Longing for a DC life

It is a bitter truth that one inevitably ends up longing for exactly the things one once decried. The distance between now and once need not be long. In fact, in retrospect, it always looks too short.

It was on this exact same blog that I used to complain about life being too DC. The year was probably 2012 or 2013 A.D. Then things changed as they always do and they triggered me as they, again, always do. Self diagnosis tends to be suspect but I do think I have very mild autism, as evidenced by my fear of change and my delayed response processing problem.

Life these days was stable, and stability is what I long for more than anything as a broke, going-nowhere-in-life, personal or professional, 30-ish woman with nothing to say and no one to say it to. I severely underestimated its importance and well yes I have realized my mistake.

I find doctors to be the only class of people who can ever diagnose anything correctly about me. Mostly I am on my own. So be it.

It does make one question the entire point of having people in one's life. Since I am done with the usual host of questions that accompanies midlife crisis, I can afford to deal with it now. As usual, I suspect I know the answer. Putting it into practise would take some effort on my part, but hey, I can manage it, inspite of a different kind of ache along every foot of my body that seems menopausal on multiple accounts. Ah well, one's spirit must be what it is, and mine has never been young for a moment.

Last few weeks have been lovely for half an hour every day when I study differential geometry. This is the kind of stuff I have always wanted to spend my time with, but it does not come naturally to me. Ah well nature is overrated.

All this reflection reminds me of the succinct conclusion I once reached and told Aby about, while reclining on a chair in the UC; that I don't need men, I just need maths. Men are lovely creatures and the reference here is metaphorical, towards all things material and abstract and which don't reside in one's mind. The biggest lesson I have learnt or perhaps re-learnt is that it is what it is, where it can point to each and every thing in the universe. A lifetime spent trying to fit in tells me that it is an exercise in futility, and one that tends to hurt people all around. An excess of emotions and a deep inexplicable void are things that humans carry around in one form or another and here at least I can find refuge in the elusive concept of normalcy. 

l0ve 4 haTers

I have a horror of emotions in general, unless they be negative ones. However, some people are just too precious not to be treasured; some feelings are just too beautiful not to be expressed.
Much as I worry about my internal wiring all being off, it delivers remarkable surprises from time to time. One side effect of being me is that I thrive in the face of adversity. Provided that the temperature can be kept near room temperature, of course. The summers here are simply unbearable, but one gotta live where one gotta live.
Summer in burgh was beautiful, as I once documented here. Truly beautiful. On the flip side, though, it was too easy. I just remember a group of undergrads from whatever country being somewhat rude to me in the sports complex, but even those guys later asked us if we would play badminton with them. Sweet times!
It was one of the best summers mostly due to the fact that I was moderately well-off, I had nothing to deliver for being this well-off, and I could pursue my heart's desire. Apart from drinking ice cream shakes with Aby in the afternoons, it mostly translated into studying spectral graph theory and experiment design. It was there and then that I finally understood the linear regression equations that I was supposed to have learnt in the previous semester. Who knows, maybe my professor remembers me as the girl who wanted to do 'research' but didn't know matrix inversion. Wow!
Back in those days, I used to be not popular at all. Now I look back with fondness on those serene days! Still, it was there that I made a not-very-radical observation that keeps popping up on overheard- I don't need men, I just need maths.
Hard work just isn't for me, and I'm just not for it. Aby worked hard that summer. I mostly read stuff on a variety of topics and theorized about graphs. Never led me anywhere!
In retrospect, I had it way too easy, and I never realized it at that time. It was only when I came back that I discovered all kinds of haters-explicit and implicit. I absolutely love them all and they are my only source of passion in a lacklustre life. With time, one learns to twirl one's curls and smile at all the incoming hate and dumbing down and underestimation that just keeps poring in. Guys who thought it'd take me six months to learn BERT, when their BERT is just model.fit and model.predict, as I say. Guys who thought I had to slave away for two years to find out stuff. Guys who think I can't write or engineer. I distinctly remember that I used to be bothered by all this, but for the life of me, I can't fathom why. Maybe due to low self-esteem. True and correct self esteem comes from the realization that we are all crap in the end and it does not matter and life is fragile, very fragile. Love, on the other hand, has turned out to be surprisingly robust, but that is a story for another day.
Why do I never experience reality the way other people do? Part of it is due to my distorted matrices, but there is something more sinister at work. Ah well. Who even has the time to be bothered about that.
True bliss lies in staying away from people in all shapes and forms, and in a happy way. Not in a whiny oh-the-world-does-not-give-me-attention, but in a careful and through way. People are people and you are you; you are crap and so are they.
Unless they hate you, in which case you have no option but to love them.
I've recently discovered Pinkaj Mishra.

Circles and movement

Isolation might be getting to me, but it has some benefits over normal life. At least I don't have to feel too guilty about doing nothing.
It is infinitely difficult to keep one's self entertained, and this responsibility can not be delegated to anyone else. I confess that I am infinitely bored these days; so much so, that at times I start thinking of responding to texts. Horror of horrors.
Communication is mostly an exercise in futility, and I am sadly too aware of the shortcomings and barriers of language and words. They way they hide, distort and malign rather than transmit, convey, inform. To try to communicate is a fool's errand.
People usually make peace with the cognitive dissonance inside, but I struggle with it too. Most of our internal life is spent resolving our own questions and dilemmas, or at least making some effort along those directions.
Making an effort is a thing that does not come naturally to me, oh no. Laziness is inherent in my material. So is listlessness. The laziness, however, always wins.
Except from being locked down with family, life is pretty empty these days. I am not doing anything and I do not plan to do anything either. Why bother pretending that I haven't given up mostly? I was never a starry eyed youth and in these mature years, I have tasted the futility and the pointlessness more than anything else.
Recently I have been watching a German sci fi series and I have a few observations to make.
1. Cause and effect are piece-wise in human life. A bit of cause, some effect, more cause and so on. Rarely does anyone do anything without feedback.
2. I think I am a non-linear system. My reactions are disproportionate and huge. I am left looking like an utter fool when things subside. It has something to do with feeling in high-resolution and noticing details. The system has its pros but it does not make for a smooth life.
3. I want to learn German, but uttering this line takes up all my energy and I am unable to do a single bit about it.
I have been happy and serene at times in my life, at places and with people. Trouble is, it never lasts. People take up too much energy and there are always miles and miles of chasms between you and them. At this point, I have pretty much stopped caring. Why bother feeling when it is utterly pointless in the end?
If I could choose a super-power, I would want the ability to sleep 23.5 hours every day.
Oh yeah, circles. Someone told me that I move in circles and stay stuck in things forever. I realized that she is right.

A creature of the shade

Sadly, I have become a creature of the night.
I wish there were some interesting angles to this, but sadly again, there aren't. Some characteristics that include too much sugar and not enough melatonin but besides, nothing at all.
The melatonin problem is an old one, I suspect. As far as I could remember, I have always had trouble falling asleep. This might have contributed to my addiction to literature, or it might have been the other way around. Long story short, when someone declares that they have sleep problems, it gives me a deep and fundamental sense of connection, unmatched by anything else, such as love for rationalism, appreciation of the fine things in life or an abstract way of talking.
It returns during lazy days, such as the ones I am currently living. Bayrozgari is more a state of mind than anything else, but the support it lends to a nocturnal lifestyle is horrifyingly strong. When you literally do not have anything to get up for in the morning, why get up at all? Why not get up at 5 in the evening, if you must, constrained by the biology of homo sapiens?
Ah, how our ancestry binds us. How I wish I could go back and select some other specie as my ancestor-something that slept more. As much as possible, ideally.
People rarely sympathize with my love for all things Kylo Ren, but it is an under-appreciated fact that the dark side has immense pull, at least on some dark natures. I have been observing somewhat self-styled bayrozgari for about 2.5 months, and I was a punctual creature for most of it. To bed at 12 AM, up about 9 in the morning. Most proper and remarkable and commendable.
Except, alas, the normalcy was fragile, as everywhere else. Something is there and you think it is always going to be there in the exact same state and you are going to be there in the exact same state and the phenomenon of observation is going to exist indefinitely in the future and the laws of physics are going to hold up forever. The laws of physics do do that, but as for the rest, it is just a sad oversimplification on the part of human beings. Absolutely no stepping in the same river twice for anyone.
Dwelling too much on this nature of reality can trigger anxiety, if combined with an immature way of handling change. The mature way isn't very sophisticated either; it just informs you to suck it up and take it in stride and move on and live in the moment.
I had been searching for answers to questions of power and stability in systems that involve multiple human beings, mostly inspired by my last workplace. It was an interesting place, to say the least. I absolutely liked my boss, but he had his 'issues' and he proved inadequate at dealing with them. I fear I might have catalyzed a chain reaction of firing there, but on my behalf, it was either that job or the remnants of my mental health.
The virus and the ensuing cascade of catastrophes have raised some very serious questions, and I shall be looking into them, like a proper scholar of human specie as I pretend to be. Today, however I will try to keep to the main point.
My requiem for stability stems from the fact that I went to bed a bit late just two nights in a row maybe, but it was enough to get me on a fixed schedule of going to sleep at least at 9 in the morning, and not a minute earlier. The ease with which I lose my footing horrifies me at times. For goodness's sake, instability should be unstable. Instead, it is the most stable thing in the world. When you fall down, you firmly remain there, forever glued to the nadirs. Maybe this can be used as an argument to show that evil and deviations from norms are, like, really low in a moral and theoretical sense, and not just alternative lifestyles.
Ah well, normalcy is an elusive spirit anyway. If they were selling it somewhere, I would have sold off all other possessions to buy some of it.
Experiences are subjective and memory is shaded. What even is the worth of stability? Things are beautiful precisely because they don't last. If you sit down and analyze the last decade of your life, you are left with fleeting impressions. A sparkle in a pair of green eyes. A stammer, coming from a glib speaker. A smile from a squash court that absolutely stopped your heart. A recitation of poetry on the roads, under a full moon, to absolutely adequate appreciation. Honest exclamations that I am a rare creature. What would these moments be, if prolonged? A drag and a burden.
Fine things are fine, but what I actually need in my life is the ability to go by myself to my favourite place and eat as much as I want.
Recently I got a lecture on ability and capability, and wasting thereof. I sulked in response, and fixed my deviant bedtime. I am going to stick to it.
Very narcissistic point of view, but as soon as I plan to fix my life, some new and utterly unforeseen catastrophe arises. Someone just had to go and release this virus from the wild. They took pity on it and introduced it in polite society as they would never introduce me. The virus, on the other side, proved fairly egalitarian and sociable. If one has to die from it, that can't be helped at all, but meanwhile I am going to be happy and myself. Utterly myself. If I am a late night sleeper, I am one, end of discussion. There isn't anything I can do about it. Embrace my inner bat, so to speak, except that they have impressive immune systems, whereas mine is fairly non-existent.
There was this otherwise silly movie about Virginia Woolf, which gave me the answer to a long standing question. I have always felt that I am more a spectator of the spectacle of life than anything else. An observer, a very third person. Never ever the first or the second one. A third rate woman to boot too, but that is a separate discussion.
I talked about this to people, crafted this feeling in my poetry, slipped it in my prose. I never got an answer from anyone. In this movie, the Virginia character said the exact same thing, and the other woman laid bare the crux of the matter in a single sentence.
Because you think when instead you should feel.
There is an upside to watching such movies, folks. Once in a decade, you get the answer to a question that matters. How one actually goes about the business of feeling is an altogether more complicated problem, methinks, and one that is above my paygrade. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

My anxiety diaries

One gets bored of everything eventually, and I can't decide if it is a blessing or a curse. At least something keeps the ball rolling, I guess.
I am amazed at all the wisdom penned down by my younger self. If only I would listen to myself, at times! Still it serves as a good sampling strategy-much better than never recording anything down. Hard to reconstruct your previous self.
A patently narcissistic thing to say, but I had been trying to get my life on track, whence arose a virus.
Very well. I graciously back down, hanker in my room, and choose not to whine. I mean whining takes too much energy and drive at my ancient age.
Instead, I will stay glued to the said room, watching screens and eating stolen crisps.
Live and learn, some say.
Apparently I am somewhat good at looking miserable. I mean all you have to do is rearrange some facial muscles and open your eyes wide and pose a wilting demeanor to the other person. Of course a few broken words, outlining the misery that is your life, add to the personality. Adjusting the tone of your voice helps too. This happens to be the most effective way of receiving sweet/salty delights that originally belong to your siblings, in the lockdown days.
Misery sells, I am telling you. I simply have to try this in other domains of life.

On striving for the ever-elusive balance

Life is strange, unpredictable, and yet cyclical. Things crop up again and again, people unexpectedly behave the same way, and there is a perpetual sense of deja vu. Blogs are a curious study in people, and their evolution. Yet the constant factor in all things good and bad is one's own self, in a way. I am so different from the person of ten years ago, and yet crucially the same.  Maybe I myself am the reason behind everything- how can something change in my life when I am the one who perpetuates, disturbs, and records everything?Of course, there are some stark differences. I happen to have lost one of the things I loved most dearly in my life-my hair, yet I am deemed pretty at times. Compliments from the other gender are always suspect, and in Pakistan they can be downright inappropriate, but a random lady at a McDonald's told me that I have beautiful hair and I think she meant it.My relationship with the world has changed fundamentally due to my becoming downright popular as compared to the unknown creature I used to be. Of course, I am nowhere near the end of the spectrum where it would be socially acceptable for me to ignore texts, but let's say that I have had a few chats with a few people who felt like talking to me. As can be expected, this was an entirely unexpected situation for me, and I had no idea how to handle it. I suspect it kind of got to my head, as a little popularity would go to one's who never found a single person interested in listening to her.As with everything else, I have a love-hate relationship with the world. I accept that one can't live without it 24/7. I need people to prepare my food, brew my coffee, drive their car for me and run an organization where I can drop in at 9 and leave at 5 to pick up a pay check and pay the said people for their services along with a thank you and a smile. A tip, if they were polite to me and prepared my food well.Things are stupid and pointless once you start looking at them closely, but this is the idea every seventeen year old stumbles upon as a rite of passage and whines about for the next decade. At my ripe old age of twenty-eight, one gets tired of crying and inevitable asks oneself, so what? What next? The question is hard to answer, but at least it is a step in the right direction. Recently I have started asking this and realized a few things:1. My standards are actually too high, at least in terms of expectations from human behaviour. People are flawed and stupid and selfish. They have an indelible mark of the culture of deceit and scarcity that has plagued our part of the earth for centuries and it is still the way things work here.2. Essentially I am just a small pipe for funneling money, since I just throw away precious hours of my life for one organization and throw away the peanuts I get in the bank account of another. Just moving money around. One does need it for essentials and to have the right amount of money is very liberating but I get sick to my stomach of being a pipe. Of course there is my morning coffee which is often the only source of happiness in my life and I'm probably going out to dine on a whim because I love that place and hate my life but it is all too easy to fall in the trap of bigger and bigger numbers. The idea of dining alone in restaurants in Isb, all dolled up and single, merits an entire post. 3. Balance is the most elusive thing for me-ever. Plus it will probably remain that way. Finding the right amount of world in your life and keeping it there-that is one hell of a job. One I constantly fail at. I tell people that I don't talk a lot, and they are surprised because they find me articulate and talkative. Ah well, some people.I took a 24 hour break and totally lost my train of thought. Apart from my narcissism, the ever-constant factor, I think my lack of stability is a huge pillar of support in my life. Strangely enough, your weakness can be your strength if you are aware of it, take pains to balance it out and utilize it skillfully. If I have learnt anything from my 5-year long mid-life crisis, it is that things are what they are and you can't run away from yourself. My anxiety that destroyed my stomach, spoiled my mid twenties and made me go almost bald was caused by a host of underlying unresolved issues. I think I was trying to run away from them, but I am pathetic at lying-to myself and to the world.My issues still remain unresolved, but at least I have acknowledged them. I still lack stability in my life and I shouldn't be too hard upon myself for it. Acknowledged that I have become fond of dining out and going to the cinema and my career has been on the back burner for quite some time, but hey, everyone needs to blow off steam in one way or the other. My melancholy still lingers, but I have chosen to embrace it once again, along with solitude. Let this be a lesson to me never to start relying on someone else, or to start looking for support from the world, for it will invariably disappoint. I must concede that human contact has a part in civilization and there is a human aspect to life, but it is vital to cede enough place to the world and nothing more. People bring a breath of fresh air in your life, a new and unexplored point of view and in rare cases a modicum of understanding and generosity, but far more frequently they bring toxicity, baseness and mediocrity alone. Maybe it isn't that way for most of the people and maybe they can interact a lot with the world and still stay happy. More power to them, and I envy them. In my unfortunate case, though, I have to guard vigilantly against the world and ensure that my dose of it does not exceed a safe limit. For better or for worse, this is the only way I can ensure my sanity. As Camus said, nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Of existential crisis, and hidden treasures

Life is strange, but I miss poring my heart all over this place. The poor thing is usually kept hidden and sequestered up in a closet, and it gets all too lonely and hidden at times. It reminds me of Iqbal's line

یہ میری خود نگہداری مرا ساحل نہ بن جائے

These days, I am reminded very frequently of this.

The bad news is that I am, once again, in the middle of an existential crisis. The good news is that I know perfectly well what I am going to do about it; I just want to remain in the throes of this crisis a little longer.

Being a sample that lies pretty much outside the spectrum of normalcy, I have no idea whether other people my age get drawn into similar storms, how they feel about it and what they do to get over it. I have always been my own person, the most own person I have ever met, and I always run into my own problems and find my own solutions. At 26.75 years of age, I am finally extremely proud of it after embracing it completely as the only mode of life. I don't know about anyone else, but this is the only way I want to live.

And live I am going to.

So this crisis was, as usual, catalysed by a large number of things over time, some of them bitter and some of them sweet. I don't know of any other person in whose life sweet things can trigger this sort of crisis, but transience and entropy are huge themes in my life and whenever I encounter something sweet, I always end up asking myself, how long is it going to be sweet? How long is it going to be? With the maturity of an adult, I finally tell myself that I don't need every good thing in my life to be permanent and I am totally able to handle losses at this point in my life, after a long struggle with the fear of loss. However, the question of sweet turning to bittersweet always lingers at the back of every situation. Mostly I am utterly fine with it. Rarely, but with a probability definitely above zero, it triggers crisis like the current one. Normal people usually can't contemplate the bittersweet taste something sweet is going to leave in their mouth; I perfectly can, and this heightened perception and vision, much like the beauty of a poor girl, almost always works against me.

The answer to the question of bittersweetness is that I don't care. I truly, honestly, really don't care. I am going to leave my greediness, my horror of change, my fear of heartbreak for once in my life. I am perfectly capable of doing this.

Let us turn to the truly bitter things now.

Lack of recognition, rather acknowledgment, is another recurring theme in my life. I thought I had left it in Pittsburgh, but boy, was I wrong! I think I am always going to carry it around with me. However, I have recognized the problem as fundamentally that of having let the world in way too much and way too frequently these past 7 or 8 years. The reality has been gradually dawning on me, and finally the sun is up. I need to stop looking outwards and start looking inwards. Inwards is the only place that has ever made me truly happy and truly content. Happiness is elusive and transient and fragile; a thing for fools to pursue, in short, but contentment and peace of heart are the things that I need to pursue for my mental peace if for nothing else. I have never asked anything of the world, and I hope I never have to. The only thing I have to ask of it is that it leave me alone.

As compared to the 17 year old scared little under-confident me who used to write pretty but pointless things here, I am much more mature, confident and independent. I know how to take care of myself. I know what I want, and I am familiar with the means to pursue it. I have the material means to do what I want, as I want, whenever I want it.

I know that my philosophy smells suspiciously of epicureanism, and I don't think that is a misleading smell. It is just that much like the original epicureans, what I really want to do is sit under a tree and study maths and write literature.

Read and write I am going to do. I am sick of the world, and I am retreating back into my shell. Life is just too short not to spend it on things that would otherwise represent themselves as regrets to you on your deathbed.

Fortunately, this time around, I have learned how to identify people who matter from the mass and mess that is the world. I know how to identify people who matter, and what to do with them. I wish I could go back and advise my younger self to stop treating everyone as The World, because individuals are individuals and there are individuals who understand me, contrary to the universal laws I believed in at that time. I just need to identify them and treat them appropriately.

And treat them appropriately I am going to, with the finesse of a poet and the precision of a scientist.

This brings us to hidden treasures. One stumbles unexpectedly upon them, in far flung places, and is reminded of Tolkien: All that is gold does not glitter. I am not sure how one should handle them: with care reserved for delicate things, reverence for something that is far above one's station, or a fear of being deprived of them all of a sudden? I don't trust my fate to bring me sweet things, or to let them remain in my life for long, or to even let them be as sweet as upon the first taste, but I guess that with my newfound optimism, we'll just wait and see how things go.

That is something no one would ever have caught my 17-year old self saying, but I have learned the need to switch my long-term and high precision vision off at times and accept life with all its perfections and imperfections.