Writing While Healing - Indie Author Interview: Rashi Gaur

Welcome to the newest post in Writing While Healing, a series where I speak with indie authors who’ve found light through writing during their darkest times.

Today, I’m honored to feature Rashi Gaur, an indie author. You can learn more about Rashi Gaur here. 

   

Please introduce yourself!

I’m Rashi Gaur — a marketer and brand strategist, Instagram creator, former media entrepreneur, and debut author of an upcoming book. A woman in my early forties, originally from India and now a Singapore expat of over a decade, I live with my husband, our eight-year-old daughter, and our much-loved fur baby. My work sits at the intersection of brands, culture, storytelling, and people — while my writing explores the messier, more human side of life.

Please tell us a little about yourself and the kind of stories you write.

My writing is honest and fierce, emotionally rich, and grounded in scenes that feel deeply recognisable. The essays I write on Substack inhabit the messy terrain of adult relationships — the chaos, conflict and confusion of friendships, the people we encounter, and the people we wish we hadn’t.

My upcoming book, however, is more literary in nature. It explores emotional turbulence and overindulgence as constant companions while growing up, and how both came to shape my formative years. At its heart, it is a story about survival — about the patterns we inherit, the choices we make, and the experiences that quietly alter us over time.

As the story unfolds, something within me begins to shift. What once felt like a lifelong search for something outside myself gradually becomes an understanding of what belonging really means — and, ultimately, the discovery of belonging.

Please share a bit about your mental health journey, as much as you are comfortable with :)

My mental and emotional journey has been messy — as life often is — but also deeply reflective and transformative. For years, I relied on external anchors for a sense of stability. What I didn’t realise was that while I was simply looking for someone to listen, those relationships had quietly become my sources of survival and validation. 

 As the elder daughter, I was taught to be accommodating, responsible and endlessly giving. Somewhere along the way, even the slightest hint of injustice began to feel devastating. I loved people with an availability I assumed would be reciprocated, only to repeatedly discover that the people I wanted to love were not always capable of loving me in the same way. Overthinking every word, searching for patterns that may not have existed, and repeatedly falling for people who showered me with love-bombing before gradually taking control — I mistook all of this for a way of surviving. It became a pattern so familiar that I didn’t know where survival ended and self-abandonment began. I went to therapy more than once. I found solace in the friends who stayed, listened, supported me, and were willing to sit with every version of my emotions. I learned to say things out loud — sometimes repeatedly, sometimes messily — simply because giving my thoughts a voice felt like a way of making sense of them. 

 And then I wrote my book. 

 Somewhere between the pages, something began to change. I wasn’t simply telling a story anymore; I was examining the person who had lived it. The book made me confront the patterns I had carried, the relationships I had mistaken for home, and the ways in which I had learnt to survive. In the process, the book didn’t just tell my story. 

 It rewrote me.

How has your mental health influenced your writing process or creativity?

I wrote my first poem in Hindi, my native language, when I was eight.

It was the pre-digital age, long before children could reach for a phone to call or message their mothers. I was at someone’s home, being looked after while my mother was at work. Everyone around me was busy with their own routines, and somewhere in that moment, I remember feeling profoundly alone.

There was no way to call my mother. No way to send her a message. So I picked up a piece of paper and, in my broken handwriting, scribbled a few lines about what I was feeling.

That was how I became a poet.

Of course, I didn’t write another poem for a very long time. Not until I fell in love.

And that love became an entire universe. He became the perfect muse for all the poetry that had been waiting somewhere inside me. Even today, I find it difficult to comprehend the intensity and beauty of the emotions I poured onto those pages.

Perhaps it was a lack of encouragement, or perhaps those poems felt too sacred to share. I showed them to very few people — except my late grandfather, who believed in those words enough to wish that they would one day be published somewhere. He held on to that hope for me for as long as he was alive.

Life happened, as it does, and I kept writing. Sometimes in the backs of notebooks I was using for my master’s degree, sometimes in Word documents that may still be sitting somewhere on the first computer I owned.

Writing poems for people on their birthdays became another kind of ritual. It was my most intimate way of telling someone, “I love you.” When ordinary words felt inadequate, I would write them a poem.

Then came Instagram, and for a while, it became another canvas for my words.

Looking back now, I realise that my mental and emotional life has always been deeply intertwined with my writing. Whenever an emotion became too heavy for me to carry, I found a way to put it somewhere outside myself. I wrote it down. I shaped it. I turned it into sentences, metaphors and, sometimes, something beautiful.

I suppose that is what writing has always been for me.

When I couldn’t contain an emotion, I gave it words.

I bled it onto the page — and somehow, made something beautiful out of the mess.

Do you find writing to be healing, challenging, or a bit of both?

Healing, for sure. But also challenging — because of the honesty it demands.

My essays, and my upcoming book, are rooted in real experiences and real people. I change names to protect privacy, but I don’t disguise the emotional truth. Anyone who has been close enough to me to occupy a place in those stories would probably recognise themselves. In some ways, that is inevitable. You can change a name; it is much harder to disguise a shared history.

That honesty has cost me relationships.

But, interestingly, I don’t believe I have lost people because I portrayed them as villains. I don’t think there are villains or antagonists in my stories. There are simply people, relationships, choices, misunderstandings and experiences — and the lessons I have carried from them. I write about what happened and, more importantly, about what it did to me and what it taught me over time.

Some relationships, I have realised, were held together by my willingness to accommodate, overgive and remain silent. When I stopped performing that role and began writing honestly about my experiences, some of those relationships fell away. Perhaps they were relationships that depended on a version of me who was more submissive, more forgiving, or less willing to question what was hurting her.

And strangely, that has also been a kind of blessing.

I have never been particularly good at loving halfway. When I love someone, I love with my whole heart, soul and blood. I don’t function very well with ego in relationships, especially with people I truly love. For a long time, I thought that meant I had to keep giving, keep understanding and keep making space.

Writing taught me that love does not have to require self-erasure.

In the process of being honest, I have lost a few relationships that were perhaps never as honest as I believed them to be. I have also gathered more resentment and, at times, more hatred than I feel I deserved. But I was never trying to hurt anyone. I was simply trying to stop hiding.

For years, I was so immersed in love, loyalty and the performance of being everything everyone needed me to be that I barely stopped to ask what was happening to me.

Writing made me stop.

It made me look at my own journey without the performance, without the need to make everyone comfortable, and without having to turn anyone into a villain to make sense of my own story.

And that, more than anything, has been healing.

The book has taught me that telling the truth can change the relationships around you — but it can also change the relationship you have with yourself.

And I think I’m still learning.

The journey continues.

Has your experience with mental health shaped the themes or characters in your stories?

Absolutely. Mental health has shaped almost every theme I write about.

The essays I publish on Substack, as well as my forthcoming book, are deeply rooted in experiences around self-erasure, the need for validation, childhood conflict, emotional dependence, relationships, and the complicated ways in which we learn to survive. These aren’t themes I chose intellectually; they are themes I have lived, observed and spent years trying to understand.

I haven’t written fiction yet. Most of my writing so far has been rooted in real experiences and real people. But whenever I do move into fiction, I know one thing for certain: my characters will have to be messy.

I’m drawn to people in all their contradictions — people who love deeply and hurt deeply, who make mistakes, carry wounds, repeat patterns, seek validation, and sometimes don’t even understand why they behave the way they do. I don’t think I could ever write characters who are entirely good or entirely bad, because real people rarely fit into those categories.

Perhaps that is what mental health has taught me most as a writer: that there is always more beneath the behaviour we see.

And that is where, for me, the most interesting stories begin.

Are there any writing routines, boundaries, or self-care habits that help you stay grounded?

I spend a lot — read, an insanely lot — of time alone. And I genuinely love it.

I like sitting with my thoughts, without always feeling the need to distract myself from them. I take myself on dates simply to observe. I look around, notice people, nature, animals, architecture, little gestures, conversations, sounds — all the things we tend to overlook when we are rushing through our days. I think solitude has made me a keen observer, and observation inevitably finds its way into my writing.

I also read. I am known for my almost crazy love for books. Having done my Master’s in English Literature, reading has been a constant companion for as long as I can remember. I read every single day, and there is a very particular kind of happiness I feel when I am completely engrossed in a book — when the world around me disappears and I am entirely inside those pages. Books have been my best friends in many ways, and continue to nourish the writer in me.

Instagram has also become an unexpected creative outlet. My journey as a fashion and lifestyle creator has given all those random creative impulses somewhere to go. It has taught me to notice aesthetics, moments, people and stories, and to turn fleeting ideas into something tangible. It has also helped me shape and discipline a creativity that often arrives in completely unexpected ways.

So I don’t really have a rigid writing routine. My creative life is much more fluid than that. I observe, I read, I absorb, I think, I create — and eventually, something finds its way onto a page or a screen.

Perhaps that is my way of staying grounded: giving myself enough solitude to hear my own thoughts, enough books to keep me company, and enough creative space to let those thoughts become something.

What advice would you give to other writers who have similar struggles as you?

One thing I have always done, especially when my thoughts become too loud, is scribble them down on paper. I also believe deeply in journaling. You don’t always need to know what you are writing towards. Sometimes, you simply need to get the thoughts out of your head and onto a page.

When I started writing my book, it was actually a resolution for that year. I had no idea it would become a book. I just started writing. I didn’t think about structure, grammar, language, chapters or even whether anyone would ever read it. I simply wrote the emotions as they came to me.

It was only after I had emptied out the main emotions and experiences that I went back and began to shape them. I found a structure, worked on the language, connected the pieces and slowly turned what had begun as scattered scribblings into a manuscript.

So my biggest advice to anyone struggling with their writing would be: write before you edit yourself.

And, above everything else, be honest.

Honesty has been the greatest strength in my writing journey. I believe that if you have an honest story to tell — one that comes from a place you have genuinely lived, felt or understood — it will find its audience.

You may not know who that audience is when you begin. You may not even know what the story is becoming.

Write it anyway.

Sometimes, the story reveals itself only after you have had the courage to put it down.

Have you ever taken breaks from writing to focus on your mental health?

All the time.

For me, taking a break from writing doesn’t necessarily mean stepping away from creativity. It often means stepping back into life.

One of my favourite ways to reset is to go to India and spend time with my parents and the people I love. There is something deeply grounding about being around the people and places that have known me long before I became a writer, a marketer or a creator.

I also love shooting content for my Instagram channel. Fashion, lifestyle, creating something visually beautiful — it gives me a completely different creative outlet from writing and allows my mind to move in another direction.

And then there is my family. I have a beautiful family, and with them, breaks happen quite naturally. Life has enough everyday moments, conversations, laughter and chaos to pull me out of my own head.

My marketing job also keeps me sane. As much as writing is an emotional space for me, marketing engages a very different part of my brain — strategic, analytical, practical and fast-moving. I think that balance has been important for me.

So yes, I take breaks all the time.

Sometimes I stop writing to rest. Sometimes I stop writing to live. And sometimes I simply need to step away from my own head and let life give me something new to write about.

What’s something you wish more people understood about being a writer with mental health struggles?

I wish more people understood that writers like me overthink — all the time.

We analyse every spoken word and every unspoken one. We read rooms. We notice shifts in tone, silences, expressions, what was said and what was deliberately left unsaid. Sometimes we notice too much.

We love deeply. And sometimes, we over-love.

We carry emotions long after the moment has passed, turning them over in our minds until we understand them, or at least find a way to live with them. And writing becomes a way of making sense of all that noise.

For me, writing has never just been about creating something beautiful. Sometimes, I write because I need to understand what I am feeling. Sometimes, I write because I need to release it.

And sometimes, I write because it is the only way I know how to survive it.

We write to make sense.

We write to heal.

We write to survive.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with the readers?

I am someone who over-loves. My friends often boast about my loyalty, and I think that is one of the things I hold closest to myself. But I am not necessarily a social person. Social performance doesn’t come naturally to me. I don’t always know how to make small talk, maintain appearances or be present simply for the sake of being present.

What does come naturally to me is feeling deeply. Loving deeply. Showing up deeply.

And writing has given all of that depth a voice.

It has also made me fearless. Whether I was editing my own magazine, writing personal essays, or putting together my book, I have gradually learnt not to be afraid of saying what I truly mean. Writing has taught me that I would rather be honest and uncomfortable than comfortable and untrue to myself.

Honesty is something I preach, but more importantly, it is something I try to live by.

I don’t know where this journey will take me next. But I know I want to keep writing with the same fearlessness, the same emotional honesty, and the same willingness to look at myself — and life — without pretending that either is neater than it really is.

Where can readers connect with you and your work? (Socials, website, books, etc.)

Substack 
Instagram

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Thank you for reading!

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