Keya had always taken pride in being the dependable one whenever it comes to responsibility at work or at home. For her these roles were like armour. She was usually the first to arrive at the office and the last to log out. At home, she is busy meeting the expectations of her family members, completing family errands, showing emotional availability to everyone, and the unspoken duty of always showing up. Her regular weekday mornings start with answering emails, responding to office group messages amidst the traffic, rushing for back-to-back meetings without settling down fully, and then finally returning home to be emotionally present for her kids, partner and parents. Somewhere between performance reviews, showing emotional availability to loved ones and a sink full of dishes, she felt too stretched between office & home. "I’m doing everything,” she often thought, “but it still feels like I’m failing.” The mental cracks emerging from such a routine were not apparent initially. Nor did it happen suddenly. They crept in through small moments like a snapped reply to a loved one, a forgotten anniversary dinner and evenings where she couldn’t even remember what she had eaten. What began as unnoticed tiredness, had turned into something heavier and quite unresolving. Her weekends melted into weekdays. Then there was a tipping point that came quietly. First, she missed her anniversary dinner. The next week, she broke down multiple times over a few small errors at work. That was when a colleague gently asked, “Are you okay?” - a question that cracked open something she had kept buried all this while. That was the moment where despite doing “everything right,” she felt something was going deeply wrong. It was the first time Keya found it impossible to handle everything all on her own and decided to reach out to the campus counselor.
That first session with the counsellor was not really about solutions. It was about being Seen, Recognized and Heard. It was the moment where Keya began learning that “change is a process, not an event”. She had always imagined “balance” as something to achieve as an “endpoint”. However, through repeated counseling, she came to see change as a gradual process, as a practice & as a series of gentle course-correctional measures. | 
