Poila Baishakh: A New Chapter of Self-Acceptance
"When I left the classroom, someone said, "She’s quite the la-di-da kind. O God! She just suggested the professor to discuss this or that. Bloody fast reader!"
I stepped up to the "Jolchad"(water roof). I never went up to the "actual" sixth-floor roof. That fifth floor and its small, unplanned, and uneven side roofs are nicer. The rooms and the little roofs have a certain understanding, I guess. They have a clear identity as roofs, and the rooms have not-so-snooty walls. In the "scorching" April afternoon, my hands were getting some tan spots. They might have gotten on top of me perhaps for setting up the tone for later, as if to possessively argue about these "one and one" times. But should I have consulted with them before suggesting that text? I thought that the text would be a great reference to Tagore’s "Samapti".
Suddenly I heard chatting and laughing sounds. I could see my classroom window from the side roof. One of my classmates saw me looking at their laugh. She blocked the opened window with her broad shoulder. I could have shouted and said, "Hey! I know that tawdry joke."
But some days you just don’t need to...phew! The long corridor and the beige clanged doors too had a blank and nonchalant dig about the chattering bits."
-"The la-di-da girl" ,College Street
It’s a small note from my old phone. I might have edited some parts; perhaps I edited some harsh words. It failed to give me the exact date. But it’s from my university days. I guess it’s from the second semester.
It gave me a clear throwback. I didn’t feel exactly the same way I felt on that day, but I definitely could sense a little dampness around my eyes. I was like holding a heavy stone in my sweating hands. That heavy stone might have a hidden tag: the tag of "judgment". I was given names, and my actions were misunderstood. And the worst part, I wanted to clarify; I wanted to make things better. Those days were like sealed jam bottles. It was tough to open some days, and some other days it was amusing. Those days had that typical oxymoron kind of sense.
Well, now my surroundings look something like this: I’m tapping my left foot on an ottoman. My canvas, paints, brushes, laptop, and AirPods are waiting for me on the coffee table. My South Calcutta apartment doesn’t at all look like the old bulky classroom. It looks like any minimalist Parisian cozy ‘salon’ from this side, and from the dining table side, it gives the feeling of extravagant ‘Shantiniketani’ spreads. The walls are painted in simple, solid colours. And I don’t go to the Jolchad anymore. My mind is right now very much with John Maynard Keynes. But I felt from the heap of printed articles George Orwell’s Why I Write hushed. And this time that la-di-da comment looks elegant to me! Oh, yes, I can see alta marks on my palms. It’s three days before Poila Baishakh (Bengali New Year).
A quote I just heard on an audiobook before writing this blog. It’s from Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”. He says, “The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience.”
He further explains, “It's what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as "the backwards law"-the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.”
Unfortunately, it’s very much true for me. I tried hard to find positive experiences in that shady classroom. If my past-self now shouts that it isn’t true, then it wasn't me; and, I wouldn’t have written everything immediately, and I might not have edited it later. I certainly made that a little less painful for myself only. Years ago, it pinched me hard; it pinned me to the wall of self-doubt. The past layers of getting appreciation are simply like leaving behind the broken crockery set. Now they don’t have any golden rims. It’s faded.
I took a whole bunch of time accepting it.
We are all, at some point, dumped into the judgmental heap. Anything we do, we first think what others gonna think about it. And it’s so annoying that it metres out our comfort levels. If they say good, then I am happy, and if they doubt, then I will scrap it off. But how long could this ‘theory’ go? It circles back to the same spot where it started. It is the loop of self-doubt. And I know we can’t wipe that out in one go. It’s a slow process. That acceptance of negative experience needs to go through with growing maturity. But we can start disconnecting the loop. We just need to take small steps towards self-acceptance. Ask yourself,
What is important to me? Is it others’ opinions or my decisions?
Why is it bothering me? Is it coming from any special place?
Where is my heart? Is it on their side, or does it still have the ‘little’ me in it?
Prioritise your answers. Write them if you want your own validation. When we give ourselves that time to be with our own self that makes it breathable. Take the time to push off the blabbering mess from your surroundings. Let them fade away. Let self-acceptance blossom. I call this time Ina*.
I’ve worn alta, (Ālatā) the red dye in the cover photograph. In Bengali, it symbolises ‘gorgeous simplicity’. Again, oxymoron. And this one is for the most denied empathetic attention from us to us.
(*In Sanskrit, Ina (इन).—a. means determined or anything that is powerful.)