Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Adieu mon amie, je t'aimais bien

Its not something anyone wants to do, but saying goodbyes is undeniable & inevitable.

Some goodbyes are final and come with varying kinds of grief (or relief), while some goodbyes are temporary with a chance (however fleeting) of turning into a hello somewhere, someday.
But what about the goodbyes that we stretch out, like goodbyes that signal end of relationships.

So many of us hang on to some slim hope that what we shared with someone else will survive. We hang on desperately in the hopes of recreating past highs together, while the ghosts of lows haunt us from the edge of memory.

We are addicts who are at the wrong end of the addiction - not riding high on a new buzz but trying every trick to get the buzz back.Love is an addiction at the best of times. This is true for the feeling itself or the idea of it & sometimes, the hope of the feeling is the high itself.

We have millions of songs, books and poems about the grief, loss and sometimes joy & freedom that goodbyes are often accompanied by. There is a bittersweet release in the act of letting go; whether welcome or otherwise. This is an universal phenomenon, wholly complete in its humanity.

But I am letting go of myself, the versions of myself that lived in the past. The girl who couldn't grow up fast enough, the girl who was bullied and abused. That is not to say I didn't have a happy childhood, my parents loved me as best they could, my sister gave me everything she could. But I was just not capable of being the person I wanted to be -- like many tweens and teens both before & after me. I have been many versions of that person, many I didn't like, many I am ashamed of. I guess they are right when they say that childhood is wasted on the young.

It is today as I look back on my mistakes, I am trying to let go of the person I used to be in order to really be what I can be. I am saying goodbye to the small infinities that made up my past and looking forward to the infinite infinities ahead.

I am doing it in part with the help of my job that I love, understanding how I feel about how I look & surrounding myself with people who accept me without judgement. I am also trying to feel less like an impostor who is waiting to get caught. I am learning to like myself and accept my drawbacks and grow on my strengths. Love is still elusive but I am hopeful that if I am lucky to find it, I will be ready for it.

So this is both a goodbye & a hello, a goodbye to the neurosis of the past and a hello to the insanity of the future. 

2 comments:

  1. You know, I never realized you didn't like the time during school and college. You, in fact, were my role model in school. I wish I was as funny as ipshi, I wish I was as jovial as ipshi, I wish my english was half as good as Ipshi, I wish I was as confident as ipshi! Some of the things that I recollect....
    And I will never be able to forget how you stood up to teachers and the principal to ensure you stayed in my class with me, with just a glance at my stricken face.

    You may want to forget Ips - but that Ms. Ipshita Sharma, I will never and don't want to ever forget :-)

    I am proud of who you are today - and I wish you can see yourself as I see you!

    Love!

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  2. Thanks darling, I think I have blocked out a lot of positives because I spent so much time remembering the negatives of school -- the girls who bullied me, the teachers who compared me to my sister, so on and so forth. I am amazed when people tell me they liked me in school because i only remember how I thought everybody hated me and I shouldn't trouble anyone with my company.

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