Making decisions without getting emotional. Emotions are catalyst for change but they blur the lens through which we look at life. Accepting them and calming down is the challenge. I’ll get there little by little.
Author: notahero
Shooting Star
Sometimes I am sad at how I ended up this way. I feel chained to my life. Weighted down by the insanity in my mind, the thoughts of sadness, desperation, helplessness and past choices. You can laugh one moment only to realize that nothing has really changed. You want to win at life, you want to feel free from the rat race, fell down the dark forest that surrounds your wayward mind.
Then I sit down in silence to realize these are my thoughts and that my life is overrun by them. So I gently walk away from them, without turning back, and slowly reappear in the present moment. I hear the sounds of the cricket, the gentle howl of the wind and then I affirmatively gaze at the wealth of life that is this unyielding moment. I realize that change is inevitable and so I smile again. And life repeats itself!
Love is so much hate.
The one that makes you feel a million bucks. I liked her and would daydream about her, sometimes even when we were talking to each other. Silly me! We were friends before college and I knew her through a friend of hers, that I then fancied. I never had the intent of falling for her, after all she was this spectacled geek, whom I thought as just being friends, not my type. Our three year friendship blossomed pretty well. I think you realize by now that this obviously ends with me getting rejected. We all have a story like that, this one isn’t special. But rarely do we understand the implications of the events that happen in our life and the seriousness with which we decide to change our lives based on these events.
As of my story, you see she got closer to one of our friends in our circle, they were just friends of course I knew that. However she thought of him to be better than me, someone she could confide in and talk too, apart from the fact that he was a smooth talker and girls liked him too, also gets better grades than me. It’s this jealousy that I couldn’t get her attention or be around her, that slowly began to eat into me. I obsessed over her, felt she was mine cause I loved her, I was her friend, I would be there for her. But all entitlements are just the rattling chains of your thoughts that you imagine are worldly truths and this is a truth that is not evident in your early life. Eventually after being rejected, all that obsession and naive reasoning just catapulted into this hate. I had a need to punish her choice and at the same time rid her memory from my collective sense, and that changed my nature. I got aggressive, I wanted better grades so I got studious. I started hating my current circle of friends, since I felt betrayed and decided to get a whole new group of friends. I even decided not to pursue higher education and get a job only because it was the exact opposite of what she was doing. I decided to be the best, be the richest, get the best job, be ruthless, be an asshole. I wanted to be at the height of egotistic power staring down at her and those friends and tell them they were losers. The pain of love makes you do foolish things and unexpected choices. Those choices made me successful in a lot of ways, but I think it dehumanized me in a lot other ways. The need to hurt or outdo others only brings pain and misery. I never really felt love after that and I just stayed alone in my world. That is a price you pay when you hold onto hate. Although later I realized that you cannot hate till you truly loved someone and you cannot love again till you have learnt that hate is something you can overcome. Funny isn’t it!
It feels like dying!
I remember being scared, like my life was draining out of me. I was pale, numb and incoherent. My thoughts were static, I felt everything around me slowly slipping away. My vision was blurring. It was a nightmare, something I wouldn’t forget. My colleagues who were worried, had taken me to the urgent care. They thought I was having a heart attack or that I was slipping into the abyss of lunacy, because I kept asking if my lips were turning blue. The blue lip comes from an episode of House where an oncologist moonlighting as a chef asks if she had blue lips before she passes out. My mind, in the midst of being scared shitless, thinks that exactly what’s happening right now. I might be dying, I don’t know what’s going on, there is something seriously wrong with me. It’s weird how for every gentle breeze, your mind thinks there is a tornado that could pop up right around the corner.
The nurse asked me a couple of questions like my DOB, what I had eaten and more. I could understand the questions, but in my daze I didn’t know what I was answering. The nurse drew some blood, another strapped me to an EKG and then there were a bunch of tests. I don’t remember much of what happened but an hour later the doctor walks in and says, “Everything looks fine you had an anxiety attack”.
I for one had never had an anxiety attack before, so I described to the doc what happened and how I feel that my head had been fried to a point, that made me incoherent in my thoughts and actions, that I couldn’t stand up without trembling and that I was passing in and out of consciousness . I sort of remember the following conversation. The doctor said, “Sometimes stress at work or home can cause those. Depression could also lead to these kind of situations”. My colleague interjected “There’s no stress at office and this guy is always smiling, laughing and cracking jokes, he can’t have depression.” The doc ignored that and said, “It’s a treatable condition, take these anxiety meds for now, but speak to your physician and may be seek a therapist. If you can’t find one call me, here’s my number, I can help.”
Obviously at that point I paid no attention to what he was referring too. I felt that all this was due to some crazy disease that I had, or maybe I had a tumor in my head. It felt like was about to die anytime anywhere. Every action had the potential to lead to something terrible, but mostly death. I went home and tried to sleep with these thoughts. I couldn’t!
It’s me!
It’s been a year since I fell victim to vertigo. It’s been a rollercoaster since then, but more importantly it’s been an eye opener. One year of acceptance, one year of learning, one year of letting go, at best I could describe it as a mind game although it isn’t. At some point you realize that all of it is just an obstacle you need to get over.
And life is just filled with them. Sometimes you’re stuck at a hurdle longer than others but that’s ok. Take your time and finish it because that’s all that matters.
Not a Hero 