#iwear

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BITS OF AWE I read a sentence that went, "Your life is filled with bits of awe" and it was the answer I've been looking for, for a few years now and calling it a midlife pandemic. What is there to look forward to? What is inspiring? What is exciting? What thrills & what is a reason to wake up each day, to show up for the world, to be myself, to be my best self for it? Bits of awe. As a child I navigated the monsters called bullying, violence & assault. I could because always, for every hurt there were a million wonderful ideas & experiences & lessons & stories & objects. As I got older, I learnt to carry the pain, to nurse those wounds. And my eyes & ears started to find things that would heal these, protect from these. It started to feel like all this was, was a world of poisons & antidotes, of knives & bandages, of searing words & cold ones. Awe finds no place in these because awe is that which is unexpected, undefined. The things you cannot capture in words, box in labels, order in logic. I'm dismantling my identity of the bandages, the shields I've accumulated, forgetting they are not my identity. What will I have left? Bits of awe. I hope. Or at least room for it all. #IWear #Ideart https://www.instagram.com/p/CNXWArjpZp7/?igshid=h007wvcgxnjh

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𝕄𝕌𝕋𝕌𝔸𝕃 𝕄𝕀𝕊𝔹𝔼ℍ𝔸𝕍𝕀𝕆𝕌ℝ Do we know how to relate to other people without fear & hurt driving us? What we call relationships seem to be people taking turns to misbehave. When small children behave badly, it’s called tantrum throwing. They're parented with punishments to instill fear & distress - adult version of the same. Women throw tantrums, men withold affection. The assertive bully, the passive betray. Bosses & subordinates, clients & vendors take turns to exploit, undercut & demean each other. It’s all just different cycles of alternating misbehaviour. The unique ways we pass-the-distress-parcel are the stories of our relationships. Is misbehaving the only way to cope with the very natural experiences of fear, grief, disappointment? Misbehaviour does not actually help us cope, it creates even more things for us to cope with, not the least of all, the wounds we inflict on other people. If you don’t believe in karma, consider the vindictive culture that justifies lashing out & weaponises trauma. We all live in it; we are it. I’m trying to define myself outside my reactions that harm other people. I’m often thrown off track but each day I see myself a little more clearly & I like what I see better. But I don’t know if relationships can be more than mutual misbehaviour. What does it look like when we take ‘You-can-hurt-me-if-I-can-hurt-you’ off the table? What’s dosti that rejects the ‘no sorry, no thank you’ rule? Can committment be more than a combined entitlement to erode each other’s peace of mind? Is romance possible that does not pay for the right to damage by offering yourself up to be damaged? What does a family or a society where we don’t penalise each other for having needs, look like?  When we stop letting misbehaviour be the basic unit of our interactions with each other, who are we? As individuals & with & to each other? #IWear #SareeStyle https://www.instagram.com/p/CNKYFKrJtIv/?igshid=vsezwjyui189

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THE PUBLIC PERSONAL I lost a friendship sometime ago because the person took something I said on one of my Lives, personally. I don't know what was said or which Live it was but I know I didn't say anything aimed at them or about them. I know this because I've been doing this for 16 years. I've been mining my personal experiences to share ever since I began blogging anonymously as IdeaSmith in 2004. And even then, even behind a handle & the less accessible internet of those times, I was near paranoid about what I let the world know. I am a very private person. But also what I say swims in the realm of the deeply personal & intimate. That is who I am, that's the part of the human living spectrum I inhabit. It does make my boundaries porous & easy to breach & assume connections where none exist. In all these years, people have wondered what part of my expression is for them & about them. I want to say it was easier in my anonymous IdeaSmith years but it wasn't. I've been harangued by the upset girlfriend of some stranger who had told her that my poetry was about him. I've received angry emails for not having someone on my blogroll "because I thought we were friends". It got more complex when I shed my anonymity because who violates boundaries more that people who can claim some connection to you? I've evolved my personal ethics where I express my feelings about people as lucidly as possible but don't reveal any details about them. I change minor details, erase identifiers. Thus these are characters I create, yes, mined from real experiences but definitely not related to real people. But that doesn't stop people from seeing themselves in my stories. In fact, isn't that the point of writing like mine, to feel relatable? It doesn't hurt any less when people decide they dislike it so much, they are willing to walk away from me. Writing is who I am, so rejecting this is a rejection of me. I guess I take a lot of things personally too. It goes with the turf. To write is to be that blurry boundary between reality & imagination. The skin that feels the heartbeat as well as the hard outside. #IWear #SareeStyle #kashtasaree https://www.instagram.com/p/CL_TwMyFUgK/?igshid=1xh0xxb9ojx93

BLEEDING COLOUR When it hurts, and you aren't even allowed to bleed, turn it into art. When they have encoded hatred into every thing that touches you, every gaze, every fabric, every brushstroke, every word, let the burn power you. If you are a child of pain or even a vehicle for others' sorrow, let it course through you like electricity. Feelings are fuel and they are a palette. When I watch women, girls with makeup, I see them absorb the policing of their bodies. I see them write away their agency to patriarchy & to capitalism. I see them blend, I see them self-edit, I see them scream but on mute. I see them never realise what masters they are at painting, what magicians they can be for the illusions they create. I don't know why I never learnt to see the brush as a police baton or a pencil as a hot brand. In my hands, they're magic wands. They let me erase shame, not myself. They enable me to elevate the wounds other people have inflicted, from scars to tattoos. They flow through me, from gaslighting into poetry. The red lines become but the start of a new piece of art. The salt water creates washes that tease out nuance in pigment. I didn't ask for it, I didn't deserve it. But this, this is what I create and this is mine. When you are stripped of every vestige of control, remember, no one can take away what you make of yourself. With love to the ones hurting & bleeding, choose your brush and blaze a trail called you. #IWear #Ideart https://www.instagram.com/p/CLuh8ouJEmc/?igshid=1qv152eylhiqs