The longer version
of the story

The name came first.

Sahil Tayal. In Delhi rooms, that name prompted a question before a handshake: where are you from, originally? The answer never fully satisfied. You learn early that a name can position you before you've said anything — and what it positions you as isn't always welcome. I grew up in a city where the ethnic arithmetic is always running in the background, where names carry caste and regional markers that people read in seconds. Mine invited a certain kind of scrutiny. I learned to answer the question cleanly and move on.

It was my first experience of a gap I'd spend decades studying: the distance between who you are and who you're being read as. That gap turned out to be interesting. It also turned out to be painful. Usually both at once.

The child who felt too much.

Before I had language for it, I had rituals. Counting steps. Touching doorframes in specific sequences. Checking things repeatedly — not because I thought something was wrong, but because the world felt unstable and the ritual made it feel less so. OCD before anyone called it that. ADHD before anyone noticed that what looked like distraction was actually a very intense focus — just not on whatever the room wanted me to focus on.

Teachers used the word overthinking like it was a diagnosis. Adults told me I was too sensitive. I remember wondering what the right amount of thinking was, and who had decided. I kept asking questions that made adults uncomfortable — not to be difficult, but because I genuinely needed the answers. That need was consistently treated as a problem.

I kept that child alive. It wasn't always a conscious choice. Sometimes it was just stubbornness. But I kept him.

2008. The Justin Bieber hair.

Thirteen years old. Side-swept fringe, the full early-Bieber architecture. I committed to it seriously — not because I particularly cared about the music, but because looking like everyone else felt like camouflage, and camouflage felt like safety.

I look at photos from that period and see a kid trying very hard to disappear into whatever the room wanted him to be. There's something both funny and a little heartbreaking about it — the precision of the performance, the sincerity of the effort. He almost managed it.

The hair was a symptom. The real thing underneath was: I don't know how to be myself in this room and I am not sure this room would survive it if I tried.

Too emotional for a guy.

Delhi has a particular script for men. Stoic. Unreadable. Contained. The masculine code is legible and enforced and I couldn't follow it. I felt things loudly — grief, awe, frustration, joy — and the feedback I received, consistently and across contexts, was that this was a design flaw.

You're too emotional for a guy. I heard it from friends, from colleagues, from people who meant well and people who didn't. I heard it enough times that I began auditing my own responses in real time: is this too much? Should I dial it down? Is the feeling itself the problem, or just the showing of it?

This cost something. Not because the feelings stopped — they never stopped — but because the energy that went into hiding them couldn't go anywhere else. I spent years with a significant internal tax that nobody around me could see on the balance sheet.

The hardest part.

I have a mood disorder. I have that language now; for a long time I didn't. What I had, for an extended stretch, was an internal weather that had stopped corresponding to external reality. Periods of unusual intensity followed by periods of fog. A system running hot or running cold, with limited control over which one I'd wake up to.

The people around me didn't have a framework for it either. Mental health vocabulary barely existed in the rooms I was in. So the explanations that emerged were the ones the culture had available. One response, genuinely offered by people who cared, was a religious intervention — the theory being that something external had entered and needed to be removed. I sat through it with whatever grace I had. I was not possessed. I was unwell, in a system that had no other word for it.

That period was the lowest one. There were stretches where continuing felt genuinely optional. What kept me here was not any single dramatic thing — it was accumulation. Small anchors. Music, mostly. Eminem specifically, which sounds unlikely but is true. There's something in watching someone take the worst material of a life and forge it into something that's neither inspirational nor defeated — just present. Proof that the wreckage can be used.

The turn.

At some point I stopped asking what was wrong with me and started asking what was wrong with the rooms. These are very different questions. They produce different answers. They generate different research.

The intensity that had been flagged as a problem my whole life turned out to be a cognitive style — one that's well-suited for watching systems carefully, for noticing what others have normalized, for sitting with contradiction without needing it resolved immediately. The OCD patterns that had made me strange as a child had, over years, sharpened into a capacity for systematic observation. The ADHD that had made classrooms difficult gave me an unusual ability to track multiple threads simultaneously.

I am not arguing that everything happens for a reason. I don't believe that. I am arguing that the material you have is the material you have, and what you do with it is still a choice.

Today.

I'm 31. I live in South Delhi, embedded in a family retail business I've deliberately structured as a field research site. I hold an MBA in HRD from JBIMS and experience across Big Four consulting, organisational behaviour practice, and institutional compliance. I am applying to doctoral programmes in Organisational Behaviour with supervisor fit as the primary filter.

My research question — why do people systematically fail to act in alignment with their own stated values and intentions? — is the academic formalisation of something I've been living since childhood. The identity-action gap is not an abstract puzzle to me. It is a map I have been drawing from the inside.

I'm not recovered in the sense of being done. I'm constructed differently than I was — more deliberately, with more precision about what I'm building and why. I have a psychiatrist I trust. I have a medication regimen that works. I have a research project that is genuinely mine. And I have, finally, an accurate name for what I am: a scholar who needed more time and harder material than most before he could do his actual work.