Worn soft at the elbows

Lately, I keep thinking about a shirt at the back of a thrift shop. Good cotton, a decent cut, the kind someone once bought for an occasion. It has been washed too often since. The collar has given up its old stiffness, the blue has dulled into the nondescript grey of Gurgaon’s sky, and there is a mark near the pocket that has outlived several detergent brands. Held at arm’s length, it passes. Somebody might say it has a few years left.

I’ve started to feel that the shirt is me.

Hold a much-washed piece of cloth up to the window, and you can see the light coming through. That is roughly what happened to me, a slow erosion of the person I used to be.

Cloth doesn’t wear out all at once. It goes one thread at a time. So do I. I lose the thread of a sentence halfway through it. And even though I still look like myself, my beard is flecked with grey. I feel tired. I can still make a room laugh and give a stranger good advice about a problem I will never have. 

The irony is that my work, and much of my life, revolves around untangling other people’s knots. A founder whose leadership team has gone silent in meetings. A manager who can’t bring himself to give feedback. An overlooked employee with drooping shoulders and a resignation letter saved in drafts. I am good at this. Then I close the laptop and look at an email I have been meaning to answer for 11 days. Four lines would do it. I know what the four lines are. My hands will not write them.

For much of my life, I had no explanation for that gap, only a verdict. Lazy. Careless. Brilliant but inconsistent, which is what teachers and managers write when they are frustrated with lack of progress. The ADHD diagnosis came late, well into a career built on looking like I had things handled.

It brought me a bit of relief because it explained the email (or lack of it, in fact). What I learnt is that my brain does not reliably recognize importance. It runs on interest, novelty, urgency, and the occasional jolt of fear. An email that matters but bores me is a door with no handle. A deadline tomorrow has a handle made of panic, and for 20 years I grabbed it gratefully. I became a connoisseur of the last minute, spinning a night of dread into a deck that won the room, and I mistook that for a system. I enjoyed the reputation.

Undone things do not stay put in a brain like mine. They hum, like a fridge you only notice at night. Every unanswered message, every promise made with total sincerity on a Tuesday, every book bought because I truly wanted to read it, every idea that arrived at 1 a.m. demanding a domain name, each one takes up a little space. They stay open like browser tabs, each sipping a little battery, until the whole system freezes. Other people seem able to set things down. I carry mine everywhere.

Every dropped thread leaves loose ends and that’s where fraying happens. I don’t fall apart or at least, I haven’t fallen apart so far. But I do come undone in small, ordinary ways, a little more each day.

So rest stops being rest. A free afternoon becomes a silent audit. A novel on the nightstand becomes an accusation. An unwritten article sits in my throat like something I can’t swallow. I own more books than I will live to read, and I keep buying more.

I know how this sounds. I have a family I love and work that uses my mind and pays decently. I share my home with several animals who are convinced I have a superpower, namely opposable thumbs and the ability to open tins. I know people carrying illness, debt, grief, loneliness, and far more. Remembering them doesn’t comfort me. It just adds guilt to the pile. Exhaustion is allowed after a disaster or a surgery, but is it even acceptable to feel worn out merely by one’s existence? 

Most of what wears me thin, I chose. The clients. The animals, who arrive with expensive medical histories and total disregard for my calendar. Being the person others call for advice. I assumed love would make it sustainable. It doesn’t. Love just means you keep pouring after the jug is empty, tipping it a little further each time in case something is left at the bottom.

A late diagnosis adds its own layer. You look back and see the boy who was told he wasn’t trying, the young professional up until four to cover for a morning he knew he would lose. You want to sit beside them and say something. You can’t. So you grieve them a little, along with the old story where the struggle was a flaw you would eventually outgrow.

Every few weeks I still draw up a renovation plan. Up at six. Walk Chia. Exercise. Inbox cleared by noon. A chapter a day. Plan, start, collapse, guilt, plan again. Rinse and repeat. A shirt isn’t ruined in one single wash. What keeps thinning it is a repeated cycle and I can’t help but think that’s exactly what’s happening to me. 

Then there are days when something catches, and for six hours I am so deep inside a problem that I forget to eat. I used to call those my real days and the rest lapses, but one can’t have 5% real days and 95% lapses, can one? I am trying to stop. The man lost in a problem and the man frozen in front of a four-line email share the same brain. Neither one is a factory second version of the other.

I keep going back to that thrift shop. The shirt on its crooked hanger has been mended at the elbow with thread that doesn’t match. Still, someone cared enough to repair it badly rather than throw it away. A hurried shopper only sees the damage. Anyone who has owned a favorite shirt knows the elbows are where it went soft, where it learned the shape of the person inside it.

I have been looking at myself like the hurried shopper.

A few weeks ago I left an old shirt on the chair in my study, one I had stopped wearing because the cuffs had frayed too far. When I came back, Cotton, one of the cats, had claimed it. He had kneaded it into a nest and was asleep in the middle, paws tucked, breathing so slowly I could barely see his chest move. There was a cushion two feet away. There was a bed that cost more than three new shirts. He picked that old shirt.

Animals understand this. I’ve seen a frightened rescue dog settle faster on fabric that has been lived in, because it has lost its stiffness but kept the scent of someone safe. The newness a shopper wants is exactly what an animal distrusts. What it wants is the give in the cloth, the warmth that years of washing could not quite remove.

I have spent a long time mourning the crispness I lost. The sharp collar, the bright color, the man who could go all day without fraying. It never occurred to me that wear does something besides take away. It softens. It makes things easier to rest against. I may no longer be the shirt anyone would pick for an interview. I might be the one a small creature drags into a corner and falls asleep on, trusting it completely, because it has been through enough to stop being stiff.