Belonging Nowhere

“I want to go home.”

As far as I can remember, I have uttered these words in that exact same combination at least three times. They were a wish, a desperate longing and a plea clawing itself out of my throat. They used to be a tether to return to somewhere I thought I belonged, but these days they have become an exasperated sigh and the stark realisation that I don’t belong, at least not anymore.

People often talk about how they outgrow the places they are tied to by birth. I always thought it carried a note of escapism coupled with the need to have an explanation that isn’t rooted in ourselves. If I had known I would be in the same boat, then I probably would have listened to them better.

Home for me has never been about the place but rather the people I care for. But it seems the geography does shape the landscape of the mind and I am now on the other side of the fence, looking in.

To be honest, I don’t know when I changed into the me that I am right now. Maybe it was gradual enough that I didn’t notice. Or maybe it was sudden enough that I was shocked into forgetting. Either way I have changed and the places I carved out of myself in a frantic need to fit in have been stitched together with the self I have since discovered. And this hopelessly ragged piece of the puzzle no longer fits as elegantly as it once thought it did.

A part of me misses the ease of consumerism, how easy it was to get the things I wanted overseas. A slightly less superficial part of me longs for the ability to blend into the background and go about her ways. But instead I am left with the sense of unease that only a woman would ever feel in this society. I am caught in the disastrous struggle between gritting my teeth, never raising my head lest I create a “scene” and my stubbornness to meet the cat-callers, the oglers in the eye. There is no winning in this struggle. In this place, my desire to find meaning in work, in my choices is something that needs to be rectified through marriage. My voice, my opinions are something that should never be heard or seen for how else do you “tame” a woman? My politics are something that are unseemly, my nonexistent faith is something that requires either a noose or reluctant tolerance that hinges on my silence. My annoyance at a society that refuses to let go, to change, to stand by everyone and not just the select few is troubling for most. I am either a mindless, self-centred, upper-class consumerist voyeur or a conniving peddler of “western” ideologies, hell-bent on ruining our society. Either way I am not welcomed.

Have I outgrown this place or is my romanticism of what I had left behind finally out of steam? Even as I type this, a voice whispers that perhaps this has a veneer of pretentiousness. I never felt like I belonged but now that I see that I can’t belong, am I grasping at straws to legitimise this realisation? Am I justifying my wanderlust by pushing against the “norms” of this society? After all if I can’t mould myself to fit into the place that reared me for 18 years, where do I belong then?

Never, ever broken.

Words of power. Powerful words. The power in words.

I have been rolling these phrases on my tongue for the last few hours. I don’t know where to start. I know firsthand the power behind words; the way they slice my flesh, snake their way under my skin and dig into my heart, festering as though a bullet shattered into a thousand pieces.

So yes, I know the force behind the words. But, if it was words that whispered “You are worthless”, then it was words that took hold of my hand and dragged me through the mud and left me at the shore. I still have bits and pieces of that riverbed stuck in my throat that I spit out just to stop choking on them. So yes, words. I am quite familiar with it dear friend. Perhaps this is why I know what you are trying to say when you sigh “I can’t get out of bed today”. Because that right there is the annoying shrill of the fire alarm in my head. And no matter what I do I can’t fight this for you. Not even my I-will-probably-kill-and-hide-the-body-for-you kind of love will be enough for this fight. And few will learn to accept this struggle of yours as valid and I am sorry for that. I am sorry for the number of times you will hear “it’s just a phase” or “are you crazy” or… no I am going to stop because you don’t need to hear them here. You will never hear them here, never.

I don’t have words for you that could help and it makes me feel so excruciatingly helpless. I don’t have the words, because I am out of them myself. I only have my second-hand crutches to offer you with shaking hands and a note that they are slightly wobbly so take care when you lean on them. And another note in hasty scribbles how you will never be just broken but broken so majestically that you will only ever be a kintsugi, a piece of art because that’s what we all are. Never broken, never a mess that needs to be fixed by someone else. We fix ourselves, we pour that hot, bubbling gold in our veins and muffle our screams. And we are never broken.

A friend of mine recently told me that I have a habit for attracting bad situations because I tend to plan to some extent for the worst case scenario. Now, I don’t buy into this notion that we somehow can attract misfortune while pushing away a stroke of good luck. For me it feels like that once you slip, you tend to think of the other things that could go wrong… a lot like how bad things supposedly come in threes. For me, it’s an odd combination of self-fulfilling prophecy and probability working against you.

This is my attitude towards things at the moment.

Another saying about bad luck is the infamous silver lining story. Well, for once can I just have the silver lining and you keep the black cloud? No? Thought so.

Well, I am only human and at times susceptible to ideas such as bad luck or silver linings. So if you were to ask me what would be the silver lining of this recent roadblock,depending on the time of the day and how much sleep I have had my answer might surprise you. I realised I was spending a lot of time on my Mac, and by a lot I mean every possible waking hour including but not limited to work and socializing purposes. Considering that I can function on 6 hours of sleep that leaves me with 18 hours, majority of which I spent on the internet. Basically I was a girl gone wild internet edition. So yeah, I have a problem that I am only seeing after I have been forced to be separate from my baby (My Mac book Pro, duh!) for the next two weeks.

Now, I strongly believe that every problem has at the very least one solution. My solution to my internet-dependency for basically everything is a bit of everything. Finish going through the stack of books I have in my room, cook more, embark on more thorough cleaning of my place… you get the picture. Yes, it is difficult to keep up with my work because I now have to rely on the computers in the University and I can’t work overnight on them but there isn’t anything else to be done. Despite the headaches, I am getting a better sense of my working hours.

Would you look at that I sort of discovered positive things in an otherwise terrible (and expensive) month! Now excuse me while I eat my sorrows away.

Hey you over there, STOP Panicking!

An accurate title would have been “How I went from panicking all the time to panicking only 80% of the time“, but that was a mouthful and I wanted a more zingy title to reel you into my blog.

So now that you are here and I have sunk my rather beautiful claws into your hand, let’s start by emphasising on how much I panic. I panic, like PANIC and imagine that in sparkling neon text, underlined twice and in bold. It’s not as though I enjoy living in a constant state of waiting for the other shoe to drop and worrying myself to a frenzy of some severely disturbing thoughts. The panic just creeps in or at times hit me like a wave that popped out of nowhere.

The question that I keep asking is what to do with this Panic-Ninja? The answer is simple and not-so-simple at the same time… like every other thing in life.

Back in my UG years I was dabbling in Psychology from time to time and  remember running into the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic loci of control and wondering which one I fell into. (I wasn’t wondering. I knew it was the one that came with the largest pile of issues.) A rotten Julian B. Rotter (I kid, the guy was probably nice) developed the concept of this extent to which one believes they can control the things happening to them. Basically, if you think you are in complete control of the events in your life you can stamp yourself with the intrinsic loci of control. On the other hand, if you think your environment, religious deities, fate etc. control your life then tada you belong to the extrinsic bunch! I am aware that there is a 28-item measuring scale of Internal Control Index that can be used to find out where you fall on it. You can do this for fun, but it really doesn’t tell you much as I fear it tends to aggregate your experiences as opposed to looking at them on a case by case basis.

I used to think that my loci of control was entirely internal, which was further backed up by my atheist ways. If you ask me now, I may be forced to draw a Venn diagram and subject you to my babble.

Like I said, our experiences don’t always fall into neat bundles that can be easily categorised. In some situations I am in control of my actions and the consequences of those actions to an extent. In other situations, my hands are tied.  And perhaps that’s the way it should be? I fear what I didn’t grasp a couple of years, or even a couple of months back was that despite being in control of my own steps I can neither control what someone else does nor can I bear the weight of their actions on my shoulders as though it was under my control. This latter notion is so liberating that I am surprised it took me this long to realise it.

I can’t panic and plan for every possible contingencies that I can think of because I am not living in a vacuum or space, though I would like to live on Mars (NASA make this happen). What I can do is make sure things are functional on my end and make an educated guess on the likelihood of shit hitting the fan. And then try to worry a little bit less. If all else fails listening to Calm is surely helpful or breathing or just planning on being a hermit works fine as well.

So you’re having a shit day…

“Our hands are tied.”

I think I heard and said that phrase over a dozen times since yesterday, sometime in exasperation and others in bitterness. The end result is the same nonetheless. There isn’t anything to be done. So, I went out for a night with friends and had some fun conversations. Also bought a pair of shoes because of course my heels would break on the way to a party. And then woke up this morning remembering the 2 minutes mini-meltdown I had in a washroom after I got the news about yet another visa problem that was entirely the fault of a clerical error that I am going to end up paying for… possibly dearly.

Here’s the thing, there really isn’t anything I can do now. Other than keeping a level head and preparing for the worst case scenario, it’s my hands that are tied. This sudden sense of shrugging off the weight of everything that is going wrong feels oddly relieving, or perhaps it’s justly so. Call it personal growth (well I am calling it that), I am handling this new mess a lot better than my earlier forays into controlling the chaos. I don’t know what happens next, but I would like to think it won’t be something that I can’t handle (…and I just jinxed myself. Wonderful!).

Upside to the heel debacle, I got this lovely pair because I couldn’t be barefoot.

If you are having a similar bad day then you could check out LifeHacker’s post that science-s it. (Yes, I just used science as a verb. I am (/was) having a shit day.)

If you have been following me on Twitter you already know I was anticipating a confirmation on my scholarship status today. Sadly I still haven’t received it and that’s enough to make me sad because before the Great Visa Debacle of 2014 struck earlier this year, I was confirmed for a spot. I feel a tad stupid for not getting the scholarship and slightly peeved at the circumstances, but there isn’t anything I can do at the moment. Just focus on the work ahead.

As for feeling stupid, what The Cult of Genius said seems to have struck a cord in me.

Yes, you have to be clever, but if you have good taste in problems, an ability to forge intellectual connections, an eye for untapped opportunities, drive, and yes, a willingness to work hard, you can have major impacts on the field.