The itch to write (when hands are tied)
Just took a look at the date of my last post and realized I’ve not written for over eight months. Weird. When I started blogging I thought this is gonna go well for quite a while. Not that I didn’t want to write. I really did. A lot. Just couldn’t manage to “start the engine”. Had a lot of things going on in my mind, even topics popped up in my head every now and then. Just didn’t do it eventually. Don’t even know why. Deep down somewhere for some reason, dancing my fingertips on the keyboard just seemed like too much hard work.
Yeah, that’s how awkwardly lazy I’ve been feeling for quite a long while now. It’s really disturbing. Sometimes I feel like even thinking takes too much effort. Don’t know why. I won’t say I’ve been depressed. Can’t think of anything in particular that bothered me to that extent, either. But I’ve been going through this really itchy phase – been carrying a lot of thoughts and wanted to get them out, but neither did I want to talk to anyone or jot down the thoughts here. Been feeling painfully lonely, but absolutely no interest in chit-chatting with anybody, not even the closest of my friends.
Of all the things that’s been affected by this ugly nameless phase I’m passing, my photography has probably been hit the hardest. I haven’t even taken 5 photographs over the last 7-8 months that I can truly feel good about, and my Flickr garden has become a desert lately. I haven’t been such a sloth since I started taking photographs out of passion for it. Strangely, the laziness has been the same here as it had been in writing. In my mind I knew I’d be ecstatic to take a good picture, but I just didn’t feel like taking the camera to a trip. And whenever I have tried to force myself to shoot, had this shouting in my head – “something, anything!” – I’ve ended up with shots that have only discouraged me more to pick up the camera again.
I’m just putting it out now. Trying to feel lighter. I don’t even know if I’m going to click the “publish” button after I’m done. I just know that I’m unloading. Published or not, after a long time, I’m writing. And that’s what’s important. I don’t need to be a maestro of words right now, and don’t need to go astronomical with complex insights about human behaviour. I don’t even need anybody to read and enjoy this either. I’m just being a selfish writer a this moment – writing for myself and myself only, talking to the blogging website more than with anybody else. Can’t deny it feels easier this way. Maybe that’s it – you can’t write when your hands are tied, in your mind. Maybe when it comes to writing random blogs, it’s more important to simply want to write than to have a topic in mind. That’s what’s happening now. I’m just writing whatever’s popping up and not caring. All that matters is that after a long time, I truly FELT LIKE WRITING – and here I am.
Ah, what the hell … I’ll publish this.
For better or worse, I can feel some change in me.
The Clear Blur
It’s not a very uncommon routine. It starts with pain. A pretty deep one. A pain that has been slowly growing inside you, taking the size of an ocean, one wave at a time. Or, a pain that just strikes out of the blue and pulverizes you. Once the mutating agony hits the trigger point, or that giant boulder hits you and throws you off the cliff, very commonly there’s a super-fast rise-and-fall motion in your ‘emotional intensity graph’. Then begins the natural process of indifference taking over the mind. It’s almost like an innate mechanism of the human mind that acts as a defense system. You look around and everything seems to be missing something. It’s like watching a movie in super-slow-motion, or like watching a video that goes mute every other minute, and you could hardly care. And finally, when you realize you’ve become completely numb, you don’t want to become human again. You’re given choices – let your emotions breathe again while risking your happiness, or hold your ‘peace’ to yourself in a state of indifference. If you can’t relate to a single word I’m saying, then it’s not a rational choice to read ahead.
You can sit on the floor, resting your head against a wall of a prison cell – a quiet and dark one, and still be free as a bird. Or, you can lie down on the grass in an open field with the deep blue sky and playful little white clouds up above you, and still feel claustrophobic. Sometimes it’s all about where the heart is, isn’t it? You can be in the presence of all the air you could use and still suffocate. Sometimes, it becomes really hard to distinguish between people you’ve known forever and people you’ve never met – they all seem like complete strangers. Why are we so weird? Why are we so diverse and complicated when it comes to emotions? We believe in so many things only because we choose to believe in them. Always running towards the easy way, being in pursuit of euphoria that’s built with bricks of lies we choose to tell ourselves. Is it usual for us to be unusual? Very normal to be abnormal?
We develop behaviors that turn into a part of who we are. We’re never truly entirely transparent to the people around us. There’s a mask we wear before them. Sometimes we act differently from who we really are to please other people, to make them feel closer or more comfortable to us. Sometimes we wear the mask because we’re embarrassed of or not entirely confident about who we really are. Sometimes we hide our true self behind the curtain because “that’s how we communicate with people”. Other times, we really don’t know why. From absolute strangers to the closest people, we conceal a part of us, tiny or large, to all of them, to appear the way we want to be seen and known. And then, at the end of the day, we turn the lights down, crawl under the blanket, and just before closing our eyes, take a deep breath and wonder how all the people we spent the day with really don’t know who we are. All of a sudden there’s a feeling of intense loneliness and sheer alienation from the rest of the world. But wasn’t it our fault to begin with? Deep down inside there’s either an iota or a mountain-size agony of loneliness in almost all of us, cause in the course of trying to put on colors that we want to appear in, our true colors have faded in the mist, and now nobody really knows exactly who we really are. And it’s hard to decide who we’re cheating more – the others or ourselves.
Don’t try to find much sense or direction in whatever I’ve been saying. These are just random thoughts popping up in my mind that are either boring you, or irritating you enough to make quit reading my future posts. But sometimes I really wonder how mysteriously complex human emotions are. There are so many explanations to why we feel what we feel, and yet nothing is truly completely clear. Sometimes it feels like we’re all simply a very large number of actors on a pretty congested stage.
‘Bitching’ ain’t a girl’s prerogative
I’m not as good with words as I am with silence, and so I’ve played the role of an ideal listener to a lot of people. A considerable proportion of the times I’ve heard someone talk to me about someone else involved spewing lava in the air. Also, I must say, as the universal truth states, women are the undisputed dominators in the realm of backbiting. From the very direct “why is she wearing those shoes?” to the artful ensemble of hurtful words that goes nuclear a few moments after utterance – the ladies deliver memorable performance at all levels. This overshadows the male involvement in the backbiting market, which is what I’ll discuss a bit about.
We, the men, don’t get our teeth dirty doing what is popularly known as ‘backbiting’ (the blogger just winked). What we more commonly practice is sharing of honest opinions about other people beyond their radar, since there is a chance of misunderstanding if the subject is present during the discussion. Suppose, if a friend has been really irritating and immature lately, we use the words “he’s still a kid on the inside, but not everyone can take it”. If someone never takes ‘no’ for an answer, we say, “He should be more open to other’s opinions” We also happen to use a ‘third-person-villain’ approach when we say, “People think ill of her character, but her good qualities remain unnoticed.”. This really helps, because that way we put the popular view in the spotlight while washing ourselves clean of any risk of accusation whatsoever. Plus, it shows that we’re concerned about the person. Altogether, the sentences sound so harmless that no one can ascertain that it’s an act of camouflaged bitching.
All the sophisticated multi-layered backbiting, however, rest with the smarter guys. The rest, can’t hold their horses, and erupt in the wrong place at the wrong time to the wrong person. I’ve watched guys talking rubbish to girls about other guys behind their back, making himself look like a saint and every other guy look like a sneaky pervert. That’s most commonly used as a last resort when a boy lacks all the qualities needed to impress the girl of interest. So he becomes the protective friend of the girl and lives under the delusion that making every other boy look like a jackass might secure him a place beside the pretty young lady. Sometimes this helps, since many girls lose confidence on their “pervert detecting sensors” after they make a few memorable mistakes. Then they fail to distinguish between boys who warn them on serious notes and boys who are just bitching about other boys. Funny world, really.
Women mostly trash other women behind their back. Men, on the other hand, almost seem to believe in gender equality when bitching. They spare no one. The ladies, the innocent uncomplicated souls that they are (!), run with the mighty dagger, and go for fast and brutal character assassination. Men, on the flipside, mostly walk like stealthy killers, carrying a large syringe loaded with chemicals that would slow poison one’s image. I must mention though, that this shouldn’t be over-generalized, as the sexes sometimes do swap their techniques. Regardless of all the stealth and the expertise, men’s bitching lack the heat and the tension that’s there in a group of women listing “the scopes of improvement in other’s characters”. So although bitching ain’t the girls’ prerogative, they do rule the world of vampires preferring to attack from behind.
This writing didn’t turn out like I thought it’ll be. However interesting (or boring) I’ve made the topic, saying something negative about someone behind their back isn’t really a noble deed, but a perilous and sinful one. And when you’re pointing a finger at someone, your three other fingers are actually pointing at you. The ability of finding out everyone’s mistakes, putting them under a microscope and then beaming them through a projector isn’t really something to be proud of. But what you can do sometimes is take the back seat like a mere spectator, and enjoy the bloody brilliance of the versatility of human behavior.
Walls, four more walls and (a little) beyond – Part 2
I used to be the star in my class. My teachers loved me. My friends loved me. Their parents loved me. I never had to spend even half an hour a day studying at home, but my grades were the best in the class. Then slowly things started changing. I was losing attention, my grades were spiraling towards the south, and I wasn’t even enjoying school. I started frequently getting into fights with the kids in my neighbourhood during afternoon cricket. I wasn’t enjoying cartoon anymore. Basically my days were going by doing nothing. I wasn’t even that happy with my sister anymore.
It’s only a few years back when I realized what was the indefinable sadness that I used to suffer from – I was no more the center of attention – it was my younger sister. Growing up, she was doing things and saying things that made my parents really happy. Every new word she said, every tiny progress she made in learning to walk, every time she smiled or laughed … as much as it made me happy, it pushed me away from my parents since I was no more feeling like the kid in the limelight.
Then started the phase when my sister was old enough to play with me, run around with me and fight with me. Yes, the fights – which used to end up with her crying at the top of her voice, and me getting a good round of scolding from dad. We were both kids, but since I was the ‘elder one’, I was expected to be ‘more rational and mature’ towards my little sister. Of course I was yet too young to ‘understand’, and thus slowly and unknowingly emotionally grew a distance from mom and dad.
As time passed by, I pretty much started living in a world of my own. Mom had to take care of my baby sister and the household chores and dad had to spend all his time at home listening to his little princess, after returning from a busy day at work. So I was the silent spectator of it all, curled up in my shell of isolation. Then there was high school, during which I in developed the comfort of being alone. Eventually, it became such that I started disliking attention and preferred to be far away from the spotlight. I used to hate meeting relatives who came to visit us, and I also used to hate going to their places. I even grew distance with some of my cousins. My world was then limited to a few friends, some TV shows and some computer games. I got tagged as the most unsocial member of my family tree, without those who tagged me (or even me) knowing truly the underlying reason behind my preference to solitude.
So here I am. See how I’m so far away from where I started this discussion? Yeah, I already said a lot in the course of trying to explain how it was like having the three people I love the most, sitting in my room, and just talking, smiling and laughing. It’s much better now actually. Compared to 3-4 years ago, now I’m a lot more open to my parents. Things have been changing for better. I’m more open with dad than I ever was. I’m a lot closer to mom than I was in recent years. And my sister – I love her more than I ever thought I could, and we hardly ever fight anymore. In fact, we’re just inseparable.
It’s amazing how things change so much with time. Amazing how feelings that we can’t decipher at one point of time, become as clear as crystal at a much later moment. I’m still under the influence of what I went through as a child. There are still walls around me – walls that prevent me from looking or feeling very alive. But I’ve made this my comfort zone without even realizing. Loneliness has its virtues as well, doesn’t it? It’s not bad at all now. After all, mom still feeds me with her own hand, with love and a smile on her face … almost every night.
Walls, four more walls and (a little) beyond – Part 1
After many days, mom and dad came to my room tonight and sat down to chat. We all watched TV together, shared updates and laughed together. It rarely happens. Mostly, it’s always me alone in my room, with the door shut, following my monotonous routines. Things have changed a lot. My growing up involved a gradual isolation process. A communicational distance has grown between me and my parents. It’s not a noticeable distance to the average person, but when I compare the present with the old days, it’s an entirely different picture.
I’ve heard stories from mom and dad and a few uncles and aunts about how my parents’ world revolved around me when I was born. Of course, that was supposed to happen. I was the first born. I’ve spent my early years with constant care and attention from my parents – mainly my mom. When I go through the old photo albums, the joy I see in mom and dad’s faces while they were holding me, is priceless. Those smiles are the very unpronounceable definitions of love. Between the ages 3-5, my world revolved around my mother. There were many days when dad was out to work before I woke up, and I fell asleep before he came back home. Sometimes if I woke up in the middle of the night, I’d see mom and dad talking. That mere blurry glimpse had to be enough for me at that time – I hardly spent any quality time with dad. With mom, on the other hand, I used to spend my whole day.
She was a homemaker. She used to work for a travel agency once, but that was a fairly short phase according to my recollection. So I used to be with her all the time. I used to follow her around like a shadow. I used to decide what she would wear (mainly sarees … seeing my mom in a beautiful saree would be the highlights of my days). We used to play indoor badminton as well. I was just a kid, but she was an enjoyable opponent/companion to me. She used to tell me stories to put me to sleep, and she would feed me with her own hand although I was old enough to eat by myself. I had to take afternoon naps holding her. If my arm wasn’t around her neck, there was nothing that could put me to sleep. So she would stay motionless until my nap was over.
Things were going great, but I was getting lonely. I used to look at other kids who played with their siblings and I felt really hollow inside. I had a lot of friends in school but that wasn’t even close to enough. I remember telling my mom about feeling something weird in my chest. I was just four-n-a-half years old. I wasn’t equipped with sufficient vocabulary to tell her that I feel very empty all alone.
Then, a year later, came to earth my lovely little sister – the apple of my eye. She was everything I could ask for. I still don’t have the skill to translate into words how ecstatic I was to have this new member in our family. She was the most beautiful thing in my eyes. I used to spend my whole day everyday with her. Words can’t say how much I used to miss her when I was at school. Every day, the entire time one my way to school, every minute during school, and the whole time on my way back home, I could only think of that tiny little baby waiting for me at home. Sadly, a hint of pain started growing in my heart although I wasn’t mature enough to comprehend what it was until just a few years back.
Not another cheerful first blog post
It’s 9:30 pm and I just finished taking a class. I usually love delivering lectures on topics of Economics. Tonight, however, it was painful. My university will remain closed for a while so it’s a bit of momentum change for me. I like either being really busy throughout the day, or spend it doing almost nothing. Yep, I hardly maintain as much “balance” as I say I believe in.
If my blabbering has already started to bore you, then you’re perfectly normal. Right now, I’m not really in the mood for maintaining “quality over quantity”. I just wanna get the ball rolling for the blog with whatever rubbish comes in my head.
Like I said, I’m not liking this momentum change. As much as I love my dear little sister, I really don’t like being an ideal tutor to her. She’s finishing her O Levels this January, and doing it completely on her own. She’s not getting the time and attention from me that I promised. The excuse for my laziness – “she can take care of her own studies”. If she gets less than an ‘A’ grade in any one of the subjects, I’m doomed.
I wish I could take a complete break from the routine of teaching and/or studying. Whenever I look up to the wide open blue sky, I’m instantly jealous of those who can keep looking at it for longer than I can. This blog isn’t more than a temporary black hole to me right now. Writing my tiny bits of frustration down (or call it whining about the weight of the world) helps. At least a little.
I’ll be back hopefully with something more meaningful, more interesting. I don’t want my posts to consistently serve you as free substitutes for sedatives.
