on finding a long-lost love, again

The discomfort you are feeling right now is a collective anticipatory grief, said the author of the Harvard Business Review article, on describing what we are all feeling during this pandemic. And if we are to be more precise, this is a bit more profound right now because its not something that we are usually used to experiencing together.

True. Usually grief is something more… personal. Unless we are talking about the atrocities of experiencing war together, unless you have gone through it yourself in the form of a personal loss, it is hard to relate to because it gets shelved as something that needs to be experienced in small doses, only when triggered by certain experiences, in our own personal times when no one is looking, or in the company of experienced health professionals, or amongst trusted family and friends. And this is the case usually in small doses, to not overwhelm our mental health. But there’s quite nothing like a good old-fashioned lockdown to ensure that now have to experience this while cooped up without fresh air, with or without our quarantine families or significant others. This was definitely not written in the handbook of the silver linings playbook of life.

I can only speak for myself. On the exterior side, I personally went through eating every few hours (this stopped after 2 weeks thank goodness), working out consistently for the first 2 weeks (unfortunately for this one), Netflix bingeing, sleeping all hours of the day without a schedule, catching up on my reading from books that had collected dust, cleaning up my storage room of props, smothering my cat with kisses till she started hiding from me, doing laundry at all hours of the night, baking vegan banana bread and other ingredients I had never opened the bottles of previously, restarting my pitiful cat-vomiting inducing self-taught violin lessons, archiving part of the backlog of files that hadn’t seen the the time of day…. it makes me sound productive but the reality is not really. None of these have been consistent. A lot remain unfinished. A lot I got bored of and stopped halfway. Some I didn’t even start such as the e-course on social media, something that I still struggle with still now.

But on a deeper level, I bonded with newer and old friends over video calls, talked with family, I went through old love emails and pictures, reminisced about past loves they are and was that really the wisest decision I made back then. I tried to be productive by watching photography tutorials until I realized it was much more gratifying to just get lost in a book. I dreamt of giggly adventures and breezy vacations and the feeling of dewy green grass on my feet and wondered how long I have to exercise from home before I truly lost it. I had friends who told me to try out dating apps because now you have no excuse but to talk, but I realized I’ve reached the point where I just don’t care anymore to impress - don’t we have bigger things to worry about than how they’re going to ghost me the next week? It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions, and I’m pretty sure I am not alone in these feelings of despair laced with hope. So I cannot make this about me. A part of me felt that I had gone down this route so many times before - stuck at home for days at time, on my own choosing, because well, what does a single person do who wants it all but is too tired to go down the route of the age old scenario of asking someone to love? As every business emails keep saying while they try to maintain their loyal customers fanbase, we are in this SHIT together, and you know what they’re right… it doesn’t feel so alone now, ha!

Accept your present. Let go of what you can’t control. Practise kindness. Stock up on compassion. Adapt. Be open about your pain. These are some of the advice we have been given (also as per the HBR article) to overcome our grief. Hmm. I don’t know. We all have different stages of accepting and overcoming. Some are faster and better than others. While the pandemic is still ongoing because Rona hasn't left the chat yet, the lockdown has been removed for a while now and I cannot honestly say I’m over it. I am not sure where I am right now in my phase now. I know I had a much needed respite for sitting myself down and embracing my present and asking the hard questions. What do I need to do, if I haven't finished answering them though? How is it I have more questions now than answers? Does this mean I’m growing? When can I stop growing so I can finally start living?

I don’t have any answers. I can give you all the PR talk that you’d like to hear because sometimes we need it and my business demands that I put up a brave front so people are confident in my skills as a photographer, but on a personal level, I am still on my tippy toes.

If I am being completely honest, I know somewhere along the lines I had found a sense of meaning and purpose in my darker hours that I was able to fine-tune, something that I had been putting off for a while now. And among them is a sense of appreciation and love for something for a finite amount of time, and how we take it for granted. Isn’t that what we have all been fighting for? A reason to continue and keep going, even when we are alone in our darkest hours. So that is what I made.

++ a love like breathing, 2020++

I guess this is a start.

on why I stopped making pictures

I didn't want to continue anymore.

Continue what, you say.

Everything.

Relax, it’s not what you’re thinking.

Do you recall that scene in Forrest Gump where one day he decided to start running? He ran for 3 years. Initially he ran alone. And then people joined him on his quest. I imagine that was a way to express himself, or to clear his mind from whatever was bothering him so he could come up with a solution (I can’t remember the details). And then just like that, suddenly after 3 years, he decided to stop running and continue with what was next. Running is always a great analogy for leaving your worries behind to clear your head so you can move on with your life, or to see things from a better, different vantage point.. When he had enough of running, he stopped, and then everyone went their separate ways as well.

I felt that. It was a long time coming, as if my well of patience with myself had dried up. Slowly, like paint drying on a wall, I realized that I just didn’t want to talk about it anymore. About myself, about anything, to anyone, even through the only medium that gave me so much sense of understanding and closure. It seemed irrelevant to talk about the same thing in twenty different ways. Everything seemed so repetitive. The plethora of thoughts and ideas that used to flow freely was pushed aside to make room for something bigger - silence. Silence was comfortable. Similar to Adam and Eve covering up once self-awareness of their naked selves entered their realms of consciousness, I decided these well of emotions or thought processes running through my head that was my outlet to a deeper self didn’t deserve to be out there for those curious enough to further dissect and analyze. I didn’t want to be under that magnifying glass, as tiny as it was, anymore. I wanted to disappear, to stay invisible, to become anonymous.

I felt irrelevant, and talking about myself seemed that it would take away attention from the larger social problems at hand. Am I really affecting anyone with my polarizingly gloomy depressing and/or bright photos? What are they thinking when they look at my pictures? Anxiety? Mockery? Curiousity? A sense of doom and gloom? Excitement over revealing what’s underneath more of these layers? Do they realize that I separate my feelings from my reality when I make them? Are people afraid to hang out with me if I admit that some of it is autobiographical but shrouded within layers and layers of digital paper because that would be a more acceptable format than those on physical paper laced with tears? Am I overanalyzing some things that artists before and in the future don’t really give a shit about because they are/were doers and not so much of talkers? Is this even art? Am I even addressing the myriad of intellectual, social and cultural contexts that is relevant today? Am I making connections that bring a greater sense of depth and understanding of the ideas and issues that shape our world?

There were other issues that were less psychological, and more technical - such as getting overwhelmed by failed concepts and frustration leading to surrender, no matter how many uplifting or motivating books or speakers I indulged in, prioritizing work to pay the bills because the rewards were more immediate to ensure a healthy bank balance, or not believing in one’s skills as adequate and thus feeling like a complete and utter fraud, or simply not being motivated enough because I haven’t monetized it as much as I should have. There are honestly a million reasons or shall I call them excuses.

Growing up extroverted meant being fearless in expressing and in turn, if successful, being wanted, admired, and respected for such. And in the era currently where we are encouraged to overtly express ourselves through an unimaginable number of distracting social platforms to make ourselves heard, these should have been my golden moments.  Except that I had enough of being an extrovert. What seemed to be easy first - to approach people and to talk about issues - eventually became overwhelming, and when we take our heads out of the sand, the whole concept seemed reductive and trivial. And honestly, with all the images being self-portraits, I got sick of seeing myself. I was bored of my face, my life, my thoughts. True, I can always direct the pictures with models, and while I had tried this before, the fact is - I can’t seem to trust someone who hasn’t gone through my own mind or experiences to carry through a picture that in my mind was my narrative, and thus belonged to me. My issues were mine, and nobody else had the right to claim it. It’s selfish, I get it. But it’s complicated. I now craved anonymity, my alone time and I was eager to shed responsibilities that weren’t my own, save for close friends and families. It really seemed that the best way to take care of this was to minimize exposure, and to just work on yourself on what made you happy, and in turn focus on what gave you a deeper sense of fulfillment and authenticity. While this may be a normal maturing process to a huge chunk of the world’s population, to me it was indicative of a sense of loss of self, yet again, similar to what happened 9 years ago - to make space for turning into someone new, and like the last time, this would have to be done solo.

I think it’s been a good 2 years now, this learning process. I didn’t realize it, but I think thats how slow this growth process has been. I’m not sure where I’m at, but it’s definitely a better place than the ride to nowhere. I’m a bit better at balancing the internal with the external now. It’s easier to say no. I don’t mind being selfish these days. I don’t feel the need to apologize for a lot of things. The rose-tinted glasses have long been broken to make way for transparent ones, and I’m learning that we don’t have to wear them all the time either. Coupled with this pandemic, it’s safe to say that everyone is in a similar boat.. no, I read somewhere that its the same storm, but we are on different boats - an unimaginable sense of loss of our loved ones or strangers, loss of routine and structure such as employment that give us a sense of identity and validation as well as a source of income, of deeper internal strife whose ramifications we are still trying to figure out or will be for a while. With this sense of mental turbulence, however, there is also the undeniable truth that all of us are headed into a new era where we may all turn into better, empathic humans because of our shared experiences in trying to adapt and make the best out of such uncertainty and restrictions. It’s definitely not the chosen method of choice to become our better selves, but it gives me hope that going through something with other people, irrespective of the presence or absence of connections with them but who will have similar stories of success and failure in the same time frame will mean that... we don’t have to be alone… for the next little while, at least.

We have been running for such a long time - some have been running away from, while others have been running away to… until something none of us could foresee has stopped us in our tracks and made us evaluate the bigger picture. I can’t answer the ‘from’ or the ‘to’ part, but I think it’s safe to say that just like Forrest Gump, we aren’t running solo in this field anymore. We have no choice but to stop running, reassess, recalibrate, and then move on by burying the past, so we can continue to move onwards to a hopefully better, and a more meaningful future.

As for me, it’s going to take a lot of practice. I’m a little rusty, but I’m a work in progress, always.

But I’m ready to continue now.

Thank you for sticking around.

on second chances

You ever feel like you’ve wanted a second chance with that someone?

That maybe that first experience was far too short the first time around, and isn’t it unfortunate that for whatever reason, you didn’t make that much of an impression on him that first time around for him to want to see you again, but somehow in a twist of fate, he did a number on you that you would warrant want a second, third, fourth, a lifetime chance with him?

I mean, they say it’s supposed to be a numbers game, right? So why can’t it be a numbers game with that same person, but then why is there a plot twist because that same person doesn’t even know you’re alive?

And to make matters worse, why is that sometimes wishes do come true, and then one lovely evening, you DO happen to get a second chance with that person, and to further make things more interesting, wouldn’t it be funny if you got a second chance from that person exactly 2 years later? The chances of remembering the Higher Powers at this point is high. You *KNEW* there was something there the first time around, see you KNEW IT! Maybe it was bad timing, 2 years ago. Maybe this time things will be better. SECOND CHANCES, third, fourth, even a fifth! You know at this point that someone is watching you, because why else would you meet that someone again, exactly 2 years later and your heart is fluttering like it was, same beats 2 years ago?! See, you were right all along. NOW, you can set things right! Full steam ahead.

So you go all out this time around. You get excited. You practise in front of the mirror. You make sure to avoid on the broken eggshells that you did before.  Na-uh! This time, you’ll mesmerize him.

And then, like a very slow deck-of-cards that has just been flicked,  you begin to have this slow realization or.. shall we say, understanding, of the Higher Powers’ method to madness… you realize why it was only limited to first chances.

Maybe you needed that second chance, 2 years later, not to convince him that you were worth it and could be an important part of his life. No, maybe there’s another reason why second chances drop. Maybe you needed that time to gain a deeper sense of who you are, not of him. Maybe he wasn’t the one that needed convincing. Maybe the convincing was meant for you. Maybe you needed to convince yourself that you are far, far better… than just a first chance, one random night.

Maybe you are now stronger after 2 years, because you come to the conclusion that you should not be limited to just a first chance. That you are more than a mere encounter. Maybe you are meant to be more than an anecdote, more than just a starry-filled night. Maybe you’re actually a story. Lets go higher. Maybe you’re a best-selling novel of grand proportions. Made of night, and day, and sometimes those starry nights have comets and meteor showers and fireworks, and sometimes those nights can be quiet and foggy and moonlit as well. Maybe those nights have stories for you and him, and they are also stories that people tell one another. Maybe you’re not a gimmick like a first chance, or a happening like a 1001 nights of stories to keep someone entertained. Maybe you are not meant to be second chance, or a third, or a fourth, or a lifetime.

Maybe you’re meant to be more, a story, a novel, a best seller, anything but a first chance…. but with someone else.