Quiet Defiance



Defiance. Such a loaded word. It looks angry. Do you think words have visual personality? I do. It’s why I never enjoyed text-speak, even back in the day when we all had those sturdy Nokia phones with the 1/abc keypads and pre-WhatsApp sms charges to contend with. I still occasionally get grief on this (thanks, Twitter), but I digress. When I look at the word ‘defiance’ I see a little word with an upturned face, lower lip curled in angry rejection of the status quo. See where the ‘f’ meets the ‘i’- like a pair of discontent angry eyes? I imagine rallies and placards and balled fists and raised voices, and perhaps defiance is all that, but sometimes defiance is something quieter, deeply personal and almost invisible.

The world pegs you into a certain hole- you tick off certain boxes in the right order, do the expected stuff and that’s that. And on the whole, you conform. You aren’t the rebellious type. Not yet. There are possibilities that make you go cold inside, like the lights going off in a festive house at the end of a party, but you’re not sure why you feel that way yet. 

Things happen. You grow. You try doing the right things, shutting off certain parts of yourself. And then one day you are in a room full of familiar strangers and a whole airless space is growing around you and the earth is pulling at your feet and you don’t know why you should make the effort to move onward. You realize later that the airless space is a new universe that you must shape yourself, marking your own path upon the earth. It is an immense task, but you make small beginnings. It isn’t easy. There are no miracles but an endless loop of hope, anxiety, euphoria and misery. You keep doing it anyway. And as you do, the world that wants to peg you down keeps intruding, increasingly insistent. Quietly, quietly, you do the things that crush your soul but you keep telling yourself- That isn’t me. That’s not forever. I am more. I am so much more. Nobody sees it, but you are defiant even in conformity. You know what you will survive, and where you draw the lines. Shoddy ink sketches, tentative rhymes, a few airy tunes- your secret little defiance.

Am I the delusional mad woman for thinking life ought to mean something? Am I naïve for wanting to make a difference with what I know and can do? Am I too disrespectful for thinking that people- minds and hearts matter more than structures and that forms are useless if they don’t correspond to little joys? I don’t want to be the proclaimer of a grand, sweeping revolution. I only ask for a little heart in our mundane, day-to-day spaces.

I’ve looked the world in the mirror and found my future. What I could be, and what I won’t. What I love is me. What I hate is also me. Or what I could become in the years to come if I let go of my defiance. I choose to rebel- in every small way. I choose to live my passion, the boxes be damned.

Ruchira Rambles 🎲






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