PVLF 2026

Interview with Pragya Bhagat, Author of Swimming In Our Oceans

Pragya’s Swimming in Our Oceans is a lyrical exploration of mental health, belonging, and self-love—inviting readers to embrace vulnerability and awareness.
on Oct 13, 2025

Frontlist: The title, Swimming in Our Oceans, evokes both vastness and immersion. How did you arrive at this metaphor, and what does “swimming” represent in the context of mental health and self-discovery?

Pragya: More than a symbol of mental health and discovery, “swimming” evokes surrender for me, a trust I place in my ability to navigate discomfort and uncertainty. While the memoir explores the larger themes of anxiety in relationships, the urban-rural divide, and notions of development, it is really a love letter to myself.

When I started writing the book in 2020 and when it was published in 2022, it certainly didn’t feel like a love letter then. The distance of past time has allowed me to see that this book, like all my work, is a prayer, a fierce assertion to be loved. Swimming in Our Oceans faces the world, palms out and head up. It claims what scriptures and self-help books have claimed time and time again: Love begins with the self.

I can’t take credit for the title of the book, because a character from the book came up with it. To find out who, you’ll just have to read the memoir for yourself.

Frontlist: Your book engages with mental health. What do you think memoir as a form can offer to the broader conversation on mental health that statistics or clinical texts cannot?

Pragya: Not just memoir, but consuming confessional works of any kind, particularly poetry, makes me feel like I’m not alone. A clinical study reduces humans to subjects, and there’s a time and place for that, but I’m in the business of storytelling, which means the story I tell needs to be worthy of being received. There needs to be a plot, a setting, and compelling characters.

There are some masters who are able to examine mental health without compromising on creativity: Victoria Chang, Ocean Vuong, Tove Ditlevsen, Art Spiegelman, Sharon Olds, Annie Ernaux. It’s a long list.

Frontlist: The book explores the paradox of visibility and invisibility—being seen yet feeling unseen, performing strength while carrying silence. How have these paradoxes shaped your own journey with mental health, and what does it mean to you now to write yourself into visibility?

Pragya: A poem comes to mind. This one is by the Scottish psychologist R. D. Laing:

The range of what we think and do

Is limited by what we fail to notice

And because we fail to notice

That we fail to notice

There is little we can do

To change

Until we notice

How failing to notice

Shapes our thoughts and deeds

Every creative act is a noticing. I write by hand because I want my noticing to be slower, more mindful. I studied Biology in college because science, too, is a practice of noticing. Writing about the discrepancies between expectation and reality, between performance and existence, noticing lies at the fulcrum of these boundaries. To talk about mental health is to normalize noticing.

Frontlist: Belonging is a central thread in your work—belonging to a place, a person, or oneself. In writing Swimming in Our Oceans, did you find belonging to be a destination you arrived at, or more of a continuous, shifting negotiation?

Pragya: Belonging, in the book, is a wave. It crests, crashes, meets a shore, recedes, and swells again. As someone who’s had a nomadic childhood and a restless adulthood, belonging often lies in the gestures I offer to people and places: posters and poetry on walls, notes written in increasingly illegible scribbles, flowers folded between pages and under mattresses, only to be discovered during the next move. I’ve written a love letter to every home I’ve ever lived in.

Frontlist: The memoir doesn’t just tell your story—it gestures toward larger questions about identity, performance, and selfhood. When you were writing, did you see yourself primarily as documenting your own journey, or were you also consciously writing into a collective experience of mental health?

Pragya: The book began as three journals stuffed with words. The words were sifted, sorted, and spliced into a story, which is a truth, but not the whole truth. I had never written about misophonia in such detail. It wasn’t meant to be a documentation of my mental health journey, but many people have since reached out to me, saying they are grateful their lifelong frustration has a word. Through the book, they felt seen. In the reading of it, in the process of meaning-making, the book became a collective experience.

Frontlist: You host The Poetry Circle in Goa, creating a space for collective reflection and expression. How does community engagement like this connect with your personal journey, and how do you see it contributing to dismantling the isolation that mental health struggles often bring?

Pragya: It’s been a while since I hosted a Poetry Circle, and your question makes me long for that space again. Writing and reading are often spaces of solitude, and the lines between solitude and loneliness are often blurry.

Community engagement continues to be an integral part of my life. I’ve started singing songs of Kabir and other Sufi mystics in monthly circles. I’ve been facilitating a series of workshops called Writing for Rage. These spaces, like the Poetry Circle, offer safety in exploring the spectrum of discomfort, much of which is societally fueled by guilt, shame, and self-censorship. These spaces invite trust, reflection, and deep listening. The kinds of communities I participate in are the kinds I want to build.

Frontlist: In South Asian contexts, stigma around mental health often silences conversations before they even begin. How do you see personal narratives like yours intervening in this silence, and what change do you hope they can ignite?

Pragya: Every catalyzing conversation begins at home. I’ve seen my friends and family move from suppressing difficult themes to fighting about them to talking openly about them. My people inspire me to continue writing on issues that matter to me.

The change I hope my work inspires is that people have the conversations—with themselves and with their loved ones—that they’ve been thinking about for years but haven’t been able to begin.

This is the time to begin.

Frontlist: On this World Mental Health Day, if you could place one message from your book in every reader’s hands as a seed of awareness or hope, which would it be, and why?

Pragya: Mental health and social justice are intertwined. We cannot stand up for our inner states if we don’t stand up for marginalized communities and ecosystems.