Notes to self

A set of reminders for a better everyday.

1.) Focus on being present in the moment . This has been a recurrent theme in my blog of late too. Learning the art of doing this from 14-month-old D.

2.) Set apart time for fitness. Work out at home, resume yoga, meditate for a while, go for a walk. Was regular with this but been lethargic ever since I got home to be with parents.

3.) Read good books. And read more often.

4.) Listen to music. Surprised that this is on the list because this is the one thing I used to do all the time. Now, though, my phone’s always on mute but I do play music in the background when D is eating or playing. But it’s mostly devotional or classical music, thanks to my family. Maybe pick different kinds of music too, so D is exposed to more variety.

5.) Mindless social media surfing needs to stop. My fingers and wrist hurt after a point!

6.) Start driving your car. Enough with the excuses and the baseless fears.

7.) Wear sarees more often, and learn to drape with more finesse. On a similar note, wear good clothes, give away stuff you don’t wear. Been doing this in regular intervals but wardrobe optimisation is a life-long process.

8.) Focus on self care. Seriously. It’s about time. Treat yourself to a good hair cut or a pedicure every few months at least.

9.) Practice patience. Easier said than done especially for someone like me who’s most impatient. But, but, I’m already doing a lot better than the last few weeks ever since I felt myself spiralling out of control. Point number 1 , aka, mindfulness, has helped.

10.) Get on top of your finances. Pending PF withdrawals, invoices, investment status, mutual fund returns, SIPs… get them all sorted one by one.

11.) Pick your projects. I’ve been turning down out a lot of work that’s come my way these days because I realise it’s not important now. Maybe it’s a good idea to say an outright No rather than reeling under the pressure once you’ve agreed to take on said work and then opting out. I want to spend more time with D. She’s my number one. Work scene seems more manageable now.

12.) Ask for help. You can’t and don’t have to do everything yourself. I can count on family and friends to help with babycare and more or just talk.

13.) Stay in touch with friends. And get out more to meet them. Also don’t shy away from forging new friendships.

14.) Do things you love. Sing, bake, cook, paint, photograph, write, work, laugh, play with abandon, with passion and zero expectations. And don’t think about how you’ll be perceived or if you’re good or bad. Treat everything as an opportunity to learn. Try it without holding back. Without seeking validation.

15.) stay grateful and positive. You are in a god place.

16.) Cut yourself some slack. It’s all right.

Ten years is a lifetime

A friend of mine shared a pic of the two of us from almost ten years ago. It was taken at another dear friend’s beach house just outside Madras and we’re both grinning like Cheshire cats. My hair looks unusually curly and teeth look gigantic in the pic, yet I’m smiling and we both seem relaxed in the way only two close friends can be when together. This set forth a wave of nostalgia and had me pining for the good old times – post work shenanigans at Zara, inside jokes and pop culture references at office, weekends with M, impromptu coffee sessions with friends, random house parties, beach house nights, fun concerts, and Madras, that beautiful seaside city which made it all possible.

But nostalgia can be tricky because it warps facts and sugar coats real life events from the past. Ten years ago, I was a complete mess. It took me a while to actually start talking to my own team mates at work. I was actually intimidated by all the seemingly cool, progressive people I went to college with. It was my first proper stint in a big city and while I’d always liked the idea of Madras as a small town girl, it was not exactly a piece of cake. I was going through trouble in the personal front right from 2008 – right after I made the rookie mistake of telling my mom that I was dating a guy and would like to marry him someday. I said it innocently enough within weeks or months of meeting M, but boy! Did my folks throw a fit. It assumed violent, disturbing and traumatic proportions in the years that followed and at 25, I was contemplating suicide. Like very seriously.

I was battling my own demons, struggling to sleep, struggling to wake up, eating too much, not eating at all, experiencing panic attacks, high blood pressure, extreme anxiety, and through it all, I envied my friends who had saner parents and normal lives wherein they did not go through a nervous breakdown when their folks called them to say hi on the phone. At work, I’d put on a facade, and joke about my situation but there have been times when I’ve broken down at office too. I did not, however, shut myself out; I did the opposite, so I was out a lot, because I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone with my thoughts or worse, with my mom, who decided to stay put with me in Madras and torture the fuck out of me every single day.

Ten years ago, the only thing that mattered to me was my career and my friends; M figured in it too I think, but only much later when family drama intensified. I was not invested in family at all, and I was sure I did not want kids, because my folks had scarred me enough and I did not want to pass it forward and screw up the genetic pool. I was ambitious and driven but never realised that I was very very depressed and anxious too. I was trying to piece myself together and just cross the bridge when I got there because thinking about my future and how I’d work things out would get me frazzled and wound up.

Cut to today, I’m married to M, mother to a delightful ten month old baby girl, I’ve come to value family more than anything else and I’m on a break from work ( something that was unimaginable even 3 years ago). Several bridges were built and compromises reached, a lot remains unresolved and I’m ok with that. You cannot really get complete closure and that’s all right as well. I choose my battles and let things go. I’m also a lot more self aware, I’m not as awkward with people, I cook pretty well and make excellent coffee. I’m more practical, more confident, stronger than earlier, more accepting of myself and other people and more acutely aware of my flaws; some of them I choose to work on, and some are simply an intangible part of who I am.

A picture can be deceptive and you’re free to interpret it any way you like. So while it seems like a happy pic, I’m honestly in a much better place now, emotionally and otherwise. I’m still smiling in the picture despite all the trouble I was having then, because I think somewhere deep down I knew things would be better. I was hopeful then just as I am, today, ten years and many battles and setbacks later. Some things don’t change.

Bookish

When I was a kid, I used to be what you might call a “voracious reader”. I was a shy kid, quiet and aloof, and would hardly speak to family but I found a friend in books. I’d almost always be found curled up in a corner of the home, book in hand. I’d read while having my meal as well, much to the chagrin of my folks. I had over a hundred volumes of Tinkle and perhaps every perceivable copy of Amar Chitra Katha books on Indian mythology, apart from several editions of Champak, Chandamama and Gokulam. This was my initiation into the world of books, and once I was big enough to read a proper novel, I started with the marvellous St Clare’s series by Enid Blyton, following it up with Famous Five and Nancy Drew books.

My school had a fairly good library and it’s from the depths of the musty shelves in that room that I fished out Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K Jerome. I laughed so hard till my stomach hurt. I re read the book a few years ago and it was just as hilarious. Swami and Friends by RK Narayan was the first Indian novel I read, and I was so emotionally invested in the story that I cried when it ended. From there on, I moved to popular books by authors like Jeffrey Archer ( Kane and Abel was one of the earliest books I’d read), but it wasn’t until I went to college that I was exposed to more interesting books.

I may not remember the story or most of the characters in a book that I read, but I most definitely remember how the book made me feel. For instance, Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead made a huge mark on me and I went on to read Atlas Shrugged, which made me all sad, angsty and upset. Catcher in the Rye helped address some of my teenage angst and rebellion. Albert Camus was my hero and for a while, I was so into existentialism especially after reading Happy Death, which was not as morbid as I thought it’d be; it is in fact my favourite Camus book more so because of his strikingly handsome face on the cover. The Outsider made me depressed and conflicted.

But there were two books that stood out for me: the weird and wonderful Catch 22, and the unbelievably funny Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I’d lent the latter to a friend and instead of returning it to me, a bunch of my friends (including him) gifted me the entire hitch hiker omni bus with all five books in the series ( the author had called it a trilogy of five). And it was around then that I realised that I love funny books; even now I look for books with a sense of humour and I love the Alexander McCall smith series, Sue Townsend and Gary Shteyngart ( ‘Absurdistan’ is a riot!). I read a fair amount of non fiction too and I’ve taken a special liking to the Indian writer Samanth Subramanian’s works. Chimamanda Adichie’s works gave me deeper, fresher insights into feminism and race, while Pico Iyer kindled my wanderlust. I just finished a book of short stories, Loyal Stalkers, by Chhimi Tendufla, a Sri Lanka based writer, and I’m hoping to read The Diary Of A Provincial Lady, next up.

Sadly though, I’m not the kind of reader I once was; definitely not “voracious”. My appetite for books has shrunk and I take forever to complete a book, sometimes months. I’ve abandoned several books too ( mostly because of their intimidating size) such as Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, and A Suitable Boy, the classic.

Hopefully I’ll stop scrolling my phone or flipping through Netflix and Amazon Prime, and get some reading done soon. Do hit me up with book recommendations and tell me what you’ve been reading.

When I get to the bottom, I go back to the top

Resilience has been my forte. I always thought of it as one of my strengths, given that I rise after every fall, pick up all the broken pieces and start afresh, every single time. Except that now I’m drained out. Exhausted. I have been doing this for way too long, and now I want life to be easy.

I’m a bit worried about my erratic mood swings – nope, I’m not PMS-ing, and I’m not pregnant. I used to be very good at hiding my emotions, but these days, I just give in, and let them overwhelm me. I seem to have lost my grip over my feelings – love, hate, stress, happiness, sadness, anxiety, panic, regret, spite, envy, confidence, confusion, optimism –  they all seem to collide at once, resulting in a giant muddled mess of nameless emotions that are difficult to read and make sense of. How did I let this happen to me? Is it depression, anxiety or am I just having a crappy day? I can’t tell anymore.

There’s no word for ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety’ in my mother tongue, Tamil. You could use the word ‘Manachorvu’ (lethargy) but it doesn’t do justice; ‘So-gam’ is sadness, and we know that depression and feeling sad are two different things. Which is why, where I come from, people do not understand depression, it’s not in our vocabulary. Depression is always considered a Western illness, something that affects rich white people; it’s an alien concept, much like Scandinavian cuisine in my hometown in coastal Tamil Nadu. Nobody would know what it is, but when they eat the food, they’ll tell you it’s just a fancy, overpriced version of the local fish curry. It’s a weird allegory, but I’m being lazy and hoping you get the drift.

So I stopped trying to talk to my folks about it; they’d simply tell me that everyone goes through a roller coaster of emotions, everyone has regrets, we all go through tough times, we feel sad, upset, angry. It’s normal. There’s no one to blame, you toss it and move on, it’s all behind you now. Which is great advice. But it’s not what I want to hear. And therein lies the problem. Because I want people to tell me what I want to hear. I think somewhere down the line, we have twisted what is simple and natural into something overly complicated.

I don’t even know if I’m depressed or anxious, so I’m fully aware that sometimes, I’m probably reading too much into my emotions and moods. The deeper I dig, the more I find that there is no reason for me to be sad at all. However, this Eureka moment happens only after I bring the roof down, burn some bridges and let the storm clouds pass. So the damage has already been done by the time realisation dawns.

The point is, I cannot use depression as an excuse for inactivity, I cannot blame anxiety for losing my cool. For instance, I haven’t gone on my evening walks for more than a week now; it’s something I look forward to, yet I have chosen to sulk at home instead of heading out. You could argue that depression makes even doing things you love difficult, so it’s all right. But no, I call it laziness. It’s stupid to not go out for an evening walk because you are busy crying over your perfectly normal life, when you know fully well that a walk in the park makes you happy. How twisted is that? I am willingly putting myself into misery, stopping myself from feeling better, and then I convince myself that it’s because I am depressed. It strikes me as odd.

M tells me to engage myself and I go livid. I tell him, you think I’m not trying? do you know how difficult it is? And so forth. After he talks to me and leaves for the day, I put on some music, I write, I cook, talk to friends, and surprise! I feel better. M’s simple advice helps me get through the day. I’m drama queen when I’m with him and the poor thing puts up with all my crap. So I tell myself that I must be happy and more stable, for his sake at least. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But I just keep on trying, falling, rising and making a new start every single day.

TED Talks, gluten-free chapathis and life lessons

My friend shared this really inspirational TED Talk with me, the other day, and it struck a chord with me.

In the video, Brene Brown talks about worthiness, empathy, connections, vulnerability, and above all, learning to embrace life and accept yourself. The underlying message is: you are enough. Do watch it. It kind of made my day.

In other news, my experiments with eating healthy and cutting trans-fats continues. Yeah, which means, I have been making more trips to the supermarket and picking up expensive (and attractively packaged) ingredients.

Gluten-free roti flour

And no, you don’t need glasses; that picture is really out of focus. This is gluten-free chapati flour by an Indian organic brand, Whole Foods. It is free of trans-fat and is made of arrowroot, soyabean and millets; it also has Xanthan Gum, which I’ve heard can cause digestive problems or bloating, and is generally not recommended, though it’s used as an additive. So not sure if it’s a good idea. Thoughts?

I don’t even make chapathis at home, mostly because I cannot make perfectly round chapathis. And I’m the sort of person who believes that if you cannot do something perfectly, it’s not worth doing at all. I pick up fresh hot rotis from a restaurant in the neighbourhood or whip one out of my freezer on to the pan.

But I must learn to embrace my imperfections and accept that life is messy, that chapathis need not be perfect little circles, that I don’t have to constantly clean up my life and empty its contents into a big brown box which I then stash in a dark dingy corner that no one can see. I should be more of myself, because I am enough.

If only I can sustain this positive thought for the rest of my life.