Can't Hurt Me: Challenge #1

I've been reading David Goggins's Can't Hurt Me for a few days now, and I've just finished the first chapter. Much to my surprise, the man challenges his readers at the end of every chapter. I have my own thing going on here, but I will definitely give this incredible man his due diligence. David shared his life story and all the bad cards he had been dealt, which he had struggled with his entire life. Real, harsh shit which actually holds him back even today.

His challenge to me is that I must make a whole damn list of all my shit which holds me back. Nothing came to mind immediately, since focusing on problems tends to morph into excuses, I'm not in the habit of keeping a list. Nevertheless, I believe David is talking about facing facts rather than seeking excuses. Already this is something new that I had not considered: deep-mining to air out all your rotten, toxic, twisted bullshit whose grotesque extremities quietly creep into our skin, pulling our stings from the dark.

Let's give this a go, shall we? I guess it starts at the start. 

The Context

I was born into a joint family home with the typical Indian drama bullshit. In a family of orthodox Hindus, my father liked foreign culture and found my mother in school. Love marriage was very much the exception. On one hand, I don't want to get lost in the weeds here. We want to cover the bad hands we were dealt, not retell our entire life story.

On the other hand, I genuinely don't know what holds me back today out of everything that happened. I remember being an angry kid. I remember feeling abandoned, like nobody wanted me, like a bag of old clothes left to rot on the street. There was also a constant sense of crushing loneliness, which is coming back to me now. 

Maybe taking a step back will help. My mom told me that the day I was born, I looked like I was pondering something deeply, with my hand on my chin. A nurse told my mother that I'll grow up to be a philosopher. I wouldn't know about that, of course. Anyway, I've had the misfortune of wondering at various points in my life why I was born into this world. It seemed to me that my mother was swept away from herself quite early on.

She had hitched her wagon to Dad, who was more of a traditional kind of guy. This meant that manipulation, conniving, and general cunt-ery were essential to his repertoire. Now, my father is not a violent man as far as I know. He's only laid his hands on me once, and I was being a right old cunt then, since my dumbass had locked my sister alone with a boy in a closet. Even so, I wouldn't call Dad a paragon of virtue.

He went out into the world and discovered technology as a way to succeed. He saw opportunities and capitalised on them industriously. Yet, instead of actually building something, I think he saw it as a golden goose. There's something to be said about the morality of manipulation in a world full of bullshit jobs. There's also the fact that actions have consequences. He knew a thing or two about computers, and that made him a lot of money.

But he became complicit and fell behind. Since he had never really worked hard to build something in the first place, and had instead hustled to manipulate opportunities to his advantage, he no longer had the drive to keep going after everything eventually fell apart. Now, he's just sitting around the house at age 60, doing all he knows how, manipulate everything and everyone to get what he wants. I think that aspect of my father's personality has always affected me in various ways.

For one, it meant that all our supposed wealth and social standing were just a cardboard facade in the shape of a grand mansion, without a pot to piss in behind it. Mom fell in love with this entrepreneurial, hustler kind of guy who liked global things, in a time when globalisation was ramping up in the country. Yet, in reality, dad was just a grifter in a city full of fuck ups, which I figured out once I left the town. It's a subtle but crucial distinction, building something versus fronting, one that's easily missed.

I just feel like my parents did everything they felt like they were supposed to. Things that the culture and other people in society told them to comply with. Study, get a job, start your business, own your assets, get married, have a family, and live happily ever after. This is the ideal blueprint for the vast majority in Jaipur, if not Rajasthan, even today. In reality, this story is just a slaughterhouse conveyor belt, an endless chain of fuel to feed the machine we call capitalism.

What my parents and countless others don't even realise to date: they are just cogs in the machine of economic development. Sacrificial lambs to feed the rich and build a future for someone else, which they would never even see. When people build their own homes, they suffer while architects profit. Today, I live in a grand house with no source of income, and take it from me, this huge piece of real estate is nothing more than a massive burden that consumes all you have and gives nothing back, except for a sinister lullaby that puts its inhabitants to sleep in a false sense of safety. 

I know it seems overly dramatic, but this has been my experience. As for mom, it wasn't long before she realised the fucking horrifying nightmare of a clusterfuck shitshow called marriage (to the wrong guy for the wrong reasons). She was a trophy wife, and soon, she knew what postpartum depression was. She had studied in school and gotten a college degree for the sake of it. Now, she was married to a guy who showed promise of success. What was she to do in all this? 

The Beginning

Have kids, she guessed. I mean, that's what people do, right? Nevermind the fact that people also go to school and finish college without learning a single fucking thing. Forget that most people are addicted to toxic bullshit. Doesn't matter that her plan to follow the sensible route had given her nothing but grief thus far. Surely, it will improve from here? Oh, wait, this baby thing is a whole new can of worms. My mother still had some support when she had this realisation, as the home was still a joint family. 

Yet, other people came with strings attached. I don't know what happened, but there was a lot of drama, friction, and fighting amongst my dad's family, which is where girls go to in India after getting married. I can imagine what it could've been; the others were conservative folks, while my parents were liberal. My folks liked to drink beer while the others preferred chai. Either way, my sister did not give her whatever she was looking for, and the joint family bullshit was getting too much for her to bear. 

So, they divided the house into parts, and we all went nuclear. On her own, it became tough to raise a lonely child, so why not have another one? I genuinely believe that this was as far as the reasoning went. I was born in this world because some naked apes were bored in a modern-day hell of their own making. Unfortunately, kids didn't save my mother. I was a difficult and energetic child, apparently, and my parents were already totally burned out. Mom's life was over before it had begun. 

While we went to school and dad went to work, she had nothing, was no one, and had nothing other than depression to keep her company. Typing it out, my parents must have gone nuclear after I was born, because I still have memories of a joint family home, where there was a single kitchen with all the women, and the whole house ate from it. The crux of the matter was that my parents had been seduced by the liberal promise of individuality in a communal country.

It said that privacy and independence were the keys to a good life, where every man and woman was king or queen. What they found was that the king and queen now had to manage literally everything by themselves. Freedom came with a sharp price tag, the burden of responsibility, and the choice of free will. No longer can they get away with anything. They must make their own decisions and learn to live with them. I don't know what they would say today, but I wonder if that was worth it. 

I remember this one moment so vividly. I must have been around 3 or 4 years old, because I don't remember dreading school back then. I was jumping around the bed or something, with just Mom and me in the room. I think I was pestering her for attention or something. I wanted her to love me. I needed her to want me to exist. I craved for her to acknowledge my existence, because she was the only one there. (Childrean are needy fuckers, aren't they?) 

But Mommy? She was just blankly staring off in the distance with a grim frown, refusing to look me in the eye. Then, a stream of tears started flowing down her cheeks. She didn't move or react in any way. Like prey trying to avoid the wrath of a T rex by staying still, with tears streaming down her face, and eyes that didn't seem to care if she got devoured. I don't know what happened after that, but that moment always stayed with me. It told me that I didn't matter to others. That I was just a burden on this Earth. 

I had forgotten that I still feel the same way. Keeping myself busy, always doing something or the other, it was like I had gotten over it. Yet, I remember wrestling with these memories a few years ago and thinking that I would always feel this way, might as well learn to deal with it. That wasn't a sole episode, by the way. I don't remember ever feeling loved or wanted, my whole life. It wasn't until college that I met a girl who noticed when I fell behind the group and started drifting in my head. 

I felt seen for the first time, and I fell in love with her, but she didn't reciprocate my feelings at all. That's when all these childhood memories with my mother started flooding back. Dad wasn't really around back then because he was busy working. Hell, he's never been emotionally available my entire life. My sister mostly treated me as her plaything. Four years older than me, she dressed me up and fucked with me to her heart's content. 

I hear she also took care of me, as older siblings do, and I reckon those accounts were rather exaggerated, not that I remember. That was the dynamic at home, which only exacerbated with time. Mom found her Buddhist practice, which gave her a chance to be social, and she started working with textiles professionally. Meanwhile, little old me was pushed into the system. I was the world's problem now.

The Outside World

I remember kindergarten being pretty chill. After all, it was a glorified daycare. I remember sleeping, fucking around, and feeling ok with it most of the time. At some point though, they stopped letting us fuck around in a room as made us sit on desks. Must have been LKG/UKG. I couldn't sit still at all, though. Perhaps I had learned early on that I was to make myself invisible and not cause any problems, so as to not bother people (or make them depressed). Perhaps because of that, I found it best to live in my imagination, which was far more vivid and colorful.

I remember watching the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man in the hall and just being totally enchanted by it. That seems right, actually, because that means I was four at the time (DOB June 12th, 1998). There I was the next day, climbing the walls of my LKG classroom with my fingertips as the teacher tried to conduct class, recreating the scenes from the film in my head. I don't know how, but the teacher must've said something to bring the class's attention to me, because all the kids began laughing and mocking me. 

I remember feeling utterly humiliated, like I was suddenly an ant amongst giants. Talking about it now, I realised that this was when I internalised the fact that I can't show my colorful inner self to the world either, my escape didn't make sense to them. Like most other kids, I would also imagine Godzilla and ninjas doing parkour on rooftops as I sat in the car, looking outside the windows. But I learned not to express it, show it, or talk about it. People thought that stuff was childish when I thought it was the coolest fucking thing ever.

Meanwhile, everyone at home was totally self-involved. I became quieter as time went on. There was always this sense that I couldn't fit in with the world, and I wasn't wanted at home. By the time I was 13, I was smoking weed, drinking, and my long-term plans did not extend beyond killing myself as soon as the opportunity presented itself, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Kindergarten was just the beginning. Slowly but surely, my parents started to outsource my childhood. 

Heaven and Hell

First, it was kindergarten, then school. Eventually, I couldn't study on my own, so they sent me to tuition classes. I hated the fuck out of school from day one. I hated my parents for making me go. I despised the teachers and struggled to find common ground with other students. It was like a fucking factory full of robots, assembling clay into useful industrial tools. It was cold, cruel, and heartless. Talking about it now, I can feel that sinking feeling again, like a battery slowly leaking acid in my guts. 

A constant pain dull enough to bear, but sharp enough to keep me on edge. I was scared of the teachers because they were drowning, emotional, and often abusive. Although they would only do things they could get away with, the emotional manipulation and power plays were enough to make it rather unpleasant. I didn't have any friends in school. I liked watching anime, Hollywood films, and Archie comics, while they were into Shin Chan, Chacha Chaudhary, and, well, I'm not sure what else. 

It felt like every time I opened my mouth, I was judged as weird, so I kept to myself as much as possible. I remember that around 3rd grade, there was another specific moment with my mother. She was trying to teach me some math, but I either didn't get it or I was being difficult, and I remember very specifically that there was an outrage, and she stormed out, giving up on trying to teach me. That felt like another level of abandonment because they were the ones who forced me to go to school in the first place. (although I didn't have any such logic to it, I just fucking hated everything man.)

Things became better when my two cousins moved to town, or so I thought, anyway. My parents started to drop us off at grandma's every weekend, and my cousins lived in the same colony. They were my mausi's kids, and I guess we scoundrels were just too much for the adults, because we found ourselves with way too much room for mischief. I was still in fourth class when we would browse porn websites together, all four of us rascals.

I was just 9, but my sister was 13, which is when you usually get curious about these things, and my cousins were from Delhi, which is enough said (iykyk). We also drank beer and rum, and watched some deranged things for children, like South Park. I didn't know it, but it was all affecting me very deeply, of course. My dad his own rape porn collection in our home, which my sister made me privy to on our home computer. 

I recall watching it with utmost curiosity and taking it all in. Looking back, kids that age are pretty damn fucking smart, huh? I knew it was wrong. I didn't know or care why. I knew to deny it if someone asked me, and I got some kind of thrill in those things, even though I didn't even have the physical maturity to get aroused. As time went on, school became increasingly a horrible experience to avoid. 

I never really studied except for the bare minimum because whenever I would get curious and ask questions, I was told to shut up and follow the curriculum, as what I was asking would be covered later. Other students became more distant as I would judge them quietly and constantly to compensate for how worthless I must have felt. I judged them for watching HIMYM, because I had watched it before them.

I'd judge them for being smart and studious. I'd hate on kids for anything and everything. It's not like I was totally alone the whole time, though. I'd have occasional small bursts of camaraderie with a handful of them over the years. Some, I played games with. Others thought I was cool because of how much I knew about drugs. I never really connected with any of them, though. I had a few secret crushes on some girls in the later years, but I never did anything with them.

I also had a good childhood with my cousins. Looking back, it was one of my favorite times from childhood. We'd pretend to be agents and have code names for each other. We'd run around the colony on missions. There were lizard-killing contests, too. Whoever ran around the colony and killed the most lizards with rocks or sticks would win. Water balloons on Holi, movies, shows, drinks, and video games. Oh, and we made bows and arrows out of falling kites on Sakrat! 

So much candy, junk food, and much more. Then, there were things I didn't enjoy, most of which came as we grew older. I didn't enjoy how scared they would make me sometimes, with the drugs and the strangers they called friends. I didn't enjoy being forced to steal gadgets from my home to sell for a quick buck. Around 8th grade, we became regular delinquents. We'd play shoplifting contests together, steal any cash from our poor old grandma, and score weed with it. 

Good Fortune Corrupts

As their friends became my friends, their vices came along for the ride. At this point, I'd like to say that I had two cousin brothers, one was just two months older than me, while the other was two years older. It was the one my age who was the proper criminal. I didn't feel very comfortable with my older cousin, but that was just anxiety, because I really looked up to him and was desperate for approval. 

One by one, we went our separate ways, and the dynamics changed with each departure. My sister left for college when I was in the 8th grade, and we took our criminal behavior to new extremes, like blatantly scoring weed and smoking it in public parks and stuff like that. I hated school and went as little as possible. I maintained the bare minimum attendance and never did any homework. I was scolded by teachers a lot. Other than tuition and school, my weekdays were spent playing video games and watching anime.

I loved to lose myself in fictional worlds. Playing Skyrim over the summer vacation might still be one of my best memories in life. Mostly, though, I just waited for the weekends. The drugs were bad, but in 10th grade, when my older cousin got busy with his final exam studies, I decided that they were a bad influence. Overall, I never really studied, passed with the grace marks, and was increasingly ignored everywhere I went. I had started reading when I started smoking up, and it might have been my saving grace.

Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey, Robin Sharma, Paulo Coelho, the whole starter kit. Perhaps it only fed my ego, though, because it was the only form of studying I was interested in doing. I feel like there's a lot of the same stuff now. A pattern of chasing highs with reckless abandonment, playing nice while judging people, and suffocating under the weight of crushing loneliness. When school was over, I realised that life on the outside wasn't as bad, and that suicide was not my ONLY option. 

To tell you the truth, I desperately wanted to see the ending of One Piece. I won't hide the fact that it was, for a good while, the only reason I couldn't get myself to jump off the roof. I remember one time very specifically when I stood up on the ledge of our roof and prepared myself for the final nudge. You have to understand, there was no such thing as family time in this home. My mother, who couldn't seem to look me in the eyes, had all the time, love, and patience in the world for strangers in her Buddhist organisation.

My father was too busy trying to make bank, and my sister was always caught up in her teenage dramas. No one spoke to me except when they needed something. I didn't feel wanted. I just wanted it to end. But looking down the ledge at the steel shed below, my vision started to get blotted with black spots, as my knees shook, and I became lightheaded. I was just imagining how much it would hurt before I would die in that tangled mess of rusty metal. I stepped down from the ledge with the new realisation that not only was I worthless, but I was also a coward. Too much of a pussy to go through with it.

I felt like my world caved in. I didn't know what the fucking point was anymore. Naruto and One Piece gave me comfort at that time. They made me feel like I wasn't alone, even though they alienated me from others who didn't watch cartoons or whatever. Nakama, friends, goals, and values. I discovered a wonderful world full of joyful ideals. It made me want to live.

Lost In The Weeds

I suppose that's as far as reciting events will take me. I saw in the horoscope today that surface level is not enough. It said that I need to dig deep, and that resonated with me. So let's skip the life story and start from scratch: what were the bad cards I was dealt in life? For one thing, I was always stuck in the middle. Too familiar with foreign culture for my peers, but not familiar enough for foreigners. Smart enough to read books, but not enough to get good grades.

No matter where I go, I feel out of place. It feels like I'm broken. Like there's this sticky black tar that I just can't get off. No one loved me when I needed it the most, and now, I'll never be able to love again. I'm scared of women. I'm scared of their bodies and what they can do to me. I'm rich enough to live in a big house with a solar panel, but broke enough to live on credit. My parents are slowly becoming burdens to me, as is the case in India. 

Their bodies are falling apart. Their minds, slipping. They don't own anything that generates income. I don't have any real monetisable skills to support a whole family, and the anxiety is soul-crushing. The worst part of all? If you're suicidal once, you can always hear the call of the void again. It feels like a scythe is always hanging above my head, with the words, "Is it worth it?" carved into it. Sure, life is good right now. I have my freedom and shit.

But what happens a few years down the line when my parents REALLY need me? I can foresee things getting very ugly, and considering how I'll probably never find someone, suicide might start looking very appealing again. You know, this morning I was of the opinion that I had healed and made so much progress. But here I am, after just a short trip down memory lane, talking just like I did on every rock bottom. I don't want to be someone's ATM. Is that why I was born on this Earth? To be enslaved?

*sigh* Jesus. I feel like my body is weak as hell. Never played any sports whatsoever, and I feel weak as shit. I feel like my mind's all fucked up, and that I'm slow and dumb because of it. Honestly, I have trouble focusing and paying attention. How the fuck am I ever going to amount to anything? Well, I don't want to be measured like that. I'd rather die now if that were true. You see how fucked up my mind is? That's why people can't fucking stand me for too long.

I'm always so serious and boring. And for such a serious person, I sure am fucking useless. Oh God, I'm just being cruel to myself at this point. How much deeper can I dig here? I don't feel anything anymore. What am I missing? Okay, so I don't edit these blogs as a rule, because these are just for me. So I took help from ChatGPT until we arrived somewhere I was happy with:

The Things Holding Me Back

1. I never felt wanted or loved as a child – I was emotionally abandoned, and I carry that sense of unworthiness into adulthood.

2. I live with a constant, crushing sense of being disconnected from where I was born – I don’t feel like I belong anywhere, and that leaves me floating without roots.

3. I am ruled by compulsions – whether it's food, porn, weed, or work, I indulge to escape and punish myself.

4. I believe my body and mind are permanently damaged – I feel weak, slow, and broken, and I don’t trust myself to ever rise above it.

5. I self-sabotage relationships – I never let anyone in fully because I’m convinced they’ll leave anyway.

6. I’m burdened by guilt rather than shame – I don’t just feel bad about what I’ve done; I feel like I need to be punished for it.

7. I fear the future because I see no viable path forward – I don’t have the skills to support a family, and I dread becoming an ATM for my parents, trapped in obligation.

8. I hold myself to impossible standards of purity – I can’t let myself cross even a single line, because if I do, I fear I’ll become everything I hate.

9. I use my intellect to avoid life – I’m smart enough to dissect everything, but I feel paralyzed when it comes to actually building something real.

10. I feel like a loser to my core – no matter how much I improve, I still carry this belief that I’m lazy, lustful, and inherently unworthy.

Now I'd say that's a perfect list, for now. On to the next one! Since this one became a really long thing, I'm going to add some headings above for better navigation.