When in Doubt

It has been raining incessantly today. Rains always make me think. So today of all days I have been thinking. You know, there are days that you wake up with certain half crafted dreams. I woke up with a strange after taste of emptiness today. This has been happening quite a bit lately. This sudden feeling of lost, abandonment, desolation. So I started keeping notes of my thoughts. So that consequently I can keep track of my mind. I might sound a bit crazy to you, but trust me I am more than fine. I have everything in order.

Just that, I see flashes sometimes. Flashes of my life flying past me. Flashes of all the people I have loved and who in their own ways have somehow loved me. Perhaps. I can’t be sure. This is the magic of uncertainty that I am talking about. This stage, this juncture that makes you doubt yourself, is where I have lately found myself standing. I am not regressing into an alley of mental stalemate. The fact that I can string coherent texts explains that I have not lost reason. Yet there is a certain level of doubt. More often than not, these days, I have had moments where I have doubted myself.

As layers of a hard frost start peeling away, you tend to realize where all it had hurt when you started to fall. Sometimes the person closest can sow the seeds of doubt into you. By constantly nitpicking on you, by constantly telling you that what you say-do-feel is wrong. That you are wrong. In those moments we start doubting ourselves, till the time that doubt starts seriously taking over your conscious mind. Would you call this love or a form of abuse? There is really a thin line.

I doubted myself when he questioned, who was I? I doubted all the years that I had spent being in love with him. I wonder if love has limitations. Or if it comes with an expiration date. When do you stop loving someone? When they abandon you midway or when they question your existence? Whom would you say is a greater evil? Or if evil had a lighter greyish tinge to it. I surely wouldn’t know. I have even doubted it being evil.

I have stood under the splatter of rain on the asphalt and questioned smiling too much. Questioned trusting. When years of blind love stings you with a question of your own existence, you doubt yourself. When the glass cages of your faith opens the door wide for speculation, you gamble yourself. Everyday when exchanges become a toxic broth of accusations, you mourn yourself. As invigorating as love can often be, it does also drain you of life. When loves gnaws you into shards, you doubt, you question, you spiral.

When it burns in the corners of your heart and causes you unutterable pain, would you call that as love? Someone once told me very sagely that, if it doesn’t make you happy and always inflicts suffering, is it worth it? Some of us become accustomed to pain. We make a habit of it, till we realize that it is not normal. We realize when someone walks in and tells us that, what we have is broken. We reach a certain stage when doubt starts seeping in and drying the corners of our soul. Where do you go from there?

One of the scariest things one ever has to do is to let go. To regress. To walk back. To let him be. But on some small occasions walking out is also liberating. If you wait around the corner and let yourself be at that moment, a tiny part of you might feel, a tad bit relieved to have let go of the pain. And that is the miniscule part, you need to focus on. One step closer to recovery is being in sync with your hurt.

So, I pause. I see my life flashing past, and I pause. Heedless to the timetable, I breathe and I pause.

Why don’t we empathize with others and ourselves?

Recovery is a process of self discovery. More often than once, I have heard people mention that certain incidences changed their lives. Change in terms of giving them fresh perspectives, altering their patterns and rescheduling their brain wires. Something like a factory reset on your systems. Unfortunately or fortunately our brains are not precisely programmed for a complete cleanup. We tend to go back and ponder. Specifically, for people who tend to contemplate much before acting, have this good fortune. Pun intended. Take it from someone who has the happy chance of being on the other end of impulse; it is certainly not a wildly intoxicating place to be. My question to you is; are all these people ultimately risk averse? Stagnant, static and perpetually boring?

So let me initiate the argument by asking you, do you think people in general are one-dimensional? Does indecision or stagnancy in certain facets of life mean that the individual doesn’t have another side to his/her personality that could easily redirect your opinion? In our fast paced lives today, we meet, talk, exchange and discard so many people on a regular basis. I do. And so do you. Some you dismiss as uninteresting, some as uneventful, some as naive, some as foolishly idealistic, and the list goes on. Judging, stacking and subsequent labelling is not exactly a crime.

But how many of us, step back and give our opinions a second chance? Call me a naive idealist, but I happen to be a big fan of second chances. I have got some and I have messed up so many. But the important point is, that those people at those moments have had the courage to look beyond their constraints.

The crucial part is probably realizing that everyone is on their own time table. I might not be at a crossroads of an investment decision right now, that doesn’t make me risk averse. I might be a believer of government bonds and not the equity market. Similarly, just because I take time moving any relationship to the next stage, doesn’t make me cold meat. Maybe I believe in building trust before going full throttle on the accelerator. These are choices really and not always individual nature.

More often than not, we tend to place judgements on people within the first 5 minutes. With age or rather with experiences, I have learnt that a little bit of flexibility doesn’t hurt. Sad truth is, you never really know someone unless you’ve had either a late night conversation, an inebriated episode, or you’ve been privy to some amount of pillow talk. So the best advice I have given myself, in the past year is, cut yourself some slack, and keep an open mind. Honestly speaking, as you grow (hopefully gracefully) you tend to realize there is a lot to learn. Specifically about people. Everyone deals with some amount of turmoil at some point in their lives. Poise is to deal with it at your own pace and not become a raving juggernaut that destructs on it’s way to oblivion. Everyone deserves a little bit of empathy once in a while.

When something happens that makes you stop, breathe and re-evaluate, use that time to discover yourself. Everyone of us is a complex web of emotions. Some like remaining bottled up, but when they unravel, that is more often than not, quite painful as a process. Being on your own on this path of discovery is loosely recovery. There is often beauty in being on your own. Relationships don’t have to be based on co-dependency. There are high chances that, if you try and explain this concept, you would be scoffed at. However, individuals who deal with changes on their own are mostly the strongest you would come across. Be social by all means. But not a nerve wreck of social niceties.

When I was a child I was fascinated with the likes of Ayn Rand. Her books spoke so much of truth to me that individuality came as a natural consequence to my mental framework. Humility has taught me that everyone probably hasn’t had that choice. You can call me fortunate to have had these opportunities or you might say that awareness about self is something that our society truly lacks. Speaking for my gender, we often take pride in being an ideal daughter, girlfriend, wife, mother at different stages in our lives. How many of us follow the paths that give meaning to our selves? It might be that living each of these roles to perfection gives you fulfilment, but to a lot of us, probably a concept of a he/them is not all encompassing. That has to be fair too, right?

So, I tell myself routinely, recover yourself, discover yourself, be comfortable in your skin. Self is not a big dark hole on the ground where you need to be buried. And off course to my other impulses I say, a little bit of empathy goes a long way.

Strangers who soothe...

Distinctions of time and spaces are fading. I have been moving around through shadows for some time now. And do you know what all crosses my mind? As much as I would want to believe that I am imbibing and inhaling peace, more than once, during these past weeks, I have found myself wondering about a certain someone I happened to have met once or twice. A certain someone who happened to have told me that I should read into the places, the people as I walk past the narrow lanes of an unknown land, rather than read the written word. I had found it strange then, however time and again I have been thinking about what all he had said. Am I impacted by all of what had traversed during our conversation? Maybe in a way. But I have found myself wondering about him more than once. When you are taking a step back, walking around aimlessly, as a tiny speck in the distant horizon, you tend to think, as probably I am. Maybe one shouldn't think about people you probably wouldn't hear from ever again. But sometimes, in far off distant lands, of the chanting mantras, or in the claustrophobic parties of an unsettled metropolitan you tend to find yourself soothed by a total stranger. Maybe he tends to teach you a new perspective, while being heedlessly lost himself. Maybe your paths would never cross again. And yet he crosses your mind every now and then, to remind you that there is still a lot to be surprised with. As there are a lot of reasons to smile.