You obsess over your identity in relation to others, while your soul rots inside of you.

The video that won't leave

A friend at work sent me a video the other day. Some guy talking about figuring out who he is, trying things, picking up hobbies, dropping them, picking up new ones. And the people around him kept handing him labels. The car guy. The camera guy. Each label a neat little box, easy to carry around, easy to file him away under.

Everywhere at once

I'm in my early twenties, and honestly, I'm everywhere right now. Mountains. Music. Poetry I'd never show anyone. Blogs nobody reads. Coffee I pretend to understand. Songs I half-learn on guitar and forget by Tuesday. A new obsession every other month. I don't really know what I love. I know what I like in the moment, and I trust that, and I keep moving.

I don't have a plan for any of this. Just a feeling that life is wide and short and weirdly generous, and I'd be a fool to spend it standing in one spot.

But I'd be lying if I said this felt clean. There's a particular kind of dread that comes with not knowing what you want to be when you grow up, especially when you secretly suspect you've already grown up. Everyone around you seems to have figured it out. They've got the LinkedIn title and the long-term plan and the relationship that's headed somewhere. You've got a half-written essay and a guitar with three working strings and a vague sense that you're supposed to be doing more.

Sometimes I wonder if all this exploring is actually a form of running. If I never commit, I never have to be bad at one specific thing for very long. Trying everything can be its own kind of cowardice, a way to taste the surface of fifty lives instead of risking the depth of one.

I think both things are true. Some of it is genuine hunger. Some of it is fear wearing the costume of curiosity. I haven't figured out how to untangle them yet, which I'm starting to suspect is okay. Maybe untangling isn't the work of twenty-four. Maybe the work right now is just to keep moving, badly and honestly, and trust that something in the pile will eventually start to feel heavier than the others.

The thumbnail problem

People will put you in a box. They have to. The human brain doesn't have storage for the full mess of every person it meets, so it compresses. You become "the guy who writes," or "the quiet one," or "the one who's always disappearing into the hills on weekends." It's a mental shortcut, and tbh, it's fair. I do it too. We all do it. Walking around with a thousand fully-rendered humans in your head would break you. So we use thumbnails.

The trouble isn't that they make a thumbnail of you. The trouble is that the thumbnail feels good. It feels like being known. Someone has a clear idea of who you are, and that idea is portable, repeatable, easy to introduce at a party. Oh, that's Vedant, he's the writer one. And something in you relaxes. Finally, a category. Finally, a place to sit.

But that comfort is the trap. Because once you've taken the seat, you start watching to make sure you don't get up. You stop doing the things that don't match the label. You stop wearing the shirt that doesn't suit "the serious one." You stop telling people about the random hobby you got into last weekend because it doesn't track with their idea of you. You pre-emptively shrink. Nobody had to force you. You did it to yourself, because being predictable felt safer than being misread.

And the rot deepens. You become very good at being the thumbnail. People praise you for it he's so consistent, so himself, you always know what to expect with him. Meanwhile, every part of you that didn't fit the picture has been quietly amputated, and nobody noticed, including you. You walk around with phantom limbs of selves you used to have, and you can't even remember when you stopped using them.

Saved for later

I scroll. I get inspired. Somebody on my feed makes something beautiful a short film, a song, a tiny apartment they built with their own hands and something flickers in me. I want to do that. I want to make that. And then I tap the little bookmark icon, save it for later, and scroll on.

For later. As if later is a real place.

I have entire folders of "later." Videos I'll watch when I have time. Notes I'll turn into essays one day. Recipes I'll cook on a slow Sunday. Poems I'll finish. Songs I'll learn. A whole museum of inspiration, locked up, gathering dust.

I used to think this was a time problem. That I was just busy, and the saved stuff would catch up when life slowed down. It took me a long time to admit it's actually a fear problem. Because making something is a vote on who you are. If you sit down to write the essay and the essay is bad, you have new evidence about yourself, I tried, I failed, I might just not have it. Whereas the bookmark costs nothing. The bookmark preserves the fantasy of you as someone who could make this beautiful thing, if only you had the time, the energy, the right tools, the right mood. The bookmark is a fantasy preservation device. You're not collecting inspiration. You're collecting the version of yourself you keep promising you'll become.

And it feels like growth. That's the cruellest part. It feels like you're becoming a more interesting person just by collecting interesting things. You're not. You're curating a folder. The inspiration was supposed to do something to you. It was supposed to move your hands. The moment it becomes a bookmark instead of a brushstroke, the moment it becomes a save instead of a song, you've lost the thing that made it inspiring in the first place.

That's how you become a spectator of your own life! Watching everyone else live and risk and create and fail, while you sit there, very moved, taking no action. Personal growth feels stagnant because it is stagnant. You can't grow from input alone. Something has to come out, even if what comes out is ugly, even if it embarrasses you, even if it dies the moment it leaves your hands.

So if there's one thing I'd actually like you to take from any of this, it's this; make something. Paint. Dance. Draw. Cook. Write a paragraph nobody asked for. Hum into your voice notes. Bake a cake that flops. Bad poetry counts. A meal counts. A drawing your friend laughs at counts. A song nobody hears counts. Most of it will be ugly, and that's the whole point. You don't get a self by saving other people's. You get one by making your own — badly, repeatedly, in public if you can stand it, in private if you can't.

One human life

I'm doing none of this for anyone to notice. Whether someone ends up loving me or hating me for it, I genuinely can't bring myself to care anymore. Or at least, I'm trying to stop caring, which is maybe the same thing in slow motion.

I do what I do because, somewhere along the way, by some accident or some grace, god thought I deserved a human life. Sit with that for a second. The universe is mostly empty. The parts that aren't empty are mostly fire and rock and indifference. And somehow, in one tiny pocket of it, atoms got arranged into something that can look up at the sky and wonder about it. That can fall in love. That can taste a mango in summer and be flooded with the memory of someone who's been gone for years. That can be heartbroken at a song.

That's the gift. The whole gift. And it arrives bundled with all of it — the happiness and the sorrow, the excitement and the long dull stretches, the loved ones and the people who can't stand me, the mornings that feel like a beginning and the nights that feel like absolutely nothing at all. You don't get to take the good parts and leave the rest. The whole thing is the thing.

I'd rather taste all of it than spend my one shot at being alive trying to fit the shape of someone else's idea of me. Let me do all the senseless things, and let people busy themselves making sense of them.