The Lazy Desi’s 25-year archive of chaos, dreams, kids, ADHD, gaming, and everything life swallowed too early.
If marriage was a marathon, I started it already tired.
Burnout was my permanent roommate.
Fatigue hummed under my skin like background radiation.
I would start organizing the house like the Pinterest Fairy
…then fall asleep mid-task like a chunky, throaty, malfunctioning Roomba.
He laughs and covers me with a blanket.
Not mockingly.
Lovingly.
Like he knows brilliance doesn’t burn evenly.
…when I wake up (sometimes days later) I’m never alone.
Traveling alone was easy:
No commentary, no interruptions, no one asking,
“Why is this person staring at us?”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to go that way.”
“Did you just argue with the taxi driver in Urdu and win?”
Traveling as a pair in Pakistan meant suddenly understanding how different the world treats two people vs one.
Hotel staff soften.
Shopkeepers smile like they love love.
Old women at airports give you the “MashAllah beta, stay happy” blessing.
Random men offer unsolicited advice about marriage longevity like they’re hot take influencers.
It’s hilarious, bizarre, mildly exhausting, and weirdly sweet.
Traveling alone felt like a mission.
Traveling as a couple feels like being part of a folklore tale — everyone’s invested.
Being a South Asian wife comes with an unspoken job description:
hold everything together.
Funny thing — I couldn’t even hold myself together.
I shifted personalities like outfits:
desi-wife version, western fashionista version, hidden-gifted-girl version, burned-out-student version.
I was all of them and none of them.
Marriage didn’t simplify my identity.
It multiplied it.
But he kept saying,
“You don’t have to pick just one.”
And that…worked.
Moving abroad didn’t just shift the landscape around me — it shifted me.
Every region has a pulse, but South Asia?
This place has a heartbeat that thuds through the soles of your feet. The chaos, the unspoken rules, the eye-contact etiquette, the aunties who can scan your entire life trajectory faster than TSA scans a suitcase… it’s all so surreal.
As a teen traveling alone, I floated above it, a feather, barely registering the machinery of society.
Now as an adult, I feel the weight of the expectations, the scrutiny, the cultural choreography I’m expected to dance with flawless precision.
And yet—
Part of me still loves that unmistakable voltage in the air.
That sense of being wrapped in a tapestry older than memory.
That whisper of home, even when it overwhelms me.
…the Macaroni and cheese
There’s a love that shouts.
And then there’s the love that waits quietly at the edges of your burnout.
He’d sit by me while I doom-scroll random medical papers, gaming walkthroughs, and baking science at 3 AM.
No criticism. No commentary. Just presence.
Once I apologized for being so tired all the time.
He smiled and said,
“You’re brilliant. Your mind moves too fast. I’ll wait wherever you land.”
It was the first time I realized:
Being loved gently is a type of miracle.
The strangest thing about getting married young:
Everyone assumes you become a wife and become an adult at the same time.
I became a wife.
The adult part lagged behind… buffering… crashing… restarting.
My executive functioning stayed in childhood while my responsibilities jumped ten levels up.
But he never demands that I “be more.”
He never holds a ruler to my chaos.
He simply… adapts.
I never cook. I do not clean. He shooed away expectations like houseflies.
I didn’t grow up that year.
But his patience did give me room to finally try.
I cried over laundry. (Folded and put away for me that no one expected me to do even though I’m married now)
And rice. (That I didn’t even cook but I thought I should have!)
And the idea of being responsible for anything.
It wasn’t sadness — it was overwhelm.
My ADHD fog was thick enough to cut with a kitchen knife.
He’d take things from my hands and say,
“Sit. I’ve got it.”
A newlywed bride sitting on the kitchen floor googling “how to be a functioning adult” was not the aesthetic I imagined.
But there I was.
Some girls have honeymoon phases.
I had meltdown phases.
But he never flinched.
I used to think adulthood would knock politely before entering.
Instead, it barged in wearing gaudy gold jewelry and carrying a wedding date.
We married suddenly.
YEARS earlier than planned.
Unforeseen issues, family storms, and the kind of cultural pressure that pulls time forward by force.
And yet…
He stood there — calm, steady, warm — almost too patient for someone marrying a girl whose brain was permanently buffering.
He looked at me like I was a whole galaxy in the middle of an eclipse.
Sometimes destiny isn’t poetic. Sometimes it’s chaotic, rushed, and confusing.
But that day?
Even with everything swirling — the exhaustion, the fear, the ADHD static — I finally felt chosen. Not forced upon everyone like an unfortunate disappointment…or an imperfect daughter.
UnderTheRock Diaries 