I spent years learning who I was supposed to be. Then I started discovering who I actually am.
For a long time, so much of my identity was shaped by other people’s expectations — what it meant to be a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother, and the person who kept everyone else happy.
It took me years to realise that I was allowed to ask a much simpler question: what do I want my life to look like?
The woman behind Breaking Free
I’m Usha — an author, speaker, storyteller, wife and mum of two. But those are the easy labels. The more complicated part of my story is how long it took
For much of my life, I learnt to make myself smaller. I kept the peace, put other people first and became very good at ignoring what I needed. Walking away from the family dynamics I grew up with wasn’t one brave moment — it was the beginning of learning who I was without them.
Writing Breaking Free changed that. Putting my experiences into words helped me understand my past differently — not as something I had to keep carrying, but as something I could learn from. And sharing it showed me just how many other people had stories they had been taught to keep quiet too.
These days, I’m still learning, still healing and still figuring things out as I go. The difference is that I’m no longer trying to become the person everyone else expected me to be. I’m building a life that feels like mine — and raising my daughters knowing they never have to earn the right to be themselves.
What breaking the cycle looks like for me.
For me, breaking the cycle isn’t one big decision I made years ago. It’s in the small choices I make every day — in the way I parent, the boundaries I keep, the relationships I choose and the way I speak to myself when nobody else is listening.
It means raising my daughters in a home where they’re allowed to have opinions, say when something doesn’t feel right and know that love isn’t something they have to earn by behaving a certain way. I don’t always get motherhood right — nobody does — but I want them to grow up knowing that their voice matters.
It means having boundaries without spending days feeling guilty for having them. It means understanding that protecting my peace doesn’t make me unkind, and that I don’t have to explain every decision I make simply because somebody else doesn’t understand it.
And it means allowing myself to have a life beyond survival. To write. To create. To speak. To laugh ridiculously loudly with the people I love. To try things I might fail at. To discover parts of myself I never had the space to explore before.
Breaking the cycle hasn’t given me a perfect life. It has given me something much more important — the freedom to build one that actually feels like my own.
Who I am beyond the story
One of the nicest parts of healing has been discovering that there is so much more to me than the things I survived.
I’m a mum, a wife, a writer and a woman who still gets ridiculously excited about a good Bollywood song. I love being creative, whether that means writing, photography, playing around with a new idea or disappearing down a rabbit hole because I’ve suddenly decided I want to learn how to do something.
I’m also still a work in progress. I overthink things. I can be a perfectionist. I sometimes have to remind myself that I’m allowed to rest without earning it first. And there are still moments when the old version of me — the one who worried far too much about what everybody else thought — tries to make an appearance.
But I like the woman I’m becoming. She’s a little braver, a lot more comfortable in her own skin and increasingly willing to see where life takes her.
From telling my story to starting conversations
Writing Breaking Free was never part of some grand plan. I started writing because I finally felt ready to put my story into words. What I didn’t expect was what would happen once those words were out in the world.
The book started conversations. Women began sharing their own experiences with me. Podcast invitations arrived. Interviews followed. And suddenly I found myself talking openly about subjects that, for much of my life, I had been taught to keep quiet.
Today, I speak about toxic family dynamics, generational trauma, cultural expectations, boundaries, motherhood and what it means to break a cycle — not as an expert looking in from the outside, but as someone who has lived it and continues to learn from it.
Every conversation reminds me why sharing our stories matters. Because sometimes hearing somebody else say the thing you’ve been afraid to say yourself is enough to make you feel a little less alone.
AUTHOR
Breaking Free
My memoir turned a story I once struggled to talk about into something I could finally own — and share.
CONVERSATIONS
Podcasts & Media
I join honest conversations about toxic families, culture, generational trauma, healing and choosing differently.
SPEAKING
Sharing What I’ve Learnt
I use my lived experience to open conversations, challenge silence and remind others that our past doesn’t have to decide what comes next.
If my story brought you here, I’m glad you found me.
Maybe you’ve read Breaking Free. Maybe you’ve heard me on a podcast, seen one of my posts, or stumbled across this website while looking for answers of your own.
However you got here, I hope you leave knowing one thing: you are allowed to choose what comes next.
You can question the things you were taught. You can set boundaries. You can change patterns that have existed for generations. And you can build a life that feels like yours — even if other people don’t understand the choices it took to get there.
I’m still figuring parts of it out too. I think most of us are.
So stick around. Read the blog, explore my story, listen to one of the conversations — or simply come back whenever you need reminding that choosing differently is possible.
Usha Singh-Das | Breaking Free 