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The work at Atoot is exhausting, and generally we don't get to decompress. My colleagues have grown up in societies where they’re expected to rigorously work six days a week, and don’t have the space to think about their mental health.

I don't want to create a workplace where anybody feels like they cannot take a mental health break, vacation, or sick days.

At Atoot, we are very rare in the sense that our colleagues have unlimited vacation time – they don’t have to worry about whether they’re menstruating or in pain. If they can’t come to work, it’s fine.

In August, I was back in Nepal for the SAFF women championships, which was amazing.

We went up to Kathmandu, stayed with our founder, went to all the football matches, and celebrated Atoot’s fourth anniversary. We’ve never had a chance to do something like that, because we’re always looking for funding and questioning whether we’re doing enough. We never sit back to take a look at what we have accomplished.

We had a whole week where we just celebrated everybody. We took all our staff and interns to different types of restaurants to experience foods they'd never eaten before – Arabic foods, Turkish foods, and so on.

We just took care of everyone. It was great, and we're gonna do more of that.

Even during that time, I was saying we need to take more mental health breaks, and my co-founder said, “People think it is so weird that we do this.”

I said, “You know, maybe that's the culture you've grown up in. We appreciate, respect, and celebrate the Nepali culture. But we are here making our own culture within our organization.”

The whole hope is again a development where you're teaching others to respect not just each other, but oneself.

I see this as a normal thing, especially because I've suffered with anxiety disorders since I was 19, and preaching this is very important to me so that everyone normalizes it.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta]