A friend asked me recently, what are you proud of?

I remember answering without hesitation. I said I am proud of myself. And as I said it, I realized I am proud of what I come from. I am proud of my inheritance – of the fact that my parents and those before them live on through me. Not as memory, but as instinct. In the way I think, act, choose, and respond.

My mother was, in every sense, the do-it-all person in our lives. Growing up, and then while raising us, she carried everything – practically, emotionally, physically. And she never really stopped. She moved through life with a kind of intensity that left little room for hesitation. Things had to be done, so she did them.

From my mother, I inherited a certain kind of strength. Fierce, uncompromising, and deeply self-reliant. She raised me to function in the world without concession. To act, to persist, to not wait to be helped. She built a life around me where strength was the default. That has stayed with me and it has shaped almost everything I have done.

But I also see what comes with it. The impulse to do everything myself. The discomfort with leaning on others. The tendency to move through life with intensity rather than softness. These are also part of what she passed on to me.

My father was different in ways that are harder to describe. A vagabond heart tied down in marital life. A carefree spirit who loved his spirits. A loner who’d rather stay put in his own haven (office) but had to return home. A dreamer who wanted everything at once. A connoisseur who loved finer things and experiences.

And yet, he took responsibility for his children. He made sure we had a good education. Despite limited means, we always had enough. He introduced us to music, to theatre, to art and culture. He spent time with us not in overtly emotional ways, but by letting us into his world. And it felt like a privilege to be there. Talking to us about his legal briefs and drafting, about Lolita and Mandela, about Soviet politics and the world beyond our immediate lives. He was deeply intellectual in a way that felt organic, not performative.

Money was never held tightly in his hands. He was generous almost by nature – with us, with strangers, with animals, with whoever happened to be around him. There was an expansiveness to him, a way of moving through the world that made abundance feel less like possession and more like participation in life itself. He also loved himself unapologetically, and in doing so, taught us to love ourselves too.

I think there was always a duality in him, between rootedness and freedom, responsibility and escape. Perhaps that tension was also what gave him his expansiveness. Gone too soon at 59, he lived a life that was imperfect, complicated, but deeply felt.

From him, I have inherited an appreciation for beauty and experience. A love for reading, for language, for the quiet pleasure of thinking and writing. A certain way of engaging with the world – with curiosity, with reflection, and with an eye for what lies beneath the obvious. I think my liberalism, my tendency to think widely and beyond my immediate world come from him too. And also, his comfort with solitude. The ability to be on my own without feeling incomplete.

For a long time, I thought parts of who I am were shaped mainly by circumstance, especially my disability. I often wondered if my push toward physical activity, toward learning and enjoying things like strength training, swimming or driving, came from having to compensate for my disability.

But when I look at my mother’s life, I see something else. She was always active, always moving, always ahead – playing kho-kho and kabaddi at a district level, swimming in village wells as a child, picking up a badminton racquet with ease even much later in life. She had already built that relationship with her body long before I began to question mine. Maybe what I thought of as adaptation was also inheritance. Maybe I wasn’t building something new. Maybe I am continuing something that already existed.

And perhaps that is true of many things in my life.

The way I instinctively take charge of difficult situations. The way I push myself toward competence and self-reliance. The way I can sit alone with my thoughts for long stretches without feeling restless. The way I seek beauty, ideas, conversations, experiences. The way I love deeply but still need freedom and solitude around that love. So much of it now feels less accidental and more inherited.

These days, as I find myself quietly restarting parts of my life on my own, I can feel both my parents in me very strongly. My mother’s instinct to take charge, to handle everything, to not depend. My father’s instinct to retreat inward, to stay within himself, to not need too much from the world.

Together, they make it very easy for me to become someone who is entirely self-sufficient. Someone who can stand alone, manage alone, and need very little from others.

And for a long time, I think I believed that this was strength.

I am beginning to understand it differently now.

I still want to be strong. That hasn’t changed. I know what I am capable of, and I want to keep building on that. Not just professionally, but personally too. The things I have taught myself to do – driving, swimming, sports, learning how to move confidently through the world in my own way – matter to me because they represent freedom, competence, and possibility. But I no longer want strength to harden into distance. I don’t want self-reliance to quietly turn into isolation.

I want to remain centered in myself, and at the same time, allow more of myself to meet the world. To receive warmth, support, affection, and companionship – from friends, from family, from the people who come into my life in different ways. Not because I want to depend on others to complete me, but because I no longer think carrying everything alone is the only valid form of strength.

This is the work I am doing now. Learning how to stay grounded in who I am while also softening around the edges. Learning how to carry my inheritance forward consciously – keeping the strength, the curiosity, the expansiveness, the self-respect, but not letting them close me off from love, tenderness, or connection.

I am proud of what I have inherited. And I am learning, slowly, what it means to live with it well.