By Preet Bulchandani
There was a time, not too long ago, when my life resembled a game show where every door you opened had a pie behind it, ready to smash into your face. Except in my version, the pies were my own meticulously baked disasters, coming fresh out of the oven of what I liked to call my uni-induced existential crisis. As an international student stranded oceans away from the familiarity of home, university life became less of a walk in the park and more of a marathon through a minefield while balancing porcelain plates on my head. I was juggling not one, but two degrees, a chaotic timetable of five units, and two jobs that were supposed to be my safety net—a net as reliable as a parachute made of toilet paper.
And just when I thought I was getting the hang of this circus act, life, the cheeky ringleader, decided it was time for the grand finale. Over the span of three days, my world didn’t just fall apart, it did a triple somersault, landed on a banana peel, and slid right into a pie of spectacular misfortune. What unfolded felt like an episode of a sitcom so bizarre, you’d swear the writers were making it up as they went along. The laugh track was definitely broken, replaced by the awkward silence of an audience too stunned to decide whether they should laugh or weep.
Day one kicked off with a bang, or more accurately, a snip. There I was, at the hair salon where I worked, armed with scissors and a head full of hair dye formulas, when I should have been mentally reviewing case laws for my next class. Turns out, obsessing over the legal analysis of my assignment while simultaneously attempting to mix a complex hair colour wasn’t a recipe for success (trust me, this was my lowest as a hairdresser). By the end of my shift, I had created something that resembled pink fairy floss when my client wanted a pastel pink hue from setting skies. As I stood there, a cape in hand, surrounded by locks of hair that I had coloured with the precision of a blindfolded toddler, my boss delivered my walking papers, and I couldn’t help but think: Well, at least the day can’t get worse.
But life always has a way of upping the ante. Enter day two, featuring the heart-wrenching exit of my university sweetheart. There were no dramatic confrontations or tearful accusations; just a cold digital text message that hit my phone with the subtlety of a Shakespearean betrayal. “We need to talk,” it read, the classic prelude to heartbreak. Hours later, I found myself tied to the train track, and with no further explanation, I was single. The message was clear, but the reasons were as absent as my now ex’s sense of timing.
The grand closing of this three-day tragicomedy unfolded on day three, in what I might describe as a masterclass in procrastination. The night before my thesis deadline, I set multiple alarms, each with a label more desperate than the last: ‘Seriously, get up,’ ‘This is your future,’ and ‘Don’t make me come in there!’ Yet the morning saw me hitting the snooze button with the denial of someone believing five more minutes would somehow stretch into another day. By the time I blinked the sleep from my eyes, the deadline had whooshed by, and with it, my hopes of passing. As I later trudged to class, my incomplete thesis clutched in my hands like a ticket to academic purgatory, I could almost hear the sarcastic applause from my professors echoing down the university halls.
In just seventy-two hours, I had been fired, dumped, and academically disgraced or to put it in my best friend’s words – I was out of bucks, didn’t need the books and had an overflowing broken heart. Sitting amidst the wreckage of what once resembled a well-organized life, I couldn’t help but laugh—because, at that point, what else can you do?
In life, sometimes you find yourself in an episode that feels like it’s written by a sadist with a cruel sense of humour. There I was, knee-deep in the existential muck that is the early twenties, as directionless as a leaf in a whirlpool. Every morning, the alarm clock sounded less like a wake-up call and more like the starting gun for a race I had already lost. My room had transformed into a landscape of dirty laundry and old pizza boxes—an archaeological dig through the layers of my recent adversities. Somewhere beneath a pile of unopened bills and discarded clothes was my floor, or so the legends would claim. My job at the local retail store wasn’t exactly the career high I had envisioned for myself. Each shift passed in a blur of barcode beeps, with each ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’ alert from the self-checkout machines feeling like a personal reproach. But the relentless march to my job remained, because hey, this queen needed to pay her bills, right?
Money was so tight that Netflix felt like an unforgivable luxury, yet there I was, paying for it instead of groceries, because let’s face it—sometimes, you need to choose the lesser of two depressions. The shows I watched were no longer escapes—they were parallel universes where problems seemed charming and always resolved by the end of a 30-minute episode. I envied those fictional lives, so neat, where even the messiest situations were tied up with a witty punchline and a lesson learned. Skipping lectures became my new norm. The black hole of thoughts that was my mind made concentrating on coursework as effective as trying to read on a rollercoaster. Each skipped class was both a symptom and a cause of the anxiety that kept tightening its grip on me, a vicious cycle that I couldn’t pedal my way out of.
I knew living life on my own had its own set of challenges, but nothing quite prepared me for the day I hit rock bottom. It was not just a figure of speech; it felt like an actual plunge into a void from which there seemed no escape. The instability was already jarring, and the notification of an impending sixth eviction landed like a knife into a pre-existing gunshot wound. You see, for the first twenty years of my life, I lived in the same place, never moved, and thus didn’t know what it felt like to pack, set up, and repack. However, in just two years in Brisbane, I had moved house five times. Now I had no money, no place to go, and to cap it off, the one person I thought I could count on had left me with nothing but a breakup text.
There’s a peculiar loneliness that envelops you when you’re sitting in a half-packed room, the floor littered with remnants of a life never quite settled. The irony of my situation was palpable—I had come here to study, to build a future, and now I was scrambling just to put a roof over my head. And yes, while some might say I was still better off than many—above the poverty line, they’d remind me as if it were a consolation—such comments felt like salt rubbing into my open wounds. I was the kind of broke that gnaws at you, reminding you of every financial misstep and every bit of bad luck.
There are days when loneliness isn’t just an abstract feeling but a palpable presence, almost like an uninvited housemate who refuses to leave your room. On days like that, after dragging myself through shifts at work, I’d end up on a bench in the park. There, between sobs that shook my shoulders, I found solace in the most unexpected of confidants— Geraldine. Why Geraldine? Because there’s something hilariously heartbreaking about being so lonely that you not only start talking to trees but also start naming them after quirky, mispronounced French names by beloved Indian uncles. Every time I said her name, it reminded me of my uncle back home trying his best to sound worldly, calling out ‘Jeral-deene’ in a thick accent that would butcher any Frenchman’s ears. That thought alone would bring a reluctant smile to my face, even as tears streamed down it. Talking to Geraldine was both my lowest and most ludicrous point. I mean, there I was, a grown adult, pouring my heart out to a tree because it felt like she was the only one in this entire country who wouldn’t walk away—or couldn’t, technically, because, you know, she’s a tree. I’d tell her about the eviction notice that felt like a kick in the gut, the job that was sucking my soul dry, and how I was ghosted by someone who promised to navigate this mess with me. And Geraldine, bless her wooden heart, stood there stoically, her leaves whispering what I imagined was tree-ish wisdom—or maybe just the wind. I fancied she was sympathetic, dropping an occasional leaf as if in solidarity, or perhaps she was just trying to politely tell me to move on. Either way, talking to her was the one part of my day that didn’t suck completely, except for the part where I had to explain to a curious jogger that no, I wasn’t practicing a monologue for an avant-garde play. I was just having a mental breakdown in a foreign language.
But here’s the thing about hitting rock bottom—it’s oddly grounding. There’s a strange comfort in it, a bizarre sense of clarity that comes from knowing things can’t get much worse. And in that clarity, there’s a perverse sort of freedom. Suddenly, you start romanticizing the pain and sadness, thinking maybe, just maybe, this intense, all-consuming agony could be the making of you. Three days, precisely 259,200 seconds, was all it took to break me. But what if three days was all it took to remake me? We’ve all had lows that keep getting lower—like a limbo contest held at a gathering of pessimists—and highs that keep getting higher. But this low taught me the fine art of surrendering, because let’s face it, when your life starts resembling the plot from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, but instead it’s How to Lose Your Life in Just Three, you know you’ve got to start taking notes.
Geraldine knows all too well that I’m still struggling to get by. But hey, at least I’m trying, and isn’t that half the battle? So, here’s a PSA for everyone reading this in their twenties: If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. But if life gives you nothing but ramen and overdue bills, consider making a budget spreadsheet—it’s less refreshing but more practical. If your grades are plummeting faster than my social life on a Friday night, maybe it’s time to hit the books a little harder, or at least find a study buddy who won’t let you doze off in the library. If you break someone’s heart—or even your own—give yourself permission to feel all the feels but don’t wallow too long. Ice cream helps, but so does putting on your favourite tune and dancing out the despair. And if you find that your list of friends is shrinking faster than my bank balance, consider it an opportunity to connect with yourself. Or better yet, go out and talk to a tree. You might find the company more enlightening than expected. Geraldine, for instance, never interrupts.
Remember, no one has it all figured out, and if they claim they do, they’re probably selling something, and you need hope, not another self-help book.
Preet is a third-year law and creative writing student. Her three years in Australia have gifted her a treasure trove of high highs and low lows, perfect fodder for her slam poetry and non-fiction. She thrives on the dark, humorous, and twisted because, let’s face it, that’s what keeps us all laughing through the chaos.
