cathartic fix.

What do you do with all that pent-up anger, hurt, disgust, fear, ennui, pain and frustration when it seems pent up inside you and simply refuses to dissolve, either into the whirlpool of meaningless, repetitive activity that you plunge into, or the defensive pretence of forgiving and forgetting that you periodically indulge in?

The fatuous temporary measure in such situations: a cathartic fix.

Tack your tenacious emotions onto someone else’s successes and failures; find someone else to sympathise with, made entirely of words, pictures and camera angles. Forget your own actual troubles in the face of someone else’s scripted dilemmas. Once all of your emotions are dissociated from you, they’re easier to release. Your life isn’t falling apart, you’re not alone, you’re not the victim, you’re not the guilty party, you’re not anything but someone whose emotions are tied to whomever the limelight is on.

Most comfortingly, you’re not important, you’re nobody.

A cathartic fix is underrated. An hour or two spent crying over someone else’s problems seriously diminishes the proportions of your own pathetic little troubles.

Tried and tested fixes:

Grey’s Anatomy
The Tudors
House
Rome
F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Love, Actually
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Chocolat
Moulin Rouge

Harry Potter (1-7) – J.K Rowling
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R Tolkien
Kartography – Kamila Shamsie
White Mughals – William Dalrymple
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Emma – Jane Austen

(I could go on forever with the books, but I’ll stop)

as i started out, all alone

Every once in a while, something happens that reminds me of something I’d rather forget; and before I can stop myself, I am back in places I have tried to escape.

A scrap of paper, with your name on it; a shared space still filled with ghosts of our past selves.

Opening an old bag. Spring cleaning tosses up the past. It all comes tumbling out: ticket stubs, tissue, toffee wrapper, eyelash, bills.

My attempts to write you out, to erase your remembered words (or should I say lies?) have been astonishingly successful. Or maybe I’m deluding myself.

I’m living resolutely in the present. I’m too afraid of the future, too tired of the past and the present holds the key.

But every now and then, something happens.

And here it all is, the detritus of the past, strewn carelessly.

[The hollow is still there, the weight merely hidden behind so much else. I've attempted to forget but I will never, ever forgive]

you’re free to leave me, but just don’t deceive me

Indian Writing – II tomorrow. I have no notes for the nine poems we have on the paper, and all my responses to the one novel we have are hopelessly “subjective”.

There are so many things I want to write about, but not too much or too little. How to maintain the perfect balance between revealing too little and too much? Because of course, being as shamelessly exhibitionist as I am, I can’t quite keep from revealing some of it. I have no defence, but the honest hope that in throwing it all outside of myself, I will not have to feel it anymore. And oddly enough, it’s not an effort made in vain.

i) This goes out to a bunch of people whom I care a lot about and who all seem to have the same problem:

Your only problem lies in your inability to see yourself for the beautiful person that you are. You constantly strive to be someone else, to please everyone around you when really, you’re only making yourself unhappier in the process. We have one life and you owe it to yourself to live it the way you want to. No one else matters as much as you do. Forget about all those things you perceive as failures, look at yourself in the mirror and see all those things that make you better and trust yourself, above anyone else.

ii) Is it normal to think you can’t ever trust anyone again? It’s so easy to slip into this self-conscious cynicism, this bitter view of things. I’m terrified, it’s true. Once you’ve felt hollow, once you’ve made yourself sick with regret and hurt, once you’ve had everything you ever believed in thrown in your face, is it wrong to never want to be that vulnerable again?

iii) All your life is based on trust. You trust your abilities to get you through education and employment, you trust your intuition to keep you safe, you trust the people around you to be everything you want them to be, you trust life itself to be for you what it’s meant to be but so often isn’t. Questions, questions, questions of sincerity, of honesty, of integrity blow about in the wind. I don’t pretend to know the truth anymore.

how long?

Everything’s gone

Things you took for granted, crumble even as you reach for them.

And actually, it’s all ok. Because you’re so numb you wouldn’t have noticed anyway.

It’s a state of disenchantment and a strange satisfaction: you always knew it would come down to this.

Building your life, your happiness and your identity around the people you love is both the easiest and the most foolish way to live

it’s either everything or nothing

and either way, you’re a willing loser.

because you’ve sacrificed yourself to become someone they can love.