Shivani Mittal

When you go on knocking any and every door, mostly the wrong ones to validate the existence of a very primal feeling of love, if you go looking for it, chances are you will not find it or find it disturbingly inadequate, or find it weirdly misaligned with your beliefs, find it in juxtaposition with rivals like grief, anger and resentment, find it so lonely, you would want to leave it alone or find it horrifyingly misunderstood. But every time you go looking out for it, you will learn which doors are apprehensive of opening themselves ,which ones do not open even if you keep knocking, which ones are just not your colour, and which ones, you should absolutely avoid. You might not learn a lot about love, but you sure learn a lot about doors.

According to Freud’s “On Transience” theory, humans are born with a certain amount of capacity to love and we are fated to cling to the object of our affection. Once this object is destroyed or lost to us, our capacity to love is liberated until we move on to the next object. It’s that simple and yet the process of detachment is so painful for us in a way that we do not renounce what is lost even when we have a substitute ready at hand. We mourn our losses in a way no other species does. We choose connection over convenience. We (the most advanced species on the planet ) are driven by love and that is our most beautiful, most primitive truth.

Your most terrifying pains become moments of minor discomfort in introspection. Something that horribly ricocheted through your entire body and stubbornly settled in your heart becomes just another memory. That’s the beauty and horror of moving on with your life. You forget your worst and sometimes with it, the lesson it carries.

We are expected to deal with our grief just like we deal with ‘bad weather’, by waiting for it to get over. But grief is parallel, it has no beginning and it lacks an end.

One of the hardest lesson I have learnt is, “Let people unfold themselves, without you trying to smoothen out their creases.”

Yesterday, someone I loved hit me with words that felt like a train wreck at first but later dissolved into a haunting realisation, “You love people like cancer. You do not know when to stop fighting it, until it’s terminal and you are out of cure. You let go only after it has wrecked your very foundation, until it eats you from the inside, until you are rotting and things around you start to die as well.”

Just read somewhere, “Your grief never gets smaller so you have to make your world bigger” and god, oh god, isn’t that the truth.

Leaving bits and pieces of yourself in everything and everyone you have ever loved (because they need it more) and still be able to constantly make up more pieces of yourself from scratch, doing god’s work, even when it’s tiring, even when it goes unnoticed, now that is the definition of brave.

I think the easiest way to stir away from the magic of our humanness is to constantly delve into defining beauty and then trying to obsessively pick out people that fit our definition of it.

Someone posted this in ig and I couldn’t agree more

You always tend know love in a way, the first time it shows up in your life which explains why some of us settle for broken versions of it.

I had only two things to put my attention into. It was either love or grief and sometimes, both of them trying to pull me towards them. How could I have managed to remain whole the entire time it was happening? How could have I managed to not swing between the two when both led to each other? How could I have managed to remain sane and reasonable while I was going out of my damn mind ?