Chapter 2 - San Francisco - The Lowest Point..Yet
Late October 2021
In continuation to the life history in Chapter 1… both my friend and I were freshly rejected from our respective job interviews. We went about our daily gym session with even more intensity than usual and got our groceries from Trader Joe’s.
I remember it very clearly because that night was colder than usual.. it was 40-something Fahrenheit and I was wearing just a tank top. By this point, I was numb to both physical and emotional pain.
We go about our purchases, and we were walking back home wondering if life could get any worse.
Oh, it could. It ALWAYS could get worse.
Misery is like the Richter scale; it isn’t linear. Every unit increase can be much more intense.
As I am thinking through my cloudy mind and baring the cold, people stare at me as though I am crazy. Well, San Francisco sure has a lot of unique characters, and I was surprised so many people were staring at me wearing a tank top on a cold winter night. This is when it starts to rain… quite heavily.
One of those gloomy evenings
My friend and I start to laugh quite hysterically.
What do we do? Nothing.. just get wet and march on. Our day would come.
As we walked through the rain, drenching wet, my friend tells me these words that will be etched in my mind forever.
He said, “Do you know one good thing about this situation?… No one in the streets would notice if we cried our hearts out in the streets right now”.
Again, we laughed hysterically but the depression was real.
At this moment, I told my friend.. “Be prepared for the Trader joe’s paper bags to tear apart and be prepared to lose out on the next 2-3 days of our groceries”. My friend laughed even more.
This was BY FAR the lowest point of our lives. Both of us had absolutely no clue on what we were doing, and we did not know how long this would continue. All we knew was, we had to keep on marching one step at a time - in the rain and in life.
Statistically speaking, we felt that something good SHOULD happen to us one of these times AT LEAST by accident. The sad part was, literally no one except the two of us really understood the daily pain we were going through. Our parents could not relate to it as well. The pain of bottling suppressed emotion was getting to us and there were days when I would just sit somewhere and stare into the blank sky. All I wanted was peace.
Somehow, God had mercy on us that night and we were pleasantly surprised. The paper bags held up even in that rain. In moments like these, where we could not satisfy our most basic necessities - I still propagated the idea of spreading positivity to the community. I could relate to people’s perspectives. You never judge anyone on face value. You never know what battles they are fighting. Be kind, the world would be a much better place by just being kind.
One year has passed since this moment. And, I still go back to those very streets of San Francisco to remind myself of these roots. Where I came from.. what shaped me.. what hardened me.. and I put things in perspective. And, I am grateful for all the basic things in life now. The first time I slept in a proper bed was 6 months after I left Davis. Getting my own bed after 6 months was a BIG achievement for me. People do not appreciate these small achievements in life. It is all social media driven milestones that I do not particularly subscribe to.
Somehow, men are supposed to brave these circumstances with “confidence”. How are you supposed to handle such circumstances with confidence? I will never know.
Due to this reason, I have become even quieter these days and share less. Nobody really cares.
As a man, I have learned to harden my soul and project a confident shell to the outside world.
Remember - football legend Messi was considered an “overnight success”.