I Ruined My Own Life, Slowly — My Eyes, My Cricket, and a Girl Named Raya Who Doesn't Even Know What She Meant to Me
This is not a motivational post. I am not going to end with some lesson about resilience. I am just going to tell you what actually happened to me — because I kept quiet about it for too long, and the silence cost me more than the truth ever could.
My Name is Avijit. And I Have Spent Most of My Life Getting in My Own Way.
I have a B.Tech in Computer Science. I am from Bengal. I am in my twenties. And if you look at my life from the outside, it probably looks like the story of someone who just needs to try harder.
But that is not the real story. The real story is about a pair of eyes that were left to get worse for a decade. It is about a cricket pitch I never got to find out if I belonged on. And it is about a girl — Raya — who does not even know that she is the person I measure every day against. That she is the clearest proof I have that I am capable of feeling something real, even when everything else in me was broken.
"I am not writing this because I have figured it out. I am writing this because I am still inside it and I refuse to be quiet anymore."
A chronological account of my own life — my vision, my education, my mental health, my love life — was mapped out and assessed. The hardship score came out at 92 out of 100. Five major life domains. Twenty-plus years. One person quietly falling apart across all of them at the same time.
This is that story.
My Eyes Were Broken From the Start — And Nobody Fixed Them in Time
From Class 1 to Class 10, I had problems with my eyes. Not complicated problems. The kind a doctor could have caught early, prescribed glasses for, and monitored regularly. Simple. Manageable. If it had been handled.
It was not handled.
There were consultations. There was advice. And then there was nothing — no follow-through, no glasses worn consistently, no specialist visits that led anywhere real. Year after year my eyesight got worse. I sat in classrooms squinting at the board. I studied with headaches pressing behind my eyes like something trying to get out. I sat my Class 10 and Class 12 board exams in genuine eye pain. Whatever marks I got in those years belong to someone fighting an untreated condition — not to someone who could not think.
I used to think the headaches were normal. Like maybe everyone studied with pain behind their eyes and just didn't say anything. It took years to understand that they were not normal. That I had been functioning on hard mode the entire time.
The Drop That Broke Everything — June 2020
By 2020 I had already lost confidence in doctors. I was in a bad place with my skin, isolated, and convinced that if I waited for proper medical help it would either never come or arrive too late. So I made a decision I cannot undo: I self-medicated my eyes with an Ayurvedic eye drop. No prescription. No supervision. Just desperation.
I developed eye floaters. Dark shapes — threads, specks, drifting blobs — that move across your vision every time you look at anything bright. A white wall. An open sky. A cricket ground in afternoon sun. A phone screen at night. They are always there. They are still there right now as I write this.
"I look at a bright sky and I see the exact moment I stopped trusting anyone to help me. It floats there in the corner of everything."
From 2020 to 2023 I told almost no one. The floaters made screen time painful, studying harder, and being outdoors something I avoided. I stayed inside. I let three years pass while the problem sat unaddressed — not because there was no solution to look for, but because I had given up believing that looking was something I was allowed to do.
Assessed across vision, mental health, education, career, and relationships. 20+ years of cumulative damage. Not one event. A chain.
Eye problems present, left untreated
Pain, strain, worsening vision. Advice given. Not followed up. Years lost to a treatable condition.
Decisive exams sat in active eye pain
Marks in the years that shape your future — taken with broken eyes and throbbing headaches.
Self-medicated. Floaters began.
One desperate decision. A permanent consequence. The floaters have never left.
Three years of hiding it
Study lost. Career preparation lost. Time — the one thing you cannot earn back — burned.
Still there. Still affecting everything.
Every bright surface. Every screen. Every cricket match under open sky. Always there.
The Acne Nobody Treated — And How It Quietly Dismantled Me
From 2016 onward, my skin got bad. Acne that does not just sit on your face but takes over your relationship with mirrors, with people, with the idea of being seen. And like the eyes — it went unsupported. No early dermatologist. No proper treatment. Just a rotating cast of face washes, creams, and home remedies that did not work, used by someone who had already started believing the problem was permanent.
I withdrew. I stopped wanting to be in social spaces. I stopped meeting people. I started flinching away from photographs, from gatherings, from anything that required other people to look at me. The confidence I should have had at that age simply collapsed — quietly and completely, over a long enough stretch of time that I almost did not notice it was gone until it had been gone for years.
Nobody tells you that untreated acne does not just scar your skin. It scars the way you move through rooms. The way you calculate whether somewhere is worth going. The way you assume people are looking at the wrong thing every time they look at you.
The acne is directly connected to the eyes. The low confidence from 2016 onward is exactly what made me stop trusting doctors — which led me to self-medicate in 2020. One unaddressed problem created the conditions for a worse one. That is the pattern of my life.
The Game I Loved — and the Ceiling I Never Got to Find
I loved cricket the way you only love something when it feels like the truest version of you. Not a hobby. A language. The way the ball feels when you get the angle right. The way a pitch changes character across an afternoon. Cricket was the one place where the rest of it fell away for a few hours and I was just someone playing.
I never got to find out how good I could have been. That is the most honest way I know to say it. Not: I tried and failed. Not: I peaked and fell short. I just never got the conditions to find out. Eyes that could not handle bright afternoon sun. A mental state since Class 9 that had been fraying under everything else. No peer network, no coach who knew my name, no one who had seen enough of me to say: keep going.
"The worst kind of loss is the one that never got an honest chance. You don't even get the dignity of knowing what you were capable of."
Cricket is in a locked room in my head. I walk past it every day. Some days I still look in through the gap under the door. I do not know what to do with a dream that was not defeated so much as quietly prevented from ever starting.
Three Colleges. Three Exits. Zero of Them Were Simple.
I started later than my peers — a late school admission, a small thing that planted the first seed of feeling permanently out of step. Then from Class 5 to 10, I had no tuition while every classmate was in batches, building study habits and friendships and the kind of academic momentum that carries you into exams. My father taught me at home. He meant well. But I was overloaded, undersupported, and increasingly behind in ways nobody was naming out loud.
In 2016 I got into a Physics course and left. In 2017 I got into an engineering college in Kolkata and left. Each exit felt like confirming something I was terrified was true about myself. Eventually I settled into a textile college near home — the option that remained after everything else had been tried and abandoned.
I finished my B.Tech. I want to say that clearly — I did not quit entirely. But the gap between what I know I am capable of and the path I actually walked keeps me up at night more often than I would like to admit.
Raya — She Doesn't Even Know What She Meant to Me
I have been thinking about how to write this section for a long time. Because it is the part where I am most exposed. And also the part where I have been most silent.
There was a girl named Raya. There still is. She is not gone — she is just somewhere in the world, living her life, with no idea that I am sitting here writing her name into a public post at whatever hour this is because I have nowhere better to put the weight of what it feels like to have lost something I never quite managed to have.
She does not know what she meant to me. I mean that literally. The version of me she knew had been shaped by twenty-something years of broken eyes, collapsed confidence, and the constant background noise of feeling behind. She never met the version of me that lives underneath all of that. The one I am still trying to reach.
"She doesn't even know. And that might be the most painful sentence I have ever had to write about my own life."
You do not know this exists. Maybe you never will. I am writing it anyway.
You did not get to meet me at my best. You met a version of me that was managing eye floaters in silence, carrying years of acne-carved self-consciousness, and had a habit — trained into me by years of leaving things — of not staying when staying felt dangerous.
What I want to tell you is that whatever you maybe saw in me was real. It is still here. I am still here. Trying to get out from under twenty years of accumulated damage so that whoever I become next gets to be worthy of someone like you.
You do not know what you meant to me. You probably never will. But I know. And writing it down is the closest I can get to making it real enough to carry forward instead of just backwards.
— AvijitI am not writing this to make her feel guilty. I am writing it because the "missed romantic opportunity" listed in my hardship report is not a statistic. It is Raya. It is a specific person who does not know she is the measuring stick I hold up against every day I am trying to be better than I was yesterday.
Every Part of My Life, Damaged at the Same Time
Permanently affected
Ignored for ten years. Self-damaged in one desperate night. Floaters that never left. Every bright day a reminder.
Broken since Class 9
Insomnia, isolation, psychiatric help for sleep. A mind trained early to expect the worst.
Three colleges, three exits
Each one a small surrender. Each one narrowing the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be.
Still building. Still late.
Competitive exams now. A B.Tech earned the hard way. The road is still long and I am still on it.
A ceiling never reached
Not lost in a match. Lost in the slow accumulation of everything else going wrong at the same time.
Raya
She doesn't even know what she meant to me. That is the whole sentence. There is nothing to add to it.
It Was Never One Mistake. It Was a Chain.
The hardest thing to sit with is not any individual event. It is the pattern. The way each unaddressed problem quietly built the exact conditions for the next one to be worse.
Eyes untreated in school. Headaches during exams. Marks that did not reflect ability. Confidence damaged. No tuition to compensate. Fell behind socially and academically. Anxiety from Class 9. Insomnia. Psychiatric help. Acne from 2016 with no support. Further withdrawal. Stopped trusting doctors. Self-medicated in 2020. Floaters. Three more years in hiding. Career delayed. Raya.
"The chain is the real story. Not any single link. The whole chain — each link forged from the one before it."
This is not a story about weakness. It is a story about what happens when help is not there when it should be — not through cruelty, but through inattention, through the quiet assumption that problems will sort themselves out if you give them enough time.
They do not sort themselves out. They compound. Every delay is an investment in a worse future. I know this now in a way that cost me more than I would like to calculate.
I Am Still Here. Somehow. Still Here.
The rubble has not cleared. My eyes still show me floating shapes on white walls. Cricket is still behind a locked door. Raya still does not know. I am still sitting exams, still building something from a foundation that got cracked early and was never properly repaired.
But I am writing this. That is something. For years I was silent about all of it — the eyes, the skin, the exits, the love — because I thought talking about it made it more real, more permanent, more mine. The opposite turned out to be true. Silence is what made it permanent. Speaking it out loud is the only thing that has made any of it moveable.
If you are reading this from inside something similar — hiding something about your health, your career, your feelings for someone — hear this: the silence is not protecting you. I paid that price across twenty years and every domain of my life. It is not worth it.
I do not know what comes next. I am working on the exams. I am dealing with my eyes properly this time, with actual doctors. I am learning, slowly, to stay inside things instead of leaving when they get hard. And I am carrying Raya with me — not as a wound, but as evidence that I am capable of feeling something that large. That underneath the damage there is a person worth knowing.
"I am not okay yet. But I am finally honest. And after twenty years of quiet, honest feels like the beginning of something."
If This Hit Something Real in You
You probably know someone who needs to read this. Someone sitting quietly inside their own chain of small disasters. Send it to them.
And if that person is you — you are not the only one.
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