Working ThroughVs Expressing Feelings

Which feelings should one “work through” and which feelings should one express? I am conflict-averse by nature so received wisdom holds that I should get better at asserting my boundaries. But in at least two instances in recent weeks, I swallowed my feelings and decided to digest them instead of expressing them, and thanked myself later for it. My feelings have been so volatile lately that I can’t trust them to stay in place long enough for me to act on them and not regret it. So what is to be done? Firstly, I might be using the terms feelings wrongly, at least according to some people. Emotions are mental states (sadness, jealousy, etc) while thoughts are interpretations of these mental states, and feelings are physical manifestations of those mental states. There is a lot of work out there urging people to pay attention to their “physical” feelings instead of getting swept up in emotions and thoughts. I read a book not that long ago titled Radical Acceptance, which has a central message of accepting every feeling without resistance and observing it instead of judging it. To pay attention to the parts of the body that feelings manifest as physical sensations. My problem is all my feelings seem to emanate from the  right lower abdomen. And, I am not sure how that knowledge helps.

Resisting Fascism

I had ambitious plans of working yesterday but then I checked the news and those plans went out the window. An ICE thug shot a protester dead in Minneapolis. She was a white female US citizen, widely considered the least threatening demographic and most deserving of protection from violence. Yes, this is not the first person ICE has killed and ICE has been brutalizing immigrants for months. But, if ICE can shoot a white woman in public, with a clear recording of the incident, with impunity, who knows what they can get away with. I have written before about how fascism is unfolding differently in the US and in India. In India, the fascist regime has slowly suffocated democratic institutions, taking them apart brick by brick. No need for shock-and-awe if you have a right-wing population that is broadly supportive of your agenda. And, fascism has to be resisted in the streets because given enough time, fascists neutralize the courts and make sure they don’t lose elections. When fascists control the state, resisting fascism becomes an extraordinarily risky business. But people have always done extraordinarily risky things for love and faith (not necessarily the religious kind). In India, not many days go by without reports of so-called “honour” killings, which is when members of an upper-caste family kill their daughter and her low-caste husband/lover as they believe their romance sullies their family’s “honour”. I read a statistic somewhere that, around the world, women are most at risk of being killed by intimate partners. But, I don’t imagine there are many places where they are at risk of being killed by their fathers and brothers. Honour killings are not a widespread phenomena in India but the very fact that they still happen is an abomination. However, news reports of honour killings fill me with both revulsion and hope and admiration. Hope and admiration for the young lovers who know that they could pay with their lives for loving the wrong person but still do. Humans have always done things that any rational risk assessment would rule out.

On Sad Boys

 I recently read a provocative piece that claimed that distressed boys were at the root of most of what is wrong with the world, and have always been. Disgruntled maladjusted boys are uniquely vulnerable to so-called extremist ideologies of the left and the right, which, the piece claims are two poles of the same magnet. One sought a perfect utopia, while the other sought to cleanse society of pollution. It cited a quote that I agree with: ’A faith is not acquired by reasoning. One does not fall in love with a woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion. Reason may defend an act of faith — but only after the act has been committed, and the man committed to the act. Persuasion may play a part in a man's conversion; but only the part of bringing to it full and conscious climax a process that has been maturing in regions where no persuasion can penetrate.’ I have lived in proximity to activists long enough to know that political ideologies are grounded more in faith than in reason. The moral fervour that animates political activists is fuelled by faith. How else do people persist with fringe groups for years, if not decades? I would even grant that such zeal makes one susceptible to conspiracy theories that support one’s cause. But, I was not comfortable with the article’s claim that extreme left and extreme right causes are equally intolerant and prone to authoritarianism. Firstly, I am sure there are different shades among the far-right, but all of them support outright violence against marginalized peoples. I am not sure that is the case on the left. The article gives some examples of their run-ins with people of the far-left and far-right. Comparing privileged participants of Occupy Wall Street with the Sandy Hook shooter, as the article does, is laughably disingenuous. Secondly, of the far-left and far-right, only one is compatible with capitalism. In a world where capital is seemingly all-powerful and mobile, how an ideology positions itself in relation to capital matters in terms of its capacity to do damage. As recent events have shown, centrists who claim to be equally repelled by the far-left and the far-right are far more tolerant of right-wing governments if they don’t gum up the wheels of capitalism too much.  

Transactionality

I was going to write a post about transactionality, but it turns out most of what I was about to write, I had already written in a post on reciprocity (note to self to read my own blog more). So, this post is going to be shorter than I had anticipated. Keeping a mental tally of how much you and the opposite person are contributing to a platonic or romantic relationship sounds like a cheerless and even petty exercise. But, reciprocity is important in any relationship. Men are not socialised in reciprocity and my previous post talks about this at more length. I feel like many people are concerned about not taking the opposite person in a relationship for granted. We should also be concerned about not being taking for granted because in the long run, that is unhealthy for everyone involved. Expressing boundaries in a relationship can either salvage a relationship or end a potentially lopsided relationship. Of course, different people have different abilities and capacities to contribute to a relationship. And, if we feel value and cherished in a relationship the mental tallies fade into the background. We only bring them out when we feel taken for granted. And, those mental tallies are useful to assess whether our feelings are justified or without reason. Because sometimes we can simply forgot what the other person has done for us.

Back to Blogging

 I haven’t blogged in more than two months, ever since I turned 40. This has been my longs break from blogging, and the reason is I have started journaling. I read a book called “A Life of One’s Own” by Marion Millner. I felt like this British woman writing a hundred years ago was describing my feelings about my life. The sense that life was passing me by, the desire to connect with others but feeling underwhelmed by the experience of interacting with others, broadly, that I was not living life to the fullest. Millner took up journalling to observe her own thought processes and hopefully distil some wisdom from the observations. So, she started recording what made her happy. With the journalling, there is the temptation to only journal when you are feeling sad or anxious, and I realised I have been doing that. So, this is a reminder to follow Millner’s and (also?) blog about happy moments.

But, I miss blogging and I think I am going to continue to blog intermittently. I have written about why I blog several times before, for example, here, here and here. I think there is something to be said for contemplating your thoughts and feelings with some amount of dispassion, as one must if one is writing for a readership of more than oneself.

Turning 40

I have never been big on marking birthdays, but this is a big one. So, I went back to previous posts about birthdays and it turns out that there are just two—for Nos 35 and 36. I turned 35 during the first year of Covid, and my post was mostly about how that year had been nothing like what I had thought or hoped for. I was surprisingly compassionate to myself, marvelling at how well I had coped with the pandemic and the various tribulations it had brought. It also expressed relief at having something to say when people would ask how I was celebrating. I am happy to report that having nothing to say to that question is no more a cause of embarrassment. Maybe its because I am older, maybe the pandemic has made social introversion more acceptable. But, a friend of mine who turned 40 last year told me to mark the occasion, else I might regret it. I bought a car a few months ago, and wrote about how it felt like something I needed to do before I turned 40.

Turning 40 is a time to reflect not just on the previous year but on the previous decade. My 30s were stormier than my 20s, which included the two best years of my life—journalism school in Chenna and the masters in Holland. It was also the decade that I discovered journalism, worked as a journalist for more than half a decade and eventually tired of it. My 30s were off to a turbulent start, being stricken with dengue in my 31^st year and the sleeping demons that it roused in me. But, I managed to life myself out of that morass and put my life back on track, which is, and may always be, my biggest achievement. And, then pandemic struck bang in the middle of my 30s. It make years to understand and reckon with the impact of the pandemic, even though neither I or my lived ones suffered grave misfortune. And, any scorecard must consider the fact that the world has become a far angrier place over the last decade or so. And, surviving in it and trying to thrive in it is no mean feat. And, while my 30s had some turbulent times, they were also a period of tremendous self-growth and accumulation of self-knowledge.

Planning for futures

The other day, I came cross a tweet that said "People are still planning for futures that are connected to a world that doesn't exist anymore". My first reaction was "My feelings exactly!" and my next reaction was "What are they supposed to do instead?". The Gramsci quote about the monster-filled interregnum between the dying old world and not-yet-born new world rings true, but until the new world is born one can only plan keeping the old world in mind. It is easy to slip into despair at the state of the world, and it is also easy to romanticize despair. One can continually come up more creative ways to express despair and feel very smart for doing it. I know because I have done quite a bit of it in the past. My favourite line, that I would trot out to anyone who would listen was “I am smart enough to realise that most social science research is bull-shit, but not smart enough to make original contributions. It has features in my blog here and here in the past. I felt smart saying it, and I felt that it conveyed humility, wit and self-awareness. On this blog, I have talked about it here and here. Now, I think it is time to retire that line. It serves no purpose now, if it ever did in the past. It is also a cop-out because it justifies inaction. If the world is uncertain, if you are not too smart or too dumb, maybe the best thing is to do nothing? I don’t mean to sound self-righteous. Expressing despair can be cathartic and sometimes one needs to take a brake from action. But those should be explicitly stated choices