(Pseu)Desi girls

IBCP

Indian Born Confused Pseu-desi.

You cannot tell me I am the only one. 

We are the lot who lived a protected life as kids, mostly in our own imaginary world, and then migrated to another country in our formative years. Only to never find a way back home. Because the country of origin has rapidly transformed into a winter vacation destination where we spend our time in perpetual special 'welcome home' status.

As such we relate to no one. 

We meet Desis (Indians abroad who believe they have a strong sense of Indian-ness) in our country of residence, happily celebrating Indian festivals, organising (to me rather painful) get togethers, and we feel nothing but the desire to disappear from the scene because it's not something we did back home, so overdoing it now feels unnatural.

We meet locals in our country of residence, and as much as we would like to fit in, the first mention of some obscure childhood television show (which didn't make its way to Indian TV) instantly creates this barrier to belonging. We nod our heads pretending to get it, but we clearly don't and never will.

And then we meet these second generation Indians, lovingly called as (Insert first letter of country of residence)BCDs, but this is where we realize that there are indeed 50 shades of confusion and no two confused states shall ever relate to one another. Apart from our daily struggles and confusion, our accents are completely different too - making sure that we can only mix as well as oil and water.

And so in order to build a community of (un)like-minded global misfits and outliers who are not only displaced from their home countries but are also equally unsettled in their residing countries, I feel the need to give us a catchy name and definition. 

At least now there is a chance that Google will randomly recommend a Meet up for fellow psudesis or IBCPs (or whatever acronym catches on - I don't claim to be an influencer) when I am least expecting it.

Dusty Days

 Somedays, some very occasional dusty days, I feel I need to give in to it. Just succumb to it completely.

Most days though, I am fighting it. I wear a mask, I wash my hands a million times, my allergies remind me to stay away. I am fearful, lazy and an escapist. At best.

I feel constrained in a world that my mind has created and trained to believe that it is beautiful. I don't fit my own idea of beauty and I know I need to update my thinking. And yet the escapist in me happily wastes time building a maze within my mind, to reach the place I know I should be operating from.

From childhood, I have a habit and almost an innate need to preserve my core. There was a time I was definitely ashamed of it, though over the years I may have normalised it in my head, and perhaps added layers to it in a way that part justifies, part rationalises my identity to that hidden core. But there is still some disconnect there, which unless I make my way into the self created maze, I will never manage to connect.

Some days though, I pretend to be so normal, I could fool myself.

To the point where I float just above that layer of vacuum that I have created, below which I know is all dusty.

Oxygen therapy

 Squeezing my eyes shut, and mouth as open as I can, willing my ears to filter out the horrifying sound of some deadly metal rod scraping away at my teeth and gums - this is when I realise that I need to breathe. 

I always knew, that I have a low tolerance for pain and not the greatest of faith in medical ability of humans and yet, when faced with the unavoidable situation that I was in, the only relief I found was to focus on my breathing.

It is such a given, as living beings, of course we breathe to live, but I had not acknowledged the power this simple act has - the way it can send to background, the painful feeling that you want to avoid. Almost like balancing those nerves and sending a strong signal to the brain, that I am still alive and things are not so bad. We can make it back from here. We can pick ourselves up. 

And come to think of it, I use it at other times too. Like when I am running, and my body tells me after the first 10 minutes, that I cannot go any further, that I have to stop. That is when I start focusing on every breath. I take deeper breaths and breathe out from my mouth. I don't know if others do this - but I do, to keep going. And slowly my body falls into this silent commanding rhythm, and I feel relaxed as I keep running.

So in a way, this is my long winded attempt at reminding myself - that even when the situation seems rather overwhelming and the problem at hand maybe overly complex, sometimes the solution may still be quite simple. It is ok to take a moment to pause, breathe, create a bit of a mental distance between the problem and yourself, and then decide next course of action.

A ghost and a shadow

If I think about it,

You have always been

Like a ghost to me.

On most days

A forgotten memory,

Until suddenly your absence

Sends a chill down my spine.

And like a soul, possessed,

I find myself sitting out in my balcony

Having an imaginary conversation 

About gangsters and their paradise.

And I have been

Like a shadow to you.

Following a notion of you around,

trying to keep up,

Riding the crest, and then down the valley

Until eventually I disappear,

Sinking back into the horizon.

And that is how we exist - 

A ghost and a shadow,

A long distance relationship, 

Thriving in imperfect harmony.

We don't belong in the same song,

Our heart beats don't even rhyme

And the smiles we shared, 

in our overlapped past - 

While some were fake,

Others, a function of incidental

happenstance.

Yet somehow after all these years

You found me, slowly blending

Into my backdrop.

And revealed again that child in me,

Who wrote verses and jumped a lot.

---

To that one friend, who I don't really understand and I don't know if he understands me either. But when we meet, we smile at each other.

Sad endings

It's particularly painful to see yourself so connected to fictitious characters. Holding onto them, crying with them. Real world does not move me as us they do. Why? Is it because I am lonely, craving a connection, craving the need to be understood?

They know what we want. They know how to manipulate us into little soft balls of  play dough. We, the audience, are totally malleable in their hands. 

The state of acknowledging that someone else has such power over us, could that be an act of intelligence?

I know, at this point I am rambling, because I want to bare all. I want to show you the inside of my soul. I want to give up on my feigned sanity. I want you to give in to my stubborn desire.

But I lie, because I still don't dare to show all.

I fear powerful words.

Like love. And Loss.

They keep building through life, building up. I keep my raw edge blunt. Because I fear cutting myself otherwise. And then bleeding all out.

So I keep my hesitation intact. I don't dare to name real feelings, just keep them as a sound that barely leaves my throat.

Only at times, through fiction, do I occasionally let the build up materialise into something tangible.

Knowing that soon it will ebb. Just like it peaked. 

But in that moment, it's real. It's painful. 

And I know I cried for something that does not exist.

On second thoughts though, maybe I cried because it does not exist.

Self introductions

Why is there so many ways to look at the same past? Like each version has a life of it's own? Visualise yourself as a nine-tailed fox. Each time you turn back, there is a different start point to your existence.

The past seems to keep evolving into a history that I never truly lived, but it makes sense. Because each time I look back, my present self is at a different vantage point.

Looking for a stable future seems suddenly pointless. And to think that this was what kept me down for a good part of last year. Even after telling myself that I have found short term resolution, I always knew in my heart I had not. But I so wanted to pull myself out of the daze. Self preservation requires the ability to convincingly lie to yourself, I guess.

...

Most times the strangest person in a room filled with people, is myself. When I introduce myself, I have a well rehearsed script that I stick with. Over time I have learnt to say it with confidence. I used to stutter saying my name at one point. Now, I have made peace with a few variations of it, and I can say it (them) aloud without much thought. I envy (and like) people who can say my name confidently. But annoyingly, I relate most to those who mumble it in a barely audible voice. Perhaps these are the ones who see through my act. They don't pretend to care or understand me (or my name). 

For a while I even took relief in physical stripping to enter a Japanese onsen (public bath house). The act of being able to strip naked in the presence of other people was psychologically speaking, quite difficult for me, but once the bandaid was ripped, gave me an uncanny feeling of liberation, albeit short lived. Metaphorically, I now know the feeling of being able to face yourself. 

And hence also the fact that I am not there yet. 

After 4 decades of living both inside and outside of myself, I am still too scared to bare all, and look at myself for who I am. A 'me' without my parents, family, friends, without a job and without internet. I cannot put a face to this person. I have gotten used to the comfort of my parasitic existence, where I live off multiple refracted versions of a personality created purely by my circumstance.

And no matter how many times I turn back, the one unchanging fear that has lived through each iteration of my history, is the fear of digging deep only to find an empty shell.

Night in shining armour

So I am back to this dark corner of my mind and this blog, which I realize is just an extended representation of the same. 

Actually I never really thought of my writing as dark and depressing, until this person who read my blog for the first time, told me so. I guess in my mind I am mostly a lighter version of dark... Like  70% dark chocolate or an espresso kind of dark - not too happy but definitely not the sad kind... Oh well, it's always interesting to see yourself from someone else's point of view.

Anyway, here I am after my holidays and most importantly the trip to Japan last year. And no it was not holiday, but a work trip, it was only a week and I did feel guilty of getting the chance to go back on my own. But at the same time, I was excited beyond words. Because of the unexpectedness of the trip, I guess I couldn't rationalize in my head the intersection of what I deeply wanted, and the sudden manifestation of it in real life.

I was also very scared of going back, scared that the world I had left behind existed only in my head. 

This wasn't true though. And I was happily surprised that our life in Japan was not an illusion but in fact very much real. And I felt the same connect and same strange sense of peace while I was there. Just that this time it was less falling in love, but more of a reassuring steady kind of love. My friend and I even joked about it - 恋じゃなくて普通の愛みたいな感じ。

It also made me realize, that I am the kind of person who can overthink and ruin a perfectly good relationship by constantly questioning it's goodness. 

A bit like a night sky. Filled with light from countless stars, and yet you mostly see the darkness.