Since it's my blog's second birthday this week (26 April 2014), I have decided to blog every day up to it. However short. However frivolous (which of course goes without saying).
Read about Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 and Day 6 here.
I have been to the beach before, with my parents. My mom always ensured that if I ever ventured into the sea, it was not beyond a point when the water was more than ankle-high. She would clutch my hands if I tried to go deeper. The instinct to protect.
I have always wanted to escape that protection. Not in the way teenagers rebel (I completely skipped that phase). But just out of the wish to experience everything. Out of the desire to feel everything there is to be felt. And purely for selfish reasons. If I hoped to be a writer some day, I could imagine events. I couldn't imagine people's emotional reactions to those events, could I? How could I write about someone falling in love, if I had never been in love myself? Or about loss, if I had never felt the hurt.
But this has led to the oddest thing. The realisation that anything that happens to me is useful (in the sense of adding to my life experience, and hence the material for a book I may or may not write in the future), the hurt I feel is always dimmed to that extent. I am able to step back and analyse my feelings-like an outsider. Like a critic reviewing a film.
Is this related to age, maturity? Is it because I don't have other people to talk to (on a daily basis), that I have these intense discussions in my head? Or is it really because of the writer-ly ambitions? (Which will probably just remain ambitions if I keep using words like 'writer-ly').
It can't be maturity. If anything, over the past nine months, since leaving campus, I have become more vulnerable. Earlier, the only thing that could get me upset were feelings of aimlessness, insecurities about my career and if bad things happened to my family or friends. I could get over anything anybody said or did to me by (mentally, always mentally) abusing them. Because those people were never important. And the important people cared too much. It's not like that anymore. But then, wasn't that the point of escaping all that protection?
Read about Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 and Day 6 here.
I have been to the beach before, with my parents. My mom always ensured that if I ever ventured into the sea, it was not beyond a point when the water was more than ankle-high. She would clutch my hands if I tried to go deeper. The instinct to protect.
I have always wanted to escape that protection. Not in the way teenagers rebel (I completely skipped that phase). But just out of the wish to experience everything. Out of the desire to feel everything there is to be felt. And purely for selfish reasons. If I hoped to be a writer some day, I could imagine events. I couldn't imagine people's emotional reactions to those events, could I? How could I write about someone falling in love, if I had never been in love myself? Or about loss, if I had never felt the hurt.
But this has led to the oddest thing. The realisation that anything that happens to me is useful (in the sense of adding to my life experience, and hence the material for a book I may or may not write in the future), the hurt I feel is always dimmed to that extent. I am able to step back and analyse my feelings-like an outsider. Like a critic reviewing a film.
Is this related to age, maturity? Is it because I don't have other people to talk to (on a daily basis), that I have these intense discussions in my head? Or is it really because of the writer-ly ambitions? (Which will probably just remain ambitions if I keep using words like 'writer-ly').
It can't be maturity. If anything, over the past nine months, since leaving campus, I have become more vulnerable. Earlier, the only thing that could get me upset were feelings of aimlessness, insecurities about my career and if bad things happened to my family or friends. I could get over anything anybody said or did to me by (mentally, always mentally) abusing them. Because those people were never important. And the important people cared too much. It's not like that anymore. But then, wasn't that the point of escaping all that protection?
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