Dear Jasmine #2
"...how you feel is valid and honest and shared by many people."
Question #2
Dear Jasmine,
Am I the only one who isn't able to shake off the grief from the past two years? Every day I wake up with a knot in my chest, my heart beating loud and clear. There are a few moments in the day which bring some stillness inside me like the stark blue sky or my cat headbutting my legs, but that's it. I feel no joy from fellow humans, family or friends. I feel so small, I have so many desires, but all I can think of are my shortcomings and failures. Like when folks around me were accomplishing so much, I was depressed, hence unable to do anything and now I am only filled with terrific longing for them. I am 21 and not financially independent, which fills me with so much guilt. Last December I finally deleted my LinkedIn profile to stop myself from spending hours looking at other people's profiles and constantly comparing myself to strangers. I miss feeling happiness in my imperfect life. I miss loving and feeling loved. Can you show me how to stop worrying and start living again?
- Anxious in Kolkata
Answer 2: Get Your Hands Dirty. Wipe Your Forehead.
Dear Anxious in Kolkata,
I have received many questions about grief in the first few days of this column that I can say with absolute certainty you’re not alone. I find it very important to address this first because all I want to do is hug you and say, “I feel the same way from time to time” and maybe in all of us admitting this truth to each other, in putting our grief in the centre of the circle, bearing witness to our lives, we can see that none of us is ever truly alone. However, the last two years have made us reckon with what it truly means to be human, to be part of the great gradient of living, and to co-operate in order to survive. We, as a people, have not been alone in this pandemic, but we definitely have been lonely.
I find that words are very powerful — they can wreck and they can heal. They can provide hope and take hope away. It is what you do with them. It is amazing how something you have said to someone can be lodged in their memory years later. The same goes for what you say to yourself. Do you, Anxious in Kolkata, remember any person in a position of power ever telling us it was going to be okay? No. The amount of uncertainty we have navigated in two years (and continue to do so) has had a profound effect on all our nervous systems. The primitive human lived in a world of uncertainty and developed a fight or flight response. Whenever they felt they were in danger, didn’t know what animal or tribe they would encounter, their nervous system would put them on high alert readying to flee or fight. Alternatively, if they felt they were safe, their surroundings were familiar and had a certainty about their day, their nervous system would relax and trigger a rest response. We have this mechanism in our bodies to this day.
So, if I had to summarise this — all of us have lived on high alert for over two years, fearing an unfamiliar danger that was constantly lurking outside our homes, and this situation was exacerbated by the constant overload of information. It is going to come as a shock (and relief) to you but your body has not been at rest for two years. Heck, ever since social media became the centrepiece of our lives, our minds have not been able to fully relax. This is why we have to now teach our bodies to relax by means of meditation and mindfulness. Imagine, we have to teach our body to perform its basic function of triggering a rest response. What else would you feel if not a knot in your chest, and a heart beating loud and clear?
To add to this, we have had to navigate loneliness like never before. We have not interacted with our social circles, not hugged them for years, not been able to share food and gossip over who is in love with whom, not taken public transport (which, a study says, alleviates loneliness as you have a shared sense of connection), and not shared our festivals with each other which are always about food and playing dress-up and festivity even for a while. Many people graduated and didn’t get jobs. Many people who had jobs lost them. It was an absolute unravelling of everything we have known about consistency and security. All the pillars of being human, of functioning in society were taken away from us. There is unrecognised grief about this in all of us. Grief as you would know doesn’t only mean the passing of someone, though that also has happened aplenty in so many homes. Suffice to say it has been a terrible time for us as humans. Therefore, how you feel is valid and honest and shared by many people.
Do you think this is a way to live, Anxious in Kolkata? Do you think we humans deserve to live like this?
You say that you saw other people accomplish many things and found yourself depressed. (Do you mean this in the clinical sense of the word? If yes, I encourage you to seek professional help.) You don’t need me to tell you but this is the age of comparison we live in, thanks to social media. But you know what the best part of your letter is? That you are 21! Oh, what I would give to be 21! Of course, I know you are 21 at a different time, but as Taylor Swift sang “It’s supposed to be fun turning twenty-one.” You have so much of your life left ahead of you, so many more experiences, mistakes, loves and heartbreaks, fighting for joy, learning new things, coming to the realisation that there is something such as too much alcohol, so many structures to take down, and poems to read, and the sea, always the sea to feel under your feet. You’re also going to find out about taxes and mutual funds and fixed deposits. What a devilishly glorious life you’re going to have! Of course, I romanticise it in a time of great upheaval but isn’t this exactly what being 21 is supposed to be? Right now, it’s not because humans are not supposed to experience so much trauma and continue to live their lives as if nothing has happened. We are not supposed to experience life from behind screens. Do you think the universe made gushing rivers, majestic mountains, made raucous rain descend from the skies, and had a small flower grow from the crack on the footpath so you could see it from behind a screen? No, Anxious in Kolkata. No. Teamwork is not supposed to be done from behind screens, lovers are not to be met from behind screens, tyranny is not supposed to fall from behind a screen.
Money, however, can be made from behind a screen. When I graduated and was looking for “stable jobs” I joined a four-person small company near my place because I wanted pocket money “to go to the movies with my friends”. I went to a tiny office, did a job that I have now forgotten, but every month I looked forward to that envelope of cash I would receive. Then, I would go to the movies with my friends, eat whatever food I could afford, and I finally left the job after a few months when I found something with a larger organisation. Find a job, Anxious in Kolkata. I know it’s most likely going to be a job online, but find one and look for another one on the side, if need be. How long are you going to live on your parents’ money? I understand that unemployment is high right now and that it’s not easy. However, there are resources at your disposal like job sites, influencers who advertise hustle jobs, start-ups looking for people to get by, and this is in the age of the great leveller — the Internet. I’m assuming you have a bank account. If you don’t, apply for one. Choose a private, well-known bank. Set up a PayPal account in case you find a paid gig from a different country. Polish up your resume by using an online design tool and have it ready for any application. Set aside a dedicated 90 mins every day when the only thing you will do is focus on finding a paid job. Take the weekends off. If you’re able to find a job locally that lets you go in to work with all the precautions and you’re comfortable with it, even better. Find a small gig that you would be able to do, pay you a decent amount of money, and give you a routine that is much needed for providing your nervous system with a sense of certainty of the surroundings. Teach your body how to trigger a rest response by giving it a routine. You will know exactly the beast you will face each day and that could be a starting point for you to ground yourself.
As for your relationships with your family and friends, I encourage you to shift your focus from them and turn your gaze inwards. I suspect that you need to become likeable to yourself. If I asked you, “Do you like yourself, Anxious in Kolkata?” What would you say to me? I’m not suggesting you’re a self-loather, I am only suggesting that the way you’ve been comparing yourself to others by looking at people’s profiles makes you feel deficient. It makes all of us feel deficient. You’re not deficient or have “only shortcomings and failures” as you said. You’re a young person who has had the odds stacked against them for no fault of yours. Why would you punish yourself for a global event absolutely outside your control? It makes no sense! What’s in your control is to become likeable to yourself. Liking yourself and investing in your own growth and joy is a very worthy ambition that has a multitude of positive consequences. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
There’s only one way to do it — swim against the tide, but it also doesn’t have to be that hard. Grant yourself some of life’s pleasures in whatever capacity we can experience them now. Join a hobby class where a group of people meet together and do something constructive. Your loneliness is isolating. Smack it in the face by wearing lip gloss and attending a cool community meet. It could be anything — folks who watch a movie together once a week, a book club that reads a common book, a group of people who turn their cats into characters and role-play, an imaginative band of people who swap ideas about how to save the world in a caterpillar costume — I don’t know, you do you! The Internet is filled with such communities and anyone would love to have you. Again, if you can find something in person that doesn’t harm your well-being or physical health, go for it. Do something that you would like yourself for. Conquer a fear you’ve had for a long time. Learn a new skill with the intention of not-flaunting it. Feel the feeling that comes with conquering the limitations you’ve assigned to yourself. Go out there and find out how it actually feels inside your bones to run 5 km when your body tells you that it cannot do so. Not literally, but find your own version of the 5 km run. There’s a reason why people do the impossible things, the things that they fear – it frees you and makes you so damn likeable to yourself that the world seems like a glorious place to live in. Trust me, it is. Only when you start to work on your own growth and inner joy you can fully experience what other people bring to the table. Be kind to these people you speak of. Even they went through two horrific years. Remember all the grief that applies to you applies to them as well. Give them a helping hand.
Last but not the least, Anxious in Kolkata, let me tell you what I absolutely know for sure. I can’t tell you if some sentient being is out there looking over us or if the Gods meet in their ornate halls to have fun at our expense or if the universe and its particles are weaving magic for us. What I know for a fact is that you will see tangible and actual results if you put two things together — your hands + Time. Do something with your hands or your body for yourself and keep consistently doing it. If you do nine Surya namaskars every day for a month, you will see an absolute and tangible result in the way your body feels. If you write a page every day in your journal where you siphon off your worrying thoughts, you will have a notebook you can burn in a bonfire a là Bollywood style. If you submit 5 applications every weekday, you will have 25 applications done by Friday, 100 applications done every month. If you learn origami for one hour a day for a month, you will have 30 origami pieces and 30 hours of mindfulness in your mental-health bank. Whatever you choose, Anxious in Kolkata remember that your hands + Time = real results. Keep the activity small, but do it consistently. Tech bros and self-help gurus will call it compounding but don’t listen to them. Don’t listen to the negative self-talk in your brain. Put your hands down into the dirt and get to work.
Everything else will follow. It always does.
Yours,
Jasmine
Dear Jasmine is a fortnightly column by an anonymous writer. If any of you want to send in questions, please send them to Jasmine here.
A very much needed and amazingly curated letter
♥