Conducted an introductory session on something work-related yesterday. It was nice but I don't know why it left me very exhausted. I had planned to work yesterday but I did some browsing for work and then went for a walk before meeting a friend.
The walk was so nice! There were so many people, kids, and dancers. There's a place in the park that has a section where people work out, etc. There were nearly seven groups of young dancers with their music systems. They were blaring their respective music and dancing. I don't know how they even kept track of the music and their beats but they did it. I was telling this to a friend and she said that it is easy to keep track of music if you practice o something. Sometimes I find her a little contrarian. Whatever I say, she will always something to explain another point of view. That exhausted me more. So I hung up. Also, because another friend was picking me up and were going to for a short drive.
In the car, my friend (who's a doctor) was telling me about how a patient expected her to be different in person than how she was on social media. Interestingly, I get that quite a bit as a blogger or as someone who writes a lot online. Some people expect me to be bigger. Some more happy. Some not as happy. Some smarter. Some not. And then they get disappointed when they encounter a different person and want me to explain why I am different from what they expect me to be. I don't know where this sense of ownership comes from. I guess I used to have it for Salman Rushdie. I love his work so much. So when all these things that Padmalakshmi said about him - I don't know why, I was very wounded by that. I wanted to ask him why he did what he did, etc. This was log back before I actually started writing publicly myself. Then I understood why he said what he said, what he did why he did - and more importantly, why questions like, "I thought you were different but you aren't" is not a valid statement. I feel when people consume more than they create, they put themselves in a place of being an authority without being vulnerable themselves. That is the offset of a consumerist nature - a tribe of bloated, entitled cowards who don't have the guts to sit with their own broken selves and look for some distraction to pass on their pain to. I am carefully using the word 'Coward' here. For me cowardice is not ignorance. You don't know that you are consuming 18 hours of TV because you feel abandoned by your family or helpless in a relationship Cowardice, fr me, is when you go and comment on someone's make-up tutorial dissing the video, not saying anything constructive, feeling marginally better, and moving on to the next movie or lamenting on how Netflix or Prime or why this website or person or podcaster is not offering you something better for FREE.
It is not easy to escape them. So that is pointless. But it is very important to not become one of them. That is the struggle. Maybe that is why I am feeling so exhausted.
My doctor friend - will call her Gyp - is working damn hard. When I listen to her life is when I really believe that something is weirdly off about mainstream medicine. How can establishments dedicated to health expect their own people to work so many hours on end with such short breaks, no time off, etc. Gyp tells me sometimes about the measures that doctors take to just cope with a regular work day (this is not even the pandemic stint. This is a regular work day). But not just medicine - this kind of a mindless dichotomy seems to exist everywhere. I tried working with a start-up that wanted to do things about mental health (something that I am interested in - would like to make a difference). And the way they were treating their own team was appalling. How do we not see our own blind spots. In the past, I have done a few things to try to 'improve the world' and got into trouble and my parents in quite a few sticky situations. (Two sticky situations, involving the police.) My father and my ex-husband, used to tell me that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In fact, my ex-husband used to say that unless I can sit with the anger for at least 3 hours, then to not pick up that cause or individual to fight for. He used to say that I would do more damage to the situation by being angry and inept than being simply angry or only inept.
Oh well, one tries. But like that saying goes, "Hearts will never be practical until the day they are made unbreakable." We make sense when we shatter.
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