Human-Being vs. Human-Doing

New Year Reflections, 2026

For most of my adult life, I lived as a human-doing.

Not intentionally — but because the pace of modern work made it effortless to confuse productivity with purpose, urgency with meaning.

Two decades in healthcare technology will do that to you.

You deliver releases, solve fires, modernize platforms, carry teams, fix broken systems, and shoulder burdens others never see. You build revenue, build teams, build products — until one day you wake up and realize you’re building everything except your own life.

I made good money.

I had prestigious titles.

But I was rarely present in my own moments.

I showed up relentlessly for employers and barely at all for myself.

And eventually, burnout stopped whispering and started screaming.

When the Body Strikes, the Soul Listens

Back in April, my blood pressure was terrible.

The nurse took one reading, looked alarmed, and asked me to breathe deeply.

The second reading? Even worse.

Meanwhile my brain spiraled into classic burnout panic:

• I’ve been here too long.

• Should I text my boss?

• Should I ping the meeting organizer?

• How do I look reliable while my body falls apart?

The nurse finally sighed and said with motherly annoyance,

“I’ll write down the first number — it’s better than the second. Please sleep more.”

Forty-five days later, same story.

Then came my conscious pause — my learning sabbatical.

Months later, with no meeting to rush into, I walked into the clinic:

BP: 121/76.

My PCP looked at the number, blinked, and asked:

“What did you do?”

I smiled and said,

“I quit.”

He burst out laughing.

“Yeah. That’ll do it.”

Sometimes it takes a BP machine screaming at you to realize burnout isn’t a metaphor.

It is biology.

Choosing Life at the Midpoint of My Career

And as funny as that moment with my PCP was, there was a deeper truth beneath it — one that had been quietly building for months.

Somewhere in the middle of my career journey — that midpoint where the first half of ambition finally collides with the second half of meaning — I found myself asking a question I had avoided for years:

“Do I want to keep waking up in dread, or do I want to look forward to my day?”

For as long as I can remember, my mornings began with a to-do list projected onto the ceiling before I even opened my eyes. Even during meditation, my mind scanned gaps, risks, dependencies, and everything that might break by noon. I wasn’t waking up — I was reporting for duty.

It was exhaustion disguised as discipline.

A close friend of mine, a PCP from Brea, listened to me one afternoon and said gently:

“This sounds like meeting PTSD. It’s not worth risking your health. Be around to see your son graduate from college.”

Her words landed with the weight of truth.

Your epitaph doesn’t need to say:

“Died rich but had no time.”

“Earned money but never lived.”

And yet, sharing this inner struggle with my leadership felt terrifying. Vulnerability always does. But when I finally gathered the courage to be honest about where I was, something beautiful happened —

they understood.

They supported me fully. They said yes.

When I turned in my notice, I did what I always do: I documented everything — every roadmap, every AI idea, every RCM gap and its root cause, every hard-earned insight about the product and the architecture. Not because I was leaving, but because I cared.

It wasn’t resignation.

It was a handoff.

A clean, loving, intentional handoff.

Walking away felt less like abandonment and more like completion — like my work there had served its purpose.

They never truly “needed” me; I simply helped them see clarity they already carried inside.

And so I left — not broken, not bitter — but fulfilled, grateful for my leaders, my peers, the PE advisors, and the VP team, all of whom gave me space to step back without guilt.

I owe them more than they know.

That experience wasn’t diminished by my leaving —

it was the catalyst for the self-realization that healed me.

And then, something I will forever treasure:

they gave me the sweetest farewell of my entire career — a KudoBoard overflowing with warmth, gratitude, and memories.

It reminded me that when you lead with intention and leave with integrity, you don’t lose a team; you gain a chapter of people who quietly carry you forward.

What Slowing Down Revealed

I began walking daily — slow, one-hour evening loops through the quiet streets of Morgantown.

At first, slowing down felt odd.

My mind hated the stillness. It didn’t know how to exist without rushing.

But then something softened.

A neighborhood cat began walking beside me like an old friend.

A deer grazed calmly while looking straight at me.

A grandpa in a cul-de-sac stopped me to talk about Napoleon Hill.

And I found myself smiling at strangers, and strangers smiling back.

For the first time in years, I felt fully present.

One evening, watching the WV sky turn purple and gold, I finally captured a truth that had lived in me for years but never had words. I wrote the poem:

“Happiness Is Wanting What You Have.”

It wasn’t a new idea — it was simply the first time I slowed down enough to feel it.

Happiness isn’t a future achievement.

It’s noticing that your life was already beautiful — you were just too tired to see it.

Healing the Body, Healing the Self

For decades, my iron levels were terrible.

My mother lived with severe anemia her whole life and ultimately passed with both anemia and Alzheimer’s.

I quietly assumed the same fate.

Every lab was red.

Year after year.

I stopped hoping.

But my hematologist didn’t.

He diagnosed meticulously, fought insurance battles, and convinced me to try an 8-hour infusion — the long, tiring drip no one else suggested.

Eight months later, I walked in expecting failure again.

Instead:

Every graph was green.

For the first time in decades.

This wasn’t just a medical milestone.

It was a personal one.

A return to myself.

A Season of College Essays, Existential Questions, and Motherhood

Another unexpected layer to this season of slowing down has been walking alongside my son through his senior year — a milestone that carries a unique weight for an immigrant parent. US college admissions felt like a maze of contradictory advice, outdated resources, and moving targets. Doing this while working remotely always felt wrong; I never had the time or the mental space to truly help him navigate it.

When the sabbatical began in July, I realized for the first time that I finally could show up for him — fully, intentionally, with presence.

This year, I saw him wrestle with something my generation never had to face:

“Will there even be jobs left in the age of AI?”

And I found myself telling him what I had just relearned myself:

AI can shrink the messy middle, but it cannot replace

• critical thinking

• discernment

• wisdom

• curiosity

• the ability to decide what is worth solving in this world

These are the muscles education builds — not just through coursework, but through meeting diverse minds, absorbing different perspectives, and shaping your belief system with intention. I also reminded him that fear, if left unchecked, turns into paralysis. Being so afraid of AI that you stop building, stop learning, and stop moving is its own kind of surrender. The only sane response is curiosity: learn how it works, learn where it helps, learn where it falls short — and keep going.

As he worked on his college essays, something struck me: the prompts weren’t designed to extract performance. They were designed to provoke self-discovery — to help a teenager articulate what they value, who they are, and what they hope to build.

I told him to treat the application season not as a burden, but as an invitation.

Not a talent show. Not a performance for a panel. An invitation to tell the truth.

He worried that writing every essay through the lens of robotics would make him look one-dimensional, that he should somehow manufacture “diversity” in his interests to appear more impressive. It felt good to help him let go of that guilt and not twist himself just to satisfy some imagined societal expectation.

One of the things I quietly cherish about raising him here is how much free will and free thinking are encouraged — such a stark contrast to my own childhood. I didn’t want his childlike wonder and genuine curiosity to be flattened into yet another admissions checkbox.

The world still needs people who care enough to go deep. Better an honest, coherent story than a collage of pretend passions stitched together for admissions theater.

I also reminded him: college matters. But your dignity, worth, and future potential do not live inside a logo. His job is to do the work, tell the truth, and keep growing — not to hand his self-worth to an admissions portal.

Rejection from an Ivy League or a UC does not turn a good student into a bad one. A college can be a launchpad, but it is not a verdict on a human being.

It felt good to teach him the difference between performing to meet someone else’s expectations and staying true to his own center. My hope is that some college, somewhere, will see the patience, perseverance, and hard work his story reflects — not because he tried to please them, but because he wrote honestly about what he enjoyed.

That moment made me reflect on my own teenage years in India:

there was no “self-discovery” — only survival.

Get good grades, avoid early marriage, don’t be a burden, escape to college before your fate is decided for you.

Intention was a luxury.

Reflection was a privilege.

Self-authorship wasn’t even in the vocabulary.

So this US college system — flawed, competitive, anxiety-inducing — still has something beautiful: it forces children to pause and think about who they want to become.

And if I hadn’t slowed down, I would’ve missed the chance to guide him through that.

I built Campus Compass during this sabbatical — a Custom GPT tool stitched together at midnight — not because the world needed another app, but because my son needed clarity, organization, and a way through the noise. And in building it for him, I built it for countless other families like mine.

But the best part wasn’t the tool.

It was the micro-moments:

• teaching him to make a document

• create tabs for every college

• paste essay prompts

• write one bullet at a time

• manage deadlines

• juggle AP classes with intention

• build atomic habits instead of panic cycles

All the habits I read about for years — suddenly, this was the time to pass them forward.

And somewhere in this process, I felt the emotional reality of the calendar:

I only had a few dozen weeks left with him at home.

This sabbatical gave me something I didn’t even realize I was starving for — long, ordinary hours with my son. Cooking meals he will miss next year, eating lunch together, listening to his worldview unfold in real time as he thinks about AI, economic pressures, friendships, and the political landscape he is inheriting. Sitting with him without rushing, letting him speak without judgement, watching him form his own philosophy of life — these small, quiet moments have been their own kind of healing.

It feels as if every meal I cook with intention, every conversation we have at the dining table, gently washes away the guilt I carried for years as a working mother. These moments have become the invisible glue stitching me back together — not grand gestures, but shared meals, shared stories, shared presence.

It filled me with joy that he was entering the best chapter of his life — and a quiet sadness that a part of mine would soon feel empty.

That is when the RCM spark returned. I realized 2026 is for his transition — launching him into college and being the safety net he needs. But 2027? That belongs to me.

It’s the perfect timeline to dream and build without pressure — to run experiments on my DGX Sparc at home, to consult when I choose, and to prepare to apply to YC 2027 with intention. Not as an escape, but as a transition into the second half of my life.

If I hadn’t slowed down, none of this would’ve happened:

not the tool, not the bonding, not the time-management lessons, not the late-night reflections, not the alignment of what I say matters with how I show up.

I didn’t just tell my son family is important.

I acted like it.

And that felt right in my bones.

The Grind That Made Stillness Possible

There’s another paradox I’ve been sitting with — one that only surfaced when life finally became quiet enough for me to hear myself. The first half of my adulthood wasn’t still at all. It was two decades of unrelenting hard work as a family: my husband earning his PhD, me working for two startups, me completing my MBA while serving as a CTO and raising an elementary schooler, both of us caring for our parents and building a financial foundation from the ground up. Those years were a partnership in the truest sense — two people trading shifts in courage, sacrifice, and endurance, saving every penny for Sreyan’s future, building a life here while supporting the life we left behind.

And that grind — as exhausting as it was — is also what made this second-half pause possible.

Money homework is done; meaning homework begins.

Without the grind, I might never have earned the privilege of stillness.

Yet without stillness, I would never have understood the grind.

Whether there was a more elegant route to this self-realization… well, I’ll iterate that in the next life!

Jugaad, Creativity, and the Patience That Carried Me

Growing up in India, I didn’t have the language for it then, but I lived inside jugaad. It was the art of making things work with whatever you had — limited money, limited options, limited certainty, but unlimited creativity.

When I look back across my career, I can see how deeply that instinct shaped me. It was there in my early startup days, building internal tools because we couldn’t afford external software. It was there when I stitched together a customer-service platform from scratch. It was there when I scraped the NPI database and turned it into a lead-generation engine so we could cold-call practices and sell our first EHR licenses. It was there every time I had to invent a solution before I had the title, the budget, or the luxury of time.

And now, looking back, I finally understand:

my humble beginnings weren’t limitations. They were training.

The same resourcefulness that carried me through a childhood shaped by constraints — not scarcity — was the same instinct that eventually carried me into burnout. Jugaad works brilliantly… until it doesn’t — until you’re solving everyone else’s problems with ingenuity and have no energy left to solve your own.

That scrappy, do-what-you-can spirit didn’t just save projects. It built my confidence as an engineer. It carried my family through lean years. It shaped my leadership before I even knew what leadership was.

Motherhood, marriage, healthcare, startups — they look different on the surface, but underneath, they’ve all been the same game: a long, slow apprenticeship in patience, creativity, and hard work. And the strange thing about apprenticeship is that you rarely understand what you’re being trained for while you’re inside it. The meaning of your circumstances arrives much later, when life finally slows down enough for you to listen.

Reconnecting With Purpose Through Helping Others

During this reflective season, I started talking to strangers on LinkedIn — genuinely wanting them to succeed.

Some of them (they know who they are, thank you J & P!) said,

“You write well.”

It surprised me.

I’ve journaled my whole life, but quietly, privately.

Their words nudged me to write more, reflect more, share more.

And in helping others, I started finding myself again.

Even with my son — watching him volunteer with shy elementary school robotics kids — I told him:

“Find the quietest child.

Let them feel it’s okay to ask questions.

That alone is a good day.”

And I watched something shift in him — purpose replacing fear.

Helping him see beyond performance reminded me of my own journey.

Slowness Didn’t Make Me Stop — It Made Me Better

Here’s the misconception:

Slowing down means losing your edge.

My experience?

Slowness sharpened me.

When the noise faded, my mind became clearer.

I coded more joyfully, with precision instead of panic.

I asked deeper product-market-fit questions.

I helped customers with sincerity instead of obligation.

Even funnier:

the moment the money pressure disappeared,

my thinking improved.

This GitHub streak — 100+ straight days of contributions — happened during my “slower” season.

Slowness didn’t reduce my productivity.

It removed my fear.

These days, my work doesn’t come from panic, obligation, or performance review season. It comes from curiosity and quiet joy. I still build, I still write code, I still ship — but the energy underneath has changed. And if all of this sounds abstract, there’s one very ordinary, very concrete proof I can point to: my little GitHub streak.

A Practical Tip: How I Maintain My Coding Streak

What surprised me most wasn't the consistency—it was the joy. When I stopped coding to prove my worth, I started coding because I was curious. Each commit became a small act of play rather than performance. I'd wake up genuinely excited to see what problem I could solve, not because anyone was watching, but because I wanted to know if I could figure it out.

Since I’m “Practice Tip Queen,” here’s a habit that changed my mornings:

I always end my day leaving one small, half-finished piece of work ready for tomorrow.

This idea came from the micro-habit philosophies of James Clear and Charles Duhigg — I don’t even remember which book seeded it first, but it stayed with me.

Every morning, before breakfast, I ask Claude to generate focused, atomic commits per file with a clean commit message — my love letter to my future self.

It creates momentum.

It keeps my streak alive.

It gives me a quiet feeling of accomplishment before the world wakes up.

I don’t chase productivity anymore.

I choose my problems consciously — and that makes all the difference.

Evidence of a Joyful, Intentional Streak

I love focused commits — one file, one idea.

I find that commit history tells the story of the system more elegantly than the code itself.

I’m not weird.

I’m a systems thinker who reads evolution, not just implementation.

Burnout → Awareness → A Deep Life

If you’re quietly burning out — numb, exhausted, or disconnected — hear this gently:

You are not weak.

You are human.

And you can come back to yourself.

Burnout forces a reckoning.

It asks:

• What do you want?

• What do you already have that is enough?

• What would a deep life look like for you?

In 2026, I’m choosing to be a human-being first.

The human-doing will follow — but from a healthier, steadier, truer place.

Happiness is wanting what you already have.

And for the first time, I really do.