Photo credit: Rick Bern
When I was 23 years old, I dropped out of law school. With no sense of what to do and nowhere else to go, I returned home. Like many suburban South Asians, my professional imagination was not particularly vast; I knew I didn’t want to do medicine or engineering, but the only other career that seemed possible, acceptable, and sufficiently lucrative had been law.
I began to feel the walls of the world close in around me. I became convinced that I would die jobless, unloved, and unaccomplished. I began to grow ever more listless, frustrated, and anxious, but I had no language through which to understand what was happening to me. One day, driving back from a weekend I spent visiting friends in New York City, I spied a series of concrete pillars holding up a highway overpass.
I envisaged weaponizing my parents’ BMW X5 and killing myself. Worse, the thought of so doing filled me with a perverse relief...