I Interviewed for the Same Life Every Day.

By Prerna Chandra · Sat Aug 08 2026

It is 6:45 in the morning and I am standing in front of the bathroom mirror in the same grey hoodie I have worn to this exact spot for two weeks straight, notebook propped against the tap, reading out a sentence I have said so many times now that it barely sounds like words anymore. I already work at Google. I already work at Google. I already work at Google. I say it to my own reflection like I am answering a panel of interviewers, like someone is standing on the other side of that mirror deciding whether to let me through.

This has been my morning for months now. Before the actual interview ever happened, before there was even a job to apply for, I was already interviewing for it every single day, just with an audience of one.

It started small, almost embarrassingly small, and then it took over completely. I had read about manifestation somewhere online, one of those late night scrolling sessions that turns into an hour without you noticing, and something about it clicked into place like a key I did not know I had been carrying around. Here was a system, finally, for the thing I had wanted for years without ever letting myself say it too loudly. Google had been my dream since college, folded up small and tucked away inside me, because saying it out loud too many times felt like using up the luck.

So I began. The 369 method first, three lines in the morning, six in the afternoon, nine at night, the same sentence about landing a role there written out until my hand ached and my handwriting turned into something closer to a scribble than actual words. Then the 555 method, fifty five times a day for five days straight, entire notebook pages filled with one line repeated so often it stopped meaning anything and started feeling like a chant. I printed the Google logo and pinned it to the centre of a vision board, surrounded by words I had cut out from old magazines. Belonging. Worthy. Finally. And every morning, this. The mirror, the hoodie, the same sentence, said out loud until I half believed the version of me saying it was already living a different life than the one currently running late for the 8:40 metro.

My friend Naina used to catch me at it sometimes, video calling while I was mid ritual, and she would just watch for a second before saying, so are you interviewing yourself again. I would laugh and tell her yes, obviously, someone has to prep me before the real thing.

Then, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in November, the real thing arrived. An email, one line, the words Google and interview sitting next to each other in a subject line for the first time outside my own notebooks. I read it twice standing in the office pantry, and then I had to sit down on the nearest chair because my legs had simply stopped being reliable for a second.

I called Naina before I called anyone else. She screamed into the phone loud enough that I had to hold it away from my ear, and then she asked the only question that mattered. When.

Ninth of January, I told her. I remember that date like it split my life cleanly into before and after.

I spent the entire month leading up to it exactly like I used to prepare for board exams back in school, colour coded notes stacked on my desk, mock interviews with anyone willing to sit across from me and ask hard questions, alarms set for revision blocks that I actually followed, which had never once happened during actual boards. My mother noticed the notebooks piling up on my desk and asked once, casually, over dinner, what exactly I was studying so hard for these days.

Just some upskilling, Ma, I told her, and passed the rice.

I could not tell her the name, and it had nothing to do with trust. Some old superstition in me was convinced that saying it out loud to my own mother would either jinx it completely or, worse, light something up in her eyes that I would then be responsible for putting out if this did not work. I had seen that look on her face before, for smaller things than this, and I was not ready to be the reason it dimmed again.

Underneath all the preparation, another voice had started running on a loop too, quieter than the affirmations but far more persistent. How could someone like me actually get this. What if the interview goes fine and they still say no. What if I have spent a whole year manifesting something that was never mine to have. I would catch myself mid affirmation some mornings, saying I already work at Google to a reflection that did not look entirely convinced, and I would just keep saying it anyway, louder, like volume could drown out the doubt.

The interview itself went by in a blur of video call lag and rehearsed answers that somehow came out sounding natural anyway. I hung up afterward and sat very still in my chair for almost ten minutes, replaying it, trying to decide if it had gone as well as it felt like it had gone. Naina made me recount the whole thing twice that evening, and both times I ended with the same sentence. I think that actually went well.

Three weeks of waiting followed, three weeks where my phone buzzing for any reason at all sent a small shock through my whole body before I even looked at the screen. And then, on a Thursday afternoon, another email arrived. This one was not a rejection, which somehow felt worse in its vagueness. The role had been frozen. Budget restructuring, the email said, with that particular corporate softness that manages to say nothing while sounding like it is saying something important.

I read it once at my desk, and I felt the floor of my stomach simply give way.

I do not remember walking home that evening, only arriving. I remember standing in my room and pulling the vision board off the wall so fast that a chunk of cork came away with it, and I remember tearing the Google printout in half and then in half again, and then reaching for every 369 sheet and every 555 notebook page I could find and ripping them into pieces small enough that I would never accidentally read one of my own sentences again. I was crying and furious at the same time, which is a strange combination, and somewhere in the middle of it I said out loud, to nobody, that manifestation was a lie people told themselves so they could feel like they had some control over things that were never going to be in their control anyway. I meant it completely in that moment. I would have signed my name to that statement under oath.

Naina came over that night with two containers of ice cream and did not say a single word about manifestation the entire time, which I was grateful for later, once I had stopped being angry enough to notice things like gratitude again.

For a while after that, the word manifestation just dropped out of my vocabulary on its own, like an old friendship neither of us had bothered to end. I went to work. I came home. I kept up my meditation practice, mostly out of habit rather than any real belief that it was doing anything for me. And somewhere in the middle of that flat, grey stretch of months, I started Positive Intelligence coaching, mostly because a colleague recommended it and I did not have the energy left to say no to anything.

My coach asked me a question in one of our early sessions that I still think about. She asked, instead of asking why this happened to you, what if you asked what this is trying to teach you. I remember rolling my eyes internally, thinking that sounded like exactly the sort of thing people say when they have never actually lost something they wanted this badly. But I sat with the question anyway, mostly because I did not have anything better to do with the thought during my commute home that evening.

I did not feel a shift so much as I noticed, weeks later, that one had already happened without my permission. I started catching myself doing this small thing, almost like a private game. Something would go wrong at work, a project falling through, feedback landing harder than expected, and instead of spiralling like I used to, I would ask myself what I could find good in it, what it was teaching me, how I could use it instead of letting it use me. This game became fun after a while, almost like solving a puzzle once you stop being frustrated that you cannot see the full picture yet.

Slowly, without my noticing exactly when it happened, gratitude stopped being something I performed for a journal and started being something closer to how I actually saw my days. And underneath that gratitude, something else was changing too. I was no longer operating from fear. I no longer needed proof before I could feel hopeful about anything.

I made a new vision board eventually, months later, and it looked nothing like the desperate, magazine cutout version from before. This one came from a place of calm rather than urgency. I was not gripping this one like I had gripped the last, writing the same sentence fifty five times and hoping repetition alone could bend the world into shape. I was simply believing something, picturing myself already living it, and then releasing it completely, trusting it to find its own way back to me, the same steady trust you would place in someone you have known your whole life to show up when they say they will.

I started calling it, half joking with myself at first, the Law of Low Effort. What is meant for you finds its way to you without you having to force every single piece of it into place. I did not tell Naina this theory for weeks because I was fairly sure she would laugh at me, and when I finally did tell her, she did laugh, but then she said, honestly, that sounds like the only version of manifesting I have ever seen actually work for you.

A year passed, almost to the week, and I landed a role that checked every single box I had once written out fifty five times a day, and a few boxes I had not even known to ask for. Better team, better mentorship, work I actually looked forward to on Monday mornings, which had never once been true of the job I had wanted so badly the year before.

I called my mother the moment the offer letter landed in my inbox, before I had even finished reading the whole thing.

Ma, I got the job, I said.

Which one, she asked, because for the first time in over a year I had actually been telling her the names of the places I was interviewing at, no superstition, no evil eye, no rehearsed excuse about upskilling.

I told her, and she went quiet for a second on the phone, and then she said, in that particular voice mothers use when they are choosing not to say I told you so, I always knew something good was coming for you, beta.

It was only once I was sitting in that new seat, weeks into the role, that I understood what had actually happened the year before. Google was never a rejection. It was a redirection, one I could not see the shape of until I was standing far enough away from it to notice the whole picture instead of just the part that hurt.

These days, when my coachee sits across from me holding their own version of that torn up 369 sheet, gripping a dream so tightly their knuckles have gone white with the fear of losing it, I recognise exactly what I am looking at, because I used to be exactly that person standing in front of a mirror at 6:45 in the morning, auditioning for a life I had not yet been given permission to believe I deserved. I do not hand them a new technique or a better method. I help them find the clarity sitting underneath all that wanting, the gratitude that makes room for possibility instead of fear, and the mindset shift that finally lets them stop performing for the life they want and start actually living it.

I do not interview for my life anymore. Some mornings I still stand in front of that same mirror, but these days I am not asking to be let in. I am already standing on this side of the glass, and I am just saying good morning to myself before I go and live the day that is already mine.