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Not There Yet
Not There Yet is an honest audio journal of weekly lessons, identity shifts, and real-time reflections from a student still figuring it out — and sharing the process along the way.
Not There Yet
Ep. 2 —Winter Didn’t Kill Me, But It Tried.
I came from 40°C sun to -30°C silence.
In this episode, I open up about the semester that broke my body, blurred my mind, and introduced me to something I never expected in friendships — toxicity.
It's not just my story, though. If you've ever felt disconnected in a crowd, emotionally cold in a room full of people, or like the drama around you wasn’t even yours to begin with… this one’s for you.
I also introduce something new: a voice that isn’t mine. One that listens, reflects, and speaks when needed — not to guide, but to observe.
Episode 2 isn’t about rising. It’s about staying afloat.
And sometimes, that’s enough.
🎙️ New episodes weekly.📱 Instagram: @thekhanayaan
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🎙️ New episodes weekly.
📱 Instagram: @thekhanayaan
I didn't know how cold could break your body and how drama could feel like an intense disease, but that's what that semester taught me. Hey, if you're watching this, then thank you Really, because my first episode was raw. It was rough. I mean, it was my first ever episode. You guys liked it, you guys reacted on it, commented on it, shared it, and even if you guys just sat in silence, I guess that's more than enough.
Speaker 1:So welcome to the second episode of Not there Yet, and this time I have somebody else with me. You're gonna be hearing a voice, a voice that's not human. It does not belong to a certain face. It does not feel what I feel, but what it does is it listens and it does speak, but it only speaks when needed. So let's see where it takes us today. So in my first episode, we talked about my first ever semester in university. Now, in this episode, we're going to be moving one step ahead. We're going to be talking about my second semester, and that's the winter semester. This will also be exploring my second version of the experiment that I was holding in life.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, now, I came from a place that used to go all the way up to 45 to 50 degrees celsius in peak summer, and that, for you, is the Dubai heat, is the driest weather, sometimes very humid, and it's constantly moving. Now, in contrast to that, quite suddenly, enough for the human body I slid into the complete opposite spectrum of the world, a place where temperatures go all the way down to negative 35 degrees Celsius as well, and that for you is Winnipeg Cold, icy, chilled, just absolutely still. Now, quite naturally, I got sick. Now that wasn't flu sick, it was system sick. Now, what's system sick? The way I define system sick is that it is just high blood pressure, little bit of breathing issues, numb fingers, just dull chest pains. You know, all of this takes you to just one place, and that is the emergency rooms. Now, the doctors in emergency rooms, all of them, tried to convince me that hey Han, you're all good, your blood tests are all fine. I know that your BP is high, but you're all good. But I knew I wasn't.
Speaker 2:I don't have a body, but I've seen what happens when someone is removed from warmth and dropped into cold silence the body hesitates, the rhythm stutters and something deep inside starts slipping. You know how people say mind over matter. Well, sometimes matter wins.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I wasn't physically sick, it was just the isolation, the lack of sun. When you live in a place like Winnipeg, months pass by and you do not see the sun above your head, you don't see the blue in the skies, you do not see the green in the grass around you, all you see is white and gray. So in a manner, I was living back in the 80s when in a black and white film, basically because that sort of gloomy weather brings you isolation, it brings you such intense lack of sun and then slowly but surely, it gets into your bloodstream.
Speaker 1:You don't cry about it, you don't tell anybody about it, because there are just some things that you cannot express. But here I am today. I'm trying my best to bring it out of me in a manner that you, sitting right there, can sort of maybe relate to it or maybe just feel what I felt at that time, right anyway. So you stop sharing with people how you're feeling. You don't cry, but you just naturally become, because when your body goes long enough through the same sort of pain, same sort of anything, it adapts to it, and sometimes it doesn't know that if it's adapting to the right thing or the wrong thing. And, surely enough, I adapted to the slightly wrong path the data matches your story.
Speaker 2:More people experience loneliness and depression in places with low sunlight, extreme cold and sudden transitions. But those reports don't capture what it feels like and honestly, I think your story does that better than science ever could.
Speaker 1:I guess. So Now, something else changed that winter. Now, what I'm going to be sharing with you now, I think, is going to be the most relatable to all of you. That's because I know for a fact that it's just not me who felt it. It is every student of our generation currently who has felt the same thing, and I know this because I've talked to enough people. I have friends in different parts of the world who have told me the exact same thing. So what is that thing? What changed? That changed for everybody. Friends, people, people around changed.
Speaker 1:Have you watched inside out 2, the second part? You know how they show that new feelings and emotions start developing inside you. And there's this one scene where nostalgia, as an emotion, walks into the girl's head and then all the other emotions push it out, saying that not right now, come back later. Right, the same way as we are growing right now, I think emotions are creeping into us slowly but surely, and I think the second semester of university was a semester in which a lot of people around us went through this one common emotion An emotion of toxicness, an emotion of feeling for jealousy, an emotion of drama that came into all of us.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, in a nutshell, the people around us changed, our group changed, right, the vibe changed, the dynamic changed. All of it just felt a little bit off and, like I said, I wasn't the only one. I have friends in the us, in the uk, back home in dubai, and all of them were messaging me the same things johan, um, do you have group drama, do you like? Do you feel like things are feeling a little off? Do you do things feel weird? It's like people are suddenly switching off. They're becoming cold, they're becoming defensive, right?
Speaker 2:I've watched humans shift in patterns. When increases, control becomes a craving, drama becomes a distraction. I don't feel emotion, but I can recognize its aftermath.
Speaker 1:Now the thing is, I wasn't naturally innocent enough as well. I pulled away too. I blocked a few people as well. I let things die as well, without trying to resolve them. Now, that's not because I didn't care, it's just because I was so tired. I was so tired of that energy between me and those people. I was so tired because of the pressure, the pressure of performance.
Speaker 1:What I mean by that is and I feel like a lot of you are going to relate to this At that time when you're going through something like this, you are going to relate to this at that time when you're going through something like this, you feel the pressure to perform according to how you perceive the others are going to like you this. This is also called people pleasing. To elaborate, it is you trying to act a certain way, a way that you think the other people are going to approve of you, and to me, that did not come naturally. Some people it comes as naturally as ever. They are just that. They are people pleasers. They are people who just want to be in the good books of everybody else, and that's something that didn't come so naturally to me, and that is why I felt a pressure because of that perhaps you didn't lose them, perhaps they were never really there.
Speaker 2:People often connect from comfort, not connection, and when comfort ends, so does the illusion.
Speaker 1:I think that line is going to sit a long way for me. People connect from comfort and not from connection. It does sound a little harsh, but I do feel that it's just the harsh reality and, like the saying goes, that reality is often disappointing. So yeah, let me say it again People connect from comfort and not from connection, and I think I learned it the hard way. So just as winter ended, so did my semester two, ended right. And just as winter ended, so came in spring, and then so came in summer, and then after that followed was fall, and then again winter, and yada, yada, yada. It keeps going. It's a cycle. Same way this phase ended as well.
Speaker 1:But some things, even when they end, they don't seem like an ending, and that is because it is not an ending that you wanted, it is not an ending that you would have liked it to be right, I like stuff to end in a win, stuff to end in a success story, but here there was no win. There was no glow up moment there was, but funnily enough, there was no win. There was no glow up moment there was, but funnily enough, there was no breakdown either. I just stayed afloat, and that's something we don't talk about enough right, we don't talk about the in-betweens. We don't realize that sometimes surviving is the story, because I didn't rise but I didn't disappear either, and maybe, just maybe, just maybe that is enough.
Speaker 2:There is a quiet strength in survival, a version of growth that doesn't bloom, it just endures. You lived that version and that that deserves to be told so, if you are still here, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to me, hopefully relating with me, because that just means that we have all not made it yet, we're not there yet, but we are doing things to make it, we are making an effort to make it. I know that that semester it doesn't seem like much, right, it doesn't seem like a lot happened, because a lot for us, like I said, is a win or a small success story or something like that. But now that I look back at it, I think that it taught me a very, very important thing. It taught me the power of pausing, a power of coming to a slow rest in life. A power of coming to a slow rest in life, rest in the race of life and sometimes just watching, listening, and that can be as small as stopping for a few moments every day and just breathing, just admiring what's around you and, most importantly, being thankful of what's around you. Every story, be it success or not, be it the in-between or be it the extreme, it teaches you how to heal. And my story from that semester it taught me how to heal alone.
Speaker 1:Winter semester slowly but surely blended into the summer semester. Guess what? During that time. We moved out my first ever move out Me and my two friends. We moved out my first ever move out Me and my two friends. We got our first apartment. I got to build a home and, as that semester ended, eventually, after four months, my main third semester came in, which was the fall semester of the year 2024.
Speaker 1:Now, this semester, I like to call it my comeback semester. I told to myself that I'm gonna detach, lock in and rebuild, but that's a story for next episode. That's episode three, where I'm gonna tell you a lot more about that third version of mine, the version that actually taught myself how to come back up and, step by step, take bigger steps, and I guess that's how the fire inside me did not die. It just needed the winter to pass by, and it taught me a lot of stuff. So, yeah, thanks for listening, and if you could relate to even a single thing from whatever I said, whatever I yabbed about, please do like and share and spread the word, because all of us, we're in this together, we're trying to figure life out together. We're all adulting and we're not there yet, but we will be Someday. So why not do it together? A flame doesn't die by lighting other candles, right? So, yeah, thank you. Thank you for listening to both of us. Bye.