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Don’t believe in it. They will want you to. And they will do anything in their power to drive you nuts so that you give up everything that you believed in and start believing in what they want you to. But don’t. Don’t give them the pleasure of getting into you. Into your head. Into your system. Into how you look, what you love, what you stand for. Because if you do, then you shall very well give up on who you are. And at what cost? You came here to make yourself a better version of you. What entails that you give up on the pretty good version of yourself for the sake of someone else whose intentions weren’t even woven for your sake.

Through the course of your life, each person that you run paths with teach you everything that acts as an add on. Consider your life to be an interesting novel. A novel that is in continuation. In and out comes these characters who in their own unique way give a part of themselves to you. Just as you give a part of yourself to them. Revere these people, some will stay for a chapter, some will recur. And you know what the best part of all of this is? You get to write this story on your own. So you get to play the puppet-master to these characters. So when once in a while, you do come across those characters who inadvertently just inserted themselves into your life without your permission and you have to use them to run the story, use them as props. Props for the bits of comedy or the ushering of tragedy. But they don’t play the centre of your story.

Who then shall be the central characters? Well, here’s is the thing. It’s your story. And the impact of your characters shall change based on their importance in your life. Just because someone played the lead once does not mean he/she cannot be shifted to the position of a prop at any point of time.

No one is doing you a favor, more than what you are doing to yourself by adding on to your life. They are in the story because you are writing it. Give yourself some credit in that area. So in the end, it is you, with your work-space, and your mind. Do not, for heaven’s sake, do not believe otherwise. Do not believe anything other than this. The moment you do, you give them the power to hold your pen and write your story for you.

One day, you shall look back into the chapters you have completed. And as you get to the last pages of your novel, let that drop of tear rush through your cheeks that every bit of your life was that pen that you held onto, that pen that you refused to let go despite all odds.

As she sat beside him, lying on the bed, covered with a thin piece of bedsheet, head turned to the other side, sleeping peacefully with a twitched smile on his face, she mused. A muse over what she had done. A muse over what she had chosen.

Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

Rumi.

What did I choose? And how did I end up choosing this life for myself? A life that you say is so wrong, yet satisfies every cell of my body, heart and mind. Perhaps, I do know somethings more than you. Of course, I do know somethings more than you. I know myself more than you. I am what I am, and what to better in myself according the rules that you set for me? She turns and looks at him, and sees what she was probably waiting to see her entire life. Liberation…. She was free, finally. From the so-called society, from the expectations set by everyone around her. Yes, it was not perfect, or even acceptable to all. But finally, it did not matter. Acceptance no longer mattered. Because she knew the world now, she knew herself now. Her lips, her skin had touched liberation. And she was never going back. Going back? To what? She turned her head and tried looking at the past. But the past was a blackhole, you can’t enter a blackhole and expect not to get torn into pieces.

It did happen once, not too long ago, in another life perhaps. It did happen once, she faintly remembers. She remembers picking up her broken pieces and running off to save herself. You laughed as she ran. You laughed because how could she escape? and how did she escape? how did she have it in her what you claimed to but never had in yourself? Because she did love you. Of course, it wouldn’t chime in your twisted head, it wouldn’t and she realized it the hard way. So she had to protect something more valuable than you. Herself. She had to protect who she was. Because if she didn’t do that, she would be lost. And she knew losing herself would close the door to millions of people like her.

She had to protect herself from not only the strange world but from her own protector as well. Ironic! And harsh! And nothing if not the truth. We seldom have to fight with outsiders with the strength with which we fight on the inside.

So here she sat, in that small bubble of a room, in her emancipation and stared at him, as she knew what had finally happened. The rules of the society shattered. It wasn’t the ‘love’ that people claim it to be, though it certainly was ‘love’. but then again, you set what love should be too, didn’t you? Love freed, and here she sat freeing herself. Now, finally, she found that respect, for the right person. A no-future, a no-past, an only-present, an only-moment.

No, not for a second believe that she wasn’t afraid. Of course she was. And no, her life wasn’t easier, it’s not a fairy tale, my dear! It was going to be rough, the road ahead. For what sets you free, binds you with it as well. But for a flicker of a moment, as she brushed his hair, she was happy.

You are free to decide, if it was worth it or not…….

So what exactly is this psychological thing called growing up? Is it the sense of being independent enough to earn for yourself, or the psychological maturity of being able to solve your problems on your own, without needing help?

To me, growing up lies in between the extremities. To ‘grow up’ might not exactly mean that you do not feel the effects of an action, or that you feel you know the answer to everything. To grow up basically might be that very stage when your IQ starts dominating your EQ. Or in other words, it is when you develop a certain sense of objectivity in you. When you realize what you are to yourself comes before what you are to other people. It is when you realize where you, and your entire world stands and how important it is that you take care of yourself now, more than ever. This might mean differently to different people, to someone, it might be the day when you are married, when your child is born, when you achieve a big career feat, the day you leave home for college, or the day your job takes a toll on you, or just that one day when you feel beaten down, and you start trying to find sense in that. And when you finally do start growing up, it might strike the wrong cord in several people. People who didn’t see you this way before. And what you are becoming now might be a matter of alert to those, for now, all of a sudden, you speak out. You speak out for yourself now, you have answers. You have answers even for the unanswerable questions coz you have figured it out finally.

But then again, that’s not your job to take care of what they feel unless you have taken care of yourself. And growing up is when you finally know that you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of anyone else. It is when you realize that you have to identify yourself before you can seek the identification from anyone else.

Now, it goes without saying that there is a fine line between this and between being selfish. But in retrospect, why can it not be selfish? Your growing up is a process that is taking a toll on you, both mentally, physically, emotionally as well as socially. Then why can you not be selfish in this phase, for you know you are expected to be selfless for the rest of your life?

Here, as you gradually grow up, you start seeing what adds value to your life, what doesn’t and choose accordingly. You realize that just as what you are going through is not someone else’s burden, in the same way, what they are going through is not yours too. Everyone, in the end, is figuring out how to grow up. It takes time and some hammering to develop that thick skin where it is required. It comes at a cost. It of course does. Every change comes at a cost. But when you do grow up, you objectively look at the cost, and decide to pay whatever amount it entails.

And certainly, it isn’t something that strikes you in a few days or months. It is a process that continues itself till you realize one day, that something that affected you once so much, doesn’t anymore. And one day you stop hurting from the past, or worrying about the future, because your objectivity tells you that you are in control of your life now. That…is the best feeling in the world. Because you know the laps you have crossed to come here.
And as you shed a tear, remembering your sacrifices, your services, your mistakes, your breakdowns, to come to this point, you also realize that it was all supposed to turn out this way, you know you have grown up.

As a child, I was told one thing by my parents. I had a talent, a talent that could be cashed on. And so, it was behooved of me to do whatever was in my power to make something of me with that talent. So when a possible threat to my talent appeared out of the blue, my parents, like everyone else’s, did what they thought best. Everything in THEIR power to curb the threat. After all, how much would a 14 year old even know to decide what was right for her. But in this possible quest to protect me from every threat, they happened to overlook something right in front of their eyes.d They forgot to check if they were protecting me, who I was.

I was shown an ideal world, a world where, name, fame, money, a perfect society approved life defined who I was. More than who I was, as a human being. Growing up in that world, my threat was somewhere buried deep inside. The threat that they had so long wanted to nip in the bud. But then how can you, if you didn’t even ascertain who your daughter was. All it would have taken for them to do was one conversation with me, one conversation about what was growing in a 14 year old in her formative years.

Years passed, and I grew up. A 23 year old with friends, family, a passionate career (you know, the society-approved one), a partner, and a prospect. And what festered inside remained hidden from the rest of the society approved world. To everyone else around me, my life seem ‘sorted’. Of course it would. Wasn’t that the intent all along? And I saw to it, that I fulfilled the intent. Props, that would complete my life. Props, that would take care of every necessary facet of my life. But what grows in a child, if not dealt with properly, doesn’t leave its mark.

And then one day, it shows up. It shows itself up in the most frightening way you can imagine. It comes and shows you your own self. Who you really are, what your parents, or that person you called a guardian, failed to see beyond themselves. You see what the years of layers conveniently hid inside of it. Where you stand, when everything that you built and that built you were to be taken aside.

So I take my leave with this very question. That…’threat’, that you were supposed to be protected from. Was that threat nothing but you? A version of you your parents wanted to protect you from? And if that’s the case, then how would that even be possible in a world where your identity was never actually revealed to you?

This is going to be so fun. SO welcome to my world, ya..all! Yeah, I try to be hip, but I hardly am. Consider this to be a place for Zee to be….herself. Her own wacky, overthinking, over analyzing, self questioning, self that might drive you crazy at times. But then again, this is much more for me than it is for anyone else. I don’t even know if this shall be relatable to anyone else. If it is and I am successful in making even a small change to the life of someone out there, then I’d consider myself blessed. Because let’s face it, in this alarmingly surging world of technology, we spend more time in being someone for others than being someone for our own selves. A true self.

And so here I am, trying to reach out to anyone out there through my experiences, the roller-coaster ride that I have had and continue to have, the one we humankind less scarily know as life. We’ll have a good time……I hope.