Life begins at 40 (or 10. or 20. or 30. or 50, or 60 or whenever you want it to)

 I am a forty something who feels like a twenty something because of my ability and willingness to learn and grow. I learned to swim at 25, to drive at 36. I am learning Japanese at 41 because I just want to know the language and not for any career opportunities. I am learning to be alone at 41. Life ends when fate decides it would end for you but life begins when you decide it begins for you. What more is there for me to learn? Maybe music, something that I have always loved as a listener but never attempted to learn. In fact when I thought I could, I was discouraged and told by people who were gatekeeping the only things they have to cling to, to forget about it, that it was not for me, that I wasn't good enough. But was anyone good enough before they decided they needed to do something or go bust? When you are young life holds a lot of promise, a lot of opportunities, and in turn a lot of confusion. Sometimes you get lost in that fog, end up following roads that lead to dead ends. And when you reach that dead end you find that too much time has passed and you are not young anymore! At that point if you give up then it is the end of it, however if you decide to turn back and find another road then life begins at whatever age you make that decision. Time is relative, time is only another dimension like length, breadth or width. So when you stop letting time define you, like you don't let your height or girth or weight define you, that is the time when your life begins. Death does not distinguish between a 20 year old and a 60 year old, so why should we? 

Slump

I run out of inspiration when I run out of pain. I am slipping again, I am not introspecting, I am falling into old patterns. This time I am standing outside myself and looking at myself falling in, yet I don't know how to stop myself. All it took is some calm and comfort and hope reared it's head yet again. Hope is what I need to let go of. Will I manage to find my way back to the truth or will I need to crash and burn again to land up in that dark place where I need to be. Watch this space to find out. 

Rebirth

 Coming back to write again after 8 years. I deleted all my old posts some time in the past, only one post of 2017 is left behind. I don't know why I have not written in all these years. I found my movie reviews blog still intact and it surprises me how intensely I used to watch movies at one time and then found the headspace to write detailed reviews. These days movie watching has been reduced to trying to watch something, only to be distracted by my phone and in the end everything being just a garbled mess in my head. Writing reviews is out of the question, because a) I haven't even watched the movie that attentively and b) Even if I wanted to write the words just don't come!

So what brings me back to write again? I have to admit that through all these years there have been several instances where I decided to start writing again; case in point me deleting all my old posts to have a "fresh start" somewhere in the past; but never having gone beyond a single post or two. There is no guarantee that this time won't be different. But I want it to be. I need this, I need something for myself as everything I have been and become through that last 2 decades of my life is challenged. 

When I was just a child, maybe 13-14 years old, I once came to a deep realization that I easily got influenced by other people. If I was around someone I really liked, I would change my entire personality to become more like them. My thoughts would echo their thoughts, my beliefs their beliefs. Teenage me found that very distressing, as I remember, and set out on a mission to "find who I really was by myself." Unfortunately while that plan was just shaping up I met the boy who would go on to become my husband. So even while basking in the glory of "being seen" for the first time in my life, I did what I always did, I lost myself, slowly, steadily, over the years, to this point today where I don't even know which thoughts are my own and which are shaped by the company that I keep.

But I am being too self critical, I am a very very different person than my partner is. I grew up with him and even with my mirroring personality, somewhere down the line I managed to grow my own. And I guess that is perhaps the reason why my marriage is falling apart right now. I held on to him through storms big enough to be called super typhoons and survived. But in doing so I clung so hard that whatever was precious slipped through my hands. I realize today that in 23 years, my partner has never really seen me, even though I used to believe that he was the only one who really saw me. He doesn't want to see me, he is too burdened by his own load to want to share another's. I don't hold any misgivings towards him but I am middle aged now and sometime or the other I need to stop waiting for anyone else to see me and see myself I guess. As the end keeps getting closer than the start I need to figure out once and for all who I am and what I think for myself, not the version that someone else made of me, not the version that the world made of me. 

Writing was always a big part of my life before I lived with my husband. I wrote poetry, I wrote prose, I wrote movie reviews, I wrote travel blogs, I wrote public blogs where I met some people I am friends with even now, I wrote secret blogs which no one has ever read, I wrote on tumblr, on blogger, on livejournal... then all of a sudden I gave up writing. My evenings were spent with people, not my laptop. I lost the drive to write and then slowly things to write about and finally the ability to put my thoughts into words. Over the years, in times of crisis I have tried to come back to writing but always fell back into the same cycle of burying the crisis and trying to be the same person I got used to being. But it has been too much for me finally, at least I hope this is it, that I finally am able to break out of the (rather fragile) structure my life has taken up over the last 2 decades. 

I will try to write more, I hope this will be a part of the catharsis. I hope this won't be a one off post only for me to log back in 6 years later wondering if this is something I needed to do. I wish I finally am able to break this cycle. I don't know who and what I am trying to be. To be honest 41 is too late an age to be trying to find oneself and be somebody and not even in the Hollywood romantic comedy kind of way! I know I won't be that protagonist who breaks out of her middle age rut by finding her creative voice/ sexuality and in the end, have the man of her dreams telling her that for him the sun shines out of her ass! Rather I will live an ordinary life, failing and trying, while things around me keep falling apart all the time. But the key word here is trying and that is what I am trying to do here. So maybe, this is not a rebirth, rather a moulting. I need to shed my skin to be something else because it's the time. Time may change me, but I can't trace time...