Abhirami Pillai

Growing up, you get used to the noise. Feedback, criticism, advice you never asked for—it comes from everywhere, but especially from the people closest to you. I used to take all of it literally. Every comment, every suggestion, I’d stop and ask, “Why do you say that?” Not defensively—I genuinely wanted to understand. But all it did was create more noise.

As a woman, this starts early. The feedback comes from people you trust, people who love you, and yet something inside you resists. You can’t always articulate why, but it’s there—that quiet discomfort, that sense that something’s off. Learning to tune out that noise, to trust your own signal instead, is a skill that takes a lifetime. Maybe longer.

So I’ve been thinking about this—how do you actually take criticism without letting it hollow you out? How do you separate what’s useful from what’s just noise?

I’ve landed on four things that matter: kill your ego, build a strong inner compass, know when feedback isn’t productive, and have grace—for yourself and for others. None of these come naturally. All of them take practice.

1.Kill your ego

The more I’ve let go of my ego, the more room I’ve found to actually learn something. As a kid, I was drowning in knowledge—or at least, I thought I was. I’d pull my father’s books off the shelf just to say I’d read them. I’d finish my brother’s textbooks before he even cracked them open. Sometimes I’d read entire textbooks before the school year started, just because I could. I read fast, and I knew it. The night before my board exam, while my parents thought I was asleep, I was up at 2 a.m. finishing Twilight. I wasn’t worried about the exam. I never was. I won’t pretend I wasn’t insufferable. I absolutely was. I mocked people for not knowing things I considered basic. I had this quiet, smug certainty that I was ahead.

Then college happened. Then work. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who were smarter, sharper, more accomplished than I’d ever be. My confidence didn’t just dip—it collapsed. The version of myself I’d been carrying around, the one I’d been so sure of, turned out to be fiction.

When that happens, you have two options: you can sit in the wreckage, or you can rebuild. I’m an overachiever, so I did what overachievers do—I tried to outrun the feeling. I read more, wrote more, coded more. I thought if I just worked hard enough, I could catch up to the people I admired. But here’s the thing: killing your ego is the hardest work you’ll ever do. It’s also the most important. I read something once that I haven’t been able to shake: the first twenty years of your life are spent building your ego—academics, achievements, identity, all of it. The next twenty should be spent dismantling it, piece by piece, over and over.

So that’s what I try to do. I wake up and tell myself I know nothing. That I want to learn everything I can. It sounds dramatic, but it’s true. And something shifts when you approach the world that way. People notice. Opportunities appear. I have friends and mentors now who’ve taught me more than I ever learned on my own, and I’m grateful for them—not because they filled some gap in my knowledge, but because I finally had enough humility to let them.

2. Have a strong inner compass 🧭

Having an internal compass in a world of constant noise and attention-seeking devices—it’s a kind of bliss, honestly. I grew up surrounded by technology, but my parents always nudged me toward books and newspapers. I write like shit, by the way. My first drafts are always terrible. But I’ve found my rhythm with it, my own strange way of making sense of things.

For most of my childhood, I was a lost kid. I’d stare at the sky for hours, thinking about nothing and everything. At thirteen, I picked up my first religious book, trying to understand God and life and why any of it mattered. It took me years to get any clarity—about myself, about what I was thinking, about what I actually wanted. But all that reading, all that writing, all those hours spent exploring ideas—that’s what built my compass. That’s how I figured out what mattered. Even though I was a total nerd, what moved me wasn’t intellectual achievement. It was people’s inner qualities. I built friendships with people because I saw kindness in them. That’s what I wanted—not the material things, not the status, just those quiet, steady qualities that make someone real.

If you ask me what I value in myself and others, the answer hasn’t changed in five years: kindness, integrity, accountability, grace. And here’s why that matters: when you know what you stand for, when you’ve done the work to figure out your own values, other people’s feedback stops feeling so destabilising. You have something to measure it against. You can ask yourself: does this criticism align with who I’m trying to become? Does it come from someone who shares these values? Without that compass, every piece of feedback feels like it might be true.

3.Know when it’s not productive 🫤

I love feedback. I really do. It’s a chance to unlearn something that isn’t serving me and relearn something better. But here’s the thing: sometimes you’ll meet people who don’t actually want to help you. They just want to put you down. It’s subtle—so subtle you’ll second-guess yourself. They’ll say things that feel wrong, and when you push back, they’ll shrug and say, “I’m only saying this for your own good.”

And because you want to believe them, because you want to be better, you’ll try 10x harder. You’ll exhaust yourself trying to become whatever impossible thing they think you should be. All it does is make you sad and stressed. I spent months dealing with someone like this once. Condescending, relentless, always framing their cruelty as concern. Then I read something that saved me. I don’t remember where, but I saved the line: “Don’t take constructive criticism from someone who hasn’t constructed anything.”

It’s true. Sometimes other people’s egos turn your life into their playground. If you’ve grown up in a patriarchal system—and I have, in an Indian family—you’ve seen this play out a thousand times. Husbands, in-laws, parents, all of them offering endless feedback while never lifting a finger to actually help.

These days, when someone gives me feedback, I pause. I take time. I separate what’s actually true from what’s just their projection. And I look at them—really look at them. Are they happy? Are they content? Confident people don’t casually hand out criticism. If they do give feedback, it’s because they have real expectations of me, and they hold themselves to those same standards. But if I catch even a hint of insecurity, if I sense the feedback is just fuel for their ego, I quietly step back. I don’t engage. I just let the conversation fade.

4. Have Grace 💛

This might be the most important one, and I’m still figuring it out. I wasn’t always kind to myself. I used to procrastinate, avoid the hard things, let fear win more often than I’d like to admit. But somewhere along the way, I learned to talk to myself differently. Kinder. It sounds small, but it quieted that brutal internal monologue I’d been carrying around for years.

I remember last year being one of the worst periods of my life—and I was still trying to be graceful. With myself, with other people, even when it felt impossible. It didn’t fix everything, but it kept me from breaking. Love begets love, they say. Grace begets grace, too.

The thing about grace is you need it on both sides. When someone doesn’t take your feedback, when they keep making the same mistakes you can see so clearly—it’s maddening. I’ve been there, wanting to shake someone and ask what’s wrong with them. But usually? Nothing’s wrong. They’re just moving at their own pace, operating from their own understanding. Some people walk while you sprint. It doesn’t mean either of you is doing it wrong.

The noise hasn’t stopped. People still offer opinions I didn’t ask for, feedback that feels off, criticism wrapped up as care. But something’s changed in how I hold it now. I’ve learned to be gentler—with them, with myself, with the whole messy process of figuring out what’s true and what’s just static. Some days I forget. Some days the criticism lands hard and I’m back where I started, questioning everything. But most days, I can feel the difference. I can separate what matters from what doesn’t. I can let things go. I don’t know if that counts as mastery. Maybe it’s just survival with better tools. Either way, I’ll take it.