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.

 

Brain Thinks Things

I wasted today by doing absolutely nothing and well, how do I feel about that? Absolutely disappointed in myself especially because knowing my own capabilities, I will be struggling with all the work I have to do tomorrow. I will not be able to finish it and I will absolutely useless because of the same. But nevertheless, I think it is nice sometimes to have a bit of a cheat day where you get nothing at all done. As much as it impacts my overall productivity and perceptions of myself, it still helps me get that important break and relaxation that my over-stressed, overwhelmed brain refuses to let me have. It is quite refreshing (the word is back for a while I guess).

I bought a few Tamil books yesterday and I am excited about them because I want to get back to reading in Tamil and these are what I consider baby steps towards the same. I want to become well-versed in Tamil writing and be able to write myself as well as translate a bit. How well I am doing on that front is a bit of a question but I guess everyone starts somewhere and I would like to start now, better late than never I believe. Tamil is that language that I equate strongly with my home and family, I cannot mentally divorce the two entities and view them as separate from each other. They are strongly linked to each other and I am most comfortable talking to my family in Tamil–it is comforting and soothing to hear the language.

I have also been thinking quite a bit about my academic life and my own expectations from the same. I realised that there are a lot of things I expected out of myself owing to my own perceived successes at the school level. These are no doubt not repeated at the college level and that makes me frustrated because I want to be smart, I want to be intelligent and I want to be competent. All adjectives that I don’t currently use to describe myself. This is quite a complicated situation to be in and it leads me into a lot of mental space issues where I go through periods of self-hate and my perceptions of myself go for a toss, feeding me toxic narratives of my own self that probably does nothing but to reinforce harmful ideas and make them seem even more real rather than merely constituted (I think I might have Judith Butlered this right now). In terms of many things I have been quite bad and I can only hope that I can turn it around because there’s a lot I want to turn around and I will, right?

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.

Lovely and Not So Lovely Friendships

All my life I never had any close friends, friends I could share my deepest fears with or feel extremely comfortable and at home with. Part of it was my own fault, my own coldness that kept me away from people. Part of it was that no one really tried to come close enough. The one person I thought who came close enough was my best friend from school. But now, as a person who has completed a year at university, I cannot help but notice the different toxic things about my friendship with her. One very obvious toxicity was the fat-shaming and utter lack of confidence and security about my own body. It was in the very small things, we would see a common friend of ours, who would be on the slightly heavier side and we would speak to each other on how she was wearing this tight t-shirt or something like that. Another was how I felt the need to hide some things from her because she would judge me for it.

For the longest time, I was apprehensive of talking to her about stuff that I believed were typical teenager stuff. I could not talk to her about crushes, not at all. The one time I tried, she told me to my face that she felt that they were unimportant and that she didn’t see why I was even bringing that up. Needless to say, that conversation died and was buried there but I always walked away feeling that maybe I should not be thinking of those things. When I was a bit more secure, I realised that I most definitely can think about those things and that it would have actually been amazing to discuss these things with a close friend. Nonetheless, that is a closed chapter, almost and promises to remain closed for a long time.

But nevertheless, I grew up telling myself that I did not need those kinds of friends that social media is disgustingly filled with. It is the kind with the sleepovers, the midnight movie marathons, the one where you trust each other with secrets, blah blah. Now I was obsessed with that for a little while, I was desperate to find stuff that I could relate to with my best friend. But I found I could not match anything I found with my own life and I decided that it was all a lie and that no one could ever have such a “picture-perfect” friendship. It was a very rare possibility and well, I was not destined for it. It is actually an idea I still believe in, that my friendships are never going to be picture-perfect, except that now, that thought does not come with sadness and bitterness, but rather an acceptance of it as being completely alright. For me, that has been quite a difficult path to traverse, but a path that was really fulfilling, for it changed the way I viewed my friendships and how I formed my friendships.

For me, any kind of relationship, from romantic to familial, involves a level of attachment and dependence. It is something I cannot break away from, something I don’t envision breaking out of. But where it becomes a problem is when it dictates your every action, that you cannot tear your eyes and frame away from that relationship to probably focus on something else. In retrospect, that was the issue that broke my relationship with my best friend from school. The realisation of my tendency to get too attached and the active efforts to curb it are probably the most fundamental reasons for why I have better friendships at university. Friendships that I feel comfortable in, that I feel loved in, that I feel a sense of belonging and safety, these were hard to come by. But it finally feels like I have that, it feels heartwarming.

It is so underrated, telling someone that they just came by to see you, or that they came by to ask you how you were feeling because you had been sick. The pleasure in feeling that some soul around you cares enough to inquire about you is something that I missed a lot while in university. But I found out today that I have that, I have those souls, I have those friends, and it fills me with hope. Yes, they exasperate me and frustrate me and irritate me, but they still love me and I love them (I think?). And well, when I have this, my heart feels a little less pain when I wonder about my crush and crib about it to my friend. The guy might not care enough, he might have forgotten me, but well, I have people who I know won’t forget me. These are people I spent a lot of time building a relationship with and well, they definitely matter a lot more. Sometimes, the perspectives you think you had are the ones that surprise you the most, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Hard Amends

I am much too sleepy to type and write this blog post right now. I had been holding out on this marvellous sleeping for a while now and the last few days seem to have been a real problem for me. I had been horrible to myself last semester and this semester, I have already been inexcusably bad to myself that I know for a fact that I have really affected my mind and body. But I have promised myself that I shall work on amends, that I shall make them as effective as possible. But of course, the first step is to realise that you messed up big time and being willing to move on.

After yesterday’s breakdown, I feel a lot better in general about myself and the situations I have managed to find myself tangled up in. One of the major things that had been on my mind was my own foolish fancies about this guy I like, and I was allowing myself to be carried away by things like messages and whatnot. Now, I would think of my behaviour as extremely stupid, expectable but stupid. So one of my primary objectives right now is to work through these seemingly stupid decisions, slowly by parts, to try and understand myself and essentially set up a system where I would be less prone to this kind of behaviour. But of course, that is not to say that I do not feel any pain at all about whatever has happened, because I do and the pain is numbing. I only hope that I shall be able to find the mental strength to pull through this pain.

It is just the second week of the semester and I already feel reminded of some of the worst days from last semester. Maybe it goes to say that there are more hard things in store for me, that there are much tougher challenges that I would have to tackle in the course of this semester. And I won’t lie, that is not something I am excited about. But I think what I would tell myself is that I can prove to myself that I have an inner strength that I can depend on, that I am someone who can hold her own fortress. While right now it doesn’t really seem like much of a founded belief, what I am hoping is that I can prove me wrong. Right now, I feel like one of the theorists I am studying in my Introduction to Literary Theory class, what with my saying the same thing over and over again, with different words.

I think that is one thing about the workload at university and the amount I need to study. I feel like, as a student, I have made some incredible progress, that my brain has grown indescribably, to be able to allow me to accommodate the different things that are happening in class. I am most definitely becoming smarter (while also simultaneously becoming dumber in places of common sense, but that is a situation I aim to rectify in the near future) and I can feel it and that is a great feeling. I think I do like education, at least right now, at this point in time. Maybe during finals week or mid-term week, I shall be singing a different tune. But right now, I think I should take it in stride, stop being stupid in the many places where being stupid affects my physical being and prove to myself that I am not a force to be trifled with, not even by myself. I think that’s always the hardest part to execute, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Complicated Ordinariness and Extraordinariness

Today was probably one of the most unproductive days I have had in the recent past and that is saying a lot because my whole summer was a case study in unproductivity. But nevertheless, unproductivity is more starkly noticed when you have something to be productive about but you fail at that. I had a lot of work that I had to get done today but I did not get it done and now, I am quite obviously paying the price as I sit here, trying desperately to fight sleep (though I don’t know why I am this sleepy despite the fact that I slept a lot) and try and get something at least done. But I think that is going to fail, so I might as well just sleep after this blog post.

Which brings me to another thing that I worry about, this blog. I am afraid of how I shall maintain this blog as the semester progresses. It is just the first week, one of my professors is not even here yet so her class hasn’t started yet, and I am already drowning under the workload. I am not exactly very confident of the fact that I can do this, but I do know that I have gotten through this (if not exactly, but still a form of this) before and I have the strength within me for that. All I have to do is find it and channel it properly and pray that I become a great person as an added bonus. Sometimes I wonder if there is anything I can do to make me a great person and not generally meh. I don’t necessarily think that being ordinary or average is bad (regardless of the baggage that the terms generally come with). But I cannot help but wonder how different it would have been if I were not so, if there was something extraordinary, if you will, about me. It is not exactly a very great doubt to have because it throws my self-esteem into jeopardy almost all the time. And my self-esteem is not the greatest anyway. So you take something that was already at level -1 and send it on to level -6 or something.

That reminds me, I have still not received a reply from him and well, I don’t know how to deal with it, to be honest. I don’t want to give myself hope only for it to come crashing down, so right now, I am focussing on not thinking about these kinds of things. Because when you like someone or have a crush on someone, you do tend to become quite obsessed with them. For me, this physical distance means that I have to try and not let that obsession anywhere near me because it is pointless and shall never achieve fruition. I am just really afraid because I have never really dealt with things like this before. The one time before this, I had too much going on, too much was at stake. And well, as I had written, I moved on and maybe that’s what will happen with this one too. But right now, hope is the cheeky thing that continues to flutter here and there inside my mind and well, as pleasant as the feeling is, the after-effects is something I don’t think I want to put myself through (they do say that romance is intoxicating).

But anyway, aside from that, I have been sleeping a lot lately. I don’t even know why I sleep so much or why I feel so sleepy all the time. The last couple of days, I have not been able to sleep properly because there were too many things running on my mind. As they continue to do, even right now. There are too many thoughts that are fighting for attention, to be called to be typed out onto the screen. I am afraid of my classes, if I will be able to do good enough in them for my professors to like me and think of me as a worthy student. Does that make me ‘brown-nosed’? I don’t really know, because I would not equate wanting to be liked by professors to stupidly slaving away for them and saying a ‘yes’ to everything they say or do. I don’t think that’s how I want to be liked by them. I would much rather have them like me as a consequence of my smartness. But I am ordinary after all, so there’s that dilemma. Why is everything in life so complicated?

And that’s my memory for the day.

The Satisfying and the Unsatisfying

I am tempted to write about flutes again because I am still helplessly infatuated with them. They produce a wonderful tone (if played right, which I most definitely don’t). But anyway, I manage to have a better success rate with blowing on the flute, as in, I have a higher probability of producing some sound through the flute. Me yesterday would not have thought that would ever happen. But well, continuous blowing makes you get better I guess (the number of blowing, holes inappropriate jokes we made in class is mind’blowing’ (sorry, I had to put a bracket inside a bracket to acknowledge my own dumb pun)).

But the flute is fascinating, especially for me, because I think the one thing that the keyboard did was keep it quite easy for me to play it. You just had to press a key and it was reliable and sound would most definitely come out. Whether the series of notes I would play was nice to hear or not, I always knew that if I played a C, I would get the C sound. With the flute, you just blow it hoping that sound comes out and if it does that, you hope that it comes in pitch, without being too airy. There are too many things that can go unpredictably wrong with the flute and for someone who has had absolutely no background in it, it is scary. But I am taking it up as a challenge to myself because to finally produce some sound gives me so much joy.

It reminds of me as a student of Computer Science in school, during my eleventh and twelfth standard. I learnt C++ programming and I absolutely enjoyed programming. I like computer science insofar as I was not doing theory (like about networks and all). I found that I hated theory and much preferred just coding, because it was fascinating to see a bunch of variables, symbols, come together to make something fascinating. It could be something very simple as

#include <iostream.h>
void main ()
{int x, y;
cout<<“Hello”<<endl<<“Please enter one number “;
cin>>x;
y=x+6;
cout<<endl<<y;
}

The output would be something like

Hello
Please enter one number 3
9

(the 3 is user input, hence bolded)

But anyway, when my code would work, or when it would get compiled without throwing up any syntactical error, it gave me great joy. There is something so satisfying about running a code an realising that you have left behind no rogue comma or bracket, that it has all been perfectly rounded off and closed. Whether the code works or not to fulfil the purpose for which it was written, the fact that it did not throw any error was always something that provided me great comfort. Especially during times when it felt like I forgot some code or logic and when I struggle to figure out a logic for some question, I would feel extremely happy when my code would be error-free. It induced happiness in me and sometimes I wonder if my life would have been a lot different if I had chosen Computer Science here at university, or joined the bandwagon of engineering colleges that a lot of my classmates are currently burning in.

This question also arises especially during some especially hard literature classes, when I wonder about my own place in the scheme of things. My place at the department, as a student of literature. And I am afraid, afraid of my own incompetence (and though I try to tell myself that it is probably unfounded, it is easier said than realised and believed). I mean, language does have power, saying it a thousand times to myself may actually help me believe it. But right now, I am in a very vulnerable space regarding my major choice, because I still don’t feel worthy of it.

But I can say with surety that I am feeling better about it as days pass and I realise that there are things I do that surely distinguish me as a student of Literature, and I daresay, a competent one (at least for the stage I am in, in my education). And that is quite a liberating feeling in itself, that you are not as bad as you would believe. And I am hoping that this semester will provide me with some much-needed clarity about my own life and what I want from it. My college education needs to definitely see its place in a bigger picture and I am hoping that will be something that the remaining part of my degree shall show me. That I shall be able to run this code of my life, without facing any huge error (regardless of whether the code does what it is supposed to). To be error-free is not that huge an expectation to have, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.