a return to the page

and perhaps a reckoning with being seen

I caught up with a friend I have not seen in a long time and during the obligatory end of the year recap, trying to contain in words the sheer breadth of life experiences, processed and unprocessed from this year of our lord 2024, I found myself longing to return to the page and write it all down. We laughed about how every year feels like it cannot possibly be topped in terms of the chaos that abounds in the world but this year has felt especially intense. I’ve also learned that intensity is neither good nor bad. That celebration and mourning exist as two sides of the same coin.

A lot changed for me this year. In really positive ways. I got engaged to a brilliant man, someone I respect and love deeply. I purchased a home. I started a work as an executive at new company. I got to spend a lot of quality time with two loving families. It honestly felt sometimes like more happiness than I could humanly contain. And it also felt like in the world we live in, with the kinds of dark, horrifying things we are forced to contend with daily, there really was no room to celebrate or feel the joy in a way that felt uncontrived.

And so I have mourned a lot this year. I’ve mourned for the inability to feel the joy in the way I’d have expected to. This is different from feeling joy because it’s the nuance of feeling like you’re meant to feel this emotion in a particular way but you have no reference point for how you experience it and so you intellectualise the whole thing until you’re just deeply sad.

I’ve mourned for my inability to be contained by my loved ones who are each navigating their own hard transitions and I’ve mourned my selfishness of wanting to make things about my own experience and center me.

I’ve mourned aging, postponed decisions to care for one’s health and the real implications of choosing to live so far away.

I’ve mourned the transitions, the way life truly has not drastically changed overnight for me but has been a series of small BIG decisions that have resulted in a year where everyone I’ve loved has remarked on how I’ve changed.

I’ve mourned incarnations of my past self, paths I could have taken, hypotheses about what could have happened if only I stayed home, if I took up a different profession, if I were closer to family, if I chose to live my life in a different way than where I am right now. I’ve wondered how I’d be received if I could just give a bit more to my friendships, if I could find the words and the ways to share the feelings as they are happening and instead I’ve retreated to my journal and my partner, choosing to turn inwards and “process” rather than share externally, which has also made me feel sad.

I’ve found more expressions of grief this year than perhaps I ever thought were possible.

I suppose that is par for the course when life lifes in shockingly fast and transformative ways. But I also think that I’m struggling with joy because it is far more acceptable to be sad. See, being sad almost automatically helps you give the person you’re expressing sadness to a way to be helpful. We’re (mostly) all equipped as humans with empathy and especially when we love someone, it’s easy for us to want to fix and hold the sadness, even if presence is all that is asked for. But joy? Sitting with actual unbridled joy? When you’re going through your own shit? This requires the person receiving the joy to do work. You have to set aside your immediate sense of self to be excited for another person’s happiness. To truly hold space for joy, you almost have to be willing to be excited and happy, in spite of yourself, your neuroses, your envy and jealousy, your sadness to be present for someone else, to truly see them. It is a beautiful thing to behold and yet there are very few people I know who can look at a person, even an internet stranger, expressing joy and feel joy for them, without immediately reaching for rationalisation.

I share all of this because sharing joy on the internet and feeling joy are separate things but they stem from this need to be seen. We want our friends and loved ones and perhaps even random strangers to be happy for us. And yet we are terrified of being seen. It’s even codified into culture. Indian culture has the concept of nazar, where you intentionally do not share good things for fear of the evil eye. And yet we consume alarming amounts of content of other people realising their dreams and sharing their joy, all the while wondering why none of this seems to be happening to us. Even when we are putting in the work and it is.Quietly, invisibly, slowly.

My brother introduced me to this term recently, anhedonia. It’s the clinical lack of interest, enjoyment or pleasure from life's experiences. I was particularly taken by knowing there was a word for this feeling because I genuinely think we are all experiencing some version of this. When we’re constantly told to commodify our gifts, perform an identity on social media, share wins and highlights while being authentic and vulnerable but also spend so much of our life curating a persona on the internet, we become so disassociated from life that what could we possibly feel? It’s almost like we’re programmed to feel when we receive approval from other people and we modulate our emotional state to the response. Which begs the question - what are we actually feeling?

Last year, my home was published in Apartment Therapy. As someone who loves interior design, this was a really cool moment for me. I’d submitted it on a whim, one of those fuck it moments of putting myself out there. I remember the excitement when I saw the article in my Instagram feed, the shock and mild horror that my home was on display. I felt proud! And excited! And so I shared the article with my close friends. I shared it to my social media. I got on excited video calls with friends genuinely happy for me, people who had stayed in my home and had felt at home (which is honestly the biggest compliment for me). And then I read the comments. Random people I’ve never met before criticised my home for being too empty, with little art on the walls, not enough personality. All that excitement turned into sadness and a bit of shame. Why did I submit unprofessional photographs? Why hadn’t I thought through my entry a bit more? Why didn’t I write longer captions explaining that I had just moved halfway across the world and had only been in my space for a year and hadn’t gotten all of my things yet. Why was I overexplaining? Why wasn’t I satisfied with my home and content enough to just be happy internally?

This bothered me deeply. I retreated back into my shell for almost a year and a half with little to no posts about a home I loved and wanted to show off because I was too scared of what other strangers might say so this is hardly a post about courage. I was terrified of writing about anything for fear of not enough caveats to account for all of the inevitable comments about to rain down on me for perspectives unconsidered, a narrow perspective, the audacity to feel joy when the world is inherently suffering. I was soothed with time, with loved ones continuously poking and prodding me to start writing again and me trying to explore why I’d ever stopped, remembering that this whole world is a construct and that being delulu is the solulu.

But more importantly, to be seen implicitly requires the vulnerability to potentially feel shame. The reward of being seen is the risk of the shame of certain people not enjoying the show. As my therapist has gently reminded me, shame is not a negative emotion, it simply is showing us where we ourselves feel inadequate or flawed, where we know someone could hurt us. My shame is often derided by my ego coming in to tell me that nothing matters and I’m being self absorbed. And that is where I am right now. Holding the reality of us all being dust in the wind, none of this mattering and in the age of AI, knowing that our mortality, our taste, our uniqueness is all that matters. (I will write about this.) As well as the reality that this entire world we have constructed exists because we exist and if we are out of the picture, all the constructs in our minds also largely fall apart. We are simultaneously both deeply insignificant and the most important thing in the entire world. And that is ok.

Zafar Mahal Entrance, Mehrauli, 2024