Saturday 1 September 2018

Bags & Brains

  Remember when we were in school and we used to write random things on the last page of our notebooks? Well, I was the girl who had songs, quotes, random words, doodles, patterns, etc on several of the last pages of every book. Even now, I have few different notepads, work diaries, etc which contain random thoughts, lines, and paragraphs of things I want to blog about some time. Not all of them end up here since I’m so consistently irregular! But today morning, after yet another sleepless night, when I wanted to write before my thoughts ran out faster than words, I couldn’t find a single of my books on me for including the previously thought up things on this one topic going on in my mind.

  Post a frantic search, I settled down with a bunch of rough papers and penned down the first question that popped up from the unyielding search. What do you do when you’re rendered helpless to your own devices because you find them to be gone, and it is just your sole and soulful self left?
So I have this obsession of always being prepared. For example, any time I go out, I plan on the worst what-if situations and carry everything I think I might need. That ranges from a pen to a charger to an extra lipstick to a pocket knife or even to an extra pair of clothes sometimes! And I try to cramp I as much as I can in whatever bag I’m using and carry it around even though I end up using hardly a couple of things. Now I’ve observed that this obsession has stemmed from a harmless habit formed by many experiences and situations where I’ve needs something and I found it from nowhere but to just remember to carry/have/get it myself. Probably, also around the time I figured that at the end of everything, no one will help me but myself.

  And with time I’ve grown to be proud of this trait of me; partly because it made me helpful to others. A fun example would be from this trip I went on a couple of years back with a group consisting of equal number of known and new people. And as per my rule, I had made a list and packed everything I thought I or anybody in the group could possibly need. And my friend was really amused at first when she would ask for something and it would be right there in my backpack every single time! So by the end of the trip she was actually testing to see if I could really have anything she asked for- right down to an ear bud and the exact flavour of a cough drop candy she wanted. And proudly, I would fetch it out of my bad like magic!

   Sometimes my friends have kindly offered to carry my bag only to exclaim at how heavy it was, irrespective of the size. But I never really mine fed the weight as long as I had what I thought I needed. Until recently, I didn’t realise that this was my way of feeling safe. Another thing that I realised is that these things that I carry around are all materialistic; even something as simple as a tissue. But I had them all labelled under essentials. And apparently I’m growing tired of carrying the extra/unnecessary baggage.

  Similar is the battle with my emotions. I have stored and filed and piles up so much since, God knows when, that now I have come to ignoring the pile that is unravelling right down at me. I tend to describe my mind as a web browser with hundreds of tabs open at the same time. And now, more often than not, the system crashes and gives me brain freezes. And I am growing tired of the overwork to reboot because it just does not reboot anymore; tired of the weight of those piles, just like my bag, which have now scattered to a chaos and left me lost. No matter how many times I reboot or clean up or half-heartedly take help from customer care (friends), I seem to be a loss for any solution. So completely that I- I cannot even describe it enough to complete the sentence.
Usually, one of my sure shot self-help ways is to write about whatever is running through my mind. Poetry has been my outlet since middle school, which developed into blogging. It helps make decisions by sorting out stuff in my head like I would rearrange stuff in my bag. Although decision making has never been a problem for me, even when it has portrayed me as headstrong and stubborn at times, I’ve considered it as strength. But when I accepted to myself that I am it able to write anything since past few months- despite my heavy bag and brain freezes- I realised that it is not procrastination or laziness. I am actually clueless for the first time in my life at a whole new level.

  Although I am writing this now so that’s something. But still I found one question coming at me like an annoying boomerang. What do you do when what you’ve always done doesn’t work anymore? I’m not sure if that made any sense, but answers are welcome!

  Because I know I’m not ready to put my bag down just yet, despite the increasing number of brain freezes!

-Heli..

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