When You Don’t Always Recognize Yourself

Perhaps it means nothing to you. You’ve learned to be okay with it and you no longer fight. You were never an outwardly passionate person to begin with, but you did believe in stuff. It made you who you are. Your mother called you a fairytale baby; a firm believer in faeries and magic and bubbles. But at the same time you knew where the stories ended and where reality began. You also understood that reality was a fluid concept; everyone was entitled to their own version of it. Perhaps that is what made you so good at weaving stories. Grand sentences and beautiful tales conjured up late at night to help your younger sister sleep. You saw the sparkle in her eye, the excited questions, that satisfied drowsy smile at the end of it. And the next day you could do it all over again.

People thought you were a bubbly person, you knew otherwise. Your mother feared you lived in a land of fairytales and would end up being hurt by the Big Bad World. Again, you knew otherwise. You weaved stories and so knew it wasn’t real. You told of happy endings and castles while being painfully aware of suicides and abrupt ends. You were rooted in reality while still having the privilege of floating away from it from time to time. You knew all the ways things could go wrong but believed in all the times they won’t. You had beliefs and ideals and the occasional pretty bubble. You fought for people, for those beliefs. Fought against the concept of evil and its incidence. You believed people to be fundamentally good, no matter how naive others thought that made you.

Nowadays you tell friends that people are selfish. You don’t truly believe that, you know you don’t, but you say it anyway. Because it’s the smart thing to do. Terrible things happen in the world making it a terrible place filled with terrible people. You’ve met a few. You’ve met truly evil people who made your blood crawl and your eyes fill up in despair because you couldn’t bear the level of hatred you felt for that human being. You never believed in the concept of hate. And for a while, after meeting them and finding out the horrible things they’ve thought, you forgave them. Or you simply didn’t believe anybody capable of such thoughts. You’ve accepted it now. And so you tell your friends that people are selfish and mean. You don’t believe that. But you’re okay with saying it, because that is who you are now. You have fewer beliefs than you did before. You haven’t made up a bedtime story for your younger sister for a long while now. Her eyes still sparkle and you look at it and pray to God that never goes away. Your mother says she’s a fairytale baby too, just like her oldest sister. And you see it. You see it in the way she looks up at the night sky with you on the days you come out of your room, in the way she flips her pretend hair this way and that and talks in a strange language, in the way she treats her toys like they’re actual living beings—in the way she believes them to be actual living beings. In the way she believes in magic while still being able to question the absurd. You’ve gotten rusty at telling her about fairies and you realize she doesn’t believe in half the things she used to. When you told her stories. You look at that and think maybe it’s a good thing.

Perhaps it meant nothing to you. The stories and the belief and the magic. Maybe you feel silly talking about spells and fantasies. And maybe that’s what’s killing you. You can’t write stories anymore. You haven’t in a long while. Not happy ones anyway. You write of sick mothers and poetic deaths. You tell yourself that’s what you should be writing anyway because it’s the best kind of beautiful there is: tragic and grown up. You’re a sham.

You believe in people being fundamentally good and you believe in fairies in the garden. Or maybe you actually don’t. Maybe it truly means nothing to you and you’ve actually changed. Its why you can’t write stories. Not ones you love.

Magic never denies its evil side. There are witches and hags and greedy giants. You fight it with the good. You’ve learned to simply be. And you hate yourself for it.

Yours Truly,

Hairy Fingers

We all have those days. The ones where you can’t find anything to write about because the voices inside your head are completely silent (the voices inside mine are rarely ever silent—quite the boisterous, bickering bunch if you ask me, but they don’t always talk sense and I find myself, as I am right now, somewhat lacking in the ‘legit posts’ department and I do want to write something because, well, because I have the time)

I have a notebook. It’s a nice notebook. It’s a nice notebook I write down ideas in. I flipped through the nice notebook with the not-so-nice ideas and there were a few blog ideas I wrote down. Clearly I never actually got to them. But since I have nothing else to offer and I fear posting this infrequently will cost me quite a few readers, here they are (some of them truly are terrible, okay fine most of them):

An extract from the above mentioned notebook. It’s from the few entries that were journalistic-like in nature. It’s okay to cringe. I cringed the hardest.

• Birthdays: Celebrating the countdown to your death…speaking of things that don’t make sense: I’m In the Eleventh Grade! (?) [this was way back in January when my birthday was nearing and I had been an eleventh-grader for a month and yet it was still only sinking in]
• Favorite Past-Time: Turning Water into Wine
• A Woman Without a Man is Like a Fish Without a Dream Board [I think this one was after I saw another mind-numbing movie where the girl’s sole purpose in life was landing the guy]
• Dawn of the Dread [don’t even know with this one…]
• Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day
• The Older You Get, The Greater You Were
• All the World’s a Schrödinger’s Box and We But Mere Cats [Happen to quite like this one, to be honest. Wonder why I didn’t write anything…]
• Criticize. Condemn. Complain [Always did like alliterations]
• It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You, It’s the Hole. [Aren’t I a clever little thing?]
• Shaolin Soccer [Actually a review on the movie by the same name, but I didn’t really write a “proper” review and so decided to not actually post it]
• Smell Flowers, Look Around For the Coffin: The Average Cynic, De-mystified.
• A Closed Mouth Gathers No Feet

And on that note, I shall bid adieu.

Perhaps I should try actually responding to the Daily Post prompts instead of writing crap like this…

Yours Truly,

But..But I Thought–

Remember that warm and fuzzy time when I decided I was going to “work dammit” and ace all my exams and my sheer academic awesomeness would give me literal wings to fly so high that even the sky wouldn’t be the limit?

Yeah …not happening.

It’s been about a month since I set out with my highlighters and brand new notebooks, and so far, I’ve barely finished the Physics syllabus. Don’t even get me started on Maths…I love maths, I do, but lately (having been unable to attend a couple classes), I’m kind of lost with the new concepts, and rather than tackle that mountain, I kept putting it off, saying I would find time later…Exams begin next week. I got desperate enough to get a math tutor, but after a couple of classes he was suddenly taken ill (I suspect nothing of the sort) and so I’m back at square one. Anyone know any places where I can get some help with trigonometry?

Aaanyone?

And Mechanics. What am I going to do?? (I rarely use double punctuation here, and you should know that the fact that I am right now means I am currently at a very dark place I see no escape out of)

Okay breathe…I think I forgot how to breath. OhdearlordwhatamIgoing todo?

I know: stay up all night and watch Nazi Germany documentaries! This would be helpful if I still took History, but I can barely manage my 5 AS Levels and as much as it pained me, I had to drop History. And Literature. Literature hurt even worse—has anyone read Continuum by Allen Curnow? I love that poem and analysing it was heaven. I miss analysing literature and debating interpretations…

I know this isn’t a very interesting post (but then again, those are accidental and far between) But I said I would post updates. Also worrying about stuff means I can put off actually DOING it. Yes yes, all very convenient.

I haven’t gone out in a long time…Its either trying to study (I said, trying) or TV marathons or scrolling Word press. I downloaded a site blocker and that has helped with my productivity some. But being the intelligent creation that I am, it wasn’t long before I figured out a way to dupe the site blocker and now there is no stopping me…Half my troubles are self-inflicted really. And the other half, have mostly to do with the impending Dolphin Invasion, but more on that later…

It’ll be two o’clock soon. Looks like I’ll be pulling an all-nighter to get my work done according to schedule (I’m already about 2 days behind) I’m not among those traitorous, misleading con artists who say they have done “absolutely nothing”  and trick you into a false sense of security, only for you to find out later that by ‘nothing’ they mean they hadn’t revised that 3^rd time—no when I panic academically, I have every reason to do so. But I wish I was among the traitorous, misleading, lucky few.

But better late than never, right? 8 hours from now, I’ll wish I had started working right now (like I wish I had started working seriously 2 weeks ago)

This is not who I want you to see

It’s just adding on weight to the darkness in me

 

Isn’t it just fantastic when words like that speak right to your black, emo heart?

Yours Truly,

Inside Every Cynical Person, There Is A Disappointed Idealist

I’m one of those people who have always had a plan B. It might be for something as simple as what to make for breakfast, but it’s always there. Some/most people would say it’s a good thing—but it’s not. Not really. See, the thing is, I don’t have it so I can be prepared–no it’s there because I always expect Plan A to fail. Plan A might be the most wonderful, thought-out thing ever, but I still think it’s going to fail. It’s like I’m setting myself up for a life of settling so I don’t crumble under the sheer disappointment of not realising my dreams.

Things might be going great, but that always just seems to put me on guard—I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop; for something to go wrong so my life makes sense. For a while lately, things have been wonderful—and all I can do is sit and plan out what I’m going to do when it ends.

I rationalize this pessimism by saying that I’m just being realistic—that life is hard, and puppies get run over and the world is a horrible, terrible place with no space for optimistic fools. But it’s just pathetic because even I don’t believe that. Yes, the world isn’t the most ideal of places right now—and not everyone ends up where they wanted to—but that doesn’t mean you just drop out of the race and sit at home eating peanut butter straight out of the jar (actually, that sounds like a pretty great way to spend a Sunday evening…)

I always wake up happy. Even if my head and neck hurt due to the unfortunate placement of the pillow and even if my legs are numb from the cold because my sister hogged the covers last night. It’s not a conscious thing I do—I’ve always woken up like that. When I was a kid that was because waking up meant that I could continue reading whatever I had been last night before my mum cut that short by turning off the lights, or so that I could rush out to the balcony and just take it all in or so I could get an early start on a day spent building Lego towers and playing doctor on my Barbie. Now I wake up happy because that’s what my brain has been wired to do. Even if I’m still groggy from sleep, those few minutes before I gain full consciousness are glorious. My brain is not busy calculating all the different outcomes and impacts of the events of the day and deciding on the hypothetical course of action. The most taxing thing it is doing is wondering which way to stretch so the crick in my back is straightened out.

Expecting the worst—it’s not called being prepared, it’s just me not believing in myself or what I’m capable of. I wasn’t always like this. I was one of those annoyingly optimistic brats who laughed out in delight when it started raining even if it meant the long awaited basketball match had to be postponed. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but somewhere along the line I just changed. I had my whole life planned out—with no space for any mistakes—but now I have a Plan B to my plan B, at least, career-wise. I’ve never really been one of those self-assured, confident people but doubting myself I never did. Now, I seem to be second-guessing myself about the most basic of decisions and had decided cynical was the way to be. Because when you expect the worst, disappointment is hard to come by.

It’s hard to hold onto that confidence when everyone around you seems dissatisfied with their place in life. But I’m not them—you are not them, and it doesn’t matter if things didn’t work out for them. Because they will for you. And they will for me

And if not, I could always teach Literature to high school kids—seems like a fun thing to do, no?

Don’t stop believing (hold on to the feelin’)

P.S The title is not an original, it is a quote by George Carlin.

Monday Blues

https://8tracks.com/jaudatfm/sit-and-study