Because youth is generous with illusions, he slowly began to mistake the applause after achievements for the sound of his own worth. Achievement became the name he answered to. Potential became a promise he believed could never be broken. For a while, the arrangement felt as comfortable as slipping into a favourite jacket. Until life, in its peculiar sense of humor, introduced him to love.

Love, he discovered, was unlike examinations. There were no marking schemes or model answers hidden at the back of the book. It was the only subject he had encountered in which trembling honesty and sleepless devotion could still end in silence. So when cracks began to appear, he responded the only way he knew. He believed harder. When trust became difficult, he sent long messages way past midnight and waited with his phone glowing in his hand. When honesty became scarce, he replayed old promises spoken over drinks and convinced himself they still meant something. When certainty disappeared, he stayed loyal, even when the ache in his chest warned him otherwise. For months he sat, staring at unanswered texts and unfinished conversations, convincing himself that if he loved deeply enough and waited faithfully enough, someone on the other side would eventually explain everything. What came was the lesson that this was his canon event.

People still laughed around him. I mean, he was always funny. It brought him some joy that even when he had none, he was the reason others had some.  Deadlines still flashed across calendars. The world, insensitive as ever, refused to pause. Yet beneath the machinery of ordinary life, something had quietly broken. He began to lose things. Not physical things. More elusive things. The certainty that once made his voice steady. The ability to read the same paragraph without forgetting it. The excitement he used to feel when imagining the future. The effortless excellence that had once followed him around like a loyal pet. Even warmth seemed to abandon him. There were mornings when he curled beneath heavy blankets listening to the muffled sounds of traffic outside because blankets asked fewer questions than people. He became an expert in disappearing without actually leaving.

Then came disappointment, that old travelling companion of adulthood. An opportunity he had cherished slipped away with a polite email and a sentence that began with “After careful evaluation…” followed by “…unfortunately….”

But grief is cumulative. Heartbreak introduces itself to regret. And before long, a man discovers he is no longer carrying burdens. The burdens are carrying him. He stops showing up. Not because he lacked responsibility or ambition, but because somewhere along the journey, his mind had quietly negotiated a ceasefire with effort. “Tomorrow,” it promised. Tomorrow we will get back up. Tomorrow became next week. Next week became a month. And all the while, he perfected the ancient human art of pretending. He smiled. He nodded. He reassured, even when he wished he heard the same words said to him. He lied. A lot. In the clumsy manner of wounded people who swallow their tears in bathroom mirrors and say “I’m fine” before anyone can worry.

Yet secrets possess an inconvenient habit of expiring. Eventually, reality arrived. Not dramatically. Reality rarely bothers with theatrics. It simply sat beside him one afternoon, sunlight warming the edge of the bed, and said, with terrifying gentleness, “You are not well.” Suddenly, all the disguises became too heavy to wear.

The strange part was that he had spent so much time investigating everyone else’s actions that he had forgotten to ask himself a simpler question. “How are you?” Not what happened. Not who was right. Just a simple “How are you?” The answer, when it finally arrived, was neither elegant nor inspiring.

He was tired.

Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. He was soul-tired. The sort that made the alarm clock sound like an argument and turned the simple act of placing his feet on the cold floor each morning into a negotiation rather than a routine. Until one day, he caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror, bags under his eyes that had since become a part of him, and wondered where exactly the old version had gone.

But perhaps he had been asking the wrong question. Perhaps people are not meant to remain unchanged. Perhaps the confident boy who conquered examinations was never meant to survive life untouched. Perhaps broken hearts are not evidence of failure, but tuition fees paid to experience life, even the unfair version. And perhaps healing begins not with grand transformations, but with small acts of mercy toward oneself.

So he stopped searching for the person he used to be. Instead, he chose the person who still remained. He chose honesty. He chose help. He chose breakfast, even when all he managed was a cup of tea. He chose to answer messages instead of letting them gather dust. He chose to disappoint perfection. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, warmth returned. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But enough to notice the smell of coffee again, enough to laugh without forcing it, enough to feel sunlight on his face and remember that being alive could still be gentle.

Enough to remind him that he is just a boy.

Somewhere along the way, ambition taught me a dangerous accounting trick. When there was not enough time today, I borrowed from tomorrow. When sleep threatened productivity, I negotiated it downward. When rest seemed indulgent, I deferred it indefinitely. Tomorrow would cover the cost. Tomorrow would hold the energy. Tomorrow would bring clarity. Tomorrow would be generous. At least so I thought. So I kept signing invisible promissory notes. One more late night studying. One more project accepted when the calendar was already crowded. One more emotional conversation when the mind was already frayed. And tomorrow, patient, silent tomorrow, kept extending the credit. But credit, as every debtor learns eventually, is not forgiveness. It is postponement.

Burnout does not collapse suddenly. It is built slowly, like scaffolding erected around a building that never quite finishes construction. School contributes its steel beam, with deadlines stacked upon deadlines, lectures that blur into readings that blur into exams. The mind becomes a warehouse of obligations. Ambition pours the concrete. I began to imagine a future version of myself: accomplished, respected, composed. “All-rounded” as it is famously termed. The vision was intoxicating. It whispered that if I pushed just a little harder now, the future will arrive sooner. So I pushed. But ambition is a strange companion. It claps when you succeed and frowns when you pause. It does not understand the difference between discipline and depletion. Then life installs the wiring. Work that needs to be done. Friends who need listening ears. Family expectations. Life in general. Moments of joy that deserve celebration but arrive at inconvenient hours, so much so that achievements now are a sigh that the pressure is off.

Methinks the most difficult exhaustion to explain is the kind that does not come from work, but from proximity. Not from enemies. Not from strangers. From closeness. Friends. Colleagues. Family. Lovers. You name it. There are conversations that feel like pouring water into a cracked glass. The effort is sincere, the intention generous, but somehow the vessel never fills. You give reassurance. You offer patience. However, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the energy reserve dips lower. The strange thing about emotional exhaustion is that it disguises itself as responsibility. You tell yourself that showing up is what good people do. That loyalty requires endurance. So you keep showing up. You stay longer in conversations that drain you. You carry burdens that were never entirely yours. You patch cracks that reopen by morning. It is not dramatic. It is gradual. It’s like a phone battery losing one percent every minute until suddenly it is blinking red.

One morning, you wake up and something feels different. The alarm rings, but motivation does not answer. The coffee is hot, but the mind remains foggy. The to-do list is full, but the will to attack it has quietly stepped outside. Burnout has a particular texture. It is not panic; panic is loud. Burnout is quiet. It is the feeling of standing at the starting line with legs that refuse to move. You stare at textbooks and they stare back. Words blur. Sentences dissolve before they reach comprehension. Ambition, once a roaring engine, sputters like a car that has run too long without oil. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a realization forms. This is not laziness. This is interest on the loan borrowed from tomorrow.

The truth about borrowing from the future is that the future always collects. Every late night eventually arrives disguised as fatigue. Every emotional overextension returns as quiet resentment. Every ignored boundary becomes a small fracture in your capacity to give. The ledger balances eventually. When it did for me, I found myself sitting at my study desk in my room, walking across campus, staring blankly out of a window on an ordinary afternoon, thinking of a sentence that feels both poetic and painfully literal:

I have borrowed so much from tomorrow that I am paying for it today.

The cost has appeared (and still is) in strange places. In the reluctance to open another book. In the hesitation before answering another message. In the realization that my dreams, once bright constellations, now feel like distant stars I am too tired to chase tonight.

But debt, even the invisible kind, has a peculiar property. It can be renegotiated. Not by sprinting harder. Not by pretending exhaustion is weakness. But by admitting that ambition without rest is simply extraction. By recognizing that some conversations can wait. Some expectations can be declined. Some futures can arrive a little slower. Because tomorrow was never meant to be a lender. Tomorrow is meant to be a place I arrive at with enough energy to live in it, not a vault I keep breaking into.

These days, I am learning a different form of accounting. Less borrowing. More breathing. Less racing to tomorrow. More surviving today. Because the strange truth about ambition is that it promises a life worth living, but sometimes forgets to leave you enough life to live it. I am beginning to suspect that the real victory is not reaching tomorrow faster, but it is arriving there with something left in the tank. I hope I am right.

Then life interrupted my certainty.

It forced pauses I did not plan for. Silences where answers used to be. Moments where the ground beneath me shifted, and forward motion no longer made sense. I mistook those moments for regression. I called them setbacks. I wore disappointment like a verdict against myself.

But something quieter was happening.

I found my rhythm when I realised that a step backwards is part of the dance.

That realisation arrived slowly, almost reluctantly. It taught me that rhythm is not about constant advance, but about alignment. About knowing when to lean in and when to lean away. About understanding that even dancers step back, not to abandon the performance, but to stay in time with the music.

A step backwards is not an erasure of effort. It is a recalibration. It is the body listening again. It is the mind asking questions it previously ignored. In stepping back, I began to see what my urgency had blurred: the patterns, the missteps, the exhaustion masked as ambition. Distance gave me clarity. Stillness gave me honesty.

There is a violence in forcing forward motion when the soul is asking for space. We live in a world that worships acceleration and punishes pause. A world that confuses motion with meaning. But growth that does not breathe eventually breaks. Progress that does not reflect eventually collapses under its own weight.

Stepping back taught me restraint. It taught me humility. It reminded me that life is not a race to be won but a rhythm to be respected. That sometimes the most courageous thing you can do is stop pretending you are fine and listen to what the moment requires of you.

In the dance of becoming, backward steps are not detours - they are part of the choreography. They create tension, depth, and contrast. Without them, the dance is flat, mechanical, lifeless. With them, it becomes expressive, intentional, human.

Now, when I move forward, it is no longer out of fear of falling behind. It is with purpose. With awareness. With grace. I move knowing that if the music changes, I am allowed to adjust. Allowed to pause. Allowed to step back.

Because rhythm is not lost when you retreat.

It is often found there.

A palindrome is a word that reads the same forward and backwards. For example, Madam, Level, Ekitike…etc.

You know what I love about endings? They always mark beginnings. It’s like a palindrome. It shall spell the same way from whatever angle you read it from, as every end heralds a beginning, and every beginning is a harbinger of an end.

This year was a palindrome. This is the one where I began something, many things. This is the one where these things also ended in same measure. The one where I lost myself, which primed the circumstance to enable me find myself again. The one where I stopped trying, and got reminded why I should start devoting myself again. The one where I chose wrong, and was shown the significance of good. Sadly, the one where I almost took my own life, and subsequently saw life flash before my eyes in the midst of it. Funny right? Wrong. It wasn’t at that time. The last part at least.

Anyway,

Be that as it may, I appreciate it all. I won’t be modest and say that everything that happened to me needed to happen to me. I didn’t deserve half of what I went through this year. It’s all fun and games until you discover that rock bottom has a basement, and that you have been chilling there for a while. They say when you stare into the abyss it stares back at you, and I say be careful that it doesn’t become you, for it is nothing but abysmal. All in all, I still appreciate it. How do I appreciate pain, you ask? Because just as too far east is west, too far pain is then pleasure. It’s a palindrome, I just need to read it backwards. That’s why the opposite of palindrome is emordnilap. A word that forms a different valid word when spelled backwards, for instance, “stressed” is “desserts.” Maybe that’s why DESSERTS relive those who are STRESSED and EVIL shall LIVE longer. Maybe.

Life can take any meaning, depending on whether it is a palindrome or an emordnilap for you. When you look at it backwards it gives you the benefit of hindsight and a new perspective, and that is why “palindrome” is an emordnilap in itself. That which still appears the same if you haven’t moved perspectives can change the meaning of life, and with this new perspective, you can make it whatever you want it to be.

So, go forth next year, understand and experience life but live it backwards. Always remember: doubt kills trust, overthinking kills joy, ego kills development. Now read it backwards.