Choosing happiness

The sad thing about writing a blog post on the laptop is, I end up going on to the reader and start reading posts. Trust me, that’s sad because, once you start scrolling down the reader, it is a rabbit hole which is never-ending, ever consuming, and most importantly filled with amazingly funny and interesting blog posts. The rants, the stories, the lives, the recipes, the fun, and some pretty serious thoughts, all of those are just wonderful and a little too much to handle on a serious work day. Eventually, I ended up not working at all yesterday. And today when I open my laptop at work again, I see my open tabs filled with interesting posts that are waiting to be read. And I couldn’t resist and dived in.

It was then that I found this post on relationship goals by a very famous blogger. It was about choosing to leave and being happy over staying in the relationship and being unhappy. Well, I couldn’t agree more.

The more I think about my marriage, the more clearer it gets as every day passes. I was terribly unhappy in the marriage. No matter what anybody says, marriage is a compromise that we humans are ready for out of our necessity or want or wish to be with a certain someone. And when I got into a marriage that did not originate from love, I was pretty sure that I may not be the person who can love someone out of the blue and so thought that maybe arranged marriage is the thing for me. I thought if I can respect that someone, and if there is some attraction in between, there can be a relationship and by any remote chance even love can follow. I just shouldn’t have rushed into it and should have taken some time to get to know him and figure out if I can really respect him or not and if I’m attracted to him or not. My other mistake is that I underestimated the power of the human brain. Once I got into the relationship, it is clear that there is no love or attraction. Yet, there is a need to stay in that relationship as it involved many people, two families and their hopes, plans and pressures.

So, in the compromise called marriage, we need to make 10 thousand more compromises every day about things ranging from too little to too big with not just one person but with almost everyone around. I don’t know why compromise is a bad word, but when done with love, while in love and while being loved, nothing ever sounds like a compromise and everything seems to be fair and square. But for someone in my situation, to make all those little or big compromises every day and with a realisation that eventually, I will have to compromise on the dreams and plans that I curated for my life, is just plain heartbreak.

To stay in that marriage means to live a life that is never my wish or dream. Call it my ego or anything else, to live on someone else’s terms made me terribly unhappy. And once the wave of unhappiness hits you, it hits you hard. Throwing you off your feet, into the waves of depression and messing up your brain, body and everything within and around. At one point, the mere thought of a life with him made me miserable.

It is very easy to tell someone in an unhappy marriage to just move on OR to just bear it now and you’ll adjust to it with time OR that all marriages are that way OR to think about your parents OR that the next one might be worse OR that he isn’t abusive OR that it isn’t as bad as I think it is. It is very easy to say such things when you are in a happy place and know nothing of the cyclone of unhappiness raging within this person.

And to choose happiness, this person, has to break hearts, destroy plans and then survive the onslaught of hatred and at the risk of being called cold, cruel and selfish. Well, if it is not my life on the line, maybe, I wouldn’t be so selfish to choose myself over everyone else. Despite all my mistakes, miscalculations, misjudgements, I still have to live with myself. The only way I can do that is to accept my mistakes, accept my shortcomings and still forgive myself so that I can meet the next day in peace. I made a similar choice. I accepted myself for what I am and I choose to move out of that marriage and be happy. I know, I might never find love or might never get married again. I might be alone and might have to face loneliness at one point in time. But I still choose that over being with someone and being unhappy.

Choosing oneself for your own survival is not being selfish. It is called self-preservation. It is the best possible decision that I’ve ever taken and I’m very proud of myself for making such a choice. So, if there is something that I have to tell someone in my place, I would always beg them to choose themselves over anything and everything. No matter how many lives we have, we always remember only one and that one life is this and it is our responsibility to live it to the best of our ability.

Just choose yourself and choose to be happy. Any decision in life should be based on that. And when you do that, you’ll be ready to face any consequences that result from the choices you made.

So, that’s me for today. Have a great life, you people. 🙂

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A few questions and a lot of answers.

I’m a confused soul and have always been. I overthink a lot and get into panic mode very often. The most common thing that I would do on a regular workday is to work for a few hours and then google something and wind up in a rabbit-hole of articles or encyclopedias of information or blogs. I do feel guilty for wasting time at work but just can’t help it as I’ve always been the type to get distracted by the smallest of things. My mind just cannot concentrate on one thing at a time or worse one thing for long. So, I keep losing my train of thoughts most often and keep jumping into one thought from another. So in all that jumping and hopping, I ended up reading answers on Quora and found this as an answer to respecting spouses. The Quoran who answered this intended this to be a questionnaire to see at what level the seeker is at in their relationship.

I just thought, with all my confusing thoughts and feelings, I should answer it for myself.

• Do you respect each other?

• I respect him as a human being and so does he but the kind of respect that exists between a wife and a husband didn’t exist. My POV is that I couldn’t respect someone who failed to treat me as his equal. I know that he is not being that way on purpose but he is wired that way. In his brain it is okay for men to be superior to women as that’s all he has seen his entire life and he is okay with that status quo while I’m not.

• Do you find each other physically attractive or repulsive?

• In my short lived marriage, I was talked into a physical relationship when I wasn’t mentally ready for it. I know I was equally deserving of blame as I put my physcial interest over my mental status. Even though we had a few good moments in between, my self guilt and a weird hatred for him started popping up. That made any minor issue a major deal breaker to me. His extensive sweating, body odour issues, bathroom habits, living habits etc contributed to me being physically repulsive to him.

• Do you care for each other?

• By the time we spoke about divorce, I lost all sense of empathy for him and looking at his behaviour, I think it is the same case with him too.

• Are your expectations compatible?

• No. He is too ambitious while I limit my ambition just enough to be comfortable and secure in life. I value quiet, serene life while he is a nervous, insecure splash. The biggest misunderstanding between us is about your expectations from life. I seem ambitious on the cover but not in reality. I just am too independent and opinionated which came across as ambition to him.

• Do you flirt with each other?

• Maybe, a couple of times in the early days of marriage, but not more than that. I became too guarded and hurt his ego one too many times for him to initiate flirting. And any harshness from him resulted in me shutting down completely.

• Do you spend quality time together?

• Our quality times are filled with ego matches and pissing contests that rarely resulted in affection.

• Do you share hobbies or like the same kind of activities?

• We are poles apart and rarely had anything in common. More over, the one thing we had in common was movies and as time passed, I hated doing anything with him and ended up not watching a movie in 6 months of living together.

• Find out what it is that would make you feel loved. Talk about it. Stay positive.

• In retrospect, I think the biggest problem between us is that I couldn’t get myself to love him for what he is. I know many who would say, you need to respect and love your husband since you choose to be in this marriage all by yourself. Well, I agree that it is my choice. But it is an ill-informed choice made in a day, which was a terrible lapse of judgement on my part. I just couldn’t get myself to accept the man he is and it made me terribly unhappy, guilty and depressed. So trust me when I say, when a person is depressed, unhappy, guilt-ridden, pushed into a corner and sick, there is no scope to retain any positivity into that life unless the whole situation changes. I was suicidal, rude, arrogant, sick and one hell of a crack when I was in that phase. I cannot tell you how many horrible thoughts crossed my head during that period. I was a horrible human being, I knew of the monster i’ve turned into and was lost on a collision course, and the more I tried, the more I went deeper into that abyss and I just couldn’t get back to being myself.

• You may never ‘fall in love’, but perhaps you will find that your husband is lovable, and start loving him, and he may start loving you, as you dream about it.

• I cannot tell you how many people told me this. But neither of us are patient enough for us to love each other the way we deserved.

If there is anything my broken marriage has ever taught me, it is one thing. Never underestimate the power of human heart and brain. The depths that they can show you, are just amazing and equally scary. I was in my own mental abyss and my body started decaying one piece at a time.

The only decision of my life that is completely mine, is to get a divorce. It was such a pain in the heart, it hurt our families like hell, it was a torment to everyone involved, but ultimately it was my decision about my life. Look at me now, my physical issues can be scaled 90, were now at some 30 and mentally, I was at peace. I still have anxiety attacks, go into panic modes and turn suicidal once in a while. But that’s not the constant in my life as it used to be. Today, my constant is that I’m not working as efficiently as I should and how I should be improving that. The pain, the struggle is no longer that intense.

I’m sure one day, I will find myself again. Laugh in the rain again and love someone as much as I love myself.

A mess it is..

2017 is a weird year just like my weird life.

It gave me some of the best moments in my life and some of the worst ones too. While I love to think about the happy memories and cannot wait to relive them again, the sadness intertwined in all those scares me. But if there is one thing this year gave me, that might stay with me for a long time is that it made me fearless and confident about my capabilities. It is not that I am super confident now or anything but it is just that I’m a lot more confident about living my life in a way i want to. I now know that fighting for myself is always worth the pain. I now know that looking after yourself and loving yourself isn’t selfish. It is self preservation and realising ones self-worth.

One good thing came out of 2017. I finally took the first step towards liberation, towards a better me, towards my divorce. In 6 months, I’m going to get one. I don’t plan on living here in India for more than an year. I need to make a plan, act on it and leave this place to live my dreams.

Every year i make new year resolutions. I doubt i don’t even remember half of them by the end of January. They get lost in the rat race called life and I just end up surviving the year with no proud memories. This time it seems as if my new year started off a bit early in terms of resolutions. I already made a resolution the day I signed my divorce papers.

That I would give myself 6 months to figure out what to do with myself and to leave this job that i hate so much on the 30th of June 2018. So, I guess I’m still on that path. I was swamped with dealing with a vengeful soon to be ex and taking care of a sick parent which made me go emotionally and physically derailed. But that doesn’t mean I quit.

The fight is still on and i’m still standing. There is this one thing that I’m going to have to remind myself everyday for these 6 months. That i need to be happy in whatever I do and smile no matter how hard it feels or how lonely it gets or how scary it ends.

So here I am, smiling and still living 🙂

Happy New Year everyone. I wish this new year brings you all hope, love and joy along with the strength to face all the crap this world throws at us. Take Care.

One thing that never fails to make me happy…. Music

No matter what my mood is and how my situation is, there is one thing that always make me happy. It makes me stand up and get going. It gives me pleasure no matter what I’m doing. At times, I even feel like no matter how stressful and fearing my work is, with this, i can just conquer it all.

It is Music. Most importantly, Music in my own language. Usually i do not have these feelings of race, caste, creed, region or religion. But when it comes to music, i cannot enjoy music in any other language except Telugu. I do love Hindi songs but it takes some time for the songs to sink in and to be able to enjoy music in English, it requires a lot of effort on my part. I need to see the visual, like it, or read the lyrics, like them, then listen to the song, like the tunes, then compare lyrics to the song, sing along to get familiar with the song and then enjoy. This process takes a lot of time and effort. The same goes with music in any other language, be it Tamil, Malayalam or Korean. They all demand a lot of time and effort for me to be able to enjoy that music.

But with Telugu, it is just different. It flows like natural. Of course it does, it is my Mother Tongue after all. A language I think in. Melody, Fast beat, Lullaby, Musical, the type of the song doesn’t matter as long as the lyrics are meaningful, beautiful and in Telugu. Mostly, I love those songs that remind me of the movie story as they aren’t forcefully added to the movie but flow naturally with the movie’s pace. Such songs remind you of the entire movie making you want to watch it again.

I sometimes wonder if i will ever be able to understand songs or music the way i understand songs in Telugu. No matter how good i am at reading, writing, and speaking Hindi, I will never be able to understand the lyrical nuances like I do in Telugu. I think lyrics and composition are like 2 wheels of a vehicle called song. And when you cannot connect to the depth of the lyrics, there is only so much the score can do. To me, a soulful lyric in Telugu, sung beautifully with decent composition beats any world class composition in any language. This makes me wonder how linguistics actually work. Sure, you can be proficient in a language that isn’t yours. But can you really get to the roots of the language enough to understand and be able to enjoy the lyrics of a song in that language?

I do love the music posts many people do on WordPress. They are like reviews or intros to the songs they like. I should do a movie & music favourites category. Music is such a big part of my life. That too a happy one. I should definitely add it to my happy collection here.

Melbourne Dairies #1

There are so many times that I started writing about Melbourne and couldn’t finish the post as i get lost in the memories it gave. Today, i atleast want to start this series. These days i keep feeling that I’m dumping all my sadness and pain into this blog but not collecting any of my good memories, the happy ones. If i keep on doing this, one day, when i look back at my blog, all I’m going to get is a recollection of sad memories. I don’t want that and so i made my mind to post atleast one happy post a week. No matter how small or big it is. So, it is a gloomy but happy post today. 😄 It is raining while i started for office. I have always loved rains. I’m a July born and being in a small town for most of my life, i have never known the ugly side of rains until i came to the city. And then, I started hating rain .. that is until i met them again in Melbourne. Melbourne is a weird city. Before going there, i have read that one can see all 4 seasons in one day. I thought it was a bit exaggerated. But no, Melbourne is that way. It will be all warm and sunny when you wake up and it will be drizzling by the time you leave for office and by lunch it will be windy and by evening the chill comes back. 😉 It is like that. And the most important thing is, the weather isn’t harsh over there. And the rains, oh water comes down too sharp unlike the rains here, but the weather becomes all too pleasant when it rains. I just loved it. Watching Fidaa after being drenched in the rain is my most wonderful memory of rain in Melbourne. I think it is an amalgamation of all the things that i loved. I love rains. I love singer Rain. I love Melbourne and i loved the movie. And those long walks in that windy weather and occasional drizzles, they are just too good. I cannot wait to go back. To me, Melbourne is love and peace. At a time in my life when all I had was pain and sadness, was depressed and low, Melbourne gave me love with all the ☀️ sunshine in the world. It gave me the courage to face the world despite how messy my life is. To smile at strangers, to talk to people again, to introspect, to write, to heal, to recover, and to just be myself, it is all Melbourne that helped me. Before 2017, if anyone had told me that cities have life too and that they mean something to people, i would’ve laughed at that dialogue. But now i realise how true it is. I know what it is like. When a place gives you love and hope for future, you will love it back. The live and vibrant Melbourne will always love anyone who loves it back. It is this introvert’s paradise. One day, i will be back in Melbourne, to be there forever. 😘😍😎☺️🙏😄.

Anxiety

1. It strikes me when i think of you.

2. It strikes me when someone asks me of you.

3. It strikes me when i think you might be coming home tonight.

4. It strikes me when i see your things at home.

5. It strikes me when i see any symbols of marriage around me or when i hear any talk about those symbols.

6. When i see or hear people talking about marriage, relationships and kids.

7. When i think about our families.

8. When i come across any wedding pics or just your name across any document.

There are so many triggers to it and the first two are more impactful. Earlier, i used to react with Anger, sadness, impulsiveness and depression. Now there is no anger or impulsiveness. It is all tears, sadness, loneliness and depression.

When I read the other article on anxiety, it troubled me like anything. I felt it to be so disturbing that couldn’t even read it completely. Someone has explained what i felt like for an year. I cannot write any better than that. But the memories are painful and disturbing. I wish they just go away.

Decisions of heart ❤️

Some decisions are meant to be taken by brain not by heart because your brain thinks of your heart but heart thinks of everyone you love.

Our heart is a weird thing. It always knows what it wants. Not only that but it also knws who all are important to you and what they want or expect from you. At times, this heart forces you to choose things or people not because you love them but because the people you love, love to see you making those choices. At the end, nobody forced you to do anything but these choices, these decisions become your own even though they aren’t what you wished for yourself.

Where do you draw this line between selfishness and selflessness? Where do you stop at while doing things for the happiness of others just because you want them to be happy? To what extent is self love acceptable and to what extent do we need to go, to make people around us, our families and our friends happy?

And is it selfishness when you choose your own happiness over theirs? It feels like it is very easy to end this life rather than make these choices. You cannot even tell them that as that would be blackmail. Any decision i make with my brain, will have consequences. And more than my own fate, it is the parents’s and sister’s life that worries me. Being on the ground, they will have to face the consequences of my choices all alone while I was flying on my own being all too busy to be there for them. It is easy for me to get lost in my job and career but they have a life around them. A small town life, that gets scary when you have a divorced daughter. That too the one with no reason except incompatibility, depression and lack of feelings which aren’t good enough reasons for divorce in that part of the world. At this age, I’m going to make their lives difficult, like tenfold difficult.

My all too complicated yet liberal little sister says that I shouldn’t worry about the world and do what I really want to. And that i need to get out of this relationship if it is making me unhappy, depressed and sad. She isn’t one bit worried about the impact my decision might have on her life or atleast she pretends to be that way for me. I think she is an Angel sent to me by God to compensate for making me this weird and complicated. Just so that i will have this one person whom i can rely on and share my mind no matter what it is. But what about my responsibility towards her? How can i payback? It is very easy to clear monetary debts but very hard to clear the emotional debt. And what example am i going to set for her if i do things that doesn’t have my heart’s approval. If i couldn’t stand up for myself just because doing so would make things difficult for my family, what am i leading her to? That would be worse as she is someone who always looked up to me. I would always want her to do things that she wants to do but not the things everyone want her to do.

For once, i have decided to do what i think is right. For once, i want to do something for me. For once, i want to love myself and be honest with what my heart and mind really wants. If i cannot make my soul happy, I’m going to lose it this time and there is no return from that loss.

Once i make this choice, life is going to be ten times harder but there is a possibility that everything will eventually settle down and one day i will earn my family’s trust again. But if I don’t make this choice today, i will no longer have the courage or will to live and they will lose me forever. I wish it was easy. But since it isn’t, i have to make tough choices.

Just send me an ounce of courage if you can spare me any. Thanks.

Relive

I have no clue how people with tough lives and sad memories write memoirs or autobiographies. It is such a painful thing to do. It is almost as if the person is reliving their entire life which is more painful than the original version. Atleast in the original, we just live experiencing pain or any feelings along the way. But while writing, we recollect everything and anything the mind remembers. And you see, this thing called brain is so amazingly weird that it remembers everything that caused you pain but forgets others point of view entirely. In such cases, writing becomes the most painful and tiring activity one has ever performed.

It crushes the soul like anything breaking the heart into millions of pieces every waking minute and day. And at times like this when you realise that there is a pattern in your life and you might have repeated your past mistakes, just kills you. It need not be true but to people like me, everything seems to be wrong or done the wrong way or done for the wrong reasons, in retrospect.

I wish it was easy. 😐 Or atleast, i wish it wasn’t this lonely.

Parents

Can never understand the depth of their love and the pain it causes when you have to break their hearts for your happiness.

Their presence alone is a huge relief in a life filled with tests and challenges. I can never forget the day my mother cried while talking to me about my grandfather’s death. She said that with this loss, her life has now started a new journey into a life without parents. She said, she lost a part of her with that loss.

That day i decided to be her pillar of strength. I now wonder if i can ever live upto that responsibility! I’m too selfish to be selfless. Can I ever be the daughter they wanted? I have no clue at all.

Facts #3 – Complexities of my mind

• I cannot sleep in open places. I need closed rooms to sleep.
• I don’t like too much light anywhere.
• I prefer dark, gloomy and warm to anything else.
• I can only sleep when it is dead dark.
• I cannot share any of my things (my cup, my plate, my bedsheets, my pillow, my side of the bed, my house key) with anyone. Not even my husband.
• I cannot take it when someone messes up with things like my cupboard arrangement, my wardrobe, my kitchen setup.
• I’m too gaurded and closed for anyone.
• I’m too scared to open up to anyone. Too scared to let anyone know my fears and vulnerabilities.
• I find it too difficult to trust anyone. If I trust someone, it means a lot to me.
• I love my sister to death but not sure if i love myself enough.
• I am a woman of contradictions and complex thoughts.

Is there any reason why a person can be this weird and messed up? Am i damaged mentally? Am i not meant for a happy and simple life? How do i know?