Crushes, Red Flags and Pretty boys giving you insecurities you don't have

 It was the spring of 2020. Winter was ending and the air was filled with the scent of new beginnings. My life reflected the changing weather, as that was the year I met him. My first big crush. Crush with a capital 'c'. A crush unlike any other I've had in the short life I had led till then. His name was Vicky and the only thing you needed to know about Vicky, was that he was the most gorgeous boy I had ever met in my life. He was my senior, tasked with guiding me on doing the audit of a company, and I was smitten. I was pretty much Cassie from Euphoria, waking up at 4 am doing my unhinged morning skincare routine, trying to laser the pimples on my face with my eyes and actually put on makeup for the first time, all in the hopes of turning into Aiswarya Rai overnight. I had never been more exited to go to my soul sucking job, my mornings filled with deciding what dress I was going to wear, perpetually daydreaming about imaginary scenarios where he would fall to his feet professing his mad love for me and beg me to go out with him. I kid you not when I say I was thinking about how we were going to have both a Punjabi and Telugu wedding ceremonies and deciding on the names of kids I did not want to have.

Research says that when a person develops a crush, their brain experiences a rush of dopamine and boy oh boy was I drowning in a cocktail of endorphins. I was looking at him not through rose colored glasses but full-on red colored ones. I had always thought of myself as a practical person with my head on my shoulders, not prone to flights of fancy and not someone who was swayed by a pretty face. That year I realized that I was indeed a hypocritical bitch who had her head in the clouds, prone to wild crazy imaginings, who absolutely gets swayed by a pretty face. 

It started out small, you know average Indian men things. I told him my second language in school was Hindi and he spent the next 10 minutes quizzing me on various Hindi words. While that was annoying enough, I just laughed it away, thinking it was the casual sexism of an Indian man who could not comprehend women being knowledgeable about something. I should have, however come to my senses when he made me speak in Hindi like a fucking parrot for his amusement the rest of the day. The next indication was when we were talking about gym (he had abs, I know this only because he had a shirtless gym selfie on Instagram, not because I was undressing him with my eyes, of course), and were commiserating about how hard it was to lose weight, he told me- ''Well you not too fat, just your hips are kind of-'' his hands going round. He was saying my hips were wide, large, round-take your pick. I had till then, never thought about my hips in any great detail, but that night all I wondered as I looked in the mirror was if my hips were unproportional to the rest of my body. Never in my life would I have thought I would sympathize with a billionaire, but that day I understood what kylie Jenner meant when she said she started her Lip Line cause a boy made her feel insecure about her lips.

And let's not even start on his homophobia. He said to me one day as we were eating lunch at the cafeteria. 'I like working with you. You know the guy who used to work here before. He was always talking in a strange way. He was you know--'

'What?'

'He was like that'

'Like what, I don't get it?'

'He was gay', he said, smirking, looking at me expectantly, asking me to laugh along with him.

'So, what if he was', I answered weirded out by that point.

'Ahh, you're one of those people', he replied shaking his head going back to his food.

One of those people? You mean a half decent person who respects people and their sexuality and not make fun of them? A decent human being basically? This was, I suppose the turning point in my attraction towards him. I always knew he as a himbo who lacked critical thinking skills, but I rationalized you can't be both pretty and intelligent, that would just be unfair. I excused a lot of his behavior in fact, just because he was handsome. I would bring him to the right path. A classic case of 'I can change him' you see.

It only now with a few years behind me that I can see the whole thing objectively. He was not a bad person, he was just a thoughtless, dumb idiot who lacked critical thinking skills and had just coasted through life due to his good looks and hot body. It was also a wakeup call for me. My skills at discerning a person were not as good as I had always thought it to be. I too had fallen under the spell of an exciting crush and had forgotten to take a minute to see a person for who they truly were. It has taught me that the next time I crush on a guy, not to be naming my imaginary babies but instead look closely at the other person and identify the red flags early on. 

Procrastination, failing exams and diagnosing myself with ADHD at 4 am

 Its 4am. There is a cup of steaming coffee in front of me. My phone is on silent to help me avoid the ping of notifications. I have my study schedule for the day broken down into small achievable goals so as to not overwhelm me. I have the pomodoro app downloaded on my phone to reward myself with breaks after I finish my aforementioned small, achievable goals. I looked at myself in the mirror this morning as I was brushing my teeth, reminding myself of all the reasons, I needed to finish the chapter on 'Quality control in the audit of financial statements' like YESTERDAY and how, if I didn't finish it today I would fail my exam, never get a job, never find love and die alone with cats eating my body because no one cared enough about me to bury my body. I have done everything Chat GPT told me to do, when I, in frustration typed in 'how to fucking force myself to study' yesterday. 

And yet, I sit there with my books opened, trying to force the muscles of my hand to lift the pen on the table, that somehow seems to weigh 100kg all of a sudden. I bribe my brain with coffee and beg it to cooperate in memorizing the chapter, but it deserts me when I needed it the most, instead looping the song 'APT APT' like, temples with loudspeakers, blaring bhajans during festivals. As I try to reign in my monkey brain, it suddenly replays the highlight reels of the last one year and the comebacks I should have said to the aunty who asked my how many more times I was going to fail my exams.

Like a theatre artist performing the same show every week, I too wake up at 4 am every day and play pretend at studying for my exams. It may be hard to believe, given my current situation, but there was a time when I actually used to good at studying. Sure, I was not making scientific breakthroughs or building a business and selling it for  millions of dollars before I reached puberty, like kids these days, but I did manage to get above 80% in all my tests (well all except for math, but whatever, math is the language of the devil) and was by all accounts considered to be a good student. This makes my current situation of having to implore my brain to do its basic function of reading the text and memorizing it even more perplexing because I used to be like 'chitti the robo' when it came to memorizing theory in school. Where did I go wrong? how did I lose my way from the path of academic excellence? had the goddess Saraswati abandoned me because I became an atheist after leaving school? 

Today as I'm contemplating my life choices and having an existential crisis, I spy in the corner of my laptop (which was open in case I needed to clarify my doubts, not for any other purpose of course) an innocuous bookmark of a reddit page appropriately titled by the past me as 'COME BACK AND READ' 2 years ago, which obviously I forgot all about, because who actually reads anything they book mark? Today as these storms of emotions roiled within me, I took the cowards path out by distracting myself with shit that I don't need in my life instead of trying to get to the root cause of what was causing my procrastination and actually --you know, better my life.

It was a reddit post by _bananagoggles_ about how she had always been the top student at school, acing all tests with like 2 hours of studying, breezing through her studies at school by putting in the bare minimum. Until of course it all came crashing down by the end of her first semester at college, when she was failing all the classes she took and was about to be expelled for non-attendance. And I was like that spiderman meme, 'Is this person me? and am I this person? Are we the same people?' She then talks about how she was diagnosed with ADHD after she went to the therapist to bring her careening, train wreck of a life back to the right track (her words, not mine), which obviously led me to the conclusion the of course I probably had ADHD too. Obviously, ADHD was the reason I was failing tests like _bananagoggles_. Obviously, ADHD was the suspect, the root cause of all my life problems. ADHD was the Joker to my Batman, an evil force in the world, that I had to destroy, if I was to live a happy life. So, I did what any sane person would do when they suspect they have some sort of an issue in life and went to google - ' Do I have ADHD?'.

Immediately google gave me a list of all the symptoms that people with ADHD suffer through. Difficulty sustaining attention-check. Easily distracted/bored - check, check. Avoidance of tasks that require sustained mental effort-check, check, check. After an hour of sleuthing about on the internet, I was absolutely convinced that ADHD was wreaking havoc in my life, and I did not even know it. One of the symptoms of ADHD was hyper focusing on random information and let me tell you, I have never felt more called out in my life- I had just then finished reading a book on Ghengis khan, Gengis khan people(granted it was a very engaging book which left me with a deep desire to become a nomadic shepherd living in the remote mountains of Mongolia, drinking yak milk and riding horses all day), instead of finishing the chapter on 'Quality control in audit of Financial Statement' which I should have finished like YESTERDAY. 

After wasting about half a day imagining scenarios where I give a TED Talk 10 years from now about how I turned my life around, realized my full potential and created a million dollar business after I got properly diagnosed with ADHD, I realize that I have wasted yet another day and still have not fucking completed 'Quality control in audit of financial statement' which I should have finished like YETERDAY.

Creating Cringe Birthday Videos for a person I don't know

The earth was peaceful. And so was my life. Until... Armageddon happened, destroying what was turning out to be a Saturday filled with peace and calm. My uncle from the states had made a surprising call to my father with an even more surprising request. Now what was it? you ask, that has sent me into enough of a shock to write a whole ass article about it? THE TRAUMA KIDS, THE TRAUMA. 

Apparently, his daughter was going to turn 16 soon and they were throwing a surprise party for her. They wanted all her well-wishers to send a video message with their birthday wishes and blessings to surprise her. Mind you, this was a girl I had never even thought of for the past 25 years (pretty much the entire time I've been alive) much less wished her well. Her whole family emigrated to the states when she was born, and no one has heard from them since. The only reason I know her name is because my father, in the throes of filial piety, every few months, gives me and my brother lectures about how we should talk more to our cousins and be friends with them because we share the same ancestors. Now, it's not like I think sending cute birthday wishes is cringe, I LOVE CRING, I AM CRINGE ITSELF, but what I can't take is her watching all those videos of everyone on her birthday and then wondering who this random uncle and aunty in the middle of it are. This is a legitimate fear I have because I genuinely don't think she has any idea who we are.

And my parents being the enthu cutlets that they are, were fully on board with this idea, exclaiming about how sweet this whole surprise was and deciding that they were going to send her the cutest video birthday wishes ever and that we were going to do it together as a family. Immediately my mother became chaos itself. what were we going to wear? who and all were going to see the video? should we wear jeans to fit in fit the foreigner's or stick to a traditional saree? where is the best lighting in the house? what Jewlery would look tacky? Someone would think Mani Ratnam has come into our house to direct the one and only Aishwarya rai--my mom. And there I was in the midst of it all bemoaning the loss of my mid-morning nap.

The attires of all three of us as we stood at the balcony recording the video pretty much summed up our attitudes towards the whole thing. My mother in a fucking saree, my dad wearing a good T-shirt but lungi in the bottom (cuz who is gonna see that anyway) and me in a kuthi without a bra and my hair wet from a head bath, directing them this way and that trying to fit all of us into the frame. After much discussion we had decided to shout, 'Happy birthday Hamsika' and wrap up the video neatly. Now you would think, well, that's just one sentence, might take maybe 1 minute at most to record the video and send it on its way to America, but no, not in my family.

 As I pressed record on the phone, all three of us at different pitches, voice levels and without a shred of synchronization screamed the words together like banshees come out of the wild. And I have no idea why my dad decided to give a thumb up and grin like a maniac as he said happy birthday. I also saw crows flying away, desperate to get away from the terrible noise we made.

 So, 1st attempt was a flop. We decided, like good little perfectionists that we were, to practice and then record the video properly. So, the next 2 minutes were spent roaming around the house, loudly chanting the mantra of 'Happy birthday Hamsika' continuously with such fervent dedication, like we were devotees at some cult and the leader was going to come down and bless us soon for our devotion. Really did take me back to my school bhajan days. We decided to tone down the energy a little and look less like kids on a sugar high and more like a lofty royal and calmly, with much dignity wish a composed happy birthday to my cousin. Take Two? We looked like we were about to be sent to the gulags if we did not wish her a happy birthday. 

After about half an hour, we finally found the perfect shot and I felt the bubble of freedom in my chest expand. But heyyyyy hang on, just like a person asks who Sita is after hearing the whole Ramayana, my father as we are wrapping up the shoot gets this spark of brilliance-- 'But we are supposed to mention -'Happy 16th birthday Hamsika' not 'Happy birthday Hamsika''. I try to explain to my dad, no one would care whether we mention the 16th birthday, literally no one, but somehow my dad decides that this is the hill he wants to die on and does not relent. He absolutely wants the amendment to be included in the video and just like that my bubble bursts.

I have, I realize about halfway into the shoot, said my cousin's name more times today that I have said the name of God my entire life. There are about 20 videos of us wishing her birthday with about 20 different angles, lighting and shadows. There is a heated debate going on right now about which video to send, because in some of them my mom looks fat, in some of them my dad looks puffy and in some of them I look like I haven't bathed. With the effort it has taken for me to film this video, I better hear about her shedding a tear and falling to her knees at how touched she was because of our message.

But because I am a fucking bitch and misery always loves company, I innocently ask my family--'Well my uncle said he wanted our whole family to do it, shouldn't we ask my brother to send a video as well?'

And I grin, like Satan reincarnated as I watch as my parents faces contort with horror and watch the chaos begin anew.