Hi, my name is Samanta and I am a PhD student and a Clinical Psychologist from Darjeeling. I grew up close to the hills and the tea gardens, geographically and emotionally. Growing up amidst them, I watched my community hold grief and joy together, in the same hands, generations of violence, homes emptied by forced out-migration, youths pushed to the abyss of unemployment and addiction, all held alongside the fierce love for ordinary joys like music, art and food. I grew up listening to stories of violence shared through jokes where we laughed and cried at the same time.

Such witnessing had instilled in me early on the need for holding space for our well-being. So, I dreamt a little dream of becoming a mental health professional, a clinical psychologist, way before fully comprehending what it meant. My training as a clinical psychologist, however, left me disillusioned, that the tools and techniques I was learning were never designed for people like me, or my community. I found articulation to my experiences in Lorde's words, when she writes, 'for the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house' It was at that juncture, of feeling lost, that narrative practices entered my life, whispering gently that I didn't need to go far off looking for knowledge, that it had always been around me, only if I looked carefully.

Ever since then, I have been engaged in this slow process of learning to let go of those harmful and oppressive tools and languages I have become fluent in, and returning to the knowledge my ancestors carried to survive inside those oppressive structures. Some days, it looks like recreating the comforting recipes of home on heavy days, other times it looks like singing and dancing to old Nepali songs, laughing to 'humjayaega jokes' over potluck with my friends, allowing myself to rest when tired, or writing an essay on my grandmother and her recipes, all to learn to breathe again, to learn to take up space again.