Life Didn’t Go According to Plan — And That’s Okay
It was back in 2020.
I had been working at a service-based MNC for around 12 months, earning somewhere close to ₹36k a month. In March, my girlfriend of 3 years broke up with me because, in simple terms, I wasn’t “successful enough” for the life she wanted.
And honestly? I never hated her for it.
People want security, comfort, ambition, a certain lifestyle. Everyone has their own standards for happiness. At that point in life, I just wasn’t matching hers.
COVID had just started, so I was back home with my parents and younger brother in our small town. I was overweight, emotionally shattered, had almost no social life, and literally zero close friends around me. For days, my routine was basically: work, stare outside the window like a retired neighborhood cat, sleep, repeat.
March was dark.
But sometime in April, something hit me.
I realized I was slowly wasting my present while mourning a future that never happened. My parents looked up to me. My younger brother looked up to me. I couldn’t let my life end emotionally at 23 because one chapter closed badly.
So I started changing things.
First came the gym.
And trust me, the gym and I had a toxic relationship initially. Vomiting after workouts, feeling dizzy, almost fainting — all very common. My body was basically filing HR complaints against me daily. But I stayed consistent.
Then I started preparing for CAT.
Math had always been my comfort zone. I came from a CSE background and QA/DILR felt natural to me. VARC, however, was pure horror. My mock scores in VARC were so bad that even the percentile probably needed emotional support.
I didn’t have money for expensive coaching institutes, so I studied through Unacademy, YouTube, Telegram materials, leaked PDFs — basically the “startup founder” version of CAT prep.
And then life became mechanical.
Wake up.
Practice.
Job.
Practice during job.
Gym.
Practice again.
Sleep.
Repeat.
Slowly, DILR improved. VARC also started crawling upward like an underdog anime character. But the last 3 months before CAT were brutal.
Mentally, I was locked in. Physically, I was falling apart.
I had lost a lot of weight, was on an extremely strict diet, and sometimes would nearly faint during workouts. But somewhere inside me, a voice kept saying:
“You’ve suffered too much to quit now.”
Finally, D-Day arrived.
The exam went brilliantly.
VARC was decent. QA and DILR felt amazing. Around the same time, I had also appeared for PGDBA and scored really well there too.
Then came the results.
99.7 percentile in CAT.
A very high PGDBA score.
Calls from the old IIMs.
For one moment, life felt cinematic.
And then came the interviews.
Absolute disaster.
To this day, I don’t fully know what happened. I knew the answers. They were in my head. But the words just wouldn’t come out. Maybe it was anxiety. Maybe lack of confidence. Maybe years of self-doubt finally collecting interest.
Every single interview felt like a nightmare.
Result day came.
Waitlisted in two. Rejected in the others.
I broke again.
And just when I thought the story had reached rock bottom, life brought a shovel.
I had converted PGDBA and paid the ₹1.5 lakh seat booking amount. I resigned from my company because I had to report at within a month.
The problem?
My notice period was 3 months.
I called everyone I knew in the company, begging for an early release. Managers, seniors, HRs — anyone. At one point, people just stopped answering my calls.
I still remember literally pleading on calls:
“Please… please help me…”
But nothing happened.
That phase changed me permanently.
The stress got so bad that I ended up hospitalized. For 3 days, I couldn’t eat or properly speak. And when I finally came back home, I realized it was over.
I asked for a refund from for the PGDBA admission.
They refunded it within 2 days.
And after that, I went emotionally numb for months.
I appeared for CAT and PGDBA again the next year. But this time, the trauma had settled deep inside me. The moment I sat in front of interview panels, my mind froze. I simply couldn’t speak.
Not because I lacked knowledge.
But because somewhere inside, I had stopped believing I deserved to be there.
Fast forward 5 years.
Life is good now.
I never appeared for those exams again. Instead, I kept grinding through work, learning, failures, career switches, pressure, uncertainty — all of it.
And slowly, life worked out in its own strange way.
Today, I earn decent money. I’m healthier. Mentally stronger. More at peace.
So to everyone feeling broken because of exam results, interview failures, or life not going according to plan:
Please understand this — failure is not final.
You cannot always negotiate when success comes into your life.
But you can negotiate the path you take to reach it.
Keep going.
Your story is not over yet. 😊