bhara hua dimaag,
shaitan ka workspace

khali dimaag shaitan ka ghar.

everyone knows this one. empty brain, and the devil moves in. and honestly, fair. you sit idle, you sit alone, you sit with your thoughts for too long, and agar dimaag khali reh gaya toh the bad ones show up. overthinking. over-analysing. the spiral. the conspiracy you build about a person from one dry text. more time to ruin your own life and, if there is any left over, somebody else's.

i agree with all of it. i have been that person.

(whoever is reading this. which is me. future me is the only one actually reading this.)

but nobody talks about the other end of the axis, and that is where i live now.

my brain is never empty. it is a laptop with a hundred tabs open, and the tabs are not even in one window. different profiles. different people. different logins. i do not know whose session is whose anymore.

it is not calm. it is not patient.

a table with uneven legs still stands. it holds. but you put one glass down and the whole thing tilts, and you spend the rest of the meal watching the glass instead of eating. it is standing. it is not steady. that is where i am.

here is the part nobody warned me about. forget for a second whatever is wrong with an empty mind. an empty mind also has quiet in it. that is the thing people leave out. you wake up and there is nothing there, and some of that nothing is peace.

a chaotic mind does not just add noise. it takes away that little bit of shanti you had. whatever small quiet was sitting in there, gone, and you did not even notice it leaving. the minute you wake up and the minute before you sleep, it is already talking.

you know that cousin. the small one, genuinely the best kid, everyone loves him, and he has not stopped talking since 2019. you love him. you are also irritated within four minutes and you feel bad about being irritated.

that is my brain to me now.

mere dimaag mein poora time kuch chalta rehta hai. it is never empty of emotions, feelings, questions, answers, ideas, or the same thought for the fourth time.

and the actual problem is not that. the problem is that i want to do something every second. there is a ball of curiosity and it wants feeding, and the world has made feeding it very, very easy. talk to one person, that is a feed. open one app, that is a feed.

it is like a repo where everyone has push access and nobody set up the collaboration. free plan, no reviews, no branches. every conversation, every scroll, every stray thing somebody says to you pushes another edit straight to main.

and the whole time the commits look clean. good message, good diff, shipped. that is exactly how it feels from the inside. i am learning every second, i am taking in the best inputs, every single stimulus is a good one. the ideal scenario, genuinely.

meanwhile the backend is on fire. and not fixable-fire. it has burnt past the point where you could even tell what it used to be. and you do not know, because nothing on the surface says so.

until something trips it. and it is never a big thing. your laptop hangs. the food is mediocre. someone says something completely random. and you lose it, and for that one moment everything is broken beyond repair.

and even then you cannot sit still and work out what happened, because the mind has forgotten how to keep the brain silent.

(i keep saying brain and mind like they are the same thing. they are not. the brain is the organ. the mind is whatever runs on it. i am talking about the second one. i am not good at metaphors, you get the point.)

so here is the correction i want to make to the saying.

khali dimaag shaitan ka ghar hoga. fine. but a fully loaded, constantly stimulated, bhara hua dimaag is shaitan ka workspace.

and that is worse. at ghar you are still lounging. you are chilling. you are not really trying. at your workspace you show up in full force, and you get things done. ab socho ki koi tum par usi full force se kaam kar raha ho.

so i drew it. left is an empty mind, right is a full one, and the height is how much of you it takes over. both ends are bad, which is the whole point, and the bottom of the curve never actually reaches zero.

we romanticise the hustle so completely that nobody asks the obvious question. what is being switched on all day actually doing to you.

and i want to be careful here, because i am not saying it is bad. i come from being lazy. hamesha se. i loved studying and i hated working, and i did not work on a saturday or a sunday, ever, that was not up for discussion.

now i work on weekends. for myself. nobody asked me to. and if i get to the end of an off day and i have not made anything, i feel guilty.

that is genuinely my favourite thing about this year. being able to do the thing without anyone telling me to do the thing. i had never met this version of me before.

she also has almost no doomscroll time left and is overstimulated all day, so.

and that is the thing. there is a word for what i actually want, and it is not in english. स्थिर, sthir. look it up and you get stable, or calm, or steady, and every one of those is a little bit wrong. it is not stillness. nothing about it is empty.

it is the table again, except the legs are even. you can put a full glass down on it and walk away.

on the graph it is the flat bit in the middle. not empty, not full. that is the only part of the curve i want to be standing on.

so where does this go.

the honest answer is that i moved along the x axis and i overshot. i went from the left end, where the devil had all day to sit with me, to somewhere much closer to the right end, where he has a desk and a calendar.

and the flat bit is not a place you arrive at. i think it is a place you keep having to steer back into.

i do not know how to stay there yet.

but at least now i know it is not a straight line. it is a u.