Riding to my final exam in an ambulance!

We used to joke in college that Chennai had three seasons: hot, hotter, and hottest. It was one of the hottest mornings of the year when I put my girlfriend on the back of my old scooter and rode out to a nearby ATM. Nothing dramatic. A errand. A boy showing off a little, the way boys do.

The road had just been re-laid — fresh tarmac, sharp-edged, the kind that hasn’t been worn smooth yet. The scooter slipped. In the half-second you get, I did the only maths I could: keep her safe, put the bike down on my side. We both lived. But a patch of flesh on my left foot, roughly five inches by three, was torn loose and hanging. I was bleeding a lot. And my final-year Polytechnic exams were exactly one week away.

That is the scene. What I want to talk about is what came after — because the accident itself was over in a second, and the harder part lasted years.

The exam I almost didn’t take

Here is the decision I made, lying there, that still tells me a lot about who I was at sixteen-going-on-twenty: I decided not to tell my parents the full story until the exams were done.

Not because I was brave. Because I was scared. I knew that if my mother and father back home understood how bad it was, they would come and take me back — and I would lose the exams, the year, the small fragile independence I had crossed half the country to build. I had left for Chennai at sixteen precisely to become someone in a place where nobody knew me. Going home injured felt like going home defeated.

So I sat my final-year exams. I got to the exam hall in an ambulance. I could not have done it alone — my girlfriend’s care, the friends who didn’t make it a big shameful thing, carried me there. I wrote my papers with my foot wrapped and elevated, and I passed.

For years I told that story as a triumph. Boy refuses to quit, rides to glory in an ambulance. It took me a long time to notice the other half.

The half I didn’t tell

I did not touch a scooter for a long time after that. Years.

That is what trauma actually does. It is not the wound — the wound heals, the skin grows back. It is the way the event quietly rewires what feels safe. A sound, a smell, a freshly-tarred road, and the body decides on your behalf. You don’t get to vote.

And the scooter accident was not even the deepest of it. There is older material I carried for half my life — as a child I was abused by an adult I’d been left in the care of, someone I was supposed to be able to trust. I’m not going to put the details here; they aren’t the point and you don’t need them. What I’ll say is that the shape of trauma is almost always the same underneath. A loss of safety. A feeling of powerlessness — that you could not control or prevent what happened to you. And then the part that does the real long-term damage: the shame. The quiet, wrong belief that somehow it was your fault, that you should hide it, that you’d be judged if it were known.

I carried that shame for decades. I tried to think my way out of it on my own and wasted a lot of good years doing it. So let me say the thing I wish someone had said plainly to me: if you’re carrying something like this, a trained professional is not a last resort or a sign you’ve failed — it’s the shortest road, and there’s no shame in taking it. I learned that one the slow way.

Change is inevitable. Suffering is optional. But “optional” doesn’t mean you switch it off by willpower — it means you can build a way out, one small action at a time.

Why “just be strong” is bad advice

Here’s where the thing I write about all the time — moving from effort to effortless — turned out to apply to something far heavier than habits.

The standard advice after a fall is: be strong, get back on the horse, don’t let it beat you. And it sounds noble. But think about what it’s actually asking. It’s asking you to override, by sheer force of will, a nervous system that has learned, correctly, that the horse hurt you. You can do that for a day. Maybe a week. Nobody does it forever. The moment you’re tired or stressed, the avoidance wins — because it was always going to. Willpower is you forcing yourself uphill against your own wiring.

I think about this the way I think about Kunal Shah’s Delta-4 idea — that people only switch behaviour permanently when the new way is a big, undeniable improvement over the old one, not when they’re nagged into it. Recovery works the same way. You don’t get back on the scooter by deciding to be braver. You get back on by making the next step so small that it costs almost nothing — and then the one after that.

For me, getting near a scooter again wasn’t a moment of courage. It was a staircase I built low enough to climb. Stand next to one. Sit on it, parked, engine off. Ride down a quiet lane with someone I trusted. Each step asked for a little less nerve than my old story said it should. I wasn’t manufacturing more grit. I was lowering the cost of the next action until my body could say yes.

That is the whole move. Not how do I want it more — but how do I make the next step small enough that wanting it is enough?

What actually got me up

When I finally stopped white-knuckling it, a few things did the real work — and none of them were heroic.

A support system that didn’t flinch. Trauma feeds on isolation and shame. The single biggest lever was having a handful of people who heard the ugly parts and didn’t look away. My girlfriend then, friends who didn’t make it weird, and much later, a professional who knew what they were doing. You do not heal the wound that came from a broken bond by sitting alone with it.

Naming it instead of hiding it. For years I adapted my behaviour to keep the secret — quieter, more guarded, leaving for a city where no one knew me. The energy that takes is enormous, and it’s invisible even to yourself. Saying it out loud, to the right person, is the first action that drains the shame.

Treating recovery as a process, not a switch. I kept waiting to be “over it.” That framing is a trap. A growth mindset here just means: recovery is a slope you walk, not a door you walk through. You’re allowed to be partway. I still notice the old reflexes sometimes — that flicker that says people will take advantage and move on. I just don’t let them drive anymore.

The strange gift is this: the same muscle I built getting back onto a scooter, getting back into an exam hall, getting honest about the older wound — that’s the muscle that held me up years later when I lost my mother after a long illness. The falls don’t make you strong. The deliberate, low-cost, un-heroic practice of getting up does. And once you’ve built it, it doesn’t leave.

If you want the part of this I’ve turned into something you can actually use — the mental models, the small-step frameworks, the templates — they’re over at the resources, and the longer version of my own story sits behind the book and on my page here.

So no — I’m not going to tell you to be strong. I’m going to tell you to make the next step small, find the people who won’t flinch, and get help if the weight is more than one person should carry. You don’t get back up by deciding to be braver. You get back up by lowering the cost of the next move until you can.