An Exercise in Self-Consolation
(I have been having a difficult time this last week, and I needed to vent. I’m only trying to sort out my head. If you came here from one of Instagram videos, the YouTube link is at the end of this post. Just scroll down.)
The monster never sleeps, never lets you out of your sight, lusting after your moments of quiet joy. There is no hour of day that is safe from him, no place far enough. If I were to run to the farthest galaxy, the monster would still find a way to pounce upon my peace.
There’s a choice I’ve been sitting on for two years, hoping for someone or something else to act for me. In my dreams, packed bags gather dust at thresholds where the door no longer fits, and I am always too late or too early for trains, never quite going anywhere.
No one, I suppose, will make my choice for me. No one has been inside my head. No one has heard me stifle my screams in empty rooms. No one at all has seen me punch at invisible walls.
I try my best. I really do. I get up in the morning when I want to curl up into oblivion. I shower. I dress up. I make small talk, I even joke around. I remember to breathe. But an engine wears out sometimes, right? There are times when I cannot function, when I am choking and the monster still won’t let me be.
And I still can’t make my choice.
The trouble with things going outwardly fine, and I suppose they are going fine if I were to put my life into excel sheets because that is the only kind of truth that seem to matter these days, is that nobody, freaking nobody will understand depression, trying to reason you out of your unreasonable sadness.
I am weary of reasons. I know all of them, have given them to myself ten thousand times and am thoroughly, heartily sick of the life path I am expected to follow, smiling and ticking boxes along the way.
I am angry and I don’t know what about.
All I want is for the world to make sense, and for living to make sense. To know that our efforts have purpose. To know that all of this does some good in the world. But it doesn’t. The thing about the monster is, he isn’t the kind you slay at the end of a quest. No, he just grows bigger and bigger while you keep toiling away, round and round, over and again, gaining nothing. He makes you run a race that takes you further away from your soul.
All the while, people say- But this is how the world runs. But this is how life is.
Why, I ask you? What is the freaking point of it? What higher goal? What do we create out of our toil? More toil?
Or, I don’t know. Everybody seem to be playing around. I must be mad.
My only hope is that this must be leading somewhere, and the universe or whatever power there is will lead me eventually from the path that I know intuitively to be not mine, however long the route.
Years ago, while browsing the shelves of my High School library, I quite by chance found a book- a collection of Italian fairytales. I think I’m the only one of my class who ever borrowed that book- at that age everyone (myself included) preferred Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and Sweetvalley tales. But I picked it out, and although I don’t remember any of the stories today, at that time, I was fascinated by it. So enamoured, in fact, that some years later during my MA 1st year, I told a classmate that may be, if I ever did a PhD, it would have something to do with the all the fairytales of the world. It wasn’t really a plan, more of an airy hypothesizing, something I saw myself doing in the far distant future. I hadn’t planned on jumping into research right after my MA, but one phone call from a senior I had only known because of an Orkut community and I was suddenly racking my head trying to come up with proposals to write for the three universities I had applied to for an MPhil course. I didn’t remember the fairy tales at all. Then three years later, as I was trying to come up with another proposal, my supervisor suggested I study Jung and fairytales. Funny part is, I actually resisted, because I didn’t see my outline yet. And then, through a series of other synchronicities as things began to slowly fall into place, I didn’t once recall that grand idle wish casually expressed on a metro ride about doing a PhD on fairytales. That memory came back yesterday out of the blue last week while I was ruminating on the other odd series of synchronicities of having found Doctor Who only because of Good Omens only because of Neil Gaiman only because someone who was a Facebook friend only because of a Percy Jackson fan page posting a glowing review of American Gods. That last sentence doesn’t need to make sense of it all, but the important part of it is, all of it led me to discover David Tenant dancing to ‘Sigh No More’ at the end of Much Ado About Nothing. Call me a dreaming fool, but I aspire to that degree of passion and joy in everything I do.
And if all of these accidental chances have led me on before, then I trust the present is only another in the series to lead me into where I need to go.
It sounds silly, perhaps. Very clutching-at-straws. But on the days I cannot function, I cling onto that faith as a drowning sailor.
I hope everybody finds their faith, and in the end, everybody finds a world that is just a little bit more joyous and amazing and meaningful.
Above all, I don’t think a constant exercise in misery can be justified by existence alone. I need to live.
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