Lost and found

Several years ago, our literature professor in college brought a friend of hers to class. He was a poet belonging to a minority faith in India but much of his unique experience growing up in the 50s and 60s was defined by the fact that he was gay. He shared stories from his life that both warmed our hearts as well as chilled our spines but one passing remark ended up staying with me through the years: “I moved from country to country to escape the mental anguish I often grappled with; until I realized that I could run away from places, but I couldn’t run away from myself.”

This year, a lot of us found ourselves confronted with a similar conclusion — being forced to sit tight because of forced or voluntary lockdown meant our usual escape routes of exotic travel, friendly revelry, even small talk at the workplace were not accessible anymore. For many of us, this meant a lot more time in solitude, a lot more time to reflect. I both sent and received notes of gratitude, apology, regrets, and acceptance for many of the threads that had hitherto been easy to ignore in a life populated with all the ways in which we were used to both creating and destroying meaning. In hindsight, it seems like a switch that got flipped — conversations began to feel more real, more raw. Where vanilla status anxiety would have made us cling to pretentions of an ideal existence, there is instead an honesty that leans on the knowledge that all of us are more alike than not, that we have the same fears doubts insecurities no matter what it looks like on the outside, that even if we can’t identify with the actions of another- we can still empathise with the need.

Personally, this year really drove home the fact that our relationships with other people are only lagging indicators of our relationship with our own selves. What we struggle to accept in others is often simply what we don’t yet have the courage to accept in our own selves. The hardest conversation to have requires an assembly of one.

As the year draws to a close, one of the things I’m grateful for is this intimate awareness of our shared realities, both in terms of our external context as well as our internal design. While we don’t yet know what a post-pandemic world looks like and when that might be, here’s hoping that 2021 sees us all live with a little more authenticity, a little more audacity, and the courage to make it all happen!