The Fire

“Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly.” – Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst.

Waking up every morning to a feeling of loss and anxiety, over a period of time shuts down one’s system. The loss, unexplainable. The anxiety, unintended. Put together a lack of direction and you have the most painful and soul sucking emotions – unworthiness and under-confidence. The duo can bring down any human being!

One of the most treasured and relied upon emotions I had was anger. It helped me bring an energy to the table that I couldn’t have imagined, every single day. The anger was not misdirected but channeled well. It could get me through difficult situations by the sheer adrenaline that it generated when in need. Most of my time with my kids earlier was spent thus. Failures didn’t matter because every morning I would be filled with anger that fueled my perseverance. I believe everyone has something like that. It usually is an emotion one associates with their sense of purpose. For some it may be discontentment, for others, love. My sense of purpose was fueled by my anger towards how badly things were/are structured around me. Right from a pothole in the road to the foreign policy of Uzbekistan, everything seemed to “set wrong”. Keeping aside the veracity of that judgement, it helped me stay the course. I brought to the table a fire no one else could. When everyone else had given up, one could find me fighting away alone and with full force. Towards the end of my time with the kids, I learned, rather was made to learn that it was actually eating me away from the inside and constraining me from actually being myself.

When I reflected deeper about the revelation, I did understand that the anger though powerful was gnawing at my well-being. Anything and anyone could anger me which pushed me into a zone of “perseverance” where I would fight my way through. But when peeled that layer of what I had told myself all this while, I realized that it was my ego. The switch was immediate. I opened myself up to a world of possibilities thereafter. I kept my anger aside for a few days and embraced other emotions I felt about my journey. Happiness, sadness, anxiety, indifference, pride etc. And being myself allowed me to focus on doing other things because I no longer had to invest energy in maintaining an image of myself for myself and/or others. I was free. It then dawned on me that the true emotion that motivated me was the happiness of the people around me that is what truly drove me. It wasn’t the anger that things weren’t right which made people sad, it was the urge to bring happiness their faces. It fundamentally shifted how I transacted with the world. I could now operate comfortable with the grey of life. I did not think of someone to be wrong just because they had a different opinion (most people do but will never actually say so). This freeing up of energy also made me focus on other things that is important to us humans, love, care, family, friends etc. I was happy! The fire in me was reborn, it was now not a raging monster but a lighting candle that I could use to guide myself along the path.

Not very long ago, I started plateauing. It worried me but I stayed the course because I was confident that it was a phase I could weather. This confidence can be attributed to the strength of the people around me and also the perseverance of myself for their happiness. But slowly, day by day the fire was diminishing. It started becoming more and more difficult to bring the same energy to the table. My emotional spectrum started reducing. And before I knew it, it was darkness all around. I could not see past the moment I was in. What was I doing? Where am I headed? How will this help me in my long term? What is my long term? Where are the people around me? The lack of fire sparked off (ironically) a series of spirals within me that soon led me down a well. For the many months I was trying different ways to reignite that fire because without it I was lost. Can one really operate on a daily basis without the fire to move forward? I was ready to quit everything and go back “home”. I did take a break but in vain. I was not only in the dark, but also lonely now!

Just a couple of weeks ago, one of my closest friends said, “I will show you an email, and we will never talk about it.” I said okay. She broke down after that. For the first time I realized that I didn’t have any words that could comfort her. This was not due to lack of vocabulary or not knowing what to say but my own lack of clarity/confidence in saying it. But I reassured her that I was there for support and also shared that I was in a similar place so she shouldn’t feel alone. After returning it struck me that I haven’t really explored what was happening to me. Yes there was pain, there was a feeling of loss, there was lack of clarity, all of which I was trying to solve for by trying to ignite the fire but it wasn’t working. I tried staying the course as I always did. Maybe it was a phase that I just need to allow to pass through. Did not work. I tried a few things that I might not really be proud of. Didn’t work. I blamed a few people for putting me in this zone. Didn’t help or make those bonds any better. I wondered if I had diagnosed the whole thing wrong and so I did what I could do best, I reached out to a few people who could help me think through the future. One of them said to me, “You’re looking at it the other way around. The lack of fire is a symptom, it is not the problem.” It struck me immediately. How stupid of me to confuse the symptom for the disease.

I have always surrounded myself with people who are passionate but come with different perspectives. The grey of those bonds coupled with the strength of it helped me stay the course. Furthermore, variety brings with it a fervor to understand and know more. This also helps me acquire more knowledge, skills and perspectives, all of which are critical to how I want to build for my future. So now I have put all of these things down for myself, articulated them well enough to critically analyse what is and isn’t. I have had to really dig hard and deep to come up with the exact things that are needed for me to regain lost ground. In a gist, it is exponential internal growth. This is not just in terms of knowledge but in skills, network and sheer exposure. The very reason my kids kept me going was because I was learning exponentially. The very reason why the last few years have been really great is because of the steepness of the learning curve. It is now time to bring back that curve. I met the same friend again and this time around I didn’t say, “I don’t know, but I’m here if you need me”. I was clear and straightforward once again with what I thought. Yes, the confidence is returning, the fire rekindling itself, because it is finding a new variety, journey to the center of oneself. And it is important for me to find myself again because what will keep me going is the ability to make others happy and for that, I need to find myself again.

It's the greatest gift we have: to bear their pain without breaking. And it comes from the most human part of us. Hope.

Although, a question does destabilize me a little still – what if this "disease" I'm dealing with is similar to common cold? There is no cure, I can only ever solve (or mask) for its symptoms. There’s only one way to find out, stay the course!