Wanting

Isn't that enough reason?

Joy by Nilesh. More of his paintings here.

We are often taught we need to have unassailable reasons for everything. Reasons that aren’t just—because I want to. Reasons that we can defend, that aren’t emotional, that make sense to every real and hypothetical person. Even (especially) when it comes to our appearances, our preferences, our likes and dislikes.

For instance, I got two haircuts this year. I paid what I think is quite a lot of money for each (2000 for one, 1800 for the other). The stylist demanded why I want the style I want (short, an undercut), why I want the hair I have (undyed, greying). It wasn’t enough that I said I wanted it; my preference was probed, judged, found wanting. I wasn’t interested in mounting a defence, but ended up feeling that I had failed to defend [my hair, my preferences, myself] adequately.

I do have reasons, even big important reasons, for wanting my hair short. Longer hair feels viscerally wrong, the only part of my body that is a regular source of gender dysphoria. I’ve had long hair, or hair that at least covered my neck, fell over my ears, for most of my life, and I realised only a few years ago how much I hate it. Why would I subject myself to always feeling uncomfortable when I see myself in a mirror? Why would I [want, need, have] to explain it to a stranger?

(By one of those beautiful moments of serendipity that remind us how common many of our experiences are, I came across, after I’d written out this newsletter (and reread and edited it a few times) this beautiful poem about a young woman who gets a pixie cut and scandalises the neighbourhood.)

I’ve only got my hair coloured once in my life, and then I got blue streaks, and I loved it. But I’m too anxious to enjoy a stranger working on my hair, I’m too anxious to commit to the hours and hours it takes, I’m too anxious/lazy to figure out how to do it myself—but mostly, I don’t care about it enough to do it. But anyway, the stylist who said, you don’t colour your hair? didn’t mean, why don’t you put fun colours in your hair. He meant, why don’t you hide your grays, your age, your body’s signs of deterioration? Well, because I don’t fucking want to. I hated my hair graying at first. Till people complimented me on my gray streaks and I realised I hated it because I’d been taught to. I don’t know if I love it now, but I’ve got used to it. I know I’d hate colouring it. I know I don’t want to feel like I have to do something time consuming every month or two to make myself look like I’m supposed to look. I refuse to subject myself to looking wrong, different from how I feel; I refuse to be a subject of this heteronormative patriarchy.

Nilesh buzzed off some hair from the back of my head, which made me happy

I have wanted to be a writer all my life. The first time I articulated it was when I was maybe twelve years old. Since then, there’s never been any one thing I’ve wanted more.

I have been a writer all my life, at least since I was twelve years old. I was a precocious youngster, getting paid (just a few hundred rupees a story/installment) by newspapers for my work when I was a teenager. But I kept giving up, being derailed by things I was supposed to do—go to college learning subjects I wasn’t interested in, make a career in something I wasn’t interested in. Being a writer seemed an impossible dream. I had a living to earn. I wasn’t talented enough. Publishers weren’t beating down my door.

But I kept coming back to writing. And I let go, slowly, painfully, of all my hopes and expectations outside of the work itself. I wanted to write more than I wanted to become a writer. I wanted to finish the novel more than I wanted to be published. But I did want to get published enough to keep trying, to keep revising it over and over.

I started embroidering when I was an impossibly small child. At six years old, I gifted my Class 1 teacher a handkerchief which she absolutely refused to believe I had done. Such grown-up pursuits for a kid to pick: reading and writing and embroidery. But what was a lonely child in the years before cable TV to do?

Recently I’ve been doing up a couple of dresses, and am immensely pleased at being able to do this for myself. It feeds my appetite for colour, for fashion, for art, without spending money (I’m using materials I’ve had for a long time.)

I stitched a hem of sequins onto this dress.

Of course, you can’t, and shouldn’t, always do exactly what you want to: you’re constrained by ethics, by your resources and circumstances. But why do we feel so compelled to follow so many rules, rules that seem to only exist to make us unhappier?

So. I’ve been thinking for a few months that I want to restart this newsletter. I have questioned myself on my reasons, and they seem to be:

• I’m lonely, and this will feel like communicating, like sharing thoughts I don’t know how else to share, even if no one reads it, especially if at least one person does read and respond

• I have the mindspace now to think of things again, the kind of things I’d like to write in a newsletter

• It might help my writing career: marketing, baby (but I cringe when I think this)

• I miss it

None of these reasons are unassailable, are even very defensible, given the time and effort I will spend on this, given the few subscribers I have (and don’t I have other things to do that are more important?)

But you know what, I want to write newsletters again, so here I am. That’s the reason that really matters. I do hope to write to you at least once a month, for at least the next year, because I think I’ll want to.

I return again and again to Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, especially these lines:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

So tell me, friend, what are you doing these days because you want to? What do you want to do but haven’t started? Tell me in the comments, or reply to this email.