A small win a day: how I got through the loneliest term of class 12

There's a particular kind of loneliness that shows up in class 12, and it doesn't look like loneliness. It looks like being busy. It looks like a full planner and a half-eaten dinner and a phone that buzzes with notifications you don't want to answer.

I noticed it in the autumn. My best friend Anushka had moved to a different coaching centre across the city, so the lunch-hour chats stopped. My other friends had paired off into study groups where the conversation was all about ranks and cutoffs. I'd sit in the library in the evening and look around at forty people studying silently and think: there are forty people here and not one of them knows I'm here.

This is not a post about being sad. It's about what I did with the quiet.

What the loneliness was actually like

It wasn't dramatic. It was little things.

• Hearing my own footsteps on the stairs.
• Realising I had gone a whole day talking only to my teachers and my mother.
• Opening WhatsApp, scrolling through twenty chats, and not knowing who to message.
• Feeling oddly jealous of the girls laughing in the corridor, though I didn't want to be them.

I also felt a bit embarrassed. Loneliness seems like a thing that happens to people in movies, not to a girl with a full planner and a loving family. But I've learned that it's incredibly common, especially in exam years, even among people who look surrounded.

The notebook that saved my autumn

One evening, instead of studying, I took out a blue notebook and wrote: "Today's small win." And under it, one line. That day it was: "I drank water before tea." It was tiny and silly. But I felt a bit lighter.

I did it the next day. "Solved the Chemistry question I'd been avoiding." The day after: "Smiled at the canteen uncle and he smiled back." Then: "Sent a voice note to Anushka." It started to add up.

Here are some of my small wins from the past two months, as proof that they don't have to be big:

Date-ish	Small win
Week 1	Walked to the library without my earphones and noticed the gulmohar tree
Week 2	Finished one whole NCERT exercise before 9 pm
Week 3	Told a friend I was feeling low. She said she was too
Week 4	Went to bed at 11
Week 5	Wrote a poem about the railway bridge near my house
Week 6	Asked a Physics doubt in class, a thing I'd been scared of
Week 7	Said no to a group plan because I was tired, and didn't feel guilty

None of it is Instagram-worthy. But I started to look for wins during the day, which meant I started to pay attention to my day. That shift alone felt like a window opening.

Three things I changed, besides the notebook

1. I messaged one person a week, first. Not a reply. A first message. It could be as dull as "did you finish the Chemistry sheet?" or as silly as sending a meme. Most people reply warmly. A couple of times, the reply turned into a ten minute chat, and that ten minutes was worth a lot.

2. I found a "body double." It's a funny term for a friend who studies in the same room (or on a video call) in silence. My cousin and I study together on a call on Sunday afternoons. We don't talk much. We just exist. It's amazing how much easier it is to sit with a hard chapter when another person is breathing nearby.

3. I stopped treating the library as the only place I could study. Some evenings I studied at my kitchen table while my mother cooked. The smell of onions frying and the sound of the pressure cooker whistling turned out to be comforting. It reminded me that the world wasn't only a desk.

The writing thing

I write poems, and for a while I'd stopped because I felt I didn't "have time." That turned out to be a mistake. One evening, I wrote four lines about the stairs in our building and the way the light hits them at 6 pm. I felt more like me than I had in weeks.

A poem doesn't need to be good. It's something I keep for myself. You might have something else, drawing, a guitar, football, baking, chess. It's worth protecting one small thing that's yours and has nothing to do with the exam.

What I'd like you to know

Loneliness in exam year is usually not a sign that something is wrong with you. It's a sign that your life has temporarily narrowed to a very small corridor, and you're missing the rest of the house. But if it lasts for weeks, and it starts to feel heavy, or if you're not sleeping or eating, or you're losing interest in things you used to love, it's really worth telling someone. A friend, a parent, a counsellor. I'm saying this gently, because I almost didn't. I was afraid that talking about it would make it bigger. It made it smaller.

I told my mother in the end, in the kitchen, with onions on the stove. She put down the spoon and hugged me with her onion hands. It's one of my favourite memories of the whole year.

If you want to try the small-wins notebook

• Keep it by your bed.
• One line, every night.
• It can be silly.
• If you can't think of a win, "I got through today" counts.
• Don't use it to judge yourself. It's not a scorecard.

I'm still lonely sometimes. But I have a notebook with fifty-odd small wins in it, and a mother with onion hands, and that's enough to get through a term.