Four Women and the Art of Starting

The Glorious Discomfort of our Forward Journeys

May 25, 2020

If you were Hema,

you would hide in your grandma’s room every Sunday. You would be sweating your palms, wearing a pink frock, scared the music teacher will call. You wanted to quit the class. The previous summer, you quit basketball, and the month before that you quit science class. You were so bored in the geography tuition that you stole two colourful magnets off the tuition teacher’s refrigerator and never showed up again. You would be up to the brim with guilt for all the quitting. You would grow up smelling the guilt inside you. With you would grow the scale of things you quit: gym, sports club, C++ class, IIT coaching! You would have become such a quitter, that for years to come you’d stop enrolling for anything new. You won’t even look at the glamorous Zumba posters. Until one day, when your sick body would beg for both at once: movement and relaxation, you text the yoga teacher your friend recommended. Sweat beads on your upper lips, you transfer the fees, thinking: it is okay to try one last time.

If you were Rekha,

you would think therapy is for inarticulate and friendless balloons of sadness. You would recommend it to others, but never consider it for yourself. You can articulate all your problems in piercing detail to your friends. And their friends. And friends on social. And the person you just met on a train. It doesn’t occur to you, that silence is as much a trauma response as re-narrating the pain story over and over. As an intellectual, you can write a smooth critical review of the movie Dear Zindagi, but the day you watch it, you break into tears. A bad representation of therapy is better than no representation at all, it dawns on you. You text a friend, asking her for her therapist’s number. A week later, you stand below the therapist’s office, humming a soft song to relax your nerves.

If you were Jaya,

you would be smashing your heart on a wall. In other words, you would be distributing your heart like a cheap pamphlet, exclusively to people who show no interest in *not* throwing it away. In other words, you would be willing to love, without daring to expect it in return. You would go on for years without asking your heart what it really wants — the exact specifications of the model of love — that it really seeks. When you do, you spend another few years without stating it to people. You get cheated, ghosted, and humiliated in a world of heartless thumbs. When asked by your therapist, why you don’t give voice to your need for intimacy, your craving for a love laced with respect?, you say, well, who’ll stay? She asks you, well, isn’t it better if they leave sooner? and you wake up. Months later, you tell someone exactly what you want. Just laying it all down, without fear, feels like a love story in itself. Even before they say anything in return, your heart is buoyant.

If you were Sushma,

and yours would be a simple story, you would take a billion years to realize that you have a way with words. And once you accept that, you refuse to let go of them. You reject the language of the body, the speech of silence, the vernacular of visuals. So the day you are called upon by one of your favourite creatives to make a zine, you hear squeaky voices: “Who do you think you are to make a zine? An NID graduate?" “You’re not artsy enough for zine-making!” You can’t answer the voices, but you recognise them. You take out a blank paper, and start folding it into a zine. You find old magazines and spot images that speak to you. You stick and stick and stick until you yourself feel, the tiniest bit unstuck.

If you have taken a single step

outside some denial, some story, some fear, some box — without knowing for sure if it will serve you well — you have been these four women. I have been to all of them too, and since they were past versions of me who led me to the person I am today, I chose to give them names from an old Indian advert, and made this collage on the art of starting something, of embracing the glorious discomfort of our forward journeys.

Thank you for reading Evolving & Enough. This post is public so feel free to share it.

All GIFs in this piece have been created by crwnking

If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, HEY!