Nobody sat me down and told me how any of this works.
Not my parents. Not my teachers. Not the internet. Not the people who said "you will understand when you are older." I am older now. I still do not understand.
Growing up is not what I thought it would be. I thought there would be a moment, a switch, a day where I would wake up and finally feel like an adult. That never happened. I just kept waking up, slightly more tired, slightly more confused, carrying slightly more weight than the day before.
I still feel like a kid sometimes. Not in a fun way. In the way where I do not know what I am doing, but everyone around me expects me to have it figured out. I pay bills. I make decisions. I show up where I am supposed to show up. But inside, there is still that same boy who used to stare at the ceiling wondering what life would look like. The ceiling is different now. The wondering is the same.
I look at the city I grew up in and it does not feel like mine anymore. The streets are the same. The shops are the same. The chai stall near the corner still smells the same way. But I walk through it like a tourist in my own childhood. The version of me that belonged here does not exist anymore. He left quietly, and I did not even notice when. The places did not change. I did. And somehow that feels worse.
There is a version of me that only exists at 3 AM.
He is the most honest one. The one who does not perform, does not filter, does not pretend to be fine. At 3 AM, I think about everything I avoid during the day. The things I should have said. The paths I did not take. The people I let go of without a fight. The silence at that hour is different. It does not feel empty. It feels full, full of everything I have been pushing down since morning.
People think loneliness is about not having anyone around. It is not. I have people. I have contacts in my phone, names I could call, places I could go. But there is a kind of loneliness that exists even in a crowded room. The kind where everyone knows your name but nobody knows your mind. Where people ask "how are you" and you say "I am fine" because the real answer would take too long and they were not really asking anyway.
Having people around and still feeling unknown is a different kind of heavy.
I had friends once. Real ones. The kind you think will last forever because the laughter felt permanent. But nobody tells you that friendships can die without a fight. There is no breakup. No argument. No dramatic last message. One day you just realise it has been months since you spoke, and neither of you reached out, and the silence grew so long that breaking it now would feel strange. They did not leave. You did not leave. You both just stopped showing up. And that was enough.
I chose computers when nobody around me understood why.
In a world where people wanted safe careers and predictable paths, I sat in front of a screen writing code that nobody asked me to write. My family did not understand it. My friends did not care about it. But something about building things from nothing made sense to me in a way that nothing else did. I did not choose tech because it was easy. I chose it because it was the only thing that made me feel like I was building something that was mine.
But even that comes with guilt.
There are nights I sit and do nothing, and the guilt eats me alive. Not because I wasted time, but because I feel like I should always be grinding, always building, always moving forward. This generation taught me that rest is laziness and hustle is the only language success speaks. So I burn out. I push through. I work until my eyes hurt and my mind goes blank. And then I rest, and I feel guilty about resting. Nobody told me that the hardest part of ambition is not the work. It is allowing yourself to stop.
The internet raised me more than most adults did.
I learned things from strangers online that nobody in my real life ever taught me. How to think. How to question. How to feel less alone at 2 AM by reading someone else's thoughts and realising I was not the only one. But the internet also broke something in me. It showed me too much too early. It made me compare my life to highlights I was never supposed to see. It gave me a voice but made me forget how to use it in person. I can type exactly what I feel. But say it out loud? That is a different language I never learned.
There is a version of me online that is sharper, funnier, more put together. And then there is the version sitting alone in a dark room, phone face down, wondering if any of it matters. The gap between those two versions grows wider every year. And I do not know which one is more real anymore.
This generation documents everything but remembers nothing.
We screenshot conversations but forget the feelings behind them. We post memories but do not sit with them. We have a thousand photos from a trip but cannot remember how the air smelled or how the silence felt between the mountains. We are so busy proving we lived that we forget to actually live.
Nobody tells you about grief that does not come from death.
You can grieve a friendship that faded. A version of yourself that no longer exists. A future you planned that will never happen. A home that does not feel like home anymore. Grief is not always about losing someone. Sometimes it is about losing something you cannot even name. A feeling. A time. A sense of belonging that quietly disappeared. And the worst part is, there is no funeral for these losses. No closure. Just you, sitting with the absence, pretending it does not hurt.
In India, they will measure you by your salary before they ever ask about your soul.
"What do you do?" is never really about what you do. It is about how much you earn. Your worth gets reduced to a number, a package, a company name. Nobody asks if you are happy. Nobody asks if the work means something to you. They ask if it pays well. And if it does, you are successful. If it does not, you are a question mark. I have never seen a country so obsessed with answers and so afraid of the people asking questions.
Indian families talk about everything except feelings.
We discuss marriages, jobs, neighbours, relatives, money, politics, food. But the moment someone says "I am not okay," the room goes quiet. Emotions are treated like a weakness. Like something you should handle alone, in your room, with the door closed. Boys especially. You are told to be strong so many times that you start believing strong means silent. But silence is not strength. It is just loneliness wearing a mask.
And then there is the weight of expectations.
Carrying what your family wants you to become while trying to figure out who you actually are. Wanting to make them proud but also wanting to be honest. Knowing that sometimes those two things do not live in the same direction. You love them. They love you. But love does not always mean understanding.
I do not have answers for any of this.
I am not writing this because I figured something out. I am writing this because it is 3 AM again, and the honest version of me is awake, and he needed to put this somewhere before the morning comes and he goes back to pretending.
Nobody prepared me for any of this. Not the loneliness. Not the growing up. Not the silence. Not the weight.
But here I am. Still here. Still showing up. Still staring at the ceiling, still wondering. And maybe that is enough for now.