Making Sense of Myself and Writing Again
Writing after a very long time. I can maybe trace back to when and be shocked at the number, but I think I can attribute it simply to the fact that I didn’t feel like it. And if I didn’t feel like it, do I really want it all that much? I left writing in the guise of earning back then, am I doing the same right now? I have taken on more responsibilities. Some which always existed but I simply never acknowledged them. And when I did, everyone was happy and seemed to make the face, “About time”. Ritu is concerned about the fact that I am now borderline rude under the guise of being honest. And that I am not a person like that, and I need to be more myself and less her. I do get influenced by my partner, and I don’t want to lose myself, but I don’t see a way of telling my sister about responsibilities any other way. My parents are not going to ask her to be better; they never asked me to be better. They are complacent in their own lives, and they made us so. It is a double-edged sword, to be honest. It made me ambitionless, but I can live well below my means. I know my limits, and I won’t ever crib about living a certain way. People live worse, but I can survive well on my own. I think my sister is doing so too; she just needs to aim higher. I don’t know. My biggest problem last year or at the beginning of this year, was how to spend all the money I saved in Kolkata. Now I have that problem still, but now I am taking care of my parents in some capacity. I am helping out at home. It felt like a burden, not even a burden. I didn’t want to do it. But suddenly, as I live alone, it feels like a duty. It is what it is.
Am I ranting right now, am I not?
I have seen people do it to me and to other people; they burden each other with their problems, or they swallow their problems until they have a sun in their stomach and their body is too fragile to bear the heat, and then it comes out. Maybe they beat their daughter, they beat their son, yell at their wife, or leave home to avoid facing the repercussions of their problems. If I keep writing like this about my problems, when would I get to do any actual writing? Maybe there is a way to extract something out of this so that this can become an essay or something from this can become a prose poem. I actually read Richard Siken’s prose poems, and my view about poetry changed. It can be that too. I didn’t know. I feel better. I had bottled all these things for all these days, and it kept penting up inside me. I am still yet to delete the old software of my old job from this laptop. Remnants of a time I don’t want to remember right now. How do I make this feeling go away? That at any time, everything good that I have will be taken away from me. Do I not have any agency in my own life? Am I not the owner? I mean, not my job, it’s not mine to give and not mine to take away. So if my job is someone else’s, where I live is someone else’s, my possessions have a due date, and even my body is taken from the earth. What is mine?