My First Love or My First Crush? I don’t know what to call this feeling. I’ll let you decide what it was. This was a chapter of my life I never told anyone. Well, it was embarrassing to admit, and I didn’t know how others would react. So, here is a chapter of my life unfolding.

The story begins on my first day of college. I was nervous and a bit excited about my college life. The college was a little far from my city, so I chose the bus service provided by the college. I didn’t want to be late, so I rushed out of the house and left my phone behind. (Yeah! On the very first day, I didn’t have my phone when I needed it the most.)

And the foolish me thought nothing could go wrong without having a phone. This was my first mistake.

When I reached the bus stop, someone else was already standing there. I didn’t pay much attention to who it was and waited patiently for my bus. But it didn’t come, and I had been waiting for almost an hour when the person standing next to me asked, “Hey! Are you also waiting for the same college bus?”

I replied, “Yeah.”

Then he asked, “Are you sure this is the correct stop?”

I answered, “Yeah! That’s what they told me.”

A few minutes later, his friends called and told him to reach the next stop.

Thankfully, we arrived on time. I saw some familiar faces at college, so I started spending time with them. Although our courses were different, we spent our lunchtime together in the cafeteria.

When I reached the cafeteria, they were already there, discussing something. I asked what they were talking about, and they told me they were discussing the group of boys I’d come with that morning. A friend of mine told me she knew his group and that they were popular for all the wrong reasons. They advised me to keep my distance from them.

My impression of him was different from what she had told me. He was kind and had helped me along the way when he could have chosen not to. I thought I could be wrong, and I didn’t even know him that well. So, I decided to stay away from him.

But God had other plans. For some reason, he and his best friend were both asked to change their classes. And now, they were in the same class as me.

We didn’t speak to each other for the entire week.

But one day, during a break, I was extremely tired because I had worked until late the previous night. My eyes were barely open during the lectures. I told my friend I’d stay in the classroom during the break. My eyes were closed, but I wasn’t completely asleep. I could still hear a little of the surrounding noise.

I was sitting on the second-to-last bench when I heard footsteps approaching me. At first, I didn’t think much of it and kept my eyes closed. But the footsteps stopped right in front of me.

I opened my eyes.

He lowered his face to my eye level and asked, “Are you okay? Why are you here all alone? Did something happen between you and your friends?”

Seeing his face so close, my heart started beating faster. I felt something unfamiliar for the first time.

Without even realising what I was saying, I hastily asked, “What are you doing?”

A few seconds later, I realised what he had actually asked me. He was just concerned about me.

I replied, “I’m just tired and taking a nap.”

He apologised for making things awkward and went back to his seat.

Our routes home were the same, so we often met on our way to the bus stop.

One day, when we were on the bus, I was sitting in my seat, and the bus was completely packed. There wasn’t even enough space to stand properly. Suddenly, the bus stopped, and a person standing next to me hit my head with his elbow.

I let out a loud yelp of pain. “Ouch! That hit me so hard!”

A hand reached over and gently patted the spot where it hurt. Then the person said, “Sorry, sorry! The bus stopped suddenly. Are you okay? I’m so sorry.”

I turned to see who it was. It was him.

“It’s okay. It didn’t hurt much,” I replied. (Actually, it did.)

That unfamiliar feeling returned. And the more time I spent with him, the more familiar these feelings became. Whether it was teaching him maths, waiting for him at the bus stop, walking home together, or helping his friend ask my friend out. (Though that didn’t work out because she said no.)

And as for me, my feelings grew stronger day by day.

Whenever someone complimented his fashion sense or the way he looked, I would smile like a fool, almost as if they were talking about me.

The nerdy me, who never thought about anything other than studies and marks, somehow found herself thinking about him all day long. He even started appearing in my dreams.

Before I could properly understand my feelings for him, I found out that he was already dating someone.

I felt terrible when I heard the news. A part of me was hurt to know that he was in a relationship, while another part of me felt guilty for falling for someone who was already committed to another person. I hated the idea of coming between two people. So, even the thought of it made me hate myself.

I didn’t do anything dramatic. I simply hid those feelings and quietly let them fade away until I eventually forgot about them.

Before this, I had never realised how easy it was for me to develop feelings for someone. All it took was a little kindness, some time together, and a bit of concern.

Tagging, THE WORDS HUB team —

WordsInWilderness Aakash Deep Melanie Hilda🌹💦⭐Neha Shrimal Silhouette of Starry Thoughts keng Elizabeth Woods Becoming…Ayoyinka Sumaiya Jaweed Paulia Dianz. A🧡

Hey, I’m Amisha ❤

I hope this piece connects my voice to yours.

And if you enjoy reading this, don’t forget to leave a comment and subscribe to receive my newest posts.

See you in the next one : )

My First Love — A Writing Challenge was originally published in THE WORDS HUB on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You don’t need a new life by Monday. You need something small enough to do on your worst day.

Most of us have been here. It’s late, you’ve just decided to finally get your life together, and you start building the plan: new routine, new goals, new person starting tomorrow at 5 a.m.

Then tomorrow comes. The alarm goes off, the plan feels enormous, and you quietly postpone it to Monday. Or the first of the month. Or “when things calm down.”

I have tried to change several things in my life at once. I made big plans, set high expectations, and promised myself that everything would be different from the next day. But after a few days, it became difficult to follow everything. I eventually realised that starting small is better than trying to change everything overnight.

The pattern is common because the plan is usually too big for an ordinary day. Small habits work for a different reason: they are easy to keep, and keeping them is what builds the change.

1. Give yourself a few quiet minutes before the world arrives

Many of us reach for the phone before we are fully awake. Within seconds, the day’s news, messages and other people’s lives are already in our heads.

No study proves a perfect morning will change your life, so treat this as an experiment, not a rule. Try a few minutes before the screen: a glass of water, a stretch, one thought about what matters today. Making your bed is optional. The point is a small stretch of the day that belongs to you.

2. Read five pages

Five pages is small enough to survive a bad day. It is easy to finish while the kettle boils or before sleep, and over a month it adds up.

Choose something you are actually curious about, not what you think you should be reading. A book you enjoy gets finished. A book you feel guilty about gathers dust.

I enjoy reading about self-improvement, psychology, and how people think and behave. These topics help me understand myself better and give me new ideas that I can apply in everyday life.

3. Put a small boundary around your screen time

You open an app for a minute, and forty minutes disappear. It happens to nearly everyone, and it is not a personal failing. Apps are built to keep you there.

The research suggests small limits can help. In a 2018 University of Pennsylvania study, 143 undergraduates capped Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat at 10 minutes each per day for three weeks. They reported less loneliness and depression than the control group. In a larger 2020 experiment, 2,844 Facebook users who deactivated their accounts for four weeks spent more time on offline activities and reported small improvements in well-being. Both studies have limits: the first involved students, and the effects in the second were small.

You don’t have to quit. Try turning off notifications that do not matter, keeping your phone out of reach during meals, and choosing one offline activity for your free time.

4. Keep one small promise to yourself

Think about how it feels when someone keeps their word. Now think about the opposite, when you tell yourself “I’ll start tomorrow” for the tenth time. Each broken promise teaches you that your own word does not count for much.

Keeping a tiny promise works the other way. If you say you will study for 20 minutes, do the 20 minutes. If you say five pages, read five pages. Psychologists call confidence in your ability to follow through self-efficacy, and it grows from evidence, not from pep talks.

Make the promise smaller than you think you need to. The goal is not to impress yourself. It is to prove you can be trusted.

I have often promised myself that I would study regularly, but sometimes I failed to follow my own schedule. I learned that making smaller and more realistic promises makes it easier to stay consistent. Even a little progress is better than doing nothing.

5. Stop comparing your chapter 3 to someone else’s chapter 20

You see someone’s promotion, vacation or new house, and suddenly you feel behind. But you are comparing your whole messy life to a highlight.

Everyone has different starting points, responsibilities and timelines. A better question than “Why am I behind?” is “Am I further along than I was a year ago?” Your journey does not need to look like anyone else’s.

6. Take five minutes to look back on your day

At the end of the day, ask yourself three questions: What did I learn? What went well? What will I do differently tomorrow? You can write the answers or just think them through.

There is real evidence behind this. In an experiment at a Wipro call center in India, trainees who spent the last 15 minutes of their training days writing about what they had learned scored about 23% higher on the final test than a control group, even though the control group worked 15 minutes longer each day. The researchers pointed to growing confidence in one’s own ability as part of why reflection helped.

That study used 15 minutes, in a training setting, so five minutes is a gentler start, not a proven equivalent. Begin small and extend it if it feels useful.

7. Give it more time than feels reasonable

Many people quit within a week, because they expected to feel different by now. They read for five days and do not feel smarter. They walk for a week and see nothing in the mirror.

Habits take longer than we expect. In a 2010 study by Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London, 96 volunteers repeated a daily behavior, and the time to become near-automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days among those whose data fit the model, with a median of 66. Missing a single day did not materially affect the process. People who were very inconsistent, though, did not build the habit.

So one bad day is fine. Giving up after one bad day is the real risk. The skill is coming back the next morning.

The takeaway

You don’t need to transform your life this week. Pick one habit from this list, shrink it until it feels almost silly, and do it tomorrow.

A better life rarely arrives in one dramatic moment. More often it is built from ordinary actions, repeated until they stop feeling like effort.

Start small. Come back after bad days. Give it time.

Sources

1. Hunt, Marx, Lipson & Young (2018), “No More FOMO,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, summarized by Quartz: https://qz.com/quartzy/1459609/limiting-social-media-use-reduces-depression-say-researchers
2. Allcott, Braghieri, Eichmeyer & Gentzkow (2020), “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” American Economic Review: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aer.20190658
3. Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano & Staats, “Making Experience Count,” summarized by Harvard Business School: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/reflecting-on-work-improves-job-performancehttps://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/reflecting-on-work-improves-job-performance
4. Lally et al. (2010), habit formation study, summarized: https://spring.org.uk/?p=107834https://spring.org.uk/?p=107834

Small Habits That Can Change Your Life was originally published in THE WORDS HUB on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From the time I was very young, I seemed to pick up on things quickly.

It started before I was old enough to understand what I was noticing. I could recognize when the adults around me were having serious conversations, even when they tried to keep their voices low. I noticed when my elementary school teachers seemed more withdrawn than usual, or when the atmosphere in a room felt different from the day before. I didn’t always know what any of it meant, but I knew something had changed.

I learned to adjust accordingly. I would do what I thought was expected of me, trying to make things easier for the people around me. If someone seemed upset, I became more careful with my words. If a room felt tense, I tried not to add to it. I became accustomed to reading the room before deciding how much of myself to bring into it.

That habit followed me into adulthood.

When I meet someone for the first time, I sometimes leave with an impression I can’t explain. It might be the way they speak to a friend, respond to a question, or change their expression when someone else starts talking. I rarely feel comfortable sharing those initial impressions with the rest of my friend group. I’m afraid I’m being too critical, too analytical, or looking for something that isn’t there.

And yet, there have been times when those feelings turned out to be right. People I felt uneasy around eventually showed a side of themselves that made me understand why I had hesitated. It isn’t that I always know someone’s intentions. I don’t. But I have learned that the smallest interactions can sometimes tell us more than we realize.

The problem is that I don’t seem to know when to stop looking.

I notice when someone’s tone changes halfway through a conversation. When they break eye contact, become unusually quiet, or seem less enthusiastic than they were a few minutes earlier. I notice the nervous movements people make when they’re uncomfortable, the pauses before certain answers, the way they rub the back of their neck, and the subtle differences between what someone says and how they say it.

This awareness can be useful. It helps me recognize when a friend needs a little extra consideration or when someone might be having a difficult day. It makes me thoughtful about the way I communicate and conscious of how my actions might affect others.

Other times, it makes an interaction feel like something I need to solve.

When someone takes longer than usual to respond to a text, I worry about whether I said something wrong. Should I have kept that thought to myself? Was my last message too enthusiastic? Did I come across differently than I intended? A conversation that ended hours ago can occupy the rest of my evening with me revisiting individual sentences as though there might be an answer hidden somewhere in their wording.

Philosopher William James once wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” I’ve always found that idea interesting because I don’t feel as though I agree to notice half the things that occupy my mind. My attention is often drawn toward details before I’ve had the chance to decide whether they matter.

That’s where the distinction between being attentive and being hyperaware becomes important. Attentiveness allows us to be present with other people. It helps us recognize what they might need without requiring them to explain every little thing. Hyperawareness, however, can make it difficult to be present at all. Instead of experiencing a conversation, we’re monitoring it. Instead of listening to what someone is saying, we’re wondering why they said it that way.

I’ve spent so much time trying to understand the things people don’t say that I sometimes forget to take their words at face value.

I don’t want to become less observant. I like being someone who remembers the little details people share or recognizes when something feels different. But I’ve come to realize that being perceptive doesn’t mean I have to be perpetually on alert.

There’s a difference between noticing and feeling responsible for everything around me. I can be attentive without becoming an interpreter of every silence, expression, or passing remark. I can let certain things remain unanswered, even when my mind insists there must be something worth uncovering.

Peace is learning that not everything the world reveals to you needs to become something you carry.

The Problem With Noticing Everything was originally published in THE WORDS HUB on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.