Epiphanies in Motion

I was never a natural at maths or spatial awareness stuff. Parent evenings in STEM were always a flop. Design & Technology, writing and drama were where I shone — “exceptional,” but nobody cared about those subjects then. Somehow life steered me into an engineering school because Newstead-Wood was the known route. I didn’t care; I wanted to please my parents and was petrified of doing otherwise.

I failed a lot. Then I got that one glistening A* in the seven-GCSE Engineering Diploma that shot me off to the quirky capital of the UK to study Civil Engineering. Not because I loved it — I wanted to escape, to hide, to start again. I rode through university on last-minute adrenaline and pressure-induced cramming until second year hit me like a truck: Structural Stress Analysis and Soil Mechanics. I failed both. They made me repeat the whole year for two core modules. Ashamed in front of my family. Worse, ashamed in front of myself.

I cried — not for hours, but for years to come. The academic failure was only the start. Family ties frayed; people I thought were friends showed their true colours; relatives were for convenience, not loyalty. A world that silences fearless truth-tellers. My wings were cut.

Little did I know that repeating that year was exactly what needed to happen. That low—structural dynamics and geotechnical engineering—would become the language of my comeback. I went on to do an MSc in Earthquake & Structural Engineering. My thesis: design a solution to protect the ~4,600-year-old Pyramid of Djoser from earthquakes. And then Covid happened. Lab work — the kind of hands-on doing that my ADHD brain thrives on — evaporated. Instead I had to code a 1992 Cairo earthquake in MATLAB, reproduce the exact Power Spectral Density Function and Ground Motion graph of that unpredictably rare goddamn 1992 Cairo Earthquake, that by every logic should have been impossible to re-create on a freaking software.

A whole year. I couldn’t crack it. Nearly lost my TfL acceptance and the MSc that became the source of my resurrection. My mind felt like a prison I’d willingly stayed inside because obsessing over those impossible codes was somehow less terrifying than sitting with the slow, hot ash of nothingness inside me.

My brothers dragged me out — to Scotland, to climb. Huffing, complaining, Chandramukhi breaths and all. At the summit of Ben’aan (the beginning of the many mountain climbs that followed) something finally shifted.

I came home and in five minutes, cracked the code that had defeated me for so long. My design — a vibrating-barrier system buried beneath the soil, positioned to choreograph structural-soil-structure interaction — produced perfectly orchestrated Von Mises stress distributions and peak acceleration responses. My prototype doesn’t exist yet in real life, but the model fcking worked. I cried like a baby that’d been confined to deep agony – finally out of its cage. Relief. My broken mind had performed a miracle. My broken mind had become my weapon.

That moment re-kindled a hope I thought had gone. Life had taken a lot, but it gave back in tenfolds —

My rock bottoms were never the end; they were the scaffolding of my comeback.