To the woman turning 31 today,
It's me. The girl from the blue room.
You remember it. In that full, loud house where eleven of us lived stacked on top of each other, there was always a cousin or a brother or a neighbor boy around, always noise, always someone. I was forever the girl surrounded by guys. The one who didn't get playdates, because there was never anyone with the time to take me. And then there was my room. Blue and quiet and mine. That was the one place I got to be a whole person instead of a piece of a crowd. Where I could make things, and love what I loved, and be myself without explaining any of it to anyone. It was my solace. My safety. I was happiest there, alone, in my own small world with the things that lit me up.
I want to tell you something I could never have said back then, mostly because I didn't have the words for it. I didn't know what I wanted to be. I didn't have big dreams, not because I couldn't imagine, but because I had no idea what was even possible. Nobody had drawn me a map of a life like yours. So I never really tried to figure myself out, never stopped to name what made me happy or sad. I just kept going. Quietly, steadily, one foot in front of the other, not thinking too hard about any of it.
And look where the going took us.
I have been watching, and I can barely believe what you made out of a girl who didn't know what she wanted. Your husband, who I could never have conjured if I'd tried, the kind of person who steps toward you when life gets bigger instead of away. Your career. Your company. The fact that women you will never meet wear something you made and feel more like themselves because of it. The home that actually feels like ours. In-laws who didn't just accept me but chose me, who love me like I was always theirs. And the baby. The one you are about to meet. How easily this little one came to us, when I always quietly assumed the things I wanted most would be the things I'd have to fight hardest for, or go without.
None of it would have fit inside the head of the girl in the blue room. Not one piece.
And I need you to feel the weight of that, not as pressure but as grace. Because that is what this is. So much grace has fallen on your life. Not the things, I don't mean the things. I mean the life itself. The love. The people. The ability to keep learning and growing and seeing. None of that was owed to you, and none of it is to be taken lightly. It is a gift, every ordinary day of it, and you know it. Stay on your knees about it. Stay thankful.
But here is the strange, holy thing, the real reason I'm writing. Nothing actually feels different, does it. Under the founder and the boundaries and the thick skin you grew one hard conversation, one humiliation, one sleepless quarter at a time, you are still me. Still the girl who was happiest alone in the blue room, being exactly herself. That part never left. It just got to come out into the world.
And what you did with her. You learned to stop shrinking. You learned your softness was never the weakness they made it out to be. You learned to say no and survive the quiet after it. You learned to respect this body, this mind, this heart, to stop spending yourself like you'd never run out. You got still enough to hear something larger than yourself, and you grew toward it. I am so proud of you I could cry.
You've also seen so much of this world, far more than that girl could have pictured, and you did it on purpose. Nine months with a backpack after college. Jetsetting for the crypto startups. Building your own company. The conferences, the F1 races, the rooms you walked into because you decided to. You chose to go and see, again and again. So when you feel that there is still more out there, I know it isn't about more places. It's something deeper. A calling you haven't answered yet. More of you than you've even met. You are right. There is more. And you of all people have earned the trust that you'll find it.
Everything you think you know is about to change. You can feel it coming, can't you, like weather. A whole new person is about to arrive and rearrange every certainty you have, including who you are. Your whole way of seeing is going to crack open, and what pours in will be more than you can imagine right now, the same way all of this was more than I could imagine then.
So please. Don't be scared of what's coming.
We have never once known what was on the other side, you and me. Not when we left the safe thing. Not when we bet on ourselves. Not any of the times it turned out so much better than we could have planned. We just kept walking toward the something more, together, me from behind you, always, and we'll walk into this one the same way. Whatever this baby brings, whoever you become on the other side of becoming a mother, we'll face it the way we've faced all of it.
Together. As we always have.
Happy birthday, Shreya. You did it. You're doing it. And the best part hasn't even been born yet.
All my love, from the very beginning,
the girl from the blue room
This is the letter I wrote to myself. The version I wrote for you, on why you never needed to be able to dream a life in order to build one, is on Substack.
