If you’re in Bangalore on 5th and 6th September, I might be there to talk about Chikkamma. Save the date! Details in the next newsletter.
A few reading reccommendations:
This sharp, moving short story (content warning for attempted suicide, skinning an animal).
I reread this very old essay on safety and homelessness, racism and belonging.
- ’s stunning essay about a flood.
How To Write (Not Another Hero's) Journey is a wonderful zine on breaking out of conventional storytelling tropes. (You’ll have to buy it to read it.)
This Caravan story from a few years ago by the photographer Akshay Mahajan, who took photos of Goalpara in Assam. I saw some of these pictures at
Jhaveri Contemporary recently and was very moved.
And a book: The Last Time I Saw You by Akhil Katyal. I’m not enough of a connoisseur, a student even, of poetry to evaluate this on technical terms. I can say only, that the emotion thrums through like a beating heart. The use of 'mahak' in a poem instead of smell or aroma brings in a nuance I can’t describe. In the same poem, rain in sudden light described as ‘rain’s falling cage’. Images so vivid they stay in my head after I close the book. Phrases I keep coming back to, the garlic’s odour ‘a tendril rage’ climbing up the poet’s fingers. The utter grief: ‘All the people in the world/ keep turning out to be not you.’
A few years ago i was struggling with self pity. It’s not like i never feel it anymore: it’s natural to feel sad or frustrated at your own problems. But at the time, i was feeling terrible envy at anyone i felt had it better: who seemed to have had happier childhood or better health or (esp family) networks that offered access to career opportunities. It wasn’t that i wasn’t aware of my own privileges, and I reminded myself that we don’t fully know the circumstances of others’ lives, but i couldn’t stop envying them and feeling sorry for myself. I wanted to stop. I was impatient with myself for feeling this way, because it was an uncomfortable feeling and also seems (i still think) not a useful one; it just made me feel worse without providing motivation to make things better. It was a form of self-absorption.
I was in therapy at the time. My therapist encouraged me to “process my trauma”. Some of that processing was helpful, but the majority of the time i spent in therapy and doing therapy homework—so many hours, over months and years—just left me stuck in the loop of thinking how unfair life had been to me and feeling sorry for myself.
But life is unfair to all of us: giving us disproportionate hurt and loneliness and fear some years of decades, and also, if we’re lucky, more than a little love and happiness. I have had lots and lots of the latter too.
This is not to say therapy can’t be useful or processing trauma isn’t important. But i wasn’t just processing: I was dwelling. Wallowing, even. So exhausted from all this remembering and thinking and feeling that i couldn’t function. I couldn’t write, I wasn’t much of a partner to N, i couldn’t clean my home, i did very little for months and months.
I’ve only figured this out recently, now that I know how important writing or just getting lost, absorbed, in work, is for my emotional regulation. By emotionally overwhelming me and making me unable to function, this (excessive? incompetently administered?) therapy left me feeling even more inadequate. Broken. By making it harder for me to access my most effective self soothing mechanisms, and also by thereby keeping me farther away from achieving my goals, it made it harder for me to feel better. And of course, the worse i felt, the more i felt i needed therapy.
That’s not to say it was relentlessly terrible. Therapy did help in some ways, I did feel a little better, i did start working for money again. But i continued to feel terrible about myself. I know now that it was because i wasn’t achieving my goals and was afraid i never would: no amount of therapy would have helped with that, unless it convinced me to not want what i wanted. And I’m very glad it didnt.
I quit because my therapist went on vacation and i immediately felt better and had more energy. I don’t completely regret therapy, though I wish I’d quit sooner; I’m glad i spent some time thinking about my life and what i wanted to change. I only wish I’d trusted my own judgment more. I wish I’d believed that i was the expert on my own life. I do now.
Something that helped me with this was the Mad Studies sessions I attended, and learning about the Mad Pride movement. Learning that difference is not in itself wrong: something that I knew about other aspects of life but struggled to apply to my emotions and how I relate to the world.
Back to self pity: it’s hard to feel it right now, when media is full of images of starving people, starving children. But it is easy to feel powerless. For nearby two years now there have been protests and reports and judgements and boycotts: there’s no plausible deniability anymore. The tyrants don’t care. They are gleefully killing thousands and thousands of people. A scale of evil that is hard to wrap my head around. A holocaust that’s being abetted by governments across the world.
What do we do? What do we do but keep living, keep working. I was listening to this old podcast episode last night where the writer Rebecca Gayle Howell said: creation is resistance. Let’s keep creating. Maybe a better world will come if we work at it. Even if it doesn’t: what else is there to do?