I was seven when my whole life changed.
People talk about loss like it’s a single event. It isn’t. It’s a language your body learns without consent: the way silence sounds at dinner, the way a front door closes and doesn’t reopen, the way your small hands start doing big work. My dad was my closest person; when he passed, something in me picked up the tools he put down.
What switched on was my masculine nature: protector, provider self. I became the steady one for my younger sister and the fam, the self-appointed guardrail for our family name - something Indian culture treats as currency. I wore that duty like armor. I hated the pitying looks, the whispered “poor thing.” If there was a gap, I filled it. If there was a weight, I lifted it. I was always on the sports field, ran sprints, learned to make my voice carry. The world called it “tomboy.” I called it survival.
During that time, I didn’t trust my femininity, being soft felt like a risk I couldn’t afford. Tenderness looked like a threat, being weak. Even the Libra in me, the part that loves beauty and balance hid herself. I kept telling myself: don’t be less, don’t become the story people expect of the girl who grew up without a father.
By seventeen, something else cracked open. Not from ease, but from friction. I realized my anger at being managed, pitied, and decided for wasn’t just rebellion; it was an ache for care. For nurture. And because I wasn’t receiving it in the way I needed, I started creating it, first for my sister, then for friends, later for teams and clients. I thought my drive was about proving people wrong. It turns out, it was about building the safety I didn’t have.
That’s when my feminine part started whispering her way back in.
Not as lace and candles, though I like those now, but as a different kind of strength: the one that listens before it leads; that lets intuition cut through noise; that holds a room without fighting it. Nurturing wasn’t weakness - it was the infrastructure of everything I wanted to build. It made my masculinity more precise, less performative. I didn’t need to sprint to be strong. I needed to ground.
Looking back, I can see how my dots connected back. Loss activated my masculinity so I could survive. Nurture reactivated my femininity so I could evolve. Together, they taught me a new definition of ambition: not attention, but tending. Not “make the family proud” as a performance, but “carry the name with integrity” as a practice. Not success as proof that I survived, but success as creating the safety I never had; a place where other people can exhale.
Would I be this person if life had been handed to me on a silver platter? I don’t know. I didn’t live that version. I lived this one: the one where I learned boundaries so I could offer generosity; where I learned to decide for myself so I could hold space for others to decide for themselves; where I learned that nurturing is not the softness people warned me about, it’s the foundation that holds everything up.
Today, I’m proud of the woman I’ve become and the life I’m building. I won’t romanticize loss, but I won’t deny what it forged. My masculinity still guards the gates. My femininity tends the garden. And together, they’ve given me a purpose that feels like oxygen: to nurture people, products, and possibilities into their fullest expression.
I’ve learned to see beauty in the very thing that broke me.
What did your breaking teach you to build?
