Inspiration Diaries With Writer Aditha Reddy

You might notice a pattern in a lot of these initial Inspiration Diaries: I met many of them in a writing class I took last summer. Little did I know at the time, these women would become some of my closest creative companions, my good friends, people I talk to every week, if not every day. Aditha and I met in this writing class, and every day I’m grateful for it. We connected immediately over our shared favorite book, They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey. Aditha is a brilliant writer; her view of the world and ability to articulate it in essays inspires me so much. I’m so grateful to know her and write alongside her. She just re-launched her Substack, things i can't tell my mom. I promise that after reading just a bit of her writing here, you’ll want to subscribe to read more and more of her work. <3

xx Brianna

In the spring of 2025, I went to an author talk at a local bookstore with poet Maggie Smith.1 Maggie was promoting her book Dear Writer, a book about creativity and the craft of writing, and I had been thinking about writing a lot. A couple months prior, I read the book They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey and was blown away by how Meg wrote about ballet in the book. After finishing the book, I vaguely thought about how I want to write a book where I write about yoga the way Meg wrote about ballet but I had no idea how I’d make a whole novel out of that concept. During Maggie’s Q&A, I asked, “What advice do you have for someone who wants to write but doesn’t know what to write about?” She responded, “about-ness is a myth” and went on to say that if you want to write, you sit down and write about the things you notice about the world around you, and you’d find something to say.

A couple months later, I went to an author talk with Fredrik Backman where he had similar advice—to keep at writing. I still couldn’t fully comprehend how you wrote when you didn’t have something to say, but I did decide to sign up for a writing class—the first creative writing class I would take since my sophomore year of high school!

I met Brianna last summer through that class. It was my first experience with a writing workshop and the first time I made writer friends. I learned that writing is a team sport and having this team is what has encouraged me to write more in the last year than I have since high school.

Since that author talk with Maggie Smith, I have proven to myself over and over that it is true—if I sit down to write, I will find something to write about.2

I’ve learned that the best way to fight this fear is to notice things in my day-to-day, no matter how mundane the day itself may be… birds bathing in a shallow puddle, the swell in my chest when someone shows me how they love me, what song is playing when I’m at brunch with my friends—all moments I file away in my mental “I can write about this” folder.

For my version of the Inspiration Diaries, I wanted to show myself (and you!) how if I stay present, there is a writing prompt in every day.

It is one of the biggest days in Cincinnati! The Flying Pig Marathon and Half Marathon. I had the date in my calendar for months to cheer on my friend who had been training for the half-marathon for months, but unfortunately I couldn’t make it to the actual race the morning of because of some family who unexpectedly came into town for a very brief trip. But that didn’t stop me from setting an early alarm and sending voice memos to my friend and another friend who decided to run the half-marathon last minute.3

I felt immense pride in my chest when each of them crossed the finish lines. I couldn’t believe they had both finished running marathons while I was still sipping on my breakfast smoothie.

That afternoon, my parents, cousin, and I ended up making our way to Downtown Cincinnati to show my visiting cousin around. There were heavy grey clouds in the sky and the city was littered with remnants of the marathon in the morning—High Noons from the spectators, porta-potties at every turn.

While waiting at a crosswalk, there was a man behind us wearing a medal. “Congrats!” I exclaimed, my parents joining in with me. “Hey thanks, I really appreciate it!” he responded, beaming. On the opposite side of the crosswalk, there was a cluster of women, also all wearing their medals.

We walked on the Roebling Bridge and stopped halfway. I looked out at the Great American Ball Park stadium in front of me the little city skyline beside it. The bridge overlooked a small park and there were people smattered around. To my left was Kentucky and at the end of the bridge was a short walk to a bookstore. Behind me would be Paycor stadium.

Before we walked back to our car, I turned around and looked once more at the Roebling Bridge. The metal barricades were still up from the race this morning. I felt a surge of pride for my wonderful city—the beautiful bridge that was a blueprint for the Brooklyn Bridge, the city that came together to cheer on marathoners that morning, the view of the skyline, all the things I haven’t even done yet here!

Sure, London and New York City were very special places, but so was Cincinnati.

The heavy clouds from the day before lingered into Monday. It’s looking like April showers are turning into May showers. However, when it seemed safe enough to say that it wasn’t actually going to rain, I decided to accompany my parents on a walk.

We drove to a nearby metro park and walked along a loop with a manmade lake in the center. The air was cool enough to warrant a sweatshirt and humidity wasn’t in quite full swing yet. After making one lap with my parents, I decided to sit on a bench while they did one more round. I swatted mosquitos away with my palm while taking a seat on a bench that directly faced a small dock.

On the dock were three little boys fishing. There were two taller boys and one shorter one and only two of them had fishing poles. Only seconds after the shorter boy threw his fishing line into the lake, there was a tug and he reeled in the line. A small fish was on the end. “Wow,” I said to myself, kind of surprised that at the success, despite seeing people constantly fish at this lake. The boy struggled to get the fish off the hook and I grew anxious, thinking about how the fish was probably very uncomfortable. The other boys stepped into help and all shrieked when the fish flew off the hook and landed on the dock and began to flop around. Finally, the shorter of the taller boys picked it up and tossed it back into the water.

After the whole episode resolved, I looked to the left to see my parents waving in the direction of the parking lot. I made my way to them, turning back one last time to see the boys giggling and shoving each other.

There are few things I find more thrilling than a Ticketmaster queue. The Ticketmaster stars were aligning in my favor this afternoon because the particular sale I was trying to get into started at noon—that meant I would be on my lunch break and would long be done with patient care for the morning and wouldn’t have to worry about balancing work with this effort.

I set up camp with my laptop and phone in the break room. The wifi signal in my exam room where I spent most of the day was abysmal and I was not risking a poor wifi connection keeping me from getting these tickets I wanted. There would be two local dates for the show I wanted to see and I had a strategy—I would log into my Ticketmaster account for the Thursday show on one tab and the Friday show on another tab, and I would log into my boyfriend’s Ticketmaster account for each show on two tabs on my laptop. My friends and I decided the Thursday show would probably be the show we had better odds for so that’s what our focus was on.

As always, when the queues open, it’s chaos. But this time, it was chaos in my favor! I realized I had a great queue number for the Thursday show on my phone and was in and out of the sale in fifteen minutes with tickets for me and my friends. My heart rate was about two hundred beats per minutes and I was ecstatic. I had much better luck than my friends trying to get tickets too but thankfully we’d all make it to the show now.

After soaking it in for a few minutes, I began to make my way back to my exam room for my afternoon patients, but not before closing the open tabs on my phone. Then I stopped dead in my tracks, I noticed the Friday tab had let me through the queue and my heart sank. I frantically refreshed, only to see that the tickets were now sold out.

I felt awash with regret. I totally forgot about the tab for Friday opened on my phone and I realized I must’ve gotten a good queue number for Friday, too, by some miracle. If I was paying attention, my friends and I could’ve attended both shows!

And just like that, the excitement from minutes before was dampened.

Later, I thought about the yogic principle of Brahmacharya—the idea of nonexcess. Essentially, this is the idea of practicing moderation and avoiding overindulgence. Brahmacharya reminds us to balance our desires—and manage how much we desire. The thing about desire is that it’s kind of like children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. If you give a mouse a cookie, then it asks for a glass of milk, etc. etc. If you satiate one desire, it’s only natural to desire even more.

If you get tickets to one concert, it’s easy to want tickets to one more concert. Desiring more kept me from appreciating what I did have. Where do you draw the line on how much more to desire?

I spent the rest of the evening reminding myself I am lucky to be going to one at all and that going to a second one would not necessarily improve my quality of life. And sometimes, the universe decides for us that we don’t need something because otherwise we might not be able to draw the line for ourselves.

In therapy, something I’ve been working on is living with discomfort—not just my own but also others’. In this process, I’ve noticed that it would be easier for me to do this if someone told me it was okay that I was making other people uncomfortable with my choices.

When talking about this, my therapist referenced the movie Ella Enchanted. The story is about a girl named Ella who has a curse put on her where she is forced to do anything that anyone tells her to do. Spoiler alert: she ends up breaking the curse by looking in the mirror and tells herself to stop listening to everyone. My therapist suggested, “Maybe you need to give yourself the permission in the same way.”

I was speechless. It was truly the perfect metaphor for everything in my life.

Then, she gave me an assignment. “Every morning, look in the mirror and tell yourself, ‘I give you the permission to live with your discomfort and the discomfort of others.’”

I admitted that it felt hokey to me—affirmations always felt cheesy and futile to me but I was willing to try it at least.

And so that night, before bed, I decided to try it for the first time. I repeated the statement she suggested while looking in the mirror. A small part of me was hoping I would be miraculously transformed after just saying it once, but I felt exactly how I did seconds prior. Bummer.4

But I did think about Ella Enchanted and how unlike Ella for a majority of the movie, I had free will, and I could actually do whatever I wanted and not just what other people wanted. And even at the end of the movie, the person who restored her free will was actually herself. So maybe that permission to myself would extend largely beyond living with discomfort. I will no longer be obedient!

At lunch time, my friends and I typically go on a walk at a park by our office. Around noon, the sun is hot and bright and I always forget to bring my prescription sunglasses and a hat and sunscreen in preparation for the walk. This day was no exception. We made our way across the parking lot on the slight incline up towards the lake we loop around. There were others from our office on their lunchtime walks and many strangers. Ducks floated in the lake and the wind carried a mist over us from the fountain in the center.

One of my friends told us about how she was going to start volunteering at the animal shelter and had training for it in the upcoming weekend. She told us that her mom would always say, “If you are worrying too much about yourself, you aren’t thinking about other people enough.”

It felt very profound especially in light of how much I feel like I’ve been worrying about myself recently. I’ve been very wrapped up in friends’ bachelorettes and weddings and my eventual bachelorette and wedding and difficult conversations with my family and friendship woes. It was also a reminder how one of my actual goals for 2026 was to volunteer somewhere.

Maybe a welcome break from my own problems would come in the form of giving my time back to my community. I realized that I want to volunteer my time in a way that involved books and would have to get creative with what that would look like.

On Friday evening, I went to dinner with my parents to celebrate a big achievement in my dad’s career. A few days prior, I suggested we go to dinner as my treat somewhere different from our typical spots and suggested maybe even venturing to downtown Cincinnati to go to a more upscale restaurant. My parents kind of dismissed the idea—it didn’t come as a surprise because they are practical creatures of habit.5

I decided to take a page out of my brother’s book and simply make a reservation somewhere and tell them the plan was made and that’s where we would go. I ended up deciding on E+O Kitchen in Hyde Park—not quite as upscale as I initially thought, but more upscale than they’re used to, and not quite in downtown Cincinnati, but further south than they typically venture.

We shared an appetizer of steamed edamame—lightly coated with just the perfect amount of sea salt. My dad ordered salmon, my mom ordered vegetable fried rice, and I ordered fried gyoza and sushi. My parents (begrudgingly) admitted the food was good.

Earlier in the week when my cousin visited, my dad told us stories about growing up with her parents. He lived with her family during his high school education because the village his parents lived in didn’t have a high school. During dinner, he talked about every job he had in every city he had ever lived in.

I don’t acknowledge it as often as I should but my dad’s life is truly amazing. He was raised in a home without a television and now lives in a home with three televisions and a home theater system. His parents did not go to college and he has a PhD. He came to this country alone and now has so many friends that I get stressed at however will my parents not invite 300 people (or more!!) to my wedding. My dad set his own standard—a standard that so many in the generation after him live by.

And it’s a reminder that I can set my own standard for the next generation, even when that looks different than the standards set for me.

My boyfriend asked me if I wanted to join him while he played golf with his dad. His mom would also be going, but not playing. I asked if I could bring a book and he said, “Of course.”

I had only read about 150 pages of my 645 page book for book club—The Bee Sting by Paul Murray—and had quite some progress to make.

I like the idea of reading outside but often get too distracted by the wind or the bugs. But it turns out that reading under the shelter of a golf cart is actually the perfect setting for me. The golf course was green and lush, trimmed so short that I asked if it was really grass and not artificial turf, and the sky was so blue that it looked like a Windows wallpaper. While I read, Kacey Musgraves’ new album played softly from the cart speakers and there was an occasional pop of a golf club hitting the ball. After each hole, we whirred to the next in the cart, gently navigating the hills and turns of the course. The breeze ruffled my hair and the pages of my book, but not in an unpleasant way for the first time.

“I would do this again,” I told my boyfriend as we got to the end of the course. I didn’t make a huge dent on my book (I only read about 44 pages) but it was pleasant to spend time with him outside while reading a book.

I almost couldn’t think of a better end to the week—until we ended the night with dinner at my favorite restaurant with my favorite vodka pasta.

***

Connect with Aditha here:

Instagram: @booksadithareddy

Substack: things i can't tell my mom

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