Thinking About Camp and Withdrawal

After a very long time, I finally got to experience the feeling of having a crush on someone. Someone who was genuinely nice and sensitive, kind, smart, and interesting. Truly, it feels quite delirious, something I have never felt that much before. I think there was a time (a small duration) when I did, but it was immediately followed with a kind of guilt that was refreshingly absent here. I did not like the crush back then, because I felt I didn’t need it. But right now, I like this one, it feels great to like someone and be able to make a friend because of that. I was able to make a friend at this camp because I liked him. Of course, this is immediately succeeded by thoughts about how I totally am way out of his league (one of my closest friends told me that she will punch me if I said that, but honestly, this is the truth). But that is alright, there is the realisation that he might not like me that way, but I am perfectly okay if he just stays a friend. of course, that is difficult because we live vastly different lives, in different countries, but it would be nice to continue to stay in touch, I guess. I would love that, I really would.

I wish I could speak a bit more about my fears over here, but I also know that this is not my diary for me, so I shall refrain. I shall give away too much information if I go beyond this, and I want to hold on to something, just for myself. Just to keep inside my head, to think about and feel equal parts delirious and nervous about. I also think I am facing some kind of weird withdrawal symptoms–I want to get back to the camp, not so much to university. It is funny because a month back I was rearing to get to university. But I think I am only now properly seeing the true worth of this country and I want some more time here. But I guess, I have to finish my university education before I can give a shot at applying for higher studies in the UK. If anything, I am more convinced than ever that I shall apply mainly to the UK for higher studies. If I get to meet more people like these guys, I would be super glad, I truly would.

It has been a good week, in retrospect. Made me learn a lot of new things, things I would have probably never had the chance to learn otherwise. I got to be a person I could feel proud of, who was liked by at least a few children. In fact, a few small girls around the age of 7 came in search of me, just to hug me and say goodbye. If that is not wholesome, I don’t know what is. The kids were the cutest things on camp (aside from my crushes, but hush now, don’t make me gush) and I was once again reminded of why I really loved kids. Kids are wholesome little monsters, they do the cruellest things (as much as they are capable of, I mean) in the most heartwarming way. I wish I could be a kid again and get away with the stuff they do. But I know that is a desire that can never be fulfilled, so I content myself with being someone the kids can trust and look up to. There are times when my own mischief bubbles out of me, out of control, but I like to think that only endeared me to the kids more than anything. Adults are out of the question here, to be honest.

Adulting is hard, especially when you know you have to set a good example but you can’t help but feel that swell of mischief from time to time. There would be times when I would feel like I should throw a plastic cup across a couple of tables into the bin. I know that I would be embarrassingly unsuccessful at it, but it would still be a niggling urge at the back of my mind. But I would be eating food with a bunch of twelve-year-olds, who I wouldn’t want to see me do something like that. So I would calmly get up, collect the other trash from around me, go to the bin and put them in. This gave everyone the impression that I was a very responsible person, an impression I tried very hard to maintain, so much so that I actually got quite annoyed seeing trash on the floor soon after that. It does say something about me, I need just a few days to develop a habit. I believe that is the case with a lot of people, except that they give up in a couple of days. Maybe if we all faked it for long enough, we might one day actually make it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

First Day of Camp

I am on the first day of camp and I sit here, connected to the internet through my phone, typing away on my laptop. The concept of culture shock is becoming increasingly important to me, as I see kids younger than me talking about their lives here, their school lives, their romantic lives, the drama and the subjects they do in school. I have never felt so enthralled but also simultaneously alienated all my life. It feels like there are plenty of places where I know much more than them, I know that my face goes into the polite, listening adult mode during those times. That smile, as I mentally laugh at their childishness. And there are other times when I feel like I know absolutely nothing at all, and that there’s so much more to learn and know. There are 14-year-olds talking about makeup, about asking people out and while I know that it is super commonplace, I cannot get over how much I have not seen in my own school life.

The fact that I am one of the very few 18-year-olds and the fact that those who are my age have already come to this camp so many times that they are now leads and sub-leads of the teams. One kid thought I was a parent, my own sub-lead thought I had come to see off my kid, a few kids believed me when I told them that they had to leave their shoes off in some place, even though I had absolutely no clue about protocol. I think that is quite wonderful when people think that you’re an adult. But when you are doing things with the other kids who are younger than you, it is not exactly nice. But this is what I get for signing up, and I should probably just stay quiet about it and not crib much.

The kids around me are all Indian kids, who have lived in England almost all their life. They speak little to nothing of their “mother tongues,” obviously cannot read or write them, are quite spoilt (at least in comparison to how I was raised), and I sometimes find them quite annoying. But I am biased, I have particular ideas of how people and children should grow up and behave, ideas that are constantly challenged and have undergone large and drastic modifications nonetheless. My sub-lead did not even know about the team she was leading. Each team is given the name of a branch of Indian philosophy, mine is named Samkhya, and she had quite haphazardly copied some stuff from Wikipedia and was explaining stuff to us. I knew more about Samkhya, even though I never learnt about it specifically. She couldn’t even pronounce the name right, or even read the Sanskrit words in her description. But as I said, I am quite biased against things like that, I am trying to not be too judgemental. Though in my defence, she was leading it and the camp booklet had a note from the sub-leads and she’d sounded quite enthusiastic about the philosophy and what it taught. I was somewhat disappointed to see that she knew close to nothing about it in reality.

It is bedtime here, people are slowly getting to sleep, we have to wake up early tomorrow morning. This is just the first day and the camp is for a whole week. I have joined the music team for performing on the cultural programmes night, so there’s that to look forward to. They don’t have mugs in the toilets, which means that I shall have to learn to use toilet paper. It is not a lesson I am looking forward to, but these processes are out of my control. So I shall have to learn to handle this too. It is just the first day and there already seem to be quite a lot of difficulties, and my biased mind is quite obviously not in support of quite a lot of changes and challenges here. But that is the thing about minds and biases, they can be overcome. If my one-week stay here turns out to be quite a learning experience (which I really hope it will be), I will be quite glad. This post shall end here because of lights off. It shall be a good week, won’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Realising Hurt and Adulthood

When you realise that you have ceased to be an important person for someone, what do you do next? When you realise that you had quite unconsciously put in time and effort in a bid to stay important and relevant to someone else, without quite caring for yourself. I write today, with a lot of hurt that I struggle to voice out, simply because voicing out hurt is not me. I am used to being stoic, the person who would keep it all together, to whom others can come to. Hell, I take pride in being that person, there is something strong and brave about that. And I have always, since I was a little girl, wanted to be strong and brave. Don’t we all dream that in the future, in that mystical world of adults, we would all miraculously grow up to be these strong people we only see from afar? I surely did, these mysterious beings called adult humans who always had answers and always knew where their pencils were, who could solve any problem. I wanted to be them, wanted to become like them, the person who would have the answers. What I did not realise was that it was a double-edged sword, you become dependent on your independence, the time you don’t want to be independent, you realise you can’t afford to not be independent.

Maybe this all sounds too ‘up there’, but I can only hope that the future Yashasvi who would read this will understand. She should, for otherwise, everything I thought I knew about myself would also be in jeopardy. And I don’t deal well with jeopardy, not when it is about myself. I would like to be in a space where I am comfortable with myself, with my knowledge of myself. I have been extremely vocal about the importance of loving myself, something I have always struggled with, something I still suck at, most of the time. But in my defence, it is not easy to love yourself when you have been led to believe, all your life, that you aren’t worthy of that. It is a struggle to look yourself in the eye (metaphorically speaking, of course), and to tell yourself, that you are worthy of admiration coming from yourself. Forget coming from someone else, it doesn’t happen much anyway, but to tell myself that I deserve my own admiration and support is in itself, a struggle. I don’t know when this started. I don’t know when it ran into this point from where every direction seems to lead into a dead-end.

Maybe it started with the malicious comments by my family itself, my mother, my father, my brother, even my grandparents. Maybe they hadn’t intended them to be malicious. You know how much I am always harping on about how lucky I am to have had the childhood I did, the parents I did. But sometimes I wonder if that is my way of trying to come to terms with and get over whatever hurt they have caused me over the years, whatever hurt they continue to cause me. It is a vicious thought, this question of how much they might have caused my own self-hate. I can almost hear my father’s voice, he would say, “No one causes anyone anything. It is up to you to take what you get and make what you will of it.” It is something I had always believed in, that nobody said anything hurtful, but that I had turned what they had said into something hurtful. But that is like saying that the sharp knife won’t cut until you press your finger on it. Even if someone cuts your finger with it, it is like saying it wouldn’t have cut you if you hadn’t pressed on it. It doesn’t work that way, the other person had the knife that they did not hesitate to use, that they used quite liberally, but are now turning the tables at you and saying that you cut your finger on their knife.

But really, I am still struggling with that crushing feeling in my chest. This hurt, this pain that pricks me hard enough to draw blood, making me drip and drain out drop by drop. This is why I think a younger me had taken so much pleasure in dreaming up an orphan life. Of course I had been naive enough not to know what an orphan life would entail, hell, I am still clueless. What I understand of orphanhood is in itself so small and inconsequential, that I am embarrassed to even mention it at all. But I just understand a little better, one of the little whims and fancies of a little girl with curly hair. Sometimes, this hurt carries with it a deeper understanding of something, doesn’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Shifting Times, Shifting Me

Today is an important day for me, it is the day when I can freely, guiltlessly select ‘yes’ in the countless forms that ask me “Are you above 18?’. I am actually extremely exhausted and tired, while also simultaneously excited for my birthday. My birthday led me to a crisis where I spent my time wondering how quickly 18 years had passed, and how I had nothing, no place where I had shown myself and made a worthwhile impact. Now of course, me being who I am, a thousand of these existential crises occur every day, I can become quite the public hazard.

Added to that, we are moving houses here and so, the whole day was spent in moving, packing, walking, basically every action that surrounds the act of packing and moving. Packing is a difficult job, but today, I struggled especially because of this one special crisis, or maybe I shouldn’t even call it a crisis. I was reminded of the many other times when we packed and moved, it means a complete upheaval of life as we knew it till that point. When you are already thinking about your impending ‘adult’hood, a reminder that everything was going to change, especially in the form of packing and moving houses, was not something I was very keen on welcoming.

But you see, things that we are afraid of and keep at a distance are exactly the things that seem to come back and bite our derrieres later. There was a point of time, in fact, just a few days back, when I was jumping with joy at the prospect of finally becoming 18. I am one of the youngest in my batch, the child, so to speak and I spent a lot of my time last year explaining to people that I did not skip a year in school. No, I might look that bright and smart, but I did not skip a year. I would be 19 when I graduate, just turning 20 maybe. People are shocked sometimes, they are already 19, they tell me. Then they pat my head and say, ‘how cute’, hmph. But I think secretly I enjoyed those little moments when I could be a kid, the one that needed protection and head pats. Seriously, head pats, they are so underrated and need to be brought to the mainstream ASAP.

I have slept intermittently while writing this post. Being back home has made it quite a struggle to write every day. My parents don’t understand why I have to do this. Honestly, I have stopped explaining it to anyone at all, why writing these posts matter to me. It has always been difficult for me to have a consistent enterprise, I always used to lose hope and motivation. I do not want this blog to be a failed exercise, and I will continue trying my best to make sure it isn’t. Yes, there are times, like today, when it gets extremely difficult, but I think that’s when I have to woman up, take charge and be the adult that I know I can be, regardless of whether my age agrees or not. After all, if there’s anything I can take from myself, age is just a number. My turning 18 today is not a sudden change, the world doesn’t suddenly look different to me. It is, for all facts and purposes, just a number on paper. I am not going to drastically change because of this, and that is not a bad thing at all.

I guess, it is fitting that today is the best day for me to post this book–Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It was a book that changed me the time I read it. A heartbreaking, heartwarming story, I came of age reading it. Today, as I celebrate my 18th birthday, I present to you, Little Women.

It was a rainy, Chennai day when
Huddling in a blanket, I travelled to the
House where little women found their home
I missed father, I hugged mother
Peeked at the large mansion right opposite
I ate Jo’s burnt toast for breakfast,
Sneaked up on her kissing Laurie
Cheering in my head, only to relish that
Painful heartbreak when she rejected him
Cried for the people I lost, you ‘beth’cha
Tasted those pickled limes, dripping down
In the wasted droplets of salty tears
Little women, I became one of them
Attaining maturity

Looking back on these 18 years, there are so many things that I wish I could have done. So many skills that I wish I could have learnt and picked up on. But then, I also realise that a regret-less life is near impossible to achieve, there’s always going to be at least that one thing that we wish we could have done. Just like my houses, my identities and ideas will keep shifting too. There’s never going to be that one stable ground that will be stable throughout. But that’s okay, I can make my peace with that, I can learn to handle the situation as it arises. After all, I did not spend 18 years on earth to stay without a fight. A fight I shall give, and I shall make it a good one. Who said you cannot wrestle in the shifting sands?

And that’s my memory for the day.