The moon rests lightly on the twelfth slat of my blinds —

Bright, circular, slightly off-center.

I slide up to see if that makes a difference, it does.

The moon shifts, like water on a hollowed stem.

No, too far right, I slide down again —

Slowly, carefully, calculating the exact moment it pulls into the center.

I did it.

I stare at my manufactured perfection —

Calculated, unstable, temporary.

Yet, satisfying.

I hold the perfection in my eyes. I revel in it.

Until, the stillness gets uncomfortable.

I tell myself that it’s the way my neck is awkwardly placed on the pillow,

that the instability of the bright light that is the moon is chaotic,

that my eyes are strained from the staring.

I can think of at least five other reasons —

But to be honest I think I could have held that gaze for longer.

It was the mindless silence that got me — the emptiness.

The brief moment of nothingness.

I’m not ready for that yet. To be fully free.

To not manufacture perfection. Even when I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t.

It’s a strange take but I also don’t think it is.

I don’t think I’m there yet. I don’t think I need to be.

So, I break the stillness —

I move down again. I get distracted. I think about thinking.

…And the moon shifts back into its bright, circular, off-center self again.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

This poem has no one inherent meaning. I wrote it at 1am in bed while trying to fall asleep. I was literally staring at the moon. At first, I thought of it as an odd thing to write about but the image was strong in my mind that it wouldn’t let me sleep till I wrote it.

The idea of manufactured perfection came to me halfway through the poem. It was as if someone had suddenly tapped into a part of me that had been silent for longer than I care to admit. The thought was something like this: throughout our life we’re dealt ideas about what it means to be “perfect.” We internalize those ideas to such an extent that we strive to create those perfections daily. Now, the problem begins when one realizes that those perfections don’t leave space for contradictions. And contradictions, as confusing as they could be are inherent to human nature. Good people can feel anger, they can be jealous, they can have insecurities. Good friends can (and should) step back and put themselves first. The idea that these are independent of each other is frankly quite strange. But, even we know these things we don’t truly believe it. We strive to manufacture every version of ourselves into ideals of perfection. There is joy in achieving it. There is stillness. We trick our minds into believing that we’ve done it, we’ve achieved our stillness, the peace of mind that we all crave for. But honestly, we’ve only built ourselves, more like twisted ourselves into reaching these goals that aren’t unattainable but unrealistic. That comes to light when the temporary joy of achieving it starts to fade away. The “stillness” we craved gives way to more doubt, more distractions, more unattainable and unrealistic standards. And then we get stuck again, in a never-ending cycle.

I realize that by using “we” throughout that last part, I really projected my own thinking on all of you. Despite saying at the beginning that this poem has no inherent meaning. Well, what I meant to say is that yes, I think this poem is about the idea of manufactured perfection. But that does not have to mean to you what it does to me. A friend said this poem reminded her of the relationships she still has in her life. Another said it sounded like a 2am musing (more a rant if you ask me). I want to take away the idea that a poem has one absolute meaning and if you don’t reach it, you don’t understand poetry. Poetry is what you make of it, it’s yours. I always say this, you can make a poem work for you. And you should.

I hope this one makes you think, as it does for me. And I hope you get back to me and share your thoughts. Thank you for reading, letting me be vulnerable, and allowing me to be my authentic, unmanufactured self.

There is something about walking alone through the streets of old cities — an odd sense of comforting familiarity that comes from the realization that the street holds stories of millions before me. They’ve seen heartbreak and celebration, prejudice and protest, and have had many footprints etched into them over time. New memories, like a chisel to the red bricks, carve themselves into the lines of old ones creating mosaics of lived pasts and unfurling presents. There’s a street a short walk from my house where the sidewalk stops at doors like “Poppy’s Dressmaking,” where the name is written in a cursive swirl of yellow against a bright green background. In the evening light where the streetlights have just turned on against the pink of the sky, standing there feels like being thrown back into time — a time which isn’t familiar and yet recognizable, where Poppy walks to her dress shop every morning, and where the local lamplighter patiently climbs ladders to light every street light along the way. That memory, the created memory is more palpable than the present until the Green Line’s screeching throws you back into the now. You have to find the humor in this, the train’s screaming as a metaphor for our reality. It’s almost like the world refuses to let you escape it despite your mind’s relentless efforts. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not, this inability to transgress the present but in some strange way, I like to think that the trees, the sidewalks, Poppy’s shop and the tram all hold secret conversations together about me.

“Poor thing looks a little tired today, let’s let her stand here for a minute” — cue pink sky and swaying trees

“Okay, enough dwelling, time to move forward” — cue the train’s dramatic entry

It’s an innocent imagination but it works in unimaginably powerful ways. For one, it makes walking alone through unfamiliar places a lot less lonely, and a lot more fun. The first thing I always do when I move somewhere new is go for a walk alone, it makes the whole process of moving less frightening. It’s the same concept as having a morning routine — to know exactly what to do when you wake up so that the uncertainty of life doesn’t settle in till your coffee has prepared your mind to tackle it. That first walk is crucial, my mind makes a map of places I’m most definitely inclined to rely on — the nearest grocery store for the emergency morning milk run, the Starbucks a little further down that will convince me out of the milk run, the pretty stationary store that serves as an escape and an inspiration for bad days, the nearest park to run to for “fresh air,” and the street with mismatched houses and colorful front doors that are little worlds in themselves. Eventually, as time passes and everything gets more familiar, my feet take me to places I need the most without a conscious effort. The first time that happens is always special, it feels like a warm hug of acceptance from the place I now call home.

It’s pretty easy to create a sense of home when you’ve moved around a lot — you know the exact color combination to make your room feel safe, you carry a zip pouch of old photographs that have unmistaken tape marks on the corners, and you know it’s important to find the right grocery store and stick to it (because honestly, the aisles of grocery stores start feeling like home before anything else). But, there’s one thing that I learnt from my experiences and it was that the greatest comfort came from what I told myself, and everything that I held within me. I’m faced with crossroads and uncertainty again at this point in my life and the only thing keeping me going through it is knowing that I’ve been here before — maybe not in the same way or without the same stakes but the feeling is familiar. I think that the only way to deal with the big changes is to find comfort in the small things, by creating moments of familiarity and comfort that keep you grounded. But, the truth is that the comfort lies in the process of finding that familiarity and not the familiarity itself. It’s in knowing what to do when you feel anxious and alone because you’ve already been there before; it’s in knowing that you need a bowl of pasta to feel better regardless of where it’s from; it’s in trusting your feet to take you through the mosaic of memory etched streets; and it’s in knowing that you have a whole lot of people, but most importantly yourself to have your back.

The first time I walked the streets of Boston alone, on my second day in the city, I knew nobody except the polite friendship I had established with the girl who lived above my hostel bunk. I was completely and utterly lost, and I had no agenda or plan for an entire week. In that state of vulnerability, I walked the streets of Boylston and Newbury, and somewhere along the way found an overwhelming sense of warmth and comfort in the spirit of those who’d walked them before me. Moving away from home isn’t easy, especially when you’re not sure where home is — the town that you grew up that you hardly recognize anymore? Or your college town where you truly learnt to be yourself? Or if you’re like me, the places, even countries that you moved to in between? It’s impossible to dissociate yourself from any of those places and yet, it is equally difficult to recognize each of those places within you. Not knowing where home is can be both terrifying and exciting at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, I have a place that I call home — it’s the apartment that I grew up in where my parents still live, where I finished redesigning my room just before I moved away again — but, even that hasn’t truly felt like home in a long time. No matter where I move, there’s always a part of my heart longing for somewhere else, not any one place in particular but just someplace. It craves for the grounded-ness of my hometown, the freedom and ecstasy of my college city, the newness of life I felt from the country I went to high school in, and the terrifying independence that came with being a twenty something in a new country. Through time, through carefully crafted “moving” rituals, through learning to find the same comfort of a cozy living room in a group video call, I’ve come to this conclusion: It may be impossible to feel completely at home anywhere, but there’s no harm in giving everywhere a chance.

Uncertainty abound,

the world suddenly moves into stillness.

Moments rarely acknowledged —

A coffee on the deck,

The tenth white flower on the newly revived tree,

A less than two-minute garbage run,

And the way the spring breeze brushes my hair against my cheek

start feeling like moments of uncorrupted freedom.

I can’t decide whether I’ve become used to it —

Somedays, the sound of waking up to birds has me filled with unexplained gratitude

and other days, with frustration.

Sometimes, the rain looks so beautiful as it falls uninterrupted against the light of the moon instead of the headlights of cars,

and on other days, it just makes for a really dull day.

I guess I don’t have to decide, because it won’t last, or so they say.  

The uncertainty is paralyzing,

Mostly because it isn’t abstract anymore —

I can hear it in the siren of the ambulance,

See it in the eyes of my friends,

Taste it with every half onion used to make my groceries last longer,

And touch, no I can’t touch it, that’s not allowed anymore.

For the world’s sake and my own, I hope this ends soon.

There are days I don’t believe in that at all, but today isn’t one of those days.

Today, I can confidently say that I believe the end will come,

And how did I reach that conclusion?

Well, maybe it was just me looking for a sign,

But while I sat outside on my deck,

With my hot coffee

And my gaze fixed to that tenth white flower,

I heard ambulances again

But, I also heard church bells.

The juxtaposition was comedic almost —

The sound of faith against the noise of death,

But, it produced the desired effect, it gave me hope —

Like a humorous dramatic monologue as an aside in a tragic play,

Kind of funny but also not,

It gives you space to breathe, to laugh in the face of tragedy and above all,

to believe that the adversity will end,

And for now, that hope is enough.

To be perfectly honest, I picked up Untamed in an impulse stirred more from the anxiousness of a twenty-three-hour travel day during a global pandemic, than my desire to delve into the inner depths of my soul. I wish I had a more profound story about how I felt inwardly drawn to the book when I first saw it on the shelf of a duty-free shop at Logan Airport, but I must admit that I’m the ideal consumer of capitalist structures and I picked it up because I recognized it from all the Instagram ads I’d seen.

I had finally decided to travel home after a year and a half, and as happy as I was to see my family again, I knew the risks that awaited me — a deadly contagious virus, an isolation that didn’t let me hug my family on seeing them, and most possibly the worst of all — alone time with no real distractions. Okay, judging from my previous posts you’d think that I understood the “mundanity of time,” but honestly, the events of the past year have turned my mind into a chaotic swirl of thoughts that are pretty hard to control most times. I try, but it’s hard, hence the book. In that moment when I was trying so hard to distract myself from my anxiety, I forgot one fundamental thing about books — they’re “a creator of inwardness,” as Susan Sontag once said. This is true for almost all books, the good ones at least, but it is especially true about Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. Apart from the literal title of the summary being, “This is how you find yourself,” reading Untamed is like taking an Instagram selfie without any Thai Furtado filters — it makes you really see yourself, and you may not like it.  

I always viewed reading as an active pursuit of some truth, but I didn’t realize what I was doing wrong till I picked up Untamed. I initially started reading the book like I read all non-fiction, self- help memoirs — like an advice board, highlighting all the quotes of wisdom that stood out to me, as if creating a map to a magically transformed version of myself. That first came to a halt when I read, “shamelessness is my spiritual practice” (19). I was taken aback by this statement because in my mind I was thinking about how it’s impossible to exist in a society without respecting the “rules.” I thought I understood what she was saying, and that frustrated me because it felt like someone was asking me to do the impossible. How can I just exist as an individual? How can I not take into consideration the rules that the society is built on? It sounded like someone hadn’t given enough thought into what they were writing about, and they were just repeating the idealistic clichés that floated around on the internet. I shut the book and went about my day. Throughout the day, I thought about that statement, and I thought about the story Doyle had narrated before making that statement. My bachelors in literature has taught me one thing, and it’s that context matters. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how wrong I’d been in assuming its meaning. She wasn’t asking me to exist outside of society, she was simply asking me to confront my own truths. She was asking me to forgive myself for all the “faults” that I thought I had and learn to live my contradictions, and my truths with a shameless confidence. It was never about me vs them, it was always about me vs me.

Throughout the book there were many such moments where at first, I didn’t understand the depth of what I was reading, and moments where I just blatantly disagreed. But, I realized what I loved about the book is that Doyle let me have that space to engage in conversation with her thoughts and mine. Maybe I discovered this really late, but the process of reading this book really shifted the way that I read books. So much of reading is reflection, a pause in time to truly explore human nature, emotions, and the world. In the book, Doyle talks about how she would escape into her closet and close her eyes to practice seeing inward, and I think that’s an ideal description of what reading should look like. If you disagreed with me here, and it forced you to think, you just did the same thing! Think about it, we often talk about how reading books, especially non-fiction memoirs is like getting a peek into someone else’s life, but we seldom talk about how it’s also an active experience, and a conversation with the author. Untamed challenged me to unlearn how I viewed the relationship between a book and its reader, an author and her audience, and myself as a reader and an individual.

Doyle’s signature is confrontation. She uses the book to confront her own “cages” and pushes you to confront yours. Like any confrontational meetings, it is uncomfortable but revelatory. The three parts of the book, “caged”, “keys”, and “free” outlines a journey of her life from living according to standards and expectations established by everyone but her, to living by standards and expectations established by herself. From a distance, that arc sounds familiar, but the details of that arc make it so incredibly unique and special. It is her story, but it is also your story and mine. She manages to create that notion without imposing her truth on you, and the fun part is that what you discover at the end of your journey with the book may be completely different from what she discovered, but it will still make sense. She will make you confront your raw reality, without the filters and when the question of “what are you?” creeps into your mind, you’ll know to try to accept all parts of you and just say, “I am.”

There’s an odd sense of comforting familiarity in the quiet moments — the ones where life seems like it’s paused in its mundanity, where the certainty of the next step exists, but along with a sense of an endless chasm of time. I never know how to deal with such moments — do I embrace the solitude and relish in the stability? Or do I face the darker, more anxious feelings of loneliness, which almost always lead to a bigger existential mind game? I guess it’s impossible to choose, and knowing the mind, quite impossible to do one without the other either. But, as I said, there is a comfort in this strange feeling, a sense of knowing that I’ve been here before, and that I’ve made it out.

Yangon, Myanmar. 2017. 5pm.

I fidget with the thought of going out for a walk again. I stare out the window for the tenth time that evening and I watch the sun lower itself onto the lake. Pretty. It would be nice to sit out on the grass by the lake, but somehow one half of my mind (the stronger half) isn’t convinced so I stay in. I watch as the sky changes colors, I watch the people running, sitting, staring, I watch till the sound of the crickets is louder than the thoughts in my head. The sense of urgency in my stomach feels strong, I can feel my muscles twisting and I know anxiety has kicked in, but for what? I’m not sure. I take my sketchbook out from under the table, lay all my color pencils out and start looking for something to sketch. The vase? Too simple. The view from the window? Too complicated. The drawing from Pinterest? Too whatever. This is when I figure out there’s no way out of this. I figure out that my mind is going to make up an excuse for every distraction that I come up with so I just sit. I sit with the feeling, I sit in the silence of the apartment that doesn’t yet feel like home. I sit in the absence of immediate purpose or meaning. I just sit and wait it out. I think I cry, I can’t remember. The stillness is hard, so is being alone with my own thoughts. I’m not used to it yet and it feels ugly, disconnected, and confusing.

Mumbai, India. 2018. 7pm.

I watch as the sky turns pink. I’ve been sitting here for an hour, and my mother will soon be back from her walk. She asked me to light the candle in the temple. I haven’t moved. I’ve done this before — the staring, the stillness, the silence. It’s not any easier yet. But, I do have a reason for my anxiety now. I stare into nothing, listening to my mind at battle. Every time the thought of giving up kicks in, it’s swiftly pushed down by a stronger, more insistent thought of possibility. The optimistic what-ifs are stronger than the cynical ones. I smile.

Pune, India. 2019. 6pm.

The rain is making harsh noises outside. My best friend is working less than six feet away from me. She looks tensed. We watch the sky get darker together, and a nervous laughter ensues — we both see the coming of the night as a finality, a passing of time a reminder of the approaching deadlines. We get to work again. But, just as before, my mind won’t let me distract myself from that feeling. I look up from my laptop and watch the rain hit the leaves next to my window. I remember the moment where I felt like this before. Moments where everything was exactly where it was supposed to be, and yet nothing made sense. A sense of in-betweenness, a frozen moment in the passage of time. I continue to stare, but I acknowledge how this time, I’m comfortable with the silence.

Boston, USA. 2020. 7pm.

It’s raining again. The wind is already thick with the nostalgia of summer. I look outside the window and see the leaves on the tree turning red at the edges. The same sense of urgency has creeped in again, this time accompanied with an irrational anxiety about various things. The past month hasn’t been easy, but according to the various calls I’ve received, I have emotional resilience. This moment feels empty — quiet, unmoving, repetitive. But my mind is loud, as it gets in such times. I have a thought — it’s this again, I know this feeling. In a time of crippling uncertainty, the familiarity of this feeling seems comforting. I pull up a chair near my window and sit. My laptop on my lap, waiting to be ready to make sense of it, but also capture it. I notice the stillness around me, but this time it’s also found its way within. There it is again, the contradiction of my mind, but even that feels familiar. I’ve made peace with it. It’s me. Slowly, I take these thoughts and I write. I don’t run, I don’t try to escape or distract myself. I face them. I’ve gotten better. They’re not ugly, or disconnected anymore. Still confusing though, but I’m sure I’ll make sense of that too.

In the past week, I was asked the question of how I spend time alone? Most of the times, it’s easy. There’s always something to do — a new project, Netflix, painting old moments in an attempt to feel them again, experimenting. But, I guess the question wasn’t about those times. It was about these mundane, quiet moments where the world seems to leave you behind for just a minute. When your mind is in different places at once, and nothing, absolutely nothing seems to distract you from these feelings. Well, here is the answer. I’m not sure what I do but I know I’ve gotten better at doing it. Because I feel more confident in these moments. I used to be scared, but now I find them almost essential. This was an attempt to make sense of one of those moments, a stretching out of my hand to offer help, but through a glimpse of my mind instead. Well, the least I can say is, it gets easier, I promise.