I hate being ordinary, and yet, no matter how much I fight it, I know I am. I hate being a face in the crowd and hate the fact that I’m going to die being a face in the crowd. The fact that I’ll die and people will eventually stop thinking about me is scary. But then, at the end of it all, we are all faces in the crowd. Nobody is immortal, and every person, no matter how great, will eventually die out of our memories. Maybe there will be a tomb, maybe there will be a public holiday. But even in the most selfish and practical sense, how many of us actually think of Mumtaz Mahal or thank of Shah Jahan for building the majestic Taj Mahal? How many of us are actually grateful that Gandhiji was born, hence the holiday on Oct 2? Sure, their names have gone down in history and will be passed down from generation to generation, but does anyone genuinely care?
I hate the fact that life is so fragile, so limited and so dispensable. And in this limited time period, you have scores of restrictions. Don’t do this, or that won’t be appreciated by the ‘society’. Alright, so I have one very ordinary and very limited life to live and I am supposed to spend half of it worrying about what other losers with even more ordinary lives would think about me trying to make my life a little more interesting?
Everyday, it just kills me to realize that someday I will fade into nothingness. Its not the dying that scares me, believe me, I could die today without caring less. It’s the facelessness that’s scary. How will I be any different than the millions that die everyday in some or the other corner of the world? I won’t be. That’s the only answer I find. Call me selfish and a self obsessed narcissist, but that really bothers me. Being just another face in the crowd bothers me.
I don’t like to think that someday I will get married and have kids and lead a very ordinary life like everyone else. What if I’m not okay with that? What if I’m not okay with my life revolving around my husband and children? What if that’s just not good enough for me? I know it’s just a phase. On some days, I find the thought of having a married life with a husband to come home to, very comforting. While on other days, I just don’t want to grow any older and take on those responsibilities and compromise my freedom. My sister once said to me, “the problem with you is that your teenage still hasn’t ended.” I guess I just refuse to grow old. I used to think that’s a good thing, I still would, if it wasn’t for the restrictions I keep meeting everywhere.
I find myself so confused at so many junctions. Some days I’m the rebel who wants to break all barriers and break free for good, while on other days I am the tired fighter who is about to raise the white flag. I remember being this same confused soul in my adolescence, always wondering, always pondering, always questioning and in the end, always lost. I alienated myself in my own fantasy land and drifted apart from people I called friends. I kept thinking, its just puberty, just teenage, when I grow up, I’ll grow out of it and find sense. But here I am all of 22, and still pretty dumbfounded.
There are so many things I want to achieve, to do before my youth forsakes me. I used to have a list about things I want to do before I turn 18, which was pretty foolish because I only sprouted wings after 18. Anyway, what happened to the list, I’ll never know, probably got destroyed in one of my ‘white flag’ phases. One thing I have learnt anyhow is that ‘someday is not a day of the week’. If there is something you always wanted, there is no better time than ‘now’. I wanted a guitar; I wanted to learn to play it. I didn’t have the funds and my parents wouldn’t buy me one. So I waited till I got a good job with a handsome salary and went ahead and bought me a guitar. People told me to wait until I had more time to devote to it, but if you say you have no time, you’ll never have the time. I always wanted a permanent tattoo but I knew my parents would be dead against it. Lesson 2, if you want something bad enough, give it your all and it WILL come to you. I got my wish; I have a beautiful butterfly adorning my back.
One thing I know is that I’ll never stop fighting. Fighting against stereotypes, fighting against gender inequality, fighting against limitations, because there is just one life and in this one life, the sky is the limit and I’ll die fighting for it. Who wants to look back on those years and wonder, where those years have gone?
