When I let a rotten part of mine transform me into a monster
I was unfair! So unfair! A couple of days back, for a couple of days I found myself filled with a sense of betrayal and with a sense that the world had been unfair to me. My writings also followed that sense. Where did these feelings come from? They emerged because I unquestioningly hopped on to the train that my mind, my immediate feelings and my body guided me into. A moment of sensed withdrawal of a person felt like a huge calamity and crisis. The mind connected that moment with a similar moment from five-six years back and created the narrative that a person had always been unkind towards me. Or that I had been a better friend, a better person than my friend had been to me. So far from the truth, I acted blind. All my creativity, my ideas and ideals fell flat in face of that feeling which might have been just a sudden episode of anger. Rather than waiting patiently beside that anger, I let it guide me for a couple of days. And worse, I acted on it. I wrote what I wrote based on what the anger dictated.
This is not about me. This is about how we often make ourselves prey to our redundant narratives and to the cruel parts of our minds. But why? In my case, the belief that no one cares for me sticks with me perhaps because I have felt for long that I do not deserve care. And that is no one else’s problem or fault. So no matter how much people care, the one instance where I feel neglected magnifies and confirms my belief that no one cares. And my brain seeks pride in telling me, “See! I was right all along. No one cares.” No it was never right. It just finds home in the environment it is familiar with, no matter how detrimental that environment is to us and to everyone around. And no one is ever responsible for reproducing the patterns of our mind. The moment we become attentive to that pattern, we are able to challenge it. However, in some cases, like it happened in mine, it gets too late. It got late because I caught within me the event of recurrence of an old pattern, after I already wrote what I should not have. And that is the loop that binds us, over and over again.
In fact it is wrong even to say that my mind tricked me. As if I am driven to act with it as my master. That is not true. The person who acted upon the anger chose to do so. She could have chosen otherwise. I could have chosen otherwise. For whatever reason, one can in vain name events of past trauma, I was unreasonable. Again, this is not to assign blame to myself but to suggest that sometimes we need to pause, to reflect, to see the right from the wrong. And it takes great effort and courage to refrain from acting through the moments of our weaknesses. Also, we are not automatically entitled to be trusted again, once we have acted through our anger or rage or resentment. It took twenty minutes to question something that had been built over more than a decade. But it might take another decade to make repair for those twenty minutes. Who knows? But I know that for another decade now, I will have to try to be cautious, to be very very cautious and consistent. No, not to get anything back, not to get anything at all. But just to heal the wound, the scar that a moment of my anger wrote upon the sky.
And yes, this is not a punishment or a sentence but a learning, the acknowledgement of my willingness to develop healthier ways of being. Not seeking another chance, not chasing another dream, but just stepping in with the self with as much humility as possible. Unless I am willing to see the rotten part, how can it be removed? I cannot pass over this cancerous moment. I will have to locate the cancer and undergo the chemotherapy. No other way around.
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