Demons

Ever since I can recall my academic life, from school to university, I have been an extremely worried student. I have constantly been of the opinion that I am not doing well and that I am only destined for doom and nothing less. That is not exactly a wonderful feeling and while I never did cherish those memories where I have vomited or cried or spent hours freaking out about everything under the sun, I also learnt to kind of suck it up and deal with it. I would get extremely stressed about many things, sometimes very much legitimate things, deserving things. I would deserve the most scathing comments I could inflict on myself and inflict them I did with a sadistic pleasure that I still find.

I never had a choice, I had the undeniable pleasure of being a disappointment many a time and being an appreciated success equal times. College taxonomies implore me to define myself in some way, ways that are simultaneously alien to me as they are relatable. I feel like I am an average student at best alongside times when I feel like I am intelligible one (not intelligent, mind you). Actually, that is a lie, I have felt like an intelligent student too at times, especially during English classes in school. At university, I felt intelligent in certain classes that have gone so far away into the horizon that talking about them feels eerily like an exercise in nostalgia. Let me rather not.

I think part of the problem comes from a place of deep-rooted anxiety and insecurity, and dare I say it, hatred and prejudice directed towards myself. That is right, I probably hate myself, for a lot of things, the least damaging of all being my own perceived mediocrity. Just saying it out loud makes me feel like I am creating unnecessary drama, creating a space that legitimises my own demons, just so that I can bask in the comfort of my own misery. It is convoluted, extremely so but the fact is, I don’t think I can say any of it without being reminded of the pervertedness of my own mind. It makes me hate it all even more and wish desperately that I didn’t have my mind, that I (this wonderfully constructed self-identity that somehow is intrinsically connected to my essence) didn’t exist. I don’t think I have, ever in my life, despite a lot of issues and problems, ever wished that I didn’t exist. But recently, it is a thought that comes back again and again, to make me wonder what it is about my existence that I cherish enough (turns out, the answer is nothing, really).

Things I cherish don’t cherish me back the same way, and well, I might wax lyrical about having no expectations but when it came to my own doorstep, I was left extremely disappointed and hated everything (enough to state that I shall cherish those same things no longer). I am easily emotional, a fact that I rue to no end (of course, no one likes to associate themselves with someone who is so prone to tears all the time like I am!). I have never felt quite so emotional as I do these days, tears seem quite ready to flow out at any point of time. Overwhelmed is probably the right term to use, I am most definitely, completely overwhelmed and right now, it is out of my hands that the only thing I can do is shed tears of helplessness. And what a wonderful job I am doing of that, perhaps the best job I have done so far. It is going to turn out alright right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

 

Friendships and Horrors of Horoscopes

I write this post early because I have my flight to Delhi tomorrow morning, which means that I would have to be up early to get ready for my journey back home (of sorts). Ashoka has become home, I will give it that, and there’s a part of me that wants to run back to its familiar confines, and as a friend put it today, “into her arms” (which I assume means not just her, but my friends in general, but one can never be too sure, I feel). I think there is no better time than now to completely and truly acknowledge my own contradictions, general confusion, and lack of clarity. I have probably never ever in my life been in such a place where everything I know and understand was thrown into jeopardy (or maybe jeopardy is too strong a word, I don’t really know much these days). Also, brownie points for my abysmal grammar in the previous sentence. 

But aside from this general state of confusion, I think this break was much-needed. It gave me a space to relax and have fun, be by myself a lot, catch up with old friends and reminisce about times that have long gone past. Which again makes me wonder if my friends at university right now will also grow to become mere acquaintances in the future. Part of the reason why my school friendships turned out this way is that I cut myself off (not very consciously, of course). They had most definitely not seen me at my absolute worsts like my friends at university have. And well, we never got the opportunity to properly bond like I did with my friends at university. A part of me likes to believe that even after university, I shall do my best to stay in touch (and hell, be really good friends, even best friends maybe) with my friends at university. But again, no guarantees right? What is a person to do during these times? 

I remember when as a child (teenager—14 ish?), I was obsessed with horoscopes. I would spend hours sometimes, looking up horoscopes for all of my friends, to figure out our friendship compatibilities and see if we were destined to be friends forever. Well, that evidently worked out really well because none of the things on those websites actually came true. But the time I read them, I remember feeling elated when I realised that I could relate to a lot of what was being said. For example, it would say, “The x and the y are two opposite signs and hence complement each other very well to form a deep, connected friendship once they look past their differences.” Looking at it now, I realise how absolutely generic that statement is, of course people form deep friendships by looking at the differences and accepting them and continuing to invest their time in that relationship. But anyway, I would think about how my friend and I were actually quite opposite to each other and how we had our issues in the beginning but how now we were past that and were destined to have a deeply fulfilling friendship. We had a fall out around that time and well, it was both of our faults but at the time, I only remember the crippling feeling of being betrayed.

Nevertheless, I think one of the stupid things I did over the break (a guilty pleasure, if you will), was google the sun signs of all my friends at university and check friendship compatibilities. Turns out, they are all absolutely wonderful (even better than the ones from school) and so, I am doubly worried now because I always felt like I jinxed my own friendships because of this completely useless exercise. Guilty pleasures have become guilty banes of my existence and i have no one to blame but myself. Of course, I can always tell myself that it is all nothing but a big basket of horse-poop and call it a day, but I know that it shall continue to haunt my mind for a long time. I don’t want these friendships to end because I could not employ the smallest amount of self-discipline. I already feel like this break and being away from campus has made my friends forget about me and there’s a fear that they will find a life without me in it to be much better than one with me present in it. I will make it through these perilous and dark times, won’t I? 

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.

Crash and the Process of Self-Love

I cannot explain the complete, utter burnout crash I experienced today. I haven’t crashed like this since last semester, when due to lack of sleep and loads of work and stress, I was vulnerable to these periods of times, where I would crash close to passing out for hours on straight, beyond my control. But what is refreshing for me is that, unlike those times where I would be possessed by a deep, anguished guilt for sleeping and wasting my time instead of getting my work done, this time, I feel refreshed and I am truly able to appreciate the rest my body forcefully made me take. Though I am still confused and don’t really understand what could have caused this, because today was probably one of the days when I was completely fine and definitely the least exhausting of all the days that have passed in this week. But that could also explain the crash, being a logical conclusion to these last few days of exhaustion.

I have recently been finding myself obsessed with a couple of songs, hearing them on repeat so many times that they probably have lost their impact, but that doesn’t faze me. I can only remember a handful of times when that has happened before, when I listened to a song too many times that they became irrelevant in my mind. And almost all of those times, they were preceded by a time of mental stress or issues. There could have been a personal thing that would have been bothering me too much and like the escapist I am, I would drown my sorrows in that song or those songs. It was my belief that if I listened to that song too many times, just like how the song would lose its meaning in my head, so would the problem. For a few days, that song would only make me remember whatever it was that was causing my problems. But after that initial, mostly painful phase, the problem and the song would vanish slowly from my memory. There are quite a few songs like that that exist in my library now, that leave a vague ache in my heart when I see their names. But aside from that small prick that I have now come to accept as inevitable, the songs cease to really pain me as much as they used to. They also lost their meaning, I don’t really listen to them anymore. I am more insulated and protected, so to speak.

I wrote an email today, or rather, I am writing one side by side to this post. An email that I felt needed to be written, an email that really took its time getting written but that which left me feeling better and lighter. It was to a good friend, about something important that had been in my mind for a very long time. I will not say much more here for fear of revealing it all, but the mail was something I felt I needed to write. While I don’t know how it would be received, whether I would be seen as a nosy arse who couldn’t mind her own business or as a dedicated friend who had their best interests at heart. But that is out of my control at the moment, I have tried my best to be as good as possible and I was extremely sincere about it. I can only hope that it shines through my otherwise quite immature words, that they will see through it to see the deep care I feel for them that prompted me to write the email in the first place. Does that make me a bad person, disguising a potentially nosy email as one of care, so as to escape retribution? I really don’t know and I fear, if I dug a little too deep, I would not be pleased with the answers. But isn’t that the case with everything, when you dig deep, you discover problems non-existent before.

But coming back to the songs that helped me cope with pain. I have been vocal about my struggles with weight. It has been a huge part of my life, adding to a lot of insecurity I have felt about myself, The construct of attractiveness and beauty, of what is worthy of love and affection and care. Through school, I drilled into my own head that I would never be worthy of love and that I would be better off being alone all my life. While the second part is something I still think about from time to time, I would like to believe that I have outgrown the first part. But there is still a part of me, one that rears its ugly head a lot of the time, when I walk past a mirror, to hiss in my mind, “look at yourself, how absolutely ugly, how do you think people would find you attractive enough to like you”. And to my utter shame, there are times when I nod my head (metaphorically, of course) and think “fair enough”, with an air of carelessness and acceptance of my ‘fate’. But here was the deal, this judgement only came towards myself. I found other plus-sized women gorgeous and beautiful (not just as words to comment on their pictures on social media, but from the bottom of my heart), I just couldn’t translate that to myself.

I would like to think that the shame I feel with concurring with that stupid voice in my head is proof that I am more than those sad and insecure thoughts. That somehow, I am becoming better, that I am overcoming these ideas and thoughts, toxic thoughts that they are. I like to think that I am fighting against that poison, and the fight is hard, so extremely hard and there are times when I am winning and times when I am losing. But the war never ends, I am preparing for the next leg of the war as the previous one gets finished. It is a constant process, I guess, this business of loving oneself past your external flaws and appearances. There are times when it works, sometimes when it doesn’t, sometimes when it just doesn’t matter at all. Regardless, I like to think that I am in the process, this process that apparently could last a lifetime. Are there really people who don’t go through this process every day?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Judgements and Friends

I watched a movie today called Padmaavat. I will be honest, I would not have watched the movie by myself ever, I lack the guts to do it. I hate any kind of violence on screen (and to an extent, in books too). It is something I have tried to tackle and I am getting better at it (I think). I don’t run away from the room when I don’t want to see something, just bending my head down and closing my eyes gives me the solace I seek.

When I was younger, I never could watch any of the popular action movies because I absolutely hated the blood, gore and fights and violence that occupied a large part of screen-time. More than anything, I hated violence in those movies (and this included even seemingly non-violent allusions). I have never been a fan of suspense movies, especially those where you know it is all going to turn out bad but it is still a suspense.

I remember how many of those kind of movies used to come on TV. The promos all used to end the same way— “…thiraikku vandhu sila maadhangalae aana, super hit thiraipadam” (the super hit film which hit the screens only a few months back). Pardon my very mediocre translation skills. They used to have a popular hero (or rather a popular hero who was slowly losing popularity as a result of acting in a set of back to back ‘flop’ films), have unnecessary ‘masala’, absurd storylines and also, the heavy dose of high-maintenance masculinity and sexism. Sigh, bad days.

My parents used to watch these movies– they came during the weekends and were our primary source of entertainment. And I remember, how whenever a fight sequence came on, I used to run to the bedroom. When the villain climbed into his absurd jeep, carrying an equally absurd weapon, my sense of self-preservation would rule supreme and make me resort to the comforts of my room. I was poked fun quite a lot for it, my parents used to tell me that it was just acting, that they were all actors playing a part. They told me about how the gun was not real, how the sickle was just cardboard, and how the blood was ketchup (I know they are not exactly the correct materials, but to my parents’ credit, they tried). For some time, it seemed to help. All I had to do was tell myself that the person being killed was actually very much alive and this was all unreal. But it wasn’t easy, I soon went back to my older state.

I was slightly ‘better’ by then. I could watch those scenes in movies by closing my eyes shut and folding my ears and covering them properly, to have a wall of cartilage and hand in front of the earhole. And what progress it was, to go from running away to staying put. But nevertheless the taunts and jibes continued. It only made me more apprehensive of even watching such films. I would never watch them alone but watching them with company made me a point of ridicule. People are insensitive, they sometimes don’t understand (it’s okay, I am that way too). Maybe it is not a conscious thing, sometimes you just don’t get why something so obvious to you was not the same for someone else.

I remember this one time I watched a somewhat violent movie with a friend. She really wanted me to watch it with her. In her words, she was like “I want to introduce you to these things so you can become more tolerant of them. Don’t live in your little ignorant bubble of Disney and CGI animated short films”. Needless to say, that really hit home. I do not like being called ‘ignorant’. All my life I have strived to make myself less ignorant. And I had tried constantly to expose myself to such movies. I was still not fond of them but I was making progress. But would I pay money to go and watch such a film in the theatre? I most likely won’t. Hence, it must be no surprise that most of the movies I have watched in the theatres were comedies/animated/romance/<insert any non-violent genre>.

Most of my friends could never understand why I was so intolerant of those scenes in movies. They never understood, and most of the time I was faced with a lot of judgement. Again, I don’t want to villainise them. It is human to not understand and to judge, but that does not take away from the fact that I felt hurt and actually a little afraid of showing my true feelings about anything. Once you know that a person could judge you, especially a person who you do care about, you want to subdue huge aspects of your personality that you worry the other person might judge you for.

Why am I saying all this here? The movie Padmaavat was a good movie– had brilliant visuals, a fairly good plot, and a pretty neat execution (ah, look at me being snobby and discussing films like I know anything at all about them). But there was violence, some explicitly stated, some very subtle, some allusions. Overall, there were many parts that made me really anxious, I could hear my own heart (in a way) and I was constantly under stress to be able to deal with any sudden violence.

We watched it in a classroom, my friends and I. The classroom had a projector, a screen, and good overhead speakers. Overall I had a good theatre-like experience (minus the really tasty popcorn Sathyam Cinemas has). But what really got to me was how I could feel the judgement whenever I reacted to the violence. When I closed my eyes or bent my head down, I was immediately reacted to. There was some anger (whether it was in jest or not, my sleepy self right now or then never could decipher), some exasperation, lots of judgement, and most importantly, the whole episode left me feeling the inexplicable feeling of inadequacy, of being somewhat less than (surprise surprise, when do I not?). It also takes me back to the evening, when a friend in jest said that I was too insecure.

Funnily though, I know I am insecure. I am not comfortable with myself, with what I think, what I believe in, with how I behave or with anything at all related to me. I am an extremely insecure person, and also a supremely critical and judgemental ass (towards myself more than others, I think). I did not like it when one of my friends commented that I should only watch Disney movies (it was in jest, but it took me back to those earlier memories). When one of my friends felt that I was being a stupid, dumb person (I don’t recall exact words, just the meaning), I found myself really wishing for some kind of sensitivity, of understanding.

To be honest, I don’t know why exactly I wished and thought that would happen. I know people are judgemental. People who knew me for years judged me for my behaviour. I know these people for only a small duration of a few months (how much like those movies that came on TV! But hopefully, these won’t ‘flop’). But nevertheless, I walked away quite frustrated and angry. Not very pretty aspects of my personality, I agree. But to ignore them would make me the exact same ignorant person I tried not to be, won’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Realisations of a Different Kind

I had gone for a symposium today, it was a creative writing symposium jointly organised by my university and University of Chicago. It was a very new and enriching experience for me because I have never been to such events before. As usual, there had to be some things that happened that would take me down a spiral (it has become a predictable pattern, even for me). As I say, it has left me very powerless, I am not in control of these reactions anymore it may seem. But I am not one to give up that easily, I may be a very stupid person but I do fight back and put up a good fight most of the time.

It started with the panels and I felt very lost, like it was all a bit too much ‘up there’ for me. I could not think about it or draw connections, it was like a block. And the more I couldn’t do it, the more frustrated and desperate I became. For me, it became a question of my choice of my own major, of my suitability to choose them in the first place. The first panel also drew me down a road of self-hatred for how much I am forgetting Tamil. I grew up reading Tamil works (of course I did), but I never got to creatively writing in the language. I speak it very fluent and read and write very fluently too, but my creative prowess in the language goes for a toss. I cannot put it to words in Tamil easier than in English, and for me that became a point of focus. Of my own inadequacy.

The second panel was on poetics, another point where it became quite obvious that I was going to be affected by it. I had started writing these feelings down on the notebook every attendee had gotten. I felt like I was wasting the ink of the pen and the sacrifice of the tree to do something the organisers evidently didn’t have in mind. To waste them, who am I but a mere mortal, foolish young girl? It led me into a space where I questioned my own writing, questioned everything and felt sorry for myself (something I do on a daily basis). It was actually very stupid of me, I now realise.

My friends sat with me and spent nearly two hours talking with me about this all. Sometimes I wonder if I even deserve those people who have become, in many ways, my support system in college with whom even the everyday, mundane seems rare and precious. As I said in my previous post, they have a habit of accelerating my thought process and bringing me out of these melodramatic phases faster. I am so used to this kind of drama that it is actually really funny now that I think about it, what dumb ways in which I responded to the whole event. But it is done, I got some decent pictures and most importantly, I had fun. And sometimes, despite the dark things that dominate the colours of your sky, one small star adds that little bit of spark. I want to be that star, I can be that star can’t I?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Leaving Home But Not Hope

I’m leaving back to college tomorrow. A week has passed by so fast that I am left struggling to come to terms with it. But I am grateful for the respite (however fleeting and short-lived it may have been). It was getting too hard to stay sane and in control and this break has done me good. I am in better spirits, I want to fight now. It is refreshing to myself and I want this attitude to stay with me as I inevitably battle my way through college.

It is so funny to think that just a year back, I had been giving my board exams. All those worries I had then, about whether I’d get into a good college, whether I’d get good marks, etc etc seem so trivial and pointless now. But back then, they were very important and consumed my whole mind. And I keep telling myself that what’s happening to me right now will feel the exact same way a year later or so. That I will look back to 17 (nearly 18 year old me) and be like ‘tch tch, what an immature child, worrying over such useless things’. And honestly I think my future self would be quite justified in feeling that. And it is weird to acknowledge it and come to terms with it.

I was reading back to what I’d written during mid term week here in my blog. I consider it an achievement in itself, that I managed to get my submissions done while also keeping up with my blog and writing here everyday. It has been very difficult but I think, for all the stress it does put me through, it has been a worthy journey so far. And I hope I don’t jinx it but I think I can take this moment, right here to acknowledge that I have been writing every day for slightly more than 2 months and that I am proud of it.

Writing this blog has become a routine now, I need to write. It gives me some clarity and perspective and I feel lighter at the end of the day. For whoever is reading this, I am sorry if it gets too boring and diary-like. I started this blog to just write about my memories and I realised that memories are not just those that you have of the past. Every day, I make new memories, memories worth remembering. When I write about a very bad day, it is still a memory and I like to think that my future self will have quite the laugh about all this and I hope for her, I make this good enough.

I am not perfect, not exactly the most productive person around. I am not exactly brilliant and I’m not the best writer either. I want to be better though and that’s something I am working towards. And this blog was one of my methods to improve myself, to make myself write better. It has helped me a lot, I write faster these days than I used to and better too.

I realise that I have been quite down, not exactly the best person but it is all part of a learning curve. I may not be as lucky as I used to be, there are much bigger fish in this pond I am swimming in. But I am going to continue swimming regardless. Knowing that I swam as much as I could does wonders. There will always be things I will be bad at, that I will slack at, that I could do better but I should be able to get up and move on. It’s a long trudge but I finally feel like I should fight my way ahead. I had gone to a temple today and for the first time, I found myself asking not for results but for the strength to push myself to achieve those results. I am growing, I have grown a lot and there’s still more to come. It is wonderful to feel this hope again.

And Yashasvi, when you read this as I suspect you will after getting your mid term results, I hope whatever they were, you stop pulling yourself down that spiral you were stuck in before. Stop fretting about it and go ahead with your job. It won’t be easy, you will feel mad and angry and wish you knew better than to give ’empty’ advice but think of hopeful Yashasvi and get back to work. You can still turn things around for the better. Hope is so underrated and is so subtly there in your everyday life. I have found some hope now after a long time. I will be able to hold on to you for long now, won’t I hope?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Comfort and A Message To Myself

Music is calming and there is something that comforts me in listening to music in my ‘mother tongue’ (whatever that implies). I grew up marinating in the language, learnt it in school and out grew an appreciation for its beauty. It’s beautiful, really, how language exists for so many things.

Music in Tamil make me happy. Maybe it’s because I understand the lyrics and therefore can make more sense of the song and is beauty. I can listen to it and feel like I know what’s happening. Right now, I’m listening to this beautiful song by A R Rahman, sung by a beautiful singer called K S Chitra. Just listening to the beautiful voice, instrumentals, as I walk around my campus occasionally looking above at the small dots of stars shooting the dark sky is therapeutic for me.

Sometimes I fear if this is my way of escaping from what I deem as unfavourable situations. Recently I’ve been feeling increasingly trapped, increasingly inadequate in many senses of the word. A strong feeling of not being enough, of not being right for something has been taking over my mind. I want to go back home, to refind myself in the comfort of my family’s warm embrace.

There has been quite a craving for the physical intimacy, especially of my mother and brother than I am acutely missing in this space. College is tough, no one expected it to be a cakewalk. But I fear the time after this break.

In my own words, I feel like a sacrificial goat that has its head out, ready for the final cut to end it. I am waiting for the scathing comments of every professor to whom I’ve submitted a paper to (which is everyone). That one paper has ruined my mind, it seems.

Right now, a sad song plays and I feel like someone gets me. I fear my own thoughts, I’m scared of this negativity and jealousy that’s rearing its head inside me that I still am trying to make sense of.

I’m not this person, I’m not a dumb person and it looks like I’m trying so hard to convince myself of this. So much so that I just want to concede and accept that I’m not suited for this place, not worthy of having the friends I do. A small part of me tells me otherwise and I try to hold to it, I really do but it gets too hard. I don’t know if the wind is currently making my eyes tear up or if it is my own thoughts that I’ve tried to write out here.

It sounds dramatic even to me, me walking around campus with tearing up eyes. I want to admonish myself for this stupid show of weakness.

Again, makes me wonder why anyone would be reading this blog post. It is essentially the angst of a young girl who is just probably overreacting to her surroundings. In fact, sometimes I tell myself that I should just stop this too. Evidently, my blogging is not the best.

But then, this has become habit now. I don’t want to stop, it is like writing a diary and it feels soothing. If for anyone, I want my future self who is reading this to know that she pulled through. And sometimes, a message from the past makes the present more liveable doesn’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Curly Hair and Identities

I have curly, messy, thick hair. It resembles a nest or cotton candy most of the time. In fact, in my school, I used to be called scotch-brite (dishwashing metal wool) hair and cotton candy hair. Ah, nice memories. But anyway, I have always had this messy, bushy hair. There was a point of time when I compared myself to Hermione from Harry Potter, because, I told myself, I had bushy hair, I was smart and well, I was iconic. Too bad, I did not form a part of a golden trio. It would have been nice to have a friend who would literally die for you. Well, and be resurrected back too I guess, but let’s not move away from the point.

My hair was the same thickness from top to bottom (before I cut it into layers) and it brought many problems with it. For one, I was a Bharathanatyam dancer, I had to use the false hair for my braids. The false hair was embarrassingly thinner than my hair and my hair never tapered towards the ends. So my braid ended up not joining properly, creating two independent blocks of hair. It looked funny and we had to do all kinds of embellishments to make sure it wasn’t very noticeable. But one good thing about my hair, was its trap-like qualities. Nothing could potentially fall out of my hair. This meant that all pins, jewels, anything put on my hair, would be secure. Too secure, in fact, that sometimes we had to literally pull it away from my hair. I grew up with pain, it shaped my personality to be hard and tough. So my braids never had the potential to fall apart, even though my hair was only as long as a couple of inches below my shoulder.

My curly hair came with its benefits and problems. Its thickness (how I miss it these days) and dryness gave me a lot of scope for playing ancient male characters. I had the perfect hair to play Krishna, Ravana and also Shakespearean villains. Well, my hair had to be tamed a bit (a struggle I let others face on my behalf) and had to be handled for a long time, but it was still an asset. Despite all the negativity around its roughness and bushiness, it was still a huge part of my identity. Once, after staging a play, I sat in the audience as the other teams performed, painstakingly removing pin after pin and trying to detangle the mess that was my hair. I had a person sitting behind me tap on my shoulder to comment that my hair was blocking their vision. Yes, it was that bad. When I went back home, I had to brush through my hair, a painful process, because my friend who had done my hair had twisted and turned it here and there like she did others’ hair. My hair being itself, had gotten tangled extremely badly and it was a painful 1 hour.

I remember a young me, maybe 9 years old crying to my mom about how my hair does not tame down easily and how everyone teased me about it. I complained about how it was so bushy, so tangled and how all my friends could blow their hair out of their face and how their hair fell around their face while mine defied gravity and stood up. It used to be a game my friends played with my hair. They used to pull small parts of my hair on two sides of my head and it would stand, like two horns. And they would cackle loudly about it, while I would just stand there not knowing what to do. It was also once in class that we had to do an experiment about static electricity. We had to rub a plastic comb on a dry surface and then use it to attract small pieces of paper. No points for guessing that my friends ran the comb through my hair, which was by far the driest, and it worked beautifully.

I used to feel very insecure about my hair, I did not like it at all. But I didn’t want straight hair either. I wanted ‘better’ curly hair, like the ones in movies. I wanted those defined, shiny curls instead of the dry, bushy, mess my hair was. My mom told me something that stays with me even today. She said, “neeye adanga maatengira, un mudi mattum eppadi adangum?” (you yourself are not tame, how can you expect your hair to be so?). She meant it in a scolding/teasing way to talk about how much of a rebel I was and I took it that way too. Now I was much too proud to comment on it and in fact, I used it as an excuse to be even more flippant and rebellious.

But I think, in retrospect, it can be taken in a positive light too. My hair obviously was and is an extension of my personality. It being messy and untameable, does reflect a lot about myself. What needs to be tackled though is if I am comfortable with that aspect of my personality. And it is a question that I still struggle with. What parts of my own image of myself am I comfortable with acknowledging? What parts of myself (if ‘myself’ exists in the first place) do I ignore because I am afraid of it? And does being content with oneself imply that one is comfortable with all aspects of themselves, even those that are alien to them?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Apprehensions and The Post That Almost Did Not Exist

I don’t have a photo here for today. In fact, if I had let myself, I wouldn’t even have a blog post today. It was a very exhausting day, mentally for me. And I couldn’t get through the readings for tomorrow completely, but I decided that doing nothing is better than doing a shoddy job of the readings.

I was reminded of myself during 11th and 12th in school. Especially, 12th and before exams. I could never study early in the morning or late into the night and my brain would refuse to function if it didn’t have its 7 hours of sleep minimum.

I didn’t work as hard as the other students in my class. I was just working to do as much as I could and it turned out that that was all was needed of me. I never gave up, I didn’t give up even now. In fact, right now I feel even more better because I managed to write something. As small and bad as it is, going against my whole concept of doing nothing over doing a shoddy job, I think this post is just to prove to myself that I do have the ability to get a work done. I came into college this semester, with apprehensions of how successful I will be in pursuit of writing in this blog everyday. I still do have hose apprehensions, but I am taking it one day at a time and I am glad that today’s post is one less regret in my life.

It is true that I have no obligation per se to write in this blog everyday. There are a thousand small things that happen everyday, all leading into a jungle of confusing, conflicting ideas and memories. And it is so easy to get lost in them and also get exhausted in the process. There are things I ‘should’ be doing instead of this. But somehow, I am glad I am doing this right now.

I think, this will to get something done is something that I deserve to be proud of myself. I have always prided myself for being strong enough to compel myself and get something done despite whatever my situation and problems at a point of time. And it has almost always kept me in good stead so far and saved me a lot of regrets. I think I would not be what I am today if I didn’t push myself to try not to have any regrets. Some days it is plain painful and hard, it feels like having a regret is better than getting the work done. But I did that a few times and I did not like the regret one bit. It might be a very personal feeling or idea, I do not claim that this is the way forward for everyone. But I guess, for me trying to reduce the regrets in one day has helped me a lot more than I give it credit for. And I guess, even if I can’t live a regret free life, I can definitely try to minimise them can’t I?

And that’s my memory for the day.