Devotion has a Price - By Priyanka Das

Written By: Priyanka Das

Category: Essay

Competition: Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In her evocative essay "Devotion has a Price," Priyanka Das delves into the complex layers of devotion and its impact on the self. As a participant in Hashtag Kalakar's Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, Priyanka invites us to explore the fine line between love and self-surrender. Her work beautifully encapsulates the universal struggle of finding balance in relationships and the human heart's tendency to confuse devotion with self-worth.

About the Work

Priyanka Das's essay is a profound meditation on the nature of devotion, exploring its seduction and the quiet fears it often masks. Through reflective prose, she examines how devotion can lead to self-erasure and the construction of metaphorical mazes within oneself. The essay is rich with vivid imagery and introspective questions, compelling readers to consider the true cost of devotion and the courage required to remain whole within it.

Devotion has a Price

Original Submission by Priyanka Das

Devotion has a Price

There is an old weakness in the human heart for anything that makes surrendering feel like love. It begins so softly that one almost feels grateful for it, as if the soul, after standing for years in the cold court of itself, has finally been allowed to sit down. A tired person does not always know the difference between being held and being claimed. Sometimes, after carrying oneself like an inconvenient witness, even surrender begins to feel like mercy. You do not call it danger in the beginning. You call it peace. You call it finally having somewhere to place the ache. You call it the first real direction your scattered heart has known in years.

You do not notice the first law changing inside you. You do not notice the small voice that once belonged only to you beginning to ask permission from what it adores. That is the first cruelty of devotion: it does not always take us by force. Sometimes it stands quietly at the door with lowered eyes, waits for us to mistake its silence for gentleness, and receives from our own hands what it could never have stolen so completely.

I have lived inside this truth for years, sometimes knowingly, sometimes with the helpless innocence of someone who thought giving everything made her good. Devotion, I have learned, is not as simple as love. Love, when it is clean, lets the air move through you. Devotion builds corridors where windows should have been.

Inside me, devotion never felt steady or holy the way people describe it. It felt like wandering through a maze built from all the things I was too afraid to lose: affection, approval, memory, tenderness, the hope of being chosen, the fear of being abandoned. Every passage inside that maze was shaped by some old wound I had mistaken for loyalty. I kept inventing little sacrifices, little duties, little ways of becoming smaller and calling it devotion, because somewhere deep down I believed love would vanish the moment I stopped earning it. And the frightening part is that I did not only suffer inside this labyrinth; I maintained it. I rebuilt it every time it cracked. I defended it even when it exhausted me. Whenever fear entered me, the maze grew more complicated. Whenever I thought of leaving, new doors appeared, each one leading me back to the same need to be wanted. I kept mistaking this endless circling for depth, as though suffering intensely meant loving truthfully. I confused emotional exhaustion with devotion because I did not yet understand that real love is not supposed to leave you lost inside yourself.

What disturbs me most is that devotion rarely arrives as pure love, no matter how beautifully people speak of it. More often, devotion grows from a quiet fear that we are not enough unless we give too much. It begins with the belief that closeness must be paid for, that to be loved we must become easier to keep, easier to forgive, easier to use, easier to leave waiting without complaint. There is a voice inside me that knows this and refuses to let me hide from it.

What exactly are you worshipping? it asks. The person, or the relief of not having to face yourself alone? What are you hoping to receive by disappearing so gracefully? These questions hurt because they do not come from cruelty. They come from the part of me that still remembers I was not born to beg for gentleness. And perhaps I have been hiding the answer. Perhaps what I called devotion was, at times, only hunger dressed in holy language because hunger by itself felt too humiliating to admit.

There is something painfully seductive about giving yourself wholly to someone or something. A person, a god, a dream, a memory, an idea - anything can become an altar if it makes your suffering feel meaningful enough. To give yourself away can feel like freedom when carrying yourself has become too heavy. Devotion promises that if you surrender enough, love enough, believe enough, the noise inside you will finally lower its voice. Perhaps your contradictions will stop fighting in the dark. Perhaps your shame will stop pacing through you at night. Perhaps you will no longer have to wake up each morning and decide who you are without help.

But the more I tried to escape myself through devotion, the smaller the world became. The labyrinth closed in. The rooms grew familiar in a frightening way. Every door I opened led me back to the same ache, and after a while even that ache began to feel like an address. Soon devotion became a performance before an audience I could not see. Even alone, I behaved as though someone was measuring how beautifully I could suffer, as though somewhere a silent clerk was noting each restraint, each swallowed word, each graceful wound, and filing it under love.

I often find myself bargaining with my own conscience. If I give up this desire, will I become worthy? If I swallow this doubt, will my devotion finally be clean? If I ask for less, need less, speak less, bleed more quietly, will I be easier to love? These bargains are silent, but they are never harmless. They gather inside you. They settle over your instincts. They cover the old refusals you once knew how to make. At first, each compromise seems small. One truth left unsaid. One discomfort softened. One wound explained away. One hunger made polite.

Soon, the whole structure is no longer built from love but from fear: fear of disappointing, fear of being too much, fear of being abandoned by the very thing you have given yourself to. And once fear enters devotion, destruction does not need to announce itself. It sits beside you quietly. It learns your language. It begins sounding like patience. It waits until you start calling its weight peace.

What troubles me is how devotion changes the way we see. Under its influence, the beloved stops being fully human and becomes a sign, a verdict, a door, a weather system by which we begin measuring whether we are safe inside our own lives. A god becomes tangled with our need to be rescued. An ideology becomes a shelter we are afraid to question. A memory becomes something we polish again and again because seeing it clearly might break the last beautiful lie we have left. The danger is not that the devoted stop seeing. The danger is that they start seeing only what allows the devotion to survive. They forgive what should have frightened them. They explain what should have been enough. They decorate the corridor so beautifully that they do not notice it is getting narrower, and by the time they do, they have already taught themselves to walk sideways.

There are nights when the labyrinth feels almost alive. The walls seem to breathe with me. The silence gathers in the corners like something that has been waiting longer than I have. In those moments, I feel watched - not by the object of my devotion, but by the version of myself I left behind to keep loving this way. She stands somewhere in the maze, not angry, because anger would mean she still believes I might come back for her, but sad in a way I cannot defend myself against. She holds everything I gave away too quietly to mourn: the first refusal, the first instinct, the first honest anger, the first moment my soul whispered, this is hurting us, and I chose devotion’s voice instead. She is the cost of every compromise I made. And in those moments, I understand that devotion does not quickly destroy. It destroys by accumulation. A little silence here. A little swallowing there. A truth folded under the tongue. A wound dressed so carefully in virtue that even the wounded person begins to admire it.

What makes devotion even harder to question is the meaning it gives to pain. To be devoted is to feel purposeful, and purpose can become intoxicating when you have spent too long feeling lost inside yourself. The world sharpens. Priorities arrange themselves. Even suffering begins to look as though it has been assigned a sacred task. You start believing you are part of something larger than your fear. But meaning borrowed from devotion is not always meaning understood. Sometimes it is only a covering placed over an emptiness we are not ready to face. Sometimes it is only a candle placed beside a wound so the wound looks less lonely. When devotion becomes the main source of meaning, the labyrinth does not need chains. The captive begins to fear the open field. A life without the very thing weakening you begins to feel not free, but empty.

I have seen people - and perhaps they were mirrors - treat devotion like a moral currency. The more they suffer for what they love, the more convinced they become that their suffering must be worth something. Their pain becomes a ledger. They carry it carefully, almost proudly, as though somewhere the universe is keeping account and will one day repay them for all they endured. I know this madness because I have lived inside it. I, too, have believed that if I waited enough, forgave enough, stayed enough, made my hunger small enough, one day all of it would return to me as grace. But there is no such economy.

Devotion does not repay the devoted. It does not come back years later with apologies and gold. It simply changes them, slowly, until they become someone who can survive on less and call that survival peace.

And still, I cannot spit on devotion completely. That is the cruelty of it. It has also made people build temples, write poems, sit beside hospital beds, stay awake beside fevered children, and return to blank pages with trembling faith. It can pull a human being beyond selfishness, beyond loneliness, beyond the small hunger of the ego. It can make us brave. It can make us tender. It can make us capable of staying when staying is holy. But beauty does not make anything innocent. A flame is beautiful while it eats the house. A prayer can be beautiful even when spoken from a cage.

Some love asks a person to stand near the fire and keep their hands open. Some love teaches them to climb into it and call the burning devotion. Many wounded people were never taught the difference. They were taught to prove love through endurance, to confuse merging with intimacy, to feel guilty for every border their soul tried to draw. And so devotion tempts them to dissolve, to become indistinguishable from what they cherish, then flatters that disappearance by calling it purity.

There is a question that follows me like a creditor: Is devotion itself destructive, or does it become destructive only when it meets the wounded places in us that are already waiting to obey? Perhaps devotion is not the enemy. Perhaps the danger begins when we use it to run from the rooms inside ourselves we have refused to enter. Without inner clarity, devotion becomes a borrowed identity, a costume of holiness, a shelter built too quickly in the middle of a storm. One begins to live from the altar instead of the heart. And every altar, if fed with enough fear, eventually becomes a mouth. When a life is built on something fragile enough to demand constant worship, collapse does not arrive as an accident. It arrives as the natural ending of what was being built all along.

The labyrinth within me has taught me a final truth, though I resisted it for years because truth does not make suffering feel noble. Destruction is not always the enemy. Sometimes it is the first honest thing to enter a house built from illusions. The parts of me that devotion shattered were the parts that believed love required disappearance, that endurance proved worth, that silence was nobler than refusal, that surrender was holier than staying alive to myself.

What survived were the instincts I tried to bury. They were not elegant. They did not speak like prayers. They scratched from beneath the floorboards. They whispered, even in the darkest corridors, that I was allowed to exist apart from what I adored. They did not save me dramatically. They simply refused to die. Sometimes the soul begins its return through such small rebellions.

So I do not believe devotion should be rejected. That would be too simple, and simplicity often hides fear. Devotion must be entered the way one enters a beautiful house at night, knowing beauty does not guarantee safety, knowing some rooms may lock from the outside, knowing a lamp can light the table and still leave the exit invisible.

Devotion can nourish, yes, but it can also teach the soul to mistake hunger for loyalty. It can unite, but it can also make captivity feel chosen. It asks for closeness, not collapse. It asks for sincerity, not the ceremonial offering of one’s own voice. It should stand beside the self like a lamp beside a sleeping body, not climb upon the chest and call the silence love.

And so I arrive at the truth I had been circling for years - not with triumph, but with dust on my hands and the shame of someone who helped repair the walls she later begged to escape. If devotion becomes destruction, it is because somewhere along the way we abandon the responsibility of remaining whole inside it.

The labyrinth tightens when we forget that many of its walls were built from our own fears, our old hungers, our need to make suffering meaningful before admitting it was suffering. And perhaps the most radical act of devotion is not surrender, not vanishing, not kneeling until the knees lose all memory of height, but the terrible courage to stand beside what one cherishes without offering one’s own life as proof; to love the flame without becoming its fuel; to remain close enough to be warmed, but not so close that, when the beloved finally turns, there is no one left standing there to be seen.

About the Competition

The Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar celebrates the power of words and the creativity of writers worldwide. This esteemed competition provides a platform for poets, essayists, and storytellers to share their unique voices and perspectives. It fosters a community of literary enthusiasts and offers participants the opportunity to engage with diverse themes and narratives.

Thank you, Priyanka Das, for your insightful contribution, "Devotion has a Price," to the Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Your essay's exploration of the nuances of devotion is both thought-provoking and enlightening. We appreciate your participation and look forward to more of your profound reflections.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.