I've been quiet for three weeks. I was learning Claude Code — went from the desktop app to running three CLI sessions at once (below), shipped three systems into production. I'll write about that separately.

Today is a harder topic.

In my first three months at Amazon, I resigned.

My boss refused to accept it. He said: take four weeks off, then come back and decide.

I came back. Four weeks after that, the score my reports gave me — "how would you rate your manager" — moved from 1.9 to 4.9 out of 5.

Nothing about how I ran meetings had changed. Nothing about how I gave feedback had changed. The team was the same. The work was the same.

What changed: I'd started treatment for anxiety disorder.

Stress is loud. Everyone talks about stress. Anxiety disorder is something else — quieter, more insidious, and far harder to spot from the outside, including by the person who has it.

From the outside, every metric said I was fine.

Top three ranks in school. Ninety-plus in tenth and twelfth. Debate competitions won. Top 400 in IIT-JEE, Four years at ITC out of college. IIM Calcutta. Investment banking. BCG. Startups. Amazon.

Never spent any time in sports. I think that's one of the root causes, but that's a different piece.

I had severe anxiety disorder for years. I didn't know.

I have a beautiful garden at home. For the four years I had it before treatment, I never once sat in it for 10 minutes.

Every time I tried, my mind said: you're relaxing now. There must be something you're supposed to be doing. If you thought hard enough, you'd remember what. And because you're not doing it, it'll come back and bite you later.

So I ran. Every minute. Full speed until physically exhausted, just can’t do more - was the only way to stop in my survival mindset. No hobbies. No writing. Social occasions only when missing them caused more anxiety than attending.

Every win was a stroke of luck. Every setback was my fault — even things outside my control, even random things other people did. All of it folded back into: I'm about to be found out.

That is what high-functioning anxiety looks like from the inside. The outputs kept landing. The person producing them was quietly coming apart.

Anxiety disorder is not stress. It is not burnout. It is not a rough quarter. It is a medical condition. A psychiatrist handles it. Not a therapist, not a psychologist — a psychiatrist. A good one.

I won't go into the specifics of treatment. That's between each person and their doctor.

What I'll tell you is what changed.

Six months in, my life which was a black-and-white tragic movie suddenly turned to a joyful movie in Eastman color.

For the first time in 40 years I saw color of life around me, and paused to take it in. First time in 40 years I wasn’t anxious or scared that I will fail.

40 years … half my lifetime … gone … saved

The job was the same. The pressure was the same. What shifted was my relationship with all of it. The background hum of dread went quiet.

I could box things. One worry stopped bleeding into the next. I started picking things out of joy instead of fear. I became present — really present, not physically-there-mentally-elsewhere. I became more genuine. I started to actually live.

I sat in the garden. I wrote with a fountain pen. I watched the koi without reaching for my phone. I listened to my kids talk about their day without the pull back to work.

And the ratings moved. From 1.9 to 4.9.

After treatment, I thought it was my duty to tell people.

I started with my IIT hostel wing — 36 people I'd lived with for four years. Forty to fifty percent had anxiety disorder. Ten percent had taken intervention. The rest were silently suffering. Two of them sought treatment after we talked. Their lives are now in Eastman color too.

I went wider. Close professional friends, high-achieving operators. Almost half were already being medically treated for it.

One pattern held across both circles. Roughly eighty percent of the people I'd describe as extreme ownership — first to arrive, last to leave, won't let go until every T is crossed, able to foresee disasters most people can't — had anxiety disorder.

The profile isn't incidental. It's structural.

Here is the thing that kept me — and keeps most people like us — from seeking help.

We believe the anxiety is the edge. Take it away and we lose what made us valuable.

That is wrong.

The edge is an internal alarm tuned louder than most people's. It's what makes you spot the risk three steps ahead. It's what makes you carry what others drop. It's what makes your appraisal read incredible ownership, unmatched attention to detail and struggles to delegate, tracks every update in the same review, because those are the same behavior viewed through two lenses.

The alarm is the feature. Always has been.

Anxiety disorder is that same alarm, stuck on. It fires when there's no threat. It scans when there's nothing to scan for. Over years, it doesn't just exhaust you — it narrows you. You see the next crisis, but you miss the meta movement. You track the detail, but lose the pattern above the detail. You're too worried to notice what's in front of you.

Think of Superman the day he starts hearing every voice on earth at once. Before he trains, he's paralyzed. Not because his hearing is broken. Because he can't turn any of it off. Training doesn't dull his power. It lets him focus it.

Treatment is that training.

You don't lose the edge. You get to aim it.

The ownership is the feature. The torture is the bug. You can keep one and drop the other.

I'm living proof. So is half of my professional circle. So are two of my college wingmates. We're still sharp. Still high-ownership. Still first in and last out when it matters. We just stopped paying rent to the alarm.

Don't wait for your ratings to drop. By the time they do, you're no longer high-functioning — the Coyote has finally caught the Road Runner. You're in the crash, not the warning.

The diagnosis is what you feel, long before anything outside gives way.

Can you sit still for 10 minutes without your mind accusing you of forgetting something?

Do you feel like an imposter no matter what you've achieved?

Do you take ownership of things that aren't yours — including random things other people did?

Are you great in a crisis, and does part of you wonder if it's because you live in one?

If three or more describe your inside, don't wait for the edge. Don't wait for a resignation letter.

See a psychiatrist. Not a therapist. Not a psychologist. Not a life coach. A psychiatrist. A good one.

If it turns out you're fine, you've lost one afternoon.

If it turns out you're not, you might get your garden back.

Nobody on the outside can tell you the torture is separable from the ownership. Only someone who lived it knows.

That's why I'm writing this one. Most of the people I know who've come through it stay quiet. The topic is taboo. They keep their treatment private, the way I did for years.

I'm choosing to break that.

Because the only way the next operator with severe anxiety disorder believes she can keep the edge without the torture is if someone who had both, and let one go, says it out loud.

I had both. I let one go. The other got sharper.

If this is you — go find out.

~Discovering Turiya@work@life

Not the only way. Probably not even the best way. Just one practitioner's version that worked.