Slacking Breaks

I think one of the elements of allowing myself to relax is the realisation of exactly how exhausted and tired I am. I don’t think I ever properly realise my own exhaustion during my time at university. I don’t have time for such frivolities, I have more pressing concerns to attend to, namely studying and doing important things for my own education that cannot be put off for longer than absolutely necessary. And I justify it to myself by saying that I am at university to study and study I must do without slacking. Everything I do is in a bid to not slack and call to question the use and legitimacy of being at university. I am there with a purpose to learn and I shall work myself and apply myself to that process, and when I fail in that purpose, like I have done a lot this semester, it takes a toll on me because I cannot bear the thought of being like that.

But I have been really sleepy the whole day today, my head is aching right now as I type and I want nothing more than to collapse on my bed and sleep until the end of eternity. I am also worried because half the semester has gone by so fast and in another half, I shall have my finals and I am absolutely not confident about it at all. Part of it is probably my own insecurities coming into play about my own estimate of my intelligence (which is not very high, to be honest, because I have allowed myself no reason to believe otherwise). But that being said, I think this break has allowed me a time when I could properly take time out for myself, to be with people who love me and who I love back. Of course, I also miss university and the people there with a strong passion, but I am going back there and I also most definitely needed and wanted this. This breath of home and grandparents, of one of the very few things that have been quite stable so far in my life. Surely the quest for this was worth the general slacking I have been doing this break?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Unexpected Things Happen All the Time

I think I have gotten used to the idea of being overwhelmed, I forget the times when things used to be simpler 9which wasn’t even that long back in the past, to be honest). I cannot help but chastise myself, because a lot of this is caused by my own stupidity/naivety. I was naive enough to like someone, so much so that the smallest things got me anxious, nervous, and so many other things including despair. An unread message became the bane of my existence, an unopened snap became the stick with which I measured my own self, someone else’s comment on my apparent “un-gorgeousness” got me into a spiral of self-pity and disappointment. Need I even go on? Funny thing is, it still affects me, but I think I am finally ready to somewhat let go and move on. If things happen, let them, but I need to stop myself from doing the dumb things I have been doing all this while.

This feeling of being overwhelmed is not alien to me. Taking a trip down memory lane, back to the previous semester, or particularly, the end of that semester, I can very clearly see how flustered and overwhelmed I was. What is alien to me, however, is the fact that it has been so little time since university started at all. Three weeks and that’s it and I already feeling my tearing my hair apart from frustration. It doesn’t help that I end up screwing up everything I do. It starts from the from the smallest of things like getting three meals a day, to writing some emails. Everywhere I turn, I am bombarded with a thousand different things and I manage to fantastically ruin them all. Of course, this general hopelessness aside, I have not exactly been having the good run I wanted to have with this semester. My whole academic life is at stake, I don’t know what this semester will bring. I cannot deal with more disappointment than I already have.

But one thing that has been relatively going better in my life is my Carnatic flute classes. I now have my own flute for the semester and I am enjoying the instrument. I can now play the seven notes in the Harikamoji Ragam (I think that’s how it’s spelt, but oh well) and also a small tune with only S, R and G. So that’s good progress because I am finally making sound and I feel more hopeful about the instrument now. All is not yet lost, I can learn to play something at least and it is always a cool skill, in my opinion, to know to play an instrument. I felt that way with the keyboard for sure, when I could play this melody that I thought only experienced players could play, it felt great! I am pretty sure I also shared that joy over here, as I very visibly improved with constant practice. That is something I am trying to do with the flute at the moment, I try to practice every day so that I have a better “success rate” (which basically means I can produce sound in the first try, all the time). It is still not reality but I have progressed quite a bit and I am very much proud of that.

I am finishing this post up early because I have too much work to do and I wanted to get this done before dinner so that the time after dinner can be utilised properly for concentrated study. Now I am afraid that stating it out loud (or typing it out, whatever) might actually have the opposite effect and I might end up not finishing my work. That is terrifying, I am scared of my own speech and jinxing capabilities. Also, just a few minutes back, I was hit with a sense of crippling loneliness. I don’t know what exactly brought it, I had been planning on getting dinner with my roommate, but she cancelled last moment and I didn’t have anyone to go to the mess with. I couldn’t find my friends, they were either outside campus or at the Freshers’ party and I just missed them. Well, I messaged one of my friends and then the feeling just vanished as quickly as it had made its appearance and now I don’t even know why that one moment of sentimental stupidity occurred. But I guess things just happen sometimes and well we don’t always have explanations do we?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Fears and Moving

Just a month or so back, I had been so ready to pack up and leave back to university. I was missing all my friends, I was feeling lonely despite being surrounded by my parents and brother. I was feeling locked in, there was nothing much to do here except stay in the house and look for hours at my phone, ruing the day I decided to join any kind of social media at all. I was seeing everyone having fun lives, hanging out with friends, while I was sitting miles away in the UK, staring at the screen of my phone and wishing I were back there instead. It is not a very fond memory to reminisce, for obvious reasons, because it has too many problems that seem apparent in retrospect, but then, it was what it was. Blinding isolation, I like to call it, when I withdrew because I felt others were withdrawing and suddenly, I could see nothing at all anymore.

I shall miss this home that I have managed to make mine in the three months I have been here. There have been times at university when I would turn awake at night, half-expecting to see the bottom of the top bunk above me, like I would have if I had been back home in Chennai. There were times when I would wake up, slightly delirious, half-expecting to see my wardrobe there, with its sticker-filled exterior and messy interior. I would then realise that I had moved on, moved away from that house. That house has been with me through my teenage as I remember it, from when I moved in at the age of 12 until I moved out at the age of 17. It has seen me through many times, from my first excursion with my classmates to Mahabalipuram, to my outing with my best friend to the beach or to the movies. It has seen me grow up, seen me be a prejudiced arse, seen me be mean to myself, spewing hate at myself, it has seen me cry into my pillow at night, when a close friend moved schools, it has seen me angry when I did not get recognition for my efforts in my school, it has seen me through a lot of things.

But now, it has seen me move away and make a new life, almost, in a new city (or maybe I should say cities, counting this home here in the UK). And I am excited to see what all this new home is going to be seeing me do. Maybe it shall see me join higher studies, maybe it shall see me graduate, maybe it shall see me make my way to a job, maybe it shall see me make my way here every summer, with hopes and dreams, maybe it shall see me make new friends, fall in love, maybe more. I don’t know, the future is full of possibilities, scary possibilities, exciting possibilities. But right now, despite it all, I am scared to leave. I have been here for three months and it feels rooting, I feel rooted here now and to leave seems to be a painful uprooting. I am not ready for it yet.

In contrast, when I was moving into university last year, I had been raring to go. I was ready to pack up and leave, of course, with some level of apprehension and fear, but overall excitement. But this time, I am scared of moving back and I cannot exactly find a particular reason why. Maybe it is because I am afraid of what the university life entails, I had been ignorant before but now I kind of know what happens, what I shall have to go through every semester. Maybe it is also anxiety at having to leave my family, not where I can access them easily, but instead far away, farther than they would have been if they were in India. Maybe it is the anxiety that I shall be travelling alone (even though I have done it countless times already) and that I have no plan for my transport, as of now. Maybe it is the fear of unpacking and arranging my room once I get to university, take all my things from the locker, carry them and put them all away neatly. There are too many things that I am afraid of and I don’t know what to do about it all.

But then, university has also taught me to learn to deal with many of my fears. It is inevitable that I shall leave for university tomorrow, it is going to happen, I have my flight ticket to vouch for it. I have no control over it at all, and so I will be forced to deal with it. I just hope that I can find the strength to do that, that I shall continue to find the strength during my tough times. I have a family to turn to, no matter how many times I have faced issues with them, or have fought with them. I exist here for a reason, I have the strength to deal with the hard balls that are thrown at me. I am here to make an impact in the world,  no matter how small, and I shall work to realise myself, to make myself happy. I have the guts to move ahead through it all, don’t I?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Fans, Heat, and Stories

I love fans, I always have, even though they have an annoying capacity to accumulate dust and dirt and could trigger an allergic reaction in me. I am allergic to dust, smoke, and pollen. It makes me sneeze continuously, gives me a runny, stuffy nose, and if it is my good day, that’s all that happens and it settles in a couple of days, by itself, or a day, with medication. But if it turns out to be my bad day, I would have to face the trouble of a blocked nose, wheezing, and at least a week of being sick. My parents say I have a very sensitive trachea and that is the reason I have drastic reactions to these things sometimes. I hate it, but there’s not much I can do about it. My grandmother says that doing Pranayama (a breathing exercise routine which comes under Yoga) can help me a lot, but save a few times when she tried really hard to get me started on it, I never continued with it. Well, I am most definitely at fault for that and she uses all opportunities to point that out to me. But in my defence, it is hard work and I don’t always run on amazing levels of motivation.

In India, as far as I have seen, almost every house has a ceiling fan at least. The heat makes it imperative to have one. I was of the impression that in the UK, one might not need fans because the weather is cooler. I could not have been wronger, it gets boiling hot here and I feel like jumping in a bucket of ice and staying there. The buildings, the cities, they are all built for the cold weather. They are built to be as heat-absorbing and holding as they could be, meaning that when temperatures shoot up, the buildings continue to do their heat-absorbing thing and people inside get slow-cooked to medium tenderness. My clothes are drenched, the one table fan my brother and I share in our room gives me brief seconds of respite before it turns away to do the same for my brother. It is unbearably hot, even though it is 11:20pm and it is supposed to be cooler.

The whole of England is actually facing a terrible heat wave at the moment and everywhere is as hot as here. There is quite nothing that can be done except escape into a place where there could be AC or some other cooling device. In India, even when temperatures shot up, we had the luxury of fans and ACs in our house, which would keep us quite comfortable. It was the outside that felt hot, Here, the outside is relatively cooler than the inside, but the windows don’t open fully, and the breeze is not very powerful either. I wouldn’t have, for the life of me, thought that I would miss Chennai’s heat, but I do. I miss it very much, it was a wonderful city, a wonderful house that I miss terribly.

Speaking of Chennai, I finished writing a story today. It is for a competition and I set my story in Chennai, during the 2015 floods. I actually felt quite proud of my story, which was a very welcome change because I generally am very critical about everything that I write. I am almost never happy with my work and for the first time, I felt quite content with my piece. Of course, I still wish I had the capability to make it sound as beautiful as the stuff I compare it to, quite unconsciously, in my head. But I am oddly at peace with it, I am okay with just letting my story speak in its own voice.

In fact, I think I have realised that the problem with everything I have written was that they spoke in a voice different from what I wanted them to speak in. For me, I thought it was a demerit, but I have come to accept it as something that is inevitable and not necessarily a demerit. I still have quite a long way to go before I could start seeing it as a merit, but I am getting there slowly. This has actually been something that has taken me the whole summer to arrive at. I am oddly at peace right now, there are a thousand conflicts and issues in my head, a thousand disappointed thoughts, but somehow I have managed to gain some form of control over them. I still struggle, I fail a lot, but I am getting better. I may never be 100% scot-free, but that doesn’t necessarily put me on the naughty list, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Growth, Love, and Peace

Today was an important day for me, for my own growth, for my happiness and peace of mind. I managed to clear the air with people, finally made sense of my frustrations, and worked to resolve them. I also managed to find a volunteering job for myself at a local charity shop. I will be working twice a week, 4-hour shifts, and I start coming Friday. Understandably, I am excited to do this work even though I have absolutely no experience of working in a shop. But one thing that had been on my mind was whether this voluntary work would be worth it for me, whether it would add anything of value to me. To be blunt and honest, I was thinking about my resume and whether I needed to find something that would look great on a resume, something that was not ‘worked in a charity shop’.

But what I realised was that I did not care about it as much as I made it out to be. I wanted to volunteer, I wanted to work in that shop, and my CV never featured in my list of primary concerns. It has been my dream to work in the social sector, and any kind of volunteering job is only going to provide me with more experience in the social sector. Moreover, I believe in karma and I like to believe that my volunteering will one day come round to help me when I (hopefully) start my own NGO or organisation, that I will not find it very difficult to find help and/or funds. Yes, selfish motivations are big on this one. But I will say with absolute surety that I am looking forward to volunteering at the shop, regardless of what benefits I could get out of it.

I heard back from one of the internships, their vacancy was apparently filled and so they wanted to know if I would be interested in another position. But I was not very keen on becoming a campus ambassador, after applying for a content writing internship. Moreover, I had not liked their website that much either, so I am not that disappointed. I was definitely not as disappointed and heartbroken as I had been when I got rejected for two other internships I had been really interested in. I am still not keeping my hopes very high for the other internship I applied to. I want to be selected for the internship, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? What you want is not going to happen all the time. But I am not fretting too much because I have something else in my bag that I am genuinely excited about.

The break has been largely lazy for me, it has left me bored and lonely. I miss the times when I could just meet my friends at 12:30am, chat with people round the clock, go for a walk around campus when I feel particularly down. There was something my university that somehow simultaneously robbed me of my comfort but also provided me with it. I had been eager to leave for the holidays, I had missed my family a lot. But now that I am here, I realise that I miss my friends and my university equally. I miss everyone, I want to go back soon, and give them all the biggest hugs I can possibly give. I realise that I cherish these people and their presence, I absolutely love them all. It feels nice, to be filled with love and gratitude, especially after a particularly dry spell. I did tell you I believed in karma now, didn’t I?

And that’s my memory for the day.