J'ecris

A writing blog in which I shout into the void

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Home

Home, I always thought was a place. It was the people, the sights, the sounds, and the smells. But it's not.

Home is a state of being. It is acceptance, routine; it is blindness. Home is where you can walk down the stairs with your eyes closed. Where you enter a room a hundred times a day without ever looking at it. Home is where your head instinctively finds it's place on the pillow. Where every  crevice beneath your feet is one that seems to fit. Home is where you are just you and things are just what they are; no more and no less. There are no questions, no answers. 

When we visit places, or at least when I do, we ask questions. What is this? Why is that? Who built this? Who lived there? There is a reasons that tourist groups are tourist groups; locals never ask those questions. They accept home as an entity separate from the world, as a part of their being. And home asks no questions and presents no puzzles. 

Home is blindness to all that would've been subjected to the power of your vision if it wan't home. Home is feeling like you pressed the play button on a paused life every-time you return.

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I haven't posted in a while. But anew, though short-ish post is coming soon. Thanks for hanging in there. :)

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On success and intelligence

Ever since I was a child people have told me I'm smart. It's not their fault, all the evidence suggested it; I got good grades, teachers loved me and awards rolled in. But, the thing is I don’t feel smart. I feel like just another person stumbling her way through life, trying to find what’s right and what’s not. I feel confused and conflicted and disorganised. I don’t feel smart; I don't feel special, I feel ordinary. I feel really really average and yet people don't seem to see that. If only they could see the anxiety, the self doubt the confusion that lies behind it all. To them it's another thing that I did and was good at, but to me it's so much more real, so much more fragile and so breakable. It's as if I'm balancing this huge weight on my shoulders. I’m just an ordinary person who happens to have found the right position to stand still so that the delicate balance doesn’t go off. My biggest fear is that one day, the weight that I am balancing will change, and along with it, the center of gravity. The weight will fall and it will shatter and I will be left with nothing but the empty reassurances of the past that of course I’m smart.

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Senioritis: An Actual Affliction

It's more than lethargy; it's more than just "not trying." When people told me about senioritis, I shall admit, I scoffed. I was not that kind of a person. Grades were never my goal, so why would I stop working if I believed that their significance has decreased? I was wrong. Senior year is draining. With APs, college apps, graduation, financial aid and a million other things to balance, it gets to a point where the candle that burnt so brightly at the beginning of the year burns out and you're left with the faint glow of motivation that only decreases by the day. You've worked so hard, and all you really want is to be able to come to the surface and gasp for breath.

It's even harder when you are what is considered a "good student." When you have never really missed a deadline. When you have never walked into a test with oblivious to the subject of it. Every part of your brain screams as to how wrong this is. It tells you to sit down and write that essay, do that maths problem or even just read through and review what is on tomorrow's test. But your body seems physically incapable of these tasks. So, you procrastinate. You read what isn't assigned for English; you watch 5 seasons of a TV show in 3 days. And then when the time comes to face the music, that's when you want to curl up into a ball and never get up. 

I think that the thing that bothers me most is that I'm not really learning anything at this point. I love learning, I love knowing new concepts and ideas, but all that is done at this point in the year is prep. Prep for exams, strategise for essay sections, memorise for multiple choice questions. This is not what I enjoy, this is not knowledge, but this is the way it is. So, somehow, with a lot of will and even more courage to face the consequences of incomplete assignments we will (or at least we hope that we will) get through this. Till then, 41 days, 12 hours, 2 minutes and 29 seconds to go.

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On Boston and other tragedies

In times like these it is easy to lose faith in humanity and it is easy to say that the goodness in the world is lost. I confess, that is what I did. I shivered and cowered in fear for people I’ve never seen and because of people of whom we do not yet know. It is not irrational to try and be rational, to try and pin the blame on people, to try and find reason.

But, perhaps in our rationality we are lose sight of what these incidents teach us. For every bomber, there are ten people who rushed to the site within minutes, risking their own lives for others. For every every injury, there is a doctor or a nurse working overtime to save a stranger’s life. For unit of blood lost there is a unit drawn from a person’s body to renew life in someone else’s.

Someone once told me, “The only thing these attacks teach me is how truly loved I am.” I cannot help but extend this to the entire human race. Yes, there are people who commit terrible crimes, who make us question the very existence of goodness. But for every one of those people, there are a hundred who stand up humanity and go above and beyond to prove the opposite to us.

In our shock and greif let us not forget those people. Let this incident, or any incident for that matter be not a reminder of the perpetrators but of the helpers. An act of terror intends to do just that, inspire terror. Let that purpose not be served. Let the prevailing emotion be not terror but strength, resolve and faith in all of human kind.

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Hi! Thanks for reading my blog! I really appreciate it! 

If you have the time, I would really like to hear your thoughts about what you like/hate/would like to see more of on here. I'd love to know your opinions!

Also, each like/reblog and follow means so much to me, so thank you very much. :)

Have a great week!

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Writing Prompt: On Empathy by Meekakitty

It's okay to not be okay. 

I feel like enough people don't realise this. It's okay to not be happy, it's okay to be sad or angry or upset. It's okay to feel the full spectrum of human emotion because you are human. We are too often driven away from our negative emotions. We're told that "Everything is okay." We're told to not be sad or upset or angry. That's understandable. When we say "Don't be sad" maybe what we really mean is "Don't be sad; I don't know how to/can't fix this." It's the noble instinct of "fixing" something that's broken. I understand this and I know that it comes from a good place. But maybe if we began to accept our sorrows like we do our joys, we would be better people. Maybe if we accepted that we are upset about legitimately terrible situations and that its okay to feel that way and its okay to work through them at a comfortable pace, it would be better than plastering a smile on your face and continuing to feel like the world around you is crumbling. 

When we comfort others, perhaps we should replace "It's okay" with "You're okay" because that implies that nothing is okay, and you feel terrible, but that is okay. Your troubles are valid and so are your emotions. Till a person reaches the stage of acceptance at which they realize that everything is fine, telling them to "cheer up" or to "stop feeling miserable" is just going to tell them that their problems aren't problems and that their emotions aren't right. 

So, yes everything is going to be okay, but before they become okay, they have to be not okay and that is just fine.

(Ps. I'm not talking about depression or anxiety because they are psychological issues that need to be dealt with professionally. Please do not take this as ignorance with regard to these problems and the help that they require.)

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Writing Prompt: Time Doesn't Exist, Clocks Do

"Time doesn't exist, clocks do"

So goes the popular post on tumblr. One which inspires awe and misery alike. "What exists if not time?", we ask. For time is the only constant. The ticking of the seconds, the only continuous comfort in this confusing world.

But time exists. The sun rises every morning and then sets. Summer turns to Fall which turns to Spring. What you are becomes what you used to be and what you do becomes what you did. There is hope for what is to come and there is regret for what has happened. There is the awareness of the wrinkles that slowly settle into the smoothness of your face. At a large cosmic scale, one in which both space and time are infinite does the minute you spent reading this or do the eighty odd years on this earth matter? No, of course not. But so long as you remain conscious of your being, so long as you are aware of the rising an setting sun time will exist; it always has.

(draft)

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Writing Prompt: Arch Nemesis (Actual essay title in bold below)

                             Note to Self: Add Title Later

The date on my computer silently changes from the 29th to the 30th as I type away feverishly. My sleep-deprived eyes dart from my copy of Antigone that lies next to me to the highly inadequate 200 words that I have written. I wish I had finished this two hours ago, like I had planned. I wish I was asleep rather than contemplating the tragic hero of the story. But, I’m not and it’s all because of my recent encounter with my arch-nemesis: Procrastination. Enemies put obstacles in your path; they stop you from getting what you want. What I want is to be able to finish my work in time to have a good night's sleep; what stops me is Procrastination.

With Procrastination as an enemy, every submission is a battle and life, a battlefield. It begins first thing in the morning. When your alarm rings and the snooze button beckons you, that is Procrastination. When you spend an extra few minutes letting the warmth of the shower wash over you, that too is Procrastination. And, when you convince yourself that you can afford to spend time reading one more chapter of the book you’ve not been assigned for English class, don’t be fooled! It’s just Procrastination.

From all my encounters with this beast, I have come to but one conclusion. It seems to rear it’s his ugly head only when the word “assigned” is on the horizon. How else would you explain the phenomenon that the cleanliness of my room increases exponentially when I have multiple assignments due the following week? Or the fact that my desire to finish the book I’m reading seems to be directly proportional to the amount of Calculus homework I have? Over time I have developed a diverse arsenal to battle Procrastination. It ranges from applications on my laptop that prevent me from wasting time on Facebook to airtight, minute-to-minute schedules that leave no room for funny cat videos. My most lethal weapon however, continues to be my own nagging conscience that often guilts me into facing that empty Word document.

Despite my best efforts, I have been left with battle scars. From the batch of cookies I baked this weekend (for no reason) to the doodles of the integral sign in my calculus notebook rather than integrals themselves, they all serve to remind me of the times I succumbed to the overwhelming forces of Procrastination.

As I press print and watch the work of the past few hours come out onto paper, I tell myself that tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow, I will finish my work in time and won’t let anything distract me. So, I scramble into bed for a few hours of sleep before my alarm jars me awake. I fling my legs out of my bed and ignore the snooze button. In that moment, I know that I have won the battle. But it’s not a cause for celebration, for ahead lies the war.

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(This was a college essay)

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Hi!

Thank you for following me! I will be posting my first long-ish post soon. Hope you enjoy it. :)

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Writing Prompt: Favorite place to get lost

To me, the word lost has the implication of being stranded, of being cut off from the outside, and isolated. The only place where I see myself being isolated from the world is the bookstore.

As a child, whenever my family went to the mall, I would beg my parents to drop me off at the bookstore while they shopped. There, within the confines of its four walls, my parents knew that I wouldn’t get lost. But, they were wrong. When I am in a bookstore, I am lost between the aisles of fiction and non-fiction, I am lost between the pages of the book I’m reading, I am lost in the portals that books create to new worlds. I like wandering in a bookstore, for I never know what I will find. Perhaps I will end up in worlds of fantasy where all my dreams and nightmares come alive, or I could discover a world of intrigue where the only question that exists is “Who did it?” When I read, I am transported across thousands of miles and hundreds of years to worlds that never were or never will be. As I am enveloped by the comfort of the presence of thousands of books my worries all fade away. I am no longer anxious about the calculus test the next week, or the assignment due tomorrow.  

A bookstore is my favorite place to get lost. Here I am lost in the maze of the thousand worlds contained within the pages of a thousand books; I am lost without the intention of being found.