Moving Back Home at 25 Was the Most Educational Thing I Did That Year

The decision to move back to Surat at 25 was practical: the role I had been in for two years in Pune had ended and a new one had not yet materialised, and the financial arithmetic of maintaining a flat independently during an uncertain job search did not work.

I moved home with the specific cheerfulness of someone managing their own disappointment and with a very clear internal timeline of getting out as quickly as possible. The eight months that followed were longer than I had planned and considerably more formative than I had expected.

I had not lived at home since leaving for college at eighteen, and the version of my parents I had interacted with during the intervening seven years - during holiday visits and WhatsApp calls and the managed pleasantness of limited shared time - was a significantly edited version of the people I was now living alongside daily.

What I found was two people in full. My father, who in my childhood visits had always been composed and clear and certain about most things, was revealed to be managing a level of professional anxiety about the final decade of his career that he had never disclosed in the form I could now see.

My mother, whom I had always thought of as the more content of the two, had opinions about things - about her community, about her marriage, about her own unlived possibilities - that she had never shared in the context of our previous relationship and that were much more interesting than the version I had been given.

I discovered, in the ordinary proximity of shared daily life, that my parents were people with inner lives that were not primarily organised around being my parents. This sounds obvious stated directly and was genuinely surprising to experience.

I also discovered things about myself that required the mirror of being known closely by the people who had known me longest. My mother noticed patterns in how I handled rejection that I had not noticed.

My father noticed an avoidance I had around financial conversations that traced back to things he could identify in our shared history more precisely than I could. By the time I left for Delhi and the new role at month eight, I had a relationship with both my parents that was less comfortable in the old way and considerably more genuine.

The eight months I had tried to minimise turned out to be the thing I am most glad happened in that period.