March. One year since I joined Adalat AI.
I have already written about the work itself — the courtrooms, the languages, the gap between benchmarks and real benches. This post is not about that. This is about what happened to life around the job.
Off the Clock
I came in carrying a particular kind of guilt — the kind that early career researchers accumulate quietly over years. The feeling of always being one paper short, one grant proposal behind, perpetually under-delivering against some invisible standard. Academia plants that feeling so deeply that you forget it’s not natural.
Joining an early-stage startup was a different energy altogether. The work was real and immediate — models being deployed in actual courtrooms, every bug feeling personal, every improvement visible. There were nights when the grind was genuinely enjoyable, because the stakes were clear and the team cared deeply. The kind of environment that can easily tip into everyone burning the midnight oil, not because anyone asks, but because it just happens.
What kept it from tipping was something simple: a clear signal from leadership that late-night collaboration was not the culture we were building. No pings after hours, no expectation of response. It was stated and it was held.
Room for the School Bell
That gave me the room to do something I had never quite let myself do before — step away without guilt. I was the only one on the team with a young child, and I needed to be offline after school pick-up until the kid was in bed. So I was. No special case made, no justification offered. The boundary was just received.
There’s something that quietly settles in you when that kind of inclusion doesn’t need to be negotiated.
You Know You’ll Be Away, So Be Here
The other thing it did was sharpen the hours I was present.
Knowing I’d be offline by a certain point meant I stopped letting the day drift. The work window is what it is — so you use it fully.
A Team That Has Hobbies
This one surprised me the most.
The people I work with are genuinely good at their jobs. But they also run, cycle, paint, dance, swim and apparently lift weights too 😅. There are Slack channels for hobbies. Not performative “look at our culture” channels — actual spaces where people share a playlist from a run or ask if anyone wants to join an upcoming marathon.
When you are surrounded by people who treat life outside work as something worth protecting, it becomes easier to do the same. I watched younger colleagues — people a decade or more younger than me — talk about fitness with genuine enthusiasm. With plans and progress and setbacks and the kind of curiosity that has nothing to prove.
It stirred something in me — a quiet question about why I had never thought to do the same.
The 90s Girl Who Never Moved
I grew up in the nineties, in Kerala, in a household where studying was the sport. Physical activity was not really part of my script. I was not sporty. There was no expectation that I should be.
Last year, I enrolled my kid in Bharatanatyam. I sat through those first few classes, watched her learn to hold a posture, to control her feet, to carry her arms just so. And somewhere in the watching, I wanted to try. So I enrolled myself too. Dance requires a body that works with you. Flexibility. Stamina. Strength. I was not there. Not even close. I wanted to move, and my body was not ready.
So I enrolled in an online fitness group. And then came the real education.
I grew up in the nutrition folklore of a generation that did not have better information. Max one egg a day, eggs not more than three times a week. There were lessons in textbooks about balanced diet, but I never cared about really understanding them, let alone applying them.
Unlearning them took more effort than learning new things. Mindful eating is now replacing the rules. Strength training is now becoming a habit. Slowly, something is shifting — not the way I look, but the way I inhabit myself.
I am not going to claim I am a fitness person now. I am still learning 😄. But I am in better love with this body than I have ever been. Not because it performs better (though it does, a little). Because I started paying attention to it as something worth caring for, not just carrying around.
A Year Later
Here is what I did not expect from a job: that it would give me space to become more of myself.
The work has been demanding and meaningful in ways I will write about separately. But this post is for the other things — the boundaries that held, the colleagues who showed me what a life looks like when work is one part of it, a dance studio that made me realize my own body was a project I had been postponing.
One year. More to come.