I, Me, Myself

Introspection is as much needed for me as a movie once-a-week in the theatres. It’s my staple diet when I stray, and gives me some time to think on what went wrong. And I’ve gotten just the answer I was looking for.

Sometimes, many people come at the crossroads of making that decision that ends up inevitably changing our lives and whatever follows in the process is given a new angle as a result. This comes with a baggage of positive and negative elements, and however superficial this might sound, these elements play havoc with our minds.

This is where we start to do the one thing that brings our morale down to such an extent we spiral downwards on the verge of depression: we allow the negative to overindulge with our brains. I do it, you do it, everyone does it; they just wouldn’t admit it. After all, it’s in everyone’s benefit to portray themselves as flighty, happy-go-lucky individuals. Interestingly, the decisions we’ve taken in the recent past suddenly start to feel like mistakes. In this process we start feeling worthless and then die a little inside.The noise in your head doesn’t seem to recede, but of course, your outer self becomes a creepily quiet, almost-zombielike one. One that you wouldn’t really want to see in the mirror.

This is where a break is needed to solve our problems. Introspection is needed to get away from all the crap and get straight to the point. This very phase of life keeps coming back to almost save me from a lot of worst things that would happen to me in life. On the verge of a wrong decision I took quite sometime ago, a dear friend I care about angrily hollered at me, “What you need is some quite introspection.” There was a lot more he said to me that I was angry with him about, but a bit of retrospection did me a lot good and made me understand things I later apologized to him for, and though he’s told me he’s cool with me, I still wonder if he is.

Coming back to the introspection. Yes, I did need it then, and I did need it a couple of dsays ago as well, when I landed in Kolkata. My relatives asked me why was I super-quiet. I didn’t answer. Probably didn’t have any answer to give them, as if I’d been straightforward enough to tell them I’m introspecting I would surely meet with some diverse reactions that would surely turn my head over to saturation point. Interesting. Let me just be by myself for a bit. Not that I didn’t talk at all, but the first few days were devoted to thinking. Quite a few people I had gone over to meet had told me, “Smile! Why do you look so flustered?” Chill, I’m not flustered, I’m just rebooting and it’s going to take a while.

Yes, introspection has given me a clear window to what I’ve been doing wrong all this while. It’s cleared my head, and probably that’s why people take holidays. But then they just spoil all that “palate-cleansing” (no, do not refer to How I Met Your Mother) with the hogwash they’re presented when they’re back home grinding along the same problems in life. Sometimes I wonder if that frequently happens with me.

Anyways, I’m told not to think too much. And because I’m told not to think too much, I have decided to write all my thoughts and treat them like passing buses instead. Practical, isn’t it?