Of making leaps & having quote-able friends #5

Hello friends!

• You know, I always write the whole newsletter and then name it. I never know what to name it first. I let my words take me on a journey. Something that I am also doing with my life currently. I quit my job this week and I felt liberated. I thought what I was doing there was something I was born to do. Okay, maybe that’s a stretch. But I really thought that was my dream only to late realise that sometimes, the things you think are your dreams, are just that - dreams. They are not your reality. Am I making sense?

• Codependency is real. My mother and I share a very codependent relationship. I thought it was mostly from her end - all the overbearingness and constantly making my life the centre of hers, but it’s in therapy when I learnt that I was also doing the same. I am trying to work on that now. If you’ve ever been in a codependent relationship, you know just how hard it is to break from a pattern. For instance, when I tell her to give me space and she does, I worry and I get anxious because I am so used to our existing relationship that I don’t know if that goes away, what will be of us. Imagine you have a vase on a table. It’s always been there. But now that vase is gone and you have to put something else on that table. It’s like that - I don’t know what to put on the table if it isn’t going to be the big vase.

• I don’t know where my life is headed as of today. I know I want to do many things but mostly this is how I feel since the past month:

It could be that my depression is making a comeback. Which reminds me of a very funny thing my friend once said, ‘Yeh aise beech mein kahan chala jaata hai?’ And tbh, I have no fucking clue. It’s like my depression goes on a vacation for some time and once it’s done living that vacay life, it comes back, gets to work and makes my life tough. I have zero will to do anything nowadays and that’s coming from someone who keeps taking on multiple things/projects. I simply don’t want to do anything. I just want to be wrapped in a blanket and maybe not even be a person.

• I have also been thinking about how grateful I am to have friends in my life who are so quote-able. My whole life is quoting my friends. When in conversations with them, I find myself. So naturally when I was questioning my ability to be a person and where I am headed next, my friend said, ‘We give meaning to things. It’s fully on us. So we get to decide whether to give something a bad meaning or a good one. We decide what power something has on us. ‘ And that resonated a lot with me because I’ve been thinking about how it just won’t make any sense to take a break now, after working relentlessly for so many years, it might even raise a question to my future employers but I am deciding to just be. I have spent the last month on LinkedIn and believe me, it has been exhausting. I am so scared that I won’t find my place in the world. Like I thought the thing I was doing was something I was meant to do and now I don’t think it’s that - so what is it? And how do we know where we belong? Why don’t we come with a manual? ‘Sharma from Bandra will be an engineer. ‘Malhotra from Colaba will be a designer. ‘ ‘Wadhwa from Juhu will be in denial.’ Because that’s what I am, all the time.

• Yesterday I was narrating to my therapist what I wrote in my journal. We were discussing love and I said, ‘Who decides what love is and what love isn’t?’ It came from my anger towards this boy who wouldn’t make as many efforts to keep our relationship alive while still claiming he loved me. It made no sense. Because for me, love is when you want to make efforts. But that’s what love is to me and it’s okay if that’s not what love is to him. Whoever decided we all need to have the same definitions of love?

• My OCD is so fucked and there is no better way of saying it. I thought it was only me until I spoke to a few more people. There is more to OCD than just having everything around you clean. OCD is disturbing, persistent thoughts that haunt you and don’t go away. I’ve had it ever since I was a child and got diagnosed a year ago. I’ve been living so long with it that I am not quite sure how to live without it. An OCD-free world, how would that be? Do you have OCD too? Write to me so we can comfort each other.

• About tonight - my brother and sister (sister-in-law but I don’t use it because it sounds formal) went out tonight. And every time they go out, Chewie (my dog) is worried when they’ll come back. He sleeps with my maa and I until they do but I realised one thing about him, in between sleeping, he’ll wake up, wake me up only so he can go out to check if they’ve come back and once he’s realised they haven’t, he comes back to bed. So if you’re feeling bad about being clingy or needy, know that it’s okay. Don’t make needy a bad word. It’s beautiful to care that much. Needing someone does not make you weak. Chewie teaches me to how to accept my needy self everyday. There’s so much you can learn from animals.

• I don’t think I have anything more to say. I made this a bullet list thing because my feelings don’t have structure today, and they don’t usually, so I thought I’d let you in my structureless feelings. It’s wonderful and raw here. Leaving you with something my friend said yesterday as I cried for an hour: ‘Let’s handle one project at a time. I know you’re clueless about many things and a lot is happening so let’s take one thing and solve that for now. Then slowly slowly, you’d have solved so many things. ‘ It was his way of saying, I know you want to build a home right now, but let’s take it wall by wall, brick by brick, pick up one brick, put it on the cement (I don’t know how construction works I am assuming they do that) and keep doing that. One day, you’d have made a whole home of all your beautiful things.

• I fucking love my friends.

  Sending you love and healing,

  Let’s make a home together.

  Nidhi