I have noticed that our lives mimic nature more than
we are aware of. Spells of sunshine interchange with the ones of dark clouds
hovering above and then all of a sudden a thunder strikes down, sends shivers
down your spine, throws some new light on the world and makes you look around
with a new insight. After a period of heavy rains, what might follow is a
period of long drought. Having cried their hearts out over some deep
irrecoverable wrong or misfortune, people sometimes just bottle up. They become
indifferent or lifelessly submissive to what ever is going on around them. You
can see them walking around with “Do what you want with me. I don’t care and
even if I did it wouldn’t make a difference.” attitude written all over their
faces.
I used to think that tears are only for the weak. I
didn’t like them, mostly for the fact that you can’t control them. Once they
build up in a mighty torrent, nothing can stop them. Before you even know it, there
is a terrible flood of emotions all around the place. Who would ever want that? So I decided to stay clear of the disturbing matters. On
the one hand, I wanted the world to know where it has gone wrong, on the other it
was too hard to speak up to it.
When I finally decided to sketch some of these
episodes from my past, I did it out of wish to help other people, hoping that
it might speed up somebody’s recovery process. I wanted to take this special somebody
by the hand and help them back into the world. I wanted to tell them that you
can always stand up to your past, thank you for the lessons it taught you,
acknowledge the traps it might have led you into and then move forward much
stronger. I wanted to bring down some walls of silence between people and
replace them with bridges of understanding. And I would still give any minute
of my time to put my whole heart and mind into doing any of these.
However, as it often happens in life, you set out
to help somebody else, yet in the end you realise that perhaps the healing process was
equally needed to you as well. I became aware of it only recently when a friend told
me that he was amazed at how positive I was talking about the hardships from
the past. He ascribed it to my character and made it sound as if I was born
lucky to go through it all so easily. It made me smile really. I had some
explaining here to do describing that it was a product of much effort rather
than the influence of some lucky star I was born under. However, I think that
much can be ascribed to writing as a lot of unresolved feelings get much
clearer in the process of putting them into words. And if you think that it can
be of good use to somebody and you give it a purpose then the writing mission
works both ways. A French philosopher Derrida once said that “what cannot be said
must not be silenced but written”. I couldn’t agree more.
I went home that evening flying on a brand new pair of
magic wings, which seems to me always come as a reward after a long tough
battle, thinking one happy thought over and over again “I’ve made it! I’ve
really made it!”.
