Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Oh my God, it's starting to work...

There's this girl that I've known forever, and I realized that for a long time I've been treating her like crap. When we were very little kids, it was fun. We'd do some drawing and then we'd change our minds and do some counting, play house perhaps, maybe even some pooping in training underpants. It didn't matter what we did. We were fine and happy and went with the flow.

But then, starting in grade school I remember hurting her feelings by comparing her classwork to everyone else's and making her feel like it wasn't good enough. And then in high school and college, I more or less told her she wasn't that smart. She derived a lot of joy from doing art, but because some other Indian ignorants devalued it and I began to agree with them. She still drew a picture now and then, thankfully, but she never called herself an artist. Or a writer. Or smart.

What a bitch I have been to myself. For 20 years.

Every single book on my shelf that I've read and put down- Stop Self-Sabotage by Pat Pearson, The 7 Keys to Happiness by Deepak Chopra, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle- say the same thing. And after spending years of wanting to be happy and trying to do what they say as if they are homework assignments but feeling like the magic never happened, I finally felt an glint of a glimpse of a fleeting shimmer of progress.

I was nice to me today.

That's all that it was. When I should've looked up directions more clearly before heading to an unknown destination and spent time getting lost, I was about to berate myself. And then I didn't. Instead, I just forgave myself.

I'll remember me for that moment. The way I remember when my second grade teacher gave me a teddy bear cushion to rest under my broken arm, when I had been angry at myself for having broken it at all. I will give myself teddy bear cushions.






Monday, January 25, 2010

Reunited.

A great friend and I just hung out after a long while, and it came right on time. It's sometimes hard to believe that someone can know the thoughts that flow through your brain. It's like seeing past the doctored photograph, beyond the Clinique foundation that still does not quite match your Indian skin tone (though please keep trying, Clinique Lab people, as I do not want to continue to look orange or yellow, depending on the lighting), through the Givenchy mascara, and into the windows of your being.

I love the fact that we connect through our senses. Like when I creepily stare at NYC dogs that I wish were mine- the way my mother often obsesses over little Indian kids who play the role of grandson in her mind- the way we make contact is through the looking at each others' eyeballs. And not just looking at them the way you'd look at the surface of a marble, but looking through them, even into them. It's almost frightening because we don't have a way to measure the link between our minds, but I believe it is there.

Or when I used to fall asleep on my dad's chest as a little one, somehow the sound of his voice softly vibrating through my heavy head as he finished his tales from Indian Chandamamma Magazine (about stubborn kings with 13 wives who couldn't produce a son, but I digress) made me feel like I was in the safest place that I could ever be.

It convinces me that whatever the answer is to the meaning of life, or even the afterlife, it must have something to do with our connections to each other.