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Mira Sethi is a lot of things — she’s an actor, an author, a noted feminist and…a gym rat? Fans got to know her more closely on Wednesday after Sethi answered some of their questions on her Instagram stories.

The actor talked about a number of topics, from her acting career, to her writing, to exercise and mental health. Things even got a little philosophical for a couple of answers, but the tone remained light.

Starting off with the basics, one user asked Sethi how things were going. She said they were okay, but that she missed acting. Writing a book, she said, was a “weird internal time”.

A couple of others asked what projects she had going on right now, to which the author said she was working on new novel set to release next year. She also said she was working on the drama Doctor Bahu, posting a picture with co-star Adeel Husain.

Someone asked if writing was a lonely process, to which Sethi said it was, but it was worth it. She also told fans about her writing process, which was, “chai peeyein and bakwas likhein (drink tea and write nonsense)”. That bakwas, she said, was what a writer needs to work through to produce something.

When asked whether she’s hopeful about the world today, the Kuch Ankahi star said she wasn’t, but that being in nature helped her deal with the doom and gloom. She also revealed she was last reading a book by Daniyal Mueenuddin.

One of the more serious questions was one where a user asked Sethi about her experience with therapy. She called therapy a “healing container” and said the key to its success lay in consistency.

The space between a therapist and their client, she said, becomes a model of how to act in the larger world.

Another question was about not knowing one’s self and how someone can deal with that. The author said it got confusing at times, but recalled reading on Instagram that one can only know they’re on their own path “because it disappears”.

One fan asked how they could differentiate between writing about grief and trauma dumping, to which Sethi said, “If it sounds like a post on Instagram, you’re probably trauma dumping.” True emotions, she said, were murky and grey, so writing about them is supposed to be challenge.

Some fans wanted to know how they can be more like the actor, to which she said they should “over-caffeinate, exercise, dissociate [and] come back to the world of the living”.

On exercise, she joked her routine was “a mixture of strength training and cardio and self-hatred”.

When asked about poetry and book recommendations, Sethi said she liked Robert Hershon’s Superbly Situated and recommended books written by Dr James Hollis.

This isn’t the first time the author posted so candidly on Instagram — her rant on producing literature in a time dominated by short-form content turned some heads in January.

Sethi said it was “very exciting when seven strangers read a book it took you four years to write,“ especially when a few hundred thousand saw a clip of her screaming in a drama on TikTok.