Pimpin my Pain

I am a very accomplished person. I have won more awards, been granted more scholarships, received more honors, and obtained more acceptances than I can count.

Despite the accolades, there was no joy, happiness, or excitement. The awards often didn’t even resonate. I never took time to celebrate or to be proud of myself. High performance was the expectation. It’s what I did. It’s what I was known for. Consequently, I never felt anything about them. But recently, that began to change.

Every award I won was purely meritocratic. I won, I achieved, because I was the best. But when I got to college, that was no longer the case. The personal statements that colleges require force you to think about your story. When everyone has similar grades, activities, and letters of recommendation, your acceptance becomes contingent on your ability to tell a story that resonates with readers. The story I told was ……. It was the first time I told that story. It would not be the last.

My first internship was in the Summer of 2021 at Beach Point Capital Management, a credit focused hedge fund in Santa Monica, CA. I don’t remember the details of that interview, but I do know that whatever I said led the interviewer to believe in me so much that they described me as a winner. Not in the sense that I won the internship, but that I win in life. Beach Point was a foundational experience, and my mentor taught me things that have become essential to how I approach life. At the same time, it was also apparent that I was a DEI hire. I don’t mean that in a negative way; I wasn’t treated any differently than the rest of the interns. But the timing, six months after George Floyd’s murder and the way I was sourced made it obvious that the firm was making diversity more of a priority. I knew this, but it never bothered me. I needed an opportunity; I was granted one, and I ran with it.

My next internship was at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker in New York. That interview I remember fairly clearly. It was a superday, which means I had three interviews back to back. There are certain questions each interviewer is responsible for, and one of the questions they ask is to test for conscientiousness. You start off each interview telling the interviewer about yourself. If done correctly, this is the opportunity to tell a story and create the narrative that represents who you are. Guess which story I told? The story I told resonated so much that my interviewer didn’t ask the assigned question. They said there was no need, as I clearly displayed conscientiousness. Of course, I did have technical questions which I still had to answer. And while I was technically sound (I knew those financial statements so well that I could picture how they worked together in my head.), it was my belief that my story made the difference. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, but it didn’t really matter. I needed an opportunity; I was granted one, and I ran with it.

Despite receiving a return offer, I didn’t return to Goldman. I decided I wanted to learn to code, so even though I didn’t have anything lined up, I declined my offer and in the spring of my junior year, I took my first programming class. After a summer that some might describe as herculean, I declared the computer science major that fall. Except it’s actually not that simple. At Berkeley, you need a minimum gpa of 3.3 across three specific lower division computer science classes to declare the CS major. I did not meet that requirement, so I had to appeal to the department to let me in. The appeal process requires writing an essay about why they should accept you without meeting the requirements. There were new details added, but guess which story I told?

Except this time, things were different. The story I told is one that leaves you believing that I’m resilient, hardworking, and full of potential, all of which are true. And every time I told that story, the results lined up. I performed. But not this particular time. I did not perform. I was not good enough. I was not the best nor was I close to it. I struggled in class, and I struggled to find a software engineering internship. Eventually (read: a week before my start date) I got an internship to work at Vercel. I didn’t quite tell the same story, but again, it was my story that got me the job. I didn’t do a technical interview (and likely would have failed, given I had failed every previous technical interview up to that point) and at that point in time, I couldn’t even tell you what the company did. Luckily for me, Vercel believes in hiring people for their slope and not just their current y-intercept. In other words, my manager believed I had potential. Thankfully, I displayed enough of it to receive a return offer, and I now work there full time (I’m killing it btw).

However, sometime around February 2025, I was reflecting about how often I tell the story of my background as a way to benefit. I have used my story time and time again as a way to gain. Without realizing it, I was, in essence, pimping my pain.

The comparison seems dramatic, but the principles are the same. For prostitution to work, you need the collaboration of three parties: pimp, prostitute, and client. Prostitutes offer sex and clients pay. It’s a rather simple exchange of services, which begs the question, why do you need a pimp? In exchange for protection and ensuring payment collection, the prostitute gives the pimp a percent of their earnings. This makes sense, especially considering that prostitutes tend to be women and the clients tend to be men with questionable ethics at best (we don’t typically consider people who solicit sexual services as particularly upstanding members of the community). However, what most people don’t realize is that the relationship between pimp and prostitute is not really a business one. In reality, it’s an emotional one, molded by manipulation.

When you see a woman selling herself for sex, it’s easy to assume that she wants to be there or that her financial circumstances require it. That is sometimes the case. But what often happens is that a man will begin to develop a relationship with a woman. Unbeknownst to the woman, the man is trying to extract value from her rather than add value to her. He knows that he can’t skip straight to extraction, otherwise the woman wouldn’t go for it. So before he ever tries to pimp her body, he pimps her mind. He tells her what she wants to hear. He buys her what she wants. He makes her feel special and important in a way that her father never did. That may sound like a good thing, but in reality, it is cultivating psychological dependence, and eventually financial dependence, on the man. At some point, the man makes his move and successfully turns the woman into one of his prostitutes. She likely has some hesitations and skepticism at first, but in her mind, he loves her, so if he’s asking her to do this, it must be what’s best for them both. She gets to keep some money for herself, plus she’s making him some money, so she feels valuable, at least at first. Over time, this woman begins to experience a dual degradation. She starts to lose her self worth. The woman who once felt like the only woman in the world, begins to feel like the only value she has is her ability to be used for sex. And her actual “product” degrades as well. As the woman ages, her sexual value dwindles, until eventually, she is discarded.

This is essentially what I’ve done to myself. The only difference is that I’m both the pimp and the prostitute. When I first started prepping my answer to the classic “tell me about yourself” interview question, I told my story with hesitation. I couldn’t tell you why, but something about it felt wrong. The story was true, and it was powerful, but it felt kind of icky to tell it to someone I don’t know in hopes that I get the opportunity. Nevertheless, I convinced myself that it was okay. I told myself that I knew what was best for me, so I ignored my gut feeling. Telling the story, as I detailed above, worked, so I kept doing it. Over and over and over again. For a while, it felt good to tell that story and think about everything I have overcome. But eventually that ceased to be the case. I started experiencing the same dual degradation as a prostitute would. The more I told my story, the more meaningless it felt. I commoditized it, reducing it to a resource for revenue instead of honoring it as something precious that shaped my perspective. And it wasn’t just my story that began to feel valueless; all of me did. I had used my story so much that I began to question whether I actually had the ability to execute on the opportunities that my story granted me. I wondered if the potential that people saw was real or was the result of a well crafted performance. I doubted that I could actually make it in the real world. And as those feelings came, I realized that my story really was worthless. It no longer mattered where I came from. What mattered was if I was good enough. What mattered was if I had what it takes to make it in the real world. So, like a pimp with a prostitute, I’ve effectively discarded my story; I no longer need it to gain access.

As similar as this story is to that of a pimp and prostitute, there is a key difference: how the story ends. When a pimp is done with a ho, the woman is left with nothing. No money, no sense of value, and no purpose. That isn’t the case with my story. My story is still powerful and it does have a purpose. Its purpose is to protect my humility and serve as an inspiration to others. My story comes with me through the door; it is fundamentally a part of me. But it does not get me in anymore. Excellence does that now.