The
last year and a half or so have been a strange kind of time. Beginning with a really happy peak, when I was so thrilled
with developments in my personal life that I could almost believe I was
floating, through the abyss of great personal loss and physical pain, to this
place I am at now… with so much gone for good, so much lost in the personal,
while so much great stuff is beginning to happen in the professional sphere; it’s
more than I can do to wrap my head around everything that has happened, and continues
to happen. Thinking about it, in a broken-record, destructive-cyclic, vicious
circle kind of way doesn’t seem to be doing anything other than set me on the
path to being clinically insane, and while books and work and life provide some
much needed breaks from my own head in the daytime, nothing seems to prevent my
nightly dreams from being one long horror movie fest.
If I could ever write down my dreams
(or is it nightmares?) accurately, if I was a good enough, powerful enough
writer to be able to catch the eerie, macabre, blood freezing stuff my brain
throws at me every single night, I would make a fortune as a writer of horror
movie scripts. Trouble is, I am not. I am not a good enough artist to capture even
the tiniest essence of what I live through in my dreams. Neither am I able, nor
willing, to make such an attempt. That would mean having to consciously revisit
all those things, feelings, fears, depressions, that I am so firmly, and mostly
successfully, pushing so far into the background, that I am so resolutely
ignoring, that I am so obstinately keeping from ever floating to the forefront
of my mind. So… thanks a lot but no thanks. Given the way my head is, and has
been for the last 20 odd months, I think I will have to give up trying to be
the next Roald Dahl or Stephen King.
One of the theories about why we
have nightmares says that they are a tool our mind uses to work through our
greatest fears and traumas. It replays your biggest phobias, the worst times of
your life, the craziest suppressed pain you have held on to, and it does so
again and again and again, apparently until the event, incident, or
anticipation no longer holds any trauma for you, until you stop fearing it. If
that’s the case, I am not sure my mind has quite managed to get it right yet. Considering
that I am not much prone to nightmares even at the worst times in my life, and
yes there have been times I’ve sauntered through hell, it is strange that I
should suddenly find myself having them almost daily, and for this long. It’s
been bad, yes, but not as unmitigatedly awful as some other patches I have lived
through. So why all the technicolour spookiness of somnolence, all of a sudden?
I don’t really know. Given that I am much older, and presumably a lot more
mature, since the last stint of awfulness. And, as I think about it, there’s a
lot more of the good stuff in my life now – to offset the bad – than I had at
some of the worst times.
Maybe it’s a cumulative thing. Stuff
has been presumably piling on for a while now, directly for some 20 months or
so, building on a foundation of some pretty dark stuff from years and years
ago, and maybe the combination was enough to set the whole edifice shaking. After
all, therapy or no therapy, maturity or no maturity, medication or no medication,
the basic truth is that some stuff just never goes away. It just gets a little
bit easier to handle it on a day to day basis, and to continue functioning as a
member of society or a “normal” human being or whatever, but the darkness, the
pain, the monsters, it never, never completely disappears. And sometimes all it
takes is a word, a smell, a sound, a tiny little incident to bring it all
rushing back. Maybe that’s what’s going on here.
Or maybe, as some people tend to
think, including my man sometimes, its just imagination. If I hear “apne aap ko
dukhi mat samjho to sab theek ho jayega” (stop thinking of yourself as unhappy
and it will be fine) one more time, I am liable to break something. The closest
people in my life, at least, should know that the last thing I am is obsessed
with pain. I don’t imagine myself unhappy, even when I actually might be. I’ve
been known to party hard, laugh out loud, and enjoy every small happiness in my
life even at my worst times. In the last 12 years or so, I have also worked hard
at, and become good at, working things out in a steady and mature way, for
myself as well as for others. And I am trying to be that person now as well. Neither
friends for family can claim to have seen a long face in months, or tears, and
although dad did notice the dark circles, that’s easily shrugged off as
something physical, or ignored altogether.
So what would make someone
imagine I am wallowing in self pity I have no idea. But it seems to be the
popular opinion in certain circles, including the recently disowned relatives. Now
these very disowned people, at least one of them, is one of the major contributors
to the angst in the first place. After all, when you have loved someone like a
sibling, like a best friend, for the best part of your life, sudden unexplainable
coldness, sarcasm, thinly veiled insults, and sniping on public forums tends to
be disturbing and hurtful. Having spent years on getting my self esteem back to
a healthy state, and yes, as some people would say, being egotistical (my ego
is my shield, my badge), I made the decision to cut them out of my life,
permanently. I’ve done this before, since I prefer the pain (and yes it does
hurt) of a clean cut to the daily stress and hurt of being ill-treated by the
people I love. This cutting out has, unfortunately, dragged a little longer and
taken a bit more time than I would ideally have liked, because certain events were
impending which everyone wanted to go off without any unpleasantness. And this
protracted tearing of the bond has created more pain, in addition to the sense
of betrayal and the anger and the hurt of having someone so close to you turn
on you so comprehensively.
That’s been going on for a couple
of years now. The drawing back, the turning bitter and acidic, the preferring
jibes to straight talk. What made is worse was that with the recent shrinking of
the friend circle, this person had become one of my mainstays in terms of
socializing, especially as he was intelligent. And yes, the shrunk social
circle probably has something to do with the screwed up mind too. For someone
who is used to having up to 20 people around all the time, and regularly having
parties with two dozen people at least, to be down to two couples for Christmas
or new years’ can be a huge change. There are weeks, even months now that I
don’t go out other than to bring baby from school or to go visit my mother when
she is in town. When my brother was here recently, we went to get coffee, and I
suddenly realized that that was the first time I had done that in over a year! And
this is me! Who not so long ago went to get coffee and conversation EVERY
SINGLE day!
What this essentially means is
that I also have a famine in the conversation department. I miss spending hours
just talking with people of similar or superior intellect. I miss the all
nighters or late nighters with the mad bunch, or with bhai. Lately I don’t seem
to even have meaningful conversation with anyone other than family for weeks on
end! And, and this was quite a thorn, even when bhai was here this trip, we
didn’t manage to get a single one of those in, for one reason or another. Come
to think of it, we barely managed a single conversation! Well, that’s not
helping the overall feeling of unease, malaise. After all, this man is my best
friend in the world, and I saw him after a gap of three and a half years, and I
didn’t get to have a single meaningful conversation. Almost beginning to forget
what those feel like, and they way they get my brain fizzing. This endless domesticity,
something I have never been particularly great at, this ROUTINE (dreaded word),
this constant being of mother, partner, daughter, to the exclusion of all else is
not helping whatever ails me.
Add to that the constant pushing and prodding I have had to do on the
matter of adoption. Considering this is something that was a given, something I
have been wanting to do for at least 15 yrs, something that I was emotionally
promised (at a moment of great pain and loss) would happen by last December, it
is amazing how mush pushing I was having to do over the last six years. I HATE
poking, I HATE nagging, and I HATE having to maneuver. And I have had to do all
of those, with increasing frustration, hurt and anger, as nothing, but nothing
got done. And when we finally managed to even find the time to walk into an
agency, we were made to feel like criminals. Our crime? We want to adopt even
though we have a biological child! Hold on! Isn’t that a GOOD thing? Don’t we
want more and more people to choose adoption as the way to have kids? And being
able to and choosing not to is the real choice right? Not being able to and
choosing to adopt is good, but its also desperation. Right? Apparently not in India.
I was practically told flat out that my chances of actually getting g a kid are
nil. Seems there is a chronic shortage of kids for adoption in the country,
never mind the hundreds of thousands languishing in badly run, unhealthy, and
terrible orphanages. So, if and when a child does become available, they will –
of course – give preference to childless couples. In short, the adoption counselor,
in not so many words, basically told us to go home and try to make a baby
instead of trying to adopt one.
That’s presumably the end of
that. And given the traumas I have been through last June, I am not likely to
be trying to Produce another offspring. Also, with everything that’s going on
in the professional sphere, I won’t have time to, even if I had any wish to. So,
effectively, that’s the end of any chance of my ever having a second, let alone
a third, child. While this may not seem like a big deal to most people these days,
who choose to be unencumbered with children or to have just the one, to me it
is an untenable loss. Especially since another loss is still fresh enough, and
will always be fresh enough, to bring unbidden tears to my eyes every time something
triggers a memory or an emotion. It’s like a solid fist of pain in the gut and
the throat, all the time. And the loneliness I see in my daughter, the complete
lack of a social life that her generation faces, and the thought that she will
never know the closeness that bhai and I share, that can be got only with
siblings, makes me sadder.
Strangely, this is also a time of
unprecedented things in the work sphere. The business looks on the verge of
exploding in size, which means that already things are moving fast and will
soon move much faster. I might soon have to make a full time commitment to an
office bound life. With big things in the offing professionally, I am going to
have even less time for the things that make me feel alive. With the way the head
feels right now, and with how things are going with the dreams, I have no idea
how I will handle less personal time and more sensory and cerebral deprivation.
There is no hope of working through what’s already going on in the head, and
the near future promises fewer opportunities and much less time for it. So, I guess
the demons will have to go back into the closet, the maelstrom will have to continue
to be ignored, and the nightmares will continue… ah well!
