Remembering the Self

We simply seek to speak our truth before we get mangled by other people’s bullshit ideas of us.

Saira, We Are Lady Parts

Finished another journal and I have done the usual, small ritual to stack it away with the others. I leafed through my own sometimes-hurried, sometimes-peaceful handwriting and found traces of the months gone by, forgotten notes for new poems, reminder of old stories, and experiments with stream of consciousness writing that I had started and followed deliberately for a few days. Usually, I use a variety of coloured pens, pencils, and I punctuate the pages with a ‘Books of the Month’ section and stick cutesy stickers. However, in this one, I have largely used the blue fountain pen I received as a birthday gift and I have pasted almost no stickers. As for the Books of the Month, I’ve pencilled in none after, say, February. While reading Babel by R.F. Kuang last night, I was struck by the realisation that reading that book is a lost cause, the characters are so dry and flat that I might as well abandon it. I have long forgiven myself for not finishing books I have started because they don’t work for me. There’s only so much time we have on this planet.

Q. What did you do with your time? A. Stare at the mountains. Squeezed lemon juice. Dip yourself in the water of your ancestors.

11 July, 2024

I love that the journey of writing is a discovery of what will happen, a discovery of the unknown, of the yet-to-be-formed. I’ve always found it enchanting to uncover what my mind has to say to me when I sit down to write. However, fear is a consistent companion. Most of what I write is punctuated with an invisible fear of forgetfulness, of meaninglessness. What if it all comes to naught? What if I forget how to write? What if the stories are all a decoy? The fear mutates and strings out, wraps itself around my heart until I untangle it. It is this discovery of the unknown that accompanies most things we do with the heart. For everything else, there’s a blueprint, a process, a long drawl of the uninspired that people follow into the Mordor of Everyday Living. I call it so because the indifference we put into everyday world-building is plainly available for all of us to see. Our public places inspire no one, not even the rats; our spreadsheets inspire only the hardened leaders and that’s not a compliment; our political systems inspire the worst of our lot and so on and so forth. All I have ever wanted, is to make something that has value and beauty. All I want to do is be the life-sized version of the vertical 9:16 influencer who paints everything in her house in bright, bold colours, copiously uses geometric wallpaper, and refurbishes items she bought from the thrift store with pink chalk paint.

What if flowers grew out of my hands in the past and that is why I am drawn to the natural world?

02 Feb, 2024

I unearthed my colouring journals from the archives of my cupboard because life had gotten too noisy. I found that my past self had been here and had been happy, and it soothed me to colour Alice in Wonderland pictures while the rain poured outside. The drumming of the rain drops against the earth made me feel centred, and coming from someone who didn’t like the rains in the past, it is saying something. It made me feel inspired and reminded me of our ancestors who took to rest and paint in caves when the thunderous clouds rolled by. Colouring in my old journal calmed a constant fear inside me (which I wrote about recently on Instagram) and I remember those rainy evenings fondly as if they are from the long-lost-past and not just the backyard-of-my-recent-past. It is one of the things I remember vividly unlike some of the other sorrows I’ve written about. A Twitter handle posts snippets of journal entries by famous but dead authors and I found those posts inspiring because at no point did those writers feel the need to explain their inner thoughts. if Sylvia Plath or thought that a day in July was pushing her towards, ennui and depression, it was. She didn’t feel the need to elaborate and defend. What I am saying is that those journal entries feel like a mirror into the every day life of other humans. They spoke about a life that didn’t need explaining, and yet was described precisely.

Q. What (else) did you do with your time?

A. Put local words into the poetry of the colonial language as a mark of protest. Build structures that do not need protesting. Knead your knuckles into your lover’s back. Stop using filler words. Feed the crows. Stick your thumb into the ground with a seed under it. Improvise.

11 July, 2024

On a rare occasion, I was listening to a podcast. A mental health academic was explaining that we should try to maintain a granularity when we express our emotions or ourselves. She said that children do this often but as we grow up, we tend to paint our emotions in broad strokes making it harder for us to separate our identity from the fleeting emotion we are experiencing. For instance, a child would say “I like to have my toys organised in a ducky row.” An adult might reframe the same incident as “I have OCD.” or “I am finicky.” The intensity of expression and feeling in these two scenarios has changed the way the human being expresses how they feel and how they see themselves. I am going to practice this in my new journal and see if it makes me feel like I am explaining myself more in a bid to be understood. Even if it is to be understood by my own self.

You know what upsets me? The persistence of everything.

21 April, 2024

Perhaps that’s why representation matters. So we can see our lives, our interiority, even fractals of it mirrored in stories we tell the world. Watching the characters of We Are Lady Parts live their variegated lives on screen made me feel less invisible. I have been feeling flat as a badly written character for most of this year, but some stark reminders through the months and reflections of myself in art and cinema made me feel inspired and alive, once again. For instance, the last episode of We Are Lady Parts (SE02) was one of them. The moment when Saira walks into Momtaz’s electric studio. The moment when Amina sings a song in the middle of the road. These scenes made a shiver go down my spine, reminded me of what happens when you follow the paths that inspire you while they scare you, and what happens when you don’t give up on your self, after all.

I’m a woman, I’m a creature
I’m Madonna, I’m the whore
I’m a zombie queen, I’ll eat your brains
I am the girl next door

Fish and Chips, We Are Lady Parts