Melancholia.

One of the most mundane attempts to get over boredom is to browse through Facebook aimlessly. At 24, I think it is a crime though I am guilty of doing it. As it turned out, I opened Facebook today when it welcomed me with 'What's on your mind?' For starters, a lot. An unimaginable amount of incorrigibly ridiculous nonsense. I wished it asked me 'What's not on your mind?' That would have been an easy question to answer.

I am a slave to my emotions. Sometimes, I arrive at a point where I think I am an emotional masochist. While I definitely do know that I am not one, I also know that I am an insanely sensitive person. It doesn't take much to make me weep. I weep even a TV series ends, even when it is not Friends. I cried when Entourage ended. Who in the world cries for Entourage? I do.

Let's talk about what's on my mind for the day. I was having a conversation with one of my friends who has been complaining that I am being constantly absent from her life. I apologize to all the friends who are experiencing my sudden disappearance, but you'll see a lot more of my absence. So my friend was asking me why most of my writings are centered around sadness. I failed to answer her question then, mostly, because I wanted to get back to reading but here's the thing about sadness. It gets to us, and not even the strongest and the mightiest of us are not spared. Talking or writing about sadness is not showing your vulnerabilities. If anything, I believe it's all a part of acceptance. The irony about sadness is that it transforms us in a way that happiness doesn't. I am not saying happiness is a bad thing. It is an end goal of EVERYTHING we do in our life.

A person I knew once told me that some of the best, world famous works by musicians, artists, writers, painters have been produced out of melancholy. And some of the lesser known works too, of course. When someone asks us, why sadness? Why choose that? We have to tell them that there is nothing disdainful about it. It is an emotion everyone goes through. Some choose to talk about it and put it in the open, some don't. It's alright, however, one deals with it, but the definition of sadness is never altered.

The Curious Case of Sadness.

It was 6 AM. The sun rays were playfully dancing on the contours of her face. She cupped her face and turned her back towards the window. She did not want to get out of the bed. She did not want to face the world. She wanted to stay still in the comfort of her room. She felt the pain filling up at the pit of her stomach and anxiety creeping up her spine. She dolefully wiped the stray tear on her left cheek. She dragged herself across the room to sit in front of the mirror to notice the bags under her eyes, her otherwise big brown eyes.

"A long indulging bath would help," she murmured, "it helped yesterday. The day before. And for months." She took turns to run lukewarm water and cold water on her. She loved how the hot water soothed her after the cold water. That's how life is, she mused to herself. The warmth always saunters after the piercing cold leaves.

She looked at her reflection in the mirror flattening her hair. She took her sweet time to apply her favourite mousse to her hair and dressed in black pants and bright red top. The red lipstick did a great job at lightening up her face, and on the outside she looked like someone who was not broken. She twirled a little, hid her pain behind her kohl-lined eyes and walked out of her room.

Maybe she was feeling better. Maybe she was not. But she was not giving up.

***

If you are reading this and can relate with it, do know that there are people struggling to get better like you. If you are reading this and cannot relate with it, please understand that in this real world, there are people who make a gigantic amount of effort to walk out from their bed to the outside of their room. Each day. Every morning. Sadness, void, depression are real, as real as you and I. If you think happiness is real, the opposites of it are real too. And they fight with each other to claim larger spaces of you.

Depression(or sadness) is that cynical dude who seduces you into a dark place. Remember the cynical dudes we found hot during high school but deep inside, they are good for nothing. Yes, that! Happiness is that geeky dude you ignore in the beginning but take the time to understand how amazing he is. In a way, you need to fight your way to end up with that geeky dude, you need to make efforts to accommodate him in your life. But here's the deal. The cynical dude and geeky dude will walk along with you. As the cynical dude is sardonic and the geeky dude is shy by nature, you need to make the first move. Even when you choose the geek, the cynic will lurk around you, and many a times, he will lure you into his darkness. You'll have to be firm with him. You'll have to tell him that he doesn't get to make the choices in your life. He is free to make himself comfortable in your life, but all he gets to do is see you waltz with the geeky dude. Unfortunately, you need to meet the cynic to value the geek.

In the end, it all falls into place, though.

P.S. You don’t have to build a fort for insecurities, sadness, depression, fear, anxiety. They can look after themselves. I know you cannot demolish the fort overnight, it takes time to ruin something too. However, wake up every morning and show up. Create something each day and happiness will build a fort for you. That’s the catch!

Dear You!

Dear you,

Today was a difficult day and more is yet to come. You feel the darkness engulfing around you. You feel sad. You feel the pain at the pit of your stomach. Your heart is broken and you cannot gather the broken pieces. You are too tired to mend it. You do not love sunsets any more.

You want to read books and not think about him. You want to go to your favourite coffee shop and not miss his presence. You know you have lost your favourite corner, your safe haven, but you also know that you have not lost yourself. You have stopped taking pleasure even at the beauty of butterflies. You stare endlessly at the wall and question yourself. Everything goes in vain. You know that, don't you? You want to watch a movie and savour pizza even if he is not around. You know he won't be but that you will be around yourself. Your world should be filled with you.

You stay up late one night to finish an assignment, but all you do is weep your guts out. You cry for the lost moments, you cry for what's not yours any longer, you cry for the song that reminds you of him. There is still time to get better but for now let me just lie in the darkness and the shadows, you tell yourself. You chant 'I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine.' Unconvincingly. You stop noticing the little things and you stop fighting for fine mornings. You just be and you ask people to let you be. People around you pass on the unsolicited piece of advice, they force you to go back to how you were. Funnily, you will never go back to be how you were. You will never be the same person again.

You try to smile. You sign up for bizarre things, you try to do more. You know that he was just a terrible chapter in your wonderful story, but your story is not over yet. You start believing in yourself. You begin to understand the importance of you. You walk the streets and do not crave for his arm in yours. You start loving your morning coffee in a coffee shop that you went along him. There will still be songs that remind you of him. But now you have a new playlist that talks about the person you are.

You learn new things. Your heart was broken for a reason, to make space for more beauty in your life. You can feel yourself healing, the physical pain at the pit of your stomach has vanished for good. You see the sunshine creeping through the windows into your room. You smile at your reflection in the mirror. You start loving the sunsets and you notice the flowers in your garden again. 

The essence of the beauty in your life was never meant to be lost. You were never meant to be lost. You were meant to reach here, but you just embraced a thorny path to reach here.

Your story is all about you now.

The Demons In Our Head.

Often there are demons in our head we have to fight battles with.

These demons cripple us. They begin living with us. It does not matter how much we try to push them out. They stay. They hover. They make our head their home.

One such demon I fight is love. People who read my blog or know me well enough know how much I think about love, or how happy I am when two people in love have a really happy ending. I derive so much happiness from the little stories my friends or family tell me about it. But in this post, I am not referring to the romantic love alone. I am not even talking about the platonic one. I am talking about the love that comes in various forms. In the form of friends, family, coworkers, strangers we meet every day.

It is strange that over the past few days, weeks, months. Wait, you know what? I actually lost the count of it. I have come to believe that love is a bad space to be in. And this is coming from a person who weeps every time a romantic comedy ends. Not a cool thing.

I began to believe that love is a lie. That when someone loves me and then stops loving me, I have done something utterly terrible for them to stop loving me overnight. That when I attract unhealthy friends who convince me to do things I hate, I blame my love for them. Never did I blame my poor judgment of choice. Or when some random relative gives me advice or forces me into things I hate, I forget to stand up for myself. I blame love for it. In fact, I blame it for every bad thing that happens in my life.

That is the thing about the most of us. We forget that our problems with the people we love are the problems we have with them. Not with love. The problems we claim to be problems are because we stop fighting for them, we stop talking about them. We stop communicating. We avoid them. And what happens when we avoid them? We make space for sadness and demons.

I have this wonderful, a little special friend who said something a few days ago. Confront your devils before they take your soul for ransom. I don't know what he meant when he said that, or in what context he updated that status, but I knew that I have to really deal with my demons (or devils) first. Little by little, probably, but I won't let them stay in my mind for things I blame myself for.

I hope you all fight the demons in your head (We all have different ones. Yours and mine might be different) and help the people around you to fight theirs. There will be no end to our struggles if we aren't in this together.

P.S. I hope you all had a great Sunday. I look forward to nothing but Monday. Gosh, I am such a Monday person.