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One Small Step

PERSONAL ESSAY2025
One Small Step

The loneliness arrived before anything else — before the coursework, before the cold, before I'd unpacked my one suitcase from home.

Author
Kshitij Seth
Topics
Personal EssayResilience

I had moved to the U.S. for graduate school. Everyone said the first semester would be hard. Nobody told me what hard would actually feel like.

What helped was not a grand intervention. It was running. Three times a week, badly, for a few months. Then a conversation. Then another. Mental strength, like physical strength, is the accumulation of small consistent steps. That's all it ever is.