A letter
to Eminem.

Dear Marshall,

There were years when support felt scarce. I was younger, still trying to make sense of myself and of a world that did not always feel easy to inhabit. I don't need to turn those years into a neat success story. Some parts were difficult. Some remain difficult to explain.

But there was music.

Your music was one of the things I could return to. Not because it solved my problems, and not because every line was a lesson to follow. It gave anger a language, humour a place beside pain, and intensity a form that could be heard instead of merely carried.

I have no way of knowing what you intended for a listener like me, sitting far away in India. I only know what I found in the work: an artist willing to put contradictions, discomfort, absurdity and vulnerability into public view without sanding away every rough edge.

What I took from the work

I did not take the idea that being loud makes someone right. I did not take the idea that provocation is a substitute for thought. I took something more useful: that honesty can have rhythm, that craft can turn raw experience into expression, and that a person need not wait until every part of life looks respectable before beginning to make something.

Some songs gave me energy. Some made me laugh when laughter was hard to find. Some helped me feel less alone in the strange combination of ambition, confusion, defiance and wanting to be understood.

That mattered. I don't need to exaggerate it to say so.

Appreciation does not require imitation. Gratitude does not require perfection.

A healthy kind of Stan letter

I know the cultural weight of the word Stan. This is deliberately a different sort of letter. I am not asking for a reply, access, recognition or a place in your life. I am an adult with my own work, relationships, responsibilities and questions. I can admire an artist deeply without confusing the music with a personal relationship.

I also don't need you to be a perfect role model. Nobody is. I believe in taking the best out of people rather than making their worst moments the only story we permit ourselves to tell about them. That doesn't excuse harm or make criticism illegitimate. It leaves room for discernment — and for gratitude.

What I hope to carry forward

Today I write about consciousness, human behaviour, identity and action. I build small websites and experiments. I work in family retail. I make perfumes. These are not the same craft as yours, and I am not claiming your music caused them. But your example of unguarded public expression belongs somewhere in the story of how I became willing to make my own work visible.

I want to be candid without being careless. Playful without being hollow. Willing to be misunderstood without turning misunderstanding into an identity. Brave enough to revise my opinions when experience teaches me something new.

I don't know whether you'll ever see these words. You don't have to. This page is also for the younger version of me who needed music, and for the adult I am now who can finally articulate why it mattered.

Thank you for making the work. For the technical obsession, the uncomfortable honesty, the comedy, the contradictions, and the moments of humanity that reached across a very large distance.

I hope my own work can be of some use to another person someday. Not by becoming you. By becoming more fully myself.