Learning Collapse, Learning Clarity

At twenty-nine, I moved to Los Angeles with a chip on my shoulder and an offer letter that felt too good to be real.

What followed was six years of projection, collapse, depression, and slow rebuilding—a stretch of life where therapy, failure, and letting go of old scripts about success and masculinity reshaped me.

Fifteen years later, I can see that what looked like setbacks were actually scaffolding, and that the climb was less about arriving than about learning how to live with honesty.

I was twenty-nine in 2010, when I moved from Virginia to LA for a job at AT&T Interactive. The offer letter said $110,000. For a Pakistani American kid with a résumé full of half-starts, academic failures, and a long line of people ready to underestimate me, that number felt absurd. It was proof, at least on paper, that I’d made it. But even as I signed the paperwork, I carried a private unease: the sense that I’d talked my way into something I wasn’t fully prepared for. I worried people saw me as a smooth talker more than anything else, and sometimes I suspected they were right.

That chip on my shoulder about “starting late” made it worse. Twenty-nine felt old for a first big role. Friends and peers had already stacked titles while I was still trying to catch up, still patching together credibility. That sense of delay haunted me—it fed the need to overexplain, to prove, to hustle harder than anyone else just to feel level.

What I didn’t yet understand was that the very skills I was embarrassed by—reading a room, persuading, connecting—would later become strengths. It took years of therapy to stop treating them as evidence of fraudulence and start recognizing them as part of my makeup. They weren’t a replacement for competence; they were part of how I built it.

Back then, though, I didn’t have that perspective. I was in survival mode. ADHD was part of it—I’d been diagnosed, but I hadn’t yet built the scaffolding to manage it. Hyperfocus, disorganization, cycles of intensity and burnout—they all ran unchecked. I thought success meant pushing harder until the cracks held.

And then the cracks didn’t hold. I left AT&T for a startup that promised upside, and it folded. I spent the next year and a half unemployed, my first real encounter with depression as a daily state instead of a passing mood. LA is not a forgiving city when you’re idle; it thrives on forward projection. Everyone else seems to be pitching or building or meeting, while you disappear into the background. I felt hollowed out.

Those years were messy. Therapy was still new. My awareness of ADHD was shallow. And the instability in my life showed up everywhere—not just in work or relationships, but in how I thought about tradition, faith, and obligation. Slowly, I was beginning to see that much of the model of manhood I’d inherited from a South Asian, patriarchal culture—where vulnerability was weakness and false bravado was the norm—wasn’t serving me. I thought being a man meant absorbing pain in silence, never admitting doubt, never showing need. But in practice, it left me brittle, easy to fracture.

Collapse forced me to cut loose from some of those inherited scripts. It made me re-examine masculinity not as posturing but as resilience, as honesty, as the ability to name my own struggles out loud. The more I leaned into therapy, the more I saw that the version of manhood I’d absorbed wasn’t strength at all—it was armor that kept me from real connection. Letting go of that wasn’t easy, but it was the only way to rebuild.

Sticking with therapy for fifteen years now has been one of the best choices I’ve ever made. It gave me language, tools, perspective. It let me grow into someone who isn’t ashamed of wiring or delay, someone who can see ADHD not as a defect but as part of the design.

Fifteen years later, the contrast is sharp. I’m in work that aligns with what I care about, with a partner who steadies me, in a life that feels built rather than performed. I’m more financially secure than I ever could have imagined when I arrived in LA still convinced I was behind. But what feels more important than that is how grounded I am in owning my faults and inadequacies.

Somewhere along the way, in trying to be real, I became the guy who talks about the things people usually avoid—mental health, personal accountability, our own culpability in our struggles. That honesty has given me clarity and steadiness, but it’s also created a kind of distance. Not everyone wants to live at that level of rawness, even the people closest to me. And that’s its own kind of loneliness.

Still, I’d take that trade. Because the throughline of my climb isn’t about polish or projection—it’s about stripping things down until what’s left is real. That’s what Steve Martin meant with the mantra I’ve carried for years: be so good they can’t ignore you. For me, it wasn’t about being flawless. It was about being honest in a way that can’t be dismissed. That, more than the money, more than the titles, is what’s made the climb worth it.