“When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche

It all started with a failure. I tried and I failed, but I was determined to try again. And hence, I marched into an uncertain territory. I did not know whether it was a right decision to give up comforts and tread into a dark, uncertain future. I still don’t know.

I am the kind of person who reads inspirational quotes when in a fix.

“Lahro se dar kar noka par nahi hoti; Koshish Karne walo ki kabhi haar nahi hoti ” (Late) H.R. Bachchan

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” Paulo Coehlo

I am that person who reads the stories of struggle of successful people when facing a predicament. I watch inspirational videos, listen to songs, trim my beard, watch a movie, read weird questions on Quora, do anything and everything possible to divert my mind from the thunderstorm inside my head. I do all this and finally came to the conclusion:: I need to take a leap of faith into the abyss of uncertainty.

And so I did.

At first, it was sheer joy; the joy of breaking free from the shackles of job and step towards your goal. I dream a lot, in fact there is so much that floats in my imagination that sometimes, I doubt I might be schizophrenic. I dream of everything that a highly successful person is supposed to have: good cars, foreign vacations, lavish lifestyle and a lot more! But somehow, I have yet not found a definite path leading to these luxuries; may be because I never cared to find one or may be because such a definite path doesn’t exist at all. I believed the latter and so put my faith in persistent hard work with perseverance.

My family was and is highly supportive regarding my career preferences; it won’t be an overstatement that my parents are my spine and without their support, I probably can’t even stand. I took a leap of faith because I knew my parents would find me and pick me up from the darkest corners of hopelessness.

But despite all this, the fear of failure never left me. It kept haunting me. Psychologically, the human brain is wired to be more conscious for the loss than the gain. It means that our brain is biased into worrying more about the failure than the fruits of success. At the back of my mind, there were a number of “what-if” scenarios floating; ‘what if I fail this time also, what if I end up losing everything, what if one more year is wasted’ and lots more. Slowly and gradually my social life succumbed to these pressures. I lost contact with many of my friends. I stopped enjoying and started taking my goal as a do-or-die game. My journey into the abyss had started.

(to be continued)