An Update on Life, Failures, and Here-and-There

As you can notice, I have successfully abandoned my beautifully crafted, loaded-with-hopes NovPoWriMo project with the help of failure just after one week. Yes, and you know what? I am not even going to backhandedly revive it by turning one night into crazy and overload myself with too many metaphors to have a poetrorrhea and mass-post backdatedly. So, I am just gonna let it create its own grave in my museum of failures.

Anyway, life has been... life-ly. Not lively!

I am soaking my mind in the poetics of Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and of course English. Learning the nitty-gritties, the history, the style, the cross-connected meanings, etc. Letting each language tug me into its own rhythm, its own architecture of longing and breath. Each language opens a door into a slightly different version of me, a different pulse. I am learning how metaphors migrate, how grief changes shape from script to script, how love rearranges itself depending on the grammar it sits in. Some days I feel like a vessel being rewired; other days like a child relearning how to name the world. Each language carries its own temperature, its own memory, its own way of holding a wound. I’m letting all of them seep in (slowly, stubbornly) until they begin to braid themselves inside me.

On Sunday, I woke up around 8 a.m., then drifted back to sleep. Regretfully, I was woken by a lucid daymare. In it, I saw a series of vignettes: I had just woken up to discover that people had found out about my blog, and my sister had texted me saying she had opened some pages from my blog for an interview. The next vignette cut to her giving a news interview about my blog. The vignettes are slowly fading, but after I finally woke up, I spent a few hours trying to make sense of them. For a moment, I even thought it was all real. It wasn’t, at least, I hope not. I tried to ruminate, but the thoughts slipped away as the vignettes continued to disappear, like a dream dissolving before I could fully grasp it. Oh, the horror... if this hurled-up, vomit-stained mess of emotions were ever unmasked to the world I know. The thought alone coils in my stomach, equal parts panic and shame, as if someone might peel back the skin of privacy and parade the chaos beneath it.

Pain has become devoid of pain. It doesn't have the lazzat-e-girriya effect anymore in it. It lingers still in crooks and corners of my soul. But. I wonder about it a lot. I wonder about it a lot. I don't get sad like I used to. Like nails uprooted after scratching the rock bottom trying to write a prayer that is not prayer to a god that is not god. I have been working on multiple projects, papers, and I have my meagre social justice job. But the desperation is devoid of desperation. It doesn't have that catastrophic urgency anymore. I think about it a lot. I don't spiral like I used to. Like the mind used to split itself into thin, trembling threads and tie every loose end of my life into nooses.

Now it just… pauses.

Maybe it is age coupled with exhaustion, or it is the quiet uncelebrated work of healing, you know, the kind that doesn’t announce itself with trumpets but arrives like a guest who didn’t knock, just slipped in through the kitchen door and started making tea. I do think about the days when there was the old sharpness of longing with that feverish, foolish belief that destruction is a kind of art form. Now everything is softer, dull-edged, almost bureaucratic in its sadness, like a societally approved melancholy that is romanticized, the kind that pops up when you fill out forms, stand in queues, and make beautiful, aesthetic reels about it. I write, still (please let this be the proof of this statement). In fragments, in stolen ten-minute pockets between work emails and existential sighs. Some of it is ugly, some of it is startling, some of it is just me talking to my past selves like a group chat that refuses to mute. And through all this, life keeps happening in its strangely indifferent way... the tea gets cold, the laundry demands diplomacy, the moon refuses to mind its own business.

But somewhere in me, a small voice, the one that survived all the museum-of-failures exhibitions, has started saying: “We’re still here. We’re still trying. And, guess trying counts.”

So this is the update: I am unfinished. I am uneven. I am learning and unlearning and mislearning. I am losing track of my own projects and still pretending it’s all part of the grand artistic plan. I am alive in that half-feral, half-domesticated way that all people with too many thoughts and too little time tend to be. And in this slow, uneven season, I’m learning that surviving is no performance but an ordinary whisper of the hand resting quietly on the edge of the day, like it is the permission to not be extraordinary. Sometimes, that’s where hope hides. Maybe the truth is that life never straightens out. It just spirals differently, in wider circles, gentler curves, fewer sharp turns. And maybe the point isn’t to escape the spiral at all, but to walk it with a little more grace, a little less frenzy, and a little curiosity about where it leads next. And maybe one day I’ll walk back into that graveyard of abandoned projects, brush the dust off a headstone, and feel a pulse under it. Not a resurrection, but just a reminder that even failed things try to live. So yes... this is the state of the union of my chaotic little universe. No fireworks, no epiphanies, no triumphant “I have healed!” banner. Just a person updating her life like a glitchy software patch with minor fixes, unresolved bugs, performance issues. But hey! It’s still running. Until then, I’ll keep moving. A little crooked. A little lost. But moving nonetheless.

So I’ll keep at it... writing, overthinking, accidentally ghosting my own goals. The usual. At least this time, I’m doing it with better metaphors and slightly fewer breakdowns (I do miss the broken-reset effect it had). Call that growth. Or delusion. Same difference. And honestly? That feels… enough for now.

~ Oizys.