Days go badly, and if too many of them go badly, they roll into tough weeks. And I find myself obstructed from the act of living, from being able to do the things I enjoy, and sometimes even need. And how does a day go badly? In ways more than one, I suppose, but it takes me a while to process it. I usually tell myself if I sleep in for half-an-hour extra, I will feel better. Maybe today, if I forego the no-sugar rule, a dessert could perk me up. If I ignore the pile of fiction on my table and doomscroll through social media, I will be able to distract from my thoughts. More often than not, it accumulates into me staring at 6 days of not having worked out, having eaten a lot of junk food, and sitting by my window staring into the distance to nurse my aching eyes. It is when my eyes start aching then I realise I have neglected to take care of myself. Truth be told, it is no one else’s responsibility to take care of me, but me. And if I fail, I fail. Well, so much for self-acceptance.
It’s hard taking care of oneself, you know? Giving your body the rest it needs, your mind the recovery it requires, eating clean and constantly having to sift out the chemicals from your fruit is exhausting. It is hard to set boundaries with people who put you through emotional duress such that it affects your body. To add to all this, you gotta go out into the world and sit at tables where food is politicised so much, it is infuriating. Communal eating used to be one of my favourite activities, and now I detest it. I remember living alone for a bit and dreading dinnertime, dreading the loneliness of it all. I would much rather take that over communal eating now. I would like to eat my food, in solitude, thank you very much. But I don’t think it’s about the food itself, or the misreading of the ubiquitous memo which said: ‘be kind’ that is now completely misunderstood, or even the constant performative existence. These days, I am so emotionally tired that my biggest grouse is that I am unable to live my life. Live. That is all I want to do.
Thankfully, I am way past the point where one is disappointed in the world and existential because of it. Sure, I am disappointed in the world, but I am keen on living this life partly to enjoy living and partly because I know that pain must and will come, so you gotta suck it up and deal with it (because what else are we puny creatures going to do, any way?) I am very angered by the fact that I am unable to do the things I want to and feel them wholly. I am unable to experience my own life the way I want to because so much of it is crowded by others. There’s so much of everyone else in my life that I feel less and less like myself every day. I stopped playing to the gallery a long time ago, which was fun, even if for a while. Then, it became a burden. Turns out being non-performative is also a performance. Or as they say, we as a generation are just tired. I didn’t want to do this — say I am tired — because it is lazy for me as a writer to say it. And you know how I know it is lazy? Because when Virginia Woolf was tired of being told not to walk on the lawns as a woman, or that she was not allowed to enter the library without a male Fellow, or that she didn’t have her own women’s funded college, she wrote a 97 page essay (if you consider the font to be really small) about it. She was tired and she was angry, but she was also soaking in 1929 London feeling grateful for being alive. So, she wrote a 97-page essay to express it. What am I doing with three little words, now? Lazy.
When I set up my desk next to the window, for theory purposes, I considered it to be a beautiful thing. Who doesn’t want a desk near the window with a little garden in the sill overlooking a giant jackfruit tree that houses hatchlings in nests on their branches. Every one, that’s who. But I don’t think I really paid attention to this space until recently. When my eyes started hurting. When my chest started hurting from all the lives I am not living. When my whole being was being weighed down by compassion fatigue. When I had made terrible decisions like changing workplaces to go to a more toxic workplace than before. When I was overcome with the helplessness of the incessant hair fall. When the workouts I have missed started piling up. When the letting go that my body has had to do became trapped. Until recently, I don’t think I really paid attention to how the rain falls through the green leaves of the jackfruit tree. It required a slowing down that comes with age. Not my numerical age. In this case, it happened to be sentences that were almost 100 years old, and those sentences are long! Though what struck me most about Virginia’s sentence structure is the perfect use of commas. Whenever Virginia added a comma, the whole sentence took a pause, I could feel the breath of air in it, and then, she led me on again. I don’t like calling her Woolf, that was her husband’s surname. Not hers. If she were alive today, A Room of One’s Own probably might have her thoughts about women’s surnames not being their own.
I know all the -isms. The internet has helped me unlearn all of them, and our fascist government has shown me all of them in practice. So, my education on the -ism dictionary has been informed and observed. Only once in her essay does she refer to the patriarchy by name. The rest of it? She’s batting out insightful paragraphs without missing a heartbeat and not using a single -ism in her text. That made me slow down. And what made me also slow down was the rain. It so happened that every time I was sitting next to this window that overlooks the jackfruit tree reading A Room of One’s Own, it rained. It rained in droves, in mirth, in abundance. The rain did not shy away from being itself. And if there’s anything I remember now is how peaceful it felt to have to focus on reading her long sentences with thoughtful pauses while the rain fell outside my window. I don’t think I could have read this book in a hurry, between chores, on the train, or anywhere else. Every thing about that writing required me to slow down. Things have changed so much for women from when this essay was written. Women’s lives have become so much better, and yet, so much change remains to be desired. The movements work. The rage works. The writing works.
And yet, from time to time, such as now, I feel like I have no room. No room to be myself or experience my own life fully. So much of my own emotional exhaustion incapacitates me from action. This infuriates me because our culture has somewhat tied my self-worth to what I’ve done, what I’ve accomplished. And I’ve bought into it. As we all buy into it. I’m aware of it, and as has become the nature of such declarations, I am aware of what I need to unlearn. But I would like a break from the unlearning, too. I miss the space of non-judgment that I have not been able to provide to myself. The one that comes from old friends. And yes, it would have been nice to have a friend around these past few weeks. Someone to talk to about the drama and the consequence of it, and maybe even laugh about it all. In part, I resent some of my close friends for not being there for me. In part, I realise that they’ve had their fair share of struggles, too. But I suppose there’s only so much deep breathing you can do. Sometimes you need a friend to tell you it’s going to be okay. Ah, well!
So, you deep breathe, read Virginia Woolf who was convinced that people would read her run-on sentences (and turns out she was right), and listen to the rain while your heartbeat slows down. And slow down, it does.
amarllyis 
Leave a Reply