Break

Some days in life are hard to forget. They rob you off your sleep, and makes you ponder. I had one such sleepless night yesterday. And it is precisely because of that night that I choose to write. I’m left to wonder about some basic ideas in life, happiness. When I am sulking, or sad I often ask myself the reason, or try to find it within me. But many a time, I get none. I’m sad, but I don’t have a reason. I’m sulking but again, I don’t have a valid reason. So in order to not feel that I’m sad without a reason, I try digging up my past, including the days in my childhood, to find reasons to be sad about. Like we dig a grave to find remnants of bodies buried long ago, I find reasons that are reduced to mere skeletons, or near nothingness.

I dig up those pieces one by one, and start feeling bad about each of them. Those reasons that I had chosen to bury at a point in my life, I find them again and fret on them. As I find more of those skeletons, I feel sadder, and then yes, mission accomplished, I start crying. I put myself in the shoes of the girl that had to go through all these in her life. (by “all these” I don’t mean to refer to anything that was traumatizing, many of those reasons were petty, and the others worth being sad for). The strange feeling of sadness inside me starts consuming me little by little until my mood is all spoilt and my eyes are swollen enough to let everyone know that “oh no, I was not crying, some dust particle went into my eyes!” yeah, I do say that to people, because people are dumb and can’t see my pink running nose, and my blood shot eyes with tear stains. Till this date I have not been able to come up with a valid excuse to mask my guilt or shame that I cried pointlessly for hours on end.

On such days, I wonder what happiness is. I know what sadness is, but what exactly is happiness. Is it eating your favorite food? Or coming home tired from the class or from work, to see someone waiting for you, or is it a pleasant day when you can go out and do what you like the most? I find it easier to define sadness than happiness. Happy is this ambiguous word that has a lot of interpretations. While sadness is simple, it is when you are not happy. Did I just oversimplify it? Maybe a little.

There were phases in my life, where I entrusted the responsibility of making me happy, to some else. I depended on the people in my life to spread light in to my life. I considered my birthday incomplete without their wishes, my day void without a conversation with people. Until I realized I cannot do it anymore. Depending on others became a habit, that I forgot what makes me happy. I forgot doing things on my own, things that I love. Somewhere in the process I stopped writing, I wrote poems but kept them tucked in safely in my diaries or the safest corners of my phone. In a way, it was good. I was no longer in search of validation from the world or even the closest people. I didn’t care if my poems made absolutely no sense. I was at peace with myself, with my writings. And I started portraying my life through verses that were made up of random rhythmic words. Some of them began with flowers and ended in buckets. That was how disconnected those ideas were from one another. Yet, for me each of those words represented something important and it was all I could gather up from a tangled self.

Then one fine day, I stopped depending on people. created my little world, where I made myself a better person and filled it in with things that helped me stay away from sadness. Just enough to keep me not-sad. I wrote and wrote, filled in pages about everyone around me. Again, somewhere in this path, I shut out people. refrained from getting attached to anyone, for that called again for dependence. And it was not my thing anymore. I started preferring small closed rooms to huge salons of discussions where conversations are forced and expressions faked. I made myself so busy that I had absolutely no time for anyone for that matter. It was like a shell, like a cocoon where I could be what I wanted without having to think about the world. Where nothing mattered except myself. It was a transformation phase of an extreme extrovert to a quiet person who liked keeping to herself or the little people she was surrounded with. I was not particularly happy in there- in that little shell, I wasn’t sad either.

Happiness is something that still eludes me. I can’t define what it could be, even for myself. Acceptance is a form of it, love is another. But what is it as a whole. When I read through my writings, I find that I write only about things that get to me, I don’t prefer pinning down anything that gives me happiness. If it was so beautiful, why would I not write about it. Even at the end of 910 words, ive not written a word about being happy. But there is something that I believe in, you create your happiness and its totally up to you. To choose your reasons, build your castle, find that acceptance and learn to be comfortable in your skin. It all comes down to this base fact. Being happy is a choice we make. If you ask me, at this minute whether I’m happy, I would give an affirmative reply. Right now, at this moment, I’m happy for I did what I love after a long break- I wrote. Maybe this will see the light of the day as I publish it. And maybe, just maybe, I might find my way back into my old self again.