Mostly Reflections ‘21
On a regular day, I’d poke the sun’s eye, hate the heat and blame it for the apathy it has for the sustainability of its children, and on a freezing cold winter night, I’d wrap to trap some heat that has been missing as I myself drove it away when I had it. To realize that it’s not apathy, that some of it is sustenance and to realize your parents, your friends and acquaintances and your lover and their lover are all people made of real flesh with real feelings who have the same experience with heat and cold as you do, has been a real emotional upheaval for the rest of my life. Funnily and fortunately in 2021, the learning curve really had an outgoing arc. Here’s some of it that I learned without the textbook definition to limit its experience.
Narcissism
This is a word used very frequently and without meaning even, in contemporary communication. In the course of life, many you meet including yourself and the many versions learn to adapt to a very complex need to like and love yourself and probably even to put yourself first, before a wreckage sweeps you away. But that’s just it. All of us, the entirety of humanity works on the basic sustenance mechanism of co-operation. I learned that when one puts oneself above the co-operation, they kill the empathy required to keep their own humanity going. Narcissism, if rooted deeply as a weapon against one’s battle with their image that they could love, turns dangerous, more for people in their life than probably for themselves. It is highly important- and I cannot stress this enough- to lookout for the signs of NPD or Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the people who you feel manipulated or drained by. Remember, acceptance is hard, really hard and to cope up with its guilt is harder even, but in a functioning relationship, you CANNOT ALWAYS BE WRONG. When a person you think has a strict “I don’t care what you think unless it is about me” attitude, start looking for the signs before you give yourself a hard time.
Unlearning
The objective of human life remains a mystery. You’re born in this world and you learn its many ways before you eventually peek out of the matrix and find yourself lost in a morally and ethically diverse world that has designed to eat itself by its several principles branching out into the void. It then, gets very difficult to find your way out of a path that does not lead to one of many dystopias. There is but one truth and fuel of the universe, life and everything in it and that is love. Love- without ANY condition- has to triumph. There is no scale of love. No species, gender, orientation, nationality, sentient body has any upper marking on the deserve-ness over any other. But our life, as unfortunate as it remains, begins with a reserved and complex scale. A comprehensive guide to live life by a meter of deserve-ness. In this guide, there are certainties as to who deserves to be loved more and who deserves less, limits of knowledge about human condition and its truth that eventually leads to one of the dystopias that is greatly feared. Hence, I think, the real objective of human life, at least on an individual scale, has to be to detach and unlearn every thing learned in the guide. On good unlearning days, I do think that life should not be a book of rules to follow, but a blank journal to fill. To record every experience you collect without prejudice and reservation. To unlearn, to be ready to give up in a debate, to not be rigid with one’s experience as an objective truth, is to ascertain a real, valuable, learnable, enjoyable meaning to life. Love, it’s all there is. It’s all there has to be.
Fear//Writing
I think fear in writing is primarily of what not to write. We’re so paralyzed by the fear of using the wrong lyric, wrong adjectives, wrong expressions, wrong meters that it clouds and blinds our motive. To be perceived wrong, even if it’s a diversion from the twitch of the eye, the scent in the cotton, the historic Shakespearean tragedy that transpires behind doors and curtains, the youth described ever so slightly wrong that good becomes great and bad becomes a hole in space, is a disaster to a writer’s spirit. It breaks the pen. To write, to really sit down with your thoughts, so as to use the vocabulary and language at your emotional disposal as and when the expression demands, I think, is a true human endeavor. But one has to begin somewhere. Somewhere- that’s the teacher.
Performance
Hey, we’re all performers somewhere if not everywhere. And that’s okay. Lemon tarts and naked bodies. Synonyms and Exaggerations. Social Media and NFTs. Some or most part of our performances begins directly in co-relation to a life we’re suffering to build around ourselves. People you love may not contribute to a life you want to build and so you put up a performance. Parents you really throw yourself for are almost certainly the reason you have to throw yourself, but they’re your parents and so you put up a performance. Your life is not as perfect as one you can build as you can do it on social media, one that makes you happy, one that makes you curate and assemble and connect and really dive into the portal of satisfaction and so you put up a performance. Performance, inherently and truthfully isn’t a wrong thing, it never never is, unless you’re digging a hole for yourself. Unless you’re having real difficulty saying things directly. Unless you’re building and stacking unrealistic expectations that you know needs ground work not achievable by sheer performance. Unless you’re turning into a narcissistic monster and delusion is killing all of your associations. Unless the rigidity of your performance is not ensured by the reality of a past, present and a future you. Until then, perform as you like, as you love, as you’re aware enough to pull yourself out if its any bigger to contain. Hey, all the world’s a stage after all, right?
Hot people
There is general limit of beauty and aesthetics that defies all senses at once and more. We’re limiting and closing the gap of understanding beauty and setting a more comfortable definition of beauty that is born out of good old love rather than a bigoted guide that is no help, no bible to anyone. We’re becoming more aware of ourself in regards to our health and beauty and are putting up more pictures of ourselves on social media for everyone to see (which btw is so fucking attractive). And so my learning based on pure observation and speculation is this: Hotness- as close as it gets to feeling like an objective truth- is purely purely subjective. Yes, the “guide” has a definite arc, a definition of what geometrical and fabricated limits can help you “score” more but literally fucking look at Pete Davidson. Not to slut shame or anything but he managed to outKanye Kanye at his homeground. Hotness is a state of mind that limits ourselves to valuing and weighing the actual behavior and personality of oneself against how they look. Yes, looks matter. Of course they do, of-course! But so does the unaided (sometimes aided), freeing, liberating, witty, clever, supportive, loving, funny, learned, pretending, trying, failing, falling, crying, weeping, watching, hurting, sentimentally aware, yogurt loving, pizza criticizing, swift fangirling personality that you have and it has real and certainly more of an appeal than just the psychological capital juicing of what hotness as a physical appeal really is. I do believe that if we create a solid, loving, unalterable-by-guidebook personality, I swear to evolution’s future, we’d be so hot in that element of ours.
And that’s just few of many things that are still filling up the journal as we speak. There’s the ever evolving concept and trial and errors of romantic love that though I’d love to talk about learnings of, but that has a pending state as ever. Then there’s friendship, again, something that is incredibly affirming if its done right, and dangerously life wrecking if slipped. We’re mostly what our friends are, our culture and habits are effectively impacted most heavily by our tribe, so keeping a close eye on who you choose to hangout with and defining a certain boundary where needed is incredibly incredibly important. There is shame to abandon, art and it’s loneliness, liminal spaces, liminal people, Greta’s Ahoy Sexy, Joan Didion’s bittersweet learnings, memories of all the time we were a creep ourselves, therapy and transformations, never ending friendship with Mary Oliver and the incredible impact of female artists, authors, filmmakers, thinkers, journalists on life and so on. There is so much life to be defined by you, you must have a pencil at your disposal. Happy New Year.
