On Identity.
Identity is not discovered. It is decided. But before you can decide, you have to notice what was decided for you — the scripts that were written before you had the vocabulary to question them.
The script you did not write. Every household has one. Expectations layered so early they feel like nature rather than programming. The career path. The timeline. The definition of success that was handed down before you had the experience to evaluate whether it matched what you actually value.
An Indian household carries specific versions of this. Not unique — every culture programs its children — but specific in flavour. The professions that count. The milestones that matter. The unspoken hierarchy of what a good life looks like, delivered not as instruction but as atmosphere. You breathe it in before you know it is there.
I am not rejecting the programming. I am noticing it. There is a difference. Rejection is reactive — it defines you against the thing you are pushing away. Noticing is neutral. It says: this was installed. Now I can choose whether to keep it, modify it, or replace it entirely. The choice is the freedom. Not the outcome.
The identities I have worn: the crypto obsessive, charting patterns at midnight, certain the future was being built in decentralised systems. The fighter, training six days a week, structuring life around competition schedules. The footballer, before all of it, when the body's intelligence was the only kind I trusted. The man with long hair, carrying a visual identity that said something specific about who he was, or thought he was, or wanted others to think he was.
None of these were lies. All of them were real at the time. The mistake would be pretending they no longer exist — that each phase was a mistake superseded by the next.
You do not shed identities — you integrate them. The person who loved crypto, who trained obsessively, who grew his hair for years — he is still here. He is just no longer running the show alone. He has been absorbed into something larger. A version of self that holds all the previous versions without being imprisoned by any of them.
Free will is a practice, not a state. You do not arrive at freedom and stay there. You practise it daily — in the small moments where the old script surfaces and you notice it rather than follow it. In the moments where “you should” arrives and you ask: according to whom? Based on what? Is this still true?
Contradictions are fine. You can love discipline and resist rigidity. You can value tradition and break from it deliberately. You can respect your roots and choose a different direction. The people who insist on internal consistency at all times are performing coherence for an audience. Real identity is messier than that. It holds tension. It contains multitudes that do not resolve neatly into a brand.
Zarathustra's valleys. You go down. You sit in the contradiction. You do not rush to resolve it into something comfortable and presentable. The valleys are where the real integration happens — in discomfort, in uncertainty, in the silence between one version of yourself and the next.
You do not shed identities — you integrate them. The person who loved crypto, who trained obsessively, who grew his hair for years — he is still here. He is just no longer running the show alone.