geography – untitled atm

103b – foggy

Up early even though I don’t think I’m fully rested. Probably the jet lag. The last 3-4 days have been kind of confusing— happy to back to Delhi in some ways but also very dysregulated in some. Don’t think this is the city I want to continue to live in, but also very unsure of “where to, next”. I do feel the need to organise my space a bit, it’s been very cluttered lately and I feel like it’s a factor in how blocked I feel with “productivity”.

Been feeling quite directionless (well, pulled in many directions) but stagnant because one is not much stronger than the others. I do miss being creative and the ability to just sit down with myself and my thoughts for hours and hours. I think I need alone time.

The SF trip was super fun and I’m glad I did it. It did however make me feel like I do miss certain parts of that life which I must try to incorporate into my current life. What are those parts? I think better weather, more mobility, walkability, cleanliness outside, going out more often, feeling more energetic and active. But primarily, better weather. I feel like weather makes SUCH a huge difference to my nervous system but I have only properly realised that now. I don’t know how I was able to spend more than a year in India without fully realising the gravity of how much I was not able to be “fully” myself.

There are certain things that I am interested in beginning, but unable to find myself from actually doing it. I think I’m feeling a stagnation that I just can’t describe properly. I know the only way out is to actually go ahead and do said things, but..

I think A needs a lot more help than she’d care to admit (and it’s the same for me, in so many ways), and I also don’t want to push any of my “new” ideas of productivity on her. Well, I don’t know where this is coming from. Maybe certain thought patters of her are affecting me a bit too. And again, that goes back to needing my alone time.

I’m also VERY conflicted about pursuing something so that it can eventually fetch me some money or to actually go ahead and try those almost no-income internships/opportunities just to understand the kind of work that exists in those kind of roles. My heart says to opt for the latter, because not sure when’s the next time I’ll have the chance to make that kind of a choice too, what if things change in life a couple years down the line where I definitely have to make the more monetarily-informed decision.. so yes, it makes sense to go ahead with what I want right now as opposed to what I necessarily need. And yet, everytime there’s a delay in any of it, I find myself questioning things again.

Well, there is it. I do have some answers. Going to go ahead and act on them. Cheers, folks! xx

092a – promises, caution and chatter

I don’t like making promises I can’t keep. But in the moment when you’re really enjoying time with someone I tend to say “let’s do this again” instead of “I’m having such a good time”. I guess I’d like to change this.

Which is why long distance friendships are sometimes so much easier to maintain. You meet someone for a weekend once a year and you get to tell them how much you enjoy time with them, you both know there isn’t much point in making plans for another few months. Even when you do talk about taking trips, it’s not as high stakes because you know it’s okay if you don’t execute these plans. And you can somehow trust that the other person knows it too. Then, if you do execute them— it’s a bonus.

But maybe the fear of disappointing others also comes from the very childlike “disappointed” part of me. Broken promises, maybe I still carry the hurt from them.

Now, I can trust that other people are adults too. Of course, I do want to be careful with my word. But things do change sometimes, we do say things a little impulsively. We can’t always stop ourselves. I am a little impulsive and I am a little moody but that doesn’t mean that I don’t mean the things I say. But sure, I can still afford to be a little more careful, overall.

Anyway, that’s a bit of thoughts and rambles and now I must make space for some chatter. Pretty occupied with social and family time till the first week of March and then there’s a music open mic coming up in the last week of March— would like to prepare seriously for that. By the end of March, I would also like to wrap up a a teaching project I had taken on a few months ago. I’ve been off and on with that and I’d like to see it through.

I completed 6-7 months in Delhi recently and I think I really like being here. Apart from the weather, most things are pretty good. I feel like there’s mostly a good amount of fun things going on (friends, family, hobbies etc) which is the primary reason I don’t feel like I need to think about geography too much. I’d like to be here at least throughout 2024 and then I can always recheck or reevaluate.

My most important task on a daily or weekly basis though is making enough time for myself and creative work. If I don’t do this, I end up discontent. As long as I keep writing and/or engaging with music or photography “enough”, I feel like things don’t get too bad.

Success for me is more good days than bad days and enough time for art and creativity and people I love and by that definition I’d say I’m pretty happy. Sleep has also been much better over the last couple weeks and I’m pretty grateful for that.

Alright I think that’ll be it from me today. Hope y’all have a good end to February! xx

057a – some clarity

It’s been a difficult week. Anxiety has been super active, and I’ve found that it likes to focus most on two subjects: career and love.

The interesting thing to realise is that my anxiety doesn’t focus on geography as much lately. (I think this could be a sign that India is working well for me, potentially. However, I know that it could be conditional on the fact that I have kept my daily frustrations minimised to a high level. I think I do feel more number of smaller, daily frustrations here and yet feel more of a long-term overall groundedness. But if the frustrations were more for any reason, there is potential for that to rock that feeling of overall stability, of course).

re: career

I’ve gotten more clarity on this as well. I’ve found that music and writing are the two forms of creative expression that I gravitate most towards (for various reasons which I know very well but don’t need to list out here). I can legit sit at home and play, sing and learn music all day, and that’d keep me at peace and also happy and also satisfied, fulfilled. If I were living in a vacuum, I’d probably continue life the way it has been over the last couple months for at least another couple years. But because we live in a society, and money is a thing, I’m thinking I’ll start looking for part-time, remote jobs (what kind, I don’t know yet) starting January. This would still allow me to continue to spend on creative pursuits, I think. And then I can always reevaluate.

I also think I’m not a big fan of the term “career”. I don’t think I’ll be working on building another career, so to speak. I’m probably more aligned with the idea of jobs, yes, when you need money, and otherwise of course spending your time meaningfully is important, and for me that meaning can be derived from the little things. In the current phase of my life, majority of my “work”-time would be devoted to creative expression, whether or not I share the results with the world or not. It’s what allows me to best explore my inner world (and maybe even the external world), and it’s what gives me the most joy and meaning. Whether or not it’s enough for long-term satisfaction is something I’ll probably know with more time, but for now this is enough.

re: love

I’m learning to focus more on the present, as opposed to worries about the future. This is obviously valid for life in general too, but can sometimes really show up with relationships and dating stuff. I’m learning to work on some of my anxious-attachment symptoms, therapy has been super helpful with all of this. I’m learning to listen to my body and my gut as opposed to my mind. My mind is very loud, tuning into the body is often the only thing that helps me be closer to what I really want.

Time to head out for my vocals lesson. Cheers!

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. 🙂 ❤

050 – two months of moving to India + 50,000 words

Lately I’ve had nights where I wake up with the same thoughts that were buzzing in my head when I was going to sleep. It’s kinda weird, because sleep is almost always a good way to get a “reset”. Without this reset, the day that’s coming up can feel really bleak (if the night had been feeling that way). I woke up kind of depressed today. I’ve been feeling low since the last two days. Which, of course, I’m generally used to, ie periods of feeling low, but things were still a bit tough this weekend.

This lowness was making me doubt my moving-to-India decision quite strongly. I’m okay now, did a bit of physical exercise, had my afternoon coffee, played a game of online Catan, and consumed a bit of nicotine too. In the meanwhile, my mind was able to come up with some counters for this doubt.

I did this to minimise regrets, and that’s still very important. If I plan to adjust to India even for a full year, I will have to go through the doubt days. The days when it feels like a bad decision. That’s just a part of any big move. I’ve had similar days in grad school in Atlanta, in SF and even in Amsterdam. Regardless of the place or the thing, I’m like a 100% sure that “doubt” is just a part of the package.

I literally don’t have the option to not be working anywhere else. So I just need to remind myself to be grateful for the career freedom I have right now. I don’t get that anywhere else. When I see people living in all these beautiful countries and “having fun”, I don’t see the 40 hours work-weeks they’re living for that fun. (Yes, that may still be enjoying that, but I personally wouldn’t at this time, so it’s just not an option for me.) I don’t get to compare the “fun” if I don’t keep in mind the work thing.

The other day I was talking to my sister, who was having similar feelings about her decision to be in the US. And we concluded that no place has everything, so even if we want to divide our time in multiple places in the long-term, in the short-term we still need to focus on making the most of where we are. That advice is obviously valuable for me as well. While I’m here, I need to focus on all the things I have here. ie the people, the art I want to make and all the additional time I have that I get to use on whatever I want.

That brings me to the next thing. How do I want to spend all this extra time I have? I think I’ve already addressed that here. Maybe it might be worth putting down some long-term goals to make all of those buckets a little less vague.

Currently, I think I’m also feeling blocked because house-search is taking a good amount of bandwidth, and I feel like I’m not able to fully feel the freedom that I want (need) until that isn’t done. And that’s fair. Since that is something I’m sure I need to get started on “life”, it’s okay for me to feel blocked by it. Of course, in ideal conditions, we won’t be waiting for X and Y to be sorted before we could work on Z, ie if Z was important enough, but I don’t think I’m there yet. And it’s not like I’m not doing Z at all. I’m just not fully able to enjoy it.

Since this is going to be my 50th post here, I figured it might be worth making it a 1000-word post. I was planning to reflect a bit on writing anyway, so maybe I can just do that here.

I’ve increasingly been feeling that setting up this blog was one of the best things I could have done for my writing goals. And my creative goals in general too. The freedom of just being able to write whatever you want and hit “Publish” without thinking much about it is amazing. The pipeline is easy, there isn’t much overhead, and I get to feel satisfied about sharing most of what I’m writing.

I have 70 subscribers here! Yay! While the number may not feel like a lot in today’s age of multiple thousands followers and subscribers that most people have, it’s still worth celebrating, since this is purely word-vomits, and by some miracle I have 70 people who receive updates whenever I share something. (They may or may not read it, it doesn’t matter, really, but I’m super duper grateful anyway)

Because dedicating a place for just writing was so helpful to me (and similarly the music account I have on Insta was as well), I do think it might be worth separating out my photography and art accounts too. I’m super conflicted about this one, and I follow a couple people who’ve experienced the same conflict too, but data tells me I should do it, if I really just want to do “more” of either (or both) things.

The other day someone asked me what is the one thing (activity) I feel like is “mine”, the one which I feel really called towards, or really am able to feel “attached” to in a way… and I said “writing”. I think that itself for someone like me speaks volumes. And I think I have this blog to thank for it.

I posted a lot in May and June! So having the spare time to do this did make me do more of this, and that makes me incredibly happy.

Getting back into reading has been good too. I’ve had 2-3 years of very minimal reading, and now that I’m getting back into it, it feels really good. While reading is not necessarily a requirement for writing, it does help to get some inspiration from time to time. I finally left the book I was stuck on even though I thought I didn’t want to leave it midway, and started reading a new one, which was a great decision because a. It’s been a really enjoyable read and b. It makes me want to write more.

Alright, that’s a wrap on 50,000 words on here. Happy July!

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.

035b – dream cities (read: dreams)

People often ask me what my dream city would be. Mostly when I’m complaining about how geographical movement is hard. But I don’t know if I have a dream city. I just have dreams.. and most cities I’ve lived in are capable of fulfilling them for me.

I don’t think my dreams are too big. I want to sing for small-medium sized groups of people. I want a decent-sized sunlit apartment to spend my indoors time in. I want a guitar and a keyboard at home. I want relatively warm weather for as much time of the year as possible. A couple months of rainy weather would be nice too.

I want a sense of community, belonging: I think I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to build this, again, at least in places I’ve lived so far. I want to be around good friends. And I think I want to spend 20% of my social (and free)-time with close family.

I want a person to share all of this with. I want to be able to do fun things with them. I probably want us to co-parent a cat. And some plants.

And of course, I want to able to earn some amount of money to support all of these things. Ideally, I want a career that can help me earn some money and also help me fulfill some of my yearnings. But with a lot of remote opportunities and general globalization, I think the city I choose wouldn’t affect this in a big way.

I want some greenery I can access within 10-15 minutes of walking or biking, ideally. I want to be able to drive a car. And I want a city with infrastructure decent enough to make it fun to drive around.

Of course, I want to be safe while I do all this. So yes, half of the Indian cities I know get removed from my “cities I can live in” list. But Bangalore, Mumbai and even Delhi (with some caveats) stay on.

I want good food. I definitely want some cute cafes here and there. I want to be able to go dancing once a while.

–

I was writing this between breaks from reading this brilliant read about picking careers. Went back and spent around 2 more hours on it, brainstormed and introspected a bit, and suddenly I find myself feeling very optimistic. Maybe it’s helping that I’m seeing 7 am after many days (my sleep schedule’s been really bad, so I ended up pulling an all-nighter today). But regardless, the optimism is real.

I’m okay with perhaps switching careers at the age of 30, I’m okay with being single for as long as I don’t find the right person (and if that never ends up happening, I feel like I’ll be okay with that too), I’m okay with possibly never having kids (which reduces the time pressure on finding someone). And lastly, I’m perfectly okay with my place in this world – small or big. How liberating to feel this. Hope it lasts a while!