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Hello Soubhagya,
Congratulations for turning 20. We are not in our teens anymore. Life is fun. But that’s not what I am writing to you. Let’s call this a letter to myself.
On Belief and Breaking
I know you’re carrying something you don’t have words for yet. You think the world runs on certainty – that if you study hard enough, train long enough, stay awake through enough nights, you’ll be able to control the outcome of the things that matter. Medicine teaches you that. AIIMS reinforces it. And loss… well, loss is where that belief shatters.
One year from now, you’ll lose your father. You won’t be there.
On Loss, Guilt, and Becoming
You’re going to replay that moment again and again, not because you could have changed anything, but because your heart will try to bargain its way out of the truth: that even doctors cannot outrun mortality. You’ll tell yourself stories of guilt because guilt is easier than helplessness. You’ll imagine that if only you were beside him, if only you were a “better doctor,” something might have been different.
But I’m here from the future to tell you this: You didn’t fail him. You just loved him. And love always wishes it could do more than reality allows.
You will leave clinical medicine, and for a long time, you’ll wonder if that decision came from fear, from inadequacy, from that one moment you couldn’t rewrite. But it didn’t. You left because your path was never meant to stay in one room, one ward, one clinic. Your mind was always roaming a bigger landscape – systems, people, ideas, change. You traded scalpel for strategy not out of escape, but out of evolution.
Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
And then, years later, something unexpected will happen. You’ll decide to try for a baby. Suddenly, all the grief you tucked away will rise like a tide you can’t hold back – fear, guilt, love, longing, the ache of becoming a father when you still feel like a son who lost his. You won’t understand why you’re breaking down then, but I do. It’s because bringing life into the world forces you to confront every loss you never processed.
On Love, Presence, and Wholeness
You’ll lose your mother soon after. You’ll hold your son in your arms within a few weeks of losing the woman who first held you. And in that paradox, that unbearable, beautiful symmetry, you will finally understand what your tears were trying to say –
You were grieving not just the father you lost, but the man you were trying to become. You were afraid that you would not be enough. But you are. Your son will not need you to save him the way you once wished you could save your father. He will need you to show up. To love. To laugh. To carry him through rooms filled with sunlight and rooms filled with shadows. And you will. You will be present in ways that heal the part of you that believes presence is the only measure of worth.
Listen, younger me, You are allowed to grieve, You are allowed to change direction, You are allowed to build a life that doesn’t look like what you imagined at 18 or 21 or 25, You are allowed to be human, not heroic. One day, holding your child, you will see your father in your hands, your mother in your tenderness, and yourself – fully, finally, not as a doctor who left medicine, not as a son who wasn’t there, but as a man who learned how to love without conditions. You did not become less. You became whole. And it took all these years, all this grief, and all this new life to understand that. Please remember –
To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it. It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future.
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
With love,
Your older self, Soubhagya
A letter to myself as the year ends. 2025 was the year of highest highs and lowest lows. In this year, I have had to face a lot of repressed emotions, some because of choice and some because I had no options. The thing that it reminds me how unpredictable life can be and it teaches me is that I can look at the younger me with a lot of kindness. He was trying to do his best. The featured image was clicked in Bali earlier this year. One of my favourite sunsets of the year. More pics on my Instagram
