Upon moving on

-
Today, I decided something...which caused me to feel some freedom yet a tough, lingering sense of sadness. By the end of this year, I had hoped to get together with someone. This, based on my decision today, pushes me further from the finishing line. Oddly, I do feel bad yet liberated. Self-respect is a funny little companion. I haven't exactly heard it speak up too often. It gets drowned out by the long wail of love. But sometimes, when love has thrashed about and injured every scrap out of you, this teeny little whisper of self-respect will come along and mumble, "Nope. You mustn't be treated this way. You deserve better. Come, now, let's get coffee." And then you do get up, wipe off the dust and tears and maybe the spot of blood that trickles down your lip, to get that cup of coffee. The voice of love trails along. It says that you are making a mistake. That you really must be more patient and all that. That maybe you should not be so selfish. It will tell you that you are abandoning much that is good and wholesome. For something that may or may not even exist, that weird cloud of whateverness that self-respect has become. Except that whateverness points to your wounded lip and tells you, again, "No. You deserve better."

The mind will always have justifications. The heart will always have disclaimers. No wonder one has such a hard life. Imagine getting through with a law firm in your psyche.

Comments

Mugdha said…
You go, girl! You DO deserve better. Don't make compromises where your happiness is concerned.
9:38 AM
Deepa said…
It's funny - the date. I made a vry similar promise to myself then. Hope you are well.
7:06 AM
Anonymous said…
And THIS!

I read somewhere that they must have a name for it when you date your best-friend, and I agree they really must.

And now, after being there for each other for over 5 years, out of which only 4 months were as a couple, it is pretending that i don't exist? i am at the receiving end of a silent treatment. i have tried to justify so many things so often that now - "Nope. You mustn't be treated this way. You deserve better. Come, now, let's get coffee."

it has taken me so long to get here that it feels much better than worse.
7:47 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei...
Read more