The World' and Leaving Our Mark

Today I was feeling unusually down and depressed. You know that vulnerable state you find yourself in every now and then, where you don’t know what’s happening and can’t figure out how to make it hurt less? Yeah that. I remembered this piece I’d written a few months back and turned to it for comfort.

Fellow broken people, I see you. I know your pain. I understand the days where just getting out of bed is painful and pasting on a fake smile takes up all your soul. I hear your sobs when you are alone and no one is watching. I know of the desperate tears and pleas for help that go unanswered, often unheard. I know of that moment when life seems like a noose tightening around your neck ever so slowly, till breathing feels like dying.

I want to tell you something.

You are not alone.

We are all shadows of the people we were or the people we could have been.

We start off with these high hopes and grand dreams of Changing The World’ and Leaving Our Mark and whatever else that caught our fancy before Life dunked us head first into the world and water boarded us with reality, numbing all other senses till surviving became the lasting concern, the only instinct. And Life keeps at it, throwing hurdle after hurdle, tragedy after tragedy, till you abandon the part of you that wants to reach out and hold someone’s hand to ease your/their pain; till you break the belief in the heart of your heart that we are meant for something bigger than what we are made to believe; till you stop seeing humaneness in humanity.

The uncomfortable truth is that we were all broken. Either by the people around us or by the circumstances we found ourselves in. Cracked if not completely broken. Cynical and mistrustful, we expect a pit of snakes waiting for us at the end of the rainbow instead of a pot of gold. We set filters in our head to stop the world from getting to us, from seeing the real us. We see easy smiles as evil intentions, hands reaching out are percieved as attempts to pull us down, and somewhere along the road, we forgot to stop and smell the roses.

We are broken people and it’s time we recognize that. Not to celebrate this brokenness and wallow in self-pity because we are ‘unfixable’, but to realize that we were broken together and we can heal together. We don’t have to shoulder the heavy boulder that is compounded pain and crippling self-doubt on our own. There are others on this bone-jolting, teeth shattering ride with us. And the more we reach out and help each other, the lighter the boulder gets till one day it becomes a tiny pebble that fits in our palm, a pebble that we can fling far away into the horizon of our past.

Let’s stop romanticising our pain and dwelling in our brokenness. Let’s learn to look beyond the cracks. Let’s detox our existence of cynicism and selfishness and make compassionate living and loving our default state. It won’t stop hurting immediately, but the world will surely become a slightly more liveable place.