I got through life by writing stories and poetry. I was the hopeless romantic passing love notes to classmates and filling diaries with heartbreak. The page was the one place I could say everything that burned inside me without fear of rejection or judgment. When the world felt too small for who I was becoming, I turned to writing to make sense of it.

I grew up in Canada in a mixed-race household steeped in South Asian culture. I learned to be a good girl, to please my elders, and to keep the parts of myself that didn't fit neatly tucked away. I became skilled at reading a room, meeting expectations, and being liked. What I didn't yet know was how to be fully myself.

At eighteen, I set off to explore the world. While my peers pursued college and careers, I travelled with a tiny backpack, a film camera, and a diary.

Motherhood brought another dimension to these questions. What do we pass on without realizing it? Which parts of our inheritance do we carry forward, and which do we hope to transform? What does it mean to raise a child between cultures while still learning to make sense of your own?

These questions have drawn me back toward my roots and into the histories of the people who came before me. I've become increasingly fascinated by the threads connecting personal memory to family history, ancestry to identity, and the places we leave to the places we call home.

The Long Road Home is where I explore these connections through personal essays, travel stories, photography, and reflections on ancestry, motherhood, and belonging. It is my ongoing attempt to understand the stories that made me, the ones I've chosen to tell, and the ones still waiting to be uncovered.

I don't believe we need to have our stories figured out to begin telling them. Sometimes we have to tell them to discover what they mean. Sometimes looking back reveals something we couldn't see while we were living through it.

I was drawn to unfamiliar places, the lives of strangers, and the freedom of being unknown. Travel gave me room to experiment with identity, desire, and possibility. Through my camera and travel writing, I documented the world around me. The more personal stories, the ones about longing, heartbreak, and my search for belonging, stayed in my journals.

It took me years to understand that I hadn't left my old world behind so much as carried it with me. The voices that taught me to stay quiet and small had become my own. I could cross oceans in search of freedom, but I couldn't travel my way out of the stories I believed about myself.

Writing remained my companion through it all: a place to question, remember, and piece together the fragments of a life. Over time, I began to see that our stories are never entirely our own. They are shaped by the families we come from, the cultures we inherit, the silences we grow up around, and the worlds we move through.