The Perks of Showing Up!

I once read somewhere that “Consistency is key.”

It sounded like the usual fluff. The kind people quote on Instagram or overpriced diaries. But oddly, it stuck.

So I decided to test it. Not the motivational-poster version. Not the morning routines and meal-prep kind. I’m talking about the brutal kind of consistency. The kind you drag through grief, exhaustion, and decades of silence. The kind that leaves scars.

I started showing up.

At work, even when my body screamed no. Back home, where responsibility sat heavier than the rest. When my wife nervously made her first-ever dish, I didn’t critique. I honoured it. Because trying deserves more than applause. It deserves presence.

I showed up when our son went on his first school sleepover. He slept like a baby. We didn’t. My wife and I kept staring at our phones, waiting for a message that never came, inventing reasons to worry. Because when you grow up with absence, love becomes vigilance.

I showed up for his first school trip. His flu shot. His first scraped knee. Every little thing that once wouldn’t have mattered to anyone else mattered to me. And then I read something that finally broke me open:

“Your love language is often what you never received as a child.”
That one line felt like someone turned the lights on.

Because I wasn’t always the man who showed up. I was once the kid nobody noticed.

No one was there when I wrote my first poem—just a kid pouring his heart out in awkward rhymes. No one clapped, no one noticed. I was 13 when I first travelled alone from Delhi back home. People called it brave. It was nothing to my family.

No one was there for my first heartbreak. In fact, I got blamed for it—“Who told you to fall in love at that age?” they asked. As if love was some privilege I hadn’t earned.

When my wife gave birth to our son, the room was filled with pain, sweat, joy and tears. 

But not family. Not support. Silence. We did it alone.

And somewhere in that silence, I made a decision.
That I would never let the people I love feel that kind of void. That absence.

So yes—I show up. Every single day. For the life I never got to live. For the people who count on me now. For the boy inside me who still aches for a hand that never reached back.

There’s no medal for this. No applause. Just quiet revolutions, repeated daily. Because love isn’t loud. It isn’t poetic. It’s showing up when it’s hard. When it’s boring. When no one’s looking.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s what healing really is. Not the loud break, but the silent repair. Not the drama, but the discipline.

This is how the cycle ends—with me. And begins again—with love.