The Woman Who Left Isn’t the Woman Who’s Coming Home

Eighteen days in Norway, a younger Kiran found, a future Kiran waiting, and a life I’m finally ready to live.

It is grey and gloomy outside today, the kind of Norwegian day where the sky seems to have forgotten how to be blue. I’ve lit the candles and settled at the dining table with my laptop, with Crime Patrol playing quietly in the background. For the first time in eighteen days, I am beginning to think about going Home. I had a lie-in this morning, caught up with Dad on WhatsApp, helped him with a couple of things, made breakfast and reset my brother’s studio a little more. Nothing particularly remarkable, just an ordinary Saturday morning, and yet I keep thinking about how extraordinary these eighteen days have actually been.

When I left the UK, I came to Norway with two fairly simple intentions: I wanted to spend time with my Dad and family, and to spend a week by myself at a cabin in the Norwegian Highlands, where I could finally finish editing my book. That was the plan. But life, as it tends to do, had other ideas. Someone very special said something to me when I left for a month-long trip to Norway last year that stayed somewhere in the back of my mind: “Look around; when you come back, nothing will be the same.” I remembered those words this morning because I realised that this time, it isn’t Norway that has changed; it’s me.

The woman returning to the UK tomorrow morning is not the same woman who left eighteen days ago. The first four days were spent with my family, and somewhere in those days I met several versions of myself I hadn’t consciously visited for a very long time. Looking at old photographs of myself from my late teens brought back more than memories of how I looked. I remembered how I felt. I remembered the girl who tried so hard to be pretty, to be accepted, to be enough. The girl who learnt to adapt herself to what everyone else wanted her to be. The girl who put pieces of herself away because belonging sometimes felt more important than being herself. And I felt her pain.

What surprised me wasn’t that she was still there, but how quickly I could recognise her once I stopped being busy enough to avoid her. I didn’t want to judge her or tell her she should have been stronger, more confident, or less affected by what other people thought. She was a young woman trying to navigate the world with the tools she had. So instead, I sat with her. I held space for her. And I told her something I think she has been waiting decades to hear: “I’m here now. You’re safe. You don’t have to become who everyone else wants you to be anymore.”

Perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts of getting older; we finally become old enough to go back and meet the younger versions of ourselves without needing to change their story. We can look at the girl, the teenager, the young woman and understand that she was doing the best she could with what she knew. We can see the choices she made with more compassion because we now understand what she was trying to protect, what she was trying to find, and how desperately she wanted to belong.

And then, this morning, I read a comment from Marusya Price on my #85WeeksToFifty interview with Sif that hit home. She wrote about turning 50 and unapologetically announcing, “I am now entering my Golden Age”. She spoke about living her first fifty years with the feeling that she’d missed out on pleasure, adventure, and laughter, and about taking off the “I am a victim” badge and giving herself permission to live, love, and lead her life wholeheartedly. That sentence about missing out stayed with me because, if I’m brutally honest, I understand it.

I sometimes feel as though I lost my youth somewhere between my mid-twenties and mid-forties. I was building a life in a new country, raising Khushi by myself, building businesses, learning, working, growing, evolving, surviving, and doing what needed to be done. I don’t regret the life I’ve built or the woman I’ve become, but there are parts of me that know I didn’t really live those years in the way I wanted to. I was so busy creating a life and making sure everything was okay that I didn’t always stop to ask whether I was actually experiencing it.

Perhaps that’s why approaching fifty feels different. I’m not interested in spending the next thirty years looking backwards at the life I didn’t have. I want to live the one I have. I want to experience pleasure, adventure, laughter, friendship, connection, and love. I want to make memories that belong to this version of me rather than mourning the ones I think I missed.

And yes, that includes love. I want to find my person, not because I am incomplete without him, but because I have built a life I would genuinely love to share. I want companionship. I want someone to grow old with, someone to share the ordinary with, someone to sit beside on a Sunday morning, argue about what we’re having for dinner, laugh about something ridiculous, travel with, come home to, and experience the beautiful mundanity of life alongside. And yes, somewhere inside me there is still that younger Kiran who wants to be madly in love (I blame Bollywood movies. If you know, you know).

She has been waiting for that story for a very long time, and I’m not going to tell her she’s foolish for wanting it. The soon-to-be 49-year-old Kiran wants it too, but she has learned something her younger self didn’t know. Love isn’t something I can sit inside my sanctuary and wait for. As bloody lovely as that would be, my person isn’t going to magically appear at my front door while I’m sitting behind my laptop, candles lit, tea beside me, and Crime Patrol playing in the background. So this Autumn, the Meet-Cute Experiment begins.

The same thing happened with my work during this trip. I came to the cabin intending to finish my book, but instead I found clarity about so much more. I clarified the 49-to-50 Project. I thought about the woman I am becoming. I found a clearer direction for my businesses. I realised I don’t need to be an expert in everything, and I certainly don’t need another credential simply to prove that I am worthy.

I also realised how much I wanted to simplify the way I work. So on the final day of my cabin stay, I made a decision that I had been circling for years: I would stop juggling multiple platforms and bring each business under one roof. Then I actually did it. Five days of migration, editing, deleting, fine-tuning, and making decisions later, both businesses have their new homes. The Sattva Collective has its new home, and Kiran Singh has hers. The podcasts have moved, the course is there, and most importantly, the community (that’s you, my dearest reader) is there.

That part was unexpectedly emotional because I went through so many pieces of writing from earlier versions of myself. I remembered the excitement of writing them, the pride of pressing publish, and the woman who sat behind the screen believing in what she was creating. And yet, when I read them now, I couldn’t connect with them. At first, that felt like losing a part of myself. Then I realised something: I don’t have to carry every version of myself forward in order to honour her.

Those hundreds of articles existed for a reason; they were part of the road that brought me here. But I am not the Kiran who wrote them anymore, and that is okay. I don’t need to drag every old version of myself into the new home simply because she once worked hard to build it. Some things can be thanked, appreciated, and released.

Maybe this is what midlife is really giving me: the courage to curate. To ask what still belongs, what I actually believe, what comes with me, and what I am finally ready to let go of. I have spent years accumulating knowledge, responsibilities, credentials, ideas, content, and roles. Now I’m learning how to choose.

A quote I found this morning says that the only two people we owe anything to are our 6-year-old self and our 80-year-old self. I don’t know whether I completely agree that they are the only people we owe anything to, but I understand the sentiment deeply. My 6-year-old self deserved to feel safe. My teenage self deserved to know she was enough. The woman in her twenties and thirties deserved more than survival. And my 80-year-old self deserves to look back and know that I didn’t spend the second half of my life waiting for permission to live it.

She deserves to say, you did it. You finally lived.

That’s the woman I want to make proud now. My younger self is already proud of me. I can feel that. She sees the woman who raised her daughter, built businesses, survived difficult chapters, kept going, kept learning, kept creating, and somehow found her way back to herself. But now I have another woman to think about: the 80-year-old Kiran, the woman who will look back at 49 and 50 and remember what I did with this enormous threshold.

Will she remember another decade of proving, or will she remember the year I finally decided that my life wasn’t something to postpone? I know which story I want her to tell.

So tomorrow, I will fly back Home to the UK. I’ll unpack my bags, reset my own space, light my candles, make tea, and sit at my bureau looking at the life I have created. I’ll probably feel a little strange for a while because something has shifted. I came to Norway to spend time with my family and finish a book, and I am leaving with something much bigger. I met the younger versions of myself, listened to them, made space for them, and let some old versions of myself go. I found clarity about my work, simplified my businesses, made room for love, made room for friendship, made room for life and, perhaps most importantly, made room for Kiran.

Not the daughter. Not the mother. Not the businesswoman. Not the woman trying to prove herself. Just me. A woman who is nearly 49 and has finally realised that there is no catching up to do. I don’t need to recover every year I think I lost. I simply need to live the years I have left with both hands open.

So here’s to the next chapter. Here’s to the Meet-Cute Experiment, the book, 49, the woman I am becoming, and making my 80-year-old self damn proud. I came to Norway looking for clarity and a quiet week to finish a manuscript; instead, I found something much more precious: a clearer understanding of the life I want to live and the woman I want to be while I’m living it.

The woman who left the UK eighteen days ago isn’t the woman returning tomorrow, and I have a feeling she’s going to like who she is becoming.

Kiran x