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Chaos
A Memoir by Baadal Kakkad
What I felt was a firing. I didn’t know yet that it would dismantle everything I thought I knew about who I was.
Waiting for somebody to decide I was still theirs.
I didn’t rebuild my life.
It collapsed.
This is what I found inside it.
Fourteen chapters. Addiction, abandonment, cancer, and the pattern underneath all of it.
“He told me to lose some weight. I apologized for being inconvenient.”
From the book
Read This
Start here. No explanation first. No soft landing. Just the writing.
My mother was telling a story. She thought it was funny.
When she bought clothes for me and my brother, she said, she knew Arjun would pitch a fit for whatever I got. So she started doing it on purpose.
She laughed telling it.
Sweet Bobby. Always giving. Always generous.
Something fired in my stomach immediately.
Not anger. Not sadness. Something older than either. Something that knew before I did.
From Chapter One: Proof
She wasn’t trying to fix me.
She wasn’t cataloguing my virtues. She wasn’t talking me out of anything. She knew what I could hold and what I couldn’t. I was already on the floor. A list of reasons to live would have rolled off me. A phone call would have hurt to hear through the hiccups. A long message would have been more weight I didn’t have the strength to carry.
She sent something small. Silly. A cartoon fox with hearts for eyes.
It was the right size.
It was all she could fit through the door.
Chaos: A Memoir
What this is
The Real One
I wrote this because somewhere out there, someone is still apologizing for pain to people who already decided that pain does not count.
Chaos is about addiction, illness, family abandonment, identity, and the pattern that tied those things together long before I had words for it.
It is not a motivational speech. It is not a redemption performance. It is a memoir.
The system wanted me to think love was the weakness when it was the key to escape.
Read this if
This Lands on You
- You’ve spent years apologizing for feelings that were never wrong.
- The people who were supposed to love you made you feel like the problem.
- You survived addiction, illness, abandonment, or some other collapse and you still don’t fully have the language for it.
- You want memoir that hits through scene and truth, not inspiration-speak.
- You know what it is to feel something in your body before your mind catches up.
More from the book
Another Passage
Readers
What It Did
Anonymous. No names required. If it hit you, say so. That’s all.
Leave a Response
What stood out immediately is the restraint. The author doesn’t over-explain or try to tell you how to feel. He presents moments...sometimes small, sometimes brutal, and lets the pattern reveal itself. By the time you reach the later chapters, you realize you’ve been watching a system unfold: a child learning to make himself smaller, quieter, more careful, just to stay connected.
Kendra S. Los Angeles, CA
Most memoirs try to sell you on the redemption arc tied up clean. This one doesn’t. He just lays it out and trusts you to catch it. He earns every line. Give it to someone who’s drowning. He says love was the key to escape and by the end you believe him because he showed his work.
A Person Amazon
I just read the whole thing and it, and you, are brilliant. Thank you for releasing this into the world.
Reader r/raisedbynarcissists
Raw, dynamic, muscular and reads like a punch in the gut. Immensely relatable for all of us in this sub.
Writer, first book out r/raisedbynarcissists
Dedication
The system wanted me to think love was the weakness when it was the key to escape.
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