Second time around

I guess I have been away for so long that I was literally surprised by the new (to me) 'Monetize' tab up on blogger. Gosh!

Now, about the desertion. Basically I had been whining a lot, and I figured that is not how I wanted this space to be. I wanted it to be a somewhat decent extension of my already irreparably screwed up persona.

I cringed at the thought of going through my older posts. I did not want to whirl down that vortex again, you know? Now, under no circumstances do I think that I need to justify any of it, and the sole reason I say any of this is so that I can look back at this time, years from now and be comforted by the fact that there was this one day I felt strong enough to stride out of the abyss in me and make a semi physical contact with the world outside. That been said, I realised that to be able to do that I need to be completely honest and be myself, no matter what. Now, you may be thinking "What is so challenging about that?" Well most of my life I have struggled with letting people see what I really am like, and it goes without saying that here, in this space too, I haven't projected myself in my true identity. Of course I haven't lied about who I am, or what I am like, but in a way - I probably have. I always hoped to get in touch with who I will be when I grow up.

And now that I guess I am pretty much grown up, there are things that I am discovering about myself that really do not make me very happy. So all I am saying is, when I realised that what I am saying here is not helping me in any way, that it is not enriching me, or satisfying me, or even letting me vent for that matter, I knew that I needed to be true to this space if I wanted it to be a true reflection of my life.

I think a part of whatever it is that held me back, was the lack anonymity I had allowed this blog to enjoy. People I know, people who know me personally used to read this blog. And of course, neurotic that I am, I would obsess over every possible reaction they would experience to what I write.

Remember though, I am from India, so blogs aren't that big a deal there. Moms do not blog there, men above a certain age are skeptical about using the internet for anything other than business, and barely manage to associate it with only sports, news or pornography. Enlightened-quasi intellectual-emotionally estranged high school students do blog, but they 'grow out' of it by the time they start college, and the few that stick around through college write about food and movies, or powerful women at the most. Also there is the category who are poets and have discovered this channel to burgeon their creativity. I, of course, landed into none of these categories. If anything I would probably come closest to a disgruntled teenager, wading through the pangs of self destruction - so the high school 'emos'.

But really, I did not want to see myself as any of that. I wanted to be proud of myself and to reinforce by belief in the strength of my character. You see, right after I landed in the United States, I lost all sense of identity. That might sound strange, because in a land that I was so alienated in, that only thing I trully felt sure about should have been myself, right? But no, turns out I spent way too much time with myself, over analysing every single move I made, and consequently getting so wrapped up in it all that somewhere down the road, I completely lost touch with myself.

Suddenly I wasn't sure of my decisions anymore, I regretted things after I had calculatedly decided on them, I did not like the clothes I bought a week after, I didn't know what cuisine I like the most. I no longer knew what my favorite color was, did not like Poets of the Fall anymore, did not enjoy walking by myself.


You'd expect my saying all of this to have a point right? That everything turned out fine, that I had a moment of revelation, and that I looked through all of this?

Okay, that has not happened. I loathe myself, now more that ever, and may have stringed other people into this mess. However, something makes me feel that even the act of thinking all of this aloud, or even putting them down in published text will help me sort things out better. This may be one of the most fulfilling things that I have done in months, and I am glad I waited until I was strong enough to sift through the junk inside of me to find a handful of cogent thoughts that I could string together and form something coherent and honest and that did not make me want to gag a minute after hitting that orange button down there.




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