Existence

Recently, I have been struggling with figuring out what to write in my daily blog posts because I don’t really see the point of recounting an uneventful day and that is exactly what my days have been. They have been inconsequential (much like what I have come to realise is my own existence) and to put it out here feels like I am giving too much importance to myself and besides, who wants to read my mental ramblings about how I had a class and how much work I have and how many meals I skipped that day. What is the use of a life whose only concern is about how each day is proceeding and nothing more, where its primary concerns are not of any consequence in the world? Whose world is this existence making better or helping? Potentially no one’s.

But let me move away from that for a second to talk a bit about brilliance and the way it shines through. This is where I think I behave a little elitist and say that I believe there are lives and people who don’t shine, who probably never will, whose existence will merely be a speck. This could be because of whatever reasons and I am in no position to speculate about that. But I think one of the few thoughts that I have about my own existence (what is even mine in the first place, I wonder) is that it is a useless one. Yes, I occupy positions in this world where my presence adds some value to people’s lives. Yes, I am a daughter, a friend, potentially say, a mother or whatever. But these are roles that can be fulfilled by anyone or if I didn’t exist and no one else existed in my place, those places would not be there at all and it would have been a different life, but one that would have been perfectly fine anyway. But aside from these misfortunes of circumstance, there’s literally nothing I can call to my name and fame. It is quite a useless and pittance life, honestly.

It might be a good counter-argument to say that I am but 18.5 years old and of course cannot be expected to already be someone of consequence in the world. That is true, I would agree completely, I do have time. But do I have what it takes to convert that time into a consequential existence? I am not very convinced. I really have a lot of work to do that is extremely important for my life at Ashoka and I am not really getting anything done. Adding to my worries is my own dwindling mental health, I mean, it fluctuates a lot, there are times when I am doing quite alright and sometimes when I am just a burden on this world and myself and I don’t really see the point of going on and on. It sounds horrible and of course, I don’t support or entertain any ideas of suicide (it is a very serious issue and I hope that people who face problems get help and keep themselves healthy and safe, we need you). Anyway, it is all part of the shining existence idea because that is something I revolve around in almost all aspects of my life. I will do better, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Useless, Lazy Days

I sometimes wonder if moving on is really that easy, or if I had it easy or if I had only been fooling myself. Regardless, the fact still remains that I may not have moved on as quickly as I like. But that’s okay, it is still happening, I can feel it and while it is a slow process, I know that it shall yield its results soon enough. I have withdrawn because distance helps me move on and I guess, I can only hope that it gets to work faster. It is too slow for my liking, at least the pace at which it has been happening lately. The only thing that gives me any semblance of hope is the fact that I can visibly see that the moving on is happening and so I know it will come to fruition soon enough. 

Today was an extremely lazy and unproductive day and I probably should not be quite so cavalier about it. But I also think that a whole week of poor sleep led me into this—I was so sleepy and tired and exhausted and I fell asleep just about everywhere. I could not concentrate on my work for a sustained amount of time, could not come to write my paper and get my work done. In retrospect, that was an extremely dumb move because that means I will have work piled up for a long period of time. But in my defence, I really needed the sleep. That’s all the defence I have, which is comical, almost. 

What is the deal with life, really? You breathe in breathe out and suddenly you’re expected to pay for that oxygen you consume in the form of living a life. You have a body you’re supposed to feed and protect (assuming this ‘you’ is separate from your body), you have a role in the world that you’re supposed to fulfil, there are others whose role is to ensure you fulfil yours, we are all censoring and self-censoring and we all take joy in making each other pay for their share of oxygen. It is quite ironical that people say “live your life” like it is this freeing thing when actually living your life is as restricted as you can get. There, I have officially become the old hag on top of Oracle mountain now.

Coming back to my ponderations and considerations on the topic of my own uselessness in getting my work done, the wifi is not working on my laptop. I have legitimately tried everything, from restarting to disconnecting to everything and it still refuses to work. This means that this post shall go up only later, whenever my wifi connects. But because I have written it earlier, I shall use that as an excuse to pre-time my post, this seems almost like time travel and maybe it is, I don’t know. But I don’t want it to go unnoticed, I think that the fact that I am writing this despite not being able to post it shows my own dedication to this cause. That should show me that if I set my heart to it, I can get my work done. It may seem like I can’t and I agree, sometimes I fail miserably. But I have the capability to get it done, the capability to move on, and so I shall, come whatever (where is this fighting spirit the times I really need it, I wonder). Positivity is one thing, but blind hope is another. This isn’t blind hope, right? 

And that’s my memory for the day. 

Eat, Sleep, Live

So, this time I am setting myself a limit of twenty minutes to write this post. I fear that giving too much time to this blog could end up having a negative effect on me, an effect I don’t think is very healthy for me. It is all probably part of my endeavour to develop healthier habits to cope and survive, and more than survive, live. Today, I woke up feeling sick and I ended up vomiting a little in the morning. I can only attribute it to my general sense of health all this while, my general lack of taking care of myself no doubt. I had skipped many meals and it was all causing my stomach to throw up what it did have. Nonetheless, I forced myself to eat lunch and dinner and even though, it seemed to resist and did not seem particularly pleased with food, I managed to give myself the calories I obviously need.

There was a point of time in my life when I actually considered starving myself, because I felt that I should not eat. This came from a place of deep insecurity and hatred for my own body, I hated that I was fat (I still am, but I am more accepting of that than I was before). That’s all there was to it, I thought I was fat and considered not eating so that I won’t be fat anymore. I think I tried that too, a few times, but I always ended up succumbing to my growling stomach and ate. When I would eat, it would be followed almost immediately with a burning anger at my own helplessness against my hunger. It was a malicious, vicious cycle I managed to thrust myself into. But it was a cycle that fortunately never gained the traction that it desired, if it had, I probably would have been thinner but the effects of that thinness are something I am glad I never would have to face. It is better to lose weight healthily than that way.

Which brings me to what I wanted to say here, I have been losing weight here at university. It was the effect of many dietary changes (most of them bad, I should say), it has come from skipping meals and eating lesser quantities than I used to. Last semester, I was not this bad but this semester, I feel like I have lost weight faster (and it has only been a month into university!). Now, I don’t know if I have lost weight or not, I never tried to find out, what I do know is how I feel and I don’t feel great. I don’t like the loss of appetite, I don’t like this and hence why I am trying so hard to bring it back on track, start eating properly again. I am going to work through this and emerge victorious, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

PS: I was done in 10 minutes, which means more time for me to read

Living in the Head

There are days when I feel like I am stuck in that metaphorical dump where nothing seems to ever go to plan. The dump where I feel alone, demotivated, stressed (though about what, I can never tell), and a thousand other negative feelings and thoughts that pass through me. Today was almost one of those days, where I felt absolutely lazy and hopeless, where I wanted nothing more than to just lie down and sleep, forget the problems that were plaguing me. The fact that I could do that is a mark of my own privilege and good fortune, and this thought really does nothing to alleviate my problems. If anything, it adds on to them, because it is followed by the toxic thought that if I am so lucky in life, why am I being ungrateful for my blessings by feeling this way? It is a narrative that has been fed to me throughout my life, from everyone around me, including my own parents who have an almost cavalier attitude towards mental health. Unless it is so serious as to require medication and other forms of treatment, it is probably not an issue at all.

While that is not a narrative I believe in, there are times when quite unconsciously, it seeps in, most especially with respect to myself. I would chastise myself for “overreacting” despite being given “everything I wanted.” I would fall into periods of self-hate where I would struggle to reconcile the differences between why I was feeling a particular way and why I need not be feeling that way. And as I have come to realise, that is not an easy struggle, it leaves you panting for breath, trying to claw and catch hold of something that shall bring you back into the world of the sane. It is a very difficult process, a process that potentially has no end, you can hold it off for a while, but it shall resurface once in a while. Or at least that’s what happens to me, and I am by no means an expert. Maybe there are people in this world who can tell me that the battle can be won once and for all, I could definitely use that motivation and hope.

We all have a tendency to look for the ideal, to search for it, to revel in it, to marvel over it (please wait as I think of more beautiful verbs to use, at the risk of sounding like an absolute snobby English major). Talking of English major, when I was at camp, one of the guys told me that he was actually surprised by my English, that it was really good. That I didn’t obviously have a British accent, but I didn’t have an Indian one either, that my English sounded crisp and polished. I was flattered for a second, before realising that it could also be quite a toxic compliment. Toxicity just pervades every sphere of our life, there is something to be offended by all the time. Even things that seemingly intend no form of offence, seem to gather hate and offence. But oh well, that begs the question of who decides what’s offensive or not. Thinking about all this is like being a fly that gets stuck on a spider web, you think you finally got hold of the thread that binds you to the web, but when you begin to unravel it, you find yourself more soundly stuck and tangled up in the web. There are too many questions that can be raised with every single thing, you just cannot please everybody, even though in an ideal world, you can.

I have always been a fan of that dream of the ideal world, with the ideal peoples, with the ideal ideologies, with the ideal resources, the ideal everything. Even issues in that world would be the ideal issues, that can successfully employ the ideal solution. Oh, sexual harassment won’t even be a thing, because, with fluidity in gender, ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman shall be annihilated, which means that toxic cultural positions on the same shall cease to exist, rape or harassment shall find no meaning because everyone would be sensitised and understand the implications of their actions. I also realise that I have a new favourite word at the moment, toxic, I have used it quite a lot already.

Do you know what else is toxic? Specific kinds of friendships, and friends. I have been that kind of a friend many times in my life, mostly unknowingly. By the time I would realise and take steps to change, I would have already done my damage. That is not exactly soothing for my ego or my self-confidence, but I always believe that to pretend a problem does not exist is to give it undue weight and power. If I pretended I was never a toxic friend, it goes to say that I may potentially never take any steps for my own personal improvement and progress, thereby giving my problem a power that it does not deserve (and I daresay, shall never deserve). The more I think about it, the more convinced I am about that. After all, we all do live predominantly in our own heads, everything we do is a response from our head. And to live in that head, while simultaneously reconciling with our presence in the world outside is a big deal, a scary one at that. It does not do then, to let ourselves feed power to toxic things around us and inside us. Maybe I can take this advice from my head and truly use it, both inside and outside?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Usefulness and a Sad Event

There are times when you feel useful, and times when you don’t. Today, I opened some of my older posts on this blog, to give myself some hope that I will get through this week and submit my papers, which will all hopefully be well-written. It is a dream, a very illogical dream, that is far-removed from reality. But I have promised myself that I will not fret too much about it. Battles are lost even before entering the battleground, I refuse to let this one be the same. I will not go down without a fight, and this spirit is refreshing for me, especially because I would not be normally this way.

I am still afflicted by that horrible writers’ block, I have two papers due tomorrow that I need to be working on but words fail me. I am simply unable to even start writing them. I am hoping that I will be better tomorrow, and be able to write a better paper tomorrow. For now, I regret this to my core, but I think I will stop this blog post here. But before that, I would like to talk about just one thing, One of the professors here committed suicide yesterday. My roommate was in this professor’s course, and the suicide came as a rude shock to everyone.

They say he jumped off the 12th floor in his apartment complex. Why he felt the need to take his life in such a manner, I shall never know. I also chanced across his blog and one of the posts talked about his struggles with depression. I was left heartbroken even though I had never seen him before. To know that someone who had inhabited this world of mine, whether or not I knew them or they knew me, exists no more is a rude shock. It is scary, how small life has become, makes me rethink twice before complaining about myself and joking about dying. It has become a habit to say “I am dying” to indicate the struggle of college life. But I should be grateful (how sad is that!) that I do not feel the need to take my life. I may be hopeless, but I still want to live. Sometimes, the will to live is so underrated, when it literally decides the difference between life and death. I should be glad that the will to live still flutters inside me, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.