If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends!
A love letter, to all my favourite women.
This week’s flowers from my thought(am):
(It’s like the Malayalam thottam, i.e. garden, but it’s my thought garden. Hehe, it was funnier in my head.)
At my (almost) mid-20 mark, I must say that my favourite canon event has been the evolution of my female friendships. (The only trope I love seeing overdone by pop culture. I will watch every, and I mean every, movie made on female friendships).
My most cherished friendships are the ones I share with the women in my life who are so damn loud, soft, stubborn and hardworking in all my favourite ways. My closest female friends are all stubborn cows. Including me. If you’re a stubborn cow, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The best part about it, though, is that we take turns being the stubborn and the stubborn-y. (More new words, I love writing with no rules, hehe). Let me explain.
There is always a Ms. ‘I know I need to ask for help, but I shall overthink/overwork because I’m a strong independent girl’ and a Ms. ‘Let me smack you and take some weight off your shoulder, you silly goose’. And that right there is my favourite kind of friendship. Only these friends truly know when I need an intervention-like-sounding ‘Ameyaaaa’. Only they know when I need a long walk to get coffee at the turn of the road and when I need an ‘I’ll sit next to you quietly and we’ll get through this’ kind of day.
This was never always the case.
I used to always place a boundary between myself and girls my age. Female friendships, for the longest time, seemed unattainable to me. Except for a select few, it seemed like every girl was pitted against the other, and I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was in some sort of competition. I was always comparing myself to other girls, trying to fit in, and always feeling like another girl’s success was my own failure. I’m sure this is rooted in all the media we’ve been fed over the years (young Taylor Swift You don’t Belong With Me), but whatever the root cause, I really wanted to be ‘not like other girls’.
And I love that things changed for the better.
There are a few tests of friendship that I hold really dear to my heart, and those are:
Will they call you out, unabashedly, for your behaviour?
Will they celebrate your wins and not see it as their loss (and vice versa)?
Can you go on a holiday with them and come back in one piece?
(As you may have noticed), I’ve been having a severe newsletter block. And answering question 3 recently, led me to take to my pen (keyboard) again. I recently went on a trip with three women I call my own, some old (almost second skin at this point), and some new. And I can happily report that this trip reinforced in me the belief that female friendships have really changed me, for the better.
The women in my life exist so beautifully, with all their multiple, messy personalities. They whine about the silliest of things, get excited over discovering a new favourite matcha flavour and also present groundbreaking work at the office like it’s no big deal. They spiral about asking for too much, lose their minds over boy-of-the-month’s text and tirelessly build new definitions of themselves, over and over again, as they move cities. I love that conversations always range from ‘Ames, should we treat ourselves to ghee podi dosa today’ to women in academia and our latest research rabbitholes after reading a new paper. I love that they all wake up every day, deciding to be better people, in whatever shape and form they can. And most importantly, I love that they all, unapologetically, take up space. The women in my life are people I will hold onto tightly, fiercely, and safely, for as long as I can. They are everything, and more. I love them, most ardently.
Ameya’s Meal Tracker:
I'm trying to improve my diet (to be read as: I’m trying to read more and better). A section where I share short thoughts/reviews of books I’m reading to keep me accountable to my ‘I-must-read-more-in-2025’ goal).
I finished reading Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, and I am absolutely loving how Saharu writes. I picked the book up in my pursuit of exploring more writing styles, and I love love love how an entire hour and a half of an event spills over an entire book. Very interesting. I also love how it was raining in Bangalore when I read this, really added to the atmosphere hehe.
‘My Arabi teacher used to say that grammar is the most basic philosophy. And there is no grammar to a crowd, my son. A crowd is as unmoving as an exclamation mark.’
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Do I recommend it?: Yes (and would get myself a copy just because it’s always lovely to collect writers’ first books.)
Did it taste good?: Yes! Felt like eating a pazhampori in the rain with a cup of tea. And also weirdly popcorn, because the atmosphere gets quite tense. Pulled me right into Vaiga.
Was it nutritious?: Comparable to a heavy snack. A short, simple read, but it packs quite a punch.
Screenshots from this week:
Weekly hard and not hard-hitting lessons/something that popped right out of a book/my Instagram feed, and reached into my head
Reading Nandini Jiva (my best friend) on ‘fighting the epidemic of amnesia’, reminded me of:
the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
Milan Kundera's novel, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," highlights the importance of remembering and resisting historical injustice.
What I’ve been humming:
(More like background track to this newsletter)
This newsletter is dedicated to all the friendships that make your heart feel safe.
May we all have at least one person who lets us take up all the space we need to.
Big ummas and hugs,
Always, Ameya.
loved this so much <33
so beautiful :))