Hello There!

I know we all live in the same world and strangely under the same reality for the first time ever.

And I also know that it has been a long time since I posted anything here. But if you know anything about writing, you know how it is. You can only write when the mind wants to write. There is no forcing it or marching ahead no matter what. There is no other way around making one’s brain to write. So, it is the same case with me. Life got to me and I have been busy and with no space left in my brain to gather enough energy to write.

But I know I cannot stay away from this little space of mine forever and hence, here I am. So, whoever knows me, here’s a quick update and will get into the details of what all has been happening later.

I have been well and I hope you are all well and doing whatever is best for you in this situation.

Since I live in the capital city of a southern state of India and work in IT, I have been faring relatively well compared to the general population of the world. And I know that I shouldn’t complain, but I have worked 3 times more in the last 2 months than the entire Q4 of 2019-20. Partly because Q4 is usually filled with a lot of holidays and Corona has led to a lot more additional insecurity related to the Job resulting in me working harder than required. And since the last week, I have started going back to work after a long work from home period. It is not a choice and it could have been completely avoided for at least a couple more months but what can I do, I was asked to come back to the office and obliged after stalling it for 3 weeks. So, that’s that.

And before Coronavirus started its invasion, I was spending days miserably at work every day, just surviving week after week and filling weekends with endless chores and silently waiting for my bank balances to rise enough to help me make a move for my Melbourne plans. In a way, Coronavirus saved me from my depressing office setting. I wish I get to work from home for a couple more months. My productivity hit peaks during the last 2 months. I wish someone notices that and asks me to work from home for the rest of my life 😛  And my finances are a bit better now, with me reaching a break-even point in terms of expenses vs savings enough to survive me for a couple of years abroad. But now that we have new health scenarios in the picture, I realised that I also need to plan for health emergencies both for me and my family. It will be a few more months of toiling but I’m sure I can tolerate this job and frankly, I don’t have a lot of choices, with or without the world being this way.

And after surviving anonymity for a decade, I made a mistake last week of linking my newly created Instagram account for the blog with my personal account and it sent out notifications to everyone on my contact list. This stress caused due to this is equivalent to that of a heart attack and somehow I survived it by making the blog private for a while and deleting the said Instagram account.

To all my friends in this sphere, I hope you all are doing well in your lives and not hit by the covid19 pandemic. I would love to know that you are doing okay. Please stop by if you have a minute and drop me an email if you just want someone to talk to.

Love, Sahasra.

 

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Day #0 : 23 March 2019

You know, I really thought this would be one wonderful trip. Counting them all together, this would be my 6th international tour. Of course, like every other time, I was scared of meeting a new client and making new mistakes 😱😜. But I was still excited as this is a short trip to a new city in South Africa and I’m going to meet the client that I’ve been dealing with for the past 1 year. It is through this client that I got to know some wonderful women that I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking to and working with. Each of them so different yet so similar in their strengths. They are people I aspire to be.

And when I was in this excited but nervous as hell state of mind, just one day before Day 0, things started piling up.

First among the lot is the ticket booking process itself. This is my first time booking an international flight on my own and my priority was to comfortably reach Capetown by Sunday and rest well before getting back to work. As a result of that, I happened to choose a very pricey flight which just made me feel really guilty. It took me a while to get used to the consequences of that choice of mine where I was my main priority. It took me a day but eventually I was fine with that choice but little did I know that it was just the beginning.

The new prospective client that I was working with since a month, suddenly decided to come down to our office and finalize our POC requirements. That too at the end of the week when I’m supposed to leave. It was one hell of a Thursday with that client and it was almost half past one on Friday when we’re done preparing their solution base. By then, I had asked my boss atleast a hundred times for permission to skip the next day’s meetings and take a day off for travel preparation. He finally said yes and I was just about to leave when I happened to notice that my visa only permitted 20 days of stay in South Africa but my booking is done for 23 days. By that time, I have already done my web check-in and this news came as a rude shock. It was a struggle to get that changed to fit in my visa permitted limit. So finally after endless option evaluation, we were able to prepone the return flight. But that was at an added charge.

And after that, I thought my troubles were now over and my trip finally started. But nah, little did I know how gravely mistaken I was! After a hectic day of endless chores and tasks, I was finally at the airport at around 12:30 for a 4 am flight. For the first time in my life, I was 3.5 hours early for a flight and yet I couldn’t board it. Yeah, they said that there was some issue with the booking and my ticket had been cancelled. Yet, no one, not the airline or the travel company, no one thought of informing me. Instead, I was provided with a ticket copy and a boarding pass. Remember, I did the check-in before my 2nd disaster. My 2nd disaster is the reason to my 3rd. At the airport, while I was waiting with my loaded bags to do my check-in formalities, I was told that I had no flight to catch! The flight my office paid a bomb for, the flight I cancelled client meetings for, the flight that made me take a day off after pleading my manager for like a thousand times, the flight I spent an entire day prepping for, was just not there anymore. I was standing at that travel company kiosk waiting for the guy over the counter to talk to me and staring at the very real possibility of a trip cancellation. After 2 hours of endless discussions that seemed like forever, I was finally told that it might be their mistake and the update done to my earlier booking might have knocked off one of the connecting flights due to which my booking became kindoff useless. I was asked to wait until 3 in the morning until the flight boarding closes to confirm that there’s no seat on the plane, which turned useless. It was around 4 when the travel kiosk guy confirmed my new flight tickets late at night on the same day, some 12 hours away.

Thank god, all of this happened in my home city and I have a home to go back to after the mess. Now that I think back, it is not just the situation with the flight that made it so difficult but the entire week. It is amazing how certain days can still get on my nerves even after 9 years in this job.

So, that’s Day 0 even though I was still in India by the end of it 😁.

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.

Curator of things #1

I have many addictions. And of all those, the worst is my addiction to collect. It is not just any one thing in specific. I collect a variety of things. I don’t know for sure, but maybe, many of us do but never realise how much and what all we collect.

I collect movies, trust me, I have TBs of hard disks filled with movies collected over the course of time. I collect songs, way too many and worse, i make “listen later” lists for songs! I make “read later”, “watch later”, “re-read later” lists on my phone, laptop, shopping sites and even on my office and personal emails. I take monthly backups of bookmarks so that I’ll not lose my endless list of curated content. No matter how much I try, I never see the end of my bookmark list. My list doesn’t just end with movies, music and books. It just starts there, voyaging into realms of articles about politics, history, art, home decor, cooking, baking, architecture, relationships, friends, family, culture, immigration, studies, climate, technology and whatnot.

I also collect, pictures and screenshots of content that I one day want to revisit. It even seems like my life is an attempt to collect things for a future that I might never see. Instead of living in now, I save everything for an unknown future whose arrival date I’ll never know. What a waste of life that is.

So, I want to start a cleanse. Infact I’ve already started one. My last 2 posts were a part of me revisiting my notes on my phone. Hereon, i will try to collect less and live more. The only place where I’m going to curate things is this place with my thoughts around them. I need a phone, body and mind cleanse and I’ll get it.

So, here it is, #1: Job related

Ten Things Never, Ever To Say In Your Resume
https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2017/06/02/ten-things-never-ever-to-say-in-your-resume/amp/

One good piece of advice, let your achievements talk of your qualities instead of the adjectives you would like to describe yourself.

If you go deeper into other advices on the site, “lead by example” and “trust but verify” are a few more that I came across today when I revisited the site. Here’s the link to the 2nd article.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrismyers/2018/10/17/how-this-millennial-came-to-realize-the-value-of-old-school-management-techniques/#5d2a567227cd

Here are my key takeaways:

• Dust up your resume preparation skills and start redoing it again.
• My resume needs to wake up from its zombie state.
• Let your achievements speak instead of heavy adjectives.
• Clear examples always lead the way.
• If there are no resume worthy achievements or qualifications, it is never late to get some. The only secret is to work hard.
• To be a leader, the best policy is to lead by example.
• You don’t have to compromise on being tough to be a cool leader.
• Always remember, trust and verify go side-by-side.

Everything revolves around work – Day 173#

If at all there is one thing that I consistently excelled at since childhood, it is Day Dreaming.

I was always the one who wandered into my own land of dreams every possible minute. My brain, by the basic nature of it, it needs strict deadlines to do things or else any task gets procrastinated and nothing ever gets done.

I’m the master procrastinator. I either need deadlines set by an external medium or either the ones set by myself. I was always an above average student and so my content parents never set any targets for me. And the targets that my teachers set cannot be worked upon as my ego is too big to let some stranger decide my capability. I know, i sound arrogant, rude and naive but i was all of those during my teen years. When I set targets for myself and realised their worth, i always got results. It is only when there is a question about the results and confusion about my target that I procrastinated and day dreamed, which is most of the time.

At work I rarely faced any issue as i take less time to finish things and my pace balanced out the time I wasted. These days I’m wasting a lot more time than usual and working comparitively less which is again making me insecure. Less work always made me insecure. I crave to be overloaded with work so that I know I’m performing. Completing targets at work is such a morale booster which is why I called the other day a good day.

In that sense, i did little or nothing yesterday and it made me feel miserable and i binged on food again. The only good thing that came out of it is i went to bed a little early than usual and woke up early.

Day 173 is a day that involves binge eating, binge watching, no work and a lot of day dreaming. In short, another disaster.

I guess if I’m at work for a minimum of 9 hours everyday, it is going to be the biggest contributor in determining if my day is a success or a disaster. I need to learn to be happy at work and find meaning in my work so that it adds value to my life and eventually leading to my betterment.

But the hows and whys and whatifs are still dancing in my mind. Don’t really know where I’m going with this rant, but yeah, I’m somewhere.🤓👩‍💻😀