There are moments in life when words fail us. Not because we lack the vocabulary or the ability to articulate, but because the weight of what we carry makes even the simplest sentence feel impossible. For me, that moment came in January 2025, when my brother passed away.

I stopped writing. Not intentionally, not as a conscious decision, but because the part of me that had always found clarity in words suddenly found only silence. The cursor blinked on empty pages. Ideas that once flowed freely now felt trivial, disconnected from the profound shift happening inside me. How could I write about strategy, systems, or solutions or the farmhouse I am building when I was struggling to make sense of the most fundamental questions about life, loss, and meaning?

For months, I told myself I would write “when I was ready.” But grief doesn’t work that way. There is no finish line, no moment when you wake up and feel whole again. Recovery isn’t a destination—it’s a slow, uneven process of learning to carry what you’ve lost while still moving forward and it’s hard, till date I sense him around me every hour, and minute of the day.

I haven’t fully recovered. Not by miles, I’m not sure anyone ever does nor will I. But I’ve realized that waiting for complete healing before returning to the work I love means waiting forever.

So here I am, writing again. Not because I’ve found all the answers nor have forgotten the loss, but because I’ve remembered why I started writing in the first place.

what grief teaches you about clarity

In the immediate aftermath of loss, everything feels both urgent and meaningless. The emails that once seemed important now feel absurd. The phone calls, the Whatsapp messages from friends and ex-colleagues, the meetings, the deadlines, the metrics—they all fade into background noise. What remains is startlingly simple: the people you love, the work and thoughts that gives you purpose, the problems worth solving.

This clarity is brutal. It doesn’t arrive gently or gradually. It arrives all at once, like a spotlight in a dark room, illuminating everything you’ve been pretending not to see. And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.

I’ve spent the past nine months struggling in a dark room trying to understand what it means for me and why I do anything in the first place.

the silence that followed

In the weeks after my brother died, people would ask how I was doing. I would say “fine” or “okay” or “taking it day by day.” These were not lies, exactly, but they weren’t true either. They were the words you say when the real answer is too complicated, too raw, too much for casual conversation.

The real answer was that I didn’t know how I was doing. Some days I felt numb. Some days I felt everything at once. Some days I could think for hours and forget, briefly, that anything had changed. Other days I couldn’t focus for more than a few minutes before the weight of it all came crashing back.

What I couldn’t do was think, what I couldn’t do was write.

Writing, for me, has always been how I think. It slows me down. I don’t write to communicate ideas I already have—I write to discover what I think in the first place. The act of putting words on a paper forces clarity by slowing your thinking. It exposes gaps in thinking, logic, reveals assumptions I didn’t know I was making, and transforms vague intuitions into concrete arguments. It also helps remove emotions.

But after my brother died, this process broke down. I would sit down to write and find nothing. Not writer’s block in the traditional sense—I had plenty of thoughts and idea — but a deeper paralysis. Every time I tried to articulate something, it felt hollow. The words were there, but the meaning behind them wasn’t. Nothing made sense.

I realize now that this wasn’t about writing. It was about purpose. Writing requires you to believe that what you’re saying matters, that the work of thinking clearly and communicating precisely is worth the effort. And in those early months, I didn’t believe that. I couldn’t see the point.

the weight of triviality

One of the strange things about grief is how it makes everything else feel trivial.

Before my brother died, I cared deeply about my work. I spent hours thinking about problems. It felt important. During his year long fight and after he died, it all felt absurd. Who cares about anything when people are dying? Who cares about any of the stuff happening around you?

This feeling—that everything except grief is trivial—is common. Psychologists call it “existential crisis,” though that term feels too clinical for what it actually is: a complete recalibration of what matters.

But here’s what I’ve learned: the feeling that everything is trivial is itself a kind of distortion. It’s grief’s way of protecting you, of narrowing your focus to only what’s essential. And for a time, that narrowing is necessary. You can’t process profound loss while also worrying about customers, targets or product roadmaps.

But if you stay in that narrowed state too long, you lose yourself. Because the truth is that work—meaningful work, work that solves real problems for real people—is not trivial. It’s one of the ways we make sense of the world. It’s one of the ways we create meaning.

My brother understood this. He worked in technology, building systems that helped people do their jobs better. He didn’t think of it as trivial. He thought of it as craft—the work of understanding a problem deeply enough to build something elegant that solves it.

And he was right. The work isn’t trivial. What’s trivial is the noise around the work: the politics, the bureaucracy, the posturing, the metrics that measure activity instead of impact. Grief strips that away. What remains is the question: are you solving problems that matter?

the quite comeback

I didn’t choose to write again — it just crept back in. Slowly, almost invisibily.

It began with notes. Not essays. Fragments. Things I noticed while reading, questions I couldn’t answer, odd connections between ideas. They weren’t for anyone else; they were a way to think out loud.

Over time, those fragments started to click. A note on customer feedback systems bumped into one about organizational dysfunction. A question about why companies ignore data linked up with a bigger one about making decisions in the fog of uncertainty.

I wasn’t trying to write. I was just trying to think. But thinking, for me, has always required writing. And so, without quite meaning to, I found myself writing again.

The first drafts were awful—stiff, self-conscious, trying to sound like an old version of me. Eventually I stopped chasing a voice and just said what I actually thought. Less pretense, more honesty.

what comes next

I don’t know what comes next. I don’t have a plan or a roadmap or a clear vision of where this is going. I’m writing again because I need to make sense of some of the questions I have on my mind. And because I think the answers matter.

I’m not fully healed. I’m not sure I ever will be. But I’m here, ain’t I, and I’m writing, and that feels like enough for me now.