Kākarav
May 2026 was one of the most exhausting months I had at work. Most of it was my own doing. You see, I love to bite off more than I can chew and then figure out how to gulp it down. I was working day and night, and yet somehow it felt like I was making no progress at all.
May was also when I had a preplanned getaway to Mendocino. I had been excited about it. I can never get enough of dramatic cliffs! But by the time the weekend came around, all I wanted to do was curl up and sleep. Fortunately, my friends didn't let me do that.
I was very much in my sad girl mood. We were surrounded by redwoods and beautiful landscapes, but my brain was still very much at work. I would look at the trees and wonder how cool it must be to just keep growing. I'd look at the sky and feel very, very small. Usually I love that about the sky. That weekend, I had already had enough perspective for one lifetime.
I entered Mendocino with melancholy. It was a cloudy day. At one scenic stop, I got out of the car and tried to fill my lungs with as much ocean air as I could.
"Deep breaths, Rupali," I kept telling myself.
There were wildflowers everywhere. I wandered around, deliberately trying to notice them.
"Oh, that's such a pretty shade of yellow."
"Oh, there's purple too."
I was being extra cheerful, hoping my brain would eventually get the memo. And that's when I saw an eagle.
I love eagles. They have always fascinated me. And seeing one in the wild made me genuinely happy. It was just ruling the damn sky! Barely moving its wings, effortlessly soaring above everything.
Then I heard another pair of wings beating rapidly near me.
A tiny bird was flying nearby. I don't know what kind it was, but its little wings were working so hard!
The contrast was almost funny.
One bird barely moving and soaring impossibly high. The other flapping furiously nearby.
And because my brain was being dramatic that weekend, it immediately turned this into a metaphor.
I am not an eagle. Maybe I'm that little bird. For a few miserable seconds, this felt extremely profound. It was not helpful.
Tears welled up in my eyes. I quickly moved away from everyone because how do you explain this to anyone lol. I stood in a corner and pretended to look through my binoculars.
Then I noticed something else in the distance. Another eagle. And around it, a couple of crows.
That sight shifted something in me.
So what if I'm not an eagle? I have never been an eagle. I am Kavale. Rupali Kavale.
I've heard plenty of jokes about my surname over the years. Kavala means crow in Marathi, my mother tongue. But standing there looking at those crows, for the first time I felt weirdly proud of it.
And crows are kind of incredible.
They're ridiculously smart. Curious. Adaptable. Persistent. They survive almost anywhere. They watch, learn, remember, figure things out. They even have a subreddit dedicated to them lol.
They aren't eagles. They're crows. And honestly, that sounded a lot more like me anyway.
I bite off more than I can chew and then somehow figure out how to gulp it down. I get myself into things I don't entirely know how to do and then figure them out. Sometimes I flap around furiously. Sometimes I make a complete mess of it.
But figuring things out has always been my thing.