Category: culture

088b – good vibes, experiencing space

Feeling pretty great today. I feel like I’m in problem-solving mode as opposed to problem-thinking mode. But it’s not anxiety fueled. It’s actually positive energy and motivation and genuine resonance fueled. Obviously, I have a bit of an obsessive streak when it comes to open problems and open questions but I’m thinking it’s not such a bad thing. For a set amount of time, if I can channel this energy into getting things done that may not be such a bad thing. As long as I can keep “productivity” and the “doer” energy balanced with “being” energy, days could be nice. 

Got some clarity on the gender and body dysphoria question in therapy today, and that feels pretty great. For now, I’m good. Turns out there are certain days I just don’t like being strongly associated with femininity, but I have enough moments where I do like that association (and in various ways). Currently, for a couple months, I’ve been experiencing a good amount of the yin and the yang, and I’m pretty okay with that— and I imagine I’ll learn to actually really celebrate that as well. 

I think I have some space for mentorship in my life. I already have an “emotions, health and interpersonal relationships” mentor ie my therapist, who I’m pretty happy with. But I think what I need is someone who has experience with creative work, ie a writing industry mentor and a music industry mentor. Obviously, I don’t have space for two people so something I may need to figure out is what I need more at the moment, but I’m going to be exploring that this week. 

I’m thinking that it could be nice to try to look for creative work / freelance jobs in H1 this year. Currently I have the time, resources and the opportunity to explore this thread, and it’s worth trying it out with 100% effort and only falling back to the things I know and like ONLY IF it doesn’t work out. Ie let’s say I find don’t find the kind of work that I might actually like, maybe I can fall back to my more stable tech pay check job world. I just feel like there’s enough people working in the arts industries and why should I not give it a shot, at least? Especially maybe if I’m okay with earning a bit less at the moment. Obviously, I’m not saying I will be fully fulfilled right away, but I just feel called to at least trying to look. Why should I give up before looking? I don’t know, let’s see. 

Also learning to set better boundaries with people in my DMs, something I’ve been practicing for a few years now but still need to continue to do, for reasons I’m not sure. I thought most people who interact with me are actually people who know the things that I stand for, but maybe there’s still some “warding off” of negative energies that needs to continue. 

Anyway, that’s that for today. Hoping for a good last week of January! Cheers xx 

086b – the kiki bouba effect in conversation

kiki: sharp, precise, particular

bouba: loose, round, soft

I’ve always been a little Kiki when it comes to.. most things, really. I was reminded of this while talking to a close friend of mine. We’ve been pretty close for almost a decade now— suffice to say we know each other pretty well and have talked about various things under the sun. We were reflecting on our friendship and relationship a bit, how it has evolved etc and something that came up was a difference of ours. This is one of the few differences that has persisted over the decade— he’s a little bit Bouba and I’m a little bit Kiki. 

In conversation, I tend to be quite Kiki. I’ll always be the one thinking-frowning at words that I don’t think fit very well and at generalisations and at vague descriptions of problems and (although this is unrelated) unsolicited advice. 

With some people, this results in great things, we collaborate to find words that fit better, we learn a little more about each other every time we strike off a generalisation and discuss how the generalisation may not apply even to us as data points, and we get closer to the sub-problems that we’re interested in talking or thinking about. (Even if that problem is a very simple and mundane one, like where should we hang out the next time we meet. Side note on calling this “open question” a problem is pretty Bouba of me but ah, well.)

So anyway, I suppose these people are equally or more Kiki than I am and so they’re okay with deep-diving into precision ABOUT the things I want to get more precise about. 

What happens when you talk to someone who’s not as Kiki about the same topics as you are, then? I am often met with resistance. They give me reactions like “ah, well you know what I mean don’t you” or “why are so fixated on x y z when that was clearly not the point of me talking about a b c” etc. And I’m okay to take that feedback, I think I’ve gotten a little bit better at being a little more Bouba with different people in different situations. Like yes, maybe sometimes being pedantic is really just coming in the way of transference of feelings. In a way, when I’m pedantic when the other person doesn’t want me to be, there’s of course a disconnect that they might feel. They might feel misunderstood, or like they’ve said— they might just feel like in the moment I (the listener) might be focusing on the wrong thing.

This makes sense. For people like me then, it becomes important to discern when there is a “discussion” or a “debate” happening, and perhaps when it’s just feelings being shared. 

But what about when Kikiness is actually really useful? How do I communicate that to people? Like there are some people who are so Bouba that they get defensive about any examination of the things they’re expressing. 

Maybe it does just come down to discernment. One of my friends does this pretty well, he might say: “I disagree with the use of the word XYZ here, but I know what you mean”. And then if I want to open a thread there, we can do that. If I don’t, we carry on with the original conversation. 

I don’t know, I thought I was going to go somewhere with this, I really wanted to make a case of “when can being Kiki be useful”, but I’m gong to test out my discernment theory a little more in conversation from now on and then see where that takes me. 

084a – sleepless + abundance mindset + resignation

New neighbor that I have no way of contacting is drumming (it’s the middle of the night) and I can’t sleep. Obviously, sleep has been tough even otherwise but it’s extra tough with this added problem. I have brunch plans for noon so this is quite painful. Not sure if I’ll be able to wake up on time. 

Funnily enough, I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a drum kit since I’ve been learning them for a few months now— and I’ve been super confused between an electronic and a steel kit, and even though I knew acoustic kits can be super loud I was still considering getting one, hoping that maybe since there’s no one around on my floor I could still get by. But now that I know someone is nearby AND is equally annoying as I am— this could go either ways. One thought is that I’ve been pre-given a taste of my own potential medicine, and the opposite possibility is that “hey, we could both annoy each other”.

I’ll write this and then do some reading and just hope that they eventually stop. If there is a god then I’d love to get at least 6 hours of sleep tonight. 

I’ve been having nice conversations with friends lately and I get such a kick out of stimulating conversations that it sometimes feels so dry when you don’t have that going with other people. Where this is coming from is that lately I’d been trying to be more accepting of different kinds of relationships and dynamics in my life, I was trying to spend time with people even for other things apart from conversation— ie good feelings that come from other things like a ton of shared context, shared past, physical affection, and just.. non-words, in general. But I don’t know, when the words are good, that makes everything so much more fun. 

I’ve been thinking about abundance mindset a lot lately. With art, I think I’ve incorporated it a good amount into practice as well. For example, creating “more”, posting/sharing “more”, expressing “more” and with “more” types of people, so that you are not tied to specific things. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as they often say. 

With friends also, I’ve gotten better at this. Make more friends (to the extent you can without a quality compromise, of course) for different parts of your life, perhaps. I wouldn’t say this is a cope to “loneliness” necessarily because I don’t think more friends can solve this really, at some point you also do need to be okay with being lonely, etc. However, it’s nice to have different friends for different interests, and different kinds of activities etc, I do believe it results in greater resonance than attempting to mould existing friends for everything. 

It’s been toughest for me with romantic interests and romantic relationships, though I’ve gotten much better at it over the last few years. It’s a hard thing to learn and accept really but at the end of the day you cannot make very few specific people the centres of your universe. And the trick is to not necessarily have to make “your own self” the centre of your universe or whatever, the trick is to really have just MANY centres in your universe. 

Obviously for me that’s consistently been friends, family, animals, nature, music, writing, art, tv, books, philosophy, and a little bit of spirituality for a good amount of time now. But then on some nights (nights like these), I cannot use my usual faculties to feel okay, and that’s when things feel quite tough, I suppose. 

*Sigh*. It is what it is, I guess. I’m going to make something to eat now and then read a bit. Hopefully, I’ll get to sleep soon. 

068b – diwali but this post is barely about diwali

It’s been a busy three days. We’re celebrating Diwali here in India. I posted a bit already on Instagram about how it ended up being a bit too much for me, especially since I’m celebrating in India after six whole years. It’s mostly over, but I’ve been thinking of regret and “fomo” a lot. On Friday, I was sensing increasing anxiety about the festival, the parties, the firecrackers etc and I was wondering why I wasn’t able to surrender to it all. I was also wondering if I would regret it later, whether I would miss not spending enough time with the family and friends around me while I have them.

But I’ve been thinking about the last few years, and while I did miss spending time with family/friends when I wouldn’t get to see them for many months, I don’t think I’ve missed “big” events too much.

But I’ve also been thinking of this all from the sensitivity lens, and I wonder when things got so intense. Like I don’t remember being bothered too much by loud noises, events, overstimulation etc when I was a kid. 

I think part of it has to do with our collective lowkey-obsession with our physical forms, which always seems to increase around events etc. Now, I do understand why some people like to dress up, etc, but I think there is a bit of an expectation for everyone to do it, and that is what I’m not too fond of. I specifically remember times in my life where I’ve actually really enjoyed events— and those were times where the people I was hanging with weren’t too form-obsessed, where we were doing a lot more than just clicking pictures, commenting on each other’s outfits, etc. 

I did also get a haircut yesterday that I didn’t end up liking (and I miss my longish hair) so maybe that’s got me a bit annoyed as well. 

Talking to my sister about everything really helps though. We spoke after almost 4-5 days today and it’s nice that we’re now able to put some gaps between interactions. (Since our phone calls tend to get pretty long and hence time-consuming). We’ve actually been weirdly in sync about life stuff over the last couple months. We were going through what felt like slumps throughout August and September and somehow came out of them together as October came around. 

I often wonder what the point of these journal-entries-like word-vomits is (ie is there a point to making them public?)— and I’m going to come back to this question soon. Sometimes I feel like I’m being lazy when I write these. But let’s see, I want to have sufficient reasons to why I’m doing this in public. I know I had reasons when I’d started but lately I can’t remember them. Or be convinced by them. I know they hold value for me— more on that later— but I want to be sure of the reasons why I’m doing this in public. Otherwise it’s just vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake and I don’t necessarily need that in my life at the moment. 

I feel better now, though. Man, making space for all the unpleasant thoughts in your brain feels so good. 

067a – jacob collier + taking up space + living

This is a bit of a morning pages kind of word-vomit and I don’t know yet whether I’ll post it. Let’s see. 

Yesterday was.. quite something. Saw Jacob Collier live and I imagine I’ll be talking about this for years to come. I already feel like I might have been a bit annoying about it with friends, family and social media. I don’t know. 

There is definitely a voice in my head that thinks taking up too much space isn’t okay. I think a bit of it it comes from my parents— my dad takes up too much space in rooms, my mother’s been taught not to. Although, she does take up a decent amount of space in certain rooms, I know she makes herself smaller in some.

Although I’ve gotten MUCH better at taking up space, and I think it’s a very good thing, I do wonder where and when I might have internalised this though. 

Jacob Collier actually talks about this a lot, and although I mostly agree with him, I do wonder if there’s one point he’s not addressing though, which is skill. The people who get good at “creatively” taking space will obviously find it easier to do that. And there is also the second aspect of subjectivity. The other day at reading circle it was easier to take space because the people around were similar to me in many ways. So there was a natural connect, resonance. But if I go talk about the same things in front of people who’ve never had any of those experiences AND are not open / curious enough to listen to what I’m saying, then taking up space will end up making me feel bad, probably.

Then maybe the thing to get better at is how to not take the lack of connect, resonance or general engagement personally. If I’m taking up space and someone has a non-positive reaction or feeling about it, that’s not something I can really help. Or maybe there is a way to take space while bringing the other into it along with you. 

Anyway, that was a nice little side-trip. 

I saw Jacob Collier live and I imagine I’ll be talking about it for years to come with anyone who will listen. There’s obviously a lot of thoughts and feelings and I’d love to really “evaluate” them all but I’m not going to do that right now. Maybe another time. 

Because I’ve had a lot of (ie sufficient) time for emotions and art lately, I sometimes get the feeling that I’m not “living” enough. I don’t know if that’s true though. I imagine that the time I spend engaging with all of these art forms (and learning) should count as living, even if I’m doing it by myself? Or maybe this feeling comes from feeling quite happy and content over the last couple weeks and I’m not too sure how it’s possible that I’m so happy and content. There it is— these last couple weeks have been the happiest I’ve been in at least the last 5-6 months. Are there important things missing from my life, still? Of course. Is there a lot of emotional work I need to do still? Of course. Are there certain situations I still avoid in order to maintain this sense of peace and calm? Of course. 

But am I also regularly moving towards the things I want, the emotional healing I crave, the avoidance I want to cut out? Also yes. Is it slow movement? Yes. But it’s what’s tolerable. I cannot make it faster, that’s just not in my capacity.

Do I still sometimes worry about things suddenly going wrong, or events I may not be able to tolerate? Of course. But I’m trying to let those worries be passing, and not engage with them all the time. 

People, nature and art will be the light to follow while of course being cognisant of my (somewhat limited) capacity to take in the new. 

066a – daily rambles, hello november

It’s a beautiful day to write. 

Why do these words ring true? I hadn’t even stopped to consider that it really is a beautiful day today. I woke up a little late today and immediately got to some of the things I try to make sure to do every morning— the routinely stuff, basically— but I think I was operating from a brain lens, not a body lens. And yet, these six words, they brought me back to the present like nothing else had, until so far. 

This is the power of words. This is what I want to access more often. I write a lot lately but I know there’s a reason it’s satisfactory only like 6/10 times. Because I’m not feeling it, often. So how do I write in a more embodied way? 

I’ve been having the same experience with drums. My instructor is pretty good at this, he keeps asking me to come back to present, to not “think” so much, to “feel” it. And initially, I wasn’t really getting it. I was very defensive (unintentionally). I kept claiming that no, I don’t think I’m thinking too much, and what? Of course I’m feeling it. But then, when I actually felt it, I knew what he’d been trying to say all along. And it’s been lovely. I can’t yet keep the focus active for maybe more than a third of the class, but that third is the most satisfactory. 

So I imagine that’s going to be the case for writing too. So, how do I write in a more embodied way? I want to spend more time with this question. I’m running a bit late for class right now so I gotta stop. But I’m going to come back to this. 

— 

Alright, back at this. 

Had a nice action-oriented evening.. attended drums and vocals lessons, bought some food on the way back. Shortlisted some of the poems I want to submit for a thing, resumed lessons with the other kid I’ve been teaching for a bit. 

I’m trying to understand how I feel around children. Sometimes I feel really nice, sometimes I feel a bit weird. I think it’s a me problem though. I don’t know, when I’m relaxed and not too worried about my goals and “adulting problems”, I enjoy interacting with kids. But when I have all these things on my mind, it’s generally a little annoying. But I think there’s a lot to learn from them. How to take up space, for example. How to be authentic. How to connect by giving attention. Kids aren’t skilled at having equal conversations, you don’t go in expecting it to be a 50/50 exchange. You give attention without expecting much in return but then you get it eventually. But you get it back in ways you wouldn’t have been able to foresee actually. But that’s the best part.

I have a theory that most kids (hence, humans) are at least somewhat sensitive but when they’re forced to grow up (or for various other reasons like societal pressures) they numb down or dull down their sensitivity— at least a little bit. [More research on this sometime]. 

Got some laundry done too, I’ve been putting it off for a while. 

Stepping out of the house (even for an hour or so) can have such great returns. Should make it a point to do this most days. 

062b – grief is not generous

Everything feels a little different now. The news of Matthew Perry’s death is hitting hard. I read the news in the morning and went back to sleep, hoping I’d wake up to a different reality. 

I rarely feel this way about celebrity deaths (Matt Haig states the same sentiment in one of his very fresh posts). In fact he’s already expressed some of the things I’m feeling today / right now so maybe this is repetitive to anyone’s who’s reading this. But it doesn’t matter. 

I rarely feel this way about celebrity deaths but maybe Friends was different. Even when I’d made real, made-to-last friendship bonds, Friends was still precious. Our friendships deepened over long character and episode discussions and many, many rewatches of them. 

In school, I’d relate to Chandler a lot. 

This May, I saw the reunion movie (after a long break from the series) on a flight to Bangalore, which I was on to visit my college friends, after a sufficiently long gap. I told them when I met them how fitting it was that we (well, most of us anyway) were all obsessed with this show during college and now here I was watching the reunion movie almost a decade later since we first became friends.

It’s all a lot. 

I know a lot of people I know are feeling a lot. But I don’t know why that’s not making any of this easier. 

I suppose grief has a way of taking all your attention, all your resources. Grief is not generous, I’m realising. 

There’s also other contexts of the world (or our own personal lives, in many cases) that we cannot ignore. But we must grieve each story, each loss: whether we do it individually or separately is upto the feeler of said feelings.  

Or maybe “big specific deaths” also bring into focus the fragility of life. You get tense about the things you haven’t done, the stories you haven’t told, the people you haven’t spent enough time with, the grudges you haven’t let go of yet, the nice things you haven’t said to the people you want to appreciate, all of that. And yet, will you change? Will you take the courage to do even a little bit of everything you haven’t done? I’m going to do it. I’m going to write love-letters (or e-mails) to all the important people in my life today. Or at least, as many as I can. 

October seems like it’s becoming the season of goodbyes. 

Wake me up when October ends, I think? 

053b – if I die, do not say I was reckless and stupid

The mind goes to dark places tonight. I’ve recently moved to an apartment by myself in South Delhi, India. Delhi is infamous for being a terribly unsafe city, especially for women. I’m experiencing a bunch of strong thoughts right now, ranging from actual worries about my literal safety to judgement around having made a potentially bad, stupid, not a very thought-out decision. I’m also a little angry with the people who I did rely on for a “second opinion” during my search, who didn’t voice out their concerns when they could have. 

I’m trying to access stoicism, even though that’s tough to access when it comes to the worst-case scenarios around this kind of a problem: sexual assault, rape, a range of physical harm, murder. I don’t have reassurance to offer to myself. 

So that’s the first part of the problem, but considering it is not the average-case scenario, only the worst-case scenario, I want to address the other part of the problem. Let’s say I have a couple weeks of bad-sleep-nights, and I come to the conclusion that this wasn’t a good decision.. is that so bad? I didn’t originally want to make a fear-based decision based on my past philosophy, but maybe it’s okay to arrive to the conclusion that in certain situations, making fear-based decisions is fine too. (Of course, it’s the more rational thing to do for a lot of people, but the reason I hadn’t wanted to do that until now is because I run more anxious about many things, and I didn’t want my anxiety to impact my life, not too much.)

— 

Slept off eventually because I was tired enough to, so maybe I’ll continue this another time. I’m planning to have some backups in place though, more self-defence tools, and maybe some self-defence classes. Obviously, if anything major was to happen, this wouldn’t help much, but one can only hope. 

Anyway, the daytime is quite nice, apart from it being extremely hot, and I don’t want to keep the air-conditioning on all the time. I don’t know, I have so many conflicting desires in life, not sure how to find a middle-ground with any of them. 

I really love the house otherwise, like I can envision everything, once it’s all set up, I can imagine having a really nice stint here, socially, creatively, I think. And post August I think it also won’t be as hot anymore, so that’ll be quite nice. I need to go out for a walk today to explore the area a little bit, though I’m feeling a little lazy. 

One realisation I had yesterday was that I’ve had a lot of exposure therapy wrt my anxiety etc in the last couple days, so it’s good to know that when I do need to do things that are non-negotiable, I’m able to do them. This is good for self-trust. 

My third month in Delhi has ended, but really, my time here only begins now. Delhi, be good to me. 🙂 ❤ 

052a – daily adventures in my city

It’s raining cats and dogs. There’s a 2-hour traffic jam on both sides of the road, it’d be completely stupid to take an auto or a cab to get to where I want to go. My destination is only slightly over a kilometre away. But I know the walking route is not very well-built, a friend had once tried to walk the same route to get to my place and had informed me of its quality. She’d arrived at my place, very flustered, exclaiming “never again”, even though that was during a relatively better-weather month. I’m very unsure of what I’m about to do, but I’m going for my first drums class, and I don’t want to cancel it. I’ve been looking forward to it the whole day today. 

I start walking. It’s not that bad. I’ve got my worn-and-torn shoes on, and there’s enough people doing the same walk I’m doing, dodging the same puddles, using the same stones and bricks for support that I am. Who needs to go to Yosemite when you have this easy-moderate hike right next door to you, I think. I had stopped liking this type of humour for quite a while, but when you start living in India, it’s hard to not to be a bit sardonic sometimes. I’ve grown up in Mumbai, I should be able to do this, I think. But I don’t put my earphones on because I need all my brain-power and focus to not get more mud on myself than I need to. I cover half the route without any major problems. But then the pedestrians start to disappear. I’m a little worried, though I know even in the worst-case scenario, it’ll be like a half-kilometre stretch. There’s a lot more honking. The sidewalk ends abruptly, but I see a man continuing to walk himself and his bike amongst the puddles and the traffic coming from the opposite side. I quickly decide to follow him since I think he might be someone who does this on a daily basis. I feel lucky to have found support before I have the time to regret this stupid walk. He looks behind and catches my eye, we both sigh and then simultaneously smile, frustrated by the weather and the state of our surroundings. I’ve seen Parasite, I know that environmental disasters (big or small) affect the (financially) underprivileged so much more than they affect me.  

But right now, purely in this particular moment, we are in the same situation. And I know that our destinations may be vastly different (mine was recreation, his might have been work, I don’t know), but at least in this ten-minute journey, he seems as glad as I feel to have the company. 

051b – late twenties are tough

Dating is hard. One minute you’re deep into the fantasy of falling in love with a new person you might have met, and the next minute you’re grieving the fact that they left you on “Seen” (albeit for a day). I’ve worked a lot on myself since my first dating-apps-sourced heartbreak of 2020, but there is only so much work you can do with the past and the present. There are scenarios that come up every time you meet a new person that bring up so much new stuff for you, and no amount of self-work, therapy, healing, non-fiction / self-help books can really prepare you for the real thing. I think. I shudder to thing how much I might have been affected by said scenarios if I was still the same person I’d been in 2020. 

Dating is realising that the knowledge of your attachment styles, communication preferences, following @therapyjeff etc etc doesn’t actually prevent you from feeling shitty when things don’t go as expected. Partly because the people you meet may not have engaged in all of this. But also partly because at the end of day, lived experience will trump everything. Bottom line is, while you can look at your feelings with more awareness (and knowledge), there is no way to avoid them altogether. Pain and suffering is the price we pay for living. 

Last couple of days have been tough. House-hunting was paused for a bit because I couldn’t really find good options, but overall I’ve been unable to focus on other things until this piece is figured. I think that’s the tough part for me, parallelisation. It does take around a month in most places to find a place, so I’m trying to just remind myself that, but overall optimism has been hard to find when it comes to this. I’m also conflicted about the area/neighbourhoods I’m looking in and whether I should compromise a little bit on that (since I’m unable to find good places in my most preferred areas). I don’t know. 

I found a music open-mic event that’s happening somewhat nearby to my current house, thinking of going and participating in that. I was practicing singing today and realised that it does recharge me, even though I often forget that when I’m not actively engaging in it. So maybe it’ll be nice to engage in this goal of mine and get that done with. I also enquired about drums classes nearby and going for an intro session today. Excited about that though! Been meaning to try this out forever so if I can engage with this, I might feel good. 

I was supposed to have therapy this Monday which got canceled which I think is the primary cause of why I’ve been feeling so low last few days. I mean, not the root cause itself but something which could have alleviated everything. 

In summary, dating, house-hunting, physical tiredness, a canceled therapy session, potential pms – these are the things that have got me down. Let’s see what shape the week ends up taking. Onward!