Building a peaceful life is a feat in its own
On small wins, cautious energy, and not overselling where you are
For a long stretch after the funeral, I was numb. Not devastated — just flatlined. Tired all the time, stressed about everything, unable to start anything without abandoning it at the first sign of difficulty. I thought it was grief, or burnout, or just the general weight of the year. Turned out it was a vitamin B12 and vitamin D deficiency. Supplementation fixed most of it within weeks. The universe, apparently, does not always deal in metaphors — sometimes it is just biology.
I am telling you this because it matters to what comes next, and because I think there is something worth saying about how long you can mistake a fixable physical problem for a permanent character flaw. The activation energy for tasks dropped. I could use my brain properly again. Projects stopped dying at the first obstacle. That is not a small thing — for someone who had spent years watching himself start and abandon, it felt like something coming back online.
Since then I have been building things. An old gaming laptop I resurrected and got running modern titles again. A dumb LED strip I turned into an IoT-controlled device. A canvas I painted on a whim that is now on my living room wall. A YouTube video — my face, my name, my voice, my story — that I actually posted publicly and sent to people. That last one sounds small written out like that. It was not small. For someone who kept an extremely private life for years, who could not even speak his own truth out loud, putting himself on the internet with his name attached was the kind of thing past-me would have found genuinely unthinkable.
Which raises a question I keep coming back to: how many other things did I leave on the table, all because of fear, or low agency, or a self-image built on years of being told — explicitly or otherwise — that my judgement could not be trusted? I do not have a full answer yet. I am still taking inventory.
Building a peaceful life is a feat in its own. I have to keep reminding myself of that, because it does not feel like enough from the inside.
My girlfriend moved to Bengaluru recently, which ended a long-distance situation that had been quietly expensive in ways that are hard to quantify. Living with someone you love does something specific to your baseline — it reminds you that you have skin in the game, that there is someone in your corner of the ring. A lot of the growing up and healing I have had to do this past year has been about learning to trust my own judgement again, and that is easier, it turns out, when someone who knows you well already trusts it. I do not want to make this sound simpler than it is. But it is real, and it counts.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part of the essay where the temptation is to wrap things up — to say the small wins add up, to say things are trending in the right direction, to perform a cautious optimism that sounds earned. I am not sure I am there yet. Life still feels stagnant a lot of the time. The remote job applications are mostly going into the void. The career situation is unresolved. The city is still the city. The nights are still 3am.
Hope has not historically been met with much grace by the universe in my experience. I have wished for things and had wrenches thrown into the works more often than things working out cleanly. I am not someone who finds it easy to assume it will all come together. And yet — I have managed, some way or another, every time. Not cleanly, not on schedule, not without cost. But managed.
There is a version of the future I want: time freedom, work I actually chose, financial independence that is not just "earns enough to survive." I know it exists because I can describe it in specifics, not just vibes. I do not know how to get there from here yet, and I am not going to pretend I do. What I have instead is a present that is genuinely better than it was a year ago, a handful of things I made with my own hands, a person who believes in me, and enough energy again to stay up until 3am building something instead of just lying awake anxious about everything.
That is not the ending I would have written if I had a choice. But it is an honest one, and for now that is what I have got.
Still figuring it out. Not pretending otherwise.