Elbow Room

A parasite of inadequacy nibbles at my insides at times when I come across a good piece of writing or an original piece of thought. Confidence, rather an extended lease of over-confidence over my own unexploited potential, clouds the possibility of selfless admiration. What is left behind is a lacuna, a painful reminder of my own lack of progress towards an intended future. And future not just in the vague, ever-receding sense but one the furthering of which every passing second affirms.

I need to write. I want to write. For long I have been unable to, rather withholding myself from it for reasons I don't know. Every time I hear or see or feel something, I take a mental note and in that moment there are so many permutations and combinations in my mind and heart. The feelings that all my experiences evoke in me splash inside me and attack me with a violent fury. They wait to find salvation in expression, tired of passive contemplation. A half-clad girl on the traffic signal performing acrobatics, her dark hands meshing with the sweltering black concrete, or a skeletal of a dog on the side of the highway to Jammu with death hanging on its dry tongue, or a poignant feeling of helplessness at seeing the dark circles under mom's eyes, the same that look over/after everyone, and every time I read into an expression on the face of the young helpers at my place, one that instills the luxury they extend to us with a guilt, and every time when personal disappointments make me want to give up, make me want to run away to a distant shore or hill, every time I stand in the balcony staring for hours at the queue of raindrops hanging on the electricity wires in the street, hanging for dear life, every time the thump of the rolled morning newspaper on my head slaps me out of my slumber……

I want to write and find myself. As much philosophical as it may sound, that's what I think is the logical culmination of writing. Probably I have been too afraid of myself. Too afraid to look within, deep enough, and find those words to describe what I'm really, really feeling. For to write you must dig. Where was it that I read that a writer to write a great piece of work must commit to isolation? It is in that state that you can begin to dig and dive into your heart and surface with something worth writing, worth sharing. I have been too afraid of isolation. Outside and Inside. Too afraid of a calm, of silence, of popping out of my bubble.

I have always been surrounded by people at home, ours being a joint family. Always had a best friend to talk to, been in a 'group' in college, had a gang of cousins while growing up, have been shy but never a loner. Back in 12^th class Farewell, Hotel Ashoka, everyone around me dancing in saris and suits, there was a time when I felt alone, neglected and isolated from everyone around me…and what did I do? I ran. I ran from the claustrophobia of that isolation.

Even my diaries, I sometimes feel, I have been holding myself. Trying to avoid acknowledging certain feelings, certain events, fabricating a past I didn't want to remember.

But I feel its isolation, not an unworldly kind though, that unleashes the true self. To be able to write you need to have experienced a privateness, a solitariness of being. I have been running away from that solitariness. It scares me.

What I have come to realize is that escaping does not necessarily exorcise it. What does that, is the act of what they call 'facing your fears'. Of 'getting down to it'. And the contentment after having written a page, of having truly expressed yourself on the draft of your blog compares to nothing. It brings back the ability to admire others. That had never been jealousy in the first place anyway, only a misdirected rage and frustration at the inability to find my own calling in life. Once you've used that rage to create something, It's liberating. It creates form out of the chaos that is your life. The lacuna begins to fill, then.

Sometimes I want to shriek. Loud and far. So that I may hear in the echo, the ear-shattering sound of something I need the most right now-inspiration.

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