There’s a chapter in Untamed by Glennon Doyle called “Boulders.” She talks about how families carry invisible weights and when those boulders are finally lifted, love has room to flow in. Not every family gets to experience it, she says. But when they do, EVERYTHING changes.
I think about that chapter often. And I think the boulders don’t just sit between people. Sometimes they sit inside them. Wedged in the mind. Quietly shaping who deserves your compassion and who doesn’t. I watched one of those boulders move once, on an ordinary evening, on an ordinary street. And that moment lives in my heart as the clearest proof I have ever seen of what transformation actually looks like.
A Year That Changed Everything
Let me give you some context.
During my BSc from Christ University, I got selected as a peer educator and that experience opened up a whole world I hadn’t expected. It exposed me to communication, addiction, and all the messy, real things that people my age were quietly dealing with but would never walk into a counsellor’s office to talk about. Something in that work just clicked for me. Post graduation, I took a break year. Not because I was lost, but because I had discovered that I drew energy from people. That I was pulled, almost magnetically, toward understanding and helping them. So I decided to explore that pull seriously. I enrolled in a Diploma in Counselling with Banjara Academy and what followed was one of the most transformative years of my life.
We learnt a lot, and then we put it to practice. In the last few months of the course, we were placed at palliative care centres and kidney diagnostic centres, not just visiting, but actually counselling people there. We sat with people in their most vulnerable, raw, difficult moments. But it wasn’t just about being out in the world with others. It was also deeply inward. We went back to the smallest, most fundamental concepts of life and examined them with so much depth. Self-awareness wasn’t a buzzword in that space, it was the whole practice. And slowly, quietly, the things that truly mattered became very clear to me. My whole lens shifted.
I came out of that year a different person. And my parents noticed. Everyone around me did.
The Gift That Came Back Around
The year after I graduated from that course, my dad enrolled in it.
He saw what had happened to me, the way I was moving through the world, the conversations I was having, the way I was seeing people, and he wanted that for himself. My parents were always wonderfully open-minded. But like most of us, they carried their share of conditioning. The kind of unexamined assumptions that come from decades of living in a particular way. But he chose to walk into that classroom anyway. He made friends. He had conversations he’d never had before. He sat in rooms where people were honest in ways that don’t happen at dinner tables. For him, it was transformative. Life-changing, even. But I didn’t fully understand just how much had shifted until one evening on a walk.
The Sidewalk Moment
We were walking down a road, the three of us, my mum, my dad and me, on a completely ordinary evening, when we saw a man, drunk, in the middle of the path. He was awake, stumbling, reaching out toward people passing by. Not aggressively. Just lost.
Honestly, I expected him to look away. My dad had a complicated relationship with drinking and with people who drank. He had lost his own father very early in life to lung and liver failure. That kind of loss doesn’t leave you. It shapes you. Somewhere along the way, that grief had built a wall. And in that moment, I expected it to hold.
Instead, my dad walked toward him. He helped the man get to the side of the road. He got him water. He made sure he was sitting safely before we left. My mum and I just looked at each other. She was visibly shocked. Not because my dad was unkind, he was one of the warmest, most genuinely kind people I knew. But this was different. This was him extending grace to the one kind of person he had always found it hardest to extend it to. And he did it without a second thought.
I didn’t say anything right away. I just walked beside him and felt something enormous move in my chest. Pride, yes. But more than that, awe. The quiet, almost disbelieving kind. Because in that moment I understood. My dad no longer saw alcoholism as a character flaw or a moral failure. He saw it as a disease. As suffering. He saw the person. And he responded to them accordingly.
The Miracle of Grace
Glennon Doyle writes that the miracle of grace is that you can give what you have never gotten. That line has stayed with me. I think about it often. But I also think about its mirror, that sometimes, the miracle of grace is that you can give what you have only just learned to see.
My dad had every reason to look away from that man on the road. History, grief, loss. All the most understandable reasons in the world. But he had done the work. He had sat in rooms and listened to people and let something shift inside him. He removed a boulder, a mental one, the kind that quietly decides who deserves your kindness and who doesn’t. And when that boulder moved, the love didn’t just flow toward our family. It flowed outward. To a stranger with a paper cup of water on the side of a road.
I take a little credit for it. I do. I like to think that the year I spent learning to see people, really see them, planted something in our home. That it made space for my dad to want that for himself too. But the truth is, he did the work. He walked into that classroom. He chose to grow. And I was there to witness it. I got to be on that sidewalk. I got to see the exact moment the boulder moved. Not everyone gets that miracle.
I did.
Now, every time I pass someone on the side of the road, struggling, helpless, lost in something bigger than themselves, I think of my dad and that evening. And I think of how quietly, completely, a person can change. If they choose to.