Coping with the givens of adulthood: A pandemic in my 20’s (Part II)

Part 2: The Cuckoo Outside my window: Rewriting narratives.

Despite living on the 23rd floor, I would be woken up by the sound of cars honking on the road every morning. Like I mentioned, Mumbai didn’t sleep. But every morning after that night, Mumbai seemed to be in a state of fragmented slumber. And from that atypical morning that became the norm, my rewrite began.

In college, and I say this under the partial impression that it is a distant memory when it actually isn’t, we learnt about narratives. Narratives are the way in which we create stories of connected events in our lives. There are dominant discourses and then there are alternate discourses. The former are influential stories that often impact the way in which we interact, make choices and most importantly, see our world and ourselves in it. Often, we make such an enduring habit of writing the same story that it becomes problematic. One such story that I’ve written is of my general capacity to maintain relationships as an adult. In this one, I am a brawny whiff of air.

I speak and contain the right amount of words. I am invested in the relationship and I make people laugh. I offer emotional support and I genuinely express affection. But somehow, if I communicate any vulnerability, I seem to be visibly rattled and mostly, the relationship crumbles. You could say that I look inwards to attribute such failure. And I have made a habit of narrating this story to myself as if it were the only truth that existed.

In retrospection, in the same class, we had also learned that if the way you narrate a story is of concern, how can there be only one way to do it? My professor said that this was a relative way to look at reality. Simply put, imagine that you can see ‘truth’ outside your window, relativism will say that there are as many truths as there are windows. I know someone who would laugh at this proposition. To them, this is the equivalent of “it’s your word against mine”.

I know a few graves that would quiver in disagreement. I also know my own reservations with the idea. To me, believing that x is also y and z was like believing in everything and which, according to my grandmother who once punched our television because India lost a cricket match against Bangladesh, is like believing in nothing. What I didn’t pay due attention to in the same class was the premise of the conversation. You see, the foundation of the argument wasn’t ‘from where’ you choose to look at truth, because that premise doesn’t make sense if you believe in an absolute reality. It was to define where you put the stakes on truth as opposed to the comprehension of that truth.

Before I lose you in my web of existential jargon, let’s go back to that evening. Slumped on the bed the 22 year old woman who does not like asking for help called my parents and cried about a broken phone. Now here is the context: for the longest time, like most children, I have relied heavily on my parents for information, references for behavior, and even implicitly acquired loaded opinions about the world.

In the social sciences, we call it the downward transmission of culture. However, when I left for a boarding school in 2014, something about our relationship changed. The following year, my father’s eyesight deteriorated. My mother began foraging through every possible treatment online only to realize that all we could do was continue the ongoing one. Our yearly vacations were spent clocking through counters in eye hospitals in different cities, and the books on my father’s nightstand were replaced by eye drop dispensers.

Every time my father was unable to get something done because he’d just been injected in the eye, I would step up. Every time my mother’s Hindi broke into an apology or her English rolled back into her tongue, the receptionists would look at me. And with every subsequent prognosis, my view of the world became foggier.

Now what do competitive adolescents become when they’re faced with the possibility that the order of the world may be random and far from ideal and predictable? They become cynical. Cynicism, like any appraisal, comes with more emotional and cognitive baggage. Mine came with skepticism, and the relief of having more control over things than I did before.

Now that I’ve held your attention this far, let me attempt to explain this seemingly complex theory that cognitive behavior theorists believe in. All behavior serves a purpose; even the refusal to indulge in any behavior serves a purpose. Worrying about a disaster that may or may not occur may serve the purpose of exercising control when there’s little you can do.

Some people say that it ‘prepares’ them for the worst. Similarly, believing that more things in the world are unfortunate than pleasant was my attempt at preparing for things that I dreaded and had no control over. So what did this pandemic do that changed the way I prepared myself? It presented to me, the fact that despite our best efforts, utmost certainty is fictitious. And so is the perpetual need for control and therefore, the likelihood of never allowing weakness to show.

In closed spaces, I am a crier. I cry more than I get angry. But crying to my parents was not in the list of things I do to cope. And yet, that night, I wailed to my father like I did the time I grazed my knee against a rough pavement. I was six years old, scared, and needed a hug. So I raised my arms and I asked for it. You do not need a degree in psychology to tell you that that was the right thing to do. Therefore, I wonder, when did I grow into this person who doesn’t raise her arms to ask for a hug? At which point did all of us become so afraid to ask for love when we need it?

My story did not change that night, and it didn’t for several weeks after that. In fact, don’t believe anyone who tells you that one day, you’ll have this epiphany and solve the mystery to eternal happiness. It doesn’t matter if one believes in the existence of the one vincible truth or write “I am sad” in thirteen equally plausible ways. Changing the story we’ve been telling ourselves takes time, because it’s easier not to and may sometimes even help us.

But as a 22 year old independent woman who doesn’t like to ask for help, I realized that my identity as that woman didn’t change. I still liked finishing my own work, folding my own clothes and washing my own dishes. If given a chance, I would still prefer to take the 11:11 local to CST alone. But I could also be the woman who cried, picked up the phone and asked for emotional support.

Like most of my friends, my parents and I still don’t hang up saying that we love each other. Our phone calls last five minutes at most. But on the good days, we laugh about how my dogs like watching the TV with my parents and need to be put to bed. On most days, I still don’t tell my friends that I love them or tell them about a bad day. But on the other days, I tell them that I am scared. And it’s not like I started doing any of that recently.

Like I said, I did not find the potion to happiness. In fact, I have been doing it for years. I just didn’t realize that it was possible to write more than one story at once. To tell you the truth, dear reader, I still don’t want to be vulnerable. But on some days, outside my window on the 23rd floor, I like to listen to a cuckoo in a quiet city instead of looking at the barricades outsides.

To be continued…