I had an epiphany recently when I read this in a book: “You just told me what you think. Now tell me how you feel. It had never occurred to her that the two were different. So she tried to think about how she felt, and the truth was, she didn’t know. She didn’t know how she felt about anything.”
I have flirted with self awareness forever but in more committed ways for the last two years. I have thought about my feelings, dissected them, configured them into more palatable versions of themselves, always negotiating boundaries of acceptability with myself. How do I honor my emotions and still remain a functioning member of society? How do I listen to my instinct and still make decisions that keep me emotionally and materially safe?
One could say I have taken up self-awareness as a hobby, as a coat I try on for size but don’t choose to keep. I’ll level with you: I don’t know why I write here and existentialism forms the root of my dread and joy when it comes to my substack, my work, my life. I thought Camus was cool when I was 18 and I am 25 now, finally entrenched in what he was entrenched in, without making this about him. It seems obvious to me that it is the most important question in the world: what is the meaning of life?
This question was the project of my life for ages before mindfulness and metta meditation and therapy and books made me reframe it, softly and then loudly: what is the meaning of my life?
It has only now, post epiphany, occurred to me that thinking about the meaning of life is so different from what I feel about my life. At any given point of time, things can be intellectualised in thesis level, expert articulations, but the truth is that feelings tend to be simpler, more direct, more close approximations for what might actually make you more happy and fulfilled.
For instance, as soon as I read that sentence in that book, in the middle of a train journey at 4am, I asked myself how I felt and it came down to two words: cold (quite literally because Indian railways are weird and expect you to carry blankets) and raw (in an empty, out of my tortoise shell way, like a baby whose mom has exfoliated her way too much and she feels all exposed and light and a little red and very clean)
It all sounds strange but it makes sense to me, because till now I was thinking about other people’s actions, life’s twists and turns and the anatomy of a good life in lots of words and theories, but quite simply noting my raw exposure to the world lifted a weight those ten hours of cerebral analysis had not. I had been pulling off the most sinister hide and seek of them all: hiding my feelings behind concepts, then chasing the concepts endlessly.
Back to the immediacy of it all: since I don’t have a concrete plan for what I am doing here, I concede that currently, I just do it because something is telling me to. There is no plan, no marketing audience, no social media page in the works, no vision. There is just something in me whispering that it’s time and sometimes I back off because it all feels self indulgent but I can’t shake off the feeling, reinstated so well by consistency is proficiency, that something’s gotta give, some door’s gotta break.
Concepts are still really fun to think and write about, but I am putting them in perspective: my feelings, no matter how half-baked, get as much say on the table as their more nerdy, verbose cousin.
I’m bringing my weapons out, keeping them on the table. I love deranged writers (Ask Molly), I love how their writing takes ridiculous leaps that connect with me on a primal level, how I have visited the same crazy forests of impulsive writing when I was young, returned and now feel ready to visit again. It’s an acquired taste and if you end up wanting to create here, you are the chosen one. You belong. You own a stake here, half protective, half buzzing with electricity. The best part is, the forest rewards the feeler with way more treasure than the thinker.
My tongue is purple, my hair frizzy, I am stumbling in a haze. This murky forest is the only place where I find it all: the more I unearth, the more there is to unearth.
I write here because I feel like writing here.