queer – untitled atm

094b – hanging out

Sitting in a Doolally in Andheri in Mumbai and I’m determined to write a post today. I’d decided to travel for very personal reasons and even though I was content to be able to visit, I did keep an additional couple days on almost a whim of sorts. I thought I might meet people, go to the beach or do something fun, without planning too much for it. Also the tickets were much less expensive which was an important factor too.

I do feel like including a bit of randomness in life can be really lucrative, conducive, especially to creative work. Which is why I also feel that if I don’t get a post done I won’t feel like I made the most out of this “time” I had to kill.

Of course, if there were enough people to meet I would have been happy to spend my time with them too, but since it was short notice and somewhat last minute, I do have the evening to myself. I have a couple hours to kill before I can head to the airport and to be very honest, I feel like they might not be super easy to kill. But let’s see, we’ll see how that goes.

There are of course other “tasks” I can do but really don’t want to. Part of me wonders if I should have gone to a cafe instead of a bar. But cafes can be a bit too quiet actually. I’m not very sure. Maybe we do need “work places” that also serve alcoholic drinks. I know there’s probably a few out here but maybe not enough.

My time in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi has reinforced one thing for sure however— Mumbai definitely feels the safest and most “chill” (especially for me personally as a single queer woman) amongst the three. The other day I felt extremely unsafe and observed in Delhi, even at the airport, a place that’s supposed to be very busy and diverse.

As I start to feeling closer and more attached to the person I’m dating at the moment, I’m starting to feel warmer towards monogamous / monogamish structures again. I was thinking maybe I don’t feel jealousy and possessiveness for people lately but now I’m thinking maybe that’s not very true. We’ve spent a lot of time together over the last week and I’m feeling a lot of “new” feelings for this person since then. But I do, still, worry about the idea of attempting to “secure” our attachments. It feels quite risky. Addressing this feels good though. I hadn’t realised I was carrying this and it was weighing on me quite a bit. I do feel a lot of separation anxiety when we say goodbye or end calls and I just don’t know if that can ever be solved or if that will ever feel less painful. With separation anxiety, it’s never a lasting feeling, I know that things become okay once we spend a bit of time apart, like I get busy with my own thing, my own routines etc. But it is super difficult when actually separating. Maybe I look this up a little more and do some research on this. Maybe there’s a way to ensure that I won’t be co-dependent even if I’m in a monogamous relationship. This sounds tough to me but I DO feel that that’s my primary fear. Not that I won’t get to date other people etc but that I will lose my individuality. So maybe I think about this fear first instead of thinking about non-monogamy instead. Maybe detanglement and individuality and independence is what I care about a lot more than wanting to see other people. Maybe seeing other people is just one way of asserting that independence and choice, and wasn’t the aim all along. Let’s see. I’m going to sit with this for the next few weeks.

I’ve written this word vomit with only 80% focus (I also replied to a bunch of texts with 80% focus), but I think I’m good for now. Hope to write again soon, cheers folks! xx

095 – curiosities and non-monogamy

There are things I do on a daily basis which help me maintain a sense of stability even as I try to keep with the various big crazy uncertainties of life. Singing, dancing, making lists, journaling, talking to and texting with people who feel like home, watching Schitt’s Creek, making and having my morning cold coffee— these are some of the things that allow me to cope with the big questions of life. These are the things that help me cope with my exploratory needs, even when those needs are incredibly anxiety inducing.

What are some of these needs, one might wonder. Lately, it’s been curiosities around non-monogamy. Which has bought up quite a bit of tumult within me, if I’m being honest. Yesterday night I realised how invested and attached I do feel about one of the existing connections in my life right now. There’s also a lot of discomfort around realising how ingrained within me the current monogamy mental model is. It’s not just me, of course, most people I know are quite monogamous and are quite happy with it as well. But in my current circles, I’m the only one who’s “trying” to check what I prefer. One of my friends identifies as polyamorous, but he has done so for pretty much the longest time and I don’t know if he struggled with any of this, and it certainly didn’t show even if he did. Another friend experimented a bit with all this— and I actually realised I wasn’t super supportive of his explorations when he was in the throes of it— I think I was of the opinion (without perhaps being very aware about it) that we don’t need to do things if they give us so much anxiety. (He would tell me about the amount of anxiety he would experience when his partner was on dates with other people and I would just struggle to understand why they (he and his partner) were putting themselves through so much when it was so uncomfortable for the both of them). Over a year later, as I’ve reconnected with the exploratory, curious parts of me, I realise that just because new things give us (me) anxiety, it doesn’t mean new things are bad.

I’m glad I’m able to hold and face this believe again and again, with various things in life. I’ve accepted that anxieties about all the plethora of things in the world aren’t “not going to show up”, and to “delete” them can’t be my aim. The aim is to just to be in touch with what new things are worth trying despite all the anxiety, and the reasons for which I may want to try them. (“What is worth trying” is also something we cannot answer in the present, but I suppose being clear about why we’re “putting ourselves through” something can help).

Whenever I’m faced with something that’s so non-conventional, I always automatically go back to the time when I first discovered that I liked women. Somehow, that wasn’t at all anxiety inducing to me. Maybe because I discovered that through love, or maybe because it was still within the limits of “my “open” mind” as it were at the time. Basically, somehow, I wasn’t inherently homophobic and was also lucky enough to probably not have too many (openly) homophobic people around me (which I believe is why I didn’t get influenced into taking on any external homophobia either).

The topics of gender and non-monogamy on the other hand, have been uncomfortable enough. But I won’t want to blame myself for the discomfort. It’s okay that it’s uncomfortable. And I know that I can work through it, also.

So yeah, I feel better now that I’ve acknowledged and laid out the discomfort and the context of the situation here. Now to the next part: if being clear about the reasons of something can help with carrying it forward, what are my reasons for wanting to explore non-monogamy?

I think it was triggered by realising I had some residual feelings for a person while I started to see a new person, and I actually felt for a (albeit brief) period of time I actually had feelings (and curiosities about more than a single person). (Side thing here— I felt a bit guilty about this, and I feel like the monogamy model is one of the causes for the guilt.)
Did some research and reading, and of course, having curiosities for more than a single person is just the starting point. Non-monogamy is not just about having these curiosities, it’s about a lot more— ie whether you have the wish to follow these curiosities, whether you have the bandwidth for it, whether you have the capacity for very open, honest communication with multiple partners and the ability to respect different types of boundaries AND the capacity to deal with the reverse, and lastly of course whether you have the willingness to then date only within the non-monogamous pool— because the reality does seem like it is an objectively smaller pool.
I do compare romantic love with non-romantic love as of now, sometimes though. I just feel like I’m a better friend because I have multiple deep friendships. And for the same reason, I just wonder if I could also be a better “lover” if I have multiple deep romantic relationships. I basically wonder if I could be more “secure” if I was non-monogamous. I’m reading a lot more about this and of course, it’s not like I’m trying to solve my relationship with myself THROUGH other people, like I know that the security essentially has to come from me, only me, and whether I date one person or two (or zero actually), that piece of the picture has to still be painted through my own internal work.. and yet, I just feel like being “forced” to do some of the work and having different types of structures and stimuli can help with it all. (Again, as it often does with friendships and all the other types of relationships.)
I’m trying to answer this very important question for myself: Why is it that we believe that we can only (romantically) love a single person at a time? Or whether it’s even true. If it’s true (for me), I may not end up caring about the why, but if it’s not true— I would really like to know sooner than later.

There’s probably a few more things here but I’m actually really satisfied with the last point, I think that’s the crux, really.

Phew, that was a lot. Stay alive folks, cheers xx

092b – new topics in life + gratitude

Every time something new comes up that I haven’t talked about too much on here, I experience new sorts of vulnerabilities. For example, I’ve started seeing someone more regularly over the last couple months and that’s brought up a lot of new questions, thoughts, feelings, etc etc in me.

That, in turn, made me realise that despite talking about SO many things with so much openness, there are still so many things that I don’t talk about, or hesitate before talking about.

Sex, physical intimacy, kink, these are some topics that I realised I’d like to talk to people more openly about. I used to think that I was the more “closed” one when it would come to these topics, and YET these days I find more people shying away from these topics even more than I do. Maybe it’s true for the Indian society, maybe my benchmarks were the ones that had been formed by my time away from India.

Monogamy and non-monogamy is the other thing that’s been occupying a lot of brain space. And while personally I’m okay with open questions taking their sweet time to find resolutions, obviously with other people in the picture, some of these questions do come with some time constraints, and I guess I have to be okay with that.

Being doing some research on the origins and advantages of monogamy and one of the primary considerations (advantage) it provides is definitely around child-bearing, raising etc. So it makes sense that I’m curious about non-monogamy because I’m also not sure whether or not want to bear (or even raise) kids.

Personally, the main aversion I feel from monogamy is the idea of being “tied to” one person. Honestly, emotionally, when I like someone I don’t feel the need to follow other curiosities. But I know from experience that other curiosities do come up as time progresses. And in those scenarios, I would just like to have more freedom to discuss them AND potentially explore and follow, if they’re strong.

Spending a lot of my time with books also. Enjoying that a lot.

I talked about love and learning earlier. I think February has been pretty great for both. If you find the right people these two things often come together, actually. I learn the best from people and if I can also find love in those dynamics (whether it’s romance or friendships or other dynamics), time-management becomes much easier. (As non-poetic as that may sound.)

Yeah, life’s pretty decent, I suppose. Not much to complain about at the moment. Pretty grateful for most parts. I’m just going to savour it all this week and not try to optimise it or “make it better”.

Why fix when not broken? Basically.

Alright that’s it from me. Hope y’all are having a safe and sound February! xx

074 – you have to write about the questions too

I don’t think enough writing can be done if your aim is to only write about the answers. I think you have to be open about the questions too, primarily because for someone like me, even the answers are found through writing. Of course, this is one of those times where the questions I’m seeking answers to are a little scarier than the ones that were present in my life over the last couple months. Questions like “Do I like to write as much as I think I do?”, “Can I make 10 original songs?”. Based on everything that’s happened this week, those questions are easy. Even “failure” in that aspect feels so easy to cope with.

So what questions am I talking about then?

This week, the questions have been:

Q: Does the label woman not fit me well anymore? Could I benefit from labels like genderqueer or gender-fluid or nonbinary a little better?

This one obviously came with a lot of grief. Realising how attached I was to this label was a revelation. Actually, it wasn’t a revelation. I knew I was quite attached to it. Growing up, I was quite often called a “tomboy” and I never actually liked the word. I don’t know why but I didn’t like being made feel “masculine” just because I liked to wear conventionally non-feminine clothes. So, then, feeling feminine and actually liking the label “woman” was a relief. If I liked the label, if I liked feeling feminine in my own ways, then clothes and presentation didn’t have to matter as much. I actually remember feeling quite happy when I got my first period. Despite all the crap it meant (ie monthly bleeding, cramps, PMS, etc etc), it made me feel great – like I finally belonged.

I don’t know enough about how I feel about this label anymore, but I’m going to take this slow. It’s entirely possible that the label has served me well until now but it just doesn’t anymore. We’ll find out.

I will be moving (or attempting to move) towards some detachment from it so that I can find out whether I’ve just been “tolerating” the label or whether I actually like it.

Of course, it’s also worth keeping in mind that I may not want to think in terms of “man” or “woman” anymore. Currently, both words make me feel a bit icky. Which might be understandable because both words currently carry so much more within and around them. What a conventional man or woman looks like, their associated qualities, what society expects from each of these roles, etc etc.

Why is this scary?— someone had asked me earlier. I think it’s only scary if I start thinking about the sexual identity aspect along with this as well. That is,

Q: Do I not like my female body anymore?

This one, I don’t think I want to explore just yet, not by myself. I want to understand how I feel, internally, before I start thinking about my form. After all, I am more than my form. I am more than body. Of course, I’m grateful for my body— it helps me sing, it helps me write, it helps me dance, it helps me paint, it helps me play instruments, it helps me smile, laugh, run, walk, sit, talk, eat, see, sense, etc. So, yes, I’m grateful for my body, and currently, acceptance and gratitude is all I can offer it.

I wish I could tell you that writing about these questions makes me feel better. But the truth is, it only makes me feel a little better. So— then— there are some other questions that I think can help me cope with the heaviness of these ones, while I live and figure out the answers.

Q: How do I comfort myself?

I know I have people who love me, support me, are willing to talk to me about all this and that’s amazing and I’m incredibly grateful. But here’s the thing. Sometimes the hardest moments are just your own. You’re the only one who has to witness them, and you’re the only one who has to remind yourself that everything is passing. Compassion, music, kindness, self-love, I have to vocalise all this to comfort myself. I have to explicitly tell myself that I’m capable of finding my way out of this chaos, that I am capable of supporting all these confused, fearful, anxious parts of me as well.

Q: How do I find joy and hope when I’m sitting in what feels like rock-bottom?

Overlapping with the previous one, mostly. Went to a really nice concert last night and that really helped. It has in the past too.

I remember April 2022, it had been over a month since I’d moved to Amsterdam. The housing market was proving to be super difficult and I was terribly anxious about not being able to find a place in the time-frames that I wanted. I was staying in my third hotel in less than 2 months, and I was about to enter a depression pit. But we had tickets to Peach Pit (one of my all-time favourite bands) and I put in all the effort to just GO. It was kind of the same last night. So I guess community events that are also aligned with my values and interests could be an important way. And of course, affirmations. We’ve made it this far, we can make it farther.

Q: When do I feel powerful?

I don’t know where this came from exactly and power is not something I seek, but maybe so many feelings of of fragility, insecurity, weakness naturally beg this question. I think mostly, I feel powerful when I’m in awareness. Every time I can remind myself to come into awareness, whether it’s with positive daydreaming or even negative thought-spirals, coming into awareness can be an incredibly powerful and revolutionary act. Yesterday morning, it was after doing a “what am I feeling?” exercise, and turns out I was feeling a lot. So yeah, I think I feel powerful when I can be aware of everything I’m feeling or thinking and not let it consume me. It’s not about control, more about simply not being controlled by anything.

069a – passive writing, intentions for the week

I want to sleep before 4am today. Because I really want to wake up before noon tomorrow. Which means writing a word-vomit now, doing some reading and then literally just switching off the lights by 3:45am. Had some friends over today and realised I really care about them. One of them I was meeting after more than 6 months and he’s been going through a bit of tough time. Him getting me upto speed is when I realised how much I really felt for him.

I’ve been a bit triggered about lacking a romantic relationship over the last couple days so today was a bit of grieving the last person I dated. I thought I was mostly over them but today brought some new (old) inner feelings out, I guess. It’s been over a month since we ended things and I expected this much time to be enough for me to grieve. But maybe I need a few weeks more.

I’ve decided to purchase an electric and a semi-acoustic guitar soon but the research part of the purchases is not very fun.

I think I definitely want to complete 2 more songs before the end of this year. That’s doable, I think.

I haven’t taken a flight in a while. I think I’m missing the feeling. Even though flights and travel give me some anxiety, I think even WITH the anxiety, the overall feeling is nice and interesting. Maybe I’ll go somewhere early December.
I guess I used to think the net feeling in a moment is the “sum” of your positive and negative feelings but I think it’s not really that. It’s not [happiness minus anxiety = less happiness]. It’s just (happiness, anxiety). This is actually quite interesting to me. (#epiphanies)

This word-vomit is slow because I keep getting distracted. I’m really tired today though I don’t know why. I’ve slept enough and I didn’t do much. Maybe it’s just that. I didn’t do anything refreshing.

Do I really not have any thoughts at the moment? How is that possible?

I have many tasks to do this week, most of which I’m not looking forward to. So, then, what am I looking forward to, if not those tasks? How can I make this week a bit nice? There’s an open-mic I could sign up for potentially, but I don’t know what songs I’d want to sing. Okay yes, I think I can do this. It’s a task that’s the right amount of challenging, plus it’ll also be nice to move towards my medium-term goal of doing ten open-mics by the mid of next year. It’s also at this queer/mixer event type thing so it could potentially be nice to meet some new people, and I’ve been meaning to find ways to do that anyway.

I want to get back to 1000-word posts because I think more stuff comes out when you write 1000-word posts as opposed to shorter ones, so yeah– that’s something I’ll probably start doing soon. I’ve also decided I’m not switching to substack until I’ve written 10-long posts/essays that I’m actually satisfied with (where the satisfaction rating is at least a 7/10). Alright, these conclusions feel good.

051a – drained

Emotions are really hard these days. After I woke up today, I lay in bed for almost twenty minutes doing nothing, paralysed. Just thinking. Ruminating. Eventually, crying. I hope I’m PMS-ing because I don’t know if I can take more mornings like these, at least not this week. I’ve been trying this “morning pages” thing which allows me to journal right after bed or right before going to bed, which has been nice, and yet, today it didn’t help at all. The idea is to clear your head as much as you can and then go about your day. Of course, these word-vomits tend to serve a similar purpose, when I can manage to do them.

I started house-hunting which made me realise I was biting off more than I could chew, so then I decided to pause one other project that I was planning to work on. I think collaboration is something that doesn’t come very easily to me, not without external / organisational structures or the base of knowing a person beforehand, and so that added some icky feelings around this particular project in me as well, which is the primary reason that it was the one I chose to cut.

This weekend was very draining, emotionally and mentally. I had a long, open conversation with some of my family about queerness and sexual, gender identity and although it was much needed and I really appreciate them taking the time to engage, it was definitely tough. I don’t know if I can do this very often. The conversation also took a bit of a turn and people also ended up sharing a bit about some of their stuff, their past, etc.

I wish people of all ages and backgrounds (who can afford to) would be intentional about healing. I wish people would realise how much trauma they hold and carry, I wish people would put in effort to look at it. I don’t like that a lot of people hide behind their age and their “generation”. When you tell about anything that’s a little new to them, they’ll say things like “oh this is just not how our generation thinks” etc etc. But like, we’re not talking about the whole generation. We’re talking about you. Or me. Ah, it just feels like an excuse.

A lot of people will tell me that “when you grow up is when you’ll realise how difficult new things are for you to accept as well”. And I don’t know, maybe I’ll find out they were right, but I hope with all my heart they aren’t. I hope my curiosity doesn’t die. There’s a lot of things that I still don’t agree with or vibe with (AI art, for example), but I don’t think that’s got anything at all to do with age or anything similar to that.

Being in India for the next 2-3 years feels like a pretty challenging quest. And definitely I don’t know if I can be here for the long haul.

025 – spring cleaning

Well, Friday’s here. I’ve had a good week so far. I’ve been wanting to write a post about photography but I think I want that to be a little more organized than most of my other posts. I want it to be readable and I want to be able to share it with a group of people who I think might want to read it or could get some value out of it. For that, I’ll probably have to put in a little more effort than simply writing on a whim. I have notes and content, so I’m not too worried about that, it’s just the structuring that’ll require some effort.

One thing I’m learning about “good” and “bad” weeks is that good weeks require slowing down and reflection as much as the bad ones do. It’s quite easy to get carried away in the general easiness of things sometimes and I worry about how that might leave me in a worse place than a bad week by itself might have. While anxiety generally makes it hard for me to let things go, I at least end up completing my goals and tasks most of the times. When the anxiety’s not around, I often end up living “too” much in the present. I suppose it’s a constant battle to manage the short-term and the long-term. Or maybe this is just the anxiety talking again.

I’ve got an apartment move coming up ahead, and the decision making over it has completely fried my brain. The budget decisions, the wants, the fitting my wants within my budget, it’s all quite exhausting. Fortunately, work’s been a little light this week so I’ve managed to do a bit of house hunting. It’s terribly windy outside, I wish that weren’t the case. I’d have loved to take a walk right now. I went downstairs and had to come back up within five minutes is how chilly it was.

I finally figured out how to add “top posts” and “tag cloud” widgets to this webpage so that’s kinda cool. I don’t know why I’d been struggling with that earlier. The thing I’m unhappy about though is that I wanted to list out of my top posts based on views, but that only takes into account the views from 48 hours and not all-time views, so I had to list them out by likes instead.

On the work front, my repressed interests in product management have come up to the surface again. I’ve always thought that I care more about the “what and the why”s of a product rather than the “how”s. But the thing I don’t love about product management jobs is that they definitely seem to involve a LOT of multi-tasking, organization and meetings, and I don’t know if that’s something I’d enjoy. Thankfully this isn’t a completely uncommon switch that people make, so I know I can find enough material to help me think about this and figure out if makes sense for me.

In other good things, my heart’s been warmed by how much great queer representation I’ve been seeing in the media these days! I was making my mom watch Atypical, which literally has one of the cutest wlw arcs. Followed by Ginny and Georgia, it completely blew me by surprise, and Sara Weisglass does such a phenomenal job in it. Lastly, from the motherland – Bombay Begums – again, very surprised they handled a queer arc gracefully. Have to say it again, my heart’s so full. I was thinking about how the word “representation” doesn’t fully capture the value it actually holds. Representation doesn’t just mean “seeing” more kinds of people and diverse storylines – it basically implies “resonating” with them. Quality representation of diverse emotions is probably an important goal that the word by itself doesn’t convey.

I think a cool thing about writing one of these is that often at some point halfway through I remember everything that’s bothering me about the “things I haven’t done” or the things I haven’t planned for, and I’m almost forced to step out of this and make that list I’m always putting off. Because if I don’t do that, I’d either end up writing out of my feelings about those tasks in the post, or I’d end up giving up the post at that point. And since I know I don’t want to do either of those things, I end up making that list. Which actually ends up helping a ton.

Well, Sunday’s here now and I had a pretty great weekend. It was productive when it comes to my personal goals, it was relaxing, and it was social – it was everything I could ask for in a weekend. No crises this week and I’m quite happy about that. I don’t have much to write about tonight so I’m going to use the last chunk of this post to note that I’m in a good place with my “hobbies” now. I think I’m at the place where I can all all three of photography, music and writing a regular hobby that I find that I’ve been able to stick do and do somewhat regularly. Regularly enough to not really lose touch with all of them. I think the next thing I need to do is setup some good workflows for my work work, so I can make sure to not get lost or off track on that. I also want to set some financial goals and see if I can become a little smarter about my finances so I don’t have to worry about them too often. The next thing I want to take care of my health, I’ve been doing much better from a month ago but I want to take some time to reflect on it.

Word vomit’s done. What should I call it?