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It happened at 3 AM, and it was monsoon outside, which felt almost too on-the-nose. My heart rate spiked to 135. My health band said my stress score was at 70%, and it had no business being that high, not at that hour, not for any reason I could immediately point to. I did what I know how to do — drank water, closed my mouth, breathed through the nose, slowed it down. I was making the kind of sound a panic attack makes when you’re trying very hard not to let it become a panic attack. Thank god I’ve been through this before, because my body knew what to do even when my head had absolutely no idea.
I got through it, and eventually I slept. But the entire next day went to one single question, circling back over and over like a song stuck on repeat: what is you, Naman? I’m only sitting down to actually write this now, at night, after carrying that question around all day without putting it anywhere.
I have this habit I’ve built over the years — call it a breakdown theory. When something knocks me sideways, I take the day apart piece by piece and try to match it against my life, like I’m looking for the scene in an old film that explains the scene I’m currently stuck in. This time the match was fear. Not one single fear, but a layered one — fear of doing things I don’t want to do anymore, fear tangled up so tightly in emotional attachment that I can’t tell where the fear ends and the attachment begins.
There’s an old line I keep coming back to on nights like this:
“I asked for strength, and God gave me difficulties to make me strong. I asked for wisdom, and God gave me problems to solve. I asked for courage, and God gave me dangers to overcome. I asked for love, and God gave me troubled people to help.”
I used to read that and feel like I was being handed a blueprint. I thought I was actually building something with it — turning hurdles into proof I could take a hit and keep standing. Then I hit one more hurdle, the same shape as the last one, and I was broken again like none of the previous ones counted. So now I’m sitting here asking a stranger question: is my defense mechanism made of glass? Because if it is, I don’t want glass anymore. I’m not even asking for metal at this point. Just give me plastic. Something that bends instead of shatters.
So — what is you? You can’t even define it yourself, and that’s the part that keeps me up.
The First Fear: Losing Control of Your Own Story
I think humans are built to stack things, the same way a phone fills up with photos you never look at again. Doesn’t matter if it’s waste or memory — it all piles in the same place, in the same order, whether you wanted it there or not. Past trauma doesn’t disappear just because time passes. It sits underneath everything newer, quiet, until one ordinary Tuesday it floods out of nowhere and you’re left wondering why a 3 AM heartbeat spike happened over something you thought you’d already dealt with years ago.
Here’s the part that scares me more than the flooding itself: every memory is tied to a person. The second you tell someone something real, you’ve handed them a key to a room in your life. From that point forward, they have access to a section of your story that you no longer fully control. No control. That, right there, is the fear underneath the fear. I’ve handed out so many of these keys over the years — to friends, to people I trusted for a season and then didn’t, to people who probably don’t even remember holding them — that I’ve genuinely lost track of who’s holding what. Somewhere out there, pieces of my life are sitting in other people’s heads, filed under whatever meaning they decided to give them, and I don’t get a say in the filing.
Am I smiling right now, writing this? Yes, actually. Am I happy? Honestly, I don’t know. Both of those can be true on the same night.
The Second Fear: Who Gets to Hold You
The second fear is about who you actually let in, and how much of yourself you’re willing to risk on that decision. We call it connection, bonding, human attachment, chemistry — whatever label fits the mood — and somehow it always seems to hit hardest between two people who are drawn to each other in that specific, electric way. For a moment, it genuinely feels like being complete. Like some open loop in you finally closes. Everyone who’s felt it knows exactly what I mean, and most people spend a frustrating amount of energy chasing that feeling again once they’ve had it.
Did it complete me, even briefly? Yes. Did I like it? Yes, without hesitation. Do I want to go back to it? My outer shell — the part of me that talks to people, that posts things, that shows up looking fine — says absolutely not. But something underneath that shell, the part that doesn’t get a vote in public, is screaming yes. Both of those are also true at the same time, which is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived inside that contradiction.
That’s the real trouble with memory and trust — figuring out who’s actually safe to hand your story to, before you hand it over, not after. Blind faith is rare, and rightly so. Like Sheldon and his “trust circle” — that bit that sounds like a joke until you realize most of us actually run on a version of it. A handful of people get the inner ring. Everyone else gets a smaller, edited version of you. The hard part is that even the people in the inner ring don’t always want to be there. They don’t always want to carry your archive, even if they once said they would. And that, more than anything, is a fear I don’t think ever fully goes away — not because people are bad, but because carrying someone else’s memory is genuinely heavy, and not everyone signs up for heavy on purpose.
My brain just shut off thinking about it that day. Could barely breathe without circling straight back to the same loop.
How Someone Breaks What You Gave Them
Here’s the part nobody warns you about, and the part I think matters most to actually say out loud: when you hand someone a piece of your memory, the breaking almost never looks like breaking. It doesn’t arrive as a slammed door or a screamed accusation or some dramatic final scene. It comes quiet. A detail you told them in confidence shows up somewhere it shouldn’t, reshaped slightly so it doesn’t look like a betrayal anymore. A version of a moment you shared gets rewritten in their retelling so it favors them and not the truth of what actually happened. A silence creeps in where there used to be a daily check-in, and it’s introduced so gradually that by the time you notice it, you can’t even point to the exact day it started. None of it announces itself as damage. It just looks like nothing — a normal day, a normal distance, a normal “things change, people grow apart.” That’s what makes it worse than a clean break would be. You’re left holding proof that something shifted — a weird feeling in your gut, a memory that doesn’t match what they’re now saying — with no one willing to admit they’re the one who shifted it.
And the strange, almost unfair part is that the person doing it often doesn’t even experience it as breaking anything. To them, it’s just moving on. Managing their own life. Protecting their own peace. Self-preservation dressed up as growth. To you, on the other end of it, it’s a section of your own archive that’s been quietly rewritten by someone else’s hand, edited without your consent, and you don’t get a vote in the new version.
The Part I Don’t Want to Skip — Revenge
I said I wasn’t going to leave this part out, so here it is, stated plainly: underneath the hurt, there is a pull toward revenge. Not the cinematic kind, not some grand plan. Just the quiet, everyday kind. The urge to make them feel even a fraction of what you carried. To let them know, somehow, what it actually cost you. That urge is real, and pretending it isn’t there is its own small lie I’d be telling myself, and I’m done telling myself those.
But here’s the thing I keep circling back to, the thing that almost makes it bearable: revenge and connection come from the exact same root. Both are just two people who once mattered to each other, colliding over who gets to be right about what happened between them. We dress the collision up in nicer language depending on which side of the story we’re standing on — “exploring a connection,” “setting boundaries,” “just moving on,” “protecting my energy” — but strip the language away and it’s the same old human collision it’s always been, going back as far as humans have been capable of remembering each other. Two egos that each privately believe they couldn’t possibly be the one who got it wrong. We say humans are the most intelligent beings to ever exist, and maybe that’s exactly the problem — intelligence doesn’t make anyone immune to being wrong, it just makes us better at constructing reasons we weren’t.
I’m not interested in pretending the urge for revenge isn’t there, because suppressing it has never once made it smaller for me. What I am interested in is not letting it write the next chapter. Because revenge doesn’t get the memory back. It doesn’t undo the rewrite or restore the version of events that actually happened. All it does is hand the other person one more piece of you to carry around in their head, rent-free, while you sit there thinking you’re the one in control. And I’ve already given away enough pieces of myself without my permission. I’m not interested in donating another one on purpose, dressed up as justice.
So I Asked Myself
Can someone use you? Yes — that’s just human nature, and pretending otherwise is naive. Does it affect me? Yes, clearly, given that it’s 3 AM and my heart is doing 135.
So I’m back to the same question I started with: what is you?
I think the honest answer is something like this — I’m someone who likes to be around the people I trust, even on the days when that trust isn’t handed back in equal measure. Is that good or bad? Honestly, it cuts both ways depending on who’s holding the scale. For them, it’s probably inconvenient. For me, it’s probably reckless. One small mismanagement, one careless retelling, and the whole archive scatters across people who never asked to hold it in the first place. The glass walls crack. That’s what’s happening right now, mid-monsoon, mid-panic, and it isn’t comfortable to sit inside.
But maybe that’s the actual lesson buried in all of this. Humans like to believe we’re too intelligent to ever be wrong — and that exact ego is what collides with someone else’s ego, every single time, in every relationship that’s ever quietly fallen apart. We used to call that collision revenge, plainly, without flinching from the word. Now we call it bonding, connection, exploring who we are through each other — softer words for the same old human friction.
I don’t have a clean ending for this one, and I’m not going to force one just to wrap the post up neatly. Just the questions, carried through a 3 AM spike and a full day of circling them in my head, finally written down tonight — because writing them down felt better than carrying them alone in silence for one more night.
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