Anxieties and Heat

It is quite funny that I almost forgot that I had to write in my blog today. Sometimes it feels like I have made this blog up in my head and that I actually have not written every day. I open my blog when I feel like that, almost like I am trying to reassure and convince myself that I actually have written in this blog all these days. I think the fear also stems from the fact that I will be going to this camp for the whole of next week, which could mean that I would have to type my posts on my phone, on data, after exhausting days. I am terrified about the prospect of not being able to post here every day. I am anxious about it, more than I care to admit.

I had to pack for the camp, but I have not even properly started yet. My mother is going to have a fit when she finds out, but I think I can handle it and manage to pack everything tomorrow. The problem is, I need to convince my mother of that. All this packing reminds me of last year, when I had to pack and move into my college. It had been a terrifying experience, as well as an exciting one. I was alone, my mother wasn’t there in India when I was leaving for college, so most of my packing was done with help from my grandparents and by myself. My father had been as useful as the label my grandfather stuck on my suitcase, to identify it. But I still had managed to transport myself to college and set up my room, all by myself, my brother and father simply coming to help me carry the suitcases and for the baggage allowance they got.

I remember my feelings on the day of moving in with astonishing clarity, so much so that I wonder if I am making up some of my memories of the day. I won’t be surprised, especially after I learnt about the concept of memories not being completely trustworthy. It is a very fascinating thing because it destroys one of the key aspects of this blog itself, the idea of memories recollected and stories told. But if there’s anything my one year at college has taught me, it is to be at peace with conflict, to accept it, allow it to mould and change your life as you please, to simply live with it. It is quite a wonderful thing, once you stop attaching so much value to your beliefs, you start to be more at peace with potential ideas and thoughts that could topple them. But then, even that is a belief of mine, and if something topples that, if I am peace with that, did it even get toppled in the first place. Is this getting too meta?

I was editing and rewriting my story today, I have removed a huge part of the story as a whole and added a completely new part to it. It stands at a proud 3150 words–the word limit was 3000, but surely 150 words is not that big a transgression. The day had been unbearably hot, my whole body felt claustrophobic inside the house, but there was nothing I could do. It was only in the evening when some slight respite came in the form of rain. But even then, the heat has gone down only a little bit, the humidity is making my whole scalp itchy and I feel like sitting in a bucket of ice. But that is a drastic step best reserved for some time in the far future (read, never). But nonetheless, the heat reminds me of home, even though we are better prepared for the heat back there than we are here. The temperature predictions for the next two days is cooler, hopefully the weather shall follow the rules. It will, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Conversation and Insecurity

It is actually quite funny how recently I have been struggling to find things to talk about on this blog. Today was quite a busy day, I bought a few things, a top that I was immediately in love with, some leave-in hair product for curly hair, that I am extremely excited to try, a few other things. My mom treated the whole family to some scrumptious food at a good restaurant, I tried food I never would have, otherwise, all the while bemoaning the loss of money, but I still ate a lot. We travelled a lot, we had to go and apply for the visa to go to Belgium, and we went by train. My time spent travelling every day for three weeks to and in Central London kept me in good stead. I felt comfortable in the London Underground when I got on the District Line from Tower Hill station, I felt like I was entering home (at the risk of sounding like a crazy, dreamy, sentimental, foolish girl). It was quite nice, it felt quite nice.

Today, I realised that I was actually feeling quite proud of myself for this blog. I was reading through a few of the things I had written, and I felt proud. I patted myself on the back for having been mature, for having been fair to myself, for being strong, and for holding on to this blog and continuing the fight, so as to have brought it along this far. I have seen many success stories, but I have seen an equal, if not more, number of failures. I know people who have tried this writing exercise, who have tried a variety of things but found that they could not hold on for long enough. When I started this blog, that was my greatest fear. That I would add my name to a line of people who also venture into something like this, only to fail. But now, I am filled with hope that I may actually make it to one year of posts, 365 posts. I will be hitting my 200th post tomorrow and that is an important milestone for me. It is proof to myself that I have held on so long, that I have it in me to hold on.

I started writing a story yesterday that I was inspired to write by a prompt put up for a competition. The prompt said, “Trains” and asked us to make what of it we will. I was very scared at first, and in retrospect, I think I should have started long back so that I could have focussed my energies much better. But I surprisingly have an idea for how my story is going to progress, a cliche story as it looks like it will be at the moment. It is set in Chennai, my home city, during a flood in 2015 that took the city by storm, bringing the poor and the rich alike, to their knees. It was a very troublesome period, the whole city was brought to a standstill, everyone was hit in one way or the other. It was a struggle to find a lot of basic necessities, the lack of electricity, phone lines, everything, meant that people had no way of communicating even with each other. Water had logged everywhere, people were forced out of their homes as knee-deep water made its presence felt, open wires were claiming lives, the government hospital was having too many visitors. Rescue operations were being conducted by army personnel in boats, in what used to be proper land and roads. It was a very scary experience for everyone.

What had annoyed a lot of people though, was the fact that none of the national media had covered this natural disaster of unexpected magnitude. It brought into focus one of the deepest insecurities that south Indians have had, that they are not considered a part of the country because of their geographical and linguistic isolation.  This isolation is a huge cause of many insecurities. Many a time, my feelings about my own isolation from a lot of things, makes me feel quite insecure. And being insecure is not a nice feeling, not as an individual, not as a collective. It makes people distrust even those who might be doing things for their own good. It brings into focus the imperative of good communication and of good representation (what the ‘good’ entails, is again a huge question that I won’t claim to know about). After all, people do say that a good conversation can make changes that can have large impacts. Maybe we can start with the first conversation right now, starting with ourselves?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Spoiling the Soup

It is quite funny that I am writing this post today, calling for my own legitimacy in this world of childish make-believe. It is a wonderful thing, this idea of letting children ‘have their way’ and allow them to explore and come to their own ideas and discoveries. Personally, I love children’s literature for the kinds of possibilities that it is representative of and the possibilities it allows. Also, I love the wonderful idea of happy endings where everything becomes all right, people are restored to their normal selves, no longer creepy ogres who shall haunt the place otherwise. But somehow all this is so deceptively packed in a world of crude meanings and crass violence, the kind that a child takes undue pleasure from. The kind of holding a wiggling earthworm between your fingers, just to see it struggle and smile grubbily at your parents with pride at your discovery.

I am actually wonderfully sleepy, I have slept and woken up and slept again a remarkable amount of times by the time it takes to write this post. For some part of my sleepy consciousness, I was dreaming about plastic awareness, of shoes, of a multitude of things that were as disconnected and confusing as can be. I think that is truly representative of my own mental state at the moment. When I started writing my post, I had a clearer idea of what I wanted to say, but my small nap in the middle between typing the first sentence and now has thrown me off guard and now I am only a highly confused individual who is frustrated and annoyed at herself for carelessly sleeping. I now have lost what I had wanted to say in the first place, great job, brain.

I have been working on my final paper for my course at King’s and as I told before, I have been thinking about orphans and orphanhood for my paper. But I have come to realise that it would be more fun for me to look specifically at one example of a text because Victorian children’s literature is so vast, covering many books, a lot of which I haven’t even read ever in my life. Therefore any claims I made about a book I hadn’t read, were made through another external person who was building their arguments based on their own ideas and reading of the text. This was something I wasn’t very comfortable with, and besides, the idea that too many cooks spoil the broth, I was not exactly keen on making a soup out of ten different scholarly articles. So I decided to focus on one particular book, a book I had read and loved, The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I won’t focus my energy on explaining more of my idea here, especially because it is getting really late and I am quite sleepy.

Today was also a day when I wrote an email, saying things I had wanted to say to a good friend of mine for a very long time. There had been a lot of drama created by her in a society we both are a part of and it had been bothering me and a lot of others. Today, after a series of emails from her that were rude and problematic, I was induced to write a reply that I felt needed to address some key things about her behaviour. It was important, how as a friend of mine pointed out, “the more the other is unrestrained, the more the ones on the receiving end are expected to be restrained”. This has become quite a common occurrence much to the disappointment and annoyance of everyone I know in the group. I can only hope that things get resolved because I am quite honestly fed up with the negativity that rears its ugly head whenever this sort of thing happens.

Wow, when I go through what I have written, I am just amazed at how this is the true definition of what I would call a soup of different thoughts. From wanting to talk about childhood and family and the confusion that childhood presents, I have talked about everything else. I think, for me, that is truly representative of childhood and I daresay, life itself. All of us go through our life as confused individuals who almost never completely get what’s happening around us, what exactly we are saying, what exactly we are doing. Even that term, ‘exactly’ is so weighted, who decides the ‘exact’ness of something and other questions are raised. It is truly wonderful, this world that we inhabit in where we find meaning in a series of arbitrary symbols, sounds, etc. Do we truly understand what a ‘t’ is, for example? Does that necessarily take away from using it in a word like ‘take’? If anything, I think these last few questions are a soup by themselves. Well, I have always been quite fascinated by soups, I love them a lot too. I can only hope that these thousand things I am mixing together, do not become the metaphorical cooks who shall spoil my soup. They won’t, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Tracing My History (Slightly)

I realised something just a couple of minutes back. I am old, I have grown old, I am growing older by the second. It may not seem like that big a deal, after all, eighteen is not conventionally considered to be ‘old age’. By many people’s standards, I am still quite young. But what brought about this sudden thought was when I was playing Club Penguin’s Card Jitsu, and I realised, I no longer understood the nuances and the tricks of the game. I had been quite unbeatable once upon a time, moving from belt to belt with amazing speed, becoming a ninja in all the three, snow, water, and snow card Jitsu games. But now, I lost 5 times consecutively, a fact that does nothing to soothe my already precariously placed ego.

I also realised one more thing, that as a side effect of growing up and doing more grown-up things, I also get tired easily. Even right now, I am yawning for every sentence that I type, exhaustion has become such a common part of life. I cannot remember when it was last that I had a deep, long sleep (that’s a lie written to paint a romanticised picture, I definitely slept during the weekend). But nonetheless, I definitely believe that my younger me had a lot more energy to spare than I do at the moment. Tomorrow is a big day at college, and I want to be well-rested for a day that is no doubt going to be extremely tiring. It is for that exact same reason that I am almost tempted to end this post right here, right now.

But I do need to have at least 300 words, for the sake of my own fragile sense of self-accomplishment. So I will talk about myself, or my entry into this world of blogs. I started my first blog back when I was 14, on Blogger. My parents had been worried that I was on the way to depression, they were thinking of trying to find some therapy for me. But first, my mother had a very long talk with me, where we talked about a lot of things. It was a conversation that really helped me air out my grievances, to understand a bit more of the world. I had been home during that time because school was on leave due to the Puja Holidays (a holiday of ten days or so, generally during mid-October, during the time of Navratri). So I decided to spontaneously start a blog, to write about what I understood and learnt during my conversation.

It had been a time when I was on no kind of social media whatsoever. I had been a most obedient child, believing from the bottom of my heart, the repercussions and the negatives of social media. I was a scaredy cat, I was afraid of social media. In fact, the first time I created a FaceBook profile, I had been terrified. But I gradually overcame that, now I cannot imagine a life without social media. Anyway, when I started my blog, the absence of a social media presence made me feel like I had no one to read my blog. This is also one of the places where my childhood friend played a huge part. She was the first one who read my blog, the first one who commented about it to me and made my day. And then, college meant that I just couldn’t find the time to write anything there. Moreover, I started this blog, started out as a therapeutic exercise, one that has no doubt helped me, if not according to visible, conventional criteria, but a different, but good one nonetheless. Sometimes, these kinds of things that happen away from plans turn out to be the most valuable, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

PS: With that, I am off to bed–sleep and a comfortable bed beckon me

Exhaustion, Anonymity, and Cowardliness

It is with absolute, complete exhaustion that I am writing this post right now. There is a fear that is slowly creeping up on me, fear that I may not be able to stay true to my promise and that I may not write a post every day. I hope that it won’t be the case ever because I have come too far now to give up. Not that someone who’s travelled a lesser distance should give up. Personally, I think, people should not give up easily. They should fight, trudge on, move forward and continue their journey until they simply can’t. Most of the times though, I have found that there has always been some hidden store of energy that I had to very consciously awaken for me to get my work done. I had to tap into that during times when I was completely done and ready to give up.

I remember myself back in January when I first started this blog. I did not give my blog link to anyone, not even my closest friends. My family, most definitely not. I believed that this seeming anonymity of the blog could protect me and safeguard my deepest, darkest secrets. Then I gave my link to a couple of friends, it was an extremely vulnerable moment for me. The blog by then had become quite an integral part of my life (even though I kept on stressing that it wasn’t going to work out) and I wasn’t sure if I wanted people who knew me to have access to it. But I did give them the link and I continued writing nonetheless. Sometimes, I would think (I still do, at different points of time) that they might read what I have written and I would wonder if I should probably censor myself.

In retrospect, maybe the fact that I felt I needed to censor myself should have made me rethink my choices in life. But I am quite moved to impulsive actions many a time, so it was quite expected of me. Moreover, I know and believe (it is a pretty strong belief) that my friends have better things to do than to creep into my blog and read it every day. I would say that this is a pretty boring, mundane kind of blog and they most likely would find no motivation to read it every day. Unless, of course, if they wanted to know about my life and would want to go through all this trouble to keep up to date with my life. Personally, I don’t really see that happening, and if they really wanted to know, what better way than to ask me personally themselves. I am generally a very talkative person, and even a one-word question from someone would prompt a large essay-esque reply from me, detailing my whole journey so far.

It is actually a boon and a curse, my talkative nature. The upside is that people find in me this awkward, bumbling, blabbering child that they feel like they can trust and who they find to be quite harmless. But the downside is, people could also think that I am fake happy, fake cheery, fake, period. While that is generally not a very nice criticism to receive (trust me, I watch Bigg Boss and there are literally huge FIGHTS between contestants over being called fake), it is still criticism I shall have to take in stride. Thankfully, I have been thick-skinned all my life, with the kind of skin that does not show bruises easily. Even if I were hurt, chances are, people would not even notice. I don’t like to think that it is because that is how little people could care about me. I instead choose to believe that I am such a wonderful and convincing actor. Sometimes self-flattery is the kind of shield that suddenly out-performs its competition, leaving you surprised with its effectiveness. I have come to realise that self-flattery, in a self-deprecating way successfully distracts me and takes me away from many kinds of hurt that I may unwittingly find myself falling prey to.

But I am not going to dwell on this, much, mainly because I am sleepy and thoughts come and leave my head at a manic speed that I struggle to keep up with. So I think it would make more sense for me to provide a small account of what happened today because it was a fun-filled day on all fronts. My friend from university, who is doing the same course as me, and I went to two museums–The Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. Both of them, so high-tech, beautifully maintained, and FREE TO ENTER. It was the ultimate lazy miser’s dream. Everything was fabulous except the excessive walking. My legs are numb and I probably have burnt more calories than I ever did the whole of last week. But it feels good to walk around, it feels healthy, despite the pain and soreness and the chaffed thighs. Yes, they are a thing, chaffed thighs, especially with the heat and the fat thighs.

Class was wonderful, a lot of new things to think about that ended up really intriguing to me. This concept of childhood, the seeming beauty/purity/innocence of it, the whole constructed nature of it, and so much more. There were a lot of fascinating ideas that came up during the lecture and the seminar that warranted more enquiry. Enquiry, that I gladly gave in class and also later, in my own head (though that was to a much lesser extent because of my trip to two museums today). I spoke quite a bit in class, not hesitating to raise my hands and speaking out in class, hoping to eagerly contribute to the discussion. It was a slightly liberating feeling, the fact that I did not know most of the people there meant that I could speak more freely. I don’t know if that’s the case with only me, because my grandmother, in particular, never could understand how that was the case.

She would say, but won’t you actually be more meek and subdued with strangers? It is a very fair point because I do see the logic of it in my head. But when I translate that to reality, the exact opposite happens. I think that is also just another reminder to this blog itself, the idea that this anonymity, the fact that I am an unknown entity in this space, allows me the freedom from judgement (there, I said it out loud, finally) that I could potentially expect from people who’d know me. That is not to say that this group of anonymous people won’t judge me, but more than that, in my head, that doesn’t really matter (that is not to say that whoever is reading my blog doesn’t matter, of course not). Basically, I think the moral of the story is, I am a coward who prefers the mask of anonymity to cover up her actions, who prefers a self-deprecating self-flattery to hide herself from many issues she could potentially find with herself. If you ask her, she’d say that was self-care, but I think she is slowly starting to realise that it isn’t. It isn’t, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Remember Human Importance

I was reading through a few months of chat history with a couple of friends of mine today. I don’t know why I did it, I just felt an urge and I ended up starting from the beginning. There was so much to read, even now, as I type, I have my phone right next to me, open on a chat from the start of May. There is so much more that follows, but I remember most of them pretty well, so I figured I could get back to this blog writing business. It is funny, because the part I was at before I started writing this post, was a message complaining about how I was unable to keep up with writing in the blog, and how I slept through writing. It is quite hilarious because that is exactly what is happening right now. I am feeling extremely drowsy and I would love nothing more than to just lie down and go to sleep. But I need to finish this post first.

Going through these messages, messages that document the journey of a friendship that I invested myself in is a beautiful thing. They show me how much I have moved from where I started, how much I have built with the other persons, how much I could possibly build in the future. But it is also scary because I know I have changed and I don’t know whether the changed me would still be accepted. I think one of the ironies is that even with a thousand languages to communicate our fears and apprehensions, we still manage to struggle with it. But I think it’s a valid fear, that you do not know if you still mean the same to that other person, if you have started meaning more to them or if you’re starting to mean less to them. There’s also the question of, will your relationship continue, will it still flourish then? I don’t have answers, that is the scariest part of all.

It is a human experience to feel the comfort of a good friendship, to feel the comfort of some kind of family, some kind of group that you could ‘belong’ in. We are all social creatures, we need other humans around us. As a child, I used to be very clingy (I still am clingy, in different measures, of course). When my brother was born, I could not bear the thought of my position being usurped. I used to find all excuses to cuddle my mother, or my grandparents, to spend time with them so that they wouldn’t ‘forget’ me. I wanted the attention, I craved it (again, I still do), it made me feel like I was important to them. I think that’s another thing as a human, the desire to be remembered and to be important. In a way, I am writing this blog itself so that I can be remembered. While I don’t know if that’s a valid enough reason, I still think that it is an ‘important’ enough one, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Writers’ Block and Finding Strength

I find myself still afflicted by this curious affliction, this writers’ block, that I am becoming increasingly frustrated with. Writers’ block, how presumptuous is it to claim I have a writers’ block. It is like telling that I am a writer. Well, of course, I am a writer. I write this blog, I write the umpteen papers that are due for every class, I write those sad poems when life becomes a little painful. I am a writer and I damn well have a block. It is there even right now, in a sense, because after all, I can get away with many things as a blog post than as an academic paper.

Right now, I am struggling to write this blog post, words seem to fail me. I just woke up from what was supposed to be a 20-minute nap but was instead a 2.5-hour long one. I am deeply embarrassed with this, but I think I could not help myself from sleeping because my body needed it, despite my vehement denials. And keeping that in mind, I think I will stop fretting about my papers for a small few minutes and go sleep as soon as I am done with this blog post. maybe sleep will do me good and magically cure me of this annoying affliction. With finals week happening right now, I cannot afford to be unable to write. It will ruin me completely because it would ruin my morale and also because deadlines mean I need to submit papers by them and if I don’t, then I am done for.

But let me not think of such sad possibilities. I trust my brain, it should get its act together soon enough. I will be able to write something soon, I will get some work done at least. I have hopes and dreams and aspirations. And despite how the semester went and my own apprehensions and fears about my life in general, I want to see the fruition of these hopes and dreams and aspirations. Yes, I deliberately wrote “hopes and dreams and aspirations”. There is something about it, six words in a line, by repeating them in different places, it almost feels like I have my words back. Yes, they are monotonous, but who is doing the policing?

But then I think, the biggest takeaway and advantage of this blog is the fact that no one is policing it. Everything that is written here is unapologetically reflective of my thoughts and feelings at different points in time. Okay, now that I think about it, unapologetic may not be the right word. I am apologetic of making people read the mindless rambling and drivelling that I put up here, but then that is me. That is what people will get from me, this is who I am. This rambling, whiny, but still hopeful child who just wants to find some security, comfort, and love in the world, her world. But the blog has seen me literally grow, from my first posts to now. It is a very happy feeling, knowing that I have written every day for 100+ days, it makes me feel very accomplished.

The beginning of the semester, I had sat in one of my classes where I told the professor that I was writing a blog and that I intended to write in there every day. She had been very impressed but also apprehensive (completely reflecting my own thoughts and apprehensions). She had said that she would be surprised if I kept with it. But I did, and recently, I told her the same thing. I told her that I had been able to manage to write every day. Regardless of what I wrote, I still wrote. There were days when I just could not write, when there were deadlines hanging over my head, like swords preparing to deal the final blow. I had been afflicted by the same writing woes as I am right now. But I got through them, I have proof that I got through them. I re-read some of those posts and I marvelled over myself, for making myself write despite the problems. I think, at the end of the day, I owe myself that much credit at least. I have managed to pull off something that is worthy of being proud of. I can give myself credit for that, can’t I?

And that’s my memory for the day.

 

Childhood and About Overthinking

This post has to be typed very fast because I do not have the time to write a post. I feel horrible for this because honestly, when I thought that I will start this blog, this wasn’t what I envisioned. I envisioned a blog where I spent my time talking about different memories and how that memory was triggered by something I saw or something that happened. I thought that it would be a way for me to document those memories of my childhood in a form that I could revisit and read and feel happy about.

I had a pretty nice childhood; supportive parents, a younger brother who I adore even though he is an annoying pain in the derriere sometimes, nice grandparents, content home and just a small, peaceful life. We were never really rich but we lived pretty comfortably and as I grew up, I was witness to how much our living situations changed and improved. We are in a far better place than where we started (not that where we started was bad). I remember almost every house we have lived in since my birth, how I felt each time there was a new purchase in the house– from our first TV to our first car to everything. I remember the joy, the thrill of it all.

In many aspects, my brother lost out on that growing better phase. By the time he was capable of understanding his surroundings and making these kind of connections, I was already an early teen and we were in a far better place. He would never remember how it was to have lived in a small, single bedroom apartment, to have spent weekends alone in the house with me as I babysat him while my parents went to work. Sometimes I wonder if that is necessarily a bad thing.

Whenever I say something like this, I am reminded of my own parents and how they used to tell me about how it used to be before I was born and when I was a very small child. I vaguely would recognise what they were talking about, some flashes of some places would cross my mind and I wonder if that is how my brother feels when I tell him about all this. Or maybe, I am just the overthinking kid in the family.

I have always been called an overthinker. Everyone around me used to tell me, “Don’t think too much about it, you will always be unhappy if you do that”. It is true in some ways at least I guess. Over thinking has led me down roads I honestly would not want to traverse ever in my life, would not want anyone else to traverse either. It is a trap, you feel great when you over think but then soon, you start to over think your own actions and you start seeing things that were never there before. It ruins you. This is not the same as introspection, this is more destructive than constructive. You start to be extremely mean to yourself, a trait I have realised I embody a lot. I have been so mean to myself, especially this semester, and I hate myself for that. But you see, I hate myself for that, meaning, I am again falling into that trap of self-hate. It is scary, that you are capable of inflicting this much harm on yourself. But as I always tell myself, recognising the problem is the first step to begin working with it. Now that I have recognised some of it at least, I can start my journey towards becoming better can’t I?

And that’s my memory for the day.