In late May 2022, Dhruv Sharma reached a new nadir. Things had been going so well. He dipped out of Yale just two years into his degree, the music career he had been pursuing since he was a teenager in Singapore suddenly catalyzed by the runaway hit "double take," as Dhruv. But at the start of 2022, he went to California for the first time, hoping to write his debut album with a slew of select songwriters there. Over five months, he participated in maybe eighty sessions, all abject failures. He felt both too guarded and exposed, the slickness of California and the machinery of music overwhelming his once-insular process. He flew to New York without a single song, hoping a visit with an ex-boyfriend might pick him up. He was so nervous he scratched the stains from his hoody on the way to rendezvous. And that's where he learned that his partner of two years had already moved on, that any possibility of redemption had vanished. He felt that his personal and professional lives were crumbling, that he'd been dropped into an episode of the worst sitcom ever without a clear exit.
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