Do you remember yourself?

Do you ever feel lost - about yourself? That feeling of not even recognizing who you are?

36 years of various hairstyles, changing wardrobe themes, navigating through different careers academically and professionally, playing different social roles - only to realize I have no conception of who I am.

Ever since I remember, I have struggled so hard to become who I wanted to be personally, socially and professionally and then suddenly after 35 years I couldn't remember who I used to be and wanted badly to get back to who I used to be, undoing everything I have done, and all these without pausing for a second to recognize who I was becoming, deep down underneath the want-to-be images and underneath the used-to-be images of my own self.

That is when it struck me, that I am either always in the future or in the past, either living up to others' expectations of me or even my own expectations of who I should be and now I have no idea of who I am or have been all this while. It hit so hard that I started looking within myself and soon after I started having terrible dreams, mostly violent. But one dream that really shook me up was this:  I have this big chalkboard on my wall and in my dream, I saw it was a mirror. When I looked at myself in it, it stared back at me with that unnervingly deep see-through-your-soul kinda look that spooked me. As I tried to move sideways to avoid that stare, that image froze in its place and another image moved with me, and again stared like that and it kept happening. I got so freaked out, that I ducked down below the mirror trying to escape from the room, that's when I woke up sweating from fear.

When I spoke about it with my therapist, she said, you are making huge progress. It is a beautiful imagery that your subconscious is showing you exactly what it is going through. To say the least, BEAUTIFUL is the last thing I felt about it. Anyway, she explained that "you are taking that long hard look at yourself, within yourself, that is what you saw in the mirror. It is scary and you are still doing it, so bravo." I asked, what's with the images freezing like some horror movie? She said, "that's because right now you are in a phase where whatever you are observing in yourself at the moment, you are fixating on it as a permanent characteristic of yours and judging yourself, and losing sight of the reality. And quite obviously, if you keep judging yourself like that, it will be terrifying and in the end, you will want to avoid and escape the mirror. So stop judging. Just observe the layers of your personality as they unfold."

And thus started my journey of unraveling. Among many other things, one thing I struggled with was my gender identity. I was brought up as a son with pros and cons to it. I idolized my dad, I followed the dressing style of Male actors rather than female actors and yet, I was always a woman at heart, I wanted the attention of boys. Quite obviously, never got that coz I was too macho and my friends, both girls, and boys, looked up to me as a Bro! 

So despite being very clear about my sexual preference, I wasn't sure about my own gender alignment. I was the protector of my girlies and I have been called a lesbian, and in those days, it was worse than most abuses. I didn't know how to behave. So I swayed from being all rockstar bro-ish in school to extremely docile feminine in college and after....from being a girl who loved Tae-kwon-do and mountaineering to becoming a girl who only wanted to please her husband with cooking and dressing, of course setting myself up to fail, because that's not who I was. 

Now I am not saying I was bad at cooking, I am quite decent, coz it's a basic survival skill we were taught very early in life. But when you are doing only that, that too to please someone, cooking, and cleaning and getting groceries as a drudgery while the real you inside is struggling to fly like a free bird, go on a trek, learn flying, or whatever random adventure captured the fantasies, you are bound to screw up. You are frustrated, you do a less than decent job for which, of course, you are not appreciated, and that frustrates you even more. See the cycle there?

From following Bollywood men's fashion to suddenly turning towards women's fashion, I made a clown of myself. I dressed up well sometimes, but again, it didn't reflect who I was and I felt miserable. And not just that, I was also clouded by the societal stereotypes of the genders and roles. For example, being opinionated amounted to being masculine, so I dimmed it down. And this went on in every aspect of my life.

Slowly, I lost all sense of self and self-esteem. My daughter came into my life as an angel and one thing I knew for sure was I DO NOT want to become a mother with no sense of self and self-esteem. That's when I sought help and started therapy again. The first time I had started, I ended it abruptly coz I was too messed up in my head to look within. This time, as a mother, I knew I would do anything to get it right. 

Finally, when I had to describe myself, this is who I found. A princess, not a calm and composed one, a bratty naughty warrior princess, dreaming in a long flowy gown and running around in sneakers with a machine gun blazing yet relaxed on her shoulders - a perfect coexistence of feminity and machoism, Power and Gentleness. 

Pic: My own painting

Now I look at myself as a whole. I cook out of love, I travel out of love, I write, I paint, I seethe at hypocrisy and react, and then I respond out of love. Let's take a cliched example. When we see the beauty of the moon, we do not fixate on the blemishes. Those imperfections are what make it complete and natural and beautiful. We see the soft dreamy glow and marvel at it. My imperfections, emotional scars, and reactions only make me human, a complete human, and my retrospections and constant self-evolution make me a rather good one at that. 

If I had to do it all over, make different choices, survive different outcomes, I would give up that chance.....because anything different would not make me the same person I am today, and the more I explore and remember this person, the more I love her.

How about you, do you remember who you are? Do you remember the little child who still loves Tom and Jerry, or splashing in a muddy puddle, or building blocks? Do you remember the teen in you? Do you remember your dreams as a college freshman? Would love to hear from you in comments. 

Yet another life lesson from my 22 months old #MommyRants #ImperfectMom

Between me and my daughter, we have this ritual of caressing wherever the other person is hurt followed by a kiss on the wound, apparently making the pain go away. The point of doing this was obviously to teach her that wounds and pains don’t recover from medicine alone, but love too. Recently I got a pimple on my cheek and I (very happily) didn’t leave a single opportunity to show it to my daughter to receive a beautiful soft kiss from her on my cheek, as long as the mark is there. Today was no exception, I was making puppy face pointing to the mark on my cheek asking her for some pampering. She paused a while, put her palm on my lips. I kissed her palm instinctively and she pressed it on my cheek. Then she picked up my hand at the wrist and caressed my cheek with my palm. She, then, held up my palm on my lips and pressed on my cheeks. It took me a while to understand her repeated movement. And her teaching revealed – Self love. 

She was making me caress and kiss my own cheek. She was teaching me self-love. Yes, you read it right and I want to make myself believe it, so saying it again. My 22 months old daughter was teaching me Self-Love! She was making me shower, on myself, the love I shower on her and I expect from her. Yes people. We shower all our care and love on people we care for and we expect the same way from others when we are hurt or wounded or just like that. What we don’t do is care for ourselves or love ourselves, tend our wounds and pains with our own love and patience, give ourselves the loving attention that we too need.

I, for sure, intend to start doing what my daughter taught and reminded me. Not because I don’t want others to love me but because I want to set the same example for her. What she taught me today from natural instincts, she will definitely forget the lesson by the time she grows up, thanks to social conditioning. I intend to be her reminder like she was for me today. Just in case, you or I still don't believe it - my 22 months old taught me self-love!

Corona-tion of my World

Pandemic, Social distancing, Quarantine - probably even the Search Engines need a break from these keywords.

I heard someone say, what the world needs is a World War-III and I cringed every time I heard that. Yet, here we are. Yes, believe it or not, we are on a World war, except this time the whole world is united. The sufferings of many are tremendous and thanks to the "quarantine", we can be blissfully ignorant, focusing only 'our boredom'. Even though I fail to understand how people of my generation find time to be bored, because I am up on my feet all day - cleaning, cooking, working from home and attending to my child, in short - EXHAUSTED, I still respect the mass-boredom. Agree or not, we are unwinding, we are getting familiar with the dust that is sitting on the window pane of our own house, we are video-calling (that's a lot of visible emotion) friends rather than texting, we are picking up long-lost hobbies or even new ones and many are actually opening up their kitchen for the not-as-privileged ones. And all of these, while a few communities of common people - Pharmacists, Medicine delivery people and others are working in war footing alongside Doctors, Scientists and Police.

To be honest, nothing has much changed in my life so far, except for the better. All this while cribbing to have to go to office and not having enough time for my daughter, is a prayer that is answered. Albeit, my prayer is answered in the most tragic way for the world as a whole. All this while in all my life, I (as well as others) blamed myself for not staying up-to-date with the current affairs. Probably this time is my undoing, I feel blessed to not be overtly in touch with the news.

A few friends have asked me how am I keeping my little one engaged and I casually answered that on the contrary, she is keeping me constantly engaged. However, when I really thought about it, I guess the most important thing I could teach her at his age was to accept monotony gracefully. Like every other kid, she missed going out on strolls in her stroller or cycle, to play with her neighbour friends, or on a scooter ride with mommy or on short drives. But eventually, she is learning to accept the fact that for some reason, she has to stay indoors like mommy and if anything, she is either finding her own little games or sometimes just staring at birds and clouds from the window. Accepting monotony positively, whether in food or time is a tremendously rewarding process because it fosters and boosts your perseverance and somewhere it triggers a creative spark to break the monotony if and when possible.

For me, I am just hoping, praying and most importantly, believing this phase will pass leaving the world a better place. Ironically, I can't help feeling that this social distancing is actually creating a greater humanitarian unity - beyond class, caste, religion or even your faith in your own government.

Battles and Wars

Each battle that we fight seems huge and heavy, impossible to win over and then we realize it was only a preparation for a bigger battle and so on. 

Every woman with a smiling face – cheerful smile, tired smile, bold and loud smile, shy smile, I-don’t-care smile, please-don’t-judge-me smile, cute and chirpy smile, scarred distorted smile, I-have-it-all-together smile, I-don’t-want-to-smile smile – each one is fighting a battle at any given moment. 

Someone is fighting with limited means to save a terminally ill sibling who is abandoned by in-laws. Someone is fighting to adjust with a flat-mate who gives her sleepless nights. Someone is fighting to find a suitable match desperately only to face disappointment. Someone is fighting to get out of a so-called perfect match. Someone is fighting her fears for her child’s safety within a whole family. Someone is fighting to raise a child alone. Someone is fighting to conceive a child. Someone is fighting to be heard. Someone is fighting the reminiscence of a bad childhood. 

And these are but just battles. 

The real war is that first thought that comes while reading the paragraph above – Judgements. Judgements that “Oh, this is a big struggle, hats off!” and “Oh, that one is not even a problem, what whiner!” Yeah, we do that all the time, almost like a knee-jerk reaction, don’t we?

The real war is that smile, coz ‘WOMEN’ are #expected to be pleasant. Period. 

P.S. Men, I have nothing against you. Just thinking about women at the moment.

Worries....

Have you ever worried about your worries- what exactly is the worry about, how to get rid of it, what is the next thing to worry about and so on and so forth? (Of course, with life in 21^st century, you cannot expect to sort one worry and sit back!! The next one is always queued up… sigh!!). Well, I have been doing exactly this in the last few months. Like all of you, (heart-core empathetically) I have been burdened with a lot of uncalled-for responsibilities, the biggest (read saddest) one being “hide-your-frustration-and-smile”. I don’t know if I ever have been sadder to SMILE before this!! In short, I was sad, sad because I had to smile with all reasons against it. Anyway, apart from all the worries, my ever-growing worry-list seemed to be my biggest worry at this point of time. Guess I am confusing you all. That is exactly what I am right now- CONFUSED!

Myth: Physical exhaustion overcasts mental exhaustion.

Fact: Luxurious attention is the perfect cure for a lost soul.

I always saw my Mom over-working and tiring herself when she was sad or worried. She engaged herself in cleaning book-selves and show-cases including dusting of miniature show-pieces from milli-micron coating of dust, or knitting sweaters or stitching saree-fall etc. Not to forget, I always fell victim to this spree, for oiling window panes or iron bars of collapsible gate or cleaning fan blades, all those which were beyond Mom’s reach, unless of course, if I was sleeping. Now that was one advantage I always got (courtesy: my skinny look and dark eye-sockets) – no matter how much I slept, I seemed to her to be perpetually sleep-deprived and hence, at any point of time, if I fell asleep, she would make an all-comfort ambience for me to sleep away to glory – a major contrast to my elder sister. Sadly enough, given her lovely plump face, no matter how many sleepless nights she would have had spent, mom would never let her sleep after 5 in the morning.

If nothing else to do, one of Mom’s favorite time-pass was intra- and inter-room furniture rearrangement, notwithstanding the size and weight, and again her only enthusiastic partner being me. Dad would help us out by heading towards his chamber to leave us alone, but only after his composed commentary on Mom’s supernatural physical strength and suggestions for pivoting all furniture to the ceiling and rotating as and when wished. Didia (my sister) would try her best to escape back to her favorite work (Studying!!!) but again, of course, with Mom around there’s no escape from household work. So basically, Mom’s emotional-stress busting would drive us all to fits of irreparable muscular and bone-icular stress for the weekend mornings. But then, God knows how and when, amidst all these, she managed, all the havoc would be replenished by her super-delicious recipe for our weekend-special Late-Family-Lunch at 3:30 pm.

Anyways, I have grown up noticing the same pattern of her stress-busting strategy and perhaps by inheritance or voluntary habitualization, applied the same to my life, esp. in hostel since college days. Whenever I was sad, I would clean my room, dust the cob-webs, do the laundry, and even rearrange furniture in my room (!!!). I would do all these till I was too tired to cry and then fell asleep. It did work for some time. But inheritance involves both parents. No exception for me, with time I realized/acquired chronic insomnia like my Dad.

I started working out and early morning uphill jogging in the river-twined highway of the hill station where my college was. The rippling sound of the green waters and the ethereal view of winter fogs nearly touching the waves accompanied with the cool breeze would take away all my worries, the speed of the cascading waters would clear my mind of all other earthly things. The workout would tire out my muscles completely so that I was almost ready for the next fit of Sleep. In short, I did everything I could do to tire myself and all my strength would exhaust but could not keep my eyelids together at any cost. Being a Pharmacy student, I started wondering whether I had some problem with my eyes, apart from the already existing myopia or was it actually Insomnia. It was much later that I realized my worries were too huge to be accepted by my little unused grey cells and hence they attacked my eyes.

Irony of Life: When you are young at heart, you are not unto your age. When you grow up, you are far beyond your age.

At times I felt so restless; I didn’t know how to make myself happy. I tried all means, literally. I tried Meditation to discover the actual “Me”. I tried fags to forget the real me. There was a time when I almost gave up eating because I did not care what happens to me. There was also a time when I over-ate and sweated out in gym to shape up myself. I tried changing phone numbers once every month and as well as going on with the same number for years. I tried to be away from home to escape all complaints about me. I tried to be at home when I was ready to accept complaints as feedback or convince when and where I was not at fault. Some of the ideas did work but I am too disoriented to continue one trend for too long. Finally I met someone who showed me a totally new way of thinking.

(to be continued….)

God Ceases to Exist in Us

Isn't it funny that no matter how good or bad a person we are, we can always end up justifying ourselves as good human being, correct in whatever we do. But we conveniently forget that we have an ultimate conscience to face. That conscience which makes us feel good when we fight our own possessiveness to share that favourite dress with our sibling, blames us when we cannot control our disappointment and retaliate only to hurt the sentiments of the person we love the most, and punishes us, makes us pay in full for all our sins. It is that same conscience that we, believers, call God. That’s right, God. I must sound insane having said something like that, or at least agnostic, but I am not. I am an absolute believer albeit with weird ideology. I say weird because my faith and way of seeing things are not particularly conventional. Anyway, that is not important. I was talking about conscience. Our mind is a very powerful vehicle. We call it abstract because we cannot see it. We cannot see God but do we call Him abstract? No. That is because we have given Him a face and thousand names. Why can’t we challenge our existing thought process and visualize our conscience? It is even easier. For God, we need an image or an idol. For Conscience, it is Me. I do not need a picture of mine. I can walk up to the mirror and say,

Hey, how are you? How do you feel? Do you feel joy or the peace of confident wait for the desired?

Yes

Congrats. (Smile and you can see your conscience smile back at you from the mirror, genuinely happy.)

No

No? What is wrong? Do you feel bad? What is it that is making you feel bad?

Trust me. Our mind (Conscience) also needs a friend. It also feels like justifying. We may confide in that one person in our life, but it feels secure only in us. When you question, it is more than happy to answer. Of course, if you want your Mind to speak, you cannot afford to concentrate on that pimple scar on your forehead or admire your shining cheeks.

The fact is our MIND is more existent than anything else in this Universe. It is stronger than any magnet. Whatever we think, feel- knowing/without knowing- is attracted towards us. Let me put it this way. When we ask something from God, our Mind constantly thinks about it with a strong belief of God giving it to us and presumptively cherishes the good feeling of getting it. It is this same constant thinking that we call meditation or worship and results in receiving God’s gift or just an outcome of our Mind or conscience. Having realized that, my ever-wandering mind questioned back my own theory. If our mind attracts whatever we want, then how come I never scored well in School even though from exam end day till result day, I constantly prayed for good grades and thought nothing except that? I ran the same question again and again until I stumbled on the deeper fact—FAITH. I realized, whenever I wrote my papers well, I didn't pray for grades because I knew it would be good, I had that Faith. I prayed for grades only when I knew I did not write well and wanted to hold on to God to give me grades. My deeper conscience knew this was not possible and I was always scared of “what if my grades are not good?” I did not have that good feeling of high grades but I perpetually had the bad feeling of that “what if” consequence. So, I prayed to God but my conscience knew I did not deserve. In other words, my Mind was meditating Grades but I did not have Faith. Just as no worship is fruitful without faith in God, no thought can be powerful without Faith of receiving it, and Faith comes from the Court of Conscience deciding what we deserve and what not. While our Thoughts attract the things we wish for, our Faith brings our mind and reality into equilibrium for delivering the same, based on the judgement of our Conscience (God).

So it is all a Mind-game. When we say God exists in all of us, we refer to this conscience. My Mom used to say children are the angels or embodiments of God himself. Too full of questions (and often answers as well), I used to ask her, “Why only children? Why does God disappear in adults? God doesn't want to grow up or what?” Mom used to smile and say, “Adults are adulterated and children are pure. That is why God stays in children.” I would go back to my reverie thinking, I am a child but I do not take a bath every day. Then how am I pure? How will God stay in me? Mom baths every day. So she is pure. Then why will God not stay in her, just because she is adult. It did not make much sense for me at that age of 4-5 years. I thought God is unjust or partial. Now I know what Mom meant. She referred to the conscience. As children we say upfront what is good, what is bad, what is right and what is wrong. We know and care little about consequences and speak whatever our heart feels. As adults, we modify or even falsify the truth and manipulate the facts in order to justify ourselves. We adulterate our Conscience and God ceases to exist in us.