I am returning to India "a failure" after more than a decade. Took me way too long to realize no one is keeping score except me.

In a few weeks I am moving back to India after eleven years in the US. No job lined up. A used car I just sold. Two master's degrees and a career that looked good for a while and then quietly ended.

For months, the part that scared me most was not the money or the logistics. It was the people. What will everyone think. What will the relatives say. What story will go around about why I came back.

Then somewhere in the last few weeks it finally hit me, and I feel a little stupid for taking this long to learn it.

Nobody is thinking about me as much as I think they are.

Not even close. Everyone is the main character of their own life. They are busy with their own worries, their own scoreboards, their own quiet shame about something. The relative I am terrified of has probably forgotten the conversation by dinner. The friend whose opinion kept me up at night is thinking about his own job, his own kids, his own bills. The judgment I have been bracing for mostly lives in one place, and that place is the inside of my own head.

I have proof, too. For years I cut off good friends because I was ashamed of where my life was. I was so sure they were keeping score of me. Then I ran into one of them by chance, and he wasn't keeping score at all. He wasn't thinking about my salary or my job title. He was just hurt that I disappeared. The whole courtroom I had built in my head, packed with people judging me, never actually existed. I was the judge, the jury, and the only person in the room.

So here is what I am taking home with me. People are not watching you nearly as closely as you fear. The few who do react will forget by next week. And once you really get that, it stops being a lonely thought and turns into a free one. You can go home. You can start over. You can do the thing you were too embarrassed to do, because the audience you were performing for was never really there.

I am going back and for the first time in my life I am going to try to stop taking myself so seriously. Whatever people think when I land, they will think it for about a day, and then they will go right back to their own lives, the same way I will go back to mine.

If you have moved back home, or done something everyone seemed to have an opinion about, did you feel this too? That the judgment was mostly in your own head? I would like to know I am not the only one who took this long to figure it out.