Persuasion.

Thinking of writing something especially about myself makes me feel quite vulnerable. I often find myself weighing my thoughts and experiences on the scale of profundity, analyzing and critiquing if they have been worth it. My demeanour and chosen path of life at the moment are such that I have to be my own dancing monkey, keeping myself entertained. It also comes very naturally to me. But, I don't really have any unique experiences to speak of, for all I do is just consume, not create. This dichotomy between creation and consumption has been at the back of my head now for quite some time. It's also why I decided to start this blog, but my present level of creativity is such that I can't bring myself to write about something other than my own experiences. But my own experiences are nothing but vicariously living off the work of others; so I am stuck in a loop like a hamster on a wheel, thinking he's making progress.

Hamsters are so funny though, they just wanna run. So their owners get them a wheel and they keep running like there's no tomorrow. It's quite an act of perseverance and dedication and I feel it's quite judgmental of us humans to place it on the metric of progress and stagnancy when the hamster is just doing what it wants to do day in, day out.

In that sense, maybe I am a hamster. It's not that I don't like how I live my life, I'm doing what I want to, but it is the act of being perceived which makes me insecure. From the outside I am just a hamster running on his wheel, indulging in the daily grind of reading, revising, watching stuff, listening to music, all cooped up in my room. Every day I start afresh, moving no further ahead from where I started because my running wheel (the syllabus, the things I want to read and watch) keeps pace and moves too.

But at the same time, who cares, right? No one is gonna put me on a pedestal one day and throw eggs on me the other day like I do. Life is too short to perceive others negatively, and shorter to do it to yourself. I am just rambling about trying to convince myself, that it's ok to not be ok. But I don't know what is ok, so it seems quite entitled and privileged to even say that. I am just normal, but explicitly deciding to write about myself was going to have narcissistic connotations sooner or later. The feeling of "I am not like the other girls people" didn't leave as teenage ended and I'm still caught in prince syndrome, feeling that I should be special and unique. To be fair, there are a lot of undesirable ways through which I could have been unique, and maybe it's for the better that I am not.

So the path to progress lies in acceptance, and even though I am not making new friends or trying out new things and learning new skills, I will be okay as long as I stay true to myself and accept myself for who I am. BUT THAT'S BEING COMPLACENT. I can't do that. The answer probably lies somewhere between being curious enough to challenge yourself while also being content with your present level. Maybe. Or the answer is something else entirely and I am just on a different page of the book.

P.S. It was only last week that I learned the meaning of the phrase "brevity is the soul of wit", and it's clear that I have a long way to go to really apply it.