A reason to live; a method to die

Strength before weakness

It is easy to say “Strength before weakness” on the good days. On the days you can get out of bed: it is easy to say positive things. It is easy to make yourself happy and cheerful and pretend you have got life under control on the good days. Strength is a needed but absent thing on days when you don’t know how to be a person.

It takes courage to explore the world but it takes courage to explore yourself too. It takes wisdom and age to not be slave to your emotions but the same wisdom is required in the knowledge on when to express them. I do not know how to live in the middle and this is what broke me.

I am about to turn 30 has miserably failed to live in the middle. I have failed to be an average adult. I want extraordinary. I don’t want to spend my life in house plants or meal plans. I can’t strive for the middle**. I have kept my ambition and real desires under wraps thinking if I express them my happy bubble will be lost. My contentment would go away but now I say, fuck contentment: give me euphoria.

This would be called “placist” but I could spend my entire life being content in a village in Italy with little more to do that cook, clean up and indulge in food and wine. That is a life I can see myself living. Not in the future but in the present. Not when I am retired but when I am young. I want to walk unnecessarily in jaw drop beauty of mountains and prance around in the wild. I want to be forced to learn the language there and build a home in Montepulciano. It is a desire for what life should be.

One shouldn’t settle on the important stuff. You can settle on the restaurant to eat at, the dinner, the quality of your bedsheet, the TV size and even the amount of money you get paid. You should not settle for a bad night sleep, a partner you don’t love, work that doesn’t make you want to do more of it and people who don’t build you up. You should not be allowed to settle for that.

What I have found is: I am happy to settle days without exercise but I am not about to settle on work that does not interest me.

Now that I have puked out a lot of random thoughts which I have greatly overthought, I would get straight to my point. I am a person of action. I would like to act. The more I do, the less I think. The less I think, the more free I will be. Last weekend, a good mix of hormones, indoorness, laziness and disinterest made me give up living. NO, I didn’t attempt suicide but living is different than being alive.

Each day is a tiny fragment of your life and you wouldn’t be who you are without each of those fragments. Doing deep dive into your psyche is great. Unearthing emotional luggage you have carried for years is awesome. However, the important thing to remember is: you can’t just break and not build it back up.

Do not fear the unknown and do not be afraid to break. Be afraid when you do not build anymore. The shiny and new will eventually disappear. It is important to learn how to not settle on brokenness.

However, getting back to the point. I am not in Italy. I do not get a village house with nothing but fresh air and the sound of rain. It aches my heart to not hear that. It is cold there but it is home there. I can still smell the chimney smoke. Everyone has a home and that is mine.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my apartment. I love my terrace. I love that I have this place in a city like Hong Kong where I still get to go out every day even on days I don’t leave. The thing I found so astonishing is that I know the important stuff and yet I faff around so much in the unimportant. I spend hours and days and years on the unimportant when I should focus all of my energy on the important.

I could’ve told you in this post how I didn’t get out of bed for 5 days. Not my body, but my mind gave up. I was tired of playing house and watching TV shows and cooking dinners and looking at other people’s lives. I was tired. Not as much physically but mentally. I was tired of pretending to be an adult when being a responsible adult is not part of the Jyoti plan. Lighting candles and finding peace is not part of Jyoti life plan. It is a side quest but it cannot be the journey I want to take.

So, after 3.5 weeks of not drinking. I had wine. Then, the next day I had more wine. I am not proud that I drank for 3 days, I am not proud that I overindulged to the maximum but I know with more sureness than I did before that I will never be at the place I was last Sunday.

The place of a reason to live or a method to die.

I recover from alcohol and physically enduring tasks but my mind will not recover from the middle again so, I will not be living in the middle anymore. I will focus on pulling off impossibles. Instead of taking easy road, I’ll do the difficult things. Right or wrong,

I will do the things where I know I am not settling for a bad night sleep just because it is time to go to bed.

I am Apoorva Jyoti and I refuse to settle right now*

*only a fool commits to forever

**the buddhist middle (figure out the meaning yourself, you humdinger)