🏋️ Health
This is the first week in a long time where I actually looked after the machine, and it was also the week the machine sent me an invoice for the months I didn’t.
Wednesday I woke up at 7AM with eight hours behind me. I want that written down because it has not happened in months. Finally. I stretched. I got to the office at a time that a person gets to an office. Thursday was similar — deep sleep, up at 8, stretched, in by 10. For two days in the middle of this week I was simply a man with a sleep schedule and I’d forgotten what that feels like.
The gym was humbling. I went back after too long away and my body flatly would not take the weight. The strength isn’t there. The stamina is gone — not low, gone — and I’m starting from zero like somebody who has never done this before. Which is annoying and also completely fair. You don’t get to keep what you stopped paying for. I had my protein shake afterwards and discovered I’m nearly out, which is its own small metaphor about running on the last of something.
By Sunday it was better. Chest day, a good one, and the scale said 76.2, which is down. The body is rebuilding from the bottom and the number is moving. Both of those are true at once and I’ll take the pair.
And I cooked. Properly, repeatedly, food I actually wanted to eat rather than food that was simply nearest. The discovery of the week is a poached egg sitting on top of Maggi — decent calories, healthy technically, and genuinely good. I ate it two days running. Sunday night I ordered in, because on a Sunday night I do not want to fight with utensils, and that’s a rule now rather than a failure.
I should also report, in the interest of this being honest: there was Domino’s on Tuesday. And on Thursday I got home at 11:45 at night and ate fries. The week was not a clean sweep. It was a week with more good days in it than bad ones, which is a different and more achievable thing.
Then there’s the other half.
Two nights I was still awake at 4:30 in the morning. Not out. Not working. Just lying there. One of those nights I described to myself as crawling — crawling through the night and then crawling through the next day on the other side of it. More on that at the bottom, because it’s the actual story of the week and it doesn’t belong in a section about push-ups.
💻 Work
Keeping the specifics out of this one, but the shape of it mattered.
The week opened clean. Every single thing I’d written on the list got done — my own edit finished, a script I’d been unhappy with rewritten from scratch, the reference work closed off. All of it, in a day. That hasn’t happened in a long time and I’ll come back to why in a minute.
Then a stretch of building something I’d never built before. I got the chance to sit with the editing team and put together a set of assets from nothing. It was a struggle. Genuinely. And the hard part wasn’t the technical work — it was that the obvious thing was missing. Nobody had thought about how a person would actually use this. The common sense just wasn’t in the room yet, and most of the effort went into putting it there before any of the actual making could start. First drafts came out of it and they work.
That’s a lesson I keep relearning: the craft is usually fine. It’s the common sense that’s expensive.
Then one properly bad day. Everything I put up got rejected. All of it. Every piece turned back for the same reason, and the reason was mine — not bad luck, not a misunderstanding, mine. That kind of day used to flatten me for a week.
This one didn’t, and I’ve been trying to work out why. I think it’s because the questions coming back at me were good ones. You can take a rejection that arrives with a good question attached, because then it isn’t a verdict, it’s information. It’s the rejections that come with nothing that rot in you. I went home at 11:45 that night, made my bed, ate the fries, and that was that.
A new brief landed midweek and I set my own deadline on it, which I’m noting because the deadline wasn’t given to me. I picked it. Ideation started the next morning, and by the weekend I’d built the entire blocking structure for it — remotely, from the gym, between sets, which is either very efficient or a warning sign and I haven’t decided which.
Refining and finishing left. Wrapping it tomorrow.
And there was one day where everything felt sharper than it needed to be. Rooms, tone, the general temperature of being around people. I took it personally for about an hour and then put it down. Some days are just like that and it usually isn’t about you.
📖 Learning
I’ve been carrying something for years and this week I finally turned it over and looked underneath it.
Somewhere along the way I accepted that I’m not going to be a famous person.
Not as a wound. As a fact. Filed, settled, not up for discussion. I can make things — that part I’ve never doubted. But I can’t make myself into something that people follow. That was the arrangement I’d come to and I stopped examining it so long ago that I’d forgotten it was ever a conclusion rather than a condition.
This week I found out where it came from. It came from a number.
I never got to a million. I tried properly, for a long stretch, with real effort, and it didn’t happen. And somewhere inside that failing, I quietly converted this didn’t work into I can’t.
Those are not the same sentence. One is a result. The other is a verdict on a person. I’ve been living inside the second one for years on the strength of evidence that only ever supported the first.
And here’s the part that undoes it: I know exactly why it didn’t work. I was chasing views. Every single thing I made in that period was reverse-engineered from a number I wanted it to hit. I’d decide what should perform and then build backwards towards it, and things built that way come out hollow. People can feel hollow even when they can’t name what’s wrong. The attempt failed for a reason that has nothing to do with whether I’m capable of it. It failed because of how I was doing it.
So I’m going to try again. Differently.
I’m not counting. Not five hundred views. Not a million. Not whether a post performs or a reel travels. I’m going to make things, learn skills I don’t currently have, go and find editing theories nobody has told me about yet, and climb out of the box I’ve been sitting in for however long this has been.
I’m writing this from inside the box. I’m aware of that. That’s fine. You write the first note from wherever you actually are.
☕ Small Wins
A hundred percent shipment ratio, most days this week. Everything I wrote on the list actually got done. That number has never been that number before, and it turns out it changes more than the list.
I finally shipped the video. I’d been stuck on the how for ages — and then worked out I could do the entire thing off my laptop. It’s out. The block wasn’t the work. The block was a logistics problem I’d been carrying around as if it were a creative one.
Recorded another face-to-camera piece. Haven’t posted it yet. Will.
A thousand views on a reel. I’m mentioning it once and then I’m not thinking about it, which is the entire point of the Learning section above.
76.2.
The poached egg on the Maggi. I would like this recognised. I’ll be taking credit for it for years.
Changed the bedsheet. Washed the clothes. Cleaned the whole house. Reader, these had been on the list for weeks.
Made my bed at 11:45 at night after the worst day of the week. Nobody saw it. It counted anyway.
📚 A Line That Stayed
Not from a book this week. From a friend, years ago, and it came back to me this week with interest.
“If you are not closing the small pages, you are piling up into a book.”
I finally understood what he actually meant by it.
Small tasks don’t disappear when you skip them. They don’t even have the decency to stay small. They sit there quietly collecting other small tasks, and they compound, until the thing you’ve been avoiding isn’t a page any more — it’s a book. And nobody reads a book they didn’t mean to write.
That’s what the last few months were. Not one big failure that I could point at and deal with. A hundred unclosed pages stacked on top of each other, which from the inside felt like fog, and from the outside looked like being busy.
This week I closed them. And the effect on my head was completely out of proportion to the size of the tasks involved, which is the part I want to remember. Changing a bedsheet is not an achievement. Changing a bedsheet that has been on the list for three weeks, it turns out, absolutely is — because what you’re actually closing isn’t the bedsheet. It’s the page.
🧠 Brain Refreshment
Garba
The whole city was out for it. There’s something about a festival happening around you that resets your sense of scale, even when you’re mostly on the edge of it watching. The week had a sound to it because of that.
Two people moved back to sitting opposite me
And I was happy and sad at the same time, which I’ve thought about several times since and still can’t fully unpack. Some things arrive mixed and stay mixed. I’m leaving it written down rather than solved.
Calls on Sunday
No agenda, no outcome. We talked, we chilled, that was the entire thing. Some of the best hours of my week had no output attached to them whatsoever — that’s the second time this month I’ve noticed that and I should probably start acting on it instead of noticing it.
After Effects and Claude, just playing
Nothing due. No deliverable. Just poking at the thing to see what it does when you push it. I forget how much I like that part until I accidentally do it again.
✍️ A Poem by Me
Syad uss sayar ko mai bhi sayari batata,
kyuki vo ruk too jaata,
voo nazama aane tak ka,
intezaar kar paata
Translation
Maybe I’d have shown my poetry to that poet too,
because he, at least, would stop.
He would be able to wait
until the verse arrived.
🎵 Music
💭 Closing Thoughts
This note is ironic and I know it is. Let me put both halves next to each other and leave them there.
Everything above says I had a good week. I kept my peace. I held my schedule. I cooked my own food and it was good food. I had all my energy — a hundred percent of it, for the first time in longer than I want to admit. The list got finished nearly every day. I shipped the thing I’d been stuck on. By any standard I’d have used a month ago, this is a straightforward win, and I started the week on day two of deciding to live differently, which means the deciding is holding.
And I was awake at 4:30 in the morning. Twice.
Not out. Not working. Just lying there with my brain running the same three questions on a loop — how do I do it, how am I going to do it, what are we actually doing. There is no answer available at 4:30. There is only the asking, and the asking is very happy to go all night.
I feel constrained. Posed, almost — like I’ve been placed somewhere rather than arriving there under my own power. I think part of it is loneliness. I don’t know what the rest of it is yet, and that’s half of why I’m writing this down, because the tell is specific and I can’t ignore it: I was happy at work this week. Properly happy. And then the moment work stopped, I wasn’t.
That bothers me more than the 4:30 does.
And here’s the thing I noticed about myself that I don’t love.
I want to work when there’s a deadline. I don’t want to work when there isn’t one. But when I’m working against a deadline, the thing never really happens — it gets delivered, it doesn’t get made. There’s a difference and I can feel it every time.
So the deadline is the only thing that reliably moves me, and it’s also the thing that flattens what I make. Both of those are true and they’re standing on each other, and I don’t have a solution yet. I just know that “find a deadline” and “make something good” are currently pulling in opposite directions inside the same person.
Some decisions are coming next month. Real ones. I’m not going to write them here until they’re mine.
Until then the only rule I’ve got is this: I’m going to entertain myself.
Chase what actually interests me. Learn the things I don’t know. Make what I want to make and let it build into whatever it builds into. Because if I can’t entertain myself — if I can’t hold my own attention with my own work — then what exactly is the point of any of it.
I started this week on day two.
I opened it, and I’m more focused now than I was when it began, and I’m still not sleeping, and both of those sentences are going to have to travel together for a while.
I can do this. I will do this.
See you next week.
— Naman
Mumbai
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