Unfollowing the map: when a content writer rewrites her own story

By Kanchan Balani

In 2017, I was a senior content writer in Ahmedabad torn between satisfaction and restlessness. The job fulfilled me in some ways. I had a fantastic boss. But in various ways, it left me wanting. A familiar tension that whispers to anyone who has ever felt the pull of undiscovered possibilities.

So, when I decided to transform my parents’ property in the city into a BnB, I told myself it was simply an experiment. A small BnB. Nothing crazy. Just a way to satisfy my curiosity about hospitality. But experiments, I’ve learnt, have a way of becoming expeditions into uncharted territory.

Within days, bookings flooded in. I found myself managing a business while maintaining my full-time position. And the dual existence exhilarated me in ways I hadn’t expected. The most mundane aspects of my day job paled beside the unpredictable rhythms of welcoming guests, solving problems, creating experiences. Oh, how I loved it!

When it got too overwhelming, as side gigs tend to get, I roped in my best friend Katha as co-navigator. She handled the operations. Together we spent nearly a year learning the geography of running a business together with all its unexpected challenges.

It was during this period that I made a decision that would redirect my entire career trajectory. I applied for a Master’s programme in global hospitality business.

This truly came as a shocker to my folks, and me too. The story I had been telling myself was that I needed to follow the conventional career route. That stability meant climbing the predetermined ladder from senior writer to content manager.

But suddenly, it felt like I had been following a map drawn by someone else, for someone else’s journey.

And now I was pivoting away from it. Leaving that stability felt dangerous. Even reckless.

Astronomers have a term for the way our perspective changes everything: stellar parallax. When you look at a star from one spot, then move and look again, the star seems to shift. But the star hasn’t moved. You have. That shift in where you’re standing suddenly lets you see distances you couldn’t measure before.

This is what happens when we change the stories we tell ourselves. We don’t rewrite what happened. We just change where we’re standing when we look at it.

The heartbreak that once felt like proof we were unlovable might, from a new angle, reveal itself as the moment we discovered how deeply we could feel. The failure that once crushed us might suddenly look like the detour that saved us from the wrong path entirely.

The star didn’t move. I did, and suddenly everything looked different.

There’s one book I keep going back to from time to time, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012). Cheryl Strayed, the author, knew something about discarding old maps when she set out for a 1100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail with a pack so heavy she named it Monster. But Monster wasn’t just carrying her gear. It was carrying the weight of her mother’s death, the shame of her crumbling marriage, the guilt of her drug addiction, the accumulated debris of a life that felt completely unrecognisable.

“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves…” she wrote, and it makes me think about how many of us are hiking through life with our own version of Monster on our backs, convinced we have to carry every mistake, every regret, every painful chapter as proof of who we are.

I spent years standing in the same spot, looking at my life through a single lens. My map demanded everything. Every corner of my life had to be perfect, productive, optimised. But what I didn’t realise was that my map had become my Monster. And it was quietly leading me toward a cliff.

2022 broke me.

After completing my Master’s, I began working for a major hotel chain as a marketing and communications manager. A major pre-opening project was underway in Uttarakhand. Work. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. That became the sum total of my existence. Each morning, I’d lie in bed longer, staring at the ceiling, hoping it might tell me how to feel human again.

How does one forget to eat?! My body started screaming at me in languages I’d never heard before. Mysterious aches, bone-deep exhaustion, a heaviness that sleep couldn’t touch. I stopped answering calls, stopped having energy for anyone or anything.

The worst part? I convinced myself this was normal. This was the price of ambition.

My family doctor looked at me with concern and said I needed to stop taking my wellbeing so lightly. But I was following my map so blindly. The one that said, “more is always better”. That boundaries were for people who weren’t serious about their goals. Ugh.

In January 2023, I finally quit the job.

After serving my notice period, March arrived like a reckoning. I spent the entire month trying to understand how I had gotten so sick. How I had ignored every signal my body sent. How I had mistaken self-destruction for self-discipline.

That’s when I realised something: I had to throw out that old map entirely. I could decide what ‘enough’ actually meant to me. So, I pivoted again. I made a full switch to freelancing in the hospitality and travel space. It gave me the flexibility to take on work that genuinely interested me, including passion projects.

Now, some days, ‘enough’ looks like sitting in my balcony in my pyjamas with my coffee, watching the butterflies dance around the plants and starting work at 11 am. Some days, ‘enough’ looks like going for a gentle walk instead of an intense boxing session. Some days, ‘enough’ looks like lying with my cats instead of stepping outside with friends on a weekend. Some days, ‘enough’ looks like pushing the laundry to some other day, even when the basket is overflowing. Some days, ‘enough’ looks like shutting my laptop at 5 pm.

But old maps don’t disappear quietly. That voice still shows up in moments when you’re resting, whispering at first, then growing louder. “You could be doing more right now. So much more. You’re wasting precious time.”

It gets specific, relentless: “Sign up for that workshop. Book an experience. Learn a language. Read that book everyone’s talking about. Write that newsletter. Just do something. Anything. More.”

On those days, it takes everything in me to remember that this isn’t the story I want to tell myself. That what I’m doing is enough. Enough for today, at least.

So tell me: what is that story you have been telling yourself? And more importantly, is it still true?

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Kanchan Balani is a Delhi NCR-based marketing consultant. Through her newsletter ‘Homebody Stories’, she shares reflections on finding meaning in the everyday, and explores the universal threads that connect us all. Her debut children’s book When Golu Goes Missing is now available on Amazon. Follow her on LinkedIn and Instagram.

This essay was written in response to a prompt in the memoir-writing workshop Ochre Sky Stories facilitated by Natasha Badhwar and Raju Tai. It was first published on Ochre Sky Stories.