‘Word by Word’ is a column by Garima Behal on learning to ride the highs and lows of everyday life

If you were to ask me about the theme of my life in the past few weeks, I’d have to sheepishly admit that it was/is anger. 

At whom, you ask? And you’re not alone.

I’ve been trying to ask myself, too. Because being angry at everything and everyone doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?

Yet that’s exactly how I feel. The happy and sunshiny glow of the neighboring laburnum stands in stark contrast to the hollow red of rage I feel coursing through my veins these days. It annoys me, this second spring when the summer heat is already crossing the 43-degree Celsius mark in Delhi.

Yet it’s not the flowering of the bottle brush or the wild daisy or the pomegranate flowers that’s to blame for my state of mind. They’re, in fact, a sweet, welcome distraction against this overwhelming malady of my own thoughts having turned against me. 

Looking within

The culprit is something else, something I’ve been shoving behind the invisibility cloak of denial so I won’t have to admit it to myself for the hundredth time. Because that will mean I’ve lost and I’m once again in the same place where I swore never to be again.

The real reason I’m angry at the world is because I’m angry at myself. 

“The outer world is a reflection of the inner world,” writes Roy T Bennett in his book, The Light in the Heart. Big surprise, huh?

But isn’t the inner world also a mirror of the outer world?

How do you hold on to fleeting moments of peace and joy when they are, well, fleeting? How do you not despair when the streets, the cities, and the countries just seem to keep burning down, one way or another, for one reason or another, forever?

Like a lot of millennials, I suddenly find myself at a stage of life where the drama is just…unfamiliar. The script seems to have changed without notice. My role is evolving, there are way too many costume changes to keep up with, and the dialogs seem impossible to master. The audience, though, has great expectations. And the show must go on. 

Perfect friends have perfect Instagram weddings, while my own attempts at romantic relationships remain about as secure and steady as a high-rise with a weak foundation during an earthquake of magnitude 7. 

There’s just one revision too many each time I write landing pages while writers and editors passionately debate whether or not and how soon or not AI will be taking my job away—a job that I love beyond anything else and that sometimes shapeshifts into my reason for being. 

Clouded and confounded

There are decisions that I simply don’t have the strength and wisdom for. Stay in a job to earn enough to travel or quit and travel while I’m young. Stay in the city I have the fondest memories in or choose one that keeps breaking my heart, simply because the latter has better economic opportunities.

Stay with my aging parents or move out and do some actual ‘adulting’ of my own. Stay in a relationship that requires hard, frustrating work each step of the way, or pick the unabashed freedom and the occasional, disquieting loneliness of singlehood. 

The don’t-knows gather around me, like smothering swarms of relatives around the bride at an Indian wedding, and slowly transform into don’t-cares. There’s no air in letting go because I know it will all return to me like a boomerang. And the tiniest bit that is there? I use it to fan this eternal flame of fury instead of offering my lungs a breather. Because what if the answers, the choices that come to me, are wrong, what if I cannot live with the consequences?

I’ve been shirking away my responsibilities to myself, shying away from opening the Pandora’s box that precedes self-care. A back injury has left me cautious, causing my yoga practice to shift from active to restorative. The thought of ‘dancing the anger out’ has been packed, sealed, and stowed away in a tiny cardboard box stored on the mezzanine floor of my mind. An interpersonal conflict has left me too numb to name (or, for that matter, feel) my feelings.

Coping and hoping

I don’t know what to call this phase except slowing down and surrendering. To whatever the universe is conspiring for me. Because I am learning that both discovery and recovery are recurring. And that judging my coping mechanisms isn’t going to help. 

I’m keeping expletives for rogue road-ragers and gratitude for kind friends at the tip of my tongue. I’m channeling the anger into intense poems and releasing the smallness of my ego into the vastness of the world. I’m using WhatsApp chat windows as venting grounds, writing this column as a confession that I neither have it all nor have it all figured out. 

But most of all, I’m learning the art of distance. Of exiting the confines of my room (and my head) for a few hours each day, to look at the laburnum and the daisies and the tiny wild violet blossoms whose names I haven’t Googled yet, taking solace in the reality that I don’t have to have all the answers right now. And that maybe, once I have them, I’ll realize that there weren’t any wrong ones in the first place.