Limbo

It is 2024 and there’s still no cure for malaise.

The black bile distillate from my blood is still the predominant humor coursing through my veins. It is astounding to me that despite five years of medical studies I still believe that there is an organic cause to the ennui I suffer. Well, duh, it is a distinct lack of neurotransmitters if you want to go there, but we don’t believe in that pseudoscience. Serotonin, norepinephrine pffft, take your orgastic-like energies and other established theories far far away. Let me explain and work my own way out of this.

A lot of this writing comes out of Limbo by Bernard Wolfe. I re-read it. I thought it would help me explain my…lack of ambition. But it doesn’t. Ironically, it infuses ambition into me by making me want to research into things and not just fall into the… I have noticed that I must grab words from thin air now while previously they would come easily to me. It doesn’t help that there’s no ‘R’ key on my keyboard. It’s a little nozzle. It is a little funny looking. I wish that it was easy for me to physically solve all psychological problems. I don’t know why my mind keeps going back to Wilhelm Reich who tried to solve physical problems with psychological solutions…wait. This feels very recursive and obtuse to read. Let’s try again. My aim is to get it out. Rip it out, if necessary, because truth be told it does feel like at this point a forceful…force uh or a jerk is needed to get it out. I hate how I keep recycling the same phrases and words.

There’s a line in Bible, and really the main premise of Limbo, that the most obvious solution to your problems is to literally severe the part that is causing the problem.

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.

Bernard Wolfe really read this and decided to run away with it. I hope you know that every time I must press ‘R’ it is not that smooth and easy as the other letters.

Apparently, there’s a neurosis in all of us. Something integral within the superego, which propels us towards self-non-sexual masochistic tendencies. It finds everything wrong in the external amplifies it and wants us to punish ourselves for those things. And so, we become like this magnet of injustices. I have seen or rather psychoanalyzed too many people who I have felt like keep account of all the ills and keep those records close to them waiting to use them at any opportune moment. That moment does not have to be a revenant moment where they take out all the pent-up frustration onto the aggressor(s). A lot of the times in fact those moments are just moments where they can punish themselves, adding insult to injury. I have found myself in an analogous situation many times, where I find myself keeping tabs of miseries. It’ll go on for some time and then I’ll try to remember why I am doing it. Sometimes it is to vent it out just cathartically over to someone, sometimes it is so I can use those moments of despair in an even graver moment as comparison and maybe feel better or feel like it was just coming privy to my sodden luck. Rarely it is to justify my own shitty action towards someone else. I guess you shouldn’t trust me. Maybe the rarely is the more often chosen action. I am the epitome of an unreliable narrator.

So Freudian psychology and logic dictates that there is a basis for why I feel like I deserve terrible things and why they make sense to me too. It also explains that I seek out self-sabotaging habits as an enema to such tendencies. Well, not quite an enema. But something. Sigh. The awareness of this knowledge is comforting and makes me feel better of every time I broke some pattern where I was hurling myself at breakneck speed towards points of no return in some manner. For instance, I don’t understand my whole stick with staying out of social media. Truthfully, I think there is more to that debate, so I am going to call a raincheck on that for some other time.

So, this appetite for self-suffering is not pointless. And it hinders me from living my life to the fullest, prevents me from becoming my own Übermensch. That is so neat. I love how if nothing else at least science is so helpful and makes it so convenient for you to feel good about yourself. There’s a point to be made somewhere that it could also be just a reflection of reality but that doesn’t fuel my WHATS THE WORD tendencies. It is even more quaint that just as a part of me that is constantly bombarding me with the need to punish yourself, there must be another part that is combatting it. Right? I support this hypothesis with the Newton’s Third Law, every force has an equal and opposite reaction.
Not enough?
Then I further corroborate it with the Two Wolves in You Theorem. Sometimes I really think I am funny.

I’ll take this whole business about psychological masochism one step ahead and state that this eager receptivity for self-harm is actually masked by self-pity which fortunately for my yet functional mind takes precedence and really just makes me pathetic but okay. Call it a defense mechanism if you will. The pity is harm but of a milder, more subdued and controllable nature. After all it is quite easy to hype and pump yourself out of this shed of loathing at the smallest achievement than it is to undo any other meaningful harm inflicted on the self.

I feel like I am going in circles, but it will make sense when I finish writing all of this and re-read it. Or such an assumption is necessary for me to believe in to finish writing this into something meaningful. I am breaking the fourth wall now.

For the need to hurt myself to morph into self-pity, it is also necessary to register that tragedies have been piled on to me. Some of my own doing, and mostly by others. Which all ties in neatly to how I started this conversation about people collecting their injustices in pokeballs and using it even outside Trainer battles. Maybe they are just filling Professor Oak’s Poke Dex. But what I really want to say is that as an adult I am much more reliably going to turn a ‘bad’ thing into a more solid memory than a good thing. There is genuine scientific research that theorize on how negative information is remembered better (Meditation Model and all that, holdthat). And then when I need to hurt myself, to feel bad, to satiate my super-ego or whatever craving some hurt, I will bring out that injustice and say ‘Aha, I deserve this. I deserve to feel bad.’ And then the pit just digs itself and the mud is shoveled out sometimes as anger, sometimes as avarice. Never anything good.

But what do do.

None of this is a solution. Bernard Wolfe would prefer to give me prefrontal lobotomy and solve all my problems. But as most of mass media has shown, such an intervention would take away most of what make me me. It would stand against his own principles of cybernetics, which I assume he must religiously believe in after writing Limbo:

The human being must always be central, not the products and objects of his skill and energy.
The object in this case being those feelings. All of them.
So,

What do do?

At some point many years ago I had hypnotized myself into believing that it was by writing that I found my outlet. It was my boulder. In this absurd existence, I would keep doing it because it was the only thing that I really wanted to do which had a point. I do think I have a new boulder or maybe many new boulders now. But I cannot just abandon what was once my only Sisyphean task uphill. Then I run into the Kierkegaardian existential crisis, of losing one of my ‘tags’. And eventually run the risk of being totally enveloped my oblivion, God forbid I somehow lose any of the boulders I have recently found for pushing uphill. What will be the Moral Equivalent of my War? How many boulders can I realistically push till I realise that I am no longer doing what I initially set out to do, and have committed philosophical suicide? That I have been involuntarily conscribed into a war of attrition where I keep trying to find distractions and calling them boulders. Whereas the boulder was never meant to be a distraction. It was meant to be the thing. ‘The’ being the operative word. Continuing the very vague and ill-fitted metaphor, maybe it is time to crush, or rather ‘shot’ the many boulders to smaller pieces and gel them into one and call it a day. (I had to do it, my playlist started playing Shots by Imagine Dragons and it just fit, please don’t judge Spotify, it is not to blame, and I am definitely not to blame for listening to Imagine Dragons in 2024).

I don’t know. Maybe it is time to sit at the brink of the gaping hole of the existential black-hole and have a think, instead of just having a think elsewhere. The black hole really puts things into perspective. Maybe this weird writing is the introspection I needed. Now, hang on a minute, isn’t this writing approaching its zenith-al end?

The truth is, I am at least glad that I managed to get this out. This tirade of pessimism and melancholy that reads like a diary entry of an edgy teenager. I would like to believe that just by writing this and wanting to believe internally that I will write more often, and not just book reviews, I have saved myself from a fate like Rimbaud. I have not surgically removed myself from writing while still alive. Or as Camus would remark of his resignation from literature – and revolt itself – in his later life, claiming that there is nothing to admire, nothing noble or even genuinely adventurous, in a man who committed a "spiritual suicide", became a "bourgeois trafficker" and consented to the materialistic order of things.

God, being called the ‘bourgeois trafficker’ sounds like the highest order of insults.

There is still potential of The Everlasting Yea in me when it comes to hoping for something for myself that isn’t rotten and fermenting. I may not make it on the list of great men, who’s biography combined Carlyle believes is the account of History as we know it, but I’d be damned if I get wasted by life and its essence and am not of use.

 

Four Years After

 

Note: Wrote this for the college magazine. Four years ago I initially wrote it for a blog post and then sent it to the college magazine, now I wrote it for the magazine and will be posting it on this blog.

It is a well-established fact that getting into a medical college is not a piece of cake," I wrote in Raigzaar about four years ago, as a public-places-white-coat wearing, brimming with enthusiasm first-year student. Now, from the vantage point of pristine copies of Harpers, Guytons, Robbins, and Davidsons, I modify that statement: "It is a well-established fact that getting through medical college is not a piece of cake."

Nobody prepares you for the overwhelming sense of unpreparedness that engulfs you in your final year. Exiting Lecture Hall 1 just as my seniors did four years ago, I search for a glimpse of my naive self in the sea of first-year students. Back then, my seniors seemed to have everything figured out, exuding confidence and knowledge. They never confused Bruzdinski with Kernig, nor considered axillary lymph nodes as mere figments of imagination invented as alibis to practice tickling on patients. They were probably the experts who discerned Grade 1 murmurs with ease. As for me, I often wonder if the faint pink hue on my male patients' nails is mehndi or a subtle sign of underlying kidney injury, a perplexity that eludes the many proficient doctors otherwise monitoring the patient. And the conjunctiva remains a mystery—should I search for pallor in the pink part on the inside of the lower eyelids or the slightly pinker area beneath the globe? Or perhaps it's the more inferior part of the eye? They say, "You are who you surround yourself with." Well, one of my friends once held a stomach model during Abdomen stage and proudly called it a bladder.

One constant struggle throughout my medical college journey has been arriving on time for the first lecture. There's no valid explanation or external blame—whether it's a wonky circadian rhythm, occasional hypersomnolence, traffic, roads, or skyrocketing petrol prices. We've all experienced the guilt-ridden entrance into the lecture hall, hugging the side wall, desperately wishing it would envelop us and transport us to the farthest row, away from the risk of inadvertently catching fragments of the ongoing lecture. Amidst this, I've developed immense respect for our teachers. I've witnessed classes where rows resembled graveyards, heads slumping onto backpacks, while the teacher diligently expounded obscure mechanisms of diseases aaa-currence. It's been five years, spending countless hours with friends, yet we must continually catch up on national politics during class, all the while knowing the teacher is periodically glancing in our direction. After all “Darr kay agay jeet hay".

The canteen remains a perpetual disappointment. Nestle should consider paying dividends to our college canteen, for it is the sole source of nourishment there, apart from the occasional samosa my friends coerce me into buying. To those fellow juniors and classmates who dare to purchase more than Nestle products, I salute your resilient microbiota. You are the living embodiment of the hygiene hypothesis. Relaxation spaces are nonexistent; benches to sit on are an elusive dream. Students perch on stairs, wander through corridors in repetitive loops, speeding up or slowing down based on their desire for privacy in their conversations from other overtaking groups. Perhaps the administration should invest in traffic lights within the corridors—common rooms seem redundant after all.

Nevertheless change has permeated into our college. When I encounter alumni or reminisce with juniors, it becomes evident that things have shifted. The exact cause eludes definition. Perhaps it's the aftermath of the post-COVID world or individual factors at play. The college has changed, for better or worse. It now requires greater inertia to accomplish tasks. People seem more focused on their individualistic expressions. Events like the literary week, which were once prominent highlights of the academic year, now receive less than a week of attention. Even places like Crush Hall have been vivisected and rechristened into examination halls. Speaking of change, I too have undergone transformation. I believe I've become more tolerant, and hopefully tolerable. This growth is partly a result of the extensive exposure to human nature that we, as medical professionals, experience. However, the majority of this change can be attributed to the incredible friends I've made along the way. They are extraordinary human beings (you know who you are), and their presence has made it easier for me to embrace and appreciate other individuals, as well as love and accept myself. This newfound perspective ignites a desire within me to become a better doctor—a compassionate healer who can genuinely alleviate the suffering in this world plagued by complexities and sorrows.

As I lay down my pen to rest, a somber feeling envelops me, knowing that this journey is coming to an end. Amidst the ups and downs, there were moments of joy, mingled with questionable lows. Yet, one memory stood up vividly right now: sitting with my friends in M-II ward, transforming the manometer gauge of a sphygmomanometer into a makeshift spirometer. We take turns blowing into it, and amidst the laughter, someone accidentally sucks in, causing the needle to do a 180. It's a moment of pure delight, a respite from the professor's anticipated arrival and the weight of patient histories waiting to be taken. In that instance, tears of joy fill my eyes, my belly aches from laughter, and I realize that every single second of the past five years has been unequivocally worth it.

The state of affairs

Nowadays my personal growth from the last couple of years over self love and other elements of love seems to be culminating over a certain break point. I have learnt through persevering words and actions of others love and through introspection and identification plus fulfillment of my own needs that I do not have to necessarily hate myself. And that there are redeeming qualities in me that make me half decent. Even if all of these were false and I am completely rotten to the core and have only managed to delude myself into thinking otherwise I still have the ultimate failsafe of claiming that I am a human.
Loving myself has also allowed me to more than just tolerate others. Words like empathy, care and compassion that previously felt bookish and only found in the dictionary now reside in quiet corners of my heart waiting to unleash themselves at the appropriate instances. So yes, love has been dumped onto me but I have eked out measly portions of it to others, still greedily holding most of it but occasionally dishing it out. Which has also made me much more sensitive to emotions. Maybe half a decade ago I would’ve said that such sentiments make me weak. In fact I still have similar notions. But they’re weaker now. This amalgam of emotions makes me privy to other’s mood and makes me read too much into their meaningless actions or words. I give them too much worth sometimes and it ends up hurting me.

I am writing about this very hurt. I think one of the worst possible things that can happen to a person is to not be loved unconditionally. Not being loved at all is still tolerable. There is room there for some sort of improvement. A complete absence denotes to the possibility of a potential presence. Self hate isn’t imposed by others but is done by the self and hence cannot be the worst possible thing because the self always acts in its own self interest, sometimes it manifests in nihilistic masochistic ways. The tragedy of modern times is that all of us are more or less loved. It would be hard to pin down a person and ask them, do you think no one loves you? Images of better halves, children, parents, siblings, friends, pets, that one relative who resides on an echelon above others, all of these entities and more just flash past your eyes and even if you are compelled to say ‘Yes’, you still hesitate. And that hesitation is enough of an answer.
Parental love is conditional. They have their own interests and suppressed self-expressions that they either mould you into achieving or expect you to stay true to their guidelines. The very act of birth and conception is selfish and stinks of a yearning for legacy in the face of mediocrity and pressure of evolution or the continuity of the entire species. Love from an offspring is ‘pay back’. The love from romantic partners has the potential of being fueled by lust. And the love from siblings stems from shared experiences or a more visceral way of putting it is ‘blood’. Most other loves including friends, companions, relatives and pets have much more materialistic conditions associated with their love that I do not need to necessarily list down. Neither will I generalize these assumptions for fear of rare individual experiences. And don’t get me started on God.

The trouble with no unconditional love is the lull that hits you in between bouts of normalcy. The smallest sign of distress or mental fatigue, any predilection towards mental instability is a harbinger for much more serious and worrying thought processes.

You aren’t allowed to say no one loves you.

And at that exact moment, you cannot also quite pinpoint who loves you.

A quantum state.

There is an impulse to lash out and stop fulfilling all the conditions that allow you to be loved. To really and truly become the ‘bad boy’. But then the scary prospect of being alienated and in the cold grasps of an emotionless cruel world terrifies us.
The other more sane, typical and thus the cowardly option is to take a big gulp and just swallow whatever ego you have, to not pay any heed to any distress or any disruption in your precariously balanced on the tip of the needle relationship. Just continue it. Keep fulfilling whatever conditions that you must. Consider it a task if you’ve to.

Remember what crumb you get of love, by whatever means necessary and at whatever steep price is worth it at the end of the day, in this soulless piece of rock that we have already been doomed to live on.

A ghazal

 

A concerto of wistfulness in froggy croaks arcs and laces in my ghazal

Flowers of lexically bastardized ideas imbibe the verses of vases in my ghazal

One legged belle-lettres written piping hot for the beloved with no prowess

At risk of sedition, ironically, for the janu burger there will be no praises in my ghazal

 

Bees marshalled like beady seeds onto the rim of a slice of watermelon

Poetry wrangles to sham such rife notions at myriad places in my ghazal

 

If the white escorts green, the green must always whelm the white

In camaraderie with reality, I relegate the minorities to the cramped spaces in my ghazal

 

At my familial home, once dangling crystal balls are now crushed to shards by modernization

No profound image in any couplet, this sentimental singularity was the chassis in my ghazal

 

My strife with writing is the muted nature of the endeavor, the product never speaks its meaning

Or maybe the silence speaks of the mediocre nature of phrases in my ghazal

 

A Happy meal of apocryphal serotonin valued higher than the celibate happiness in a tablet of Esglit

In this land, of my country in decay, a cynical picture I’ve painted in stages in my ghazal

 

Near the end, the mind itches yet again to hold the beloved by ink between index and the thumb

Albeit a tenet’s infringement, her presence will break the fast; serve as an oasis in my ghazal

 

My mahi will spend another Eid away from me and my bewailing, not for much more years

K defeats M to live before -iss in a mental Manichean heresy, as words turn into kisses in my ghazal

 

Mehwar, of these slippery toad-like warty words, takes your leave gratefully now

Before my newfound ardor, craft, contentment disjoint the homeostasis in my ghazal

Identities

                                         

I have always felt a sincere aversion to the mainstream. And I do not think I am unique to harbour such emotions. The truth is that one of the many paradoxes associated with the human condition also includes the reality that all of us are unique in our own way and yet all of us know that too, rendering our uniqueness a little less potent. As if the shared knowledge of an intrinsic exoticness takes away some part of it. Therefore, I have no qualms in admitting that my hesitancy to embrace the mainstream is not exclusive to me. In fact, I would venture farther in demeaning myself by saying that this strive to shun what the common man embraces jets out of a need to carve an identity that doesn’t overlap with someone else. Because that’s what an identity is after all, something that is exclusive to us and helps us stand out from others. Something that when mentioned would immediately swivel the metaphorical compass in someone’s mind towards us.

However, there is only so far you can resist the temptation of mediocrity and not fall into the hum-drum of the machine of society, giving into all base desires of belonging and camaraderie. You end up like others and you can’t even be blamed for it. In the cold Bifrost of the world, any semblance of a warm fire and company must always be acceptable and appreciated, even the ones that stab you in the back, especially the ones that do that in fact. Thus, you find yourself at a juncture, where your identity is not solely formed out of a matter of principle of exclusion where you could base your entire personality off what you are not. Having entered the society of man willingly, almost out of compulsion, you must find other ways to build an identity.

This identity, or the word identity is such a lose term here. It is the ‘it’ I have considered in all the philosophies I have read. It is what I want to believe is at the crux of all of it. What I love about philosophy sometimes is the fact that I do not need to completely understand it. I can read the words and sentences strewn together by all these great men and understand it in whatever form that feels right to me. Obviously, I must always then stay open to correction, for my interpretations will rarely be complete and seldom correct. But they lend a more logical progression to decision making in my life. Now when I stand at this crossroads wondering where my identity stems from, I can always look at patched pieces of philosophies I’ve acquired like trinkets over the years.

Freud would say our identity starts building at birth and it is a combination of sorts of extrinsic factors from the environment, our cultural ingrained biases and some repressed emotions acquired over development period in life that find other outlets as we become adults. This sounds very plausible and convincing to me, but it doesn’t help me now. It gives too much power to the past and to what has already happened and leaves me at the mercy of someone’s help who will help me deal through this apparent cementing of problematic behaviours. Compare that with someone like Nietzsche who was very nit picky with words, so much so that he believed that there were no good or bad words or deeds till the toxic mismatch between an altruistic morality rose within society giving birth to a motivated ressentiment where labels were ascribed to previous neutral acts so that society could function. That such an overpowering act of reshaping definitions was a Will to Power is what Nietzsche claims. And only through such wills can we hope to change the world for the better. And why would we do that? Because for Nietzsche there exists an ultimate self, the ubermensch, the over man, who will exist in the future and be the product of generations of humans practicing self-realisation: the act of exercising their will to power, in simpler words: going and getting it, while at the same time embracing whatever fate and destiny throws at them aka amor fati. Nietzsche himself is sceptical whether an ubermensch can exist but he believes that it doesn’t matter if we continue to strive for it. This makes Nietzsche’s perfect idea of a self an abstract concept. The kind of concept of ‘Self’ he refuted himself in the form of ‘soul’. What credibility does that leave to his entire philosophy? I don’t know. But self realisation expressions although liberating are much harder to perform when you are yourself unsure of what your identity is. If you do not know the self, what are you realising? and if all impulse must be realised, how is man not becoming more of an animal than an ubermensch for man shows restraint that beasts don’t. No. Will to power is helpful but only once you know who you are and where you stand can you use it justify and make your decisions. It doesn’t help you in starting the process.

Descartes said "I think therefore I am" to which Ayn Rand quipped "I am therefore I’ll think". One renders the act of existence of self hinged on the consciousness. Almost blaming consciousness for existence. The other is a little proactive and instead provides consciousness as a tool bestowed to wade through existence. Whereas it’s true that all living things think and are conscious, what is not true is the fact that we are compelled to think just because we exist. Saying I am therefore I’ll think, puts the heavy burden of thought upon every living thing, which quite frankly I am better off not doing mostly. And yet, every passing moment of my life I am compelled to think. It’s almost like my consciousness is what birthed me and what makes me. ‘I think therefore I am’ makes more sense to me. Blaming consciousness for my self and my existence feels right to me. I think we can build up on that.

Nihilists specially love consciousness. It is their favourite shit-bed. They defecate on it with a nonchalance that only herd animals show to a patch of unsuspecting grass. Once you hold consciousness as the root cause to all your problems it is easy to become an anti-natalist and argue that life is bad because it begins with consciousness, even if it’s latent at start. And that an unconscious world would be better to live in. This makes nihilism appealing too, for it is not the hate of life, or a refutation of bright sunny things. Instead, it is the knowledge of existence that makes the self miserable. Were it not for this knowledge, life would be great, and were it not for this knowledge, there would be no life. What if existence is our exile and nothingness our home? It is easy for me to drop everything here and now and hug nihilistic ideas about self. Or nonideas. Of abandoning any search for a greater meaning because life which bequeaths self has no meaning. But I could only be a nihilist if I weren’t born, or if I weren’t alive. Being an alive nihilist, of any school of thought feels hypocritical. A denial of any purpose to life snatches away so many luxuries that I enjoy having and would rather have more of. My greed and ingratitude know no bounds.

What now then?

Sartre says there is no 'I'. Instead, ‘I’ is only a cumulative product of the experiences, actions and deeds that make the ‘I’. ‘I’ only exists when the self is conscious of it. When the ‘I’ is examining itself, and thus no other activity is happening at that moment except the self awareness, or rather no other activity can be said to be happening. This idea of my self being derived of all my experiences actions and life does make sense, but it too is not helpful in developing it in the first place or rather finding it after having lost it. But maybe it is not worth finding. Because Kierkegaard says that self is directly linked to despair. And to despair is the biggest sin. It gets complicated fast. But to sin is not a problem, but to despair over that sin is a grave mistake. Instead, despair must be considered the natural order of things for it is tied in with the self. And the more self aware we try to become the more despair we will feel. Then is life nothing but despair? Is that too not nihilistic and not an existential notion? And is not considering that existential a little masochistic? It would be all those things, if it weren’t for the fact that despair is both good and bad. That with increased self awareness comes more strength. And the stronger one’s self is the closer one is to God. Thus, all despair vanishes away when one is closest to God, when one has put his entire faith in God. Therefore, one must undertake a leap in faith, of increasing one’s self awareness in the face of increasing misery and at the very zenith jump into God’s lap without knowing where it leads, but to find themselves despair free.

Wow I almost sounded like a religious scholar there. The idea is alluring, and it feels right. It would also be embracing the mainstream yet again. Religion is the most subscribed to service on this planet after Netflix, but there’s just one tiny teeny problem. The leap of faith. The cessation of all logic at one point and just accepting beliefs for lifestyle. I cannot do that. Maybe I am not ready for it yet. Maybe in the future. For now, I’ll continue running tracks up and down the hill of self awareness sometime underground even till I am ready to leap and accepting things for what they are.

Speaking of it is what it is, the stoics have a very dismembering view of the self. It’s not very unlike what I said in the beginning about uniqueness. Like all stoic beliefs, this too stems from wants and desires and works towards the betterment of society directly without much ado about abstract ideas. An experience that may be harrowing for us may not affect another person the same way, and an experience that would be intense for someone else wouldn’t affect us the same way. We would thus agree that at the very base level we are all interchangeable, except ourselves. This illusion of knowing that the self belongs to the group of homogenous species yet believing it is not interchangeable is what leads to feuds now and then. If this belief was realised that we are just one of many, in all senses of that phrase then our selfish agendas would no longer be of any use to us, instead the betterment of society would take preference. How idyllic and utopian and emasculating. It sounds good on paper but what use is my constant self sacrifice when the rest of the society doesn’t compensate? How long can I realistically call my contentment my reward till I am fed up, irate and want more than just metaphorical gifts? This just doesn’t hit for me.

Maybe this pursuit is dumbfounded. Maybe I should be like an ambiguous Kafka-esque protagonist with vague aims and rigid lifestyles, or an Outsider or just tell myself that the pursuit of such questions is philosophical suicide.
But it’s not.

It has lately become important to me to figure out who I am again. I am not quite there at mid-life but I’ve already got the crisis. Unforeseen problems have a way of finding me out suddenly. I cannot seem to love myself even though I can easily love others. And even though I can see myself through their eyes occasionally and see the parts of me that they love. It is still hard for me to coalesce all those little stars into a bigger nexus. I feel like I am missing pieces, and everyone else in comparison feels much completer and more put together. I understand that such a feeling may be universal. That even expression of such a sentiment takes away the sting from my melancholy but I am not here to measure the prognosis of my disease. I am here to get rid of the ennui that haunts me.

Hence, it is vital for me to figure out who I am. I know what I am to people. But maybe, and just maybe if I know who I am to myself, it’ll be easier to isolate parts of me I don’t like, cordon them off from the rest of me and let them occlude, shrivel up and die, while I caress and let others tenderly care for the rest of me. Thoughts of not being enough are held at bay by countless hounds of reasons and experiences telling me that the worth of one man’s value varies so much from others and let’s be real, life despite having no problem apparently can always easily go south and it shouldn’t have existed in the first place, but it does and here we are now, and I can curse it all I want, but if I have it, it must be thoroughly used. If I can jolt down some ideas of self maybe I’ll feel content knowing something about myself and this restlessness of not knowing what’s exactly wrong but knowing something is, will go away.

Who am I then? I am the product of my sad consciousness which sprouted out of nothingness and has stemmed into what it is today because of the collective synergism of all deeds thoughts environments and experiences it passed through. There isn’t much point in delving into complexities as they only needlessly perplex, what is far more important is realising that I am here now and that there are people who depend on me and people I depend on. There are people I want to be around even if there aren’t a lot of things I want to do. And that’s okay. Not everyone will do everything. Surviving is just as important. It is the bare minimum but your bare minimum could also be at a higher threshold. I must pick up the rock I put somewhere a month or so ago, remember that where parts of my name start with M and A, some nonliteral aspect of it starts with S too and begin pushing the boulder while relishing in the act alone. Considering that this sole act is the purpose of my existence without being ungrateful of its nature for it is all I have. And maybe
Just maybe someday I’ll push the boulder just enough and I’ll find myself at a peak, and there will be a chasm, and the space across the chasm will be filled with fog, and I’ll close my eyes and leap with complete faith into the unknown.

Only to be greeted by another boulder, another uphill steep.