What Are Your Fears?

What are your fears? What terrifies you? No, I am not talking about spiders or crocodiles, dark streets or heights. I am referring to the patterns of fears that keep you awake till the wee hours of nights.

Do you have insecurities?

Because I have tons of them.

Copious amounts of them.

On a regular day, what are your fears and insecurities? Let me tell you mine.

The alarm on my phone goes berserk at 6 AM reminding me that it's time to do something productive and that I need the discipline to achieve things that seem too far-fetched. But on most days, I snooze it. Later, on feeling guilty, I wake up groggily at 6:30 AM only to end up staying in bed till 7:30 swiftly going through Twitter, Gmail, Facebook...basically everything social media. And Instagram. How can I forget Instagram? I live like my existence depended on it. Every morning, I look at so many beautiful pictures taken across the world on the screen of my phone.

I look at the pictures of Paris and keep troubling my mind if I would ever see the place or not.

I look at the perfect pictures of women with clear skin and sometimes, I don't feel very thrilled about the acne on my face.

I look at the pictures of couples holding their hands and staring into the sunset and feel a throbbing pain wondering if someone would ever love me that way. I look at those pictures and hope someone would not wake up one morning and stop loving me as if it was once a petty hobby.

I look at more pictures, assuming, always assuming that their lives are so much fancier than mine.

As I while away my time till 7:30 AM on Instagram, I realize my day is just beginning. I drag myself out of the bed to get ready for the job I love doing, the only thing I probably look forward to on weekdays.

Yet another thought of insecurity creeps in. What if one day I fail to put words on paper? What if I turn into a person with no passion?

During lunch, I am constantly worried about the amount of food I am eating, counting every crumb I eat and eat just one slice of pizza even when I crave more. I mean, the nature of my body is prone to put on weight. Like everyone else's.

Oftentimes I have a feeling of trepidation that I am missing out on life. That I am hurting my friends or attracting idiots. In both the cases, I end up in tears. I'm perpetually afraid of getting hurt.

It doesn't end right here, because, on my way home from work, I curse myself for not reading enough. For not doing more. For consuming lots of coffee. For being selfish. For not being a part of the important events in my friends' lives. For not picking calls. For ignoring messages and emails. For taking impulsive decisions. For being fragile. For being just me.

Yet my Instagram profile states otherwise. Like I have no fears or insecurities.

But I have tons of them.

Copious amounts of them.

Oh, Please, No Relationships!

“I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?” 

― Nicholas Sparks

Long gone are the days when lovers would make everlasting promises, vows of their undying, unfathomably immortal love. 

Long gone are the days when a man and a woman wrote letters to each other, distance never mattered, and no problem was bigger than their relationship.

We are in 2014 now. Welcome to the world of commitment phobia!

While you all are free to roll your eyes, I would like to present a closer, and to be precise, a much clearer picture to you.

The man:

It is indeed a challenging phase for a man to make a woman fall in love with him. He will possibly do everything to impress her, he will ditch his friends momentarily and spend all his time, energy, and talent on wooing the girl.

He will travel twenty kilometers to get her an ice-cream because she has a craving. 

You look like you have been bitten by the Aphrodite. You are perfect. (Oh come on, even Aamir Khan isn't perfect.)

I will do anything for you, you are worth every risk, he says. I will make sure you never shed a tear, you will be treated like the most precious thing, he says.

There you go, the woman falls in love. The following two months are so ethereal, they are SO Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts that you might wonder if your life was based on your favourite romantic comedy.

If only life was a movie!

Reality hits you, son. 

You want to crawl out of the relationship so badly that you want your gorgeous one to drop dead. You want to go back to the days of being single, where a beer can with your guy friends gave you more joy than the supposedly most beautiful woman in the world.

All of a sudden, you want your life to be Indian Jones. And not some filthy romantic comedy. 

Love eventually fades, you say that, and you walk away. It is alright to be selfish.

You deserve better things. It is not you, it is me. (If she was so good in the first place, why would you let her pass?)

And then, you turn into a freak who becomes notoriously serious about career overnight. *Slow claps*

The woman:

I have no clue why the world says that women turn prettier and rosier when in love.

We basically don a pair of rose tinted glasses and go oblivious to all the things happening around us. In a relationship, a man and a woman function differently. 

In the initial stages of a relationship, while a man showers a woman with an obscene amount of attention, the woman does not. And she turns insanely, neurotically obsessed with you in the later stages, and the man simply wants to play FIFA or whatever with his male fraternity.

In the initial stages, you take an effort to dress up for your man, laugh at this eternally stupid jokes, and think he is utterly intelligent, and sometimes, you tend to give in to men with an IQ way lower than yours. 

Happens! You've put on your tinted glasses, didn't you? You did not just turn almost blind, you have turned deaf as well.

Days pass, and you regain your wits little by little.

You don't dress up for him any longer. Yet, your whole world orbits around him. How ridiculous is that? You do not give him any space. You scare him off.

You have a problem with everything he does. His jokes turn lame, his habits annoy you. 

My love has not turned obsolete. I need to save the relationship, you say it yourself and to that best friend between tearful sobs.

You give another shot at trying to reform the man. The poor soul does almost everything to turn into an image that he is not. Because he loves you, and your obnoxiously self centered habits do not annoy him yet.

Finally, you break up with him saying he is not the man you fell in love with. CLASSIC!

Why don't you just save yourself the heart-ache and avoid this eternally messed up thing? For we are in the era of commitment phobia where we let go of our relationships because of petty things which would not have mattered to lovers decades ago.

Disclaimer: Folks who are leading the fairy tale love story, this post isn't for you. The earth is still revolving around the Sun because of awesome people like you.