🏋️ Health
I forgot to set an alarm on Tuesday and walked into the office at 10:30, which I would like to report as an isolated incident and cannot.
The sleep did not happen this week. Friday I got home at 5:30 in the morning. Saturday I woke at 12PM having not really slept, and I genuinely don’t know why — I was tired enough, I was in bed, it just wouldn’t come. Sunday I was up at 6:30 for soccer, which was good, and then the night did exactly the same thing to me again. Three nights in a row of lying there wide awake at an hour I had no business being awake.
My back has started hurting. I don’t think that’s unrelated to anything.
The good parts, and there were some: soccer at 6:30 on Sunday morning. Gym on Saturday. And I cooked my own food a few times — eggs on Saturday, poha on Sunday — which, after weeks of eating whatever was closest, felt like an actual small act of self-respect rather than just lunch.
Something has been off with me physically all weekend and I can feel it clearly without being able to name it.
💻 Work
Specifics stay out of this. The shape of it:
The week opened with a re-brief. Sitting down and being told again, properly, what we’re doing now and where the video work is going. Then studying a structure I want to build something in the shape of — pulling it apart to see how it holds together. There’s a version of this where the output comes out clean and smooth and something good comes of it for me, and I know that, and knowing it is its own particular kind of pressure to carry around.
Friday I was in early with feedback in hand and got a first draft finished. Then the middle of the day vanished into an errand that took three hours. Came back and worked till 9:30 anyway.
The weekend was corrections and edits. The last song got finished on Sunday, done by 5PM — which is a sentence I have been waiting a while to write. Then an urgent request came in for two more videos and my plan for the evening went the way plans go. Slept a bit, woke at 8PM, walked, edited them, sent them.
Then I tried to do office work on top of that and it was just lagging. Not the machine. Me.
📖 Learning
(opening about the brain’s loop stays)
This week the task came out of a conversation about struggle.
Nothing dramatic. Somewhere in the middle of a long night the subject came up — whose struggle counts, what it’s supposed to look like from the outside, who gets to decide. I’ve heard some version of that conversation a hundred times. I have never once carried it home.
This time I carried it home, and I’ve spent days working out why.
Because the interesting part isn’t what was said. The interesting part is that it stuck to me, and things only stick when they find something already there to hold on to.
What it found was this: some part of me isn’t sure I’ve earned where I’m standing.
Which is strange, because I know exactly how I got here. I didn’t arrive early. Nothing landed in my lap on a schedule. I’m here because I could not stop being interested in this and I kept turning up, and that is the entire mechanism. I know that. I could list you the years.
But knowing something and believing it turn out to be two different jobs, and I have apparently only finished the first one.
So the subject came up, and before I’d even finished hearing it, something in me said: fine. Prove it, then.
Not to them. To me. That’s why it stuck.
☕ Small Wins
The last song, done by 5PM on Sunday. That one had been sitting on me for weeks.
Soccer at 6:30 in the morning, after a week that handed me every available excuse.
Cooking twice. Eggs, then poha. Small. Counts anyway.
The urgent ask, turned around the same night. I did not want to. I did it. It went out.
Walked into the office at 10:30 with no alarm and still got the day back. Not a win exactly. Definitely not a loss.
📚 A Line That Stayed
Not from a book this week. From my own head.
“Prove it, then.”
Nobody said that to me. I said it to myself, silently, mid-conversation, and it has been running on a loop ever since.
What I keep coming back to is how fast it arrived. No deliberation, no weighing it up. A subject comes up in a room and before I’ve finished hearing the sentence there’s already a voice in my chest going fine, prove it. Which tells me it wasn’t a new thought at all. It was loaded. It was sitting there waiting. It just needed something to pull the trigger.
And here’s the part that actually bothers me: I don’t know what proving it would look like. I can’t describe the finish line. Which means I can’t tell whether I’m walking towards it or in a very tidy circle around it.
🧠 Brain Refreshment
Friday night
Out to celebrate after a long week. A lot of drinks, a lot of talking, bar to bar, finishing somewhere in Malad and getting home at 5:30. Most of it was genuinely good. One part of it wasn’t, and that part is up in the Learning section.
The errand
Three hours of a working Wednesday gone helping somebody buy a phone. Objectively a waste of an afternoon. Actually, completely fine. Some of the better hours I had this week were the ones with no output attached to them at all, and I should probably notice that.
Walks
Two on Sunday. One before the urgent call came in and one after. Both of them needed.
🎵 Music
Twenty One Pilots — Ride
On repeat all week. Not a considered choice — just where my hand kept going.
The whole song is somebody turning the same thought over and over while the music underneath stays completely relaxed about it. A tense head sitting inside an easy beat. Which is a fairly accurate description of my week from the outside: everything looked fine, everything kept moving, and the inside of my head was doing laps.
I didn’t pick it because it fit. I noticed it fit afterwards.
✍️ A Poem by Me
Bhul Jaau sab yaa yaad dilau sab,
Samaj nahi aata kaha jaau abh yaa soo jaau abh,
Naraz hai sab caahe dost yaa rab,
Translation
Should I forget it all, or remind everyone of all of it,
I can’t work out where to go now, or whether to just sleep now,
Everyone’s upset with me — friends, or God.
Meaning
Three lines, and sab lands in every one of them. Forget all. Remind all. Everyone is upset. Nothing in it is partial. That’s what the week felt like — not one problem I could point at and deal with, just everything at once, all of it at the same volume.
The middle line is the one I didn’t notice I’d written until I read it back. Where do I go now, or do I just sleep now. I’ve spent two weeks unable to sleep and unable to say where I’m going, and the poem put both of those in the same breath before I’d worked out they were the same problem.
Interpretation
The choice it offers isn’t between a good option and a bad one. Forget or remind. Move or sleep. Both sides of both are exhausting. That’s what being stuck actually feels like from the inside — not an absence of options, but a set of options that all cost the same, so you sit still and pick none of them.
And the last line goes somewhere I didn’t plan. Dost yaa rab. Friends, or God. It doesn’t matter which. Both mean the same thing, which is that you’re carrying this one on your own for now.
I wrote it in about a minute, and it says more than the thousand words above it.
💭 Closing Thoughts
I’ll be honest here, because this is the only place I am.
My head has been fogged the whole week. I can’t see anything clearly. I can’t sit through a series. I can’t hold focus on something the way I used to be able to — it slips after a while and I come back to find I’ve been somewhere else entirely for ten minutes. I don’t know exactly where I’m going right now. I don’t fully know what I’m doing.
It feels like I haven’t woken up yet. Like I’m walking around inside a deep sleep, waiting for somebody to say my name loudly enough.
Last week I wrote that I had to prove myself to me before I proved anything to the world, and I felt genuinely clear about it when I wrote it. Seven days later somebody says one thing at a table and I’m right back at the start of the same sentence — I have to prove myself again. I haven’t proved it yet. I don’t know whether that’s growth or a loop. I’d like it to be growth. Ask me in a month.
Here’s what I think I actually know.
I should start logging properly. Daily. Not just here on a Sunday when the week is already over and I’m reconstructing it from memory.
I should start putting things out again. I don’t know what yet. That’s a question for a clearer head than the one I’ve got this week.
And the part I’ve been avoiding writing down, so I’m going to write it down: I don’t know who to trust with any of this. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be building it alongside. I don’t know if I can do this on my own.
But I have to. So I will.
Let’s see how it goes.
See you next week.
— Naman
Mumbai
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