They say heartbreak is the biggest form of agony, when you’re shattered, when your heart is in a state of grief and draped in sorrow. However, I would politely like to disagree.

It’s not heartbreak but being stuck in a state of limbo, where you know staying in a situation is as chaotic and heart-wrenching as leaving it, yet you are dwindling between the options of staying or letting go.

There’s every ounce of you that wants to leave and escape the scenario, but then there’s a strong portion within you that’s urging you to stay because you don’t want to hurt people. You don’t know the costs that will come after making the decision to leave, yet you are also living halfway in there, working up your nerves to make a decision, and again you fall into the rut of indecision and torture your heart with thorns, quench the thirst of sorrow, mellow it with torment.

The gateway between these two worlds can be life-changing, and as they say, every decision you make changes every other aspect of your life. The timidness clouds your judgment; you start second-guessing your decisions. You’re so clouded that you can’t distinguish your intuition from overthinking and rationalization of thoughts.

You look at yourself and at your hands. What do these lines tell about life? You try to take courage, decide, and conquer your fears, but here you are, yet again, falling like a diffident bird who has wings but is refusing to fly. You know you hold the key, but as you walk to unlock the door, your legs shake and your hands shiver.

You’re scared that I will keep weighing options, and spiral and stave myself to death like Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy. You want to not simmer yourself in such misery and...

You wake up every day thinking this is temporary, things are going to change, but the change is waiting for you to occur. It’s traumatic, torturing, gut-wrenching, yet you think, not today. Let’s postpone it, and I will look for the right time. You stay in the ocean like that with your breath held, waiting for some master to tell you to come up, to come up and release the air out of your lungs.

To sum it up :

My heart wrenches in the dark

My hands struggle to reach the mark

The limbo is tick-toking with sanity’s share

Covered with wrath, my lungs are aching for air

I am dwindling around a flower like a bee

Yet I am scared I will starve like a fig tree

The new version is dreading to be part of my body, yet my past version is aversely clinging to my bones – refusing to let go! The sense of familiarity is adding an intense layer of friction on the ground, and my steps are tumbling and I find myself back to square one. I look at myself in the mirror and the dead layer of old version/s is now so apparent on my skin, and every time my steps shake and I find myself lingering to the same point, the layer seems to grow dense. It looks ugly and is urging to shed away but there’s this ease in sticking to the same routine and cleaning it would need removing part of myself __ which every cell of brain’s part resists with ultimate force and it signals and plays a reel of all the things that can go wrong if I took a step forward. I start to feel that I am going to lack all the strength required to attempt this catharsis, and that I should prepare myself fully. I am also not ready to go deep underwater because I don’t know how to swim when I am not in control and I’d rather not swim than get drowned. And in the end why struggle so much, when I am maybe this way! Maybe I overestimate my potential, maybe I am being thankless, and maybe the grass isn’t going to be greener on the other side. Maybe a part of my brain is trying to find a thrill, and if I cut off this relationship, I am just someone who gave up, and I learnt that you got to try and fight for it. And most of all, I am afraid to let go the castle I have carved and covered myself under, it protects me, shelters me, so what if it’s getting dusty and musty. Yes, so what, if I don’t know the world on the other side of castle, what if it’s filled with strange tyrannies, beasts and mishaps,... what if there’re flowers,…. “Hush,” the brain again said. I am not prepared to face what’s unseen, unheard, unanticipated. We got to control things, otherwise anxiety will take the best of our lives. Yes, I agree. I put down my pen and yet broke another promise I made to change life for better, because I am comfortable like this, whether it’s suffocating me but it’s not unknown. I like and prefer this better. I saw myself again in the mirror, and it’s dusty and I still see myself immersed in dead lift of layers letting to go and it’s not pleasing to eyes… But… “We’ll make the changes,” the brain said… The reflection in the mirror laughed and said, “Here we go again.”

Reality ambushes me the moment my alarm buzzes — sudden but routine. My brain dreads it anyway, and cortisol surges through my body before I’ve even opened my eyes. I get up, move through the necessary morning rituals, get ready for the office but an uneasy sensation trails me. A consistent anxiety that things might turn for the bad. A definitive restlessness cups my body.

I unconsciously reach for the hairbrush to bring my hair into order, but my brain suddenly issues an alarm: brush from the left hand instead. Going against it, apparently, will result in something disastrous. What disaster? My brain doesn’t say. It just insists.

While brushing, I notice a few strands of grey. I’d first spotted them two weeks ago — but their volume has grown since. I open Google to ask why, and the AI concludes: stress.

Some moments - even small ones - are like a time bomb. And this one is humongously yelling at me to stop stressing, to stop working up my nervous system. I take it as a sign to actually evaluate the reality, instead of just living inside it.

As I shut my apartment gate to head out, my brain - for once - isn’t the distasteful amalgam of cluttered, overarching thought. It’s at ease. And in that ease, a different voice speaks — the one that usually gets drowned out:

Is this enough? You have to make the conscious decision to stop indulging the overthinking, stop stressing your body. Grey hairs. Bags under the eyes. An apathetic outlook. Restlessness. Unpleasant feelings and anxious nerves circling you like weather. Is this how you want to live?

The thought is loud enough that I look around, half-expecting the tram full of strangers to have heard it too. They haven’t. They’re minding their own business, carrying their own weather. And so the voice presses harder: why don’t you decide otherwise?

The cage of tangled thoughts ,the distorted realities and harsh-world truths that keep tampering with the image in my head- has jailed me for a while now. Do I feel free? No. There’s a suffocation to it, one that’s quietly been draining the life out of me. And twenty years from now, is this the version of my life I want to remember : A walking corpse of suffering?

I put on a pleasant beat in my head and say it plainly: suffering is a decision I make. Not suffering is also a decision I get to make.

Do I rot in my head, or garden it? That’s up to me. Not easy - but absolutely something I can work on.

Wasting the years of my youth shackled to anxious, unpleasant thought would be the greatest disappointment I could hand myself. The problems won’t disappear — they’ll still smudge the day. But as I walk toward the office and through the gate, I make a pact with myself:

If there’s nothing I can do about it, or nothing I’m going to do about it - I won’t entertain the thought. Maybe that means procrastinating on a few things. But for now, it sits better this way.

If I can do something about it, or I’m going to - I will.

And as I wave ciao to a colleague, I ciao my old brain’s orders too.

Bring it on.

Sometimes problems come, not singlehandedly, but they bump one after one right across my face. I am in the middle of managing a family crisis, and boom — now I realize I need more finances to manage things. In the midst of handling that, my relationship(s) don’t provide me any solace. My body and mind are hardly managing to regulate me, and with all this overwhelmingness, I want to run to the jungle and become Buddha 🧘.

Racing mumbo jumbo of thoughts doesn’t help. When I actually let thoughts just pass and sit with them, I realize that these challenges open horizons to new perspectives and solutions. Probably, my life and my desires and all the manifestations I’ve been doing ask for a different version of myself, and want the change.

It takes a change of perspective to change yourself. Many successful people look at these challenges as opportunities. What I realize is dwelling on a problem doesn’t lead me anywhere — it only hijacks the capacity of my brain to think sanely and form worst-case scenarios in my head. I know I can wallow in my pain and take my human time, but what really changes the scenery of my catastrophic mind is tracking all the steps to rid myself of the problem, and swim across the ocean by taking small dives rather than trying to perfect myself in every possible way.

And these difficulties act like a blessing in disguise. Because after that challenge is over, I’ve grown as a person already, who now knows that I possess the unwavering power to overcome obstacles in life. I move on into my life with refined strategy, bravery, experience, and courage.

The melancholy has paved its way back to the soul. It feels like now it’s time to romanticise the aches, the hollowness, the dread, the emptiness, the chaos — because why not? Why are only the glamorous parts worth the exposure? When we embrace the best-looking parts of ourselves, are we cherishing them — or simply telling others that all is set and admirable?

Anyway.

The weather is doing full justice today, nourishing the infant grass shoots. The overcast sky completes that slim part of pluviophileness layered within me — the dark clouds looming over buildings, shifting the colours of plants and flowers with the sky’s changing light.

The drizzles alternating with moderate showers, washing the roads, removing their muskiness. The flowers cleansed, bright, yet characterised with gloom.

It occurs to me that all of this engraves a deep fascination — urging the soul to declare the darkness a celebratory move. To put on the record player, let the emotion-evoking, intense laments fill the room, and sink into the absolute worship of these cascading moments.

All we are ever taught is to relish in joy, to find the glimmer of hope, to turn towards the light. But what about the processing of the deeper things — the melancholic, the dark, the anxious, the heartbreaking? How do we ever arrive at genuinely savouring the good if we haven’t sat with the difficult? You cannot avoid these feelings. You cannot be happy for every hour of every day. Harsh times will occur — so, then, let us idealize those as well, experience them to their fullest extent, and realize there is a profoundness to both sides of this tide.