, ‘ishani, i need to talk to you because i am going through a major crisis!’ and maybe that’s about where we all are in our lives, or maybe it’s me feeling like i need to show up in a different way. but then i think back to when that was happening more, and how stressful it was, and how it kept repeating with the same people. i guess maybe this is me settling into what it feels like to need and be needed in accordance. like, yeah, it’s not as sexy or exciting as someone crashing out because of their shitty boyfriend every other week, but i think it’s probably more sustainable overall.
i also feel like i am very about other people’s agency in my relationships with them - like, here’s the tea, here’s the fridge, here is the snack box for guests (yes i have one of those), here are the cups, there’s the bathroom - now you know everything you need to help yourself, because i don’t think i can be trusted to effectively anticipate your needs. maybe i have failed as a brown person in this regard, that i can’t be the perfect host. but i am, at the very least, distributing labour. i don’t feel like i can be responsible for other people very much, so i am trying in all ways to make that clear. hopefully my mum isn’t too ashamed (psyche! she’s always ashamed!)
back to will. he has laryngitis, so it’s been kind of weird at home because he can’t talk much. we normally talk so much, so it’s just kind of an odd time. i have basically not been home at all this week. we finally got a night to ourselves and watched a movie, but i miss him being able to actually hang out and talk. he can’t even leave the house for long because the wind makes him wheeze. i feel a little guilty about not taking better care of him, but i just think there’s not tons i can do. like, my mum would be mad at me that i’m not preparing salt rinses or whatever. but he doesn’t even want me to be home with him - he’s like, ‘i’m being so boring! go and do something fun!!!!’
there is enormous, enormous change in the air for me. let’s see what the springtime brings us.
fun things i did this week!:
ok this was so not fun actually, but will and i had an estate planning meeting during which i was nearly upsold an entire package (i guess if you’re planning on doing this sometime, be aware that this is common practice?!). but yeah, thinking about what we have that would go to our friends and stuff was kind of nice. it’s nice to think about where your energy might go when you die, somehow. comforting, in a strange way. it also prompted me to revise my life insurance and stuff like that. boring life admin stuff.
went to see i’m sorry prime minister with michael. it was a perfectly average play that got exactly no real laughs out of me, but it was so great to see michael. he’s been in chicago for like four months for school, so it was really good to have him back. i am so excited to have him back! i hope he never goes away again!!! (i do think he might disappoint me there.)
went to the postal museum and on the mail rail with ettie. it’s taken us literally three months to do this because my first message to her on substack was like, ‘we have to go do this together.’ so in the name of friendships new and old, we have now done the olde mail rail and learned about the post! the postal museum has the cutest merch. i had a great time. i have been before and i would go again.
went to see my pal ifti do his first ever stand-up set. watching eleven people do their first-ever sets was not as awkward as i thought it would be, and i had a pretty nice time watching everyone. i’m excited to see where it takes him.
hosted a drink talk learn, where i had hilariously been too chill about people making presentations because we always have way too many - so in the end we only had six. which was actually a perfect amount for chilling out the rest of the night, as it turns out. always a nice and educational time, although i felt a bit weird about my husband sitting upstairs sadly because he couldn’t talk to anyone without coughing.
hosted a holi party at my community centre. it was such a blast. i hope they let me do it again, but i’m pretty sure they will - they were pretty hyped about it. i think it’s kind of a unique thing for them to have done this, and by far one of the most fun things they’ve ever done, so hopefully we run it back next year. they thought of everything! there was a first aid desk and a lost children desk! wild!!
went walking over the finsbury park marshlands with marianne. i’ve never been out to those ones before. i saw a bird drying its wings (i like to imagine he was reaching out for a hug). i also got to meet her dog, whose name is orinoco, which i think is actually a great name for a dog, especially one as graceful as her. they also call her noodles sometimes :)
went to eve’s clocks go forward party. i had fun! sometimes i engage with someone else’s friend group and i cannot help but wonder exactly how cringe i am in real time, but i try not to think about it too hard anymore and most of the time i succeed. it was really nice to meet a bunch of new people and i feel at this point in my life like i can handle parties and not just wallflower out by the side and hope somebody is warm enough to talk to me. i feel like i also at this point in my life have zero clue what’s going on in the world beyond major news and i do feel like that comes out for me at every party i go to (every time i go on substack i’m like oh no, everyone is talking about a new memoir or netflix show about someone i don’t know about and i don’t have the energy to learn about them beyond their wiki page), but i take it as a good sign that someone around me does. i can’t shake that entering the trudeau/perryverse was maybe the thing that pushed me out of keeping up with pop culture forever. now i don’t really go anywhere on the internet that has a feed, so i just find things out by…overhearing people? seeing snippets of the paper? it’s honestly really nice, i know enough to get angry and take action, don’t send help.
met up with my pals viana and vizor and took them charity shopping in an effort to help viana remake her personal style in an east london image, which was honestly extremely funny. i’ve mostly done this with male-identifying people in the past, so doing it for her was honestly brilliant and watching her ricochet between wanting to be 2016 urban outfitters and wanting to be femme fatale was extremely relatable. sometimes you just wanna shake someone by the shoulders and say, ‘you’re never gonna be done! you’re never gonna be a finished product! just have fun and get dressed!’ but that is stuff i learned between her age and my age and mostly i just wanna yell at my past self.
michael joined us at the end of the day and we made chocolate milk custard and elderflower custard. the first was good. i would not recommend the latter.
all in a day’s work/play! i’ve been so tired lately, i’ve kinda needed to sleep to the max. xxx