When you begin with suspicion, you bury the truth.

"Are you even real?"
"Did you write the truth or is this just well-written fiction?"
"Do you actually live the way you write?"

I get DMs like this often and it offends me. But more than that, it makes me sad. Because it reveals how we’ve been trained. We expect people to perform. So when someone chooses to be raw and honest, we see it with suspicion.

But that suspicion didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a long history of pretending.
Men taught to swallow pain like bitter medicine. Families taught to avoid shame at all costs. Where generations learned that appearances mattered more than truth. Where confessions were considered weaknesses, and vulnerabilities were stitched shut with discipline.

But,

You can’t write like me unless you’ve lived it.
You can’t describe waking up at 3 am wondering if your entire life is a lie unless you’ve done it more times than you want to admit.
You can’t summon the helplessness of being chewed and spit out by people you once trusted. That stinks of memory, not imagination.

Ask yourself:

"Why would I fake my own failures?"
"Why would I romanticise sufferings and rejection?
"Why would I carve essays out of wounds that still bleed?"

There’s no prize for writing about being broken. Especially if you’re a man raised in the Indian middle class, where masculinity was drafted by colonial scripts - silent, obedient, externally ambitious, internally hollow. Where every boy was told not to cry, and every girl was told to hide.

If I wanted applause, I’d write fantasy, not stories of mental health, love, heartbreak, and suicide. I wouldn’t share love letters after being dumped for being too sensitive. I wouldn’t talk about toxic cultures unless they had broken me.

I have lost more than I have built. Because I said too much. Regretted saying too little. Refused to pretend. I carry the dust of every mistake.
Some days I get bitter. Some days I snap.

But that doesn’t make me fragile. That makes me human.

Still, the taunt follows me.

"You’re fragile because you get offended."
"You’re fragile because you react."
"You’re fragile because you refuse to take BS."

But that's not what anti-fragile means.
I never wore anti-fragility like armor. I wore it like skin.
Because anti-fragility is not stillness. It is transformation.
It is letting the fire burn away what is false and walking back into the world with your scars unhidden. That isn’t weakness but a refusal to fake strength.

Every post I write is a letter.
For the boy who has lost hope.
For the man who finds no meaning in life.
For the girl hiding her truth because she’s scared of being called dramatic.
For the stranger who thinks sorry is weakness.
For the version of me who thought pain had no purpose.

So next time you read something honest and your first instinct is doubt, pause.

Maybe what you’re doubting isn’t me.
Maybe you just don’t recognise your truth anymore.
Because you buried it too long ago.