fears – untitled atm

078a – summoning courage

Finally have my first-ish essay ready for Substack. I’ve decided to post more long-form and “thought-out” essays on Substack from this week or next week onwards. I imagine I’ll still continue journaling-style writing here and post on a much lesser frequency on Substack but let’s see how that goes. Not sure whether or not to port this mailing list so if you want to go ahead and subscribe to that in advance you can do that here.

I have an updated verdict on Indian weddings: I don’t hate them, in fact they can be very special, and I don’t want to not attend these in the near future. However I do need to figure out a more comfortable outfit situation so that I’m not background-frustrated for 2-3 whole days.

I also realised how large events (events with many people) can be pretty great for creative work— you get ideas and they’re also pretty great for sharing and testing ideas too. Plus personally I find a lot of general value in conversation too and I think places where you can have various types of conversations can be great resources.

I am however extremely exhausted and I’m going to fall asleep soon but I really wanted to write a post first since substack is not yet setup correctly with all the logistics etc.

I feel better in terms of organisation now, I have a better handle on tasks, projects, etc. I imagine this could work decently well at least for the next month or two. I still want to wrap up a few things in December and I’m optimistic about the next 20 days or so. There’re of course enough social commitments to also make time for but I’m going to attempt to “get” as much out of them as I can.

I posted about courage here as one of my open questions and I managed to do a couple of courageous tasks earlier today (ie facing my own thoughts and feelings about an uncomfortable topic) and I want to note down what worked for me.

A lot of quiet time and observation-time with nature. I think it really helps to ground yourself through nature. Remembering that we’re all god’s creations so we are indeed capable of summoning all the courage from inside us that we might need.
However, facing tough situations in steps— if you can afford to— can help a lot. It’s important to recognise that something is likely to be “too much” if you attempt to face it all at once, and so doing it in steps can be critical.
Writing notes and letters to yourself. Affirming yourself.
The internet is a great place to find people who can inspire you. Find heroes. Find people who might have gone through similar struggles. Find people who’ve done courageous acts and are talking about them. I think de-anonymised accounts help a lot more than anonymised stories, but that could just be my preference.
Find community.
Remembering that the opposite of facing your fears is either depression or delusion. If either of those things sound okay to you, that’s great, if not, you probably don’t have a choice.

I don’t know why I shifted to second-person when I started listing these down, but whatever. Maybe somebody will find this useful. Maybe not, maybe I will again, tomorrow.

I’ll keep this one short, feeling pretty tired today. Write later, welcome December!

067b – the inherent insecurity of an artist

Something that I always keep coming back to is labels. I know that it’s important to me that I accept certain labels (from myself, for myself).

What are these labels, you ask?

Well, to name a few: artist, photographer, writer, poet, musician, singer, vocalist

I want to be able to use them for myself without scoffing.

I know exactly when I started rejecting these labels (I actually picked it up from someone else who was rejecting labels because they didn’t feel deserving of them, and because I thought that this person was actually much better at the craft than I was at the time, I internalised “well if they’re not even calling themselves a photographer, how can I?). And I applied the same reasoning to all others labels as well.

HOWEVER, there is only so much time and brainpower. It gets tedious to go through this dialog which almost always goes the same way.

Oh but how can I call myself an artist?
> Oh but you are an artist.
But I’ve never made any money out of my art or I don’t even know if any of my art is good!
> Yeah but that doesn’t matter.

So, obviously, there is a push and a pull here. There are two parts that are fighting with each other.

Maybe rejecting these labels served me a purpose AT SOME POINT OF TIME. Maybe I didn’t want to come across as overconfident, or cocky, or lacking self-awareness, etc etc. I was afraid of judgement, basically. But is it serving me at all anymore?

If I write -> I am a writer.

If I click pictures -> I am a photographer.

If I paint (sometimes) -> I am an artist.

If I write poetry (sometimes) -> I am a poet.

If I play or make music -> I am a musician.

This SHOULD feel true. This SHOULD feel enough. But why is it that it still doesn’t? I think it’ll take some practice.

Let’s look at some definitions:

noun: artist: a person who creates paintings or drawings as a profession or hobby.

noun: musician: a person who plays a musical instrument, especially as a profession, or is musically talented.

noun: writer: a person who has written something or who writes in a particular way.

You get the gist. I think it’s always the “especially as a profession” that I would hang on to as the main reason for rejecting all these labels.

Yesterday at a poetry slam somebody talked about the inherent insecurity of an artist. Obviously I really related to that and we talked about it at length, but couldn’t really come to a conclusion. I think over the last few years, enough people have given me the gift of putting these labels on me and while it always feels magical to hear someone call you a poet or a musician or an artist etc etc, I know that what I really really NEED is for me to give myself the same gift, again and again.

So okay, there is a clearly an inner-critic who is not ready to give this to me. Maybe I can think about the benefits of these labels, instead, then?

To be honest, the only benefits I can think of for now are just more efficient and optimal conversation, I do think second-guessing everything you say can get tiring for someone listening to you. And then that (ie more confidence, surity) allows for quicker connections with potential collaborators as well.

Maybe you’re thinking, how the fuck does this all matter? Call yourself whatever you want, just do the damn thing. But I’ve found that loopy dialogues like these are exactly what prevent me from doing the damn thing. If I’m thinking about this insecurity, then there’s a reason for it. I feel strongly about it, and I do feel a need to resolve it.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe I don’t need 100 benefits to a thing to adopt it. It feels true, it feels resonant. I know I revel in labels like woman, queer, demisexual, ambivert, etc etc. So why is it that I feel so undeserving of these other labels?

I still don’t know. Ah, I don’t know if I got anywhere with this.

But I’ll end this with one more point to my inner critic: maybe it’s just realising that calling yourself a musician doesn’t mean that you’re implying that you’re a good musician. That is something you cannot decide. You’re passionate about these crafts and you’re also cognisant about the subjectivity of art, that is all there is, actually.

039a – ah, December

When did December become such a big scheduling nightmare? Now I “know” rationally that it kind of always was like this. But this time? This time feels a little too insane. I’m in India for the holidays and going to be here till mid-January.

My social circle seems to have exploded overnight. Or over the year, whatever. Need to figure out how to let go of people to start making space for new people. Or figure which ones to retain and which ones I don’t need to make too much space for. Now I kind of understand why some people at parties look like they have ZERO interest in mingling and connecting.

I want to take a slow day for myself today, do some writing and reflection. But actually do it.

Okay, so maybe I can start with the biggest thing on my mind today. Which is the decision around geographical movement for myself. For a few months now, I’ve been thinking about moving back to India (for the time-being). I’ve always thought that here’s where I want to build my life, and though enough people have tried to convince me that I may not actually want to this, I’m now sure that I will never know until I actually try it for myself. So, that’s that. But if I were to humour the world for a little bit, and because it does make sense to, I’d like to seriously articulate or tap into the reasons behind this desire.

I want my familial connections and existing connections (some of my existing close friends) to be a more frequent part of my social routines. Not just over calls and videos, but IRL. And not just once or twice or thrice a year, but more frequently.

I just feel more connected to the overall “vibes” of the Indian cities that I’ve grown up in or spent time in. And yes, that’s not to say that you can’t build this anywhere else, but so far, I’d rather explore what already is than try to build this somewhere else.

I do like some aspects of Indian culture: the food, the TV, the media and content, and though I can “bring” with myself a lot of it wherever I go, I can’t really connect more with it (or deepen it) without literally being here.

The freedom around career choices: While this is going to be a hard, confusing, potentially frustrating question by itself, I still want the choice to quit my job whenever I want to or take long-term breaks without having to think about completely changing my life.

If I ever reach a point where I can help other people grow, I want the people here to benefit most from it. ie I guess I want to give back (maybe I can’t do enough of that remotely).

Okay, I think the reasoning is mostly sound. Now, to the fears behind this.

Feels like a big, relatively irreversible move. My (recent) judgement of India seems to be from breaks over the holidays etc. So can I really predict how I’ll feel on a day-to-day basis? Probably not. But does that necessarily mean it’ll be bad? Probably not, either. And that’s what I find out. So it’s an experiment of sorts, and of course, the cost to the experiment seems quite high. But I also know that if I want to come back to a tech job, I know it’s possible with some preparation. So it’s big yes, but maybe not necessarily irreversible.
The way I’m currently planning to do this is to take a break from job. This has come about from the need of me wanting some freedom (in terms of time and work commitments) to spend some time doing the things I want to do. And I’m worried that this freedom will eventually get boring and I won’t know what to do next.

The counter to this has to be a belief in my inner self. That even if I do get bored and find myself without any answers as such, I will be able to cope with that.

The other thing I need to do is set some intentions behind the move+break. I think the primary intention is to find work that I can feel more aligned with. And to at least figure out what kind of work that’ll end up being for me. I can’t narrow this down more, because that is daunting, at the moment at least. I have options that I want to explore, but the exploration itself cannot happen right now. And of course, to figure out whether an Indian city is truly a place I can be in for the long haul or not.

009 – why we’re scared of failing fast + are we?

Why am I scared of failing fast? Why do we spend hours and hours in preparation for important things only to tank them anyway? I think it comes from a belief that “opportunities are limited”. And for me, that comes from my parents’ upbringing, and hence mine. When they got opportunities in their time, it was critical for them to make the best of them – because opportunities were indeed, limited.

For me however this is barely true anymore. I’m privileged enough to have more than a basic set of skills, tools and financial support to sustain myself. A few missed opportunities is probably barely going to make a difference for me.

I know it sounds like I’m coming at this from a “work and career” perspective here but I mean this for everything. I have a terribly strong fear of failure in me. It shows up in long-term “important” actions like wanting to quit my job sometimes (and here maybe it’s aligned with my values for that to exist), but it also shows up in the most minuscule of actions. I only put up code changes once I’ve made them “as perfect” as possible, because I’m afraid of “too many” comments or feedback on them. (Even though I don’t need to be.) Failing fast should probably work much better for most communities, and at some level I do know this. I should be able to bring up issues and problems out in the open, as fast as possible. It’s not “on me” to fix everything. The more problems that exist, the happier my company would be, ideally. These are people who enjoy problem solving.

I’m afraid of going on dates until I feel like I’m in a good place, even though.. I think, in reality – all of that barely makes a difference. I can be the most perfect version of myself and it still won’t work. Or I can be flawed and rough and it still might. Plenty of people in the world, right?

(Emotional) tunnel vision probably has a big role to play here too.

It’s the same thing with difficult emotional conversations as well. Scared of testing the waters. Afraid of saying the wrong thing too soon.. when in reality – the faster you fuck up – the faster you improve and grow. I’d heard this advice from someone on how to do college best. It was that one should try to get a C or a B right in the first semester itself – it’ll free you up. Though it made sense to me even at the time, I wasn’t fully able to absorb it. And then there’s this other piece of how a bad grade might also not feel like enough of a failure sometimes. I still think it’s brilliant advice though. I see one problem with it however – it’s often hard to fail deliberately. It’s hard to go into something “knowing” you’re likely to fail at it.

The only thing you can really do is continue to set yourself up for failure (without thinking you’re doing that), by doing every little scary or difficult thing that you’re pushing away. Probably best to do a quick cost-benefit analysis though – we don’t want to be impulsive and risk getting traumatized.

The other reason could be low self-esteem, of course. The lack of trust and confidence that I’ll be able to cope with failure, that I’ll be able to build myself up again. I’ve been beating myself up lately about how “I haven’t really failed enough” and that’s the reason these new failures feel so big. But today as I’m thinking about it, I think that’s not correct. I have failed enough. I do remember how much some of the “hardships” I’ve had to face in the past have affected me. Like if I made a list – I’m sure I could come up with at least 10 ten things which at the time felt like “the end of the world”. Yet, this month, I felt like everything bad that was happening to me was for the first time in my life. So maybe we forget how strong we are? Maybe we forget how much we’ve coped with? There’s a famous quote by Donald Winnicott, which is – “The catastrophe you fear will happen has in fact already happened.” It makes sense – trauma is probably so painful that it makes sense for us to suppress it when it happens – but often it manifests as fears instead.

Does that mean my fear of failures points to a bunch of unprocessed failures? It’s possible.

I’m sure personality types do have a role to play here. What makes some people grow from failures, and what makes some people more fearful instead? It’s possible that different people are afraid of different types of failures though, so it might just feel like we’re alone in our fears.

Didn’t really get too far on this but here’s what I have so far (for myself, at least)

Beliefs about scarcity and limited opportunities, people
Beliefs about self’s inabilities to cope with failure, to cope with the emotions that accompany failure
Hazy memory, inability to collect and remember past failures
Potential unprocessed failures
I might not truly be as fearful as I think I am
- This might have some truth to it since I’m up at 5 am not giving fucks about my sleep schedule, even though last week was traumatic and I’d told myself I that I need to be disciplined

Okay, I think I have one more. People like me don’t value our time enough. And I don’t mean this in a harsh way. But if I did, I’d probably be getting more done – I’d be failing more and succeeding more. I’d spend more of my time facing my fears than I’d spend living in those fears. This one’s good, this one’s important I think. And seriously fuck the pandemic excuse. Anyone who’s saying they’re not growing during the pandemic is probably not being creative and intentional enough*. It’s interesting, this one was present in the question all along. We were talking about failing “fast”. There’s clearly a time dimension there. 🙂

*Of course, assuming one is safe, healthy and has a job.