Two years

It’s been two years since I wrote. I used MS word only to type questions and marking schemes. It has been two excruciating years where I struggled a lot with my emotions, self-confidence, and stability. I had started questioning my relationship with words. I had started doubting my writing and over time I lost conviction that I could write. I deleted all the posts on my blog as if I wanted to erase any history I had fostered with words. I went back to those days when I only dreamt about writing but never did. I dream a lot these days, about writing, about reading, about exercising and about studying. I dream about all that I missed out while trying to give myself a stability somewhere. I got busy in drawing curtains, folding laundry, cooking dinners, and keeping the house clean. I got lost in the chores and the mundaneness of everything around me. Adult life swallowed me whole and there I was in this loop of timetables and deadlines, never being able to breathe outside. 

Over time I started getting angry at the world. I was angry at everyone and everything. Any little event or comment would set me off on a tantrum spree. I was frustrated at my very own incapability of dealing with my life, all too conscious that I had paid a heavy price for the growth I had achieved. The price was all my hobbies blanketed into a bundle. It was all there in a silent box, tucked away somewhere in the corner of my mind which could hardly see past work. 

Work-life had engulfed me. There were days when I complained about not being able to read or write. On such days I had me comforting myself that I can’t and won’t be able to do everything in my life and that I had to let go of a few things for something else. Here I had traded my love for words, for the work and efficiency I portray. 

I would complain about capitalism and its aftereffects... for me I always had something or someone to blame for the lost ideas and lost time. Two years, that is what I invested in these lamentations. Well, it is not that I completely refrained from reading and writing, I did write in my phone whenever emotions gurgled up till my throat. I wrote journals on a near daily basis, but journaling was my way of dealing with the stress I had and the anxiety I had developed along the pandemic. Every phone chime would throw me into a fit of anxiety and again, I lost control of my reasoning ability. I stopped everything that I held dear. I started projecting all my hopes on someone who found it extremely difficult to meet my unreasonable expectations. 

For the first time in my life, since I started expecting people around me to keep me happy. That again led to numerous other fits of anger and frustration. I kept telling myself that things would improve, but now I understand that nothing would ever change unless I harness the energy inside me to write and to read things that I enjoy. Nothing would make sense unless I learnt to find my own happiness. 

There were countless days when a beautiful idea would take shape in my mind and I feel like penning it down, on all those days I would watch tv shows, scroll social media, and eventually end up forgetting those ideas. Nothing was the same anymore, apart from the image I had built in my workplace, there was no other identity for me. 

I am a French teacher, and that is all. But today, I am asking myself; is that all? Is that all I am, and is that all I can be? I don’t think so. I am a mixture of an extroverted and an introverted person, I am a passionate reader/ writer, I am a hopeless romantic and I also am an existential bug. I struggle among all these multitudes of identities, but it is time that I stop writing about writer's block and start writing.