24 years in my life. 24 hours a day. If I've lived a day, I've got 3 more to go. And what a day it has been.
0245 - a memory of walking with my dad to visit the hospital where my brother was being born. Except I'm told this never happened.
0400 - was ahead of all the other kids at kindergarten. Still wetting my pants because I was too scared to ask for permission to use the toilet.
0500 - another fake memory of going "hiking" with my dad and my uncle.
0530 - moved from Bhopal to Hyderabad via a long car drive. Smol pillows coloured pink and yellow. Living close to the aforementioned uncle, who would get us remote controlled cars as gifts every time he returned from abroad on a work trip.
0740 - all third grade sections across all school branches had an Independence Day quiz. My team finished dead last, with a perfect score of 0.
0930 - a new house, a new school.
1030 - school separated boys from girls by putting each gender in different sections, then sent me and a few other boys to "compete with the girls". I was in the hypercompetitive Battle of the Sexes phase at the time, but now I have lots of questions.
1130 - a new school because the old one was clearly weird.
1150 - school tour to Kerala.
1250 - school tour to Rajasthan, and a friend I still talk to. No more school trips because a few students would drown on a school trip within the next year and that would put everyone on edge.
1300 - inter-school group competition for responses to natural disasters, where we won the engineering task by combining a raft, a tank, and a crane. Some teams combined a tank and a crane, but never a raft as well.
1310 - first crush, AFTER she left the school and I never managed to get in contact with her ffs.
1445 - #1 in school and city in a competition that I only managed to enter because I forgot to register for another, more prominent one. Won two tabs as a result, ruined one but still using the other. #2 in state in a Spell Bee, and made a close friend who I've since lost touch with.
1500 - contemplated suicide for external reasons. Decided against attempting and started hating myself for beng so selfish (so wrong...).
1530 - went to FIITJEE and found a group of friends I still love.
1640 - #2 in a two-person-group logic competition by IIT Guwahati. Could've been #1, I like to believe, if I, my teammate, and the equipment didn't each malfunction at various points.
1645 - a lecturer in FIITJEE finally acknowledged that "12th ke baad maze hi maze nahi hai", which motivated me to adopt an insane, unsustainable work ethic, that I needed the 2 months after JEEA to recover from.
1655 - National Science Camp at IISc Bangalore, interesting lectures and a beautiful supersonic aerodynamics laboratory.
1730 - #749 in JEEA, and Aerospace at IIT Bombay. Joined NCC. Entered a long-distance relationship with a friend from school.
1830 - NCC Junior Council, and a tech team.
1845 - breakup.
1930 - quit NCC, become head of one of the 4 subsystems in tech team.
2000 - turned vegan after realizing that commercial dairy farms in India are bad too.
2005 - breakdown after a series of bad decisions culminating in a lot of self-hatred, self-introspection leads to a rebalancing of life and a promise to love myself again one day.
2015 - CoViD saves my ass, academically.
2030 - Windows BSoDs, I become Linux supremacist.
2100 - hired for data analysis role.
2130 - start job, see absolute disregard for employee data privacy by client. Decide that privacy of my personal data from other companies is important to me. Started watching F1.
2150 - jump ship to startup, as an AI developer. Enjoyable job in a field that I'm incompetent in. Started working with LineageOS.
2200 - personal laptop died. Experiments with LineageOS indefinitely halted, although I would still use it. Stopped hating myself.
2240 - beat the scalpers by luck and bought a Raspberry Pi. Began work on setting up Nextcloud.
2300 - actually love myself again.
2330 - I finally gave up on the friends-after-lovers charade with my ex-girlfriend for my own mental health.
2340 - permanent WFH!
It's been a very unorganized first quarter of a life, and I feel like I haven't got much to show for it. I also often feel like I threw away my career at the first opportunity. However, just because I'm not where I want to be doesn't mean I can't work towards getting there. And I owe it to myself to try.
Here's to 24. Here's to Day 2. Here's to building a life worth living.
Long version here