Feeling Better

I haven’t written anything in a long time. I haven’t been able to, I’ve been too busy. Busy wallowing in equal parts of self pity and self loathing. Depressed, dejected, feeling dumb and dull, I’ve lost the ability to articulate my opinions. Have a conversation. Write. Think.

I’ve spent the last couple of months eating, sleeping and sleep walking. I’ve “done” quite a bit, but none of it has registered over the persistent throbbing dull, sad feeling. The only things that come to mind are unpleasant breakdowns I’ve had, failures and dead ends I’ve hit in the past few months.

I’m being dragged through college by family and friends for a degree and the promise of something better after (just) one and half years more. I’m due to give my third repeat exam and at the rate my CGPA is dropping I wonder if I will be able to convince my college to let me out with a degree, much less convince some other college to let me in without a capitation fee.

I’ve been waiting for something to happen. Every day, every hour, every minute of my existence I pray for something to happen. Something which will come, sweep me out of this funk I’m in. But nothing happens unless you make it happen and the only things that I feel I can make happen are, to put it bluntly, not pleasant.

So instead I am going to write about what all has already happened to me, what I’m grateful for, and what some of my coping mechanisms are. It’s a little gratitude post, it’s going to tell me that all is not lost, that I still have a life worth fighting for and the means to fight that battle.

One of the most important things that has happened to me is blogging. It’s been a year since I started blogging, and words cannot express how much it means to me. Nonetheless I will make a short feeble attempt at explaining the role it’s begun to play in my life. Blogging gives me a sense of accomplishment, something that I badly need in the face of my failing academic career. I’ve been accused of TMI on my blog, but I don’t really care, being brutally honest on my blog has helped me deal with personal issues and insecurities with a sense of humour, it has helped me come to terms with a myself that I wanted to hide. It’s helped me understand that these insecurities are shared by others and that if I say it out aloud, I will have received and given empathy. Blogging is an outlet for a great deal of frustration, whenever I find myself in what would earlier have been a stressful or anger inducing situation, I now tell myself to take a step back, observe the situation with a sense detachment and humour so that I can blog about it later. And when I fail to achieve that state of detached humour, writing invariably calms me down and helps me sort out the very strong opinions and emotions I feel.

I owe blogging to my friends and sisters, hereinafter referred to as friends. I owe a lot to my friends. They read my blog, they listen to me and they love me. I doubt that anybody will find so perfect a combination of love, craziness, intelligence, individuality and spirit than what’s housed in my hostel. Often when I listen to other people talk about their friends, I find myself pitying them for not having mine. From my school days (when I would walk around alone in the lunch break, eating food continuously, trying to look busy, so that no one would notice I had no one to hang out with) to today (where I have in my room a wall painted bright red by my friends, so that as they explained to me, when I’m depressed and have locked myself into my room, I can look at the wall, and remember that I have friends, that I am a person people want to be friends with) I have come a long way. And it’s because of them. I’ve found my happily ever after.

Then there are the parents, they listen, they counsel, they support, they put up. I have faith in them. They are individualists and I know that whenever they have to make a decision regarding me, they think of what I would want, instead of what they want for me. They understand that I’m not them, that their values aren’t necessarily mine and that I will do things differently from them when the time comes.

So, I’ve written. The tears which prompted me to write this post have dried up. I’m feeling a lot better. From tomorrow, I will begin taking baby steps towards even more betterhood.

Instead of sleeping for hours and hours in my room, I will sleep in various rooms across the corridor, while the owners of the room do whatever it is that they’re doing. When you’re depressed and not in a position to talk to others, laugh with them, this is an easy way to gently ease back into a social life. I will resume jogging, I have no self-control when it comes to stimulants of any variety, food, music, alcohol. Jogging is a “safe” stimulant, but I end up abusing jogs as well. Once I’m in the routine, my body begins to yearn for the jogging high, I spend the entire day waiting for when I can go jogging, unable to do anything but look at the clock, when something threaten the jog, like rain or a dinner plan with friends, I get panicky and worked up. When I’m jogging, I find myself unable to stop until I’m exhausted. I will not let that happen. I will listen to anyone else who needs to talk. Because to know that you’re not alone, is the most important thing. I will ask for help when I need it.

(for those of you who are wondering, I started writing this post on the 9th of January. That day all that I could write before I gave up was the first line, also I have given and passed my repeat since then)

Hush.... it's a secret!

When the twins were born, my mother was shown only one baby. The two of them were pointed out to her in the ICU only the next day as they lay under sickly yellow lights trying to fight jaundice. Happily enough, they survived and blossomed into two healthy happy bouncing babies. And that’s where any similarities ended. To put it in my mothers words who was repeating my aunts words. “One was a pleasure to see and the other was a joy to watch.” While Sumana sat around stolidly, batting her pretty long eyelashes dressed in perfect little frocks, smiling, gurgling, cooing, Nandini would be running around, constantly getting into trouble, disappearing and reappearing with torn frocks, mysterious scratches and cobwebs in her hair.
To put it in my own words; Its pouring with rain outside, Sumana will manage to make it home from school with nary a drop of water on her and not a crease out of place on her uniform, while Nandini will make it back home two hours later, after having spent the last hour in the blazing after-rain sunshine soaking wet and drenched to the skin.
They grew up into two different people something which my parents very actively encouraged by refusing to twin them, they never wore matching twin outfits, they went to the same school but were in different sections, they had different interests which were encouraged independently. Of course nature helped, and even on the surface the two of them are as different as they get. Nandini grew up into a 5 foot and something, big, curvy, dusky beauty, while Sumana is a 5 foot nothing petite, doll like girl. Forget about looking like twins, they don’t even look like distant second cousins, twice removed.
I have a theory, which is slowly becoming an unshakeable belief, that one of the “twins” is a changeling. Some hapless woman having given birth to a girl ..... again....... bribed the nurses to exchange her girl for a boy (only one baby was shown remember!). and so our family were born, Mummy (I was copying my cousin) and Naina and Me and the babies as I remember telling my parents while swinging from their legs. My Parents on the other hand remember my telling them to send one of the babies back to the hospital (I was trying to copy my cousin who had only one sister, disaster was averted when they asked me which baby to send back and I couldn’t decide.)
I tried telling my aunt this theory, and she flared up “every mother recognizes her child”. I disagree, my mother recognized the changeling as her daughter and that’s exactly what she has grown up to be. Every Day I thank god for the switch, because I can’t think of a life where I didn’t know either one of my beautiful sisters and didn’t have them to fight with and lean on. The switch theory means that no matter how far apart the three of us were born, we were meant to be sisters and would have found each other. It means that we owe so much to our parents for bringing us up to be happy and friends and it’s not a question of genes. That love runs thicker than blood. If the changelings biological mother reads this somewhere, keep your son, he’s yours, we’re keeping our sister.

Daddy Issues

Firstly I could never call my father daddy. He has always been addressed by the traditional Telegu “Naina” and referred to as “My father” by my sisters and me. Even when I was a 18 month old, blindly aping my hero-worshipped older cousin and saying everything he said, I began calling my mother “Mummy” but my father remained “Naina”.
Nomenclature while indicative is the least of the issues. The main issue is not even that my Father doesn’t understand me(I’d trust him to pick my friends, my career, the books I ought to read, the life I can and ought to lead). But rather that I don’t understand him. I don’t understand how he understands me so well, what he does or did, and why, what he’s thinking, how he judges people, how he judges me (understanding and judging being different), how he got to be the super-liberal that he is coming as he does from his uber-conservative family. Everything I know about my father, his values, his life, his opinions is through my mother. My father, in short remains this mysterious, intimidating, quiet, hard working, brilliant, congress supporting, can’t remember having hugged (and I’m sad/sorry to say this last part) ATM.
It’s not like we haven’t tried. Imagine you’re a 19 year old, culturally confused, guilt stricken, ADHDd girl, trying to gain some gyaan from her father on how to deal with college (he went through the same thing after all, balancing family values with new-found freedom, the pressures of a professional course et al). You pluck up your courage and ask him what he did in college, how he spent his time, you stammer and you stutter and after minutes spent trying to frame the conversation in your head, imagining a nice heart to heart, you get this reply “TT- I played a lot of TT in my spare time”.

My mother still tries to get us to talk, and he very sweetly does call me every now and then enquiring about my state of affairs and finances, the weather and my health, but I still hem and haw and I’m no closer to sharing myself with him the way I am able to with my mother or even you who’re reading this blog and nowhere near getting him to talk about himself.
If I’m bad my sister is worse, she isn’t able to extract conversations from my mom and has to use me as the guide to understanding our mother. Knowing how it feels to not know a parent, I decided this situation required some expert interfering and subtly ordered my mom to start talking to her. The next day I get a call from my sister, who tells me that mommy rang her up and whined to her for an hour and she wants to, but doesn't know how to tactfully tell my mother to stop whining because,...... thats how life is. Just imagining the sight of my mother being told that “thats how life is” by my very lost and extremely lazy and unaccepting sister makes me want to burst out in laughter and made me realize that some people are just not meant to talk no matter how closely they’re related.
I tried to cheer up my sister by telling her that I’m not able to talk to our father which didn’t cheer her up one bit since neither is she. So I asked my sister for permission to tell my mother the whole story in a humorous manner, and it was grudgingly granted. My sister then messaged my mom on gtalk telling her that soon she and I would be laughing at my sisters expense, this she thought could be another opportunity to chat up our mother. Unfortunately my dad... ooops my Father saw the message and called back wanting to know what the joke was. My sister has given up. Naina if you read my blog, now you know. I love, admire and respect you and if we can’t talk, well, I'm not worrying, thats How life is!