CAREERS · Contributor

Life Isn't Fair. I Stopped Waiting for It to Be.

Hundreds of silences for one yes. A pandemic that erased my start, a cutoff missed by half a mark, and door after door shut before I'd finished a sentence. This is how I stopped waiting for life to be fair and started playing the odds instead.

By
Manisha Sarkar
Published
June 23, 2026
Issue
03 · June 2026
Life Isn't Fair. I Stopped Waiting for It to Be.
Submitted by Manisha Sarkar · Build With Her Magazine

# Life Isn't Fair. I Stopped Waiting for It to Be.

Life isn't fair. And the day you really understand that is the day it stops breaking you and starts building you.

I learned it the hard way.

Just as I graduated and was finally ready to begin, a pandemic hit. Every opportunity stopped. Overnight. A fresher, from a small town, with nothing built yet. That was devastating. I hadn't even started, and it already felt like it was over.

So I turned to government exams. And I missed the final cutoff by 0.25 marks. Half a mark. I watched someone from another region clear the same exam sitting ten marks below me, just because they were born somewhere else.

Do you know what that does to you? You slowly start to believe the problem is you.

Is that fair? No. It isn't.

Then I tried to find my way into work, and got refused before I'd even finished my sentence. Judged on paper for "not enough experience," before a single person let me show what I could actually do.

Is that fair? No. It isn't.

For a long time, all of it made me bitter. I kept waiting for someone to notice. To be fair. To finally save me.

Nobody did. Nobody was ever going to.

So I stopped waiting.

I started working harder to sharpen my skills. Building, learning, getting good enough that the work would speak before anyone could check my paper. And I started doing the one thing no one could take from me.

I started showing up.

When I was finding my way back into tech, I reached out to hundreds of people. I wasn't asking anyone to carry me. When I felt completely lost, all I needed was direction. Just the address to the next stop.

Most never replied. Every silence felt like a small no. Some days it felt like the whole world had quietly agreed I wasn't even worth a response.

But a few replied. And one of them, just one, opened the door that started everything.

Hundreds of silences for one yes. And that one yes was enough.

That's the magic of probability. It doesn't care where you're from, what your marks were, or who shut the door in your face before. It responds to exactly one thing: how many times you try. The more chances you take at failing, the more chances you create to win.

Maybe your odds are low right now. Mine were. But every attempt is another draw, and you only need one to land.

So you try. You get ignored. You show up again the next morning anyway. Most of it leads nowhere.

But not all of it.

One reply. One door. One yes. And that single yes can change the entire shape of your life.

So no, life isn't fair. But you were never meant to wait for fair. You were meant to keep showing up until the math finally turns in your favor.

And here's the one promise I made myself through all of it: I will never be one of those closed doors.

About the contributor
Manisha Sarkar
Co-Founder · Build With Her Magazine

As Co-Founder & CTO of Oz Lunara, I talk about building with AI agents, shipping production security infrastructure as a DevOps engineer

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