Back to the Magazine|Archive Issue 03

- June 2026

Career Journey
- 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.

MS

By

Manisha Sarkar

Published

June 23, 2026

Issue

03

- June 2026

Read 5 min

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 chance 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.

A Note From The Editors

Enjoying these stories?

Build With Her exists to document the journeys, lessons, challenges, and breakthroughs of women building in technology.

You do not need a perfect career.

You do not need a large audience.

You only need a story that might help another woman.

Share Your Story

📌 Life Isn't Fair. I Stopped Waiting for It to Be. (Kalyan)
🏢 Build with Her
📍 Kalyan