There Should be Hope, A Return to Writing
“Are you going to send out the newsletters again?” An Instagram comment on my presently defunct account had asked me a few days back. Another day, one of my friends who I had stopped talking to, complained that I had removed her from the mailing list of my newsletter. In the past three years, I have given up on more things than the ones I have persisted in. I have slowly disappeared, in a culture that demands constant visibility. The integral question which anyone who reached out to be about my newsletter, always seemed to be asking was, “Are you going to write?” It is a question I have asked myself multiple times in the last five months, too. The voice that asks it has changed from a slight nudge of discomfort, to self hatred against the inability to form a coherent sentence. You are not writing, it says. And when you are not writing, you are not living. It concludes.
Every time, someone would come up to me and ask me if I would be writing again, I found the idea aversive. This constant stimulation of an insatiable invisible audience, which was accentuated by algorithms playing with your insecurities, always seemed like an anathema to the creative process. I existed nowhere in the wild landscape of internet “content” and yet it always felt like I was at the mouth of the gargantuan monster, who would eat me up if I did not have anything to feed it. For the longest time, I held this aversion to the internet and to the internet audience who wouldn’t read anything meaningful, and created from this place of hatred. The thesis of hatred, however is, that it is expansive if not mediated with kindness or love. It takes a lot of space, and often finds itself imitating the similar patterns that it started as a rebellion against. The paradoxical place, I found myself in after a long time of hating an invisible monster, and finding other people who shared the same hate was that we were the invisible monster too. We were existing in a system that created these superstructures of egoism, where you were trapped hearing your voice over and over again. Repetition does not always mean reaffirmation. The critiques of the internet culture still held true. However, there was still a space you could build for yourself. The space is constantly getting smaller and smaller, yet this immense tool of infinite connectivity offered little pockets of solace in an alienating culture.
That was when, I started this newsletter. I wanted this to be a place where I wrote without shame or judgement. I wanted to transmit ideas—incredibly vague and convoluted ideas, which often don’t make sense to me if I read them after three months, yet I wanted to be honest, and that is where the problem began. It is often difficult to be honest with yourself. It was easier to hate the internet, and the audience, and the culture but it was difficult to ask myself, “Are you going to send out the newsletter again?”
My best friend and I often talk about the creative process as an object of hatred. It kills you when you are not doing it, and a major part of doing it is not doing it. To sit down, and actually write something requires a long time of just sitting down and not writing anything. In those moments of not writing anything, there is always the fear that words might never arrive. And it never gets easier, no matter how much you do it. I am always fearful that these are not my words and that the person who writes is not the person I am. So, I have been patiently waiting. We have talked more about the creative process in the past few years, than actually worked at it. However, it is important to share our collective anxieties. The belief that there is some respite, some mutual collective which not just shares our sorrows but also provides a perspective we could only look at in our shared vulnerabilities, is important. Hence, when my best friend told me, “You have to give yourself time for the ideas to arrive,” I retorted by saying, “I have been waiting for five months. There are no ideas or thoughts.” It did not solve either of our problems, yet it exposed a truth I was not ready to accept. I did not have ideas, or thoughts. It prompted me to ask the broader question, which was, why did I not have ideas? It was then when I realised that I was not experiencing the world. I was, in fact, stuck in a room.
From inside the room, it often felt like the whole world was grieving, and in all that grief, you had to find hope.
You are not told, whether the hope lies inside the room or outside it. Rather, with time you realise that hope is elusive. There are little moments you’ll inhabit hope, in times of grief. And then just like grief, you will carry it in its perpetuity through nostalgia. You will realise that both grief and hope is a struggle against loss, of holding onto something that is constantly fading. In fact, it is the persistence that offers its meaning. I am trying to persist lately, in most things I do in life.
Hence, when a few days back I wrote something after a long time on my Instagram account, and I was asked, if I will be sending out the newsletter again, the question struck me. It was, for me, essentially a question of hope. I had not read a lot this year, nor had I written anything. I have been living my life, from one day to the other, without perpetuity. There is no memory that persists, no experience that can be transmitted in its mundane immensity. There was neither grief nor hope, and hence there were no words. When you let grief and hope enter your life, words arrive too. So I went back, and read the things I had written this year. I lived the memories of the mornings which I had spent with the dream bird. I revisited Sunday nights, that felt like fever dreams. I let the grief of the moments enter. I let the hope that I could gather, to live through the grief arrive. I realised that I will write more newsletters eventually. I realised that there should be hope and love, if we have to strive through life, and you have to share it with other people.
Dear Reader,
If you have made it this far, you have shared a part of my life with me. I do not offer you ideas, or prescriptions but a place to find solace in not being alone. I believe any story can only be shared, when we are honest about it, and I believe it is only in our honesty that we can reach each other. I hope there is something you could take back from it, something that made you feel that the human experience is universal. Strive for hope and grief. Remember things, in their perpetuity and know when they need to be forgotten. Memories are what make us.
Write to me about your memories, and I will try to respond on why we should keep hoping, in times of grief.