Nervous Musings

There's a certain unmatched warmth that comes from unexpected conversations with people from your past. I love revisiting, and temporarily reliving, the me they knew. I enjoy the almost out-of-body experience it is to replay both the hallmark and inconsequential memories I shared with people I am no longer around. 

This nervous attempt at penning down actual sentiment may be triggered by newly prescribed hormone medication, or by a recent barrage of love that I was fortunate to receive. 

Telephonic (Whatsapp-video-call-ic) recollections of a neighbor aunty from 20 years ago, of a geeky, over active, over achieving, clumsy, loud, mischievous 9 year old, turned into a circus tale of feeding her two kids and me everyday after school, the hell we raised, and never really knowing peace. Lovely, kind, and caring as always, along with all the progress she had made as a parent who truly let her kids follow their dreams, she asked me, "Janu paapa...is there someone who calls you kanmani?". It took a moment before I comprehended what the question meant. 

Twenty years ago, on one of her flights of fantasy, this lady who loved me so, told me, paapa your name means kanmani. One day, there will be a nice Malayali/Tamil boy who will call you kanmani, and you'll know. I hope you'll remember me then. Why the linguistic specification? Her favorite thing about herself is that she comes from both. She claims to have lived in malayalam and loved in Tamil, I think her senthamizh speaking husband would agree! 

I asked her if it was enough that I called myself kanmani. It is true what they say about mothers tearing up. I believe we haven't been genetically coded to withstand that. 

After a brief hiatus from being able to recognize a stimulus or having an appropos response to it, I have been attempting to shock my system with an artificially induced overload of emotions. All behind the safety of a locked door, ofcourse. In other words I've been attempting to 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' myself. After one too many accounts of torrential emotional experiences (of strangers), I am at a loss. For words, emotions, facial expressions, what have you.

 Though very scarcely, I did feel a pang of longing, or a pang from not truly belonging. 

Would it indubitably ruin everything I've been saying till now if I said that's when I realized the power of the content we consume? Is it nihilism or a lack of faith in humanity or heartless if I re-realized for the umpteenth time that I definitely miss the casual intimacy, I may miss the stability, I may miss the carefree companionship, of being in a committed relationship, but not much else? My memories did make an attempt to paint only the rosy pictures from the past, but I'm not that easily fooled, atleast not for long.

Is it a symptom or some kind of urban sadness, that I yearn for the fiery, impossibly fused relationships from the myths that I read, but also cannot realistically fathom having that with an actual mortal? Maybe I'm not one person's kanmani, but many, across this speck in time that's a human lifespan? Maybe if we pieced together all the love we dispensed, it would make for a mythical tale. 

For now, it is enough for me that I am my kanmani. 

Here's counting down days till the hormone meds are done!

Tara 

Hope for #29.

I have subconsciously planned to give inconsistent a new meaning by being consistent about posting here only once in a few years. 

Hi anonymous readers! 

I believe we are at what is the best-case scenario regarding getting to the other side of the pandemic. Is that scary? I have always measured a 9 on a scale of Sartre to Nietsche, so I'm not particularly phased. 

In two weeks, I would've commenced the final revolution before I take on a new decade. It is a journey that albeit sporadically, included this blog and the assumption of readers. 

As a race, we went through an extraordinary set of circumstances in the past decade, not limited to the pandemic or self-driving vehicles or billionaires touring the space or the terror-inducing ascension of the right (alt-right) all over the world, or global warming, or cryptocurrency, or a litany of other events/phenomenon that would've been previously unthinkable. 

On a hopefully non-self-aggrandizing note, I went through what I'm made to believe are meant to be the most defining years of my life, that would dictate my final outcome in this rat race that is life. 

Though it is going to be a few years or decades before I find out exactly how delineating the years were, there are a few adjectives that I'd like to use to define 2013 - 2022. Educating, emancipating, exhausting, confusing, tiring, heartbreaking, sorrowful, joyous, momentous, successful, defeating, tearful, fearful, excruciating, exciting, overwhelming, intoxicating, strenuous, inculcating, and more? And more. That is my statement, I stand by it. Not even psychedelic mind-altering substances can do to you what your 20s can do to you! A laundry list of gratitudes, platitudes, and a strong acknowledgment of my privileged existence doesn't in the least do any justice to just how much we've been pushed and fooled by the world. There is this gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that wakes me up reminding me that my good times are done, I should've crossed all the big steps by now, oh what glamorous years these are going to be! Such blasphemy! Show of hands of anybody who didn't spend the first half of their 20s looking like abandoned waifs! 

I have recently been attracted to a certain genre of academics being tormented ruthlessly by literature. The tempests of torture, the impossible proclamations of love, the borderline-obsessive desire and lust, the fixation with fictional characters, the cogent analysis of impossible scenarios, the destructive energy of negative character developments, the painfully chafed need to simultaneously be set on fire and just lie down on the cool wet ground. And I have never related to anything more, ever. 

There have always been two planes of existence, for me. Reality, and the wondrous one in my head, complete with nuanced plotlines and character arcs and well-researched mythology worked through it. You know this. The one where the narrator takes breaks from sapphic fiction to facepalm at my lousier-than-fiction life.  The not-so-slow journey we are all taking towards what I believe is kingdom come has escalated this mildly unsettling phenomenon.

A distinct detachment from everything that is happening around you, me, us. I do not feel the rage or an outcry at the injustice, or sorrow. Just numbness. Death, destruction, injustice, school shootings, rapes, violence against all communities, police killings, refugee crisis, a horrifying employment and housing crisis - numbness. We've come so far, someone told me recently, give it time. Time? At what human cost? 

I have been informed many a time that I expect too much, that basic progress doesn't satiate me, that I'd scare people away. Not because I go around wielding a scimitar, but because I have bare minimum expectations of justice. I feel my soul/spirit/essence wander out of my body (new existence, who dis?), when I maintain silence at these comments. Academia does seep us in the false notion that these vital conversations are taking place with just as much vigor and nuanced dissections and intersections in the real world. It is not. My mental fatigue stops me from quoting stats to you, but we have barely scraped the bottom of the barrel. Revolutions crossed the seas and the mountains, and then at some point, we lost the momentum. A dangerously hypnotizing mixture of capitalism, materialism, orthodox beliefs, xenophobia and tribe mentality hit back at the global village. 

My 20s, like they are meant to be, have been ten new things everyday, where I go from euphoria to curled up in a ball crying, in a matter of a few hours. Right now, everyday feels that way. Everyday, I am more inclined to be convinced that the world where we attempt to change and heal, is in my head. Somewhere down the line, the pandemic-induced inertia turned my mind palace into a dystopian ghost town, and beat out my will to scream and roar and remember and do and be. 

I want back in. I want the tumultuous uproar and the myriad of vigorous sentiments to descend from my head and flow through my veins. I want to be able to hope unbridledly, and love fiercely. I want to be, intensely.

That is my need, wish, want for 29. 

As always, see you on the other side!

Tara