A shutout to my family - I Love You

I am normally not a very expressive person; I find it hard to say ‘I love you’ to my family and friends. I am not making an excuse, but part of this is because of the way my family is. My parents and siblings are not too touchy-feely and display of emotion above a threshold makes them uncomfortable. Sis is probably the most expressive of the lot. Mom can be a bit melodramatic at times, though I would not count that as being emotional. Dad is confrontation averse, like me, and only on rare occasions have I seen him being sentimental. The worst of the lot is my brother. Every time I have tried to express any real emotion towards him, I have seen him become physically uncomfortable.

 My friends and family have come to expect a certain unpredictable behavior from me. Sometimes I would talk to them every day of the week at other times I will be completely out of touch for months. This is just the kind of person I am. They accept me for who I am. I am more of an in the moment kind of person and out of sight can often mean out of mind for me. I pride myself on my independence and do not look to other people to solve my problems for me. Like all people, I have made some mistakes in my life. I regret none of them for I believe that my mistakes are what make my life rich and well lived. Even so, every once in a while I find myself in a situation when I have needed support from someone. At these times, the only people who have stood by be without judgement or question have been my family. I have not been the best daughter or sister and can be selfish at times but when push comes to shove, they always come through. My most ardent supporter has been my brother. As a child, he had once sworn to protect me from all the ill intent in the world, and for the past 25 years, he has made good on that promise.

 Recently one such event transpired, where I was in need of protection. People with malicious intent were threatening my well being. I tried to solve this problem on my own. Even looked to some friends for help, but despite my best efforts the situation soon spiraled out of control. It was at this time that I called my brother for help. I think the biggest help he offers in such moments is a level head and his brand of pragmatism. The worst may not yet be behind me but the one thing I can be certain of is that he will be there for me when I really need him. It is moments like these that make me realize, that the actions of my family are more an expression of their love for me than anything they will ever say to me. I am lucky to have the unconditional love of four awesome people. My only hope is that someday I am able to make them feel the same way about my love for them. Until that time, I hope these words suffice. “I love you Mom, Dad, Sis and Bro.”

Thanks...

M&P for loving me no matter what
D&A for your eternal support
MP for thinking like I think
ST for the long walks
JG for the nights of the exams
SA for the maggi and for being who you are
AKS for making me feel beautiful
AS for being the guy I regret not having a crush on
ASV for being my first real crush
AR for teaching me that every guy who flirts with me does not ‘like me’
KS for using my shoulder to cry on
SG for being the shoulder that I cry on
CP for being awesome at times
KG&MJ for being a cute couple
AP for that cute gesture u made on request of MA
MA for reminding me that sunk cost is not considered while taking decisions
NG for being the most understanding roommate
R,S&S for being my friends
SiA for being nice to me
VK for coming only because I called
I10 for the little fun I had
O11 for helping me get through tough times
G&B for a unique experience

Some Things are just not meant to be…

I have always longed for some things, but then who hasn’t. But I never tried as hard for anything as I did for this. If I look back I think some things went wrong right from the beginning. I didn’t realize at the time and kept hoping that my past would just go away abut that never happens. So at least there is one take away from all this, this time I will accept my past and I hope my past will be accepted.

I tried and tried to become someone I was not. To try and change the way I thought. But you can never really change who you are. But what if I am someone I don’t like. What if I am that person my parents warned me against? Where did I go wrong? What could I have done differently? Probably nothing! Nothing I did could have fought with that fear, that mistrust. It had to catch up with me one day. I was an eternal optimist and truly believed that one day it will all be worth it. Like any romantic comedy my life would have a happily ever after, but there are no ever- afters in life. Life is less like a movie and more like those never ending daily soaps where each day is a new episode. Each day will come with its own list of things to deal with and at the end of the day you can just pray “let tomorrow not be worse than today”

It is amazing what the human mind is capable of. In the past 4 months I have felt so many extreme emotions that I did not think possible. Everything in my life is going normally but there is a part of my brain which just does not forget. There is always the same thought with dimensions ranging from longing, hate, anger, fear, relief, pity, doubt etc. Questions haunt me at night. I ask myself why? I scream into the valley “Why?” The echo comes back “You know why!” But I don’t.

I want to be free now. To start with a clean slate, but can u ever really clean the slate. I guess you can but in the end it’s just a clean slate not a new one. We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. But it is proving much more difficult than I thought .

Longing

Not much has changed since my last post, but still very subtly things are improving. I want everything to work out so badly that I spend almost all my time as if I was on a tight rope walk just waiting for this time to pass. I do realize that this is not a good thing, for, by setting these elusive expectations from the times to come not only do I destroy my present, but also endanger the future.

A french proverb says...
"The first half of life is spent in longing for the second - the second half in regretting the first”

I just hope this is not true for me because right now I am clearly in the first half of my life, longing for the second...

Heartbroken...

Yes ladies and gentlemen I am back after a big break, a lot has happened In this gap. I have been deliriously happy and hopelessly miserable. I have been really busy and super vella all at once. I had wanted to come back, to revisit this private sanctuary of mine for a very long time. Well many reasons have kept me away; sometimes there was no time, sometime no laptop and internet connection, at other times I was just plain lazy. The truth is that I write only when I have this urge to scream out to the world the things that I can say to no one. Though the past few months have been an emotional rollercoaster and yet I did not feel this need because I always had a shoulder to cry on, and somebody to share the laughter with. I was in the false sense of security that the reassuring words can give you.

Today I was rudely woken from this dream to realise that one should not take any thing in life for granted. And so here I am with my self esteem shattered to bits all due to this all but expected revelation that the shoulder which I was using as a support actually thought of me as a weight. It’s a miserable feeling when you are being pitied and that too by people who are supposed to love you the most. A part of you is what u think other people think of you, and today I wanted to kill that part of me when I realized that the relations that I thought were the very building blocks of my survival think of me as a sad mistake of their past which they regret till date. Is this what I have been reduced to, someone else’s redemption?

No one is perfect and neither am I. I know this is a lame excuse for all my wrong doings, but that small tiny bit of self respect that still remains inside me tells me that I definitely did not deserve this. In a way history is repeating itself, I seem to be the person who does not learn from her own mistakes. A very dear friend of mine once told me that we should not let anybody have so much power over us that they can make our lives miserable, just by uttering one thoughtless sentence. My only regret is that this time it is much worse than the last time. This time I am really left all alone.

Today I don’t know what tomorrow holds for me... let’s wait and watch.

I pray for optimism

I thought I was I fast decision taker. That was before I actually had to face a situation where decisions start becoming tough and they threaten to have ever lasting impact. My life is currently as good as it can get.  I have people who love me beside me. I have financial security. And I have what can be called a great job. In short it is the exact opposite of “Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D.O.A.”  But still something inside me kept pushing me to reach out for something else. What that something else was even I am not sure but a do realize that if I did not listen to that little voice inside me I would remain restless for a long long time. And so here I am ready to put my life and the comfort zones that make it so beautiful at stake and go looking for that light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t know what that light represents but I can’t help being drawn to it like a moth. I hope everything turns out to be fine. My best laid plans have always gone haywire, and frankly luck has never really favored me and so I am really scared.

I pray to god to give me that strength that I may not regret my decisions whatever may be the outcome of them. I don’t pray for all good things to happen to me but I do pray for optimism. Several small incidents of my life have made me a little paranoid and thus at the eve of what should have been the greatest achievement of my life, the one thing that I was sure would give me happiness all I can feel is the fear of misfortune lurking around the corner.

How little we know ourselves. What is important and what is not? What are the things that really matter? How to maintain that perfect balance? I thus set out in quest of the ever elusive answers to these questions…

The Blogging problem...

I had almost forgotten about my blogging account and for a long time I have kept myself busy with other things, then what is it that brings me back here? Well its the blogging problem.

Everybody blogs these days. I for one certainly see no problem with that, as I feel its a good medium of expression and also that my blogs will form a good read for my own self in the future (maybe I'll get to retrospect a lil on reading my own blogs), so as far as I am concerned the blogging problem is not about blogging at all, but its about people who write stuff and then expect me as their friend to read what they have written and give them my "genuine"opinion on what I feel about their literary achievements. Now its very natural to mellow down your response to suit what your friends actually want to hear from you, but a recent incident made me realize that I can really be very rude to people who have actually considered me worthy enough to ask me how I felt about their blogs.

So here goes the story, this friend of mine, who has recently joined my friend circle (and so does not know much about me besides any first impressions he has got of me) asked me to read and correct a movie review he had written for his blog. It seems my name had been suggested by another friend. It also came up during the conversation that this honour was bestowed upon me not because of my literary skills but because of the fact that it is generally don't say no when my friends ask me a favor and that in all my friend circle I was the one least likely to make fun of the obvious lack of composition skills of the newbie. And thus began the very highly irritating two hours by the end of which I had wrote some nasty comment or the other about almost every sentence of the said writeup.

I sent the reviewed document back to him not expecting a reply after the way in which I had criticized his work, to my surprise I received a mail with the corrected version and a note which thanked me for all my efforts and reminded me that "you know you should sometimes tell lies to keep up the spirit " . Later that evening he sent out the link to his blog to all his friends including myself and on top of the blog was the line "A big thanks to Shivani to help me out in putting my expressions in words." I was kind of happy and embarrassed by this gesture. The writeup was still pretty much the same except that it was free of the most glaring of its grammatical errors and so I was making my peace with the situation. All of us met for dinner and somebody asked the newbie when his next post was coming. As I listened to the answer I secretly hoped that this time I wouldn't be asked to review...