Unfinished Conversations

It’s weird because when I started this blog, I wanted to be a certain kind of writer. The kind who writes about intelligent things – like pop culture and internet culture and how those forces shape our sense of self.

I wanted to critique and examine trends and understand why we feel a certain way about them. I especially wanted to understand my own online behavior, and make sense of why I evolved online the way I did. I wanted to unpack the bizarre fact that after a decade of being on social media, it was actually possible to evolve online. Like some weird Darwinian hellscape.

A year-ish and a half-ish later, I’m finding myself writing less about that stuff and I’ve been trying hard not to feel deeply disappointed with myself. Is there still culture out there to critique? Yeah too much of it. Do I still have opinions? Ya bro, so many. So what happened?

I talked about this in my previous essay, which was nearly three weeks ago. I’ve been publishing less often because life has caught up with me in good ways. My toddler is a delight but also far more demanding than she was at seven, eight, or nine months old. I’m finally back to working full-time, and it has been a surprisingly adrenaline-filled return.

But the other reason is that I’m not sure what I want to write about.

Actually no, that’s a lie.

I know what I want to write about, I just wish it was something more impressive. Because here I am. Again. Talking about my feelings. The ones I’ve felt. In my life. Me.

I am the one thing I didn’t want to write about. My perspective? Sure I guess. But not me and my feelings.

I’ve always been a fan of writing that makes you think – as if it stood in direct opposition to writing that made you feel. In my mind, feelings are easy to manipulate. Easy to manufacture.

I give you a stiff drink and play your favorite song from when you were in college and ask you about what school was like for you and boom – feelings. Blowing up like a volcano all over the couch.

I didn’t want that. I wanted to push myself creatively and dig a little deeper. So I dug, and guess what I found.

Overnight oats

It must’ve been around July 2020 when I sat in my childhood bedroom crying my eyes out to my Mum. I had been married for six months by then. So to clarify, I was now a married woman in my childhood bedroom crying my eyes out to my Mum. 

The six-ish months we had been married coincided semi-perfectly with the onset of my very first (and hopefully only) global pandemic. Everyone that knows me by now knows exactly how this went down – we got married but couldn’t quite ‘start our life’ together.

We lived in limbo – paying rent for three months at a house we couldn’t live in because of movement restrictions. We paid this out of a joint income that was only a couple of thousand rupees higher than our wasted rent. We’d been married for six months and were still staying with my parents in my childhood bedroom. Boxes of wedding presents that we wanted to carry into our new home were stacked against the wall.

If these problems seem stupid in hindsight, that’s a gift. If you remember the pandemic very differently, with real hardships, please know that I KNOW I sound ungrateful right now.

I knew it then and I know it now – I had it great compared to most. I had a roof over my head, good health, family that made life easy for me during a hard time, and literally no bills to pay (after we ditched our apartment).

Sure, there was a certain life I’d hoped to have by then, which I didn’t. But nobody’s life looked normal in 2020, so why should mine?

When I imagine the future, by default, I end of thinking of very specific things to help me firmly place my future-feet where I hope they’ll land. When I apply for a job I really, really want; as I’m filling up the application, I imagine carrying my laptop around with their company sticker on it. It’s one of the banal small ways that getting a job changes your everyday life.

In the same way, when I imagined being married, I didn’t think about sharing a bed or a bathroom. I thought of making breakfasts-for-two. Specifically, I thought about making overnight oats. They were the perfect mix of easy and bougie, which was the specific brand of married person I wanted to be. I wanted to level up, but within limits obviously.

So what happened?

Nothing happened. For months, and months, and months. And one fine day, my gratitude for having all the privileges that I did during the pandemic vanished. I don’t care about everyone else!! Who cares that I don’t have covid? Who cares that I don’t have to worry about food on the table tomorrow? I don’t care anymore! I’m still allowed to need things, even during a global crisis!!!

And what I needed so desperately in that moment was some hope that the life I imagined (the one with overnight oats) was possible. That it wasn’t snatched away from me indefinitely as I reminded myself to be grateful every. single. day.

The treadmill

This cranky day in July was an outlier. Most of my days through the pandemic weren’t spent crying to my Mum. In fact, despite my curious situation of being married, (and also being kinda broke), and confined to the same childhood bedroom where I once dreamt of independence –

A sense of “okayness” prevailed.

Sure, it wasn’t the life we hoped for. But for many, myself included, it became – dare I say those dumb words – the new normal.

I’ve written about the hedonic treadmill before, and I sense that it’s a topic that I’ll come back to often, unlike any real-life treadmill I’ve been on lol.

The hedonic treadmill is a term that psychologists gave to the idea that regardless of the peak of happiness you feel over something good, or the pit of sorrow over something bad – you will eventually get back to a steady baseline of being okay with things. And okay with life in general.

It seems straightforward because we’ve all experienced it – our dream job is, after a while, just a job. The worst breakup of our lives eventually fades into our past. Something that feels like a huge, earth-shattering personal failure eventually becomes a chapter we don’t think about all that much.

Our capacity to return to our basic temperaments over and over continues to surprise me. The fact that good things can happen to us and bad things can happen to us, and we’ll still, for the most part, be okay? That’s crazy. That somehow, our brains will drag us back to baseline regardless of how much we may want to celebrate or wallow. Wild.

We usually operate under the assumption that happiness and misery are semi-permanent states, determined by a handful of pivotal decisions. Like dating that guy, or moving to that place, or taking that big career risk.

But instead, and far less dramatically, we aren’t defined by singular moments, but by our ongoing ability to adapt and find equilibrium.

“I pictured my life looking so different right now” – I told my mum. “I wanted to do stuff like make my own breakfast.” (pretty sure my mum has never objected to this ever in her life). “I wanted to make stuff like overnight oats.” – I told her.

I can’t remember what she said but I think it was some version of “Please make your dumb oats if you want them so badly you horse-human.”

But no she didn’t say that. She was kind and understanding and helped me cope with my misery. I’m so glad she did because it would be another four and a half months till we moved out of that bedroom and into our halfway house in Goa.

Finally – oats!!!!!

Once we moved out, I didn’t make overnight oats. I just didn’t want to. In fact, Kyle and I stopped eating breakfast entirely. We began our morning with coffee on an empty stomach because we don’t care about gut health. Come arrest us.

BUT – since life is a tragic comedy – during my last visit to Bombay, as I was packing up my suitcase to leave, my Mum gave me a big bag of oats – entirely unrelated to the events of a few years ago (which I hope she has forgotten). She just wanted to offload some groceries that she had no use for.

“Of course I’ll take them,” I said, and I dumped the bag in my suitcase. I make oatmeal cookies practically every other week. I’ll just add this to my ingredients stash.

Then – at the airport, I got stopped at the check-in counter because my bag was too heavy (I might have raided other stuff from their house too) and in that moment, I had half a mind to throw away the stupid giant packet of oats but NO.

Right then and there, on the floor of terminal 2, I decided I was going to go home and make overnight oats. Some four-ish years later.

I was going to finally live out my silly pretend-play version of married life. And I did it!!!!

Last week, I made overnight oats nearly every day. Once with mango, once with nutella. With chia seeds and pumpkin seeds. Maple syrup. Chocolate chips.

An hour ago, I emptied out the last of that packet into a dabba for tomorrow’s breakfast and I thought about writing this essay. This isn’t to tell you about my evolving breakfast choices, or about how great it is now that I’m finally living my dreams.

This essay is a chance for me to talk about my feelings.

The hedonic treadmill, for all its monotony, offers a strange sort of comfort. We’re granted the freedom to wallow in misery, a necessary indulgence for the lucky ones who eventually crawl out.

And on the other hand, it snatches perpetual happiness from our grasp, reminding us that even the most thrilling highs eventually plateau.

I’m more grateful for this little homeostasis that makes life unremarkable in the best way possible. I’m glad that life is just a series of settlings and unsettlings on repeat. I’m happy that joy is an endless pursuit.

After four days of eating overnight oats, I don’t think I even like them that much. I might go back to not eating breakfast at all. But I’ll never forget what those stupid oats symbolized to my young, newly married, quarantine-riddled self: The hope that you can make tomorrow special.

Back to my feelings

This section is unrelated to oats. You can rest easy.

I started this essay talking about how weird and self-indulgent my writing has gotten lately. It’s not the fact that I’m letting strangers into my life that bothers me – I know the 11 people that read this blog and none of them are strangers (Hi Karmarkars!).

I think it’s the fact that I dislike sentimentality. As in, I really, really don’t like it (see: dislike). Anything overly earnest, anything that tells me how to feel, that forces me to feel gooey, fuzzy, or any of the other gross words used to describe what I’m talking about – just no.

I hate feel-good stuff. Like don’t tell me how to feel and set me up for disappointment. If I feel good, it should be because AYE got there on my own, not because I was dragged there by your silly movie.

This is why I’ve always preferred using irony as a nice deflection from having to state my true feelings – especially in my writing. My most personal essays are a huge embarrassment to me. But unsurprisingly, it’s my most personal writing that usually connects with all 11 of you.

For example, I think the most impersonal essay (as in, it had literally zero things to do with me) was this one on Beige Flags. It was entirely the kind of topic I wanted to cover when I began writing this blog. Random internet trend, interesting insights. When I re-read that essay, there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with it. Sure, the writing is sketchy but I don’t chide myself for the journey of getting better at something.

I think after a while of reading and writing about internet culture, I started recognizing the patterns. It was the same tired tropes: The internet is performative, authenticity online is impossible, the commodification of girlhood, the weirdness of self-presentation.

It was all the same after a while. The challenge wasn’t the analysis, it was finding a way to truly connect.

But every time I’d throw in an essay about my life:

• Like this one (which has the most reads till date seriously thank you!!!)
• Or this one on liminal spaces which fully describes my discomfort with being in-between seasons of life and navigating transitions (this has the second highest number of reads till date seriously thank you!!!)

I’d be pleasantly surprised at how super difficult it was to write about my own life. It’s so hard to put readable words to your own feelings when loud, angry sighs can do the job.

How could I stick to my brand of ironic humor and ‘hehe’ if I was talking about my deepest fears and longings?

I read a quote from an essay called, “In Defense of Saccharine” where the author, Leslie Jamison talks about this generalized opposition to earnestness:

“Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we’ll find we’re nothing but banal. There are several fears inscribed in this suspicion: not simply about melodrama or simplicity but about commonality, the fear that our feelings will resemble everyone else’s. This is why we want to dismiss sentimentality, to assert instead that our emotional responses are more sophisticated than other people’s, that our aesthetic sensibilities testify, iceberg style, to an entire landscape of interior depth.” 

Ahh. Makes sense.

I used to prioritize having a slick pipeline of essays churning through the mill based on topics I decided on months in advance. I was the opposite of spontaneous. Now, as I’m making the time and space for writing in this new season of my life, I’m allowing myself to write about whatever comes to mind as I sit down. This is something I would never do.

It’s been fun but also gross because I’m BACK to talking about myself. And the worst part is discovering that I’m just like everyone else. My thoughts, experiences, and feelings aren’t unique at all. They’re common. Banal. Unsophisticated.

I expected a certain thrill to come out of unpacking spicy internet and cultural trends, and while it has been a great intellectual exercise, it hasn’t been a rewarding writing exercise. That might change one day but for now, I’m rediscovering the importance of being earnest.

These days, this is what authentic writing looks like for me. Hopefully once I get through the mosh pit of my feelings, after thrashing around for long enough, I’ll find out what lies on the other end.

IT HAD BETTER NOT BE MORE OATS.