Hello there! It’s me again. Yes, I know it that took me
quite some while to come up with this but I’m happy that I’m finally typing
this out sitting in my couch! It’s not that I’ve been kept busy entirely with
things and life but the truth is, I was busy thinking and recollecting myself;
trying to find something worthy of reading and to be reflected upon. But then I
realized the sole motive of this blog; it wasn’t something that was meant to
portray ‘a’ me that I’m not, but to scavenge out ‘the’ me I have been hiding,
from the world, behind the drapes of introversion and the discomfort of
confiding into and banking upon someone in the recent times! For all those who
know me, I know, this will come out as a sort of small concussion, making you
think that I’m probably kidding when I call myself an introvert. But for all
those who know me close enough, will know what this is about and what my mental
state has been in the past few months!
Well, the good news is, I plan to change the status quo for
this moment, as I decide to share a piece of my mind and me, with all of you,
who have taken out time to read this. I decide to push this introversion out of
me, this once at least, as I write this down, without any guards and sheath over
my feelings.
To be honest, the recent times have been tough, challenging
and testing to say the least. An identity crisis that almost dawned upon me
nearly engulfed me as a whole and left an impact better left unsaid and not discussed.
The helplessness and cluelessness about what’s happening around and why it is
happening almost made me a captive of my own self; a self that was scared,
scarred, weak and uncompetitive of living! I became someone who was apprehensive
and paranoid, not about someone else, but about me myself! I know you all must
be wondering what could’ve been such a thing that disturbed me so much; trust
me, I’ve thought the same. Introspected myself, investigated me, asked myself a
zillion questions a zillion times about what was wrong but failed to find an
answer! Then why’s there this void that constantly growing bigger and deadlier,
like a cancer, deep within my heart?
So to find an answer to this life impeding and irksome
question, I decided to shed off my cloak of introversion and go out and talk to
people. I always knew I’m not the only one who’s having trouble dealing with
life problems. What I didn’t know was, that there’s a whole comrade of individuals
and people who are suffering from the same crisis as I was. Some were doing
better, some not so better! The next obvious question,
'What were the people,
who were doing better with their problems, doing different from the others?'
I
looked for the answer everywhere but I couldn’t find any at the start; till I
started to connect the dots between how these people dealt with the problems in
their lives.
Yes, they too were broken, scared, scarred, and apprehensive
blah blah blah... but they still lead a better life than the other half that
succumbed to the pressure. Why was that? It was a hard answer to find till one
day I came across it and realised it was always there, kept right in front of
my eyes, which I failed to notice all this time. There were these two things
that connected them all together, that had an answer to all the mess and deluge
of emotions! These two things were: one, Hope and other, Accepting
Vulnerability!
We all know about how wonderful the thing Hope is; its
healing power, the magic it can bring and what a difference it can make in one’s
life. We’re all aware of it! What fascinated me more was the other set of skill
set that I just alluded to above i.e. Accepting Vulnerability!
As strange as it may sound and no matter how much I tried
crossing that off the list, it was true. What these ‘better’ set of people had
in common was they accepted their vulnerabilities and weren’t shy of them. They
took what came into their stride and accepted the fact that they are hurt,
looked down upon, broken, scared and in pain. They didn’t just realize it, they
accepted it too. That’s not a big deal to do, right? Everyone can accept that
they are in pain and all. What they did differently was they told themselves
something most of us fail to tell ourselves.
They told themselves:
‘It’s okay! It’s okay to be hurt, to be looked down upon, to
be in pain, to be sad! It’s absolutely fine to not know all the answers to the
questions that life has thrown at me! I too can be clueless and a mess, it’s a
part of life! Yes, I’m hurt, I’m in pain but I’ll get over it! Yes, I’ll find
the answer to these questions even if it takes times. I’ll go slow if I have to
but I will eventually figure it all out!’
So I realized and found out, what these people did was, they ‘embraced’
their vulnerabilities! They didn’t embrace it to sit down and cry over them,
they embraced them to work upon them! They didn’t succumb to them but took it
in their strides as a valuable part of their lives. They made their
vulnerabilities their strength. They told themselves that it’s important to
feel this way too.
I realised that what happens with most of us is we do not
embrace our vulnerabilities but try to numb them. What we fail to understand is
that we cannot numb feelings; we cannot alienate ourselves from feelings
things! That’s what makes us Human Beings in the first place; possessing the ability
to feel things! And even if we try to accomplish it, then we not only numb feeling
of pain, hurt, sorrow, grief etc..., we numb feeling of joy, happiness, acceptance
and all the other positive feelings too. We create a hollow in our mind and
heart. When there wouldn’t be any of these feelings, a void will start to
flourish; slowly expanding in our heart, pushing the walls, making it difficult
for us to breathe and live! The void is like an air bubble, clogging your
arteries, waiting to explode inside of us! And no matter how hard we try to
avoid or escape it, it would clinch us down, slowly gripping our mind, making
us incapable of taking rational decisions! It’s like a deadly grip that’ll
leave us incapable of living fruitfully and happily if we do not accept
ourselves and our vulnerabilities and give this void a chance to be filled by
positive feelings.
So for once, I feel
it’s absolutely okay to feel vulnerable, to be human, to be seen; seen as down and out, to
be in pain, in grief and out of sync, if we decide to embrace them; not to cry
over
them, but to work on them!
Vulnerability is not a low; it’s an opportunity to attain
new highs, only if we open our arms and accept them!
