Home and hope

I suppose out of the million scattered memories I still remember vaguely from my childhood, there is one particular memory that has remained a little too vividly etched in my brain. I don't think it was anything hugely significant, and I have no plausible explanation as to why I remember it so well either, but I have certain theories.

It was an evening of 2013, sometime a little past dinner. I refused to be put to bed so soon, and with the help of Didi, we convinced Mom to let us stay up a little more. She agreed, albeit reluctantly, and we got to play immediately. Off we went to our treasure trove; a wooden cupboard that stored a green bag filled with every possible variety of Barbies and their billion different fashion accessories. As I sat down and tried to tug open the cupboard, it suddenly came loose and landed on my feet, immediately resulting in an ugly-looking bruise and a cut. Blood gushed out and true to my eight year old self, I howled in agony as tears sprung to my eyes from the pain. Mom and Dad came rushing in from the kitchen to check, and Mum immediately went out to fetch the first-aid kit. As she tended to the wound, I kept sniffing and crying in spurts; the pain wasn't exceptional, the shock was. As everybody stood in various corners of the room, trying to pacify me, dad came forth with a line of reasoning that immediately reduced me from sobbing to sniffling. His words went vaguely along the lines of this:

"Do you know something, Sonai? There was this study scientists did a few years ago, and they found out something. Do you want to know what it is?"

I was a curious child, and he knew he had found his vantage point. I nodded my head yes through blurry eyes and a runny nose.

"They found out that people's strength is held in their tears. Every time we get hurt, we get stronger, but when we cry, the strength flows out through our tears. The more you get hurt, the stronger you will get, but if you cry when that happens, your tears will carry all the strength out with them. Do you understand what I am trying to say?"

An eight-year old me found this to be a really fascinating concept, despite it's dubious scientific origins, and I stared at him open-mouthed, the tears dry on my cheeks, as he elaborated further on the theory; long enough to distract me and let mum put on the band-aids on my leg.

While the bruises faded by the same time next week, Dad's words stuck to me like glue. I grew up, and at some point of time, of course realized his was a completely phony theory, but I somehow couldn't unlearn the lesson. Pain made me stronger, I believed, and the more pain I could endure in silence, the stronger I would get. And that came with a theory I conjured up in my head all by myself: I had to stay when things got bad, if only to prove my strength. I stopped crying. Mum got to narrate famous legends of how her daughter could endure extreme pain- pierced ears, ugly looking bruises, scraped knees, twisted ankles. I didn't cry. Relatives and colleagues grew to shoot me appreciative looks; my pride in my strength grew. Everybody grew to expect me to take every sort of pain well at some point, and I wasn't going to let them down, so I shut up and smiled through all sorts of hurt imaginable.

And then came the first heartbreak. My first proper breakup happened in 2019; bang on in the middle of my rebellious, confused, angry teenager phase. First love always has the ability to reduce the best of us to weeping messes, and I was horrified to discover that I did not pose an exception. My first bathroom breakdown happened over something as simple as a cold shoulder, and it came with the scary realization that while I had trained myself to be immune to physical pain, nobody had taught me how to handle emotional pain. And somehow, nobody had mentioned to me either, that after a while, the pain was never physical, and almost always emotional. I construed up fictional theories again; I was a precocious child like that. If I could endure a broken leg, a broken heart shouldn't be too much of a problem. I could bulldoze my way through this pain too.

And thus began the battle. The battle of never being weak. As it turned out, this wasn't easy to achieve with a complicated on-again-off-again relationship with my ex. The more unaffected I tried to be; I simply turned more and more sensitive: reduced to tears from things that progressively turned out to be more and more trivial. This helplessness, paired with consequent self-hatred: being fourteen turned out to be a garish nightmare. 

It took me turning seventeen and innumerable more talks with dad to finally understand where I was going wrong. I unlearnt lessons; my tears didn't make me weak. I learnt cutting people off didn't make me a bad person; and only after I had completely given in to the grief and let the sorrow consume me, did it finally get better. The anger faded, the desperation gave way to understanding, and one sudden night, I realized I had gone the entire day without thinking about him even once, something I had deemed impossible just a few months back. 

Yet letting go felt like a personal defeat; the breaking of an unwritten tryst I had made with myself of holding on always. It felt like a betrayal to my own faith, a betrayal to my passionate fourteen year old self who had sworn to continue loving forever. It took me yet another year to realize that moving forward didn't always have to mean I had fallen out of love. I still held our love in my hands; it still stood a glowing testament to hundreds of happy memories on my bookshelf. The only difference was that I had now stopped gripping it so tightly that it drew blood from my body. I had let it breathe, and in turn, the love had loosened it's vise-like grip on my neck as well. I finally had enough space in myself to love again and let him be loved again.

Moving on to more recent times, I am forced to return to the more mundane realities of life. I had, to some extent, known that summer break would turn out to feel excruciatingly long despite the fierce yearning for homecoming that had seized me the last week of college; what I hadn't guessed though is that it would start feeling like so barely three weeks into the break. As it turns out, I am already craving for college again; and the irony isn't lost on me. 

That isn't to say home has been all bad. It has been spectacular in many aspects. I have caught up on a billion hobbies: cooking, journaling, reading, writing poetry, painting; hell, I think last week was perhaps one of my most productively unproductive week ever. I have whipped up a billion recipes, keeping true to my promise: Garlic breads, Egg bhurjis, a plethora of sandwiches, chicken dishes, and a cold coffee recipe that has miraculously turned out to be a household favorite. There has been a lot of introspection involved in addition to it, and almost all of my eye-opening epiphanies have occurred whilst I had been frolicking about in the kitchen, dancing to some heinous white girl music, engaged in a mind-numbingly tedious series of processes of chopping and grinding and mixing. Coincidence? I think not.

Being a tad bit aloof and at a distance from college has also been a welcome relief. Independence is lucrative, but there's a peace in not having to be in a constant state of high alert all through the day. There's no anxiousness constantly sitting in the pit of my stomach, whispering in my ears to keep my guard up lest I bump into someone known on the way and give off unwanted impressions. There's no persistent worry of being judged, or being misinterpreted, or the pressure to look put together always. And then...It has also been a break from him.

I am not proud of it, but I have always tended to be more of an "Out-of-sight-out-of-mind" kind of person, and summer break means no random encounters or sudden bump-ins in the middle of the corridor or on campus roads.  A lot of kitchen reflections also meant I finally realized exactly how stupid I had been, and that was followed by a stern reminder to my heart that I was simply deluding myself. Moving on began as a process. Of course, there were two ways I could have gone about that. The first would have been taking some time for myself and probably going to therapy to fix my attachment issues; aka, the sane option. I, however, have always skipped over that particular alternative and jumped over to the most insane choice available: In this case, that included rebound talking stages. (Yes, I make bad decisions for the plot, sue me.)

A friend set me up with two of his friends consecutively. Midway through talking to both of them, I realized exactly how much college had screwed me over. A bunch of people constantly telling me men could only ever be absolutely fucking insane if they liked me, had ended up convincing me that was my truth. I found every compliment thrown my way hard to believe, no matter how sincerely they were directed. Every time either of them vouched for how attractive they found me to be, or perhaps offered to do something genuinely nice, I couldn't help but be skeptical; so much so, my standard response to all those texts ended up being a laugh and a "You'll get over it".

Anyway, they were a welcome reminder of what I still deserved, and what I shouldn't be settling for. I was reminded that I still deserved flowers and being asked out on dates and being obsessed over; and perhaps more importantly, being treated without the slightest bit of hesitation as a "Hell yes" and not a "Definitely maybe". Of course, the realizations ran much deeper than some superficial male gaze validation, but I would forever be grateful to both of these guys for reminding me what I was worthy of having. 

Talking, however, also made me realize exactly how unprepared I was for a relationship. It had only seemed like an attractive option so far because I had gone for people with whom I knew it would never turn into reality. But as soon as the idea solidified, and an actual relationship became an evident future possibility, I got jitters and a billion second thoughts. The pattern stared at me in the face, and I would have to be absolutely stupid to ignore it. I had issues to fix, and I didn't want to drag these amazing men along with me down the rabbit hole, so I parted ways with both of them- one, in a way, I am not particularly proud of, I suppose. 

But I suppose that's what life is about, isn't it? We stay with ourselves, and while others are transient people that are there to provide us company and help us through certain phases, we are the only ones who have lived OUR own life. We decide what needs fixing; the parts that we hate when we think about them. The parts of us that end up harming us, the parts that we don't really like to acknowledge. So we fix them, since deserting our own selves isn't a possibility. We fix the defective parts of our soul and mind, and we learn to forgive the harm that these pieces have caused-both to ourselves and to people who hadn't deserved the pain. And we learn to hope that somewhere in this constant process of repair and mending, some one will see the pieces of us that are yet unbroken and beautiful, and find them worthy of loving with all of themselves...

Anyway, Summer school happens in two weeks, and I suppose I will see y'all then. Till then, Adios!

Signing off,

Shaona