Necessary
Required for security, core site functions, and storing your privacy choices.
Details
These technologies cannot be switched off because the website cannot function safely without them.
I do not have a clean founder story for HumanTangle, and I do not want to manufacture one now. I did not figure myself out, solve everything that was wrong, and then write a book explaining how everybody else can do the same. My own life has been much less cooperative than that.
Some of my earliest memories of school involve being bullied. I started avoiding school and making excuses that I was sick. Eventually one of my classmates told my father what was actually happening. My father went to the school with me, complained to the principal, and the boy was moved to another section. After that I remember being treated as the weak kid who needed his father to defend him.
My physical growth also became something other children used against me. I was given demeaning names about my height and size. I heard comments about being weak, about my voice, about what I could or could not carry. For years I mostly did not stand up for myself, and I cannot give you a confident explanation for why.
Something different happened in eighth grade. One boy bullied me and I suddenly kicked him hard enough that he fell. Maybe years of frustration had been building. Maybe that explanation is too convenient when I look backward. I know what happened that day. I do not know everything that produced the reaction. What I do remember is feeling more confident afterward, and that confidence lasted for roughly two years.
College brought many of the old insecurities back. My height had stopped at around five feet five, I was very thin, and people found new comparisons to make. Some students had cars while I might arrive by taxi or walk a long distance from home. My height, body and circumstances became things I increasingly judged myself by as well.
I started looking for ways to fix them. I bought height-growth ebooks, tried products making claims about increasing height and spent a long time wanting some version of that promise to work. Eventually I stopped believing those claims. Knowing that did not make the insecurity disappear. When I married in 2019, comments about my height were still there. People compared me with taller cousins and relatives and commented on how small the groom looked. By then the subject was old, but it could still reach me.
In 2020 my anxiety and depression had become difficult enough that I asked for psychiatric help. I remember crying in front of my father and telling him that something was wrong with me, although I did not know what it was. I had trouble speaking confidently and wanted somebody to tell me what was happening.
That began several years of treatment. I saw four psychiatrists over time, medicines changed and different explanations were considered. From my side, there was no magic pill. I kept looking because I still did not feel well. During that period I also gained considerable weight, which a doctor told me was a side effect of the antidepressant treatment I was taking. When I had been thin, people mocked me for being thin. After I gained weight, the comments simply moved somewhere else. I was also described at different times as lazy, incapable, a loner and mentally ill.
Eventually I started anticipating judgment even when nobody had said anything yet. I became increasingly conscious of what I imagined relatives or other people might think about me, and I isolated myself. I stopped attending some weddings and avoided meeting relatives because I expected to be judged when I arrived.
Toward the end of 2023, I started taking tramadol. The effect I experienced was euphoria and energy, and I kept returning to it. Over time I needed more to get the effect I was chasing. I continued until October 2025, and by then I was addicted to it.
Around that time my wife asked me to see another psychiatrist after one of her colleagues recommended him. I had already seen four psychiatrists, so I did not expect much from another appointment. When she asked me to try another one, I said to her, “What’s the point?”
My wife asked me to go once and said that if I was not satisfied, we did not have to go again.
I went. What I appreciated was fairly simple: he listened longer than I had become used to being listened to. He told me to taper off tramadol over fourteen days and come back. I followed the taper, but the withdrawal that followed was much harder than I expected. I spent roughly two months mostly in bed with almost no energy. I continued seeing him and the medicines continued changing, while the depression and lack of energy remained.
Over time he told me that he did not think ordinary anxiety and depression alone explained what he was seeing and referred me to a psychologist. After further assessment I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Later I was also diagnosed with bipolar II, and that diagnosis was subsequently revised to bipolar I.
Those diagnoses matter to my treatment, but I do not think they give me a key that can unlock every earlier part of my life. I cannot now declare that bipolar disorder explains why I rarely defended myself at school, that borderline personality disorder explains every insecurity I developed, or that either diagnosis settles why I made every poor decision. I would be doing exactly what I have become uncomfortable doing to other people: starting with an outcome and placing a confident explanation over it because the explanation is available.
I am still living with both conditions and still taking prescribed medication. I still experience depressive episodes and manic episodes. My psychiatrist has been clear that treatment can bring improvement, while telling me not to expect miracles. I do not know what the next few years will look like, and I do not have a better ending to offer simply because this is a page written by a founder.
I also do not want to pretend that everything above is the hidden origin story of HumanTangle. I cannot honestly tell you that a childhood incident planted the idea for a book decades later, or that one diagnosis suddenly made the publication make sense. My experience is one person’s experience. It cannot establish a psychological mechanism, prove a general rule or tell me what another person is privately experiencing.
It does sit beside the standard I want HumanTangle to keep.
The book and publication deal with questions that attract fast explanations. Someone avoids something, so we call it fear. Someone keeps repeating a behavior, so we call it habit. Someone knows what they should do and does something else, so we decide they lack discipline. A diagnosis can become tempting in the same way if we start using it as an explanation for everything that happened before it.
Sometimes an explanation is right. Sometimes several things matter. Sometimes the ordinary explanation is enough. There are also times when what happened is clearer than why it happened.
I can look back over my own life and identify things that mattered. Bullying happened. Insecurity happened. I made choices. I became addicted to tramadol. I sought treatment. I received diagnoses that continue to matter clinically. Other people affected me, and over time I also became capable of judging myself without needing anybody else to do it first.
How all of those things interacted across more than three decades is a much harder claim.
I don’t know.
I am comfortable leaving part of the answer there. HumanTangle does not need my life to resolve into a lesson before the work can ask better questions. The standard I want to keep is simpler: look closely at what happened, separate what we know from what we are adding to it, allow a good explanation to win when it earns its place, and leave uncertainty visible when it has not.
That standard applies to the people HumanTangle writes about.
It applies to the ideas in the book.
It applies to me too.
Rehan Anjum
Founder, HumanTangle
This Founder Note describes my own lived experience and my reported psychiatric diagnosis and treatment history. It is included to provide personal context for HumanTangle, not to provide medical or mental-health advice and not to establish a general explanation for another person’s behavior, symptoms or condition.
HumanTangle does not provide diagnosis, treatment, psychotherapy, psychiatric assessment, medication guidance or individualized mental-health care. My diagnoses, treatment history and personal experiences should not be used to diagnose yourself or another person, to begin, stop or change medication, or to replace care from an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.
People can have experiences or behaviors that appear similar while having different causes, diagnoses, circumstances and appropriate treatments. HumanTangle therefore does not use my personal history as a template for interpreting somebody else’s mental health.