The Ship With a Broken Compass

I sailed for twenty years without knowing my compass was broken.

Not metaphorically. Literally: I built a career in luxury hospitality across Sydney’s finest venues. I learned four languages. I managed multilingual teams. I charmed clients in three currencies. And the whole time, my brain was navigating with faulty instruments — pulling me left when I meant to go right, surging forward at 3am when I needed sleep, stalling completely when all I needed to do was send one email.

I know now. Back then, I just thought I was difficult.

Here is what a broken compass looks like from the inside: you are brilliant at emergencies and terrible at Tuesdays. A restaurant floor in crisis? You are the calmest person in the room. A long-term project with no deadline? You spend four hours rearranging the desktop icons and call it work. You speak four languages and still cannot finish a sentence to the person who loves you most. You survive things that would flatten other people — and then fall apart over a parking ticket.

I grew up in Chittagong, Bangladesh, the oldest child of two people who could not stop fighting. My job, from the time I was about thirteen, was to keep the house from splitting apart. I became very good at reading rooms — feeling the tension before it cracked, knowing what each person needed before they asked, absorbing what nobody else wanted to carry. That skill made me exceptional at hospitality. It also meant I had been doing other people’s emotional labour since before I had a word for it.

I moved to Australia in 2005 thinking distance would fix things. It did not. My parents called separately, each one asking me to take their side, one or two hours per call. I was twenty years old and I was already exhausted. I spent two years making bad choices — not to be reckless, but to stop feeling like I was responsible for everything and everyone at once. Nobody explained to me that this is what an undiagnosed, untreated, traumatised brain does when it runs out of options. I just thought I was weak.

I was not weak. I was unequipped.

The diagnosis came in La Réunion, where I now live with my wife — the best decision of my life — and our daughter. A GP told me I was depressed “like big time.” A psychiatrist eventually named the fuller picture. Four decades of my life clicked into place in one afternoon.

This is not a story about despair. It is a story about what happens when you finally get accurate instruments.

A broken compass does not make you a bad sailor. It just means every destination took longer than it should have, every storm was harder than it needed to be, and the miracle is not that you arrived — it is that you kept going without knowing where you were.

I kept going. I am still going. And now I know where I am.

If you are reading this and your compass feels broken too: welcome. You are in good company. And the sea is not as large as it looks.

Sourov Deb is a multilingual writer, educator and advocate living in La Réunion. He writes about mental health, neurodiversity, language and the unglamorous business of rebuilding a life.