As the summer internship race heated up, Nila found herself endlessly refreshing her email, comparing résumés, and second-guessing every interview. At the same time, things shifted in her close friend group. Small misunderstandings snowballed into distance and the group chat that once made her laugh now gave her a strange pit in her stomach. She tried to brush it off. Everyone’s stressed right now, she told herself. Just push through. Keep going. But the late-night spirals? The constant pressure in her chest? The way she kept zoning out in class and skipping meals without meaning to?
It was adding up.
Nila didn’t hit rock bottom. There was no big breakdown, no dramatic event that pushed her into counseling. It was more like a slow fade.
So she booked a counseling session.
Not to fix anything specific, more because she needed to talk to someone in a room that didn’t feel like it expected her to hold it all together. That’s where she first heard the term emotional intelligence.
Not in a bookish way. But as something real, something you could learn and build, like muscle memory for your emotions.
“It sounds like you’ve been under a lot of pressure.,” her counselor told her gently. “We don’t have to figure it all out today. Let’s start by understanding how this has been affecting you.”
Together, they started working through what her counselor called the four windows of emotional intelligence. Each one gave Nila a little more room to breathe. | 
