Thoughts which don't fit the word count
On taking an Instagram and Twitter break, starting this newsletter, and of rustling trees and wasp nests
Yesterday, I impulsively decided to take a break from Instagram and Twitter. It had been on my agenda for a while but I finally took the plunge yesterday morning. The break was in one measure due to trying to process the beyond heartbreaking images and stories pouring in from the events taking place in Delhi over the last few days as well as the abhorrent bigotry and hatred accompanying it. What frightens and pains me how deep rooted and normalised this hatred is becoming for the last so many months, years even. Where do people summon it up and what are they possibly deriving from it? Whatever it is, there is only so much hatred that you can expose yourself to before you become utterly overwhelmed and simply do not know what to do with all those feelings - and so came my decision to switch off. I know it is a hugely great act of privilege to do so: to switch off because I can do so, simply because I am not in the center of that raging storm, where your very identity, home, existence are being challenged and attacked, something which I cannot even imagine or have to worry about. I will talk about that on another day, if I can, if I will ever have the right words for it.
What I do know is that if I want to give what I want to give and as much as my heart's capacity allows me to do so, I need to first take care of myself. And as it often happens, answers to your questions often arrive when you most need them so - and this poem appeared in front of me the other day when I was most urgently seeking for the answer to my question.
It's been exactly a day since I posted on either Twitter or Instagram (I somehow don't use Facebook that much anymore). When I say I took a break from them, I meant taking a break from both consuming and sharing over there. While I admit that I visited both of these sites a couple of times, I haven't shared anything at all, not even a Story or a photo tweet (which is how I feel I best express myself on social media anyway!)
So why here? I first thought I would return to my abandoned blog but then, a good friend sent me the link to her newsletter (hello, my dearest R!) and I then thought, well, why not a newsletter? Why not explore and embrace a new way of expressing? After all, I realised that I was not as much as exhausted of sharing as of consuming - and it was this relentless, nonstop consumption which was eventually affecting the process and act of creating and what I happened to share. It's funny talking about sharing because for the longest time, I was so wary about sharing and even sharing as much as I did in the early years of my blog or on Facebook was an enormous stepping out of the comfort zone on my part. And yet, for the past few years, thanks to finding a community of kindred spirits on Instagram and Twitter who liked what I shared and thereby encouraging me to share more, I have been more comfortable about bringing into open my thoughts, experiences, and opinions then ever before.
But for quite some time, I also felt that I was hearing so many voices on so many platforms that I simply could not hear mine. I then found myself traversing that familiar terrain of self doubt: is my voice really worthy of listening in the first place? Am I really saying anything groundbreakingly new? I am going through a patch where I am having to struggle with either rejections or silence to my writing submissions and pitches. Is it the idea or the voice that is the problem? What is my voice anyway? And if one of the reasons for being on these platforms was to share and that act was being fundamentally impacted, I needed to introspect and at large.
I found myself wanting to write at length but no longer having to count out characters or wondering if the caption is too rambling. One of the reasons why I have never attempted to write syllable/metre bound poetry is both because I am not very good at it - and also, I don’t want to. A form gives shape and structure, I know but at the same time, I feel it constrains me, like a corset. And I guess this newsletter is going to be about that: a home for homeless thoughts, which don’t quite fit anywhere else, which can escape the stricture and labels of character or word counts and just be over here.
So what has been going on in the last twenty four hours of my life that I haven’t tweeted or Storied or posted about?
I read read as opposed to checking my phone every five minutes.
I read this haunting article by Guardian journalist, Hadley Freedman about learning what truly lay beneath the sadness she always saw in her grandmother. I thought about Hadley's grandmother, one moment, living a life in a city and with a man she loved in pre-WW2 Paris and next moment, in a suburban American town, married to a man whose children she would bear and yet, would never grow to love. “Sala had done what she had to in order to survive, but in saving herself she lost everything that had made her life worth living,” writes Freedman in this beautiful, moving piece about discovering her late grandmother’s secret, inner lives and understanding why she was the way she was. Freedman has written a book about the whole journey, The House of Glass and I will look forward to reading it.
I have started re-reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I first found it in a book club I used to belong to when living in Oman and the shame, I didn’t wind up returning it to the person I borrowed it from. However, it has given me great comfort and solace over the years and I hope that it has done the same to the many I have recommended it to.
I also read about the confirmation bias, Jung’s synchronicity theory and the meshing of a mystical, invisible, compassionate Universe and science. I need to read more of Jung, that’s for sure, especially his interpretations of dreams.
There is a giant hornet queen ( as opposed to my previously incorrect id of it being a potter wasp) who is diligently making a nest on my balcony ledge. My first reaction upon seeing the nest was: alarm. I even asked on Twitter and Instagram as to whether I should get it removed: someone emphatically said, yes while someone else wisely suggested the idea of a compassionate removal. However, my husband and I just did not have the heart to remove it and in any case, what gives us the right to do if the insect is not threatening us? It is so just so convenient and easy for us humans to get rid of anything that poses a threat or frightens us, never mind if we upset the delicate cycles of nature and destroy the many threads of connections binding us all. The ongoing climate crisis and the other environmental disasters are a grave testimony to this fact and I hope we as a human race can make amends for all the collective disruptions we have made to the precarious, precious cycle that is nature.
The nest is halfway complete so it’s difficult to peer inside it now. According to this piece, “the nest is made from chewed wood and saliva which gives it a paper-like look. Unlike with bees, the queen hornet builds the nest on her own.” These are the two blurry pictures I took with my phone as the hornet would immediately fly towards the moment I ventured near the nest upon seeing it temporarily empty. It is absolutely incredible to watch this nest come into being, assuming a pot like shape more and more every day, in front of me. And since I am also hellbent on extracting metaphors for my life out of everything that happens to me these days, I looked up what the arrival of a wasp means in one’s life and this is what I stumbled upon.
Last night, I heard the leaves from the trees outside our apartment building rustling for a long while. We have two raintrees, tamarind, jamun, junglee jalebi, avocado, to name just a few, so there is plenty of leaf music to listen to. The owl couple who occupy the tamarind tree across my apartment between late November-early February and would fill the night air with their enthusiastic or disappointed hunting cries are most likely gone now. And so, perhaps, that’s why I could hear the leaves.
And finally, I glimpsed this stunning salmon-pink colored water lily today at one of my most favorite Bangalore places, Sri Aurobindo Ashram. It was balm for both the eye and soul.
I am glad to be writing like this. I don't know who is listening but perhaps, for once, it doesn’t matter.
But if you do want to listen, you are welcome to subscribe. I promise to be as regular as I can be but bear with me, if I am not.