Birds

“Look at the birds flying, they always know where to go. How do they know? “

I told a friend once, that “You’re a bird and you’re learning how to fly. Its okay to fall and crave the nest once in a while.”

Homesickness is more serious than its portrayed to be. Its worse than loneliness. Homesickness is a reminder that you had a lovely safe world that you chose to leave behind, for your dreams. For your idea of what you need your life to be. Its for a higher purpose sure, but at what cost?

When it hits, it feels as if every decision you made at the pretext of ‘your future’ was only a selfish and narcissistic idea that you readily mobilized without giving a fuck about your loved ones, your life and everything you had the privilege of calling yours.

Its strange how my love for what I’m learning collides with this feeling often, its two opposites. The amount of time I put in to doing better at school and absorbing all the knowledge as much as I can, seems to consume my relationships with family, friends and otherwise. Some days I wake up, not even remembering to glance at the pictures on my wall, not even checking for calls and messages or even considering reverting back. It’s not conscious. This learning is taking so much of me away, at the hope of building up on the rough draft that I am.

The last one year I’ve seen the real world just a lil bit, and it’s a scary place. With every piece of information about the outside, it seems as though every little part of the inside vanishes away. Like our Friday assemblies when we discuss world issues and reflect upon them, at the end of the day, I feel more aware of not just the harsh realities and understand empathy. But at the same time I prove to myself that whatever identity I had assumed of myself in the  last 17 years was just a show, based on frivolous understandings of the world, of assumed and consumed facts passed down by society to the gullible mind of a child. And that leaves me very troubled. It adds an immense amount of pressure to my present, to figure out immediately what my identity is supposed to be.

I begin to question all the labels I had proudly thought of to be true, I begin to question my integrity. And I feel as if, if I don’t figure out my ideologies, my opinions and my circumstances now, it’ll be too late and I will forever remain a rough draft, a confused adult with a consistent mid-life crisis. And trust me when you’re hit with such thoughts and you’re sitting alone in a dorm room with piles of classwork and juries to prepare for, with a single table light on, with the sound of the fan echoing as the only movement and vibration in the air, the city lights dimly dancing outside the window, that’s when you feel alone.

Not just lonely, but completely alone and independent. There are those days of course when you realise you’re overthinking and tell yourself “there’s more important things to focus on than self-centred issues in your head, love. So get it together and get going”. And the cycle repeats, you keep pushing the internal abnormalities aside and go on immersing yourself in work. And then one day you barely talk to your mother, she asks if you’ve eaten and you lie to her because it was only then you realize its been 12 hours since you ate. You quickly put the phone down and forget again. Until the morning arrives and you don’t even realize how the 24 hours ended on you, where the dusk and dawn vanished and how you went another day without remembering to laugh and take a breath. And slowly, every internal crap you put aside, every sad thing your brain could come up with that you ignore is sitting there, in a huge mess, worse than your laundry. And Baam, the mental breakdown appears.

I might be making it sound more difficult than it does, it isn’t bad every day. Its some days.

So what do you do? You remember answering all your parents’ calls, to give them every detail of your day no matter how busy you are. You make sure you feel the absence of your sister and throw her a text message and talk to her thoroughly on the weekend. You rant with your best friends and laugh at memes. You take a step back and see all the pictures on your wall and smile, reminding yourself to breathe. You remember its okay to take a break and let it out. You write yourself a letter and feel a tad bit lighter.

And lastly, you remind yourself that there’s only a few years to go, that it won’t be so bad till then and if you don’t keep your head up now then you won’t ever see how it turns out for you.

Love yourself,

V.