The Bamboo Season

The Quiet Work of Becoming.

After a little time away, Tea with Self has found its way home. This is where I write freely, unscheduled, unpolished, and always honest. I'm glad it's back. I think you might be too.

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There’s a particular kind of Tuesday, and it’s always a Tuesday, never a Monday, when you’re already braced for it, where you sit down at your desk, open your laptop, and the numbers just… stare back at you.

Subscriber count. Open rates. Follower growth. Engagement. And something in you deflates.

Not dramatically. Not in a way you’d admit out loud. But quietly. The way a candle dims when someone walks past an open door.

I had one of those Tuesdays not long ago. I’d spent the previous week writing something I was genuinely proud of. A piece that came from somewhere real. The kind of writing where you don’t notice two hours have passed because you were so inside the words. I’d recorded a podcast episode that felt like a proper conversation with myself. I’d shown up. Consistently. Intentionally. In the way, I always ask other women to show up for their own lives.

And then I opened a tab I probably shouldn’t have opened. And the numbers told me a different story.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about metrics: they have terrible timing.

They show up precisely when your confidence is already slightly frayed. They don’t care that you’ve been doing this work longer than most people sustain anything. They don’t factor in that you’ve written six books, built two organisations, and recently launched a community that didn’t even exist a year ago. They just sit there: cold, small, impartial. and wait for you to interpret them.

And if you’re tired, you’ll interpret them wrong.

I did.

For about forty minutes, I genuinely questioned whether any of it was working. Whether I was building something real or simply building something. Whether the effort I was pouring in was being received or simply… received poorly.

It’s a strange kind of loneliness, that feeling. Especially when you know, intellectually, that it isn’t true.

I made myself a chai. Ginger. Cardamom. A small piece of jaggery. Oat milk, brought up slowly, so it doesn’t catch.

And I sat with it properly, something I’m rigorous about, in the way that some things become non-negotiable not because someone told you to make them so, but because life taught you what happens when you stop.

And I thought about bamboo.

I’d come across something recently about how bamboo spends up to five years doing what looks like absolutely nothing. No visible growth. No shoot. No signal that anything is happening at all. Underground, the root system is spreading, quietly, persistently, stubbornly, but there is no evidence of this on the surface. Nothing to point to. Nothing to measure.

And then, when the conditions are right, it grows 35 inches in a single day.

Five years. Then one day.

I’ve been doing this work, really doing it, building it into something with shape and intention, for longer than most people sustain creative businesses. I have written words that women have told me changed how they saw themselves. I have sat with women in the middle of their unravelling and helped them find language for what they were feeling. I have slowly built something that I actually believe in.

And I nearly let a Tuesday afternoon convince me otherwise.

What strikes me now, chai warm in my hands and the noise quieter, is how easily we collapse our entire journey into the present moment’s data.

We forget that growth is not always visible.

We forget that the most important things we’ve built, the trust, the clarity, the reader who’s been quietly reading for two years before she finally reached out, don’t show up on a dashboard.

We forget that we are not the same person we were three years ago, or one year ago, or even six months ago. That we have learnt things we cannot unlearn. That we have evolved past versions of ourselves we didn’t even know were limiting us.

We forget how far we’ve actually come.

Here’s what I keep returning to, though.

Whatever you are creating, you are not waiting for it to arrive. Because you are the source of it. And from there it all multiplies. You’re not waiting on others to validate you. You’re not waiting for your numbers to climb before you feel like you’re enough. You’re not waiting for your life to become better before you start feeling better about it.

You’re evoking the feeling first, from within, so that life has no choice but to reflect it back.

That’s the shift. That’s the whole thing. Because when you work on your business, your writing, your community, your craft, every single day, because you love it, because it is genuinely yours, the outcome becomes inevitable. Not because the algorithm rewarded you. But because you were in your purpose. And purpose has a way of compounding quietly, the way roots do.

It will show up. It always does, when you’re working from that place.

Here’s what the algorithm does, at its worst: it makes you measure a slow, deep, roots-spreading kind of growth by a fast, visible, surface-level standard.

And that’s not just unfair. It’s inaccurate. It’s like judging bamboo in year two and deciding the soil is barren. The soil is not barren. The roots are just not done yet.

I don’t want to offer you a tidy resolution, because I don’t think that’s what this kind of Friday asks for. It asks for honesty. And the honest thing is this:

I still check the numbers. Probably more than I should sometimes. But I’m learning, slowly, the way I learn most things that actually stick, to hold them lightly instead of handing them authority over how I feel about my work.

Because the work is not the metrics. The work is what happened inside me as I wrote that piece I was proud of. It’s the reader who replied at 11 pm, saying she’d been carrying that essay around in her head for a week. It’s the fact that I am still here, still building, still curious, still willing to sit down on an ordinary day and begin again.

That’s not nothing; that is, actually, everything.

Your bamboo season is not a failure season; it is a roots season.

And the shoot is coming.

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If this piece found you at the right moment, if you’re somewhere in your own bamboo season right now, there is a space designed to hold you through it.

The Midlife Circle is where we do this work together. Bi-weekly essays and The Midlife Edit, a private podcast, tools for every area of this season of life. From £19/month or £149/year.

And if you’re ready for something more personal, the Midlife Inner Circle at £297/year includes the Midlife Manifesto Audio Training, The Midlife Reset course, and four quarterly 1:1 calls with me.

Your roots are already spreading. Come and do the work properly.

Step inside →

Kiran x