Stable and Better

I am sleepy and I have quite a lot of work today that I am quite conveniently ignoring because I don’t feel like working right now. I am spending time with friends, bantering and arguing with them and I am quite enjoying this moment of light-heartedness. There’s something comforting about this banter and it is quite nice, quite happy. I am actually quite peaceful right now, not as unstable as I was before. I think part of the reason (okay, who am I kidding, it is a huge part of the reason) is the fact that I managed to reconcile with my friends and air out my issues and well, clear my mind a lot more than it had been before. Well, also gave them sanction to be snarky with me because of my own stupidity but it’s all good stuff. There’s something about banter that restores me to normalcy, it is comforting in its normalcy.

There is also something normal about music, it is ordinary in how it is out of the ordinary. I find joy in music, I find it soothing in the way music makes its way into my ears and how the sound resonates through my chest when I play it loudly on speaker or when it comes from my own throat. I may not be the best singer, but I am actually a pretty good one and I love hearing my own voice many of the times I catch myself singing. Yes, it also collides simultaneously with my disappointment that I cannot sing a lot of things that people who are trained can but that doesn’t stop me from trying and well, to be honest, I have come to the realisation that for someone who wasn’t trained, I actually do a lot better than quite a few of them who are trained. There is something that I find intuitive about music and rhythm that I find a lot of people struggle with. So I am grateful that I have music in my life (and a couple of other things too of course).

I promised a friend that I would write a happy post today and well, I think this post is by far the happiest in a few days. So Shree, this is for you, if you are reading this. You make me a happy person, a stable person and I have a thousand issues and I am a total bitch at times but you’re the person I am most nice towards (well, aside from Vighnesh of course). And yes, when I banter with you at odd hours, namely early morning hours, I am really sassy at you and well I love you with all my heart and thank you for existing and being a wonderful soul and for giving me company at 4am in the morning. Honestly, lady, please go to sleep, we have an 8:30am class tomorrow and this no-sleep thing is a really bad idea. We are going to be fine, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Attached For Your Perusal

The best part of travelling alone is that I get my thoughts alone to myself. I am free to think, to exist on my own terms. But of course, that comes with the risk of my thoughts running away from me and flowing away into crevices I don’t want it going into. There are thoughts that have become so ingrained inside of me. They have become “the usual” and, I was telling this to a friend today, it has become that one thing on the menu you will order regardless of what you are going to be eating that day. There is a difference you start to draw between the different thoughts, familiarity belies seeming comfort and acceptance but is actually all the more sinister. But again, familiarity is what we all stick to, so there comes an acceptance of the sinister (?), I don’t know, I probably am making as much sense as the next lunatic on the street.

I travelled today on the train, alone, for the first time on the train and it was a weirdly liberating feeling. Well, it was also accompanied by an almost crippling sense of loneliness because there was no one to talk to, not on the phone or in real life. So I read a book and well, I also suffer from mild motion sickness so I felt nauseous for a while after I was done with my book. But I didn’t regret the book, it was probably one of the best I have read in recent times. It was simultaneously heartbreaking and it is the story that I am better off knowing, the story I didn’t know I needed but once I read it, I cannot get over it. I have no doubt that it will feature in some form in my dreams today (if I dream, that is). I have been having quite a few dreams recently, sometimes I wish they were true because they are beautiful and I wish my real life were that way. But again, familiarity, right? My dreams, the ones I like are ones that have an element of familiarity, a reliability that is probably all the more sinister because real life does not provide me with that anyway. Real life is not as stable as I would like, and it is probably time I made my peace with it.

There is always the search for stability, I search for it everywhere. I search for a place to call “home” and right now, it seems like nothing shall fit the bill. I think I find it in a place but turns out I am not as stable as I would like to be over there. I am a traveller, but I don’t want to be, I want to stay somewhere (again, random fun star ‘fact’: Apparently Taureans hate change and always search for that solid ground, owing to their ‘earthly’ nature). I probably am never going to find that stability anywhere or with anyone, no matter how desperately I want to. And that devastates me because I realise that I relate so much to a character in that novel and I can almost envision my own raging emotions for the character take over, but this time for myself.

There are times when I wonder if maybe I am searching for stability only because I am told by everything around me that I need to have that thing in my life. That place, that person, that thing that keeps me stable and alright and ensures that I don’t go spiralling out of control like a kit whose tail has just been cut. Or if there’s something inane in me that is looking for all of these things. And regardless of the cause for the search, the search is still legitimate and it makes me wonder if maybe, in my misguided haste, I am looking for it in the wrong places. These are all just questions and I am an overthinker by profession, sometimes and heartbreak is real and it is painful and I would prefer to not have it. The thing is, attachment is scary, it is tricky, it is familiar but sinister, it is stable unstability. It is the thing on the menu I know shall happen, regardless of what other thing happens. And unless I remove it from the menu altogether, or change my restaurant, it is going to continue to happen. And well, it is probably not a bad thing, but it is still scary in its familiar unfamiliarity (there, I have officially reached levels that I would have made fun of a year back, almost). Talking in abstractions is actually quite a fun exercise, I should do it more often. What do you think?

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.