I can't get over the idea that being loved means debasing yourself in some way - still, I know that's incorrect.

بھلا ہوا میری مٹکی پھوٹی رے / میں تو پنیا بھرن سے چھوٹی رے

 

عہد وفا یا ترک محبت جو چاہو سو آپ کرو

اپنے بس کی بات ہی کیا ہے ہم سے کیا منواؤ گے

 

Earlier today I was making work/money/living plans for next year and I realised just now that if I've gained anything in the last one year or so its confidence that I can do things, and that things will work out for the best, even if the best is a really ideal situation. That's the sort of situation I would've dismissed earlier as too good for me.

This is not a flex

Receiving excellent feedback has made an immeasurable difference to my academic productivity. I feel a bit sad to think of an alternate timeline where I had an academic relationship like this when I was 24 because I wonder what I would've been doing at 32 then, without so many years of feeling worthless. 

An unexpected bonus, and the satisfaction of all in-air balls landing in place. I don't know why Calcutta makes me panic but it does.

Ever since I floated the idea of species suicide in the Ecocriticism class of my Art Theory seminar (don't ask me why that turned into a "can art save the world" class, it wasn't me) I have been re-dreaming my perfect future. I used to want to have a baby but I have now decided that my goal for when I'm forty is to have a dog (maybe even TWO) and a cat (maybe...TWO?), enough of an income to support them and a big enough living space for all of us, preferably in a cool city somewhere not super polluted and also far from the coast (LOL the Ecocriticism lecture before the class...). Also a big enough budget for all the skincare products I can ever want and lots of fresh chicken (getting TIRED of this bullshit frozen chicken) and access to a steady supply of Calcutta biryani (accessible anywhere in the world if you have the guts to follow the BongEats recipe, which according to my friend Suchi made her tired from just watching the video).

By the way, if anybody remembers this one ranty post I had written way back when where I'd laid out a similar list of things I wanted for myself when I was thirty, I'm ALMOST there at thirty-two (the one thing I don't have, I don't think I ever will, and so it's not on my forties wishlist).

A change of heart: can only try. Love lies in very small things, love lies in big things - as long as it's there right? I'm going to do better and I haven't lost anything.

I think with the kind of de-de-de-something (de-personalisation?) I became used to at a crucially young age it's no wonder I made so many wrong choices in my twenties and my mostly-autonomous late teens. Really the worst instincts are groomed at home, by what you see other people get away with regard to you, all sorts of hacking away at self-worth because really very important bits of it are sacrificed to very secondary social relationships. I am so angry and so bitter and I wonder when it'll get better and I'm so sad at the good things I've lost because I carry this baggage.

God I just want one Anuja Chauhan type boyfriend, is that too much to ask??

Like how you wake up after a very drunk night out and break into the horrors while you get flashbacks of all the heinous things you did and said the night before but with my twenties.

I'm not taking all the blame myself, though.

Not about love

Whatever I might have said, I stick to this which I have eventually returned to every time my hurt, anger and resentment have boiled over: they may have thrown me under the bus, but I won't do that to them.

This is all I can claim, that I tried and tried and will continue. I can only guess at what broke their hearts, and I know they broke mine, but I refuse to be part of their list.

My list began with myself and will end with myself too.