We are taught to constantly look backward with regret or forward with anxiety. The Rare View Mirror is about learning when reflection is useful and when it is time to stop driving life through mirrors.
These books help you stop letting tasks take over your peace and teach you how to move through responsibilities without losing yourself.
Learning when reflection is useful and when it is time to stop driving life through mirrors.
The Rare View Mirror Philosophy
1 in 3
Adults feel lonely globally
40%
Feel anxious most of the time
55%
Delaying major life milestones
The 7 Minutes Rule·Desire Is a Compass·Do Less, On Purpose·Mental Health·Relationships·And Many More·The 7 Minutes Rule·Desire Is a Compass·Do Less, On Purpose·Mental Health·Relationships·And Many More·
Our Philosophy
The mirror is a tool. Not a home.
"We are not broken. We are just unseen."
The world moves fast and loud. Relationships fracture quietly. Anxiety builds in silence. Tasks multiply until they become your entire identity. Most people are going through the same struggles and most feel completely alone in them. This series exists to change that.
The Rare View Mirror is not self-help in the traditional sense. There are no miracle formulas. No 30-day transformations. Just honest, researched, deeply human writing that meets you where you are and helps you understand why you got there.
Every book in this series is for every gender, every generation. Because the struggles we face are not divided by who we are. They are shared by all of us. And so are the ways through.
THE BOOKS
Two collections. Six books. More on the way. One honest conversation.
Collection One Intentional Living3 Books
01⏱️Volume One · Intentional Action
The 7 Minutes Rule
The Unfogged Lens — All of It, All at Once
For the person running multiple projects, roles, and responsibilities at once.
One rule. Seven minutes. The only framework built for people who cannot afford
to be overwhelmed by the very life they are trying to build.
02🧭Volume Two · Intentional Direction
Desire Is a Compass
Intentional Direction
We were told desire was dangerous. This book argues
it is the most reliable guide we have if we learn
how to listen to it without being controlled by it.
03🌿Volume Three · Intentional Reduction
Do Less, On Purpose
Intentional Reduction
Busyness became a badge. This book tears it off.
A guide to deliberately doing less not out of laziness,
but out of radical clarity about what actually matters.
Collection Two Human Struggles3 Books + More Coming
04🧠Volume Four · Mental Health
The Quiet Weight We All Carry
Anxiety is not weakness. It is the most human response
to an overwhelming world. This book strips away the stigma
and gives you real tools backed by research, built for real life.
05🔥Volume Five · Anger
The Loudest Quiet Feeling
Anger is not the enemy. It is a signal the loudest one we carry
and the one we were most taught to silence. This book gives anger
its honest voice, and shows you what it has been trying to say all along.
06🪞Volume Six · Relationships
Still Here
The story of Sara. A woman who had everything that was supposed to matter
and still felt like she was watching her own life through glass.
A novel about the loneliness no one names — loving someone who is right there.
+ + +
More volumes coming
The Rare View Mirror series continues to grow. Subscribe to be the first to know.
You Are Not Overwhelmed. You Are Unorganised in the Wrong Direction. →
The task does not grow. Your avoidance of it does. A look at the seven minute rule
that started with two children who did not want to clean their rooms and changed
how an entire family thinks about stress and overwhelm.
June 2026·5 min read·Collection One
Intentional Living · Issue 002 · Collection One
You Are Not Behind. You Are Just Exhausted.
6 min read
Relationships · Issue 001 · Collection Two
Why Our Relationships Are Falling Apart
8 min read
Music · Issue 004 · Swaedify
I Accidentally Created a New Kind of Music
4 min read
Coming Soon · Mental Health
The Anxiety Nobody Talks About at Work
Collection Two · Vol. 2
Coming Soon · Intentional Direction
What Your Desires Are Actually Trying to Tell You
Collection One · Vol. 6
About
The person behind the mirror.
There are people who write about life from a distance. This is not that kind of writing.
I am a mother of two, a wife, and a physician by education who spent twenty years in research compliance in higher education. On paper, that sounds like a life well built. And in many ways it was. But it was also a life lived inside the decisions of a younger version of me a version who did not yet know what she did not know.
Then COVID happened.
Like so many others, I found myself suddenly still. The noise stopped. The calendar emptied. And in that quiet, I turned inward for the first time in a long time not with answers, but with honest questions. What had I actually achieved? What had I genuinely wanted? Were those even the same thing?
What I found surprised me. Not regret but permission. Permission to understand that what you decide in your twenties is not a life sentence. That dreams can evolve as you do. That the guilt of an unlived version of yourself is one of the heaviest things a person can carry and one of the most unnecessary.
The Rare View Mirror was born from that reflection.
This series is my attempt to look clearly at the things we all carry the loneliness, the quiet anxiety, the anger we were never taught to understand, and the lives we keep postponing. Not from a place of having figured it all out. But from a place of sitting with the same questions you are sitting with and refusing to look away.
I am not writing as an expert standing above you. I am writing as someone walking beside you, looking through the same mirror, hoping that what I see helps you see too. Welcome. I am glad you are here.
"I do not write lists or prescriptions. I write stories. Because the truest things I know about being human were never explained to me. They were shown to me. That is how I write for you."
A Storytelling Author
Get in Touch
LET'S TALK.
Whether you have a question, a story to share, or just want to say hello I would love to hear from you.
hello@therareviewmirror.com
For You
SEND US YOUR STORY
Share something you have been carrying. Something you have never said out loud. Something that has been sitting with you for longer than you can remember.
We will send you a personalised card with The Rare View Mirror philosophy. Just for you. Because your story deserves to be seen.
✉️
Email your story to
hello@therareviewmirror.com
📱
DM us on Instagram
@therareviewmirror
🪞
What you will receive
A personalised digital card carrying The Rare View Mirror philosophy written with your story in mind. Something to keep. Something to return to.
You are not broken. You are not alone. You are, like so many others, still here.
READ IT FIRST.
Join readers who want honest, unfiltered insight on relationships,
mental health, and intentional living before the books drop.
Early access to every new bookWeekly insights from the seriesNo lectures. No spam. Ever.
The Soundtrack
SWAEDIFY ON SPOTIFY
Indian Classical Cinematic Fusion.
Ancient ragas meet Western orchestral composition and modern cinematic sound design. Bhairavi breathes emotion. Darbari carries weight. Beethoven and Vivaldi echo through Indian classical scales reimagined for a modern world.
In the spirit of honesty that this series stands for this website, its design, and the visual posts you see were built with the assistance of Claude AI by Anthropic. Every word written here reflects my own voice, experiences, and research. AI helped me build the house. I brought everything inside it.
FogBy the author
Intentional Living · Issue 002 · Collection One
You Are Not Behind. You Are Just Exhausted.
May 2026·6 min read·The Rare View Mirror
The truth about time, busyness, and the wheel we were never meant to run on.
Stop for a moment. Just one moment. When was the last time you finished your to-do list? Not trimmed it. Not moved items to tomorrow. Actually finished it and felt done? If you cannot remember, you are not alone. In fact, you are in the majority.
The Numbers First
Nearly half of U.S. workers experience stress daily. Over 80% are at risk of burnout. Not occasionally stressed. Not sometimes overwhelmed. Daily. Chronically. As a baseline. 52% of employees said they felt burned out in 2024. 68% of Gen Z and 73% of millennials report feeling burned out.
Gen Z is burning out 17 years earlier than the average American. Before careers have even properly started. Already running on empty.
The Hamster Wheel Nobody Admits They Are On
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes not from working hard but from never stopping. 59% of workers say they frequently experience burnout due to difficulty saying no to extra work. More than half of people are doing work they know is pointless and feel powerless to say so. This is the hamster wheel. Not just working hard. Working constantly. Mistaking motion for progress. Mistaking busy for productive. Mistaking exhaustion for commitment.
77% of employees say workplace stress affects their physical health. Stress is not staying at work. It is coming home. Sitting at the dinner table. Waking us at 3am with a checklist of everything we did not finish. Companies lose an estimated $300 billion annually due to stress-related absenteeism.
The Lie We Were Told
Somewhere along the way, we were sold a story. The story said: do more, achieve more, be more. It said hustle was a virtue. It said rest was laziness. Here is what the story never told you: busyness is not the same as purpose. You can be furiously busy your entire life and never once do the thing you actually came here to do.
The Shift
You are not behind. You are not lazy. You are not failing at time management. You are exhausted because you have been running a race that has no finish line, on a wheel that was never designed to stop and calling it ambition. The first act of doing less on purpose is simply this: stop pretending the wheel is getting you somewhere. Look up. Decide where you actually want to go. Then step off.
What Comes Next
Knowing the wheel exists is not enough. The harder question is how do you actually step off it without everything falling apart? That is exactly what Do Less, On Purpose is about. Not a productivity hack. Not a 30-day challenge. A genuine, honest look at how to reclaim your time, your attention, and your life without guilt, without chaos, and without pretending it is easy.
Coming soon. therareviewmirror.com
This article is part of The Rare View Mirror Collection One: Intentional Living.
FogBy the author
Relationships · Issue 001 · Collection Two
Why Our Relationships Are Falling Apart And What Nobody Wants to Admit
May 2026·8 min read·The Rare View Mirror
We are more connected than ever. And somehow, more alone than ever.
There is a quiet crisis happening in living rooms, DM threads, and dating apps around the world. People are not just struggling to find love they are struggling to keep friendships, maintain family bonds, and even understand the person sitting across from them. This is not a personal failure. The data shows it is happening at a global scale.
The Numbers That Should Concern All of Us
1 in 3 adults globally report feeling lonely on a regular basis, according to a 2024 Meta-Gallup survey across 142 countries. In the United States, the number of people who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990 from 3% to 12%. 54% of Gen Z report feeling emotionally disconnected from the people around them, even when physically present. The average person spends just 17 minutes per day in meaningful conversation, down from 33 minutes in 2003. This is not a men's problem or a women's problem. It is a human problem.
"Financial stress is the leading source of conflict in romantic relationships, cited by 72% of couples who report tension at home." American Psychological Association
What Is Actually Breaking Us Apart
We stopped having real conversations. Phones did not just distract us they replaced the moments where intimacy used to grow. The long drives, the quiet dinners, the boredom we used to sit through together. That boredom was where we learned each other. Now we fill every silence. And we wonder why we feel like strangers.
We carry more stress than any generation before us. Financial anxiety is not just a money problem it is a relationship killer. When you are worried about rent, you are shorter with your partner. When you are overwhelmed at work, you cancel on your friends. When you feel behind in life, you withdraw. Stress does not stay in its lane. It bleeds into everything.
Men and women are drifting into different worlds. A 2025 Ipsos survey across 31 countries found a 20-percentage-point gap between how Gen Z men and Gen Z women view gender equality, social progress, and relationship roles. This is not about blame. It is about the fact that culture is moving fast, and people are processing it differently. When two people enter a relationship carrying very different ideas about fairness and expectations conflict is not a surprise. It is inevitable.
We forgot how to be vulnerable. Somewhere along the way, vulnerability became weakness. Men were told to be strong and silent. Women were told their emotions were too much. Both learned to perform rather than connect. The result? Relationships that look fine from the outside and feel hollow on the inside.
What Is Actually Helping
The good news: connection is a skill. It can be relearned. Couples who engage in at least one hour of undistracted conversation per week report significantly higher satisfaction. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, running for over 85 years, found that the quality of your close relationships is the single strongest predictor of long-term happiness stronger than wealth, fame, or career success.
The Honest Truth
We are not bad at relationships because we are broken. We are bad at them because we were never taught, because life got overwhelming, and because the world changed faster than our social instincts could keep up. But research also shows something hopeful: it only takes one person in a relationship to shift the dynamic. One person choosing to put the phone down. One person asking a real question. One person deciding that the people in their life are worth more than the noise.
That person can be you.
This article is part of The Rare View Mirror Collection Two: Human Struggles. Because none of us are as alone in this as we feel.
Before you go
Stay in the story.
Get early access to Still Here and every new book in The Rare View Mirror series straight to your inbox.
FogBy the author
Intentional Living · Issue 002 · Collection One
You Are Not Behind. You Are Just Exhausted.
May 2026·6 min read·The Rare View Mirror
The truth about time, busyness, and the wheel we were never meant to run on.
Stop for a moment. Just one moment. When was the last time you finished your to-do list? Not trimmed it. Not moved items to tomorrow. Actually finished it and felt done? If you cannot remember, you are not alone. In fact, you are in the majority.
The Numbers First
Nearly half of U.S. workers experience stress daily. Over 80% are at risk of burnout. Not occasionally stressed. Not sometimes overwhelmed. Daily. Chronically. As a baseline. 52% of employees said they felt burned out in 2024. 68% of Gen Z and 73% of millennials report feeling burned out.
Gen Z is burning out 17 years earlier than the average American. Before careers have even properly started. Already running on empty.
The Hamster Wheel Nobody Admits They Are On
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes not from working hard but from never stopping. 59% of workers say they frequently experience burnout due to difficulty saying no to extra work. More than half of people are doing work they know is pointless and feel powerless to say so. This is the hamster wheel. Not just working hard. Working constantly. Mistaking motion for progress. Mistaking busy for productive. Mistaking exhaustion for commitment.
77% of employees say workplace stress affects their physical health. Stress is not staying at work. It is coming home. Sitting at the dinner table. Waking us at 3am with a checklist of everything we did not finish. Companies lose an estimated $300 billion annually due to stress-related absenteeism.
The Lie We Were Told
Somewhere along the way, we were sold a story. The story said: do more, achieve more, be more. It said hustle was a virtue. It said rest was laziness. Here is what the story never told you: busyness is not the same as purpose. You can be furiously busy your entire life and never once do the thing you actually came here to do.
The Shift
You are not behind. You are not lazy. You are not failing at time management. You are exhausted because you have been running a race that has no finish line, on a wheel that was never designed to stop and calling it ambition. The first act of doing less on purpose is simply this: stop pretending the wheel is getting you somewhere. Look up. Decide where you actually want to go. Then step off.
What Comes Next
Knowing the wheel exists is not enough. The harder question is how do you actually step off it without everything falling apart? That is exactly what Do Less, On Purpose is about. Not a productivity hack. Not a 30-day challenge. A genuine, honest look at how to reclaim your time, your attention, and your life without guilt, without chaos, and without pretending it is easy.
Coming soon. therareviewmirror.com
This article is part of The Rare View Mirror Collection One: Intentional Living.
FogBy the author
Intentional Living · Issue 003 · Collection One
You Are Not Overwhelmed. You Are Unorganised in the Wrong Direction.
May 2026·5 min read·The Rare View Mirror
The truth about time, tasks and the seven minute rule that changed everything.
Look at your to-do list. Not the one on your phone. The real one the one cycling through your head at 2am. How long is it? How long has it been that long?
The Problem Nobody Names Correctly
We call it overwhelm. We call it burnout. But most of the time it is something simpler. It is the gap between the size of a task in your mind and the size of it in reality. The way a fifteen minute phone call becomes two weeks of dread. The task does not grow. Your avoidance of it does.
Where This Started
I did not discover the seven minute rule in a book. I discovered it trying to get two children to do things they did not want to do. Just seven minutes. You do not have to finish it. You do not have to enjoy it. Just seven minutes and then we reassess. Seven minutes is short enough that the brain does not resist starting. But long enough that momentum takes over. What began as a way to get kids to clean their rooms became something I could not stop thinking about. Because it worked on me too.
What Happened to My Kids
My adult children think differently about tasks and stress than most people their age. They do not catastrophise their lists. When something feels overwhelming they instinctively break it down, start small, adjust as they go. They did not learn this from a productivity app. They learned it from seven minutes from the repeated experience of discovering that the thing they dreaded was never as large as it felt before they began.
The Method
Think strategically. Before adding something to your list ask whether it deserves to be there. The list that exhausts you is often full of tasks that were never yours to carry.
Stay at seven minutes. Always. This is the rule that makes the rule work. The moment you extend it you break the agreement your brain made with itself. Seven minutes feels safe because it is finite. The second it becomes open ended the resistance returns. Do not negotiate with it. Seven minutes. Stop. Walk away. Come back tomorrow.
Adjust without guilt. If you miss a day or a week you begin again. Without drama. Without the story that missing means failing.
Question everything on your list. The most radical thing this method teaches is not how to do more. It is how to stop doing the things that were never worth doing in the first place.
What Comes Back
Chronic overwhelm does not just cost you time. It costs you curiosity. It costs you the aliveness that comes from feeling like you are moving through your life rather than being buried by it. When the list becomes manageable something else returns. The person you were before the list took over starts to come back. That is not a productivity outcome. That is a human one.
Just seven minutes. The size of a song. The length of a short walk. Seven minutes to begin the thing you have been carrying. And then seven more if you want. But only if you want.
The 7 Minutes Rule is Volume One in The Rare View Mirror series. Coming soon at therareviewmirror.com
Relationships · Issue 001 · Collection Two
Why Our Relationships Are Falling Apart And What Nobody Wants to Admit
May 2026·8 min read·The Rare View Mirror
We are more connected than ever. And somehow, more alone than ever.
There is a quiet crisis happening in living rooms, DM threads, and dating apps around the world. People are not just struggling to find love they are struggling to keep friendships, maintain family bonds, and even understand the person sitting across from them. This is not a personal failure. The data shows it is happening at a global scale.
The Numbers That Should Concern All of Us
1 in 3 adults globally report feeling lonely on a regular basis, according to a 2024 Meta-Gallup survey across 142 countries. In the United States, the number of people who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990 from 3% to 12%. 54% of Gen Z report feeling emotionally disconnected from the people around them, even when physically present. The average person spends just 17 minutes per day in meaningful conversation, down from 33 minutes in 2003. This is not a men's problem or a women's problem. It is a human problem.
"Financial stress is the leading source of conflict in romantic relationships, cited by 72% of couples who report tension at home." American Psychological Association
What Is Actually Breaking Us Apart
We stopped having real conversations. Phones did not just distract us they replaced the moments where intimacy used to grow. The long drives, the quiet dinners, the boredom we used to sit through together. That boredom was where we learned each other. Now we fill every silence. And we wonder why we feel like strangers.
We carry more stress than any generation before us. Financial anxiety is not just a money problem it is a relationship killer. When you are worried about rent, you are shorter with your partner. When you are overwhelmed at work, you cancel on your friends. When you feel behind in life, you withdraw. Stress does not stay in its lane. It bleeds into everything.
Men and women are drifting into different worlds. A 2025 Ipsos survey across 31 countries found a 20-percentage-point gap between how Gen Z men and Gen Z women view gender equality, social progress, and relationship roles. This is not about blame. It is about the fact that culture is moving fast, and people are processing it differently. When two people enter a relationship carrying very different ideas about fairness and expectations conflict is not a surprise. It is inevitable.
We forgot how to be vulnerable. Somewhere along the way, vulnerability became weakness. Men were told to be strong and silent. Women were told their emotions were too much. Both learned to perform rather than connect. The result? Relationships that look fine from the outside and feel hollow on the inside.
What Is Actually Helping
The good news: connection is a skill. It can be relearned. Couples who engage in at least one hour of undistracted conversation per week report significantly higher satisfaction. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, running for over 85 years, found that the quality of your close relationships is the single strongest predictor of long-term happiness stronger than wealth, fame, or career success.
The Honest Truth
We are not bad at relationships because we are broken. We are bad at them because we were never taught, because life got overwhelming, and because the world changed faster than our social instincts could keep up. But research also shows something hopeful: it only takes one person in a relationship to shift the dynamic. One person choosing to put the phone down. One person asking a real question. One person deciding that the people in their life are worth more than the noise.
That person can be you.
This article is part of The Rare View Mirror Collection Two: Human Struggles. Because none of us are as alone in this as we feel.
Before you go
Stay in the story.
Get early access to Still Here and every new book in The Rare View Mirror series straight to your inbox.
FogBy the author
Music · Issue 004 · Swaedify
I Accidentally Created a New Kind of Music
June 2026·4 min read·Swaedify
I did not wake up planning anything with music.
I just woke up anxious. The kind where your chest feels tight before your thoughts even catch up. I had work waiting, kids getting ready, a hundred small things already pulling at me before the day had even properly started.
I did not want silence. And I did not want anything loud or distracting either. Just something that would steady me. So I put on music.
At first it was just background noise while I moved around the house. But I kept skipping, changing things, trying to find something that did not feel flat. Everything felt familiar in the wrong way, like I had heard it all before in slightly different packaging.
At some point I stopped just listening. I started playing with it. A raga here. Beethoven there. Vivaldi layered over something heavier, more modern, trap beats, 808s. Not because I had a plan, but because it felt like something needed to shift and I did not know how else to do it.
I was not thinking about genres. I was not thinking about creating anything.
I just kept adding things until it stopped sounding like separate pieces and started sounding like one continuous space.
There was a moment where I realized I had been sitting there longer than I meant to, just listening to what was coming out. It felt strangely calm. Not escape but steadier.
I do not know what to call it yet. I call it Swaedify for now. I am not a musician. I have never composed music in any formal way. But I think I have always been searching for sound that feels alive in a different way something that does not just sit in the background of life.
This is not background music for me. It is what I reach for when everything feels too loud inside. And I am sharing it because I think I am not the only one who needs that.