Doing what needs to be done, especially when it is difficult to actually do it
This might not be for everyone. If your work is your passion and you wake up excited to do what you do, this might not fully resonate with you, and that’s a good place to be. But if you’re someone who works because you have to, not because you love it, this might feel familiar.
I remember a bit from Samay Raina on detachment. “Do whatever you are doing, not with your heart, but with your brain. Detach and do it.” He was in a tough situation; he was having an anxiety/panic attack, yet he got up on the stage and delivered the stand-up. He could have let go of one show, but he didn’t. Not all can have that level of mental strength, but this truly comes from detachment. Though you might love what you do and have actually made a life out of your passion, there might come a day when you still have to deliver even when you are not in state to.
Do what you need to do. Deliver what you’re supposed to. Because the world spins anyway. In Samay’s case, it literally did. He laid low and came back stronger, and now a million views are getting added each day to his YouTube first-ever stand-up.
It’s a clear example of how, no matter how we feel, no matter how overwhelmed or stuck we are, things keep moving. Which means, in some strange way, we have to as well.
This also reminded me of a similar argument that was brought on screen a while ago, when cinema made you think instead of creating propaganda. (if you know you know #iykyk) There’s this scene from Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. where Boman Irani plays a surgeon and explains how as doctor his hands are steady at work, but if he has to do a surgery for his own daughter, it might shake.
The skill doesn’t disappear. The experience doesn’t vanish. But something changes. Attachment enters, and everything that was once effortless becomes difficult.
Work, at its core, is just that, work. You won’t always feel like showing up, and you definitely won’t be liked by everyone while doing it. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are things expected of you, things that need to be done.
And sometimes, the only way to get through that is by detaching just enough to focus on the task, not the noise around it. But at the same time, I don’t think life should be built around work. If anything, it should be the other way around.
You plan your life first, what you want your days, your weekends, your time to feel like, and then fit work into it. Because if you don’t, work will quietly take over everything without asking.
This thought became very real for me in Q1. It’s been intense, messy, and at times, exhausting. Someone recently asked me how I’ve been managing to blog through all of this, and I didn’t really have an answer then. But looking at it now, I think it comes from a place of rebellion.
A quiet refusal to let work take away the one thing that makes me feel like myself. Because I feel alive when I write. And that’s reason enough to keep coming back to it. That said, I haven’t been perfect at it.
There were weeks I disappeared completely. There was a stretch where work genuinely broke me, a full survival mode week where I barely ate, barely slept, and did nothing but work. I didn’t like who I was in that phase, and I know I never want to go back to living like that.
And yet, I still delivered. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to. And maybe more importantly, because I knew it was temporary. There was a part of me that held on to the idea that I would come back to myself, that this wasn’t permanent.
Like water. You can freeze it, you can heat it, you can change its state, but at its core, it remains what it is. It finds its way back.
And I think that belief is what kept me going. Because if, during that survival phase, I had allowed myself to spiral, to sit in fear or overwhelm, I wouldn’t have been able to deliver anything at all.
Perhaps Samay Raina also processed his emotions backstage in a similar way, and still got up and did the show.
It’s not about becoming cold or indifferent, but about creating just enough distance to do what needs to be done without collapsing under it. Because when work pushes you into a primitive survival state, you don’t need more emotion. You need less of it. You need steadiness.
You need to become the version of yourself with steady hands.
Detach, deliver, and then find your way back.
