Childhood the Crux of Life

20 Aug 2026·13 min read

Childhood - The Crux of Life

We carry a huge share of our childhood memories no matter which stage we are in. It shows up directly or indirectly in our interactions, in our surrounding, in how we react to a small slight or how we flinch at a particular kind of silence. Anyone who reads psychology would agree that most of the conditioning happens in childhood - exceptions exist, but they are rare enough to prove the rule. Our choices and preferences vary throughout our lives, but the foundational assumptions and biases underneath them? Those stay. That’s the main reason people can’t break through many of their life problems for a long time. They are not dealing with the present problem. They are dealing with something that was wired into them at age seven, or nine, or twelve - and they don’t even know it.

I have understood now that it’s possible to have some command over this - there are techniques, ways to quietly rewrite the script. But that is not the topic of this essay. This essay is about something more personal. It is about my diaries, my experiences, and the things I noticed growing up that I could not put a name to at the time - but which I have been carrying ever since.

Where I Come From

My upbringing was from a humble family - or rather, below average if we are being honest about it. My parents earned just enough to pay the fees of a convent school. That was the stretch. That was the sacrifice. And I am, genuinely, deeply grateful for it. Because of that one decision - that one stubborn insistence on good education - I am writing this today. Everything connects. I believe in a kind of universal law and order where people walk paths that are long and hard and winding, and eventually arrive exactly where they were always supposed to be.

But gratitude and grief can live in the same sentence. And when I look back honestly, I see a child who performed well, who was a high achiever - and who spent a significant portion of his childhood chasing someone else’s dream without quite knowing it. The pressure to perform was real. The fear of letting people down was real. Something was being built in me that would take years to unpack: the idea that my worth was tied to a result, a score, a rank. It took me until after college to finally choose a path of my own heart. To build something because I wanted to build it, not because a rubric said so.

My parents were not wrong. I need to say that clearly. If I had not focused on education, I would not have the tools I have now. But there is a difference between education and the anxiety-loop that often gets sold in its place. I got both. And for many children - especially in India - the loop is all they get.

The Unavailability of Guidance

We wonder why even smart people get stuck. We rarely ask how much guidance they had access to.

Earlier, guidance was almost entirely face-to-face. You learned from whoever was near you - a parent, a teacher, a neighbour. If those people had limited vision, you inherited limited vision. The world was disconnected, and information lived in people, not in networks.

Then came the internet. And the internet is genuinely magical - I mean that without irony. Most of what guidance used to require can now be found, for free, in an afternoon. Books. Talks. Essays. Conversations with strangers who have been exactly where you are.

But here is the problem: as a child, you don’t know how to aggregate it. The information exists. The child does not yet know how to ask the right question. And our schools - which are supposed to bridge exactly this gap - are almost entirely failing at it.

Life skills are never taught in classrooms. Emotions are not taught. Mental health is not taught. Basic psychology - the kind that would help a twelve-year-old understand why they feel what they feel - is treated as either too advanced or too soft. So this way children grow up carrying feelings they cannot name, making decisions from wounds they cannot see, and wondering why things keep going wrong in the same pattern.

Curiosity is the other piece. Even with all the information available, a person who has not been taught to be curious will not go looking. And curiosity is not random - it is cultivated. It happens when a child is allowed to ask questions without being punished for not knowing the answer.

What could actually help:

Dedicated space in early education - not co-curricular, not academic - where children learn how the human mind works. Emotional intelligence. Empathy. Mutual respect. Confidence. Self-respect. Real things. Practical things.
This space must not be designed by academics who have studied childhood from a distance. It must be built by people who have lived through difficult ones. There is a difference between knowing something and having survived it.
Children must never be asked to memorize this material. The moment you turn emotional intelligence into an exam, you have killed it. This has to be felt, not tested. The goal is not to produce children who can define empathy - it is to produce children who feel it.

Family, Friends, and Surrounding

I believe fully in the idea that we are what our surroundings are. Not what we aspire to be - what our surroundings are. This is not pessimistic. It is structural.

Family.

Parents are the first world a child knows. Everything - tone of voice, reaction to failure, the way conflict is handled at the dinner table - becomes a template. Children do not learn from what parents say. They learn from what parents do when they are under pressure.

The tragedy is that most parents are doing their best with the conditioning they themselves received as children. They were never taught emotional intelligence. Nobody sat them down and said: here is how to be present for someone without making your anxiety their problem. So it passes down. Not from cruelty - from inheritance.

Especially, in India there is a particular kind of pressure that sits on top of all of this. A child who struggles academically is treated as a failure before they have had any chance to discover what they are actually good at. I have seen this up close, in people I love. A child being beaten for a bad exam score is not being pushed toward success - they are being pushed toward a life lived in fear of disappointing people. That is not education. That is conditioning for anxiety.

What I wish more parents understood: a child who is emotionally safe performs better. Safety is not enemy of ambition. Fear actually produces short-term compliance and long-term damage.

Peers and Surrounding.

There is a particular kind of wound that comes from early social experiences - one that most people never fully trace back to its origin.

For many children, especially around the age of twelve or thirteen, something shifts in peer dynamics. Friendships become complicated. Attraction enters the picture. Social hierarchies tighten. And children who are not equipped to navigate this - which is most of them, because nobody teaches it - absorb everything. The rejection. The misread signals. The longing that nobody talks about.

For boys and girls both, there is a version of this wound. A childhood infatuation that goes wrong, a friendship that turns cold, a moment of embarrassment in front of people who mattered too much - these things leave marks that last years, sometimes decades. The event might not be something catastrophic, but because the child had no framework for processing it, the pain goes underground. It shows up later as difficulty trusting, difficulty expressing, difficulty believing that you are worth being chosen.

I know this from my own life. I carried something like this for years before I understood what it was. It took me a long time to learn that not everyone can like everyone - and that this is not a verdict on your worth as a person. It just is.

Then there is the question of toxic company. The peers who normalize numbness, who mistake cynicism for intelligence, who make you feel that your gentleness or your curiosity or your sensitivity is a weakness. Sadly, many children spend years shrinking themselves to fit a group that was never actually right for them. The tragedy is that by the time they figure this out, the shrinking has become a habit.

The Absorbing Personality.

This one I discovered recently. Or more accurately - I discovered the name for it recently. I had been living with it my whole life.

Some children absorb. Not just their own feelings, but the feelings of people around them. The anxiety in a room. The disappointment in a parent’s silence. The grief that is never spoken out loud but is present in the air. Such children are wired for it. And the world does not have great language for it yet, so most of them grow up thinking something is wrong with them.

As a child, I would feel heavy in environments that other people found completely normal. I did not understand why. I assumed I was weak, or overthinking, or too sensitive for my own good. It took years - and a lot of reading - to understand that this is not weakness. It is a particular kind of perception. One that needs protection and discipline, not suppression.

If you are raising a child like this, the worst thing you can do is tell them to toughen up. The second worst thing is to ignore it entirely. The right thing - the actually useful thing - is to name it. To say: you feel things deeply and its real. Here is how to take care of yourself when it gets heavy.

The absence of that naming is where a lot of early anxiety begins. Not from trauma in the dramatic sense - but from a child spending years wondering why they feel so much, with no one to explain that feeling a lot is not a disorder.

What Gets Lost

There is a particular version of childhood that many children in this country never get to live.

The version where you are allowed to be bored and to figure out what to do with the boredom. Where you are allowed to fail at something without it becoming a family crisis. Where you are allowed to feel something strange and have an adult sit with you in it instead of moving quickly past it.

Instead, many children are handed a life that is already filled - school, tuition, schedule, expectation. And they fill it. They perform. They achieve. And somewhere in the middle of all that, they lose the thread back to themselves.

I think about children who grow up in loops - not just poverty or hardship, but psychological loops. The loop of fear and approval. The loop of performing to feel loved. The loop of absorbing everyone else’s pain while never being allowed to express their own. These loops do not automatically break when childhood ends. They follow people into their twenties, thirties, forties. They show up in their careers, their relationships, the way they speak to themselves…

The saddest part is that most people in these loops do not know they are in one. They think this is just how life feels. They have never seen the alternative.

A Way Out

The solutions are not complicated. They are just consistently deprioritized.

First - make space for emotional education. Not as a subject to be graded. As a genuine environment where children can learn that feelings are information, not inconveniences. That the mind can be understood. That the way you were raised is not the only way to be.

Second - let children be curious without destination. Not every question needs to lead to an answer. Not every interest needs to lead to a career. Some of the most important things a child can develop - depth, patience, genuine interest in the world - come from being allowed to wander without someone asking where they are going.

Third - take the peer environment seriously. Schools manage academic performance carefully. They manage social dynamics almost not at all. But for a child, the social environment is the formative one. The cruelty or kindness of peers at age eleven is more influential than any textbook. We need adults in those spaces who understand this - not to sanitize it, but to help children develop the language and resilience to navigate it.

Fourth - recognise the children who absorb. They are often the quiet ones. The high-performers who seem fine. The ones who help everyone else and never ask for anything. They need the most care, and they are the least likely to ask for it.

What I Am Still Carrying

I will not pretend I have fully resolved everything that happened in my childhood. Some of it I have understood. Some of it I am still carrying. Some of it I may carry for a long time.

But I know this: the fact that I can name it now is everything. The fact that I could trace a feeling back to a moment - a pattern back to an origin - means I am no longer entirely subject to it. I have some command.

That is what I want for every child who is currently somewhere in the middle of a loop they cannot see. Not perfection. Not a wound-free childhood - that is not real for most people. Just enough language, enough safe space, enough honesty from the adults around them to be able to say: this is what I feel, and I do not know why, and that is okay.

That is enough to start.

In a future essay, I want to explore the other side of this - the specific techniques, the mind-hacks, the mental models that allow you to consciously rewrite some of what childhood wrote into you. Because it is possible. I have done it, partially. And it is one of the most quietly radical things a person can do.