A Long One

Around the same time I stopped speaking to Anirban, I stopped writing. He’d given me the excuse to get out of a relationship I saw as oppressive, and as I did that, I wrote about it. Most of my writing had to do with our relationship, but buried in the bemoaning of a long dead love was me or at the very least, the written expression of me. And I was saddened when I could write no more because I missed me.

I just finished reading an article about India. I’ve long been skeptical of Indiaphiles, Westerners who traipse her soil in hopes of spiritual enlightenment, or truth, or God. Even people who eat too much curry freak me out a bit. It’s not because I don’t understand India: there is a part of me and of my general understanding of the universe that is very much Indian. And, this is only true if you believe that India somehow manages to see truth to the chaotic and honestly disorganized thing we call life. Everything is truth. Somewhere in the chaotic picture that is a place like India, from all of her blossoming splendor and obnoxiously unceremonious ceremonies emerges a picture that any and all can recognize if they stop looking for it so hard. Out of that chaos of course, comes a culture steeped in tradition, which I assume is a natural human response to fear of the unknown, fear of chaos, fear of being born in a place so out of control that the only thing one can do is submit themselves…to anything and everything. To thousand year old stories, and fish curry, and arranged marriages; to 50 languages and corruption and abject poverty. Only action can free you from action, as the Mahabharata says. It doesn’t say what sort of action, after all.

Mohammed says I am the most normal person he knows. That almost worries me, not because I think I am abnormal but because I do not feel that way. He says I have no issues, but perhaps that is his way of saying my only real issues are with myself, and are therefore surmountable. Issues with others are more difficult to fix because we are relative to them. This disconnect makes it hard to act and even more difficult to respond to their action and eventually we become buried in our own apprehension and misunderstanding and finally with guilt for being unable to fix things. This is in fact the reason divorce exists. It is far easier to categorize a relationship as unfixable than to admit that the illusion someone can feel like your other half then someday feel like your worst enemy is something most of us spend our entire lives pretending is the meaning of life. Love is relative. Life is not.

I saw six-year old pictures of myself tonight. I cannot sleep. I made the mistake of having some coffee in the hopes that I could do some work after Selim went to bed. Coffee is such a deception…it doesn’t make you feel awake as much as prevents you from sleeping. I still feel just as tired as I did when I drank it, only now I can’t do anything about it. So, I poked around the whole house (read tore the f*cker up) looking for my Sims installation disk, only to find it hiding in a Thomas the Train DVD case with no product code to help install it. The pictures are of me and Kamal, the very first Indian I dated. I have dated three in my life, Sagar being the best of all three without even a thought about comparison. I was struck me how utterly unhappy I looked in every picture he took of me. You could almost tell I was miserable and trying to fake not being so. That was a difficult period of my life. I cannot remember a period that was not difficult. It occurred to me then that I wasn’t any happier in 2004 than I am now. I was just as fat, which I surprising considering I hadn’t had a baby yet. This thought brings me to the weight I lost while I was sick. I do not want to think about the cancer tonight.

Out of options and not feeling nostalgic enough to write about Croatia, which happened the year before and pictures in which I looked much happier and also a CD found while poking around, I call Raj.

“Have I always been this depressed?” I ask.

“Of course not. Who’d have a friend like that?” he scoffs. “When you’re not consumed by life, you’re actually fun. Sweet. Intellectual. It really wasn’t until you started dating that you became well…less than happy.”

The words my shrink said suddenly made somewhat more sense. I had in fact been looking for the right guy most of my adult life, only to begin to wonder if it was me I wasn’t happy with. Me, because I was looking for it somewhere else, and me the reason I was ending my marriage.

Raj and I were not close that year. That was the year him and Meneetha had their fling and I suspect that was why we hadn’t talked much. The next year was better. I had moved to the West side, was starting graduate school. Raj had not been there to witness the cruelty that was Kamal. He’s the reason my first thought when I realized Sagar was also Maharashtran was worry. Then I remembered that it would be categorically unfair to say that all, or even most Maharashtrans were the same. I put the thought aside quickly.

No amount of writing will allow me to escape the pain I carry around with me. I think the idea of being mentally healthy is a good one but it’s going to require more thought that creation. I should really develop something I review everyday and think about. I act without thinking things through all the time, it’s something that drives me really crazy. I think about it later, when I feel like it, and then I decide that I made a mistake or that I should’ve done something different or better. I have no idea how to change that. I’m pretty sure that I can’t afford the time it would take the get the shrink to help me fix it either.

See, I cannot go to Chicago and have fun. The anxiety and annoyance I feel around my husband is just too great. I would love to take Selim back to Chicago and show him some things, walk him through the city and talk to him. But he would be there giving me a hard time and I would be there against my better judgment but not wanting to ruin his plans to take what was left of his family on a road trip by changing my mind at the last minute. So why did I agree in the first place? Who wouldn’t want to go to Chicago? It sounded fun. It did not occur to me that I wouldn’t be able to have fun. And I wonder now if I will be able to. I wonder if even wondering about it will prevent it from happening. But more disturbing is I feel like I cannot say no to anyone. People ask, I respond the way I think they want me to, and if I don’t know that, I respond in a way I think will leave them with the most favorable impression of me. It’s really no wonder that Generation Me had such a depressing effect on me. I’m probably already suffering from low self-esteem, and here I am reading a book that not only seems to confirm that but blame my entire generation and my upbringing for it. Such bullsh*t.

My unhappiness with who I am is nothing at all new. It was just compounded by dating, which is a degrading and demeaning process if not done with a lot of skill or thought and worst of all without self-esteem. I don’t want to blame my father but her certainly had a hand in making me feel like sh*t. I desperately needed his approval, and while he was busy trying to install some humility in me, I felt like a “moron” or a “retard”, words he used often with me and my siblings. While he was trying to force me into independence, a probable social anxiety disorder went undiagnosed and I internalized his every criticism.

I think I should read Eat Pray Love again. It’s entirely possible that I hated that book because I resented her ability to just say “No, I don’t want this marriage anymore.” Maybe I would like it even more this time.

The Wild Oats market is a 6 minute drive from my office. At lunch time, I bring my freshly-printed recipes and shop a bit, finding treasures like face-scrubbing pads with orange extract in them and on-sale strawberries. I feel free. I can actually find what I’m looking for and I wonder why I’ve never grocery shopped on my lunch hour before. It’s an excellent idea and now that the weather is nice, I’ll do it just to make an excuse to leave the office.

I’ve written several paragraphs now about almost nothing and almost everything. I don’t think I will be able to sleep, but now I think that wasn’t the point at all.

I did go to Chicago, and I did have fun. It helped that the weather was as near perfect as weather gets in Chicago. We took a boat tour, after which Selim promptly fell asleep for 3 hours. I’ve never thought much about architecture until that boat tour. It occurred to me that’s probably true about a lot of things. I learn a bit about something, then all of a sudden, I know something. And that something gets lonely, so I learn some more. Such is the story of my life.