art's space

This is a sad girl's tale: A girl named Well lets just call her a Girl, for now. If she were to write, this is what she would write.

 I have been broken beyond repair now. Like I wont ever heal again and the best I can do is go with the pieces that are left and make them work. Like a machine that should have died out but still sputters but it's all wrong. It's all wrong.
Because I am not special. I am not that good. The flaw in me was always wanting too much. Wanting it all. Because now I know. The flaw in me means I get nothing. Means I get to live with the biggest, the only compromise of my life. I get to write about the only thing, over and over, every single day of my life knowing I have no right to have it. If I had been inventive, even I couldn't have ever, EVER devised this form of punishment for me. And the worst of it is, that I have to live.

the parts of me have to be put together again. And I have to work. Broken toy train running on the wrong track.

I think, I think I damnned me, I just damned me to death without life.
At least I wont be torn apart anywhere. That's some consolation.

There have been many times in my life when i have felt completely and utterly alone. And at others when eveverything that i know everything that i was came crashing down on me and smothered me with the weight of all that i had to be. and none, never more so when i first put pen to paper and discovered the ability to create whole worlds, whole lives inside of me. i didnt know, really, what it meant, to score higest on the dictation test in school in second grade. or to read a sidney sheldon novel long before i should have (i was ten, and terrified someone would find me.) Since the minute i picked up Nothing Lasts Forever i knew i had found the one thing that would bring me peace and joy and LIFE for the rest of mine.

reading. writing. going inside someone else's words, worlds, is still the greatest pleasure i can give myself. having someone get lost inside of me and mine, is the second greatest. or maybe they are incomparable. Yes, it tops swooning over a great pair of manolos. and its everything when it comes to what i want to do with the rest of my life.

see, most people would take my kind of certainty as some kind of wonder. Its not a pleasant thing to know that that one thing you want IS the one thing you are. And the one thing you love is also the one thing you want to be. For me, i knew, i had always known, like osmosis or a vocation that i had to do something with the world of words. I thought being a lawyer would satisfy the craving inside of me to see justice and fair play being done in the world. i was even willing to sacrifice the next ten years of my life to attain this goal. and to this day, when i see a lawyer a pang shoots under my heart. when, due to extenuating circumstances, i wasnt able to become one. The next thing i thought for myself was, again, ironically after reading another Sidney Sheldon novel. This one was called the Sky is falling and the heroine was one courageous lady called Dana EVans. she was a foreign correspondent and she was simply everything i wanted to be. She saved the world and she did it using words.

what better way to use my talents and passion, right? Then i did the course that would have made me a journalist. Heck, i guess i still am in a very minute way. But amidst all these almosts and has-beens, only one thing stuck with me. I took up writing stories when i was nine years old. on a bored afternoon in a place i hated called madras.

and one night, when i lay staring at the ceiling  (Yup, i do that a lot) in my old bed,  i realized one thing. I realized the only thing. The one thing i loved more than writing, and reading was love. And it took a sixteen year old alien king to make me see that. I saw that alien king eight years ago, and i wrote my first book six months after seeing him. Because i couldnt help myslef. and because i couldnt stop.

And i knew. I knew i had found the one thing, the only thing that would make me happy. The only thing i would, COULD do, for the rest of my life. whether i was succesful at it, or i was a complete failure at it. It was the only thing i knew how to do and nothing on earth could make me stop. and that was to be a writer. To write.

Have you ever had equal and opposing forces inside of you pulling at you in two directions? Have you ever had your mind split in two in pain and pleasure? If yes, then you will know how i am. WHO i am.

It is terrible, it certainly is nothing to be proud of that i am defined by what i do. That who i am IS what i do. I write. that is all.

My love for writing and my love for, well, love are so inextricably bound in each other i dont even question it anymore. I havent really. Its not like i had much choice in it, in the first place. Who would choose to be a writer when there are so many more exciting options, so many better, definitely more exciting things to do. And i am not saying I did. Rather, it chose me. Like a benediction or a curse. And here i am.

I never had any choice about the most important things in my life. The two most important thinsg in my life. My career. And My passion. And it seems..fitting, that they are the two things that are linked..connected to each other. That one without the other doesnt make sense for me.

I suppose i sound weird because who thinks of their jobs as having more meaning than giving them a fat paycheck, and the perks of having a cushy job. People dont talk like this anymore right? Who wants passion when you have paychecks and pension funds to look forward to.

I never could understand these people. I still cant. I am not asking you to understand me. or even try to. god knows, i dont understand myself. All i know is..i am actually like Howard Roarke and Dagny Taggart. I love my job because it gives me the power and strength to create something new everytime, i reach for it. Because it fills me with pleasure and makes me feel alive and bleeds my soul at the same time. And i believe, i have no choice, but to believe that what i love about writing and love about love will actually make me a better everything. And that maybe, just maybe, sometimes, you just have to believe.

Even if it hurts you.
Even if it makes you bleed.
Even if you cant sleep or breathe.

because, maybe, if i could find my passion then maybe, just maybe, i have to wait for my passion to finally find me. Maybe, this once, i have to blindly, faithlessly wait. And me being me, that is the hardest thing to do.

But then again, whoever said that the path to true love was easy, right?

For a long time now, and God, most of my blogs seem to begin this way nowadays...For a long time now, I have been trying to ‘find’ myself. A little bit of background info here...when I was a little girl, well, not so little girl, but some time back..I used to love to dance. And I was very good at it. Competitions and that sort of stuff. And I even learnt the classical...for some reason. Bharat Natyam. But, me being me, I quit because I couldn't find the heart to actually complete something that had somebody else’s rules. That was so...structured.

And now...I am not exactly regretting it. But yes, once I stopped dancing...I stopped dancing completely. The wild thrashing we all do in pubs in a semi-drunk state cannot be considered dancing in any shape or form. And I must say here, that I am pretty good at the gyrations too but, I miss dancing. I miss the structure, the learning of new steps. That feeling of tiredness you get only after you’ve danced your heart out. That feeling of oneness you have with the music and the heart of you. That amazement you get only when you have danced well.

I miss that.

And every time I promise myself that I will do something about it...about getting my butt off and not just thinking about dancing again, it’s because of a movie. Any good dancing movie makes me want to dance myself. I can count, on one hand the number of good movies they have made on dancing. And one of them, is one I saw today. A highly stylized, highly dramatic, impressively colourful film by Baz Luhrman called Strictly Ballroom. It is the first film in the Red Curtain Trilogy, which he continued with Romeo and Juliet and later on, the hugely acclaimed Moulin Rouge.

The reason why I really like this movie is not because it focuses on dance, ballroom dancing to be more specific, because scores of other movies do too. But because the style and passion that is conveyed in each frame, the detail that has gone into the burlesque style of framing the scenes, the heightened emotion that is explored through the dance. And the utter normalcy that the lead pair (Paul Mercurio and Tara Morice) lend to each non-dancing scene makes it so watchable. Yes, the movie is about dance and yes dance is about love...but the reason why I connected so much to Baz’s Red Curtain style is because it’s so loud and boisterous and even the quiet contains moments of vivacity in it. Theatre is something that has never been portrayed well in cinema, but I think Mr. Luhrman knows how to do it better than most.

And of course, watching Strictly Ballroom makes me realize I need to dance again. I need to learn the steps and feel that delicious tiredness and sweat that comes from doing the same thing over and over again. I need to feel the music in the heart of me again. And I need to feel love again.

For a long time now, (yes, I end that way too), my wanderlust has been infecting everything I do. The need to learn and be someone new has taken ahold of me, and yes, I won’t be giving it up. It makes me a better writer everyday and that matters more than anything to me. But I also remembered just how much the old me had fun dancing. How much she enjoyed expressing herself through another art form. And I know...I know, the fear I have of deviating away from the writing lest it goes away is something I have to give up.

Someone told me writing is in my veins, and yet everyday I fear if I will lose it. Because you lose the things you love the most one way or the other. I know now, its stupid of me to fear that. Because what is in my veins is a part of me as the DNA molecules that make me are. You can lose yourself, but you cant lose your DNA right? Atleast that’s what my scientist best friend tells me. That you can never really lose yourself.

I guess, what I am trying to say is, if losing myself is not an option then finding myself is a dumb one too. So, maybe what I should concentrate my wanderlust and my writing is to actually become a better me. A mix of the old and new me. A Me that enjoys dancing and singing and writing. And is in love with love and everything that entails.

I wonder, does that even make sense. And then I wonder again, does it matter?

I wanna start this blog with a line that came into my head while i was sleeping.

"The restless never sleep and sleep comes to the restless..."

 

For a long time, i have felt restless. Restless in dreams. In thoughts. In actions. Definitely restless everyday that I lived a life I thought I didnt want. A life where I couldn't get enough of the whinies and where i dreamed that breaking away and running away would solve all the problems that plagued me. Well, seven seas and several timezones later it is still the same.

 

The restlessness remains. The fear and the hunger for knowledge still plague me. I wish I knew what I dont know and didnt know half the things I do. Like how easy it is to let doubt your own goals. How difficult it is to trust someone to not hurt you just because they love you.

 

How lonely it could be to love someone...anyone. And the only thing worse than that is to love the idea of someone. To be in love with love.

 

And i wonder again, why does everything that has any real connection to me has to be connected to love. I am not a very emotive person. I dont coo at babies in prams. I dont tell my close friends how much they mean to me and i generally pretend that nothing in the world affects me.

 

I cant stand failure. and i cant stand rejection. And i guess I have experienced both, have doled out both. in equal parts. And since i write about it continuously, everyday ,makes it a huge part of me. But i dont want to go into what makes me tick as a writer.

 

Right now, I want to ask this. Is anyone out there? Who can read a line like mine and understand what exactly goes into the restless roving spirit. Whether love des rescue us from ourselves, or whether we find newer problems in it.

 

Its a question, which i guess...shouldnt be answered. It would violate my own rules of knowledge and the un-knowing!