Prose before hos

 In so many ways June and Summer Solstice roll an early backward count. If you pay attention, and are curious, you'd see the days start getting shorter by a minute first and then a little while later by a whole hour.

This Summer, I stayed at home. The stay at home daughter. It's been a year of surprises. I surprised myself with the resilience I've shown (or shamlessness?) after being subjected to entire arguments leading to chatter about asking me to leave home. I'm still here. Heart is shut, head is shut- I'm numbing myself, one distraction, one candy at a time. I've spent afternoons watching films, night reading and days doing word games. I've learnt 0 things, unless you count new ways of selling content via Social Media; my career is deadbeat and my personal relationship chart is torn. I've been out a sum total of two times and each of those have been a disaster big enough to swear me off men. I think daddy issues coupled with dating an avoidant in the past have really outperformed this Summer. The only thing that could compete with longer hours with daylight was simply the amount of shit I dealt with. 

Last weekend was another one, for the books, but the lesser said the better. Each day, I wake up, telling myself I'm so done and so through and then someone reminds me I've taken on the family gene on anger and there's no looking back. 

But the thing is, I do not want to pay my therapist for resolving a generation's worth of trauma. Why should I be the only one to work on myself when I'm destined to be in a dysfunctional family set up, dysfunctional work set up and then expected to be better? Why should I take the onus to self improve if everyone around me has a designated role, to be at their worst behaviour. 

I'm closing a chapter that lasted four years, one with my boss, my mentor who gave me a new lease of life professionally by taking a chance on me and hiring me. With him gone, I feel like the girl who was out of a job one Friday morning, not knowing what to do and who to go to. If anyone from my family or people at work lived a day of my life and the emotional burden I'm carrying dealing with this all alone, they wouldn't last an hour. 

I'm expected to upskill, outperform and learn in adversity; most of the times getting out of bed to comb my hair is the most I can do in a system designed to overfunction without compensating for it. 

I'm okay. I'll be okay. I write that in my journal and fake myself into believing it day on day. 

Writing just doesn't feature. Which is sad and beautiful. 

Beautiful because writing is a form of mental illness, maybe I am healing. My hardcopy journal that I carry along wherever I go will say otherwise. Sad because I have lost any and all discipline to life. I should ideally force myself to read and write one page every day. Maybe I'll do when I quit my job and be unemployed. 

Do I want to be unemployed? No, I am ovulating and I thrive when I work. I hustle hard and I don't hesitate in going the extra mile. I am tooting my own horn but it's my page and not a talent council meeting where people will decide my worth. This year I'm told I'm soft and I've started listening; they couldn't capture the checked out, they took my silence for change. Cute. 

Maybe I am silent. I've not said much here. Tonight, at 3:05 AM I've forced myself to write. To acknowledge that I don't feel the dark cloud I felt the last three years. 2023-2025 were tough, I was a person who I liked and disliked in equal measure. I am not sure if I like the version I am today but I definitely don't hate her. That's a change, a promising change. 

It hurts that when I think of sentences, I mockingly think through how GPT or Gemini would frame. Maybe this is the real crises. Maybe doomscrolling has brought me to a point where I cannot impress anyone, not even myself. 

I am not being hard on myself. Contrary to popular belief, I've been fucking soft on myself. A little too soft. I am finally understanding the balance to strike, not that I've done it, but trying to be there has been interesting. 

Things have changed in the last 19 years. I would celebrate this day and now I barely even write. Is it that it was talked about and performative and now that I don't surround myself with new people. I don't feel it a reason enough to talk about things? 

There's not a lot of new experiences left, in the circumstances life has allowed for me to explore. Sure, a photo-booth at work for new professional headshots is good but can it really compare to brining an air fryer and marinated herbed potatoes for fried wedges? I think not. I feel all cool things have happened and I'm in a downward slope. 

Strangely, I've never been more optimistic about mediocrity than I am today. I enjoy giving 4 stars to average films on Letterboxd and then don't understand when a film averages 4.2 that what was so 4.2 about that?

Weirdly, the passion I felt for writing changed and transformed into passion for walking. It doesn't come easy and I lose my breath but god I enjoy the sights and smells in a 2.4 km trail at Lodhi Garden. It's the only thing that kept me sane last year. Delhi has been getting harder to live in with each month and the surprises it brings so I haven't been there in a while but I wish I could incorporate that in my day to day this year the way I did it last year. 

Flexibility, comfort, convenience are all things of past at work and increasingly I feel choked at work, like I have no agency and whatever is left is sucked out of my veins on a daily basis. Taking everything from a person except their agency. 

I want to commit back to this page and my writing but I'm in my slut situationship era and the only thing I am actively doing is shooting reels with little or no planning or thought and just having fun; raw, rugged and doing for the sake of doing. The way I once was handling this page. 

I don't think I'll stick to doing videos for 19 years but it's surely fun to imagine- what if? 

This page will always be special to me. You, dear reader, may not hold the same place but the fact that I can come back to something I've made my own is a fact that nobody can change, not even my lack of motivation to do something better with my life. 

If you're here still, thank you for staying with me. If you're new here, I'm sorry- why even? If you're gone, I wish you never showed up. 

Next year this page will be 20, officlally not a teen, but a grown adult page. I will be 36, officially past my mid-30s. It'll be a huge shift, hopefully I'll talk about better things than my ex and shitty job in that part of my life. 

Here's to turning old together. 

The cool kids call it "locked in," I call it discipline. 

Which means, there's a bedtime; ironic that I am breaking it to write this. There's a regime; certain amount of work, extra work and surround work needs to go in the day. 

There are rewards; micro-luxuries, Uniqlo outfits, jewellery 

Heartbreak too, knowing I'm on a backward count cause life now wants to close this chapter and I should honour that ask in a way that I feel good about it. I need to save, for I don't know what's next and when's next but all I know is that this chapter was messy, confusing, and fun; I learnt a lot but it's time to go big and before that, go home. 

I am doing everything in my capacity to recuperate. Some days it looks like eating for a family of three, on other it looks like watching 8 hours of uninterrupted Office re-runs; all while being employed. The crash? Also, because of employment. 

I wish I knew that cutting alcohol and decentering men wouldn't mean drama ends. It only means the subject of drama shifts to areas where I like my life relatively drama free. 

Enough thoughts for a while. Might go back to drinking who knows. 

To mark one year without you, I snagged a job offer at over 100% increment on my salary, met the girls closest to me, and bought myself the most beautiful Diamond bracelet that I could afford. 

All because you told me that you didn't think this was it. For nearly a year, we negotiated our terms, and couldn't come to a conclusion we both liked. It had to end one Wednesday morning for you and it had to end one Thursday evening for me. It's been a year of turmoil and pain. 

Now imagine if you had thought this was going to be it. Just imagine what we'd do and what I'd be capable of doing. 

It's the last long weekend before the wedding. We are officially entering into three weeks before go-time. 

It's also been three weeks since I blocked him, a thing I thought and believed I'd never do. I don't have to worry about what happens next. He's not the kind of person to extend his presence outside the most convenient option. Clipped our contact to a minimum because I promised myself I won't cry, and he still made me chase and weep. I didn't want to start a new year crying, but I did. I cannot carry this grief anymore. I have officially grieved as long as I dated him, maybe even more. The most upsetting thing is the hope, which has been surgically removed for good. 

In a way it's good, I'm looking at my life outwards. Getting out of the comfort zone. One day I'll find out he's with another person and happily settled with them. One day, I won't care. 

I got a job offer, first in nearly 3.5 years and I had nobody to tell that. I thought of him that evening, an hour after I was personally informed over a call and I don't know why I had the strongest urge to cry. A friend has told me that she believes I won't move on from him or my job because I'd rather stay in the trauma than take a chance into new things. I wonder how my therapist would view this. 

I've been operating on fumes, fury and calendar events. One hour here, two days there. I experienced my first flight cancellation, first trip cancellation, and first concert cancellation. I thought it was karma on account of blocking him. I'm givng him too much credit for an activity he would never wish on me. It would require effort, which he never wanted to put. 

I'm back on the apps, seriously. It's hilarious because it makes me affirm that I should have held on to him but it's okay. Life has to move on. We have to kiss ugly frogs to turn them into handsome princes. I hope there's no tongue involved. I'd rather swallow a fly than kiss a man. I feel so unlovable despite men on apps claiming otherwise. 

I've razor sharp focus on my career. I'm told this is a year that'll be all about love (lol) by several astrology woo woo folks. Well, I hope they're wrong because I intend to work like a donkey and rant like it's 2016. It's a decade since I made my personality about work and it's time we make a comeback— tie my self worth to a job and let it kill me. Bukowski said so. 

I've spent a long time this year playing these two games- Werewolf and Conspiracy. They've anchored me to a new reality, one that involves me playing people strategically against each other. It's a humbling realisation to know I'm not good at either game or setting people against one another, that shows in games played vs games won statistics. 

There's so much of human psychology that I've seen in Werewolf, you assume a personality given to you and then you carry out the role. 'Princess', 'King', 'Knight', 'Lovers' and 'Hunter' come as sacrifices. Once in a blue moon, the 'Lovers' will play to their strength and identify a 'Shapeshifter' pretending to be one of the lovers and the 'Hunter' will perhaps be strong and take a werewolf down upon its demise when killed at night. However, these characters come to die. 

What's funny is that these characters also make for stupid deaths. Nobody cares if the 'Princess' dies, on the 'King's' death, the team loses its ability to utilise their respective power but nobody cares. It's almost as if people are grateful for these two characters to go. 

Then you have important roles, including 'Necromancer' who brings dead cards back, 'Mystic' who can reveal a card in the night (so if there's a werewolf claiming your role, you have a chance if 'Mystic' exists and will help uncover the mask), there's 'Seer', notably the most important role who can inform the team to make the decision on whether you're evil and should be voted out or you're good (and thus should help the team). There's 'Doctor', who can save a player from being 'killed' in the night but then the 'Doctor' can be selfish and save itself instead of someone else. 

Almost each time I've played a session, longer than an hour, I've felt so deeply connected to my living reality here- people will trust assholes all the time and boot good people out because assholes have a way of manipulating others. The lies are blatant, someone else could claim my role as 'Seer' or 'Doctor' or 'Necromancer' and by the virtue of being 'two claims' for 'one role', one of us is booted out by the team, thus, reducing good team's capacity. 

What's common each time is how the manipulators get to me. I am a woman in my 30s who grew up with the internet. Of course I know the internet gaming space isn't kind or courteous, but what stuns me is the ability that people carry to influence others in believing their lies. The game is typically played with strangers and you don't understand their true nature or sides until you repeat a few games with them. Very rarely do you find a team of 'smart' villagers who can see through the lies but instead you're regularly served well plated lies with evil intentions. 

Each time someone outplays me in that game, which happens regularly, I'm somehow reminded of how many men have manipulated me into making me doing things I didn't want to do. The game reminds me of the façade people put at work and change versions at will. The game reminds me of unsolicited advice people offer in the light of their perception and limited observations that they confuse with the truth. 

I may lose at Werewolf, but i'm almost always right on who's evil.