Two halves of me finding the best in both worlds

A pixel picture in an effort to have a pulse on the every day state of being when trying to figure out life living alone, away from home

Zoom in

After briefly waking up to see outside the window at the sky not nearly bright enough, checking my phone to see it’s 8:30 am, snoozing an alarm at 9:30 am and then shutting it off, I finally wake up at 12:15 with a restlessness I choose to give a name: disappointment. Begrudgingly, I get dressed and contemplate the whole time if I should get a coffee from Starbucks or just have the tea packet I had with me in my room. I decide it’s best to get out for a bit and getting coffee seemed like a great excuse towards that end. Some can argue, it could actually be the other way around but oh well, I get out of the room and into the lift with my jacket, boots, key card and phone. With a plastered poker face, I walk weird - strutting slowly, one foot in front of another as if on a ramp walk but also almost too fast, skipping people walking towards me as if on an obstacle course mission. At the counter, as I try to tell the lady in front of me my order, I realise these are the first words to come out of my rather dried up throat today. I find they come out alien - in a raspy voice as if the first time ever, somehow not right, almost too slow but also rushed as I try to adjust my Indian accent for her British one. “Can I have the iced brown sugar...oat shaken espresso?” “What size?” “Umm…tall?”

Mentally cringing at how awkward that felt, I try to mask it with a smile but was pretty sure it looked like a grimace. Waiting for my order, I don’t know where to stand or where to look, looking at my phone as if it were a book to read. My coffee comes, I leave in a hurry. Two shops away, I slow down, walking up the road back to my room with the same false conviction. I sit on the bed, to look around the tiny studio room to find nothing I could admire. Last night’s mental list of what things I would do - read a book, sit in a park, work on my assignment - escape my mind. A blurry recalling of it is swiftly chucked back as I find my iPad and think of that show on Netflix that felt nice. 10 minutes later, it does not.

Back home, I wake up at the same time but under different circumstances. I am briefly woken up multiple times not by an alarm but by the voices of my mother or father. I finally wake up to be received by chai in a big thermos jug waiting for me on the dining table, sweet and warm. Yet, its not the ready availability of homemade chai but my baa’s good morning while she reads her paath, my mami baa asking me to eat the fruit prasad she offered during her morning pooja and the smell of agarbatti that engulfs the house, that I perhaps find to be wildly different in comparison to the empty silence of the dark blue and grey walls of the room. And so I sit and wonder on my bed, why does it feels weird to smile at someone even if I want to. Why can I not walk normally without feeling like I’m being watched? Why does something so ritualistic and mundane like waking up feel so….unnatural.

Zoom out

The interdependency of an individual’s world and their social world has always been on my radar as I observed, pondered, analysed and concluded upon events, people, stories, through sightings, conversations, news - a personal but detached, intellectually processed pursuit. Not every lived experience lends itself as an awakening for you to have such musings but when you move to a foreign country away from family and friends, such an approach becomes a way of life.

It’s a shift of worlds, not just a shift in place and space but also in time. A constant comparison of here and there, now and before. One foot in what is home and one foot in what you wish could be home. One hand is always on the door between to keep it open, the key to the portal to make sure you always have a way out and a way in. The other hand flails out to reach out to people and things in both worlds, accumulating them in your memory box as you start to associate your belongingness to them. Amidst it, your head is split two-ways, one side trying to imagine the future, the other side trying to relive memories of the past. Your eyes taking everything around you, learning building and street names, while your nose locates replicable liquid comfort in the smells of coffee, chai and wine.

When your life feels like a flaccid science fiction motion film where you play the main character caught up in this divided state of being, getting a ticket front row seat is out of reach, a third category of role-taking made impossible by the sheer set up of such a stage. Your usual sense-making toolkit of observation, pondering and analysing become useless as you realise they feel powerless against your instinct, your feelings and your emotions. Every day is a feeling check in with yourself, each question a version of the other - How am I feeling about this? Am I okay with this? Do I feel like it? How do they make me feel? Your conclusions and decisions are unsuitable, unreliable, irrational. Your pursuit to understand the world, individual and social, is now more personal, attached and emotionally processed.

In this state of liminality, one’s sense of self is invisible to oneself. Questions like - What do I want? Why am I here? What do I believe in? What plans next? - have one answer - I don’t know. Like a pendulum, life oscillates between this and that, sure only about this ambiguity as regret could be not just what you choose not but also what you did choose.

Settling it

Today, while I still sit disoriented in this state, I feel like I can admit these glowing words to hang onto that I would highlight for someone that I’d see to be feeling a similar distorted reality - “I know it is difficult to trust yourself so instead trust this process. Give into this confusion. Allow yourself this chaotic mental turmoil with grace, it’s taking you somewhere you did not know you needed to be. It’s puzzling now but the pieces will fall into place. It is okay to be figuring it out, to be clueless and to have no answer. You are in air, your parachute is this step in life itself and answering the question to where you land cannot be an expectation to have. Instead just believe that you’ve got this”