The Beginning

I can feel myself drifting away from all the things I wanted to do, every time I try harder to stay on track it makes it so much more difficult to do them, and if I just stop trying, I am overcome with guilt which creeps up on me the moment I seem to lose focus and it weighs me down like a heavy burden on my shoulder. So basically I am stuck in a loop of trying to just take a break and feeling guilty and straying further away from my goals and aspirations. And sometimes when I contemplate hard about where things are going I go on a down an even more dangerous path and I am afraid of what would happen if I go there. 

So I keep trying to shun the guilt and numb all feeling and escape to a place that doesn't make me feel uncomfortable. While I am able t do that when I am wide awake, I seem to have no control over what I dream, it taps me on my shoulder in my dreams and wakes me up so I don't sleep and keep pondering over what my life is going to be like. And that is one of the most scariest thought. I wanted to finish my doctorate and go abroad for a post doctorate, but I don't know what is happening with my doctorate to begin with let alone post doctorate, I thought I will do a second masters abroad but that doesn't seem to be bearing up so well. I thought we will do some profession now, maybe teaching while my partner gets into business or something and we'll eventually go abroad, but that doesn't seem to be going too great either. Before this I thought I would have a future in Politics, but that blew up in my face, it has been one of the most toxic spaces I have been to, when you are a woman and you're from a lower caste, your chances aren't too great in politics, especially if you seem like an elite convent educated person, all you're going to receive is hate. The upper caste spaces will look down on you either way and the anti- caste spaces won't accept you because you don't fit the box. So there goes my dream of being a politician as well. 

What is left then? Nothing. The future seems so bleak right now. What is extremely distressing is that I have been feeling like this for almost a decade. The only time I probably felt a little okay about my future was in my early years of PhD, I was brimming with hope that something is going to work out for me. Five years later I still seem to be stuck with the same feeling. I feel like I have no control over my life at any given juncture, somebody else seems to be pulling the strings all along and I go along like a mere puppet whilst thinking that it is I who is in control of things. In a few days I am going to turn a year older, with no job, no degree, no plan for future, no idea of what is even going to happen next. I can sense the disappointment in my parents every time they look at me. They no longer tell me that, they just feel it all the time and it hurts just the same. 

I don't know how may times I would have wished that my professional life turned out to be different. But as I look back at my life today I don't even know what I would do differently, or if would ever have the control to do things my way. I landed a job at the age of 21, just after graduation, I have often wondered, if I took that job and worked what would my life have been like? It was only supposed to be for about six months, I always wanted to g for higher studies, so I know that no matter what I would come into academia one way or another. But had I taken that job would my parents have felt me as a little less of a burden? They don't actually say I am a burden, not anymore anyway, but I cannot help but feel like one 

I have been such an ambitious person, I wanted to be independent from as young of an age as possible, I always wanted to be able to fend for myself. I wanted to be that person who would stand on her own two feet ad support her parents instead. But each year that dream seems to be evading be more and more pushing me into a dark hole of disappointment and self loathing. 

I know that with the way the second wave of the pandemic going on, we must count ourselves lucky to be just alive, and be with our loved ones, I am grateful for it, truly, but I a also filled with dread about everything that is going on, in the outside world, as well as about all the things running on in my head. 

I sincerely wish that things get better with respect to the pandemic and with respect to my life as well.