Crave Comfort

Can someone tell me how I can get sleep, I am physically exhausted completely but nothing seems to be working. I am not even able to collapse sleep like I used to, every time I try to sleep in complete exhaustion, it’s like my brain doesn’t stop working and it leaves me feeling completely unrested. Added to that is the fact that I have been getting very little sleep these last few days and that is completely unhealthy for me. But there has also been a fear, a fear of myself and what I am capable of doing to myself and this fear also keeps me disturbed and restless. It is not a nice feeling at all, to feel like you cannot sleep even though there is nothing else you want more than to just sleep. Well, in my case, I also want human comfort, or more specifically, my mother’s comfort. It is quite childish of me, I will admit, but the heart wants what it wants.

I just want to be hugged and held I guess, in a completely selfish way. Oh wonderful, it all ties back to that one thing, I want to be loved, great job. I have successfully managed to, within the space of this one blog post paragraph, reach the root cause of my problems. Voila, deconstruction project successful. Now, can someone suggest a model that will work to use this and help me become better? Unfortunately, no one is interested in that intellectual exercise, it seems (and this obviously includes myself because what am I if not a hypocrite). Okay, I am actually going to cut this post short right now because I need to get to bed. But before that, I just feel the need to say that the smog has arrived and so has winter and I am not cherishing either of those things. Please give me a reason to continue breathing in this world, please?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Conversations

I went to Delhi with my friend today and it was a much-needed getaway and I enjoyed the day so much that when I got back, I was grinning like a Cheshire cat. I was genuinely really happy because the last week had been the most trying of times and I had absolutely hated every day and myself along with everything else. This was a much-needed trip because it meant that I got to escape the confines of the campus walls and well, that did me a world of good. The real world is a fascinating place, it is quite refreshing to see that life exists beyond these walls because sometimes, it becomes quite convenient to stay within these four walls and pretend that this where it all starts and ends when it actually is not the case.

I have been struggling to sleep these last few days because my mind has been in a really bad place the last few days. It is filled with a kind of deep, burning feeling of dislike for myself and it has only gotten worse as the days progress. I have actually grown to resent these blog posts too because they feel like a lot of work and I don’t want to put in that work. But I also feel that I need to get to this because it helps clear out some things in my head and they don’t always make perfect sense. My brain, whenever I am trying to sleep, is this restless thing that continues to work and jump from one thing to another, even though I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what those things are. It annoys me so much that I cannot help but grow a feeling of extreme resentment towards my own mind, my own existence in extension. Sometimes, it feels like I am just an unnecessary burden on this world and on the people in it.

Today, I had a conversation that towards its end threw some very important, extremely hard to swallow pills at my face. I had to swallow them, obviously, because I really did have no other choice. For my own sake and to save me a lot of self-despising registered on a platform where it will exist forever (or for a long time, whatever), I am not going to get into the details of what the conversation was. It was a very important conversation to have, I believe, but also one that I now fear could have ruined/modified a few things, especially my relationship with my friend. Well, the outcomes of that conversation were not exactly the most consoling for me because there were a lot of uncomfortable realisations in it. For fear of it being said that I misconstrued some things, I shall refrain once again from getting into the details. But all that needs to be told is that it has only instructed me that I probably need to direct my gaze more inward, probably in a less unfavourable light (I am not quite convinced of this part though, I think I really need to criticize myself a bit more because there are a lot of bad things I do). Sleep evades me, tears, unfortunately, don’t. Please tell me my existence shall come to mean something after all, please?

And that’s my memory for the day.

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.

Slight Disappointments

Today was the perfect example of a lazy day, a guilt-free lazy day. I did not get anything done today, I had nothing to get done and it felt great to not have any expectations resting on my shoulders. I mean, I do have quite a few expectations for myself but I shall get to them soon, just not today. There was dinner, a movie, a teeny tiny bit of shopping, I shall shop more tomorrow hopefully. I have plans to buy some new clothes because I feel my wardrobe needs a little something new in it. But knowing me, and my general miserliness, I will probably buy very little and call it a successful trip. Or better yet, buy nothing at all and come back.

I came back from a movie only half an hour back and I am completely exhausted from the day. I slept a lot even during the day, but a whole lot of good that did me because I am still sleepy now. The movie was slightly disappointing, I was expecting more, I guess, but it wasn’t bad. I am generally quite shit at reviewing movies, and to add to my already mediocre capabilities, I am also extremely sleepy and tired. So it probably is not a good time to type out my opinions on the movie, because my vocabulary seems quite limited to good/bad/nice. But it was a movie people had told me was wonderful and so I dragged my father along. He didn’t like the movie at all, though, while I don’t hold such an extreme view (in retrospect, I don’t hold extreme views in almost everything)

I also bought myself a mehendi cone, I love mehendi and I used to love putting it for other people and for myself. I was not great at it, but I still enjoyed it because I found the exercise very comforting a lot of the time. It made me happy and seeing the colour always made my day. I loved seeing the mehendi turn darker after the first day, I loved the smell of it that would linger for at least a day after I put it. If it was marudhaani, the smell would last for a few days, even with the perfume from soaps. But mehendi cones don’t do that, but that is not a failing, to be honest, because mehendi cones allow me an insane level of creative freedom that marudhaani can only dream of. I am most definitely doing my sleep blabber right now, so I am going to call it a night and get to sleep. Tomorrow shall be more productive, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

To be Privy to Myself

Differences get more pronounced when you put them against a backdrop of seeming homogeneity. Changes seem more alien when you keep them next to what had once been familiar. I went out with a friend today and when I spoke to her, I realised just how much I had changed from the person I had been. From the smallest things, from the way I held myself to my hairstyle to my way of speaking, everything has changed quite a bit. I view them all as positive changes, I am quite happy with the changes, they are changes I have wanted for a long time and they are finally happening. But I had not been privy to my own change–it sounds extremely dumb, how can I not be privy to things that happen to me? But that’s what it is, I have been quite spectacularly clueless about myself (I still am, but growth curves, they are quite real).

Another uncomfortable thing I realised today was that till date, the biggest compliment that anyone can give me is to say that I have lost weight. I seem to have quite an unhealthy obsession with weight, with wanting to lose it and feeling inordinately pleased when someone says that I have lost weight. It is an extremely insidious thing, I feel, to feel that way about myself, because I end up fat-shaming myself if I don’t lose weight. Possible serious issues that could raise because of this includes eating disorders, and I don’t want that on my plate (okay, that was an unintended pun, but a good one nonetheless). So I am going to actively try to stop myself from this obsession, it is difficult, especially in a family where weight is given a lot of ‘weight,’ where judgments are passed freely for weight, where being shamed for weight is normalised and is actually considered to be a motivator. I am probably at my healthiest right now and my weight should not be dictating my ideas and thoughts like this.

I do concede that just a year back, I had been a lot heavier and a lot less healthy. My weight was adding to my period complications and it was only after I came to Ashoka that I started losing weight. I was also losing weight fast, and a lot of it was also due to unhealthy eating habits. I have lost nearly 10/11 kgs in this one year I have been in college and in numbers, that is quite a mind-boggling thing. But I think this is where I shall draw myself a line, I don’t think I want to be heavier than this but I also am apprehensive of getting lower than this. I am probably still in the overweight BMI scale, but it is pretty skewed and not quite accurate and so I am just trusting what I feel about my own general health and I feel quite positive about (and I pray I am not jinxing that) that.

I also felt weirdly pretty today and just when I was feeling quite happy about myself and my life, I was whistled to on the road and I felt a rage I could not explain. I had been cycling to meet my friend and this man on a motorcycle was travelling the other direction and he just whistled to me in the cinematic hoohoo way. And before I could respond, he was gone and I had to go on my way. At the beach, as I was trying to find a place to park my cycle, I was once again stared and pointed at by a group of men. It all made me extremely angry, I was finally feeling in control of my own body and finally learning to feel confident in my own body and skin and this just pulled me down. And I felt helpless too because it felt like I could not do anything against them. They knew it too, they thrived in the knowledge that nothing would affect them. Well, that was a ruined mood, but I refuse to let it boil for longer than this in my head. I had sambar vadai, I am going to a movie probably tomorrow, and I am excited to do it all. So, I am going to sleep after a tiring day and because of tired hands that cannot type. My break will be good, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Stable Beauty

I am finally back in Chennai after quite a long while. I had not even realised that I had unconsciously missed it quite a bit, the different sights and sounds inside my own house. I think I am also consciously holding myself back from proclaiming it as my “home” because I know that right now, I probably don’t have a material interpretation for “home.” But that is not to say I don’t feel at home in multiple places, just Ashoka, for example. I feel comfortable and at home there, like I belong there (which is sometimes hard to find even within my own family). I live and thrive in the material space, I am very earthly in that way (also, fun star thing, I am apparently a Taurus and this is how they are supposed to behave, apparently).

I think one of the deals about quite a bit of travelling like I did today is that I am left completely exhausted to the bone. But my brain is still running fast inside my skull and I feel completely out of my body in a weird weird way. Today was an extremely fun day and I absolutely enjoyed it. Moreover, I put an effort to look pretty and I think it paid off quite nicely, I did feel pretty. And it felt nice to feel pretty because that is not something I feel very often. Especially not recently, and well, I don’t have anyone else to blame but myself because I let things affect me and make myself feel things. There are times when someone might say something because they don’t necessarily know that it could affect me. It could be a completely normal thing for them to say, something they have said before, but I could blow up for that because I don’t like it or it pricks a part of me that I am not very keen on getting pricked.

But regardless, coming back to the question of feeling pretty and putting an effort. I have always been a very materially rooted person, I define a lot of things in my life based on material and physical terms and ideas. I love photos, for example, and I love the small things that people might do unconsciously for me. It could be a simple thing as getting my phone for me when I leave it somewhere by mistake, moving without even thinking about it to accommodate me in a particular space, a hug, an unexpected text message, and so on. The concept of beauty too, in my head, has been strongly rooted in this material and physical world. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean this in an “I condone the idea of objective standards for beauty or I only accept conventional beauty standards” way. I mean it more in an “I believe that a person’s beauty comes in their physical self” way. This beauty is not objective, it cannot be defined. So, if I find someone beautiful, I find their physical self beautiful and if I know them well enough, this beauty I find on their outside and on the inside converge and become a concrete whole that I cannot differentiate between. This happens with me with almost all my friends, especially those that I grow close to.

So, for me to find myself pretty today meant a lot of things. But the most important thing for me was that I found what was inside of me beautiful too. I was surprisingly happy with myself, I didn’t hate myself (as I tend to do at times). That is a strong feeling, to be able to smile at yourself in the mirror (and no, let’s not get into the whole image/real, other/self question). This didn’t have anything to do with an objective view of my own prettiness today, it had to do with my own response to what I was seeing. I could have looked hideous to anyone else’s eyes, but if I found myself pretty then that was key. Am I even making sense? I am in a terribly sleepy state and I feel like I am not making as much sense as I would like. But then, if we all made perfect sense all the time, then we would be doubly critical of people who make mistakes. And honestly, I don’t think they need to berated more, not when they probably berate themselves for it more than others do. We all make mistakes, forget where we are rooted and lose our footing, but then, at the core of it all, there does exist the stability we crave and maybe one day, I will find it for myself?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Hard-to-Swallow Pills

I am finally done with my last submission for this midterm. I was actually done by 11:50pm and I had submitted my paper on time. But I realised much later (nearly an hour later) that I had botched up by not including my Works Cited page in my essay. I panicked because if I resubmitted my assignment, it would show as a late submission and that is something I cannot deal with, especially when I had submitted my essay on time and had only committed one stupid mistake (a pricey one nonetheless). So I resubmitted my paper while writing a comment for my professor to note that it wasn’t intentional but by a rather unfortunate turn of circumstance that I had messed up and was submitting again. I am hoping it won’t have much of a consequence because that would make me really sad, but I don’t have a big say in this, I believe. My only defence can be that I had my paper done and in-text citations in place. The Works Cited page could be an excused mistake (provided I don’t do it again, of course).

One of the things that had been really bothering me these last few days is my own sleep schedule and how I have been leaving it to go to hell. I have not been getting enough sleep and right now I am bogged by concerns about packing for tomorrow. I generally abhor packing because it means that I am forced to make choices and decisions that I do not want to make. It is quite simple, really, because I am one of the most indecisive people I know. Coupled with my own crippling fears and insecurities, indecisiveness is the perfect accompaniment to make me the hopeless choir that dreams are made of. In a sense, that is not a very nice thing to say about myself but I also believe that because midterm break has officially started, I need to give myself (read, force feed) some really hard-to-swallow pills. The pills shall cure my diseases, 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. 

The I in WrIting

I think it can be argued that every text has a public, whether or not this public engages and interacts with it the way the author wants. In that case, even this blog has a public. What this public does with what I publish in this blog is completely out of hands, all I can claim about this writing is that I wrote it and that’s where my authority ends. I hold the authority in the sense that I control what goes on the pages/posts. This is an immense responsibility, regardless of the absolutely mundane and exaggerating that are being written about. 

I have always been passionate about writing, primarily because I found it to let me live a world I wanted to. Books gave me worlds but I wanted different worlds from the ones I found in books. I could not find what I wanted, so I created new ones for myself, filled with what I wanted and nothing more. I think I am so utterly tired that I am quite sure I had a few dreams in a short 10-minute nap I just gave myself. 

My head is aching and I am pretty sure I have an upset stomach but university life demands that I suck it up and deal with my problems like a strong child. And I do, I have been extremely tolerant and brave many times, I have pulled myself through difficult times and managed to hold on to my sanity through it all. So I tell myself all these things as I pack my things up and get ready for more studying and a night of work. 

Today, we workshopped a story I had written in my Introduction to Creative Writing class. I was left quite delighted, unexpectedly pleased because people had such nice things to say about it. I was quite not expecting that at all, in fact, in my head, I was convinced my story was the worst in the whole week and that people were going to be extremely savage and critical of what I had written. To get good comments, (and not to mention, extremely flattering compliments from both the TA and the professor) felt great. We could all do more with having such feelings in abundance, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Facing Fear

My head aches a lot while I’m at university, I’ve realised. Maybe it’s a combination of bad food habits, sleep schedule mess-ups, academic stress and a thousand other things I let bother me and ruin my mental health and physical health. IN fact, even today, I was assaulted with a kind of banging pain and I could not fall asleep either because it felt like my head was dislocating and I could not do anything about it at all. That is not a very nice state of being, but then that’s exactly how it was. So when I collapsed into a weird position on the bed, sideways, hair blocking the light because it hurt my eyes, I was just hit with this uncomfortable feeling of my head being disjointed from my body.

I performed at the open mic today and I was so scared of it, so much so that I started panicking and I cried. When my friend called me to check on me, I had been crying and I felt so embarrassed to pick up the call but I had to because I knew she was checking on me to ask when I would come for the open mic (which I had signed up for in the first place). Long story short, I did not want to show my moment of weakness to the whole world. Well, I ended up showing quite a lot of weakness when I freaked out quite a lot and I also don’t think it was that good a performance, but I think that’s alright. They don’t know me, the people in the audience and the people who do matter know me well enough to know that I can probably sing better. And even if they don’t I don’t think I should really let that colour my considerations. That said, I was glad I sang nonetheless, even though I felt it was quite a bit of a waste of time. It is done and dealt with, I am facing my fears as bravely as I can and that matters enough, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.