I used to be the most disciplined boy I knew.

The one who ran 5 km every morning. Who never touched junk food (sometimes). Who sat down every single day to write his screenplay, opening that FDX file without waiting for motivation.

That version of me feels like a stranger now. Not in the poetic way people say that. Literally. If I passed him on the street - the version of me from a year ago - I don't think I'd recognize the walk. The posture. The certainty in his shoulders.

I keep looking for him in the mirror and finding someone heavier, someone quieter, someone who flinches at his phone buzzing because it's probably another person who wants something from him for free.

Because summer break had its own plot twist.

I gained 17 kg. Just sitting at home. Writing code for other people. For free.

They promised they would pay. I believed them. Every single time. And every single time, they blocked me and moved on like I never existed.

There's a specific kind of hollow that comes from being made to disappear by someone you helped. Not fired. Not rejected. Just erased. One day the messages stop. The read receipts stop. And you're left holding a finished product and an invoice that will never get answered, wondering if you imagined the whole working relationship.

I paid my gym membership for two months. I went for 10 days.

The other twenty times I told myself I'd go tomorrow. Tomorrow became a word that stopped meaning anything. It was just a sound I made to get through today without admitting I'd stopped trying.

The Contractor Phase

The past three months, I built products for people who never paid me. I got clients for embarrassingly cheap rates. I became everything I used to hate.

The contractor who undersells himself. The builder who forgets his own value.

I was so desperate to be useful, I forgot to ask: am I being used?

I think that's the part that's hardest to write honestly. Not the unpaid work itself - I can rationalize that, chalk it up to bad luck, bad clients, a rough market. What's harder is admitting how much I needed to be needed. How every "yes, I'll build that for you" felt like proof I still mattered to someone, even when the math never worked in my favor. I wasn't just losing money. I was trading my own worth for the temporary feeling of being useful, and calling it a business decision.

There were emails. Hundreds of them. To founders. To HRs. To anyone who might give me a chance.

No reply. Silence.

You don't know what silence does to a person until you've sent your two-hundredth email into it. It stops feeling like rejection. Rejection at least acknowledges you exist. This was something else - the sense of shouting into a room and slowly realizing there was never anyone in it.

And the one interview I somehow landed? I prepared DSA. I prepared system design. I studied like my life depended on it.

They asked me the difference between flexbox and grid.

I didn't know.

My mind went completely blank in a way that scared me a little - like watching a light switch flip and nothing happen. I sat there in that silence, the same silence from the unanswered emails, except now it was live, and I was the one producing it.

Another rejection. My fault again. I owned it. But it still cut deep.

It cuts deep in a specific place - right under the ribs, where you keep the part of yourself that still believes you're capable. Every rejection takes a small bite out of that place. By July I wasn't sure how much of it was left.

The Girl Who Almost Stayed

Early May. Late April.

There was a girl. Different religion. Different ideology. Different culture.

We talked. A lot. She became the part of my day I actually looked forward to. My comfort place in a house that felt increasingly hollow.

I think what I looked forward to wasn't even her, specifically - though it was, of course it was - but the fact that for those few minutes of conversation, I got to be a version of myself that wasn't drowning. Funny. Present. Someone worth texting back. The rest of my day I spent performing okay-ness for family, for clients, for LinkedIn. With her I didn't have to perform. That's a dangerous kind of relief to get used to.

Then I realised something I wasn't ready for.

After my father left, I am the man in charge now.

I cannot afford to be in love. She does not deserve a broken man carrying debt like a second skin. The stress I carry daily - I would never wish it on someone I care about.

So I stepped away.

Not because I didn't care. Because I cared too much to let her carry this weight with me.

I won't pretend that was a clean decision, made once and never revisited. I've replayed it more nights than I'd like to admit - wondering if I mistook fear for nobility, if "protecting her" was just a more acceptable story than "I don't trust myself to hold both her and this weight without dropping one of them." Maybe both things are true. Maybe that's allowed.

What I know is the house got quieter after that. Not peaceful-quiet. Just quieter.

15 Lakhs and a Fear That Never Sleeps

Maybe it's the education loan. 15 lakh rupees hanging over my head like a permanent storm cloud.

I cannot sleep properly. I lie awake thinking about 2027 - the year it all catches up. The fear of being unemployed with no money and no way to explain it to anyone.

It's not a dramatic fear. That's what makes it worse. It doesn't arrive as panic - it arrives as a low hum underneath everything, present while I'm eating, present while I'm coding, present while I'm supposedly relaxing. I've started to think of it less as a thought and more as a roommate. One I never agreed to live with, who never leaves, who's just always there when I turn around.

So I tell myself: work for 24 hours. Maybe that fixes it.

It doesn't. I know it doesn't. But I don't know what else to do.

There's a specific exhaustion in working from fear instead of ambition. Ambition has an end point you're moving toward. Fear doesn't. Fear just needs to be outrun, and you can never actually outrun something that lives inside your own chest.

Maybe I am overthinking. Maybe this is just my brain trying to protect me from a future it cannot predict.

But try telling that to 3 AM.

3 AM doesn't negotiate. 3 AM just plays the worst version of 2027 on a loop and asks you to watch it in full, every single detail, until sunrise makes it stop.

June Was Math

June completely belonged to engineering mathematics.

The re-exam consumed me. I ate like I was stress-testing my own body. I know it was my fault. I should have taken care of my health.

But when you're drowning, you don't think about your posture.

You just try to breathe.

I remember whole days where the only two states I existed in were "staring at a textbook not absorbing a single word" and "eating something I didn't taste to feel something other than dread for thirty seconds." Neither of those is really living. Both of those are just surviving the next hour so you can get to the one after it.

The Only Good Thing

One thing went right.

I cleared the old math backlog. No more academic stress hanging over my head. For the first time in months, I am academically free.

I didn't expect that relief to feel so physical. Something in my shoulders actually dropped when the result came in - a weight I'd been carrying so long I'd stopped noticing it was there until it wasn't.

And my hair is back.

Long, curly, wavy. I love them. Vanity, maybe. But when everything else falls apart, let me keep this one thing.

Maybe it's not even vanity. Maybe it's just that I needed one piece of proof - something I could look at in the mirror, on the worst days, and think okay, that part of me is still okay. Sometimes survival is built out of things that small.

How Did He Do It?

Sometimes I sit and think about my father.

He was managing 70 lakhs worth of loans. Seventy. How? How did he wake up every morning and carry that weight without breaking?

I used to think resilience was something you either had or didn't. Now I think it's smaller and stranger than that - it's just doing the next necessary thing while the fear is still sitting on your chest, not waiting for it to leave first. My father must have been afraid. He must have had his own version of 3 AM. He just never let me see it, and I used to think that meant he didn't have one.

This is what I tell myself now: he is still teaching me. From wherever he is. He is showing me what resilience looks like by letting me discover it on my own.

My father didn't raise a coward.

He raised a joker. A clown. A loser who keeps trying anyway.

An actor. A writer. A coder. A chef. An emotional fool who posts random shit on Instagram stories as a coping mechanism.

But not a quitter.

Ghosting Everyone

I stopped wishing birthdays. I stopped answering calls. I stopped replying to messages.

I don't know why. Maybe I don't want anyone to see me like this. Maybe I am afraid they will confirm what I already suspect about myself.

There's a particular loneliness in choosing the silence yourself. It's not that people left me. I left them, quietly, one unanswered message at a time, because it felt safer than letting anyone get close enough to see how far I'd actually fallen. I told myself I was protecting them from my mess. Some days I think I was really just protecting myself from being witnessed.

I don't like myself right now.

That's a strange sentence to write and mean. Not "I'm having a hard time" - which is true, and easier to say - but the plainer, harder version underneath it. Most days I can name exactly what I don't like: the weight, the missed calls, the money I don't have, the version of me from a year ago I can't seem to get back to. Some days I can't name it at all. It's just a low static I carry around.

But I will not commit suicide.

That is not who I am. That is not who my parents raised. My father didn't raise a coward. He raised someone who will sit in the mess until it cleans itself up.

I want to be clear about why I'm saying that so plainly, and not just as a dramatic line. It's a promise I'm making to myself as much as to whoever reads this - a line I've drawn and intend to hold, even on the nights when the static gets loud. Writing it down makes it more real than just thinking it. That's part of why this whole page exists.

What I Know

I will leave for Bangalore soon.

I will get back on track. I will find some sort of stable income. I keep praying to my father - do something magical from up there. Send a plot twist.

One thing I know for certain:

I will do it alone.

Not because I don't want help. Because right now, alone is the only shape my life fits into. Maybe that changes. I hope it does. But for now, alone is where the work has to happen.

I will lose the weight again. I will get a stable income source. I will find that international client who pays in dollars for antiz.xyz.

And glavishglow - my salon ERP - will sell. To many salons. It will work.

I am just manifesting. Adding it to the universe before it happens.

A Note to My Future Self

If you are reading this three months from now, six months, a year:

Did the plot twist come?

Did you make it? Did you find the version of yourself that you keep promising?

I don't know yet. I am writing this in the middle of the storm. But I am writing it. That has to count for something.

I think that's the real reason I'm putting this online instead of leaving it in a notes app no one will ever see. If future-me reads this and things are still hard, I want him to know that past-me was scared too, and wrote anyway. That the boy who felt like a ghost this summer still showed up, still typed the words, still refused to disappear completely even when disappearing felt like the easiest option on the table.

I am still here. Still trying. Still believing that the boy who ran 5 km every morning is still inside me somewhere.

Waiting for his moment to run again.