Chasing ambition and losing people
I don't know who needs to hear this, but it's Friday. This evening, take care of yourself and spend time with your family. Good friends are hard to come by — take care of yourself first so that you don't push them away.
In addition to navigating significant grief in my personal life, I lost my best friend this week. The former was something I could never have controlled, but the latter feels like a wound I carved with my own neglect. It was preventable. I keep turning it over in my head, wondering what I could have done differently, and the truth is I don’t know how to process it yet. The best way I know to deal with “life stuff” is the same way I’ve dealt with everything else: by writing it down, one word at a time.
Family
I’ve always been an “all in” kind of person. When I decide to do something, I dive headfirst and don’t come up for air until I’m deep in it. When I first got into cybersecurity, my weekdays blurred into one another: mornings and afternoons at an internship, evenings filled with freelance security audits and bug bounties, weekends devoted entirely to CTFs. I pushed so hard that I forgot to eat, forgot to sleep, forgot to live. For a while, that intensity seemed like strength. But eventually I burned out, and when I looked up, I realised I had poured almost nothing into my family or friends. I had traded irreplaceable time for internet prestige points.
Somewhere along the way, I began to understand that balance matters. But knowing that and living it are different things. When I started my company, I promised myself I wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes. And yet, slowly, I did. Between late nights, early morning calls, Linear tickets, and endless code reviews, I stopped showing up for the people who mattered most.
Being an international student for the past 2 years and now trying to build a dream in a foreign country has made this even stranger. You’re always split in two: never fully at home, never fully settled. The moment I find comfort in one place, I begin aching for the people in the other. Going home helps, but this proximity isn't always possible.
You can always raise another round, rebuild another codebase, or pivot another time. But when you lose the small, quiet, irreplaceable moments with the people who love you, those are gone forever. One day, you'll realise you never got the chance to say "I love you" or to say goodbye.
Friends
I’ve been lucky to have friends who have seen me at my best and my worst and stayed anyway. But friends are not lifelines. They have their own storms to weather, and leaning too heavily on them — out of fear, loneliness, or codependency — doesn’t help either side.
When my mental health collapsed in Cambridge, I responded the only way I knew how: by closing myself off and burying myself in work until the feelings dulled. It wasn’t healthy. But swinging to the other extreme, expecting my friends to carry what I hadn’t yet processed myself, isn't fair either. The only person who can truly help anyone is themselves.
The truth is, I haven’t been honest with myself about where I am. It’s easy to numb pain with busyness, to convince yourself that if you just keep sprinting you’ll outrun whatever’s chasing you. But life doesn’t work that way. Eventually, the feelings you’ve avoided claw their way back to the surface. And if you don’t face them, they spill over and hurt the people around you.
Good friends are hard to come by. Don't waste them. "Friendship breakups" are worse than romantic breakups.
Moving Forward
I’m starting small. I’m taking Sundays off, starting today. I’m going home next week to spend time with my family. Not for an obligation, not squeezed between meetings, but to actually be present. I'm still working way more than a 9-5 job, but it's not about the hours, but about being intentional with my time.
I can’t undo what’s already lost. But I can choose differently tomorrow, and the day after that. And maybe that’s the only way to honour both the grief I couldn’t outrun, and the friend I didn’t need to lose (if you ever read this, I hope you know I'm sorry).