The Monkey In Me

By Prerna Chandra · Sun May 24 2026

 A story I was too ashamed to tell for a long time.

I was fired. Just like that. A short meeting, a carefully worded conversation, and everything I had spent years building was over. I walked out of that room and stood in the corridor with my lanyard still around my neck, completely blank. The woman who had been making 350% of her sales target three months ago was now someone who needed to be let go. I could not make sense of it. So I just stood there.

I was not someone who failed. I was the topper, the overachiever, the one who always found a way. I had tied my entire identity so tightly to my performance that I genuinely did not know who I was without it. My work was not what I did. It was who I was. And the moment that was taken away, I had nothing underneath it to stand on.

The world, of course, had its own explanation for what happened. I was in sales. I was a woman. So clearly, all I needed to do was smile more, be a little warmer, charm my way through. The woman who had built her career on sharpness and hard work was suddenly being spoken about like a bimbo who had forgotten the one simple thing she was hired to do. I had gone, in people’s eyes, from intelligent and capable to someone who just could not manage a basic job. That particular humiliation, I want you to know, cuts very deep. Especially when part of you starts to wonder if they are right.
Without a job and without savings, I had nowhere to go. So I did what felt, at the time, like the only logical thing. I found something that made the noise quieter.

Whisky became my new best friend. Every other night, a quarter bottle of whisky on the rocks, poured with focus I used to reserve for closing deals. Every argument with my family became an occasion to drink. Every fight with my boyfriend became a reason. Every evening where the weight of it all sat too heavily in my chest became an excuse. The snapping came naturally now. My patience, never my strongest quality, had completely disappeared. I was not managing stress anymore. I was suppressing it, peg by peg, and calling that coping.
The terrible thing about whisky is how convincingly it pretends to help. For about forty-five minutes after each drink, the monkey in my head would slow down just enough for me to breathe. And then it would come back louder. It always came back louder. I would wake up at 3 AM, heart hammering, thoughts already racing. I could not read a paragraph without losing the thread and starting over. I would read the same sentence five times and still not know what it meant. The woman who used to devour reports and strategies with genuine pleasure was now sitting at a table, rereading the same line, feeling the slow horror of someone who suspects she has become stupid.

“I had gone from intelligent to someone who could not follow a single paragraph. And I could not tell anymore if it was the drinking or if this was just who I had become.”

My capacity for alcohol kept increasing. My capacity for everything else kept shrinking. And then, one by one, quietly, the people in my life started stepping back. The boyfriend left. The friends stopped calling. I was left alone, jobless, broke and anxious, at twenty-eight. A full-blown damsel in distress, except no one was coming to rescue me and I had done most of this to myself.
The monkey in my head, was now completely ungoverned. The part of the mind that leaps from the meeting that went badly this morning straight to the Hindi paper I failed in sixth standard, then to a job rejection at twenty-three, then to an argument with my mother that has nothing to do with any of it. It does not respect time. It does not respect proportion. It just excavates. Every crack in your confidence becomes an archaeological site and the monkey digs until it finds every failure you have ever buried.

I pitied myself. I blamed my parents. I blamed my ex-colleagues. I blamed my boyfriend. I was so good at finding reasons that I never had to look at the actual reason. The choices I was making. The slow, deliberate way I was dismantling my own life and then pointing at everyone around me.

I had no money left to hide it. And so I sat in my car outside my parents’ house, engine off, the street dark, weeping and trying to find the courage to go inside and say the words I wanted to say for a month.
I was wearing a red skirt,I remember clearly. It was the skirt I used to wear when I felt powerful, and I had put it on that morning as though the fabric could lend me something I had completely run out of. Standing outside that door, I felt exactly like the little girl in her school dress, terrified of having done something wrong. That particular feeling does not go away with age.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Tried again. Nothing came out. My father is a man who has watched me argue and win in rooms full of people who underestimated me. He knows what I look like when I have something to say. He could see, clearly, that this was not that. He waited and in that waiting there was a kindness I had not expected and did not feel I had earned.

It came out in a rushed whisper. “I am fired. It has been a month. I have no money.”

I had been rehearsing his reaction for weeks. The version I had constructed in my head was devastating. Disappointment. Lectures. The quiet suggestion that perhaps it was time to just get married. The monkey had scripted the whole thing and run it for me on a loop.He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, simply: “I will give you money. I know you have been under stress. But tell me, for how long, and what do you plan to do with it?”

“Not anger. Not disappointment performed for effect. Just a father, looking at his daughter, asking her to think about the future because he believed she still had one.”

I had cast him as the villain in the story of my own suffering for months.But in that moment, something cracked open in me. Because if he was not the villain, then I had to look at who actually was. And I already knew the answer.

I had been sabotaging myself. Steadily, creatively, with impressive commitment. I had been so busy being the damsel in distress that I had not noticed I was also the one writing the disaster. I did not know what it meant to be a parent yet. But I knew what it felt like to have someone look at you at your worst and still choose to believe in you. And I knew I could not waste that.

I drove home. I sat in the quiet. And I decided to meditate.

My first session was nine minutes of torture sitting on my bedroom floor while my monkey mind went through every excruciating thing on its list. It was not peaceful. I opened my eyes feeling worse. I almost did not go back. But I did. The next day, and the day after that because the life I had been living had become something I could no longer tolerate, and this was the only door I had not yet tried.

The changes came quietly, in the gaps between things. I noticed, one afternoon, that a crisis had landed at work , I was freelancing by then, cautiously rebuilding and I had not spiralled. I could read again. Full paragraphs, whole chapters, arguments that required me to hold a thought for more than thirty seconds. The fog was lifting. I could sit with discomfort without immediately reaching for something to cover it. I could hear my father on the phone and actually listen instead of waiting for my turn to talk.

The monkey did not disappear. Anyone who tells you meditation silences the mind is either decades in or selling something. The monkey is still there. But I can see it now. I can watch it leap from thought to thought without being dragged along. That gap between the thought and the person observing the thought, that small space of awareness, is where everything changed. That is where I got my life back.

THIS IS POWER OF MEDITATION

“At twenty-eight I was sitting in a car outside my parents’ house,
terrified of the person I had become.

Now, I still sit. But I do it on purpose.
And it has given me back everything I thought I had lost —
my focus, my relationships, my work, and the version of myself
I actually want to be.”

Five minutes a day.That is all it takes to start. It is all it will take for you too.”

_{If any part of this felt familiar,then Meditation can be helpful. I am here as someone who was exactly where you are, who knows what the monkey sounds like at 3 AM, and who can tell you from the other side: you do not need to have it together to begin. You just need to begin. The transformation that follows is yours to keep.}

_{If you are facing difficulities, reach out to me at Iamprerna024@gmail.com}