I wrote my SSLC exam in the year 2000. The next time I sat in a classroom as a student, it was 2021.
Twenty-one years. In between, I got married, raised children, ran a house, and did all the invisible work that nobody puts on a certificate. If you had asked me in 2015 whether I would ever study again, I would have laughed and changed the subject. Not because I did not want to. Because I had already decided the door was closed.
I want to tell you honestly what it took to open it again, because I meet women every week in Kerala who are standing exactly where I was standing, holding the same three fears.
The three things that kept me stuck
“I am too old now.” This is the loudest one. I was in my late thirties. Everybody in the classroom would be twenty. What would that look like?
“What will people say?” In our families, a woman going back to study after so many years invites comment. Some of it kind, some of it not. I imagined every conversation happening about me in every sitting room, and I imagined it in detail.
“I have forgotten how to study.” This was the real fear underneath the other two. My brain had spent two decades on timetables, tuition fees, fever at 2 a.m. and what to cook tomorrow. Could it still hold an idea long enough to write an exam on it?
Notice that none of the three fears was about the studying itself. They were about being seen. That is almost always the case.
What actually happened
In 2021 I restarted my studies. Not with a grand plan. With one enrolment.
By 2023 I had completed my BA in Psychology and my coaching training. In May 2024 I became an NU Certified Coach. Somewhere along the way I also completed a WHRDE diploma with First Class through ADN Talks, a government-recognised programme. Written down like that, it reads like a straight line. It was not. It was three years of studying after the house went quiet, of reading the same paragraph four times because I was tired, of asking my own children to explain something on the laptop.
The classroom part was the easy part. The hard part was the first month, when I had to keep proving to myself that I was allowed to be there.
Age and career gaps are never the end of the story.
Rabeeba Vellangara
Four things the gap taught me
1. The gap is not empty
We call them “gap years” as though nothing happened in them. Twenty-one years of running a family taught me negotiation, patience, budgeting, conflict handling and how to read a person’s mood from the way they put down a glass. When I started coaching, those were not soft extras. They were the job. Do not let anyone, including yourself, describe those years as nothing.
2. Starting small is not the same as starting slow
I did not begin by announcing a career change. I began by finding out what a course actually cost and how many hours a week it needed. That single afternoon of finding out moved me further than two years of thinking about it.
3. Your family adjusts faster than you expect
I was braced for resistance at home. What I got, mostly, was curiosity, and then habit. Children in particular adapt in about three weeks. The person who took longest to accept the new arrangement was me — I kept apologising for the two hours I had taken.
4. Confidence comes after, not before
This is the one I most want you to hear. I did not feel ready and then enrol. I enrolled, felt terrible for a while, passed one assignment, and only then began to feel ready. Waiting to feel confident before you begin is waiting for a bus on a road it does not travel.
If you are thinking about starting again, do this in the next seven days
Not next year. This week. Small, specific, finishable:
- Write down the sentence you use about yourself. Mine was “I stopped studying after tenth.” Look at it on paper. It is a fact about the past, not a rule about the future.
- Find out one real number. The fee, the duration, the eligibility, the last date. One number. Facts shrink fear; imagination inflates it.
- Audit your week honestly. Where are your two free hours? For most women I work with they exist between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., or early morning. You are looking for two, not ten.
- Tell exactly one supportive person. Not the whole family, not social media. One person who will ask you about it next week.
- Decide what you will say to the critic. Someone will make a remark. Prepare one calm line — “I am learning something I wanted to learn” — and stop there. You do not owe a defence.
Do those five and you will know more about your own restart than most people learn in a year of thinking about it.
The part nobody warns you about
When you start again, you will grieve a little. You will think about the years and wonder what you would have been. I did. Let yourself feel that for a while, and then put it down, because it is a heavy thing to carry into a new beginning and it helps nobody.
The woman who sat that SSLC exam in 2000 could not have done the work I do now. She had not lived enough of it yet. The gap was not the interruption to my story. It was the part that made the rest of it possible.
If you want someone to walk the first steps with you
Most people do not need a whole new plan. They need one honest conversation with someone who will not tell them they are being unrealistic. That is a large part of what I do — sitting with women who are trying to work out whether there is still time. There always is.
If you would like to talk about your own restart, message or call me on WhatsApp at +91 88483 10988, or get in touch here. Tell me where you stopped and where you would like to begin. We will start from there.