I will start this piece with an excerpt from a writing-my-heart-out session I did 24 hours ago.

“I have tried to take my college episode well but god knows it I am struggling in my own ways. I want to be ‘Oh-I-will-make-the-best-of-this’ but all I feel is a sense of time passing faster than I could catch up. I am stressed all the time. I want to do so much just so that I do not regret having wasted and not being able to justify this hiatus. Even the two-week break I was on was nothing but day after day of worry and stress and panic to get back to working on something and feeling some fake sense of control.”

I will follow this up with a summary of Chandni’s voice note on this before we jump to the meaty part of this piece.

1/ Do not operate from a place of mandatorily trying to justify/make the best use of something bad that external forces did to you.

2/ Do not play the reactive game.

3/ You should do all those glorious things because that’s what you’d do even if the Universe didn’t drop a bomb on you. Because that’s what makes you YOU.

Now, here are my thoughts.

On forcefully trying to make good out of a bad thing.

I find myself on the extreme end of the I-can-be-a-superhero spectrum. Years of self-help books, pop-culture motivation, and pearls of wisdom from The Elders have conditioned me to brutally believe the whole ‘Whatever happens, happens for good’ narrative. I think it’s great, and also true. The problem is that somehow I have led myself to believe that it is my responsibility to make the good happen. I do not rely on the Universe (time and clarity) to grant me perspective. This is wrong. I am not supposed to. I choose to. And I choose to do my best, happily and without losing sleep.

On the reacting game.

This one comes from a petty place and I need to work on being bigger than this. To react is to give away your power to what has happened. Now that’s not a nice place to be, is it? An added layer of risk is that it could turn into a habit. Not the best habit to have, in my shiny, first-world opinion. Note to self: Cultivate the habit of not letting small roadblocks redefine your long-term plans.

On doing things that make you YOU

Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no inner resources

John Berryman, Dream Song #14

This line is not the core of this poem, but it has stuck with me.

Something I like about myself is a degree of self-motivation to just do things. Ever since I was a kid, I have had a rich mind – an ability to keep myself engaged and occupied. From where I come, there wasn’t much to do apart from Cartoon Network and a garden. But I remember spending my time reading old books, teaching myself the keyboard from YouTube, metal craft – anything. I was never a bored kid. Neither am I today. My first instinct when I think of something moderately stimulating is to do it. 

Weird thought: Maybe the search for crazy stimuli and dopamine fixes desensitizes me to the basic levels and I intuitively develop a liking/search/need for cooler things to do.

But, this is what I love about myself. I am almost always finding something to do, trying it, maybe giving it up if it stops being fun (this is a problem I would like to solve), and then moving on to something else. It has always pushed me out of my comfort zones, got me addicted to learning, made me (mostly) indifferent to failure, and given me so much skill/exposure. I love it.

To be Anshika is to do something. Anything. All the time.

Take care,

Anshika