Fourteen

880 words

Sometimes, I feel a listlessness when I have free periods of time. At others, I sit in my chair and look at the jamun tree outside my window. I know all the theory, about how we are always tuned into social media and constantly working, and that’s why we cannot fully relax. Theory is all fine; it doesn’t help in any which way, does it? I speak to some colleagues and they mention they’re burned out, have lost a sense of purpose, tech isn’t cutting it anymore yada yada. The conversations are similar, solutions few, and I wonder if they feel this listlessness too? Is it a malaise of our generation, one caused by watching the world crumble slowly for the last 10 years on vertical small screens, or a lack of ivory-tower privilege, or an absence of time & space to explore a sense of purpose? Haven’t all generations experienced a void in some way or another? Maybe it is the human condition?

When I hear older, married Indian women tell their stories, they always talk fondly about how they lived in their house, and the stories are of their parents’ home. Even after decades of being married, they always say “humare ghar mein” and these women are, almost always, a completely different version of the girl their parents raised. It makes me sad, a little.

While talking to all these people lately, I have realised we get stuck inside our own minds. Me, too. Me, all the time. In scientific parlance, we have created these neural pathways in our brains that make us feel comfortable with the familiarity of places, people, and stories. In storytelling parlance, we tell ourselves the same stories over and over and snuggle into the phrases and commas we invent. It’s a bit like the labyrinth built by Daedalus, intricate and hard to get out of except this labyrinth is in our brains. They say the labyrinth was so complex, even Daedalus couldn’t find his way out if it, until he did. It’s always the stories we tell ourselves and pieces of what we borrow from what others tell us that get us in the end.

I started this Fourteen Day series by writing about my low self-esteem (Day One), how I never feel enough, how I have come to adopt a viewpoint about myself that no matter what I do, my peers won’t like me. Then I wrote the story about how my closest friend never called me back on a day I was feeling particularly low and I had reached out to them. Then, the story about how my body image is not positive and I feel shy about being in front of a camera, or about people seeing me. The story about how I made an “afraid to-do list” to strike off the things I have been afraid to do, and I worked through it. These past posts have been about being vulnerable here, about narrating the interiority of my life without some degree of fear.

It’s not as if I have a completely devalued sense of self. I am trying to be a better person and working on the idea that my self-worth is not attached to the number of people I am likeable to. I could list a large number of things I do that I view as contributing positively to my family, friends, and society, but that wasn’t ever the point of writing, or about telling the story of what it means to be human. Life gets messy, our minds get messy, too, and this has been an effort into the void to bear witness (as I always say) to my life, and to this part of living. This part which has offered me grooves inside my mind that are terrifying, but also a type of courage and knowledge that some sliver of living matters. Even if we can’t see it sometimes.

It may not matter to the Gods, to the government, to our parents, and sometimes even to us. (The story about how we live in a low-trust society.) It seems meaningless, this world we live in, and we are not the first generation to feel this deep sense of dread from time to time. It matters that we get up and do what is needed, and do it again, and again, and make some non-terrifying sense out of it. It matters we change the stories we tell ourselves no matter how hard that is, how impossible, how labyrinthine; because the same things happen over and over again. This Sisyphean world we live in, the circular stories we enact, all come to naught.

It is such a damned thing, isn’t it? This part of living? Of making meaning? Of making rotis, and prayer, and glass bottles, and PowerPoint slides, and fucking mobile apps, and roads, and government welfare schemes. It is all so pointless, but we do it, and we breathe in the 176 AQI air, and we don’t ask tough questions, and we feel our wounds in solitude, and we go on.

And on, we go.

Previous Posts
Day Thirteen
Day Twelve
Day Eleven
Day Ten
Day Nine
Day Eight
Day Seven
Day Six
Day Five
Day Four
Day Three
Day Two
Day One