Tahmid Choudhury
The story behind AskTahmid and Afterglow: grief, science, the people I lost, and why no one should have to carry a story alone.
I’m Tahmid Choudhury,the person behind @asktahmid and the founder of Afterglow.
I use science and lived experience to talk plainly about grief, trauma and the things people are often taught to keep private. I am not a therapist or doctor, and nothing here replaces individual professional support. I care about making evidence understandable, without pretending a scientific explanation can make loss neat.
I worked on building BioBrainBuddies my neuroscience educational channel and that lead to using my understanding to explain the science of grief.
The people this began with
My sister was Fahmida. My brother was Jabid. They are not a backstory or a reason for a project; they were two people I loved, and they are still part of how I see the world.
Fahmida died after taking MDMA. A year later, we lost Jabid too. That is the sentence, but it cannot carry what happened to us.
After Fahmida died, our family was grieving, but we did not really know how to grieve together. There was shock, pain, blame and silence, and a lot that stayed unsaid. Jabid was grieving his sister too. He said he wanted to see her again. After a suicide attempt, he went through a psychotic episode and became terrified by things that felt real to him but were not.
Jabid later died in a river. We do not know with certainty whether he intended to die that day, or whether he was trying to escape the danger he believed was around him. I do not want to turn him into a diagnosis, a cautionary tale, or one explanation. He was my brother. He was someone we loved. But I also cannot pretend that the grief, silence and mental distress around us did not matter.
Losing both of my siblings changed the map of my family and the shape of my life. There are conversations I still save up to tell them before I remember. There are dreams where one of them is alive again, and the waking can feel like losing them twice. There are memories that now have fewer people left who were there.
A private account called Grief Thread
Before AskTahmid, there was Grief Thread: a private account where I could say the things I was struggling with and tell my story without feeling exposed. At first, I needed that distance. I was learning how to speak about a life I had spent trying to carry quietly.
But the more I shared, the more people responded. Messages and comments came from people who had lost siblings, parents, partners and friends; people who were frightened by their own reactions; people who had not found a place where they could say the truth without being rushed, judged or given a tidy answer.
I could not reply properly to everyone. That stayed with me. It showed me both how many people were carrying a story alone and how limited one account, one comment thread, or one person’s inbox can be.
I renamed the account AskTahmid because grief is part of my story, not something I want to keep secret. I still share the science where it helps,the way attachment, memory, sleep and the body can change after loss,but the point is always human connection. Sometimes what matters most is simply hearing: this is hard, and it makes sense that it hurts.
The conversations that became Afterglow
Afterglow grew out of those conversations. I did not want to build another place where people consume grief content alone and then disappear. I wanted to build a place where someone can name the person they love, share a memory, and be met by other people who understand.
That is why community is part of the idea from the beginning. A memorial matters, but people need more than a beautiful page. They need to be witnessed. They need a way to say, “this happened to me too,” to leave a small message, to find language for what they are carrying, and to know that their person still has a place in the world.
Why a night sky
A lot of the deepest thoughts arrive at night. It is often when the noise has stopped, the messages have slowed down, and there is nowhere left to hide from the person you miss. The idea of a shared sky came from that feeling.
In Afterglow, each person can have a star: a lasting point of light in a larger sky, with their name, story, photographs and memories held around it. Lighting a star is not only about creating a memorial. It is an invitation to say someone existed, they mattered, and their story does not have to vanish because the world has moved on.
The star is never meant to reduce someone to an object in a galaxy. It is a way to find them again. Behind it can be the different memories held by siblings, friends, partners and families,the many ways one person existed in the world.
From AskTahmid to Afterglow
For a long time, science was how I tried to understand the world. I studied biological and medical sciences, then worked across research and biotech, including work at Ochre Bio, close to research into human liver biology and the search for better treatments for liver disease. I also worked around science: helping complex ideas become clearer, more human and easier to care about.
I left the path I was on because I wanted to use what I had learned differently: respect for evidence, an instinct for explaining difficult things clearly, and the experience of losses that changed my life.
AskTahmid is where I keep learning in public,sharing science, stories and words that might help someone make sense of grief. Afterglow is the longer-term attempt to build the place those conversations pointed towards: a shared home for remembrance, community and the love that remains.
What I’m trying to build
Afterglow is being built as a shared night sky where every person can have a star. Some memories will stay private. Some will be shared with a few people. Some may become a public place for friends, family and strangers to leave a message, light a candle or simply witness a life.
The name comes from the idea that love does not disappear when someone dies. Their physical presence is gone, but their humour, influence, lessons, stories and place in the people who loved them remain. That is the afterglow.
I do not think a platform can solve grief. But I do think better places to remember, more honest information, and real connection can make an unbearable life feel a little less lonely.
If that resonates with you, you are welcome here. Explore Afterglow, or follow the grief education work at @asktahmid.