#1: What Is Saving You?

Ello ello lovely phools,

How’s our heart?

here’s a phool for you

Whenever the number of unread emails in my inbox reaches a count that threatens to drown my will to live — especially when hiding from a deadline or putting off an urgent-important task — I sit down, draw in a deep inhale, and exhale in determination to organize.

Gmail sorts the emails into five tabs - primary, social, promotions, updates, and forums. Classic-basic categories. I start with Social (aka LinkedIn vomit) - easy-peasy, delete-easy. Next, scroll through updates from Google Groups that I may or may not remember being part of in Forums, most of them unread, unopened, select all, delete. Updates houses a pile of clutter hiding the few emails that must be kept, I scroll, select all, unselect the one to keep, delete the rest.

Promotions is work. I sift through countless spam and scam and garbage, star the precious substack emails carrying precious newsletters that I have been wanting to be in the right mind space to indulge in, mark them unread, and delete everything else. The starred emails whoosh to the primary, wait for me there.

I end up with an unread abundance in the Primary tab. I create folders: “to read (mm/yy)” (yes, they need to be dated and yes, there are several of them), and move all those emails that I want to savour into it. Work-related emails with resources, invoices, and contact details are dropped into the folder I call kaam. Another folder to hold all the drafts/nuggets which I typed into my phone and emailed to myself but never read again. And another folder for all the emails between me and my therapist I reread often.

I respond to the handful of emails I should have responded to hours/days/months ago. I open newsletters that call out to me from the inbox and bite into substack-delivered-deliciousness. I stumbled upon this question on this procrastination-fueled journey a few weeks ago. Where we met- I do not remember anymore.

What is saving you?

Right now, today, this season, this quarter, this year, this life?

This question is my newest favorite brain-tenant.

Some days I ask myself it, think through moments, and list answers. Some days, certain moments meet me as an answer to the question, without me asking.

Asking it nudges me to honor interdependence — all the ways in which earth/we/nature/beings touch each other’s lives. Answering it gives me wings to find roots; reminds me that I belong. And share it here as an antidote to erasure and forgetfulness.

Saajan Fernandez writes to Ila in Lunchbox, I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to.

And I don’t want to forget.

I hope to slip these dispatches of delight and love into your inbox every few weeks - sometimes in stories, sometimes lists, photos, music, links to gems on the internet, art, anything, everything.

Let me tell you what is saving me

slowly, over several stories and cups of chai and days

share with you excerpts from this growing-incomplete-list-in-progress

Today, let me tell you about filling out a google form - why did it save me?

I have two default responses when it comes to decision-making.

One. I freeze at the question, unable to un-plait pros and cons and contexts and feels and logistics. I go blank- my foggy brain colors my face in confusion. I stew in the ickiness of not knowing, put it off forever until I cannot anymore afford to, or until someone else decides for me.

Else. I respond with YUSSSS!! Out of love, excitement. Because WHY NOT?

I have three profiles in the Chrome browser. At all times, in every profile, I have at least four windows with too many tabs open in each. Some wait to be read, some for me to act on - applications, submissions, google forms. Most of them open for long enough for me to forget why when or how I got there in the first place. A heap of mini and major decisions to make.

The google form to sign up for a memoir writing workshop stayed open for weeks before I went on a decision-making/tab-closing spree one night I found myself brimming with full-of-life energy.

I filled it and hit submit. Because, why not?

But really, why?

---

I love stories, seek them and tell them and write them. And fact and fiction and truths spill over into each other.

I started writing online in hiding. It was easier to whisper to strangers - no eye contact, no scanning the listener’s face and body for cues which I inevitably tend to misinterpret, no interruptions, no distractions. I was 16 years old then. A blog-sphere was being built on the web for people to connect over stories. Blogger and Wordpress became my favorite places to be at. Very few people in my ~real~ life knew about the blog. I wrote. Always left traces of myself in the tiny pieces of fiction and poetry I posted, never having to explain anything beyond the written word.

I love stories, seek them and read them and stitch maps out of them to help me navigate life and living and world. Time and geographies and lives and differences and one-ness of the living spill into each other as I found home in fiction. I read. Take words to heart.

Very few memoirs make their way to my reading list. Reading Anne Frank seemed to be something everyone expected of every child who buried their noses in (non-school-related) books. I tried several times, gave up every time. Ended up giving up on everything that is not fiction.

I was 21 or 22 years old when I came across a book review that made me sprint to amazon and splurge INR 246 from the Vishu kaineettam wallet I kept away from spending. It was a thin book. Heavy, nonetheless.

In Why Remember, Why Tell? - an essay on being a reluctant memoirist- Gayathri invites you to peek into the story behind the story.

“When I was 31, I was absolutely sure that I would not live to be 32. I knew I would be missed, but I also believed that the world would move on. It felt as though my story was just another leaf in the rainforest, that it would not matter at all whether it was said or heard or not. I am now 44 and I have come to realise it matters, both the telling and the listening. Unlike what many people quickly assume, I did not write a memoir to get things off my chest and as therapy, nor did I write it to clear the air and showcase suffering. Writing is not an activity; it is who I am in the world.

I forgive you, were the last words that came to mind just before my father’s body was taken to the morgue. It took three years and a memoir to know what those words really meant.

I remember you.”

I sobbed through the 190 pages of prose- it choked and punched and hit me, I am tempted to say. But unlike being choked, punched, and hit, reading If I Had To Tell I Again didn’t take me away from myself. Instead, it melted something frozen inside of me.

I read a lot. Make comrades out of women writing their lives, carve out talismans from their words.

---

I am easily distracted. I offer this information countless times — as a diagnostic criterion, a medical fact, an explanation, or an apology. Not untrue. Not fully true.

I find so much in the world to pay attention to, stare at, understand, relish. How do you not honor the craving to connect with the world? I pay too much attention to too many things at once, delight in the absurdity and beauty of all of it.

If you are made to shrink yourself-not speak or make a sound or question or take up space; silence becomes home. You learn there is safety in not extending yourself, and keeping yourself to yourself.

Add a dollop of inability to comprehend the norms of conversation — the superficiality and hollowness of it, the compulsive avoidance of saying what you mean to and meaning what you say, the burden of having to sift through untruths and cryptic codes that say nothing. Meetings that could’ve been emails, emails that should've not been sent or written, opinions and thoughts that would have been best if kept to themselves or not existed in the first place.

I understand questions, can offer answers, truths. Lying is an acquired skill. I master it too. Even when it irks me.

How are you?

I am okay, I am good, I am fine.

Why ask if there is no space to hold answers? Why dance around words?

Tell me about it.

Why do you not tell me what you want to know about it?

Tell me about yourself.

How do I know what you want to know about me?

There is always too much to pay attention to, too many to tend to, needs and demands of others to cater to. Too much to process. Leaving very little of me to perceive myself.

I excel in looking away from myself.

Writing in the first-person pricked my skin. Passive voice and third-person perspective let me point outward, sneaking in only parts of me.

I gorge on personal essays — read lives of not-white/not-men/not-cishet writers.

I write, distract readers from myself through stories.

But I am also a fangirl.

---

We all have an internet-someone(s) whom we adore and follow (everywhere online)- sometimes over years- and want to share time with.

I love Nisha Susan. The wit and sass and heart that her writings effortlessly carry. Watch, and you will know.

In 2021, Ahmedabad University advertised a short, month-long course on personal essay writing. Taught by Nisha. I signed up instinctively. The course demanded an output - a personal essay nurtured and written throughout the course.

On the third last day of the third week, a day before the deadline to submit the first draft of the essay, I gave up on the sit-down-to-write-till-words-find-you dictum. I walked-hopped in nervousness around Kalkaji market, circled countless almost identical blocks.

A. was on a call with me. Patient and familiar with my habit of screaming questions at the world to find answers from within. I kept asking him,

WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO WRITE ABOUT MY LIFE?

At some point later that night, I wrote.

I have fun writing. I pack it away after the course is over. Send it to an essay competition - because I am a fangirl of the brilliant writer who was involved in organizing the contest and couldn’t write anything new before the deadline. The essay wins a prize, finds lovely humans who find me on Instagram to tell me about what reading it felt like.

I write, yes. Fiction. Not memoir, no. This essay happened because of a course I attended. I explain over and over.

Yet. There it was. In 2023. May.

A google form to sign up for a memoir workshop staring back at me from the laptop screen.

I wanted to write and could not bear the loneliness of wanting to write and being unable to write. I wanted a community to think, feel, and write with. To play peek-a-boo with vulnerability, unravel the shame of the lives lived.

I wanted to be gently witnessed.

I am a fangirl of the facilitators; Natasha and Raju, the softness that marks their craft. Memoir or not, I wanted to be in the presence of this softness.

I filled out the form expressing my interest in joining the workshop - asking for a discounted fee, unsure if that would be possible, definitely sure that I could not afford to and would not join it otherwise. I was too distracted by the anxiety of asking for support to consider the possibility of disappointment.

It was a first for me.

Acknowledging a need, asking for help, offering someone the chance to help. Committing to not mask myself with fiction, refusing to look away from myself.

Both were attempts at vulnerability.

Filling out the google form saved me from a lifelong habit of abandoning myself.

This story ends here; it is not about what happened after - what the workshop gave me, the love lightness solidarity that found me, the gorgeous stories of gorgeous people that make Padlet and Slack feel like home. That story deserves a home (post) of its own. Another week, soon.

you, whoever you are

on your walk / after settling into your bed, lights off, cozy / while sipping coffee / stirring bubbling gravy / scrubbing pans / breathing in intention / filling excel cells with numbers / zoning out in meetings / between puffs or drags or shots / whenever

ask yourself

What is saving you?

Tell me, if you would, I’d be honoured to witness.

Register for the Ochre Sky Memoir Writing Workshop with Natasha and Raju here.