1% of something

I’ve been contemplating whether writing this is a good idea. Am I going to embarrass myself colossally? Yes. Does it really matter? No. I don’t care.

And that’s the problem. I do not care. About anything, about everything. That might seem immature and juvenile but it is disconcerting for someone like myself to admit without an ounce of feeling in my chest. I used to be that person who cared too much about every damn thing, but now the fact that I do not care about writing down yet another sob story for the world to read and shake their head at should be enough for the alarm bells to go off.

When shit went down last year, I think I walked around like a mid functioning zombie for about five whole months before I fed myself enough hatred to spew onto anyone and everyone that crossed my path, enough anger that helped get my head out of my ass and try and do the bare minimum to call myself a living human being. I turned into a lava spewing monster who was pleased at the way she made people recoil at her words. No lie, to finally feel some sort of control over something even through dirty means felt good..until I got clapped back down to Earth for being a total and unnecessary asshole.

And then I felt sucker punched in the gut from the guilt and stayed trapped with that feeling for about three total months before I got back in touch with the therapist I had ghosted months ago to finally put an end to the downward spiral I was on. Bumpy ride much? You don’t know half of it.

She empathised with me and reassured me that there were several stages to processing grief and trauma, moving on and changing yourself and that I was just going through the motions instead of turning absolutely bonkers like I had feared I had. It felt good to know there were others like me, going through phases at a rate that gave them a whiplash. I had managed to calm myself down after that. And some isues with family and friends finally managed to put an end to the madness. No more thoughts running at dizzying speeds in my head. No more reckless ideas. No more overflowing sympathy. No more heartburn for a boy long gone. I was exhausted.

A series of unfortunate events dampened the flame flickering wildly in my chest. After it finally died out, I was left dazed and confused. How the hell can I see in this darkness? And now I’m just dazed. What the hell am I supposed to be looking for? How do I know it’s right??

I feel like not very long I used to be full of bright yellows and reds and cerulean blues. I was in no way perfect, but I was beautiful. But over a period of a year, I have simmered down so much, I hardly recognise the grey form staring back at me in the mirror. Who is she? What does she want? Does she even want anything?

One thing just led to another like a chain of dominos and everything just tumbled down together at lightning speed, giving me just a fraction of a second to register, leaving me in awe at how that had affected me and transformed me.

I feel cheated out of happiness, of love, of friendship but mostly out of hope. You can reclaim happiness and love if you give yourself another chance but you cannot give yourself another chance once you’ve lost hope. Guess I’ve hit the jackpot.

This is all becoming too much to process and understand, keep to myself. I have pushed everyone in my life away, just a little, enough for them the to still hang around the periphery of caring, but not to cross over and actually do something about me. I’m not ready to open up to anyone anyway. I am left with myself at the centre of this huge circle.

I can’t believe that this has what it has come to. To sit here with unpacked feelings, to grow more tired by the day lugging them around.

I’m so tired, I just want to be free from this burden. To feel colorful again. To smile wholeheartedly again. To feel the flame inside of me again. I wish I come across something, even a 1% of something that can spark some hope within me. I want to feel alive again.

Note: Listen to music – a momentary balm to dull the ache that never ceases to recede.

A Eulogy and a Prologue

I know you don’t care about my introductions, so imma jump right in.

Oh God, it’s been so long since I’ve written about Kurt Cobain, i kinda feel like a fraud for using his picture, but this is a eulogy and a prologue to what i had been and what i am going to be, in contrast to what i am now, so his picture seems fitting.

Kurt and i go a long way back. Long being five years back. But it feels like a decade has passed. The angst-ridden, music obsessed teenager that i was will probably roll her eyes at the person i am now. Oh, well.

I was fifteen when I discovered Nirvana while i was reading a One Direction fan fiction. Yes, the irony is not lost to me. I was greedy then, devouring new music, trying to find my taste, something that resonated with what I wanted to say, how I felt.

I was fascinated with the name ‘Nirvana’. It meant salvation. Was i about to attain mine?

I soon discovered, yes. I downloaded all the recommended songs ( Spotify wasn’t available in India yet), read their entire Wikipedia column, learnt their lyrics, found articles on the internet. I invested so many hours in them, but I wasn’t satisfied. I was near devastated. Kurt had died. By suicide. He left a letter and had signed it to Buddha.

I felt this one person with whose name grunge and punk rock had become synonymous, who didn’t wear flashy clothes like the rest of the rock stars of the era, whose lyrics were random and incongruous but so very meaningful, finally understood me, the person i was at my core, only to know that he had passed long before i was born and that i was sorta doomed, never to be taken seriously, or understood.

I don’t know what i thought understanding me meant back then, but i do know that i was at most times, very frustrated and lonely.

Five years later, I’m still lonely in the perfect sense of the word, but i’m far from frustrated.

Over the years, I’ve gone through genres like I’ve gone through clothes; excited to try but never reusing.

I’ve listened to everyone from The Smiths, Led Zeppelin, Black Veil Brides, The Script and Bastille to Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, David Guetta and Nicki Minaj.

It hasn’t been the same since I discovered K-Pop. I know what you’re going to say, “How could someone who listened to Nirvana listen to BTS?”

That’s what i thought too.

But still. K-Pop is like a fantasy. It will suck you in unassumingly, you won’t recognise any of them at first sight, but two weeks in and you’ll able to name close to two hundred of them.

The music is high tempo, their choreography amazing and the overall performance really addicting. The best part? You’ll start to dance not even knowing what the lyrics actually mean.

Call it manufactured or whatever, but you cannot deny their stage presence and the way they keep their viewers captivated. And it’s not just BTS, the phenomenon that’s taken over the world.

I’m not even into BTS anymore. I mean I love their music but I’m not as big a fan as i was ten days ago. You may think ten days is too short to curb an addiction that’s built up over six months but that’s just me. I can wake up one morning and be someone else, be into something else.

And that’s exactly why I’m not going to stress on who i am now. I can change. I always change. And I know too much change can point to a frivolous mindset and a lack of depth in character, but I’d like to point out that I’m always the same person at the core of my being. That will never change. My mannerisms and outlook may change but my principles won’t.

I never stopped thinking about Kurt Cobain even when i was ranting off the names of K-Pop idols like they were my cousins. And I probably never will. He is one of the most influential people of my life. You know when a road is being laid, there is wet cement on the ground cordoned off with yellow tape to warn pedestrians to step off. And you know how sometimes you’re tempted to step on it, so an imprint of your foot will remain etched there forever. Well he kinda stepped on the wet cement that my personality was back then. I had just begun to discover who i was, was laying the foundations to the character i’d embody when Kurt Cobain sang ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit‘ into his microphone from above.

I’ve learnt a lot from all the names I’ve mentioned above and so many more people saved on my Spotify. And there is a reason why music is so important to me. It changes too.

First it was The Beatles, Guns N’ Roses, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, then One Direction and now BTS.

There’s always something new that takes over the world by a storm, but just because people are into K-Pop now doesn’t mean they don’t stand up and sing when ‘We Will Rock You’ by Queen comes on.

I hope you remember this before you judge someone for changing. Change doesn’t always equate to growth but inertia was never the answer to dealing with life.

You get up, you get going. Sure, you leave people behind, you lose people, but as long as you’re aware of who you are, you’ll be fine.

And here’s an obligatory playlist because i feel bad for ghosting y’all for the past 45 days.

1. Wonderwall by Oasis.

2. Never Say Never by The Fray

3. I Miss You by blink-182

4. Ink by Coldplay

5. About A Girl by Nirvana

6. The Man Who Sold The World by David Bowie covered by Nirvana

7. Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana

8. Do I Wanna Know? by Arctic Monkeys

9. Hotel California by The Eagles

10. Viva La Vida by Coldplay

11. Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus

12. Last Christmas by Wham!

13. Papercut by Linkin Park

14. Breakeven by The Script

And that’s it for now! I hoped you liked my 60th post!!

You can follow me on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/user/31q57xuawucnecclsg7brmmy2mse?si=FNfb1Lv2TReWszS0Oz8zpA

Without Wax,

vodkandcokeplease 😉

The throes of being an average writer.

I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.”

– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.

Kurt Cobain. Nirvana. The Fray. David Bowie. Chestor Bennington. Linkin Park. And now, Billie Eilish.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The Catcher in the Rye. Sylvia Plath. Jack Kerouac. And now, Neil Gaiman.

The first paragraph consists of all the musicians/bands who have affected me, inspired me and drove me into a kind of frenzied trance I didn’t think to be possible. Because they are not just musicians. They are storytellers.

They are grunge, they are rock, they are edgy. They are fire, they desire. They start fires, they scream and yell, they tell things no one else tells. They’re hurt, they’re angry, they love, they hate, but mostly they love. And mostly they’re great.

And I am in awe of those people and their voices and their minds, which I try to explore by dissecting their words with my mundane, amateur interpretations. I take up a knife as though to try and chop up what they’ve written, to try and read between the lines, as if I’m looking for a secret code which will open doors to enlightenment. I do not succeed. Because their imagination is beyond the invisible frontiers of mine. If my imagination was a rubber band, it would snap trying to stretch itself too far to try to accommodate their’s. I am a novice when it comes to music and moving people with melodies.

The second paragraph is a list of all the people who have influenced me literarily. Their works/work have deeply entrenched themselves into my heart and have molded me as a reader, as a writer and as a person. I became acquainted with them at the tender age of fourteen or fifteen, a time in our lives when teenage angst is birthed, hot and burning in our bloodstreams, giving us sleepless nights and sinful dreams.

None of their works were even remotely philosophical, but they were charged with enough philosophy to mould the pliant and yielding brain of a teenager.

And now I mourn my love for them.

Because this is not about why I love them, it’s about why I’m writing about them.

When Sylvia Plath was about eight, she published her first poem in a newspaper’s children’s section. She was both talented and hard-working, a deadly combination in the dreary world of literature. She yearned to create something great, to write masterpieces and worked hard to hone her natural talent. She went as far as to give herself pep talks in her private journals which were published posthumously.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.”

-Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.

She didn’t write because she felt like it. She didn’t create masterpieces out of sheer genius or pure coincidence. She wanted to write masterpieces. She wanted to write.

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us

Kurt Cobain began singing at the age of two and by the time he was four, he could play the piano. On his 14th birthday on February 20, 1981, Cobain’s uncle offered him either a bike or a used guitar—Kurt chose the guitar. Soon, he was trying to copy Led Zeppelin’s power ballad, “Stairway to Heaven”. He was into Punk Rock and he found a fellow punk rock devout in Krist Novoselic and the pair eventually formed what was the beginning of a legacy. Nirvana. The band name was taken from the Buddhist concept, which Cobain described as “freedom from pain, suffering and the external world,” a concept that he aligned with the punk rock ethos and ideology.

Their debut album Bleach sold over 1.9 million copies in the U.S alone and was ranked No. 13 on Rolling Stone’s “50 Greatest Grunge Albums” list.

Anyhow, Kurt died from a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head at the age of 27.

We can only wonder what might have been had he lived. He was iconic, purely because he refused to be iconic, always sensitive but wilfully perverse, rejecting (or attempting to reject) all of the trappings of celebrity and fame. He changed a lot of lives.

I adore both Plath and Kurt. Not because of what people say about them, or what I read about them, but because of the way they make me feel when I read what they’ve written or heard what they’ve said. They are the kind of genius that I wish I could be.

Writing is to me, what music was to Kurt.

It is the only thing I’m remotely good at and the only thing I would go to any lengths to succeed at.

The only way to free myself of these words is to write them.
I write them because I feel. I write to feel. To live, to breathe.
Maybe my posts are just another piece of literature for you. But to me they’re unexpressed feelings and suppressed emotions.
I write them to get them off my chest. To let go of the pain I keep hidden inside. And if you’ve ever been in pain, you might feel mine, seeping out of those words, like tears from the eyelids or blood from wounds…
Writing is not just a passion for me. It’s a way of life. It’s my way of surviving life.

It is everything. “

It is what makes my hair stand on end, it is what gives me the adrenaline rush I crave daily and it is what sets me free.

But I’m nowhere near as good as I want to be.

I’m worse at what I do best

And for this gift I feel blessed

I yearn to be a good writer. No, that is wrong. I yearn to be a great writer. Writing is not something you can simply suffice with being good at. You have to be prominent, exceptional and prodigious. You have to move people with your words, you have to make them feel things, you have inflict pain or joy in them, you have to make them think, you have to make them lose themselves in a world you have spinned out of webs of carefully selected words, weaved together with sincere emotions and characters which have firmly lodged themselves into their hearts, staying with them long after they’ve finished peeking into their lives. They can chose to close the curtain but they cannot stop the light from streaming in through the windows.

That is literature.

And I want to be remembered for it. Just as I have remembered all these people, just as they are always on the back of my mind- like dead relatives, loved but lost, or beautiful moments of the past, gone but never forgotten.

I always wonder if I would’ve been a better writer had i been born earlier, in a different era. Maybe watching Kurt Cobain perform live, or reading Kerouac or Plath as part of my school syllabus would have made me more empathetic to the agony that comes from being ingenious.

Because it does hurt. Great art is birthed from having nursed a great pain. Kurt was depressed and so was Plath. And both of them succumbed to the demons in their head in the cruelest of ways possible.

He wrote, “I don’t have the passion anymore, and so remember, it’s better to burn out than to fade away“, before taking a bullet to his head.

Its better to burn out than to fade away.

And Plath was one of those people who became popular more so for the circumstances surrounding her death than her work. She cooked her head in the oven. Literally.

She’s seen as a martyr to something, although none of us are really clear on what that something is.But she wasn’t a martyr. She was someone who was exhausted and worn down and in a moment of despair took her own life.

Would I consider inflicting pain upon myself in order to get closer to what they’ve felt and become a better writer in the process? Maybe, I don’t know. That’s quite a depressing thought. But I don’t think I’ll hold back from doing anything that will propel me towards being better.

I try relentlessly to come up with ideas which will move and shake the earth, which will convince me of the talent I wish I’d possessed. When people tell me I’m doing a good job, I only smile slightly at their compliments. I’m wincing on the inside, scrutinising every word I’ve typed, criticising the lack of use of a better word, a better idea. It is not easy to be so hard on yourself, but I guess it comes naturally to me.

I won’t ever rest until I love what I write and I don’t think I’ll ever come to love what is written.

I don’t think I possess the innate talent to ever match up to the icons I idolise. But maybe I do.

I know I’m only comparing a seedling to a forest, but I have time and I have the determination and most of all, I have the passion to create something tremendously substantial than myself.

Writing is the only way I know to survive life. Write. Write. Write your heart out, write down your feelings. Catharsis is a good form of therapy. Feelings are what makes humans humane. Engrave your words into the minds and hearts of your readers, make them feel all the things you’ve bottled up inside you all your life. Whisper into their ears whilst they dream at night, give them a peek into the most private chambers of your heart and soul, and in the process, earn a place in their’s.

Leave a legacy behind.

Without Wax,

vodkandcokeplease

Cuz, everything’s better with it 😉

P. S: Nirvana’s hit song Smells Like Teen Spirit could be the title to my biography.