The Woman with Commitment Phobia

By Prerna Chandra · Thu Jun 11 2026

I couldn’t breathe. I was nineteen years old, sitting in my room, staring at the television screen, and I could not register a single thing happening on it.I had completely stopped being able to hold a thought long enough to understand it. Comprehension had become a luxury I could no longer afford. Ten hours a day I sat there, eyes fixed on the screen, using it the way you use a very loud radio in a room full of grief — not to listen, but to drown something out.
This was a girl who had studied with the focus most people pray for. Who had cleared her CA entry exam, sat through papers that broke students far more seasoned, and emerged with her head held high. Four months before this moment on the couch, I had been that girl. Now, I was someone who could not finish a sentence in her own head without it dissolving into panic.
My parents watched me. They are not the parents you might imagine, they were never the ones standing over me with expectations and ultimatums. They were unusually free for Indian parents of that generation. And so, for a few days, they told themselves I was exhausted. That I needed rest. That I would come back stronger.But the days stretched into weeks and I was still there, on that couch, sobbing through nights I could not sleep, carrying a secret that was physically pressing down on my chest. Because what I could not tell anyone, what I had not yet found the language or the courage to say out loud, was: I did not want to become a Chartered Accountant anymore. After one and a half years of preparation. After the entry exam. After making it in. I wanted out.

“The guilt of that wanting felt like a crime. Not because my parents were demanding it of me. But because somewhere along the way I had demanded it of myself, and I did not know how to un-demand it.”

To understand why leaving felt so impossible, let me take you back to a grey-floored classroom three years before this. I was in twelfth standard, standing near the door, sharpening a pencil, when Pallav Sir asked me what I wanted to do with my life. Pallav Sir was tall, handsome, brilliant with confidence that made brilliance feel contagious. He wore glasses and explained accounts like he was letting you in on a secret the textbook had been hiding. I looked up to him the way you look up to teachers who make you feel like the only student in a room of forty. I answered without hesitation. “I want to become a Chartered Accountant.” He looked at me for a few seconds that stretched into something that felt like five full minutes. And then he said, carefully and clearly, “You shouldn’t do CA.”

What I heard was: you won’t be able to.

For a class topper, for a girl who had built her entire identity around being the one who could. That sentence landed like a punch directly to the stomach. I did not crumble. I did what my ego has always instructed me to do in the face of being underestimated. I straightened up, argued back a little, and made a silent, furious promise to prove him wrong. So, by the time I was nineteen and sitting on that couch, I was not just carrying the weight of leaving a career path. I was carrying the weight of a promise I had made to myself in a grey-floored classroom, sharpening a pencil, with my whole self-image on the line. Leaving CA did not just mean leaving CA. It meant admitting that Pallav Sir had been right. And I was nineteen and I did not yet know how to hold those two emotions at the same time — Ego and Guilt. To be proved wrong.

I told my mother first, of course. It came out of me in a low, meek voice that did not sound like mine at all — the voice of someone who has been holding something so tightly for so long that when she finally opens her hand, she can barely remember what releasing feels like.

She told my father.
I remember standing there while she did, feeling my knees go soft underneath me. My father is a good man but he was shaken, and shaken men sometimes become loud before they become understanding. He questioned who I had been spending time with. He questioned whether I had thought this through. He suggested, as fathers do when they are frightened for their daughters, that I was simply stressed and would come around. I did not come around. But what followed was one of the loneliest months of my nineteen-year-old life. My ego on one side, my guilt on the other, and in the middle this stubborn, terrifying desire to stop pursuing something that had stopped feeling like mine. My father, wounded in the way parents get wounded when they cannot protect you from yourself, went quiet on me for what felt like an eternity. Not cruel. Just gone.
I decided to take it one day at a time. North Campus was a big deal back then and I let myself be in it — the coffee, the hustle, the feeling of a life that was not yet determined. I gave myself permission to not know what came next. That permission, small and terrified as it was, was the first real decision I had made entirely for myself. Over the years, the pattern continued. I moved from one job to another, never staying long enough for people to feel comfortable with me. Same with relationships. Everyone around me had a label ready – commitment phobic, restless, unable to settle. For a while I wore that label like it was a personality, something edgy and interesting, because it was easier than examining what was actually happening.

What was actually happening was: I am a deeply passionate person. To be in something halfway, to stay in a job or a relationship that I have outgrown, to perform loyalty to a version of my life that no longer fits me — it does not make me uncomfortable. It suffocates me. Slowly and completely, it takes the air out of the room. Therefore, I have spent a long time feeling ashamed of that. Wondering if something is broken in me. Wondering why I cannot simply commit and be content the way it seems everyone around me manages to do.

“Then I started to notice something. Every time I left, I grew. Every door I closed behind me, however painfully, opened me up into a larger version of myself. The leaving was not the problem. The leaving was the point.”

We talk about consistency and commitment as though they are fixed things, as though the person who made a decision two years ago is the same person standing here today and must therefore honour what that earlier, smaller version of herself chose. But organisations restructure every three months and we applaud them for being agile. A person changes careers and we call her unreliable. A marriage grows in two different directions and we ask who is to blame rather than acknowledging that people are not static, that growth is not a betrayal, that sometimes two people simply become different people and there is no villain in that story. One partner grows and the other stays behind, who is accountable?

I am not commitment phobic. I am committed — fiercely, entirely, without apology — to my own growth. That is not a flaw I am working on. That is the truest thing about me. My father came around. Not in a single moment I can point to and say: there, that is when everything shifted. It was slow. My mother bridged the gap. My grandparents, in their patient and wordless way, held the space. And as I healed enough to find language for what I had been feeling, as I became able to explain myself rather than simply defend myself, he began to understand. Not just the CA decision. Me. The daughter he had always had, who had simply been too tangled in guilt and ego to let herself be fully known.Now when it comes up, and sometimes it does, we laugh. It has become one of those family stories that gets softer and funnier with every year of distance. And what he says, when he says anything, is not that I made the right choice. What he says is that he is glad I stood by it. Because above everything else, he has always cared more about my happiness than about being right. I think about Pallav Sir sometimes. That grey classroom floor, the pencil, the five-minute silence before those four words. I used to think he underestimated me. I do not think that anymore. I think he saw something in me that I was not yet ready to see in myself — that I was made for something other than the path I had so proudly announced. That the fire in me needed a different kind of fuel. He was not wrong. He was just early.

“People have every right to be unhappy with my choices.
And I have every right not to abandon myself
just to keep them comfortable.

I am not the same person I was two years ago.
I am not supposed to be.
That is not an inconsistency. That is the whole point.”

^{If you are sitting somewhere right now, carrying a decision that no longer fits, too guilty to put it down and too suffocated to keep holding it — this is for you. You are not broken. You have not failed. You have simply grown past something, and that is not a crisis. That is evidence that you are alive and paying attention. The journey was never meant to end where you first imagined it would. It was meant to take you somewhere truer. Trust that. Start there.}