Love you Zindagi (life): Flash tips for writing with self‐compassion

Abstract

In the current era of political and academic precarity, two researchers from India and Pakistan have written this essay in an epistolary style to challenge the notion of assembly‐line writing in academia, emphasizing the importance of compassion and self‐care during the writing process. Both writers do this by centering their positionalities not only as South Asian researchers who reflexively navigate research with communities but also as women who often forget to internalize the care and compassion they garner for interlocutors when writing as insider/outsider. The two letters of compassion disrupt hierarchical, Eurocentric, quantitative norms of writing. They prioritize personal struggles of being an outsider in Western academia, anecdotes of emotional abuse in marriage, writing fatigue and emotional struggles of the self within the writing process. More importantly, this piece demonstrates that to write with meaning and purpose means to embrace the messiness, precarity, and pain of life while being attentive to and acknowledging one's challenges in the process.