Journey through my inner world

A year and a half ago, I was living on autopilot. My whole identity revolved around being the guy who gives the world everything it needs - money, brilliance, solutions, perfect performance. I thought this was just who I was: the achiever, the helper, the one everyone could count on.

But beneath that shiny exterior, I was exhausted. I couldn't understand why I'd say yes to everything, why disappointing someone felt existential, why I couldn't just... stop.

The First Discovery: It's Not About Achievement

When I started my journey to find myself - I discovered I wasn't just the achievement part. I was allowed to travel, feel emotions, to cry, to laugh, to have fun. I didn't have to be defined solely by intelligence and performance.

But that raised a deeper question: Why was achieving so important in the first place?

That's when shame walked out of the shadows.

Meeting Shame

Shame whispered: "If you explore emotions, you'll find things about yourself that are unacceptable. Better to stick with what you know works - being smart, being useful, being indispensable."

I stayed with shame for a while, trying to understand its story. And that's when I discovered shame was coming from my CEO part.

The Overwhelmed CEO

The CEO part used shame as a means to get things done. He was responsible for everything. Every part's happiness, every outcome, every schedule, every need. He was told: "You are responsible for everything."

But here's the thing - he wasn't actually responsible for everything. Someone else was telling him he had to be. Someone was whispering instructions from behind the scenes.

The Social Part's Safety Plan

That someone was my social part, who had a simple but desperate mission: make sure people don't leave.

The social part wasn't people-pleasing for the sake of it. It was people-pleasing for safety. Because people leaving meant being alone, and being alone felt dangerous.

But even the social part was getting its orders from somewhere deeper.

The Slum King - Loneliness warrior!

That's when I met him - the part who'd been running the whole operation. The Slum King had learned a fundamental lesson early in life: "If you keep giving, giving, giving to people, no matter what, that's when people stay."

He wasn't being manipulative. He was being protective. He'd experienced loneliness so deeply - through years of parents focused on twin siblings, countless hospital visits by mom-dad during my brother's childhood illness, early teenage years deliberately isolating himself from potential connections to chase academic success, and lonely nights in early twenties when tears were his only companion - that he designed an entire system to prevent anyone, including himself, from ever feeling that profound ache again.

The Slum King directed the social part: "You go hang out with people." He instructed the CEO: "You make sure everyone's needs are met, everyone's happy, everyone's taken care of." And he established the core rule: "We get valued for our brain and performance - make that our priority, everything else can take a back seat."

Slum King's world view

Slum King believed: "Love is a currency. If you don't earn it, you won't get it. Nobody's born with love."

This voice convinced every part of me that love was conditional, that safety required constant effort, that one mistake could mean abandonment.

For months, I worked to quiet this voice. I learned about abundance - that there's actually plenty of love in the world. Friends proved they wouldn't disappear if I needed space. Han showed me she'd fight for our relationship, not just leave when things got tough.

The voice got quieter, but it didn't disappear entirely.

The CEO's Evolution

As the voice quieted, my CEO part got to evolve. Instead of believing "you are the self" and carrying all responsibility, he learned his real job: help parts connect with the actual self.

He didn't have to solve everything - he just had to facilitate connection and communication.

This was beautiful progress. But we still hadn't found the deepest layer.

Following the Trail to Safety

Me and my healer kept asking: What is this Slum King's voice really seeking? The answer kept coming back to "safety".

At first, it seemed like money. "If I have money, I'm safe. My family is safe." But that led to another question: What are you afraid will happen without money and safety?

The answer revealed something profound about me: My safety isn't individual. I CAN'T be safe on an island while everyone else struggles. My safety is intrinsically linked to my loved ones' safety. If they're not safe, I'm not safe.

But money was just the strategy I'd learned by looking around the world from young age. What had it cost me? My childhood. My time. My space. I'd been so busy earning safety that I'd missed living.

The Final Layer: Loneliness

And then we went deeper still. What would happen if I couldn't guarantee everyone's safety?

That's when the Slum King finally spoke his deepest truth: "Being unsafe means being lonely."

The logic was devastating in its simplicity: If I'm not safe, if my loved ones aren't safe, then we can't be together. And if we can't be together, I'm alone.

This wasn't theoretical. When Han went on a meditation retreat recently, I fell apart. I went back to old patterns, felt lost, disconnected from myself. Because the Slum King remembered what being alone felt like, and that memory scared him more than anything else in the world.

The Boy Behind the Crown

The Slum King isn't broken. He's not something to overcome or eliminate. He's a child who experienced profound loneliness and dedicated his entire existence to ensuring it never happened again - not just to me, but to anyone around me.

He learned that giving was the price of staying connected. He discovered that being useful meant being valued. He figured out that making others happy was the best insurance against abandonment.

All my life choices make sense through his lens: the startups (financial safety), the people-pleasing (social safety), the constant helping (emotional safety), and now building What's Happening (ensuring no one else feels alone).

The Infectious Joy

When the Slum King gets to be a child again, when he's not operating from fear but from genuine curiosity and playfulness, his joy is infectious.

That's the energy people recognize in me during creative moments, adventures, deep conversations. That's when all of AbhinavLand lights up. That's when building something like What's Happening feels like play instead of desperate necessity.

Integration, Not Elimination

The goal isn't to silence the Slum King or convince him he's wrong. His fear of loneliness is based on real experience. The pain he carries isn't irrational - it's evidence of his love and his strength.

Instead, integration means helping him understand he's not alone anymore. Every part in AbhinavLand knows his story now. The CEO doesn't have to work overtime to prevent abandonment. The social part doesn't have to sacrifice my authenticity for approval. The achiever doesn't have to prove my worth constantly.

When the fear comes up - when someone doesn't text back, when I catch myself saying yes when I want to say no, when disappointing someone feels catastrophic - I can recognize the Slum King at work and speak to him directly:

"I see you. I understand why this feels scary. Your fear makes sense. But you're not alone anymore. We don't have to earn love through exhaustion."

The Gift Hidden in the Wound

Here's what I've realized: my deepest wound became my greatest gift. The Slum King's terror of loneliness made me someone who instinctively creates belonging for others.

I'm drawn to deep conversations because surface-level interaction reminds him of being unseen.

I build spaces for vulnerability because he knows what it's like to have nowhere safe to share difficult feelings.I value authentic relationships over networking because he can sense the difference between genuine connection and transactional interaction.

Why I'm building WhatsHappening

It's not just a journaling app - it's my Slum King's gift to the world.

He never wants anyone to feel what he felt. So he's creating a space where people always have someone curious about them, someone asking how they're feeling, someone who cares. It's his way of ensuring no one ever sits alone with their thoughts, wondering if anyone notices they exist.

The same drive that makes me overthink every text message, every interaction, every possible disappointment - that's also the drive that makes me want to solve loneliness for others.

Moving Forward

I'm grateful for this journey, even the painful parts. The Slum King taught me that our deepest fears often hide our greatest gifts. His fear of loneliness created in me an ability to help others feel less alone.

He's not fixed because he was never broken. He's integrated because he finally has what he always needed: a family of parts who know his story, understand his pain, and choose to stay anyway.

The boy who once feared abandonment is now the wise king who ensures no one in his realm ever feels alone. That's not just healing - that's transformation.