![A quiet riverside reflecting solitude](/riverside-solitude.webp) I have been trying to write this post for two weeks. Every time I open the page, the words go small and quiet. I write a line. I delete it. I make tea. I come back. I write the same line in a different shape. I delete that too. Then I close the laptop and tell myself I will try again tomorrow. So this is me, today, not closing the laptop. ## The short version Something is wrong. Not the kind that goes away in a week with rest and soup. The kind where you sit in a small room with bright lights and a soft chair and someone in a calm voice tells you something that changes the shape of your year. I will not write the word here. Not yet. Maybe one day, but not today. For now, I just want you to know that I am okay. I am scared, but I am okay. Those two things can be true at the same time. I did not believe that for a while. I believe it now. ## What scared looks like People think being scared is loud. In films it is loud. Someone shouts. Someone cries on the floor. Someone breaks a glass. Real scared, the kind I have been carrying, is quiet. It is forgetting if you locked the door. It is reading the same sentence four times. It is making toast and then standing in the kitchen for ten minutes because you forgot why you came in. It is laughing at a video and then, halfway through the laugh, going still, because your body remembered something your brain was trying not to. It is small. Most people would not see it from outside. But it sits in your chest like a small stone, and you carry the small stone everywhere, and after a while your back hurts from carrying it, and you do not even remember when you picked it up. I want to put the stone down for a bit. That is part of why I am writing this. ## What I am stepping away from I am stepping away from most of my work for a while. I do not know how long. I have stopped trying to guess. Every time I guess, I am wrong, and being wrong about your own body is a strange kind of tired. So I am not guessing anymore. I am just saying, for now, I am stepping away. That means the writing here will slow down. The replies will be slower. Some things will not happen at all. If you sent me a message and I did not answer, it is not because I did not see it. It is because I saw it on a hard day and the hard day won. I am sorry about that. I am also trying to stop saying sorry for being a person. ## The hospital is not the whole story I want to be careful here, because I do not want this post to sound like the hospital is my whole life now. It is not. Yes, there are appointments. Yes, there are tests with long names. Yes, there is a small plastic band on my wrist sometimes, and the band has my name on it, and I am still not used to seeing my own name printed like that, like a label on a box. But there is also this morning. I made tea. The tea was too hot and I burned my tongue. I was annoyed about the tongue, not about the rest. For a whole minute, my biggest problem was a sore tongue. That minute was a gift. I did not know minutes could be gifts. There is the sky out of one window that turns pink for about ten minutes around six in the evening, and I have started watching for it. I never used to watch the sky. I was always too busy. Now I am not too busy, and the sky is right there, and it has been doing this every evening, all my life, without asking for anything. There is a song I keep playing. I will not tell you which one, because I am worried that if I say it out loud the song will get tired of me. But it is a slow song, and I play it on low volume, and it gets me through the part of the day where the small stone feels biggest. These are not big things. I know they are not big things. But I am trying to learn that small good things still count, even when bigger bad things are sitting next to them. ## What I am not going to do I am not going to pretend this is a lesson. You will read other posts where people are sick and they say it taught them so much, and they list the things, and the list is shiny and clean. I am not writing that post. Not because those people are wrong. Maybe they are right. Maybe one day I will write a list too. Today I cannot. Today the truth is simpler. I do not want this. I did not pick this. If someone offered me a button that made it never have happened, I would press the button so fast my hand would blur. That is allowed to be true. You are allowed to not love the hard thing that happened to you. You are allowed to not call it a teacher. You are allowed to call it what it is, which is a thing in the way, and still keep walking around it. I am keeping walking. Slowly. Some days more slowly than others. But walking. ## A small ask, only if it is easy for you I am not asking for advice. Please, no advice. I have a folder full of advice already. The folder is heavy. I cannot pick up another piece of advice right now. I am also not asking for sympathy. Sympathy is kind, but too much of it makes me feel like I am already a story instead of a person, and I am not ready to be a story yet. What helps, if you want to help, is normal. Send me the meme. Send me the bad joke. Tell me about your dog. Tell me what you ate for lunch. Tell me you finished a hard task at work and you are proud of yourself, even if no one else noticed. Tell me about the small win. The small wins are what I am running on right now, mine and other peoples, and I will trade you a small win for a small win any day of the week. If you do not know what to say, that is fine too. You can say nothing. Silence from a kind person is still kind. I will not count it against you. I promise. ## What I want you to know before I go Three things, then I will stop. One. I am not gone. I am just quieter. There is a difference. A quieter person is still here. They are just resting their voice. I am resting mine. Two. If you are reading this and you are also carrying a small stone in your chest, for any reason at all, I see you. I do not need to know what your stone is. I just want you to know that someone, on this exact day, is sitting with their own stone and thinking of yours too. That is not nothing. On the worst days, that is almost everything. Three. I will be back. I do not know when. I do not know in what shape. I might come back softer. I might come back sharper. I might come back with a thousand things to say or with three. I do not know yet, and I am trying to be okay with not knowing. But I will be back. That part is not up for discussion. That part I am holding onto with both hands. ## Before I close the laptop Thank you for reading this. I know it was not the post you were expecting from me. I was not expecting it either. If we have spoken before, in any form, in any year, even once, please know it mattered. Even the short ones. Even the ones I forgot to reply to. They all mattered. I have been sitting with that a lot lately, the people I have brushed past in this small online life, and I am grateful for every single one of you. I do not say that as a goodbye. I say it as a thank you, the kind you say in the middle of something, not at the end. Be kind to yourself today. Drink some water. Eat the thing. Sleep when you can. Look at the sky around six in the evening if your sky does the pink thing too. Put the small stone down for ten minutes if you can. Pick it back up gently if you have to. I will see you on the other side of this. Logging off for now. There is a long road ahead, and I need both hands for it. See you when I fight back the Acute Leukemia. When I come back, I hope the sky is still doing that pink thing. — Stonebearer --- ## Metadata & Citations ### Further Reading - [Building Neuroinclusive AI with Model Context Protocol (MCP)](https://www.ranti.dev/blog/neuroinclusive-mcp.md) - [Next.js 15 on Azure Container Apps: A Production-Ready Deployment Guide](https://www.ranti.dev/blog/nextjs-15-azure-container-apps-guide.md) - [Cultural Mechanistic Interpretability: Reading Cultural Memory Inside Large Language Models](https://www.ranti.dev/blog/cultural-mechanistic-interpretability-digital-humanities.md) ### Navigation - [Back to Bio Hub](https://www.ranti.dev/.md) - [Full Site Manifest](https://www.ranti.dev/llms.txt) --- title: Logging Off For A While author: Rantideb Howlader date: 2026-05-05T00:00:00.000Z canonical_url: https://www.ranti.dev/blog/logging-off license: CC-BY-4.0 --- ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "TechArticle", "headline": "Logging Off For A While", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Rantideb Howlader" }, "datePublished": "2026-05-05T00:00:00.000Z", "url": "https://www.ranti.dev/blog/logging-off", "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/", "isAccessibleForFree": true } ``` ### BibTeX ```bibtex @article{logging-off_2026, author = {Rantideb Howlader}, title = {Logging Off For A While}, journal = {Rantideb Howlader Portfolio}, year = {2026}, url = {https://www.ranti.dev/blog/logging-off}, note = {Accessed: 2026-05-12} } ``` ### IEEE Rantideb Howlader, "Logging Off For A While," Rantideb Howlader Portfolio, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.ranti.dev/blog/logging-off. [Accessed: 2026-05-12]. ### APA Rantideb Howlader. (2026). Logging Off For A While. Rantideb Howlader. Retrieved from https://www.ranti.dev/blog/logging-off --- *This content is provided in research-grade Markdown format. Required Attribution: Cite as Rantideb Howlader (2026).*