02/11/25
Yesterday
May
August
September
October
November
December
January
Tonight
Tonight
Mine began with a broken projector.
Our first crack appeared in the soundtrack—my mom’s voice bridging everything we never say: my dad’s savings, my grandparent’s prayers, my sister’s move across the country. Everyone had folded a piece of their life into my script.
But somewhere between failed midterms, fading funds, and fleeting family, the reel jammed.
I press withdraw. The screen goes dark.
The Fall 2024 gap semester a debt to repay—a downpayment to everyone who had faith in me, long before I’d earned it.
Gap semesters sound poetic until you barter hours like currency.
I’d been fortunate enough to receive an offer to help start up a start-up with some Cal kids while on a trip home to North Carolina. I’d taken it in a heartbeat. This was a chance to remove any white space I could imagine on the GCal.
I don’t think any 19-year-old wakes up wanting to build B2B AI SaaS for finance. It’s a world where disruption means automating spreadsheets so hedge fund managers can golf longer. Regardless, it can be an enriching experience.
I learned to talk private equity with JPM finance bros and nod along to jargon like leveraged buyout and ARR. The networking felt hollow, and I felt like a fraud. Finance moves through life like a chess board—calculated gambits with no love for the game itself.
I spent the next two months drowning. Our team included a founder who’d just sold his startup, radiating the calm confidence of someone who’d done this before. I, however, failed at nearly every turn—failed sales, failed code, and failed calls.
Yet amidst the wreckage, there were spots of glimmer—the thrill of our landing page going live, fixing a tiny edge case, and closing our first enterprise contract.
I learned how to validate, build, and sell an idea (or at least I discovered how much I’ve yet to learn). I learned other things too—design is sometimes louder than code, how talent is oxygen at a startup, and how one of my mentors hedged his risks on gambles with every edge case in mind.
By summer’s end, I traded one grind for another.
A local tech entrepreneur offered a better learning experience and better pay. Fortunately for him, I had yet to internalize that capitalism was a pyramid scheme. I become his minion.
My days blurred into drafting legal docs I didn’t understand, laundering cloud credits through shell companies, and hunting down PhDs to endorse products they’ve never seen.
Somewhere along the way, I hired my own interns—three high schoolers from the South Bay. I finally saw the pyramid from the middle.
At the same time, I enrolled in community college, expecting it to be a pit stop—classes that I’d breeze through.
Instead, it split my world open.
At Cal, brilliance felt like a car showroom. It felt polished—edges sanded off with the same grades, clubs, and LinkedIn bios it regressed to the mean. Here, minds burned brighter, wilder: neurodivergent Jonathan SSH-ing into his server between Uber shifts, with not an ounce of fuck giving to his resume.
There’s an unspoken camaraderie—the kind that doesn’t need icebreakers or Spotted Slack channels. It’s in the little things—huddling to look at a gem of a Quizlet find 5 minutes before our Matrices quiz, slipping an extra meal swipe to someone hungrier than you, watching a 27-year-old single mom’s kid so they can test in peace. It’s called community college for a reason.
In group projects, we trade stories: I regurgitate how 61A teaches recursion, and learn how to diagnose a check-engine with an OBD-II. In office hours, I learn that clear writing is just as much a reflection of clear thinking as is in CS. For the first time, I find myself sending a thank you video to a professor. Shoutout Dr. Huang.
Community college only has one flaw: you can’t stick around. It means no dorm life, no 2:00 AM talks, or midnight friendships. I find it crazy how I’ve taken the social lubricant of living and learning in the same place for granted. CC classrooms hold urgency, not permanence—we’re mid-transit, booting up futures in borrowed time.
I felt closer to the scrappiness of community college, the people who made life feel unpolished and real—those who showed up because they had to, but stayed because they cared.
I felt a calling for a job outside my minion one that was more human—one that’d pay, but with fulfillment just as much as money.
I found it in a strip mall wedged between a boba shop and a tutoring center, coaching middle school debate.
Let me just say this: my students are the best 5’2 drunk philosophers you’ll ever find. They cite TikTok deep fakes in NATO policy debates, compared inflation to Minecraft villager trades, and aren’t afraid to steal chili crisps from the place that we rent.
On Thursdays, we held post-tournament meltdowns in Chick-fil-A booths, arguing whether pineapple on pizza was cultural imperialism and if Roblox could replace therapy (yes to both, according to them).
For three hours a day, I didn’t think about KPIs. But as I increasingly found fulfillment in teaching, I continued to feel troubled. I’d long for the 6 PM drive to debate coaching, wishing the hell of the day would end. The amount of 2 AM nights I’ve laid awake, replaying my sister’s voice: “We moved here for you.”
Unfortunately, rent isn’t paid in existential fulfillment.
I wondered if I was wasting something that wasn’t mine to waste. I quit both my job and debate coaching on a Tuesday.
My first free morning, I take a shit without checking my email.
My calendar stays virginal white. No standups. No coaching. For 17 straight days, I don’t even open my laptop—it hibernates in a drawer beneath old debate trophies and worn-out hoodies. The silence is so loud it rings.
With time, I started wandering.
I run through the cracked sidewalks and foggy hills of Pleasanton and Del Prado, shuffling between Daniel Caesar, Beabadoobee, and Chief Keef. I rack up 234 miles in 72 days, training for the Berkeley Half Marathon with my best friends.
I reward myself with a cowboy cookie from Primrose Bakery and a spiced fig latte from Inklings before heading to the library—once a workspace for deadlines and assignments, now a haven for what it was originally meant for.
I get halfway through Man’s Search for Meaning and a quarter through Gödel, Escher, and Bach, standing up between aisles. I eavesdrop on two grad students debating whether AGI will make therapists obsolete.
I spend Saturday mornings at the farmer’s market, listening to Borus, our town’s cop turned truffle smuggler. The best tomatoes, he claims as he entrusts them in my palm, reflect the sins that make ‘em sweet—with scars forged to ripen.
I find a great deal of joy in talking to random people.
At the BART station, I strike up conversations with anyone I deem safe yet enjoyable enough to talk to—a woman knitting socks for her son in prison, an 88yo Paaji who looks no older than 52 coming home from work, teens running 1’s between carts with the aisle seats as hoops.
I finally opened up my Mac again to start wandering online.
I fall into YouTube holes where StatQuest turns gradient descent with marker smudges and dad jokes. 2018 Kelly Wakasa films tomfoolery in his garage, preaching about doing what excites, even if it excites no one else. Between pixelated guitar covers of Kishore Kumar, and Sidemen’s diss tracks, I find a theology of chaos—creation is less polish, more pulse.
I trade Reels for Substack essays at 2 a.m., chasing blogs about techno-optimism, life crises from the 25-year-old female gaze, and an occasional tweaker dissecting why pigeons bob heads.
I fall into the weird, wonderful corners of Gwern.net, Slate Star Codex, and LessWrong, where LSD addicts and mathematicians debate happiness and online black markets with equal fervor.
I code a discounted cash flow (DCF) model from scratch. I realize WACC and FCF hold little meaning to me beyond memorized abbreviations. I wonder if I’ve been faking my learning this whole time.
So I try to build it from first principles, writing functions for cash flows, discount rates, and terminal values. Maybe some other lost kid in Iowa who’s also never touched Bloomberg Terminal will find my repo and think, Oh, this isn’t rocket science.
For the first time in years, life feels like play, not a transaction.
It’s not so bad if you take a second to look around once in a while. In slowing down, I notice things.
How lavender sharpens after rain. How my sister’s laugh snorts when she’s mid-eye-roll. How my dad’s Costco sermons on buying bulk toilet paper are secretly about legacy. Sunsets, I learn, are never duplicates.
Slowing down becomes rebellion. I take better care of my body. I read articles all the way through. I ponder questions no consulting or SWE job will ever let me answer: How will life look like in a post-AGI world? How do you design a bus system for kids in rural India? Why do we romanticize suffering as a prerequisite for greatness?
I realize I’ve spent the last 2 months wandering while my friends are building a future for themselves—interning, publishing papers, adulting.
But the compulsion to prove myself through resumes begins to wane. I build the website you’re reading this on—whether it finds a home on Substack or not—as a ledger of my wandering. The one-off DCF streamlits turn into explorations of cap tables and bond yields, reverse-engineered through ChatGPT prompts and SEC filings instead of a $499 Wall Street Prep subscription.
For once, I’m not shotgun-applying to internships or jobs. It feels like balancing on a suspension bridge—one foot anchored in playing the game, the other dangling freely in the joy of learning new things. Except balance implies stillness.
This feels kinetic—something taut between what society labels “building a future” and what I keep reaching for: doing things for the thrill of it, reading words beyond those assigned as class reading, or designing websites—not for a University recruiter—but because I want to do it for myself.
I pick up the guitar as I do my friend’s FaceTimes, who clown me for strumming the top two strings for D7. I screenshot their chord diagrams and learn why A minor sounds sad.
There’s no grand revelation this month, no virality or venture funding. But creating things like shitty open-source repos, or figuring out the chords for Sienna by the Marias feels so fulfilling.
I defer Berkeley again. I save up 5 months' worth of rent for a place in Southside and draft a schedule of an official unofficial Cal student: a graduate seminar on AI ethics, a design thinking workshop clash-scheduled against CS189, and all the courses I’d circled in the catalog but couldn’t justify amid degree requirements. I don’t have the bands to pay $30,000 a semester for a tenured dinosaur to read off a PowerPoint anyway.
I miss the friction of existing near people. I miss my friend Jaden dragging me to the Savers in Oakland to find vintage T-shirts, followed by devouring the Sando from HotBoys or my roommate Shiama conjuring ADHD-induced concepts that are four derivatives down. I miss late-night talks with Prakrat about how we’ll be chachus to our kids, both half-dead but giddy at the thought of making it in life. I miss Aryan, Anej, Sebastian, John, June, Ganesh, Nidhi, MJ, Krisha, Sahil, Suhani, Shishira, Isha, Anishka, and everyone else.
The journey isn’t in leaving them. It’s in staying—in the libraries, the dining halls, the dorm courtyards where we play cricket with a tinfoil ball and untouched textbooks for wickets. Staying for the nonmonetizable parts: talking with Billy the X Man on Sproul, letting Pranav teach me how to cuss in Telugu as we wait for 51B, or sneaking into Haas mixers to steal Fiji Water even though it’s no different than tap.
These things don’t scale. They don’t go on LinkedIn. But they’re what make life worth it.
I used to think life was a series of checkboxes—major declared by 20, IPO by 30, retired philanthropist by 40. Berkeley’s still out there, churning out future VPs of Synergy or other big fancy roles. When I took the gap, I thought I’d lost it all.
But this gap has been far from a dead end—it’s where I’ve finally learned to breathe.
The rebellion isn’t in taking a gap semester or not. It's finally letting myself wander – through department buildings, Spotify algorithms, and GitHub repos of strangers who also think finance should be less soul-crushing.
My friends joke that I’m adulting sideways. Maybe they’re right. But I’ve stopped seeing this as falling behind. Instead, it feels like composting—collecting mis-strummed chords, buggy code, and internet rabbit holes to feed myself for whatever comes next. After all, not every season demands harvest. Some exist to till the soil.
Tonight, my housemates Trudy, Arnav, and I are making burrito bowls. “Jesus,” they say, flicking a Cheeto at my screen, “get off your fucking laptop and help us.” I’m eager to finish this essay, unfinished and imperfect, and join them. I’m chopping the ugliest tomato I can find.
Here’s to the gaps—the fractures where the light gets in.