I’m Always Coming of Age

I’m like Sleeping Beauty in that I’ve been dead for most purposes, except for two years, not a hundred. An entirely consuming set of relationships and work projects burnt through me and left me in nothingness. And now I feel ready to awaken or be reborn. I say reborn, because everything feels fresh and new, like I can become a different person, find a different model of relationships, build a different career. This isn’t the first of its kind in my life. I have had many careers after all, and I’ve been many different people with all the relationships that have passed through my life.

Early this year, I waded into the possibility of a romantic liaison. It was great. Exciting, dramatic, fun, unexpected and always, a little terrifying. He didn’t want what I wanted. I felt myself standing on the precipice of endless, burning painful emotion and it felt so familiar, I almost didn’t recognise it for the bad pattern I’ve lived through my whole life. Somewhere dimly I knew I was ingesting something that had proved to be bad for me in earlier times and I choked, sputtering, asking for time and space to think it through. I didn’t get it and that reminded me of another time in my life.

In the middle of the most corrosive, damning relationship of my life, I still fought for clarity in my mind and I suggested a specific framework of space to him, that would take out all the pressures that kept us in that status quo. He flat out refused and in frantic aggression shut it down with what sounded like a threat – that we’d break up if I did that. It ended with every form of torture, abuse and humiliation that he could exact on me. I still think if we had done as I’d suggested, he and I might at least have stayed friends, respectful of each other instead of these poisoned factions.

This time, I know better. I know I am right, even if I’m not able to articulate it in the cold-logic/intellectual arguments that characterise my romances. If I must act in undignified, messy, ‘overemotional’ ways, I will. And that’s what I did. I got sarcastic, I wept and I crashed. It allowed me to put that distance and space. And then I ran away to Pune.

Perhaps this was the person to take the chance on, that I did on the wrong people in the past. But this doesn’t feel like the right time now. I realised my love life has been driven by FOMO (fear of missing out). They have been flinch reactions to the fear that I can see an emotional range that the other cannot and that I must carry us till they’re able to.

A friend said something about a specific situation (with someone else) that made sense to me:

“I think you’re crediting him with a lot more emotional depth and intelligence than he’s shown in all these years.”

And I realised the truism in ‘Not my circus’. This always felt like a cold thing but it is really not. There are the indulgences that one can extend, the minor adjustments one is willing to make. But one really cannot and should not attempt to fill in the thinking (intellectual or emotional) that the other person is supposed to do. That’s only a relationship with myself if I do that.

I’ve gotten into the habit of struggling, really suffering through this situation. I had to remind myself that I find it relatively easy to free myself of habits, especially those that don’t serve me. It helped to be in Pune, a place that always clears my head. I moped a bit, slept a little too much at the wrong times, binge-watched Netflix, spoke a little much or too little to the wrong people and overslept the morning I was to return. And then I picked myself up and got onto that bus back. On the way, I looked at myself in that wonderful thing called the selfie camera and I realised I’d be okay.

The weekend was better. I started with a performance. I know the way to shake a habit is not to avoid it but to look it square in the eye. So I brought my story of Custody to stage. A friend accompanied me and then cooked me lunch. Another friend picked us up and we spent an evening together.

Somewhere along the way, we got to optimising my social media feed. Emotions and what’s happening in my heart will always lace the things I do and it’s best I let them instead of drawing artificial walls there. In the examining of the images that make up the last 6 years of my life, I found myself able to say this doesn’t matter any more, this must be removed, that can be put away without clinging. And 24 hours later, I have a cleaner feed and a lighter heart.

I am constantly coming of age, it’s true. And here, it begins again.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

I think I’ll be coming of age for the rest of my life. I immerse myself so much in an experience, a person, a hobby or a job that it is a death of the rest of me. And then later, I must rebuild life all over again.

I’ve spent the better part of two years disconnected from people, especially personal relationships. And I think, for about three years before that I was too absorbed in a few specific people, to the exclusion of everything else, including the things that make my identity. This is the thing I have been examining for the past six months or so, since I decided to open my mind to the idea of boundaries.

All my life I’ve been told that this kind of immersiveness is bad, weak, dangerous. Post-mortem analyses of abusive relationships and substance addictions point to this trait as the prime cause. On the other hand, this very thing is also prized when it is labelled ‘passion’, ‘ambition’, ‘dedication’ or ‘loyalty’. So I guess it is neither good or bad, it just depends on the other people that it benefits (or not). Either way, it is a part of my innate nature so I cannot call it good or bad; it just is.

I know now that I am neither a weak, nor clingy, nor needy person. Astrology provides me the only language to explain this. I am water, after all, supremely capable of adapting, of easily taking other shape and form. I may even stand charged with having no colour or taste of my own but it would be wrong to say I possess no identity. Water endures where air merely drifts away, where earth wears away and where fire must die out without fuel. This cannot be anything but persistent identity.

The last week I spent in Pune, let me reflect on these things. Somehow it’s never quiet enough inside my mind, in Mumbai, for me to get to these realisations. And there’s the fact that in Pune, I’m welcome but never expected to be anyone or anything. There are no labels and those that there are, are quieter and more malleable. I guess that’s what a safe space should be like. This trip was good. Settling.

I’ve decided, like consciously made a decision, to build the relationships in my life. This means remembering people beyond the must-do actions and allowing conversations without agenda. It means not agonising over how unproductive or unintelligent I’m being. And it also means allowing myself the vulnerability of saying,

“Hey, I’d really like to meet you. For no reason at all. Will you meet me?”