I Created My Own Prison

And I couldn’t figure out how to escape.

I’d wake up, check off tasks, attend meetings, hit the gym, sleep, and repeat. I wrote because deadlines demanded it, rather than satiating my desire for connection and creativity. I kept myself busy learning new skills and trying to balance mind, body, and spirit. But every evening, I’d sit with my thoughts, knowing something’s missing and that something had to change.

Worst of all, this prison was mental. The door wasn’t even locked. I just convinced myself I was the problem, and not the environment I created.

So for months, I threw myself headfirst into everything I possibly could. Learned to ski red slopes in four days after never standing on skis. I worked alongside founders who’d built and sold multiple successful companies, absorbing how they thought, how they moved through problems, and how they recovered from failures.

I picked up chess. I traveled to Portugal and fell in love with the food, atmosphere, and painfully hilly streets. I watched my team, Manchester United, play live for the first time – something I’d dreamed about since childhood.

Each experience taught me something and felt meaningful in isolation.

But the loop was broken. I was learning, but never sharing.

There were dozens of story-worthy moments with each experience, but I didn’t know where the story itself should exist. Notebook? Journal? Online? Is it even worth writing and curating ideas for platforms that didn’t care about my actual thoughts?

It took me a long time to recognise that everything I’ve created since the summer of 2021 has been shaped to match Twitter’s algorithm or LinkedIn’s tone. Each idea would get diluted before being published, and if it wasn’t published, it was abandoned.

I was creatively homeless.

And I’d done it to myself.

I didn’t lack ideas, nor did I lack the skill. I could write, I could build, I could connect dots others missed. But what I lacked was a place where all of this could live on my terms. A home base where the work mattered more than the metrics, where I could write because I had something worth saying, not because I had to feed the machine.

Four weeks ago, something shifted.

I joined a phenomenal course called Act Two. In the first lesson, we were shown a map of the world from 150AD. It was incomplete. Speculative. Full of blank spaces. Over centuries, however, each generation filled in more detail, correcting assumptions from the past, and sharing what was truly discovered.

“The map of the internet is still being drawn. We think we’re late to the game, but we’re barely past the medieval period of what’s possible online.”

That’s the moment I realized my self-imposed cage wasn’t real.

I just had the wrong map and couldn’t see it.

I’d been operating from someone else’s incomplete sketch of what was possible, accepting their thoughts, perceptions, and limitations as natural law. But maps get redrawn. New territory gets claimed. I just had to allow myself to explore.

So here’s what I’m building.

A home on the internet. Starting with this newsletter, expanding to a vibe-coded website where everything lives under my own imperfect roof, and eventually onto YouTube for the stories that need to be spoken.

The foundation is simple:

I write about what matters, when it matters, and how it matters.

I’m saying no to:

• Writing because I have to

• Curating ideas for other people’s algorithms

• Waiting for permission to build something real

I’m saying yes to:

• Shipping experiments before they’re perfect

• Learning in public, sharing what I discover

• Creating something only I could build

I don’t know if this will work. I don’t know if anyone will care. But I’m done pretending the cage has a lock.

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Here’s what I want to know:

What’s the one experiment you’ve been avoiding? Not the someday project or the maybe-when-I’m-ready idea. What’s the thing you could start this week if you stopped negotiating with yourself?

Hit reply, I would love to hear from you.

And if you’d like, share this with a friend who's been neglecting their creative experiment.

In the next edition, I’m going to share the system I’m applying to turn this from intention into daily practice, a new approach to creative experiments, and how I’m building momentum without burning out.

Thanks for being here

Pranav