It’s been a week since I got placed. A whole week where I thought the pressure was finally over, that I could breathe. Placement was supposed to be my big relief, right? But no. Every new responsibility comes with its own kind of pressure. And the world? It doesn’t go easy on you.
For the past few days, I’ve been stuck to my screen, scrolling endlessly through rental websites. Clicking, bookmarking, shortlisting, only to find that nothing actually works out. And you know why I’ve been doing all this? Because yes I got placed. I thought that would solve half my problems. Instead it opened the door to new ones.
And today I finally stepped out. No more hiding behind websites and pictures. I went flat hunting in person. And god, it felt like stepping into a battlefield.
First, the rents. Skyrocketing, even in a tier-2 city. Add a fat security deposit and a 50% brokerage fee on top, and suddenly the cost of living feels higher than my future salary package. How do you even survive that when you’re just an intern?
Second, the “families only” rule. Some landlords look at a single girl and shake their heads. No, not allowed. As if being single automatically disqualifies me from living. And the alternative? PGs, where instead of debugging code, I’d be debugging who stole my Ramen bowl.
Third, the hidden costs. The endless autos, the cabs. Just today, half my monthly pocket money went to tuk-tuk bhaiya, the rest to a cab ride that ended at another dead end. I came back empty-handed, with no flat and no energy left.
But what hurt more than the money or the walking were the words. Some words sting more than bugs. Bugs at least admit they’re there. They give you an error message, they tell you where to look. But people? They throw words like stones and don’t even realize how heavy they land.
I thought becoming a developer was hard. But this messy, unpredictable, unfair thing called adulthood is a whole different kind of debugging. And life, unlike code, doesn’t come with a debugger.
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