Breathing takes effort.

What if I just stopped?

What would it be like

to die, to sleep - and perhaps to dream

of a better world, a world where

I didn't drown under waves of despair

every fucking morning?

A world in which things worked out,

where trying and putting up a fight

made a difference,

where hope wasn't just a trick of the light,

where I didn't have to spend every alternate day

wanting to cry,

burning out slow, like the fuse of a bomb,

inching closer to a meaningless end.

Today's one of the shittier days.

There are days when I want to put up a fight

and days when I simply don't give a fuck.

I'm too angry to state the obvious

to the lost bystander, who doesn't have to live like this,

who has things handed to them on a plate.

I want to quit, but there's nowhere to go -

don't want to end it, because I have good reason to think

death is just all the pain of life

hyped up to infinity, forever and forever,

so I'd rather trudge on and on and on,

pushing a rock pointlessly up a hill

until my arms give way

or

or maybe

just maybe

it turns out I was right to hope,

right to keep walking,

and I break free at last.

I’ve been thinking about the end of the world, and the meaninglessness of human existence, and what to make for lunch tomorrow, and what I’ve found is that there are no answers.

Everything around me seems to be a swirl of activity: journalists tracing the rapid progression of this country towards a fascist dystopia, doctors fighting tooth and nail to contain the coronavirus, teachers struggling against bad internet speeds to reach their students, therapists drowning under an insidious mental health pandemic, farmers marching in protest through the heart of an empire, fresh graduates feeling their way through the corporate darkness. Me, a recruiter for an edtech company, looking at Excel sheets and slipping in existential questions to kids who are probably as confused and lost as I was a year ago.

And the realisation that I don’t want to be a hero. All I want is to read, and watch movies, and play with cats, and smell wet grass, and laugh at silly jokes, and – of course – sleep.

Of course, every time I scroll through Instagram, I feel this faceless mass of humanity staring at me, yelling: “Care! Do something productive! Spread awareness!” And there are times I bow under the pressure, and wonder if someone out there hates me for allowing myself to be placid.

Honestly, though, I don’t want to rush, or be constantly fiery, or make a show of being smarter or more socially aware than I am. What I want is to catch up on my own life – a life I feel I haven’t really enjoyed for a long time.

And this is why the memoirs of Nohadon, ancient king of Alethkar, come back to me, shielding me from the despair that sometimes spills out of my eyes and squeezes my guts, leaving me curled up into a ball for hours upon hours:

“The question,” she replied, “is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.”

Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive has been sitting on my digital shelves for years, but it’s only now, with the stillness of the lockdown, that I’ve had the time and energy to finally rediscover my old love for fantasy literature.

There is something so intricately human about Sanderson’s writing. It’s often been called a treatise on mental health, but I feel this could convey the wrong idea. Unlike most shows and books on the subject, which paint it as this irregularity in the human condition, Stormlight treats it as a fact of life. We’re all “broken”. We’re all flawed. We all have our demons, those bits of us we’d rather stuff away than love in the open: and by extension, we’re all Radiants in the making.

Caring, making the world a better place isn’t an end goal, it’s a process. A process that stays with us at every step of our lives, gnawing at us, pushing us to be more than what we are at the moment.

Back in university, I thought being a firebrand, a radical, a ruthless force of principled anger, would be enough to change the thousands of fucked up things in my life. I had little room for myself, for the voice that said I was as much as part of the world as anyone else – and this shut me off from feeling, from hoping, from caring, from simply being.

Much like Kaladin Stormblessed, I tried to channel all my efforts into shielding others from the existential pains I felt, going out of the way to be the sort of hero I wished I'd found in my own life. I attended protests; I raised slogans; I asked difficult questions - and I dealt with crippling bouts of anxiety (and maybe depression!), making it a struggle to even get out of my room on most days.

Like Shallan Davar, I masked my fears, putting on the face I thought would make me strong. Heck, I even gave it a name - 'the mantis.' I pushed my failures away, spent years denying that I could have done better, and isolated myself from the people that cared until - at last - the long awaited mental breakdown happened and my walls crumbled in on themselves.

The visceral pain that punctuates the sufferings of Sanderson's characters gave me a sense of home that I had been seeking for years. People who suffer from mental illness are usually told to cheer up, to run away from their problems and to be strong for others, but Stormlight allowed me to simply be - to show up to my life in the most authentic way possible for me at the time. That meant a lot of crying, scowling and feeling hopeless, but contrary to popular belief, it made me feel better, not worse.

Not going to give you any major spoilers, because I really want you to read Stormlight, but there's a line at the end of the third book that always stands out to me: I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one. Reading this after what felt like a lifetime in the tunnels of despair, I finally felt the fresh air of openness, the possibility of redemption, the chance to forgive myself for my flaws and do better.

I still wish I could do more. I wish I could find a place to call my own, a headspace that lets me do more for the people around me, a path less fraught with fear and anxiety and loneliness. I still search. I still build what I can. But the difference is that I do it as much for myself as for the outside.

Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.

#stormlightarchive

#mentalhealth

A man’s destination

is not his destiny.

– T.S Eliot

Weathering the deep of the night,

a lone warrior rages against the walls

that bar his ever-trod path.

Unseen rise these walls,

akin to those within the warrior’s heart:

Thin as glass, and as mocking in device,

cracking up with derision

as he thrusts his armored fists

again, again, again.

Numb to the agony,

shielded from the wings of Time,

deaf to the screeching foe he faces,

he fights his lost war,

bejeweled like a glowing star

before the tides of deathless darkness.

And as he hovers there,

abandoned in the cold,

the ice grips his heart

and he beholds before him

the one enemy no might will slay.

None shall stand when the demon stings,

they say, and at last

after an eternity of blood

the warrior drops to the ground.

His armor rent, his banners torn,

his razor arms lie broken, worn,

His helm, his famous helm of lore

now crushed to be the stuff of scorn,

No more battles, no brave deeds

shall the hero ever need,

His tale forgotten, legend lost

buried in the growing frost.

The end has come, the sun has set

the warrior has lost his will:

Finally the daylight shines

and I find the wasp on the windowsill.

Control is something we don’t like to admit we lack. Even now, as I type these words, I find myself automatically trying to sort out my ideas, to make sense of whatever it is I’m trying to express. Words have a power over me that I can never get my hands around. Order in the face of chaos, light in the face of ignorance, purpose in a world that does not know or care who we are. We want to believe we can explain it all, that somewhere out there lies the truth of why we are, where we come from, where we’re headed. Like with a math problem, we seek to solve the puzzles and unveil reality from the shroud of myth, to banish the subjective and reap the answers we hope will give us a reason to fight on, in the daily battles that constitute our hyped lives.

We want to believe we mean something, that what we’ve been doing for the last three thousand years of social and evolutionary history has had an impact on the world we see around us. It has, undeniably, at least as far as we can see, but that is precisely the point – to what extent can we claim to perceive an absolute reality, if there is one? We’ve walked the earth for less than three million years as Homo sapiens sapiens, and yet we put almost religious faith in what little we have seen and heard and smelt and felt in our petty existence. Science tells us the earth is millions of years old, that humanity is but a stitch in the fabric of time, but we are still ready to think that our limited perception can perceive, or has a chance of perceiving, the universe and its remarkable laws in the fullest sense, in a future that is conveniently placed at the other end of an infinitely long path of progression.

They say that we will have peace, and empathy, and harmony, “in the long run”, but what length of time could possibly encapsulate the transformation of a species, even one as ambitious as a hairless bipedal ape with the extraordinary ability to sense and question its own existence, into something more than what evolution has proven itself capable of? We know deep inside that such a time period is a myth, that ultimately nature wires its creations to wither and die, that in a larger scheme of things no species must be allowed to dominate indefinitely over all others, that the day will come when we shall be little more than bones and dust and memories woven into the fabric of reality – and yet we continue to delude ourselves that our lives are important, that our dreams and our aspirations and our morals and our knowledge matter at all. In the last two hundred years rationality has come to become a religion in itself, the worship of power; what we do not realise, as we dissect nature into ever smaller pieces, is that it is a religion fated to destroy itself. As we discover new laws, make newer connections, we walk steadily towards the realisation that a time will come when life itself ceases to have meaning for us, because we cannot explain it, no matter how much we learn.

We may know where life sprung from, we may know exactly how powerful it is, we may even know where it is heading, but we will never know why it existed in the first place. Why does a coin fall to the ground when you drop it? Gravity, of course! And you may go on to explain exactly how gravity affects matter and energy, at the atomic level if you will. But then I ask you again: why doesn’t it fly upwards when you let go of it? Assume a reality in which gravity was inverted, in which a dropped coin would fly back towards your palm rather than away from it. Would we find that absurd, or would we try to explain it? Explain it, of course, and document elaborate theses on how this anti-gravity works. Could we explain why gravity didn’t exist?

Ultimately it boils down to this. We can discover the laws of the universe, but we cannot change them. Nor can we explain why they exist the way they are, or why they aren’t their exact opposites. When you begin to question the validity of a parameter in a model, when you begin to question the validity of having parameters at all, you realise how bound to your perceptions of reality you are, how desperately you try to explain your sensations by attributing them to external factors.

What is this world, to you? You sense objects, and life, and emotions, and you try to label them in nice little jars so you can lock them up in your cupboard for you to peruse at your convenience, but the fact is, the world does not exist without you. Without you, this world would mean nothing. There would be no continuation of life or death. Concepts, cycles, paradigms – the very fabric of reality would tear itself to shreds if you failed to perceive it. A blind man does not miss the things he never sees. He may yearn to see them, as he has heard and smelt and tasted them, but sight means literally nothing to him. Imagine someone with no senses at all, someone born with absolutely nothing – no sense of self, no perception of the outer world, no understanding of the world he exists in. In fact, to him, he himself does not exist at all.

If I didn’t see the car when it hit me at eighty kilometers an hour, it didn’t exist. If I missed the eight-thirty Kallakurichi bus because I was busy relishing a plate of porottas, the bus never existed. If I truly imagined that the world was actually a place with no life in it, it would become so. Personal delusion, then, does not exist. There is no “absolute reality”. There is no “rest of the world”. There is just me, or you – the pronoun doesn’t matter, really – and what we choose to perceive. When we hear that selfishness is wired into the way we are, and that individual selfishness coupled with perfect knowledge is the route to paradise, it means nothing unless we believe it. Perfect knowledge does not exist, not even theoretically, from a rational point of view.

What, then, is our place in this Orwellian dystopia we call our world? Why do anything at all, when we know that whatever we choose to believe defines reality, when we realise that objectivity is a slave of subjectivity, the very “myth” it seeks to dispel? When I realise that the world means nothing after I die, why on earth should I try to be a good person, to live harmoniously and sustainably? When there is no meaning to anything, why exist at all? An existential crisis is all we can achieve by these questions, you think.

But that is not true. When you really understand the meaninglessness of reality, when you acknowledge that it’s all just in your head, that there is no “larger picture”, it may initially distress you, but in the end it empowers you. I seek pleasure and reinforcement, and thus I choose to believe I exist, that what I do and say and feel does matter. Truth is a lump of clay; it is ours to shape, each of us. Our perceptions are all that matter – so the way forward is to enrich those perceptions. To live in the moment, without fear or hatred of the reality we might find. In the reality I have defined for myself, the reality in which I type these reflections, morality is something that matters. Morality, and justice, and equality. I do not know why I have chosen to perceive these things. Perhaps one day I will perceive a reality in which extinction is the only goal. But in this reality, I choose to believe in rationality, and in an absolute truth.

I acknowledge the ultimate futility of existence, and yet I simultaneously choose to believe it has meaning, because by definition, reality shapes itself according to me. I know and accept that the world may have been created last Thursday, but I also choose to believe that Occam’s razor must hold true in order to explain anything that I perceive. Truth, delusion – science, faith – rationality, ignorance – all the same thing. I believe what I do not because I think it leans towards an absolute truth, but because I want to. Life, death; existence, nonexistence; knowledge, belief. They have meaning, in the end. Not because they are objective, but because I want them to. In the same way, my values, decisions, thoughts, aspirations – they do mean something.

Something only I can know.

My first encounter?

I am thinking

of a weeping candle;

Of shadows bloodying the silence

under a midnight moon;

Terrible blind eyes all around –

under the bed,

beside the desk,

holding my pen;

of hairs rising like tombstones

on the front of my arms;

of the sudden stillness

that punctuates the black gloom;

of the scratch of nether fingernails

and the paleness of an unseen watcher;

of the soft dread of whispered breaths

promising death and union

to the living waiting to die;

of the shocks that shiver down my spine

and vanish into the cobwebs;

of the love in that soul

ripped, mauled, savaged beyond recovery;

of the swallowed scream

that drowns in my throat;

as slowly, now, and now, and now,

I begin to feel its foul sighs

upon my bare neck.

The clock ceases its ticking.

A flash, a scar of yellow eyes

and it’s here.

Then I walk to the backyard

and see, in the mirror

a stranger’s grin.