My best friend got into a government college. I'm still in Kota. This is how I'm handling it.

Three weeks ago my phone buzzed during a Chemistry lecture. It was a message from Nikhil, my best friend since class 8, with a screenshot of his seat allotment. A government medical college. In our home state, not far from our parents.

I typed "BHAI!!! Congratulations!!!" with three fire emojis and two heart emojis. I meant every single one of them. Then I put the phone face down, looked at the whiteboard, and felt something go cold in my chest that took me a full day to name.

It was not jealousy exactly. It was more like standing at a railway platform watching your friend's train leave while you are holding the same ticket. We both got similar scores in the first attempt, in the same neighbourhood of marks. He got lucky with a category cutoff and a good state-quota round. I did not. Neither of us did anything "wrong" in a way I can point to. And yet.

I want to write about what came next, because this is a topic that gets either toxic positivity ("be happy for them!") or doom ("you're a failure"), and neither helped me.

The first 48 hours: I did everything wrong

Let me be honest about it.

• I opened his Instagram story eleven times. Eleven. I counted later because my phone has a screen-time thing.
• I started doing mental math. "If I had got 12 more marks in Physics..." For the record, this math is useless. The test is done. The marks are what they are.
• I told my mother "I'm fine" in a voice that made it clear I wasn't.
• I studied for six hours that night and retained nothing, because every page had his face in it.

On day three, my roommate Aman from the next room (who is blunt in the way only a JEE repeater can be) said, "You've been staring at the same page for forty minutes. Who died?" I laughed and told him. He said, "Okay. So you're sad. Be sad for one evening. Then study." That was the most useful thing anyone said to me that week.

What I did with the sadness

I took one evening off. Not as a treat, more as an agreement with myself. I walked to the end of the road where the sun sets behind a dusty bus stand, I called my sister, and I said it out loud: "I'm happy for Nikhil and I'm sad for me, and both are true." She didn't try to fix it. She just said, "Yeah, of course."

The thing about feelings is that if you shove them away they come back at night, at the worst time. If you let them sit for an evening, they tend to get smaller. I'm not a therapist, that's just what happened to me. And if I'd felt it get heavier instead of lighter, I would have gone to our hostel counsellor. I think that's an important line to draw: a rough week is normal, but if the heaviness stays for weeks and starts to affect eating, sleeping, or whether you want to do anything at all, tell a person you trust.

The comparison trap, with a small table

Here is how I started noticing what comparison actually does. I made two columns in my notebook.

What I see of Nikhil	What I don't see
Seat allotment screenshot	The three months he cried in his room last year
Smiling photo with his family	His mother selling her jewellery to pay for his first-year coaching
"Lucky guy"	His 6 am schedule that he kept for 14 months

And then the same exercise on me:

What people see of me	What they don't see
"He's still preparing"	The topics I've actually fixed this year
A repeater	The fact that I'm better at Chemistry now than I've ever been

I'm not saying this makes the pain go away. I'm saying it makes the picture more honest. Comparison feeds on incomplete data. You compare your behind-the-scenes with their highlight reel, and of course you lose.

Three rules I use now

1. I don't open his stories on study days. I muted them, not out of anger, but because it's like leaving a plate of gulab jamun next to a person on a diet. Nikhil knows. I told him "I love you, I've muted you for three months, I'll unmute after my result." He laughed and said fair.
2. I compare only with last month's me. My notebook has a "last month vs this month" page. Last month I scored X in Chemistry on a test series, this month Y. That's the only rival I need.
3. I celebrate his wins out loud, and then I move on. I sent him a voice note, I went to his farewell dinner call, I was genuinely happy. Then I went back to my desk. Not suppressing the happiness or the sadness.

The thing nobody wants to hear

Your friend's seat doesn't take anything from your seat. There is no queue where he got in front of you. I know it feels like there is, because the exam is competitive, but his result is a fact in his life, not a verdict on yours. Your verdict gets written later, by what you do in the next several months.

I'll tell you something else. A few days ago I called Nikhil late at night and he said, "Sid, honestly I miss being in the struggle with you. College is lonely at the start." And I realised, oh. He's also having his own hard thing. It's just a different one.

I'm not going to pretend I've fully made peace. Last Friday I had a bad evening again. But I know what to do now: write it down, call someone, sleep, and get up for the 6 am batch.

If you are in your drop year and a friend just got into a college, you're allowed to be happy and sad at once. You're allowed to not know what to say. You're not a bad friend and you're not a failure. You're just a person in the middle of something hard.