Feels a Little bit like Stupidity

I have been absolutely insufferable lately. I have been mean, grumpy, angry, frustrated and hopelessly depressed. Yes, I admit I haven’t been good company. In fact, I have been absolutely intolerable. The worst part about being this way is to absolutely know how incredibly unfair you are to yourself and those around you, but yet be completely incapable of changing the way you think and feel. It’s a really frustrating, hopeless, lonely rut to be stuck in. I could easily blame my lack of amicability upon my hormones; yes to a certain degree they do hugely contribute to my volatile, tumultuous state of mind, but that would only partially be the truth. I have been generally cross with the world recently and most of it has been no ones fault but my own, I most certainly can’t blame it on my period. Sure I cannot control the way people act and behave, but it is certainly in my power to control the way I feel and react to things and it maddening to sometimes contemplate that this is the least I have control over.

My general frumpiness isn’t all a concoction of my overactive imagination. I have been genuinely sad and troubled; the worst part is my complete incapacity to discuss it with anyone, not even close friends and family. I perhaps unfairly and wrongly think that they don’t care enough or are simply incapable of understanding what I am going through. Yes, I know this might be unreasonable on my part, but I simply can’t stop feeling this way. I know the whole I am so alone, no one really gets me and the world is such a shitty place to live in bullshit is a little cliché and that I should have left my teenage angst behind a long time ago, exactly six years to be precise when I stopped being a teenager, but what the hell, I can label this my mid-life crisis and call it a day!

My dad passed away precisely six years and five days ago. I thought that things would get better with time, all wounds nicely healed and scabbed, but I guess in many ways it was some solid wishful thinking on my part. Some things never really become a distant, less painfully memory, even after all the time that has gone by. I would be lying and exaggerating if I said that my life came to a screeching a halt, a painful standstill and any other metaphors I can think off after my dad died. But with him I feel like I lost a little bit of myself too, that little something that I haven’t quiet managed to find yet. I wish I really knew what it was, things would be a lot easier if I did, all I feel time and again is this over whelming sense of loss, which no matter what I do never really seems to go away. Just when I think I am alright, I feel this crushing urge to just see him and be with him one more time, just so that I can ask him if I turned out alright. I know it’s a little sick to need this kind of validation, but when you are as confused and lost as I feel I am it’s comforting to know that you are on the right track, especially when nothing makes any sense at all. It is unbelievably painful to miss and want someone so terribly and know that they are really truly gone forever.

The gloom and doom of my father’s death anniversary and the subsequent onslaught of nostalgic recollection had made me less than friendly in the last couple of weeks. I use ‘had’ because I think I am slowly getting out of my funk, but in the process I have very successfully managed to alienate the people I care the most about. A lot of my friends have stopped calling me, just because I have been so damn difficult to deal with. Worst of all, I feel like I am growing further and further apart from my closest friend and this has been the hardest to deal with.

He was the one person I always looked forward to seeing, one I felt I could always count on, someone who got me, well at least a little. Now he is one I have successfully managed to push the furthest away. I know it’s no ones fault but my own, but it would be really, truly nice and comforting if just once he would pick up the phone and ask me if I was alright. Maybe with a little patience and perseverance cajole the truth out of me. We never spend time together anymore, not as a group, we do plenty of that, I’m talking about just him and me. Now every chance he gets he runs away, acting like my presence and company is the source of great annoyance, I really hate and resent that, only because I miss him so damn much. I know I am not fun and chirpy all the time, but to be abandoned by your closest friend at what seems like the most vulnerable time in your life, feels a little bit like betrayal.

A bunch of us were hanging out late last night and as usual the conversation took a serious turn. ‘T’ told me that I should really stop being so damn moral, judgmental and idealistic all the time. Apparently someone wise once said that ‘A high moral ground is a very lonely place.’ I forgot who it was. Yeah I guess I do agree, but I am also obstinate enough to think that what precious, few morals that I do have in possession are the guiding principals of my life and if I didn’t have them, I would be left with almost nothing. If it’s a choice between being alone and letting go of my ideals then I stubbornly choose to stick with my morality. Well at least for now anyway, when I feel like I am strong enough live with the consequences of my decision. They advised me time and again that I need to cut myself a slack and give the world a break. Don’t they think that I already know this? I mean pragmatically and logical it all makes absolute perfect sense, but making something that seems so simple into an actual living, breathing reality is a whole different ball game. Sweeping, life changes don’t really happen over night.

I am probably the stupidest human being on the planet. I am stupid because I realize that I am doing idiotic things and yet continue to do them because all I have is my idiocy.

Does it all End so Quickly?

It’s really frustrating and infuriating to see how people give up so incredibly easily, especially about the things they care the most about. I had mentioned in my last post that it is easy to be in a relationship once you have found the one that seems almost right, either by sheer miracle or an incredible stroke of luck. I guess I might just be very wrong about this one, although it’s not really the first time I have completed miscalculated things, as I grow older significant revelations like these make life a tad bit more disconcerting . It’s incredibly frustrating to think that the values, ideals and morals that you have based your whole life upon might just be an antiquated system of thought. Maybe I am stupid and naïve enough to feel that forever and ever might not be such an intangible concept, but as time passes, at every nook and bend I see relationships slowly crumbling away and subsequently with it the people involved.

It fills me with immense sadness and anger to look around and observe that people who claim to be so passionately in love with each other, give up so easily at the slightly sign of trouble and upheaval. I happen to be lucky enough to enjoy an extremely amicable, open and honest relationship with my mother. Although I don’t divulge every single relevant or irrelevant detail of my life to her, over time, we have grown to love, respect and understand each other us adults, with our own set of distinct belief’s that govern our lives and at least be respectful enough to hear each other out, even though sometimes we may not agree at all.

We have spend a lot of time talking about different things over the course of the last two years, in many ways it’s comforting and relieving to know that at the end of the day, when there really is something that truly bothers me and if I am looking for a different perspective and insight I can always go and talk to her. I am filled with immense relief whenever I unburden myself to her, she doesn’t always understand every thought I propose, but that’s secondary, it’s cathartic to talk to her. As independent, forward thinking and liberated I might think and say I am, at the end of the day, I am glad to admit that I find a lot of wisdom in many of the things she says.

A lot of our conversations revolve around the evolution of relationships, be it people specific or a massive generalization on the state of things. We are well above and beyond the rigid confines of the parent-child relationship where the discussion of boyfriends, girlfriends and sex is a taboo or a source of immense awkwardness. With that out of the way, it is much easier to talk about most things. I may not feel comfortable enough to spill the beans on all scandalous, salacious details, but what is important and truly matters I can share with ease and that’s what’s important I suppose.

I have been sad and upset for the last couple of days, every one seems to be falling apart piece by piece and the air reeks with the melancholy born out of the rancor of broken promises. I hate the idea of impermenance, I know that absolutely nothing in life will ever remain the same, in spite of my weak and futile resistance, whether I choose to accept or not, people and the circumstance that they are tied into will evolve over time. Logically all this makes perfect sense, yet on a very personal level I have grown to resent this in more ways than one. I often feel like sometimes people use impermanence as an excuse to get out of a maddening, uncomfortable, difficult, miserable situations without even so much as a feeble attempt to make things right.
Sometimes I really wonder what is wrong with us. What is so terribly wrong with me? My gigantic relationship phobia and subsequent paranoia aside, I really do feel like as a generation we have somehow missed the all important vital lessons on perseverance, understanding, compromise, patience and forgiveness that we could have learnt through mere observation.

Realistically we all know that every relationship that we enter in is bound to hit troubled waters at some point. Yet as soon as we reach that rough patch, instead of working together as a team and navigating it in the right directions, we flail our arms, throw a fit and abandon ship! We frantically swim for a while; cursing and yelling until we are spotted by the nearest life boat (my metaphor for a rebound fling) which takes us to the next safe destination and like a self-fulfilling prophesy the pattern repeats itself. Dock, descent, wait and then get onboard the next attractive liner that offers the best destination.

I am not saying that people should stay together and be miserable in abusive relationships, far from it; in fact such situations warrant strict separation and ultimate abandonment, but to end a relationship that was supposedly based on the foundation of trust, love and commitment for small, frugal, insignificant trivialities is really, selfish and unfair.

Mom tells me time and again that we as a generation have either forgotten or never quite learnt how to love. Although on principle I am forced to defend me and my kind, I can’t help but ponder upon the significance of those words and maybe even see a certain truth in it. To describe love as an expression is to diminish its importance gravely humiliate it. Love for me is a verb; it is a live, tangible, action that binds two people together, not some metaphor, adjective or word which seems almost fickle.

I may be idealistic, but I certainly don’t feel like I am unrealistic. My observations and derivations come from having front row seats to the spectacle called my parents marriage. Maybe because they had such a stellar- relationship- so imperfect and humane, fraught with unhappiness and hardships, misery and regret that it some how made them stronger and learn to appreciate what truly mattered and ultimately hone their skills at loving and persevering. My parents didn’t stick it out till the very end out of compulsion or apathy either, that would be my uncle and aunt’s genuinely terrible marriage, where they stopped caring so entirely about each other that even getting a divorce seemed like too much trouble. No, my parents for all their imperfections, insecurities and hassles (and believe me they had a lot of those) genuinely loved each other wanted their marriage to work. With time, effort, infinite patience, and understanding and in due course of time they were lucky enough to share a warm, amicable, truly tender relationship. I wistfully and desperately hope to one day share kind of relationship that my parents had with someone else. But every where I look and see, all I observe is callousness, insensitivity and a general decease in patience and understanding. I know times have changed and the world that I inhabit in is driven at an incredibly maddening pace which tests the best of souls. But the world that I live in also houses the people of my parents generations and if they have managed to some what successfully preserve and cherish what’s important, is it so damn difficult for me?

At the brink...

A lot can happen over a short period of time, the clock ticks at its own leisurely pace, making you ache with untold agony for a moment far better than today and yet the cruel hands of the chiming time-piece work at its own accord. You spend each day in humdrum monotony and yet before you know it a long span has passed before you, unknown to your conscious mind. You are somehow in the same place where you first started your frustrated contemplation, yet so much has changed, something’s more subtle than the rest, others enter your life like a force to reckon with.
I have been insanely busy with work, for the first time in a long time; I am actually satisfied in more ways than one. One of my life long dreams may just shape into a lucid reality and I am absolutely stunned and awed at my good fortune. I know that people actively work long and hard to get to a place that I am at. Every conscious moment and effort single handedly focused on his or her dreams and aspirations. I am not strong enough to possess that fierce determination, in fact I am rather frightened to exhibit or even contemplate such fervor. I float in an out of my dreams and nightmares, often lost in thought, spinning tales of a glorious satisfied existence, yet too weak to make it a stark reality. Yet here I am, at this very moment, at brink of a fantastic break that other would kill for. It almost seems unfair to those poor bastards that have tried so hard and yet struggle incessantly. I almost feel like I am unworthy of it, that the success and satisfaction that may come my way at the end of it all seems undeserved. I want to run away from it all, give up mid-way for a continued existence of mediocrity, believing that I don’t deserve better, yet every cell of my being throbs for it.
Although the opportunity was unexpected, I have struggled with it, spending every waking moment shaping a tale that may metamorphoses into a spectacle that may bring unfathomable joy or great shame. Right now I almost disregard the consequences of my actions, they almost seem irrelevant, the process excites it, it gives me the confidence that I have lacked for a while. I know for sure, that I am capable nurturing my desire for story telling, whether it is something that the whole world may marvel some day, or a few indistinct scrawls that may remain hidden in an aging note book away from prying eyes of the world is secondary. I have the capacity to write, that’s good enough for me, at least for now.
Maybe one of the reasons I am so afraid is somewhere deep down within I feel like I don’t really deserve to be happy. Be it love, life or career. I have enough skeletons hidden in my closet that make me shudder in my quietest moments. Acts of intolerable cruelty exhibited on my part under a façade of goodness. For all my lack of faith in God and the universe, I am a firm believer in Karma. Whatever I do be it good or bad is going to affect my existence, in this life. I fear that I have cashed out on my karmic balance and all that remains ahead is great darkness. Every time I close my eyes I can almost imagine being alone forever, it’s frightening and yet somehow comfortable, it’s as if I have almost accepted its inevitability. It’s my punishment for abandoning dad when he got sick, instead of sitting by his bedside and comforting him in his moments of excruciating pain, I selfishly ran away in the arms of “H” to seek my own solace and peace, unsuccessfully. At the end of it all, I managed to ruin two relationships, one that mattered the most and the other that mattered significantly. I was so caught up in my own grief and misery that I failed to notice the misery that I had caused to those around me. Mom was at her bravest, never giving up hope, doing the best that she could to keep him alive, I did not contribute one bit to ease her suffering. I don’t even know what “Mits” was going through, I never bothered to ask, I always thought she was too young to fully comprehend that her father was slowly dying. After all she was only 12, do children really understand these things at such a tender age? I wouldn’t know, I honestly can’t remember what it were like to be 12 once. I was so glad when he moved in with grandma; it was a relief not to have him around all the time, always so angry and melancholy. I was guilty at my relief but glad he was out of sight, yet he always lingered in my mind, still does, after all these years.
I wasn’t there when he died, college has whisked me away to America, I remember walking into my dorm after my uncle gave me the news, I forced a few tears out of me, it seemed like the right thing to do. I felt hollow and empty; my roommate “L” gazed at my ashen face and immediately knew something was wrong; I shed a few more tears as I told her the news. We went to Joe’s room to seek distraction; I stayed for a while but couldn’t sit around for long. I stumbled to the swing outside Adam tower and sat there for a long time, slightly swinging back and forth, my mind completely numb. I walked to the library around midnight, the campus was deserted, I stood in front of the giant gothic entrance admiring the magnificence of its structure in the hue of the tungsten lights. I crawled into bed fifteen minutes later, after setting my alarm clock for my seven thirty class. It was the longest walk that I have ever taken in my life.
I don’t think I ever properly grieved for my father, yet I grieve for him every single day. When I sit across a cute guy at the café, I turn the other way because I don’t feel like I deserve to be attractive to someone else, when I fail to peruse the men that show interest because I don’t think I deserve to ever be loved, when I occasionally kiss my best friend who does not love me, I feel like unrequited love is all I should ever get, when I loose a job or an assignment and meet with failure professionally I almost see it as divine justice. Sometimes I wish so desperately to have just a few more moments with him, just so that I could tell him how much I love him and how incredibly sorry I am.
When I occasionally hear stories of how miserable he was with grandma how she slowly but surely zapped his morale and will to live, I simmer with anger, yet back then I didn’t so much as bat an eyelash in question or protest when he left, relieved that he was out of here.
I am so damn close to almost getting what I want; I am scared that things will fuck up because of my past mistakes, I will once again be punished for my cruelty.
I wish so desperately to know that I am forgiven, that he still loves me, that I deserve all the happiness and success in spite of the errors of my ways, a few answers that I will never get.