You know what your problem is?
You’re unable to value my childlike splendour
This is a targeted letter, but it is also general as I have learned after several conversations with friends, as I have observed in several characters in books, as I have experienced first-hand with people I know.
I have struggled to believe my words are cogent, coherent, logical, and articulate. I have finally reached a stage in life where I think what I say matters and is worth discussing. I don’t know when this idea was supplanted in my head.
I am nothing if not a talkative and animated person. The thoughts never stop. People incorrectly believe that talkers either speak to the void or to sincere listeners.
Talkers are in desperate search of fellow talkers who talk back, whose responses expand beyond the realms of cursory head movements and limited analysis of the subject, whose lip-shut quiet listening is not a sign of diligent listening but of inattention and worse still, inability to cognise in real-time. Either case, sucks for me.
This is not about partners and parents. It is about none of that. However, it is quite strange that I find them at the root cause of modern-day issues in many people’s lives.
Partners who don’t listen and parents who didn’t listen have to be my favourite ingredients for the recipe of disaster.
I call this the two-ingredient thick soup for eternal unhappiness.
Oh, so it is about parents and partners. Boring.
It is not! The idea I am exploring is how lonely it is to be a person who wants to be witnessed, whose humanness is dependent on being seen and heard, who when alone feels like a machine, not any different from a chair, breathless, bloodless and heartless. I am typing only to be perceived by people with greater rigour.
But I have understood some things that are equal parts painful and equal parts freeing and it is that you are not owed a listening ear, you are not owed a response. The door you’re knocking at is fake, there is a wall behind the door. No one can open that door. And the sad part is that the door is opaque. You can only imagine what’s inside that door and your imagination is telling you there is something. So you knock, knock till your knuckles are blue. And the part that’s freeing is when you turn around, tend to your knuckles and stop waiting for the door to open.
It was my life’s greatest fear to feel lonely but so what? Just because I fear something, it doesn’t stop it from happening. I don’t like but it can happen nonetheless. And when it does happen, the painful part is that I am living my fear but what is freeing is that I can anticipate and be right about things.
I have been touting about my reading habit so much. Maybe it is not rooted in erudition but in a painful sense of longing and connection. The expectations from a book are limited because all it needs to do is provide some respite from everyday life by being at worst engrossing and at best relatable so that I don't feel lonely; so that it feels like somewhere far far away some author feels this way too.
If you came here looking for conclusive and hopeful closing statements, I don't have them. I don’t know a way out. What if this modus operandi is incorrect? Walking away when something is less than imagined. But such is the privilege of youth, the illusion of time, the illusion of the rest of my life. And I hope this privilege of walking away stays at the centre of my palm always.
