I Abandoned a Childhood Passion and Spent Ten Years Feeling Half Empty

I had filled notebooks and canvases from the time I was old enough to hold a pencil, and in the way of children who have one thing they return to naturally, painting was my thing.

My parents in Pune were supportive in the quiet way of people who appreciated it without quite knowing what to do with it - they framed the better pieces, complimented them without excessive drama, and did not push when, somewhere in the transition from school to competitive entrance preparation, the painting slowly stopped.

Nobody asked me to stop. I simply absorbed, through the ambient pressure of Class 11 and 12 and the preparation for JEE that consumed everything, the message that serious pursuits were academic ones and that the canvas taking up space in my room was a child's thing I had outgrown.

I did not think about this as a loss at the time. I was busy and the busyness was adequate. By my mid-twenties, working in product management at a tech firm, I had a life that functioned well by every measure I was tracking and a persistent, low-grade sense of incompleteness that I could not locate with any precision.

I attributed it to various things over the years - stress, the wrong relationships, the need for a career change - and addressed none of them because none of the addresses quite fit the problem.

At 28, clearing out boxes from my parents' house during a visit home, I found three canvases wrapped in old newspaper at the back of a storage cupboard. I do not have a dramatic story about that moment - it was not a lightning bolt.

It was quieter than that: a recognition so old it felt like remembering something rather than discovering it. I bought paints the following weekend with the specific awkwardness of an adult doing something they used to do as a child in a different body. The first session produced nothing good.

The second produced one thing that was almost good. The third produced the particular feeling of return that I had been trying to locate for a decade without knowing what I was looking for. I have painted every weekend for two years now. I have not shown anyone.

The work is not the point in the way it might be if I were building something from it professionally. The point is that something that had been turned off for ten years is on again, and the quality of my attention and my engagement with everything else has changed in a way I cannot fully explain but can clearly feel.

I lost a decade by deciding a thing I loved was not serious enough to keep.