“The world is about people, not about places.”

I’m Himal Mandalia and you meet me at a crossroads in my life. I am currently travelling the world sharing my thoughts and experiences as a sort of stream of consciousness online, but it wasn’t always this way.

My parents were both immigrants, my father was from Uganda and my mother from Gujarat. Both Indian. Living with my parents was difficult. I resonate heavily with the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. My dad was schizophrenic and made my early years difficult as he didn’t work and spent what money we did get at the bookies. He also tried to home school me as he was paranoid of the school system. He was well educated but mental health issues meant his attempts at teaching were harsh, covering topics far beyond what I could comprehend or was capable of as a child. So, from a young age my education and home life were chaotic. Which led to me running away and wandering the streets of London on my own when I was seven, taking the tube to airports and eventually being picked up by the police and taken home. That would happen many times.

Fast forward, while I did eventually end up going to school, I left with no qualifications due to huge gaps in attendance. I worked retail jobs and very much felt like my life was being wasted with no clear way forward or future. I was essentially self-taught in everything mostly through books and interested in coding and computers and many other things. Even the way I spoke was affected from an early age. At 23 I decided to go to university as a mature student.

During university my father died and was found five days after, alone in his flat. I had to deal with this alongside studying but still managed to achieve over 95% in most of my exams. Then, when it came to my dissertation, I ended up focusing entirely on the practical final year project and didn’t do the dissertation at all and so dropped out.

“This was a train wreck…”

Instead with what was left of my student loan I ran away to New York. I spent the summer in a rooftop hostel in Harlem meeting people, having interesting conversations and drinking too much beer. I pushed out all thoughts of university and my future unwilling to face up to the sense of failure I felt at the time.

I met a guy in the hostel who had worked in the tech industry and was doing freelance work, so I decided to join up with him. We ended up renting a place in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, he took advantage of me and I never got paid for the work I had done. I went back to the UK and decided not to rejoin him. Then he started sending me death threats and I also learned he had a criminal record. That, and the sense of failure from not completing university, put me in a pit of depression.

I’d suffered from depression throughout my life but this was my lowest point.

“I had no other options.”

I withdrew completely into myself, into despair and hopelessness. I accepted that my life wasn’t going anywhere and there wasn’t any reason to go on. I ended up spending a good few years this way.

I disappeared into World of Warcraft, where I would organise group activities within the game. I also spent a lot of time baking or making friends with the cats in the neighbourhood. I began to notice that I was good at ‘soft skills’, and whatever I did I would always become obsessed with it.

I lived in that mindset for a couple of years until I went to Gujarat with my mum for the first time. While I was there, I was able to do some travelling and although I wouldn’t say I came back with any revelations I did return refreshed. I decided to turn my phone back on after two years and get in touch with old friends.

One of the friends I got in touch with was a guy I’d worked with in a photography shop when I was 19. As we reconnected, he was complaining to me about the systems he used at work and so my ears pricked up and I offered to code a system to help him out. I felt somewhat excited to be working on something again. After working on it for a couple of months, we trialled it with his staff during events, I took on feedback and kept developing the system each time we used it. He then suggested that I should pitch to sell my system to the company he worked for. It was a bit of a pipedream and we both knew nothing would ever really come of it, but I wasn’t devastated by this. I was now seeing things in a different light and believing that I could do good and be useful. Off the back of this, I decided to create a CV and upload it to various websites.

Upon uploading my CV on a Friday, by Monday morning my phone was ringing nonstop and my inbox was flooded. I unknowingly had skills which were very much in demand in the tech world at the time. I guess that’s really where my career started. From my first job I advanced up the ladder with speed. I began working for the government helping creating digital services and then rapidly rose to working with leadership and eventually took on a permanent role.

Eventually I reached a point of burnout and realised I needed a break. I wanted to go see more of what was out there so…

“I left all that to walk the world.”

I’ve travelled all around the world meeting and talking to people – something that I’ve always found myself doing from a young age. Creating connections and friendships and learning from others. That’s what I was missing when I was at my lowest. When I completely withdrew from society, I withdrew any possibility of connecting with those around me and the opportunities those people bring with them.

“The world is about people, not about places.”

That brings me to now, I’ve met so many people who are spreading positive messages and I have begun to do that myself. I have shared my stories of travelling the streets of London as a child with the street kids of Uganda. What I also want to spread is that it is fine to fail, the possibility of succeeding is increased when you engage more with your own interests. Whatever happens, keep going, tell yourself to try the next thing or even to go:

“on to the next failure…”

This blogpost was written by Megan Morris on behalf of Tales to Inspire.

If you’d like to know more about Himal’s journey, he has written several personal stories on his own blog: