I am afraid to stare back at her because she scares me, just like my future....
INTROSPECTION
Eat that frog
Finally, we have reached the last piece of this series, and I have one more confession to make. I never thought I would be able to pull this off and finish it, because I always leave things incomplete. I never reach the end, but this time I have, and that is an accomplishment in itself. It is almost 1 a.m. I am sitting on my bedroom floor, and a lizard on the wall, with no tail, is staring at me. I am afraid to stare back at her because she scares me, just like my future.
Have you heard the Blink 182 song ‘What’s my age again’? To the person who came up with ‘Nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three’, I want to call you out. Because, everyone stops loving you when you enter your twenties! The twenties are the weirdest stage of life; at least, that’s what I feel right now while I am typing these words. You see, we all have a saturation point. Once you are an adult, especially in a society like ours, you are suddenly bombarded with responsibilities and expectations. Most people who belong to the middle class of this country can relate to what I have just written. We have to make time for the responsibilities that are suddenly ours, to carry out along with the plans and dreams we have given birth to and nourished for ages. The strangest thing about this whole culture? You disappoint yourself the most.
You try to wake up early, but you don’t. You try to eat healthy, but you don’t. You try to work more, but you don’t. You want to invest time in things you genuinely enjoy, but you don’t. You make plans and goals, but you don’t accomplish anything. At night, before you go to sleep, your whole life runs like a film right in front of your eyes, and you end up believing you’re a loser because you aren’t achieving anything. You sleep, aiming that tomorrow would be different, but it is just the same. Nothing is ever enough. Everything feels like a race; you are never content and, of course, when you aren’t content yourself, how are you supposed to satisfy others?
Plus, you learn the meanings of weighty terms like betrayal, loss and grief. You lose people, and the bonds you cherish. This is when you realise who is honest and who is just here to eat the fruit of your success. You realise your value in other people’s lives is not as established as you thought it was, and that is excruciatingly painfully heartbreaking. You doubt yourself the most. The scary feeling of never finding happiness produces knots in your stomach. Things that gave you solace once are now just useless. You wake up anxious, sleep anxious, and find temporary escapes. You see other people doing the same things you do with excellence, making you even more nervous.
I thought I would be listing solutions in the final part, but I don’t have any. Except for “catch your breath”. We often underestimate the concept of “one day at a time”. I read somewhere that when you feel you can’t go through another month, focus on the next week. When you think you can’t go through another week, focus on the next day. If you feel you can’t focus on the next day, focus on the next few hours. That is how you can manage to survive without losing your mind. You need to catch your breath and realise that this rat race you’re a part of is just draining you and not letting you focus on the most important thing - YOU. You will, and you can do this, but not if you keep on stressing out. You deserve love, and your worth depends not on how much money you make or how many achievements you have under your name, and what people think of you.
So, first things first: catch your breath. Focus. Build a pattern. Learn the organs of the frog, then eat it organ by organ.
Survive, breathe, one thing at one time.
We’re going to make it.
