Finding Alaska

Sometimes someone or something affects us deeply and we think we will never be able to forget. After a trauma we remember it every second of every day and then after long the first full day when we forget to remember, then the first week, then the first month keeps adding distance. Eventually the intense feeling also becomes a memory.

When it feels like life can't go on, it is important to know that it is possible to put it all back together. Way out of the labyrinth need not be only straight and fast, but realizing that labyrinth is not choking, but it just is, may ease the pressure. There is help if we ask for it. It maybe true that we cry, laugh, love and live less as years pass by and apathy, despair and some of those which were not in the dictionary in earlier part of the life replace them. Time heals and like those wounds which pains during some winters, some may smolder over the years. But nothing should or can maim us for life. Or that should be the belief that can take us far. 

- after reading Finding Alaska

All the Bright Places

Precocious teens, smart and wise beyond their age, moody, suicidal, beautiful / handsome, well read, troubled, weird – common characteristics of three YA novels I read recently. I seem to have forgot my teenage years, whether I struggled so much. It is the time when you understood enough about the world, society, people, politics, religion and community – but still harbor an idealistic view, wants to contribute, want to change the world and think it is possible. Half of them would have already blended in and any one fighting still could be seen freakish. It is hard to accept the adults who have become like zombies who have adjusted and accepted the world. How much longer do they fight? How do they deal with the failures when the reality closes in? How do they keep their idealism burning as long as possible, to keep them genuine, uncorrupted, fresh and innocent? How to keep the connections open while they make the transition? Or don’t transition at all, but keep the sanity?

- After reading “All the Bright Places”, Jennifer Niven

milkman

“Perceptions are reality”, they say. Start a new narrative / gossip about a person, on hearsay, driven by jealousy, intention to take revenge for one’s hurt ego, or upon violating someone’s preconceived notions about how someone should be. Keep finding new reasons to strengthen that narrative, anything could cement it further. Keep building the crescendo, the germ transferred to other minds, multiples and feeds on itself. It could lead to bringing someone down, that’s when the new imaginary monster unleashed gets satisfied. 

In its wake, boundaries of what is true and what is false gets blurred. No one is able to decide and separate out fact from fiction. Eventually the victim might start believing it herself. Any one acting out of ordinary will be turned a freak and that makes it easier to discount their view which may be the truth. Create narrower divisions of us vs them, draw crisscrossing lines to block off people like pawns in a chess board, create symbols and micro ideologies to keep the smaller groups tighter and closed off from others. Are there masterminds to these games or once started these are independent monsters who cannot be controlled? If there is an overall master mind, in spite of the evil and danger he poses, it must be mind blowing strategy.

How do one get out this maze? Reacting and kicking out will drag one down like a quicksand. Blocking out will also not make it go away. How do one fight an imaginary hydra? Do an individual have any way out once caught in this? Resign to the fate is the only option? How to device a counter attack that has a chance of success? How to keep the sanity? How to not become another pawn in the game?

- After reading Milkman, by Anna Burns.