“Don’t forget to fall in love with yourself first.”
This storm was silent, not because it had ended, but because it had just started. As the pandemic hit us I found myself craving the outside world. I yearned for the dopamine it never failed to provide and for the all-enveloping noise that we enjoy being consumed by. For its ability to never let us stop. For the first time, I was confined, alone and forced to ‘just be’. Now, there was nothing to do, I was a slave to technology, my dependence on it increases with each day I sat idle. Strangely, it overwhelmed me as I became increasingly frustrated with the virtual world feeding me information that at this moment I couldn’t keep up with.
On one hand, it’s so easy for us to disconnect, to switch off from people in the virtual world with just a click of a button but on the opposite end of this paradox we find ourselves so heavily dependent, just as I was and continue to be through this period. Where did this dependency come from, is all my mind was asking me to unearth? I couldn’t help but think that I have never learnt how to step back and breathe, how to seize the present, to just be with oneself. While the frantic social activity on my phone disallows the basic concept of ‘social distancing’ what if all we need is just some silence. To switch off. To disconnect. To use that distance to get closer to our real selves?
“If you can’t go outside, go within”, I read this somewhere and it struck me that there is so much about myself that I have never really discovered. Somewhere, there is a version of me that is a confused mix of who I am and who I must be. I found myself questioning, going beyond what was just being presented to me and I decided to go on a journey. This time, a journey that would take me inside my own mind to understand if who I am is because of what I choose to be or am I just an amalgamation of years of conditioned learning that I haven’t yet challenged?
As a generation, we find ourselves consumed by social chatter to such an extent that silence in itself, creates an imbalance in us. My eye caught my mother sitting out on the balcony listening carefully to the birds chirping and went over to my father on the other side, watching him sip his coffee, strolling carelessly around the garden, stopping to look up at the vibrant blue of the sky and what hit me was that there was stimulation in silence that maybe my generation was oblivious to or maybe it was just a choice we forgot to make.
Isn’t it strange that we have never been taught how to ‘create’ happiness, we have just been asked to ‘find’ it? Sometimes, creating your own happiness comes from just being. Personally, I found it hard to just sit, to disconnect and that in itself was a reminder that something needed to change.
A day or so passed and I found myself standing in front of the mirror. I couldn’t go out of course and had to take matters of vanity into my own hands. The blinding bulb lit up my face as I leaned forward with scrunched up eyes, brought a tweezer to my upper lip and PULLED. The tapering ends of the tweezer danced around thin strands of hair as I grasped onto each with obsessive conviction. These little monsters had no chance of escape. I scanned the tweezer along the length of my face with a careful examination in search of any more unwanted visitors. With every hair that was extricated, a piece of my confidence fit back into place. Why, you ask?
The yellow light traced the structure of my face as it bounced off the bump on my nose making its way to the cracks on my lips and finally blending into the open pores. It pierced through my outer skin and found a place for itself amidst the cracks of my confidence. I stared at myself and wondered where did my definition of beauty birth from? Was is the magazines? The glossy feeds on Instagram? Or was it the aunties always commenting on fair skin, beautiful eyes and long straight hair? When did the pressure to be a certain beautiful define my individual beautiful? What if every magazine flaunted women with bushy eyebrows, peach fuzz, and hairy arms? What if influencers marketed body-hair grooming products? What if feminity had nothing to do with the way you looked? What if it was about …just you instead? In that utopian world, we would not spend hours erasing every aspect of ourselves that didn’t abide by the rules that weren’t even set by us. We wouldn’t be chasing this unattainable sense of self masking nothing but the doubt being injected into us through everything we consume. As individuals, we wouldn’t crave to fit into these moulds of ‘feminine’, of ‘ideal’ because there wouldn’t be any. It would not be so easy to fall into the depths of shame every time we saw another person glance at our unshaven legs. But why do we allow ourselves to feel this shame? Because this world feeds on our insecurities.
“Don’t forget to fall in love with yourself first”, smiled Carrie Bradshaw sipping her cosmopolitan. “Eventually all pieces fall into place and until then, laugh with the confusion and live for the moment.”
“After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breathe and reboot.”