Loss and Nostalgia

 Today I stand before you as a 15-year-old, struggling maybe to keep my grades together, but there stood a day when I was a 7th grader with a report card decorated enough for three students to pass off of it with good merits. Yes, I do struggle to put my academic cards together decoratively today but I am still the same 10-year-old, with excellent leadership qualities, great communication and maybe a confidence many can’t gather. I was chosen at first pick after my excellent- maybe, good- maybe, I really don’t know the kind, but I did give an impactful speech for I got those natural claps that came without the teacher’s instructions. I was motivated enough to keep my scores improving, couldn’t do much, I was very satisfied with the little improvements of maybe some 20-30 marks, up until recently, when in the last test I gave, my scores took back to their lows, maybe even got worse than before. I don’t let that get to me but when I see how the best scorer in my class has no competition, I feel the immense need to be his competition, because maybe nobody else cares, but being a competition for the best scores, would be rather prided, for all I can ponder upon, I have an extraordinary vocabulary compared to many other of my greatly gifted and equally hardworking classmates, so it does hurt my pride when I watch them getter marks than me at a subject I am so passionate about. Maybe even makes me hate myself for thinking I know better than them when really I never get better scores than most of my own classmates. To top it off with the cherry and sprinkles, I even made friends with an over-ambitious ex-topper and an ambitionless ‘wannabe’. It feels much different to be low this year compared to the lows I had felt previously in my last two years. The lows this year feel like maybe they’re not my fault. 

Here's what I hate the admission of- We’re all lazy, and those who aren’t- get hated on for what they have, we sometimes or mostly tend to corner the people who are actually achieving in life with tags of gifted or lucky or maybe even blame some of them for ‘nepotism’, but they in the end are the ones who sit with a chair, or a tag, better in position compared to the others who sit lazily, lounging on a couch or bed, gobbling up a snack, hating on those who’ve worked genuinely hard. On the other end, we have those who work genuinely hard too but don’t have achievements, for all such people I’ve noticed, there’s always that one problem behind them that they tend to ignore or that one improvement they more or less procrastinate on. Now I am somebody who if would work hard, will get such great outcomes that may as well be beyond the reach of a good amount, but the big problem behind me – PROCRASTINATION.

It's an evil fought by many just like me, who’ve tried and tried again to get rid of this one BIG rock in our paths – but the problem is - it seems like a rock that’s too big to be lifted, and what I like to hear from all them philosophers I’ve read so far, and maybe a line that motivates me to still keep working bit by bit with a little hope is the rock is empty on the inside, but that is something you would only know had you tried to pick up the rock - instead of what most of us do, try to walk around or over it, eventually giving up to how massive it is. Those who did try to lift that rock, flourish, and maybe motivated others to pick up the rock. This though, would still not guarantee that you’ve gotten rid of procrastination, as you should, procrastination works more or less through a trigger in your mind, a powerful trigger, with the power to actually destroy all your mental foundation and maybe even damage the roots of your foundation. Building or Rebuilding habits is a hard task, and while it takes 21 days of doing the same thing to let your body and mind get used to it, it days only a single one of those triggers to spoil a habit you spent weeks on developing, how one works on that is something I would be rather happy to know, maybe I’d write a book about it once I do overcome my biggest weakness, but for now I feel an essay being honest about the problem I dread sharing with others should be just enough to get some things off my mind. 

Now I guess here’s the time I give a little backstory and reveal that wherever this essay (or whatever you’d call it) ends up, it was initiated as a plan to get over some simple boredom, and maybe procrastinate on an assignment, but here’s the twist: I started this as a plan to kill some time but ended up talking about my biggest, most regretted and least shared secret, one I seldom like to call even myself out on, let alone share with others.

Back to my life story now, because I may have gotten insecure about my habits after letting my worst and most rotten out to the air, let’s put it back inside and focus on the beauty, here starts my relationship with my family, which initially as a 3rd grader, was weird, having really no attention of my parents, who had spent most of their time throughout up until maybe my 10th grade on my brother, but it all changed in 10th grade when somewhere the back of my mind decided to be a part of this three-person-family and help it flourish, Here I stand today, with bonds I couldn’t have imagined myself having with my own parents in the start of grade 10, maybe not as much as an average family would have.

Here’s an observation- most (healthy) families have an expressive mother and inexpressive father, but as fate would have it, mine ended up with an inexpressible mother too, and while I may have criticized her for it a lot as a hormonal teenager, I only recently learned about the treatment she gets from her family and that’s maybe what bonds me better to her and makes me feel okay in the fact that she is inexpressive, she’s still functioning very well as a mother for somebody who suffered that level of damage from her own family, I feel somewhere my parents are more successful at not letting the generational trauma pass along than I’ll ever have a scope of being even close to. Now while I don’t know the reason on my father’s end just yet, the one thing I’ve learned from experience with younger siblings, it’s just as hard to be a younger sibling as is it to be an elder sibling, another reason I’ve worked a lot on my bonding with my brother, and tried- maybe failed, but then finally forgiven my parents for all the times I felt ignored, unloved, pressurized, because they have tried their best, but then in the end, they’re human too, all the errors they made were not something they’d noticed consciously, it’s only errors done subconsciously, those they noticed, they worked on, and I think that can be seen looking at how they’re much better parents to my brother compared to my times when they were only just first parents. I forgive my family for not knowing how to handle me because I’m unique and require a different kind of parenting compared to others.

Now on to the main part, I’ve a heart filled with gratitude that I got to actually be close to my family, have both of my parents present in my life and spend time with my grandparents, more so my two grandmothers who’ve passed away. Today when I ponder upon it I feel immense gratitude for the fact that I’d been gifted that time with my Dadiji where I got to eat what she cooked because, for all I’ve seen, my brother never got to see her healthy and be under her great guidance. Today when I think of my grandmothers, there are many memories I got to share with them - the paranthas of my dadi, doing prayers with her- the mishri and tulsi, the bathing early so I could do pooja with her. With her sickness went away my faith I’d built up with her. I never followed in her footsteps and prayed myself, the mandir stays more or less abandoned in the house today, being a memoir of some good times. On the other hand, I have my recent loss – fresh enough to be only a month old, the loss of my Naniji. I remember learning to make achaar from her and telling her she cooked much better than my mother, complaining to her every time my mom would scold me. I remember all the love and care she’d put into those sweaters she’d knit, them I wouldn’t get any more of, since none of them really fit me anymore. I remember telling her this time when I’d gone for my vacation that I was hungry, and she’d more or less stand to cook right or at least offer politely to do it later. Here in the city, it’s hard to feel her loss, or that of Dadi, seeing how she’d been sick for so long, but to think of those moments makes the child inside feel sad of how I’d never cherished those moments as much as I do right now, how I should’ve lived a little more with them, while I had the opportunity to. How I’m never gonna feel the nurturing and love, care, and attention of my grandmothers ever again, not in this lifetime, no more. There’s a pain in my heart looking at my grandfathers, seeing how jolly humans they were, and how they are now, one sick enough to have lost the ability to walk around by himself- even recognize his own family, the other having lost his charm, sits in the city all day long, bored and feeling out-of-place, for what it’s worth, I spend what time I feel I can with them, but it would never amount to the care I’d felt as a child.

Childhood was golden, teenage feels suffocating, and Adulthood can be no better.

Lovies, 
Rashima ♡