I’ve been listening to a lot of Deepak Chopra recently - his album ‘Soul of Healing Affirmations’ is my shit, which made me realise that I really am full swing into my thirties. I came across the album when one night, I was bombarded by the little screaming people in my head that usually represent was is about to be a panic attack. Suddenly, a Kanye lyric popped into my head as I was panicking (normal).
“Pussy had me floating, feel like Deepak Chopra,” and I was like hmm - let’s Google this guy, I wanna float. Ten minutes later I was sitting on my bedroom floor repeating after Deepak, whispering “I am who I am, I am who I am,” over and over again, borderline psychotically glaring at myself in the mirror in an attempt to ignore the small tufts of my cats hair embedded into the carpet I was sitting on, willing myself to breathe properly. Fackin’ hell, I need to hoover. I am who I am, I am who I am… Seriously, I need to hoover though.
Ever since I was a little girl, I was fascinated by death. How crazy, I thought - this thing that we’ll all experience, and yet not one person on earth can tell us what it will be like. How would I die? When would it happen, and how will it feel? There’s no other human experience so indiscriminate, so unique - and for a dangerously curious species like us, death remains infuriatingly and terrifyingly ominous in its mysteries. No wonder people make up stories to make it sound less scary (no shade on God, I’m a believer, but some scripture leaves me like…)
Is the uncertainty of death the reason why we as human beings are so obsessed with building a legacy? Will it ever be enough to just exist, or do we always have to do? Capitalism tells us every day - through advertising, through its treatment of the poor, through the system we have little to no choice to function within - that if we don’t monetize our existence, we don’t have a worthwhile place in society. But we all know it, deep down - productivity as a measure of self-worth is bullshit.
My dear friend Nadia sent me this excerpt recently, and it’s just perfect.
A chapter in Alain de Botton’s book ‘How To Overcome Your Childhood’ also gave me pause.
“Bad childhoods can have the emotionally deprived return, almost manically, to the question: ‘Do I deserve to exist?’
“This is why they typically put unusual effort into attempts to be famous and visibly successful. Of course, the world at large will never give the emotionally nervous the unqualified confirmation they seek.”
I never felt more like my mother when I turned 30, the age she was when she had me; it was at that age that people started telling me I looked like her. I wonder if she looked at me and saw herself, and I wonder if that filled her with joy or bittersweet resentment. I wonder if she could see her own mortality in my eyes. The need to prove that I’m not a waste of oxygen accelerated with that thought, and the pressure I put on myself was like a punch to the windpipes.
“The longing that one should be recognised for being and not just doing - even if one has done quite a lot - is an extremely stubborn part of human psychology, which has a habit of periodically rearing its head and creating serious trouble if it is continuously ignored across a lifetime,” says Alain in ‘How To Overcome Your Childhood’.
“We may well be able to meet conditions, but we can’t quite forget the desire to be loved without them, simply for being ourselves, in all our original messiness and confusion. Through a breakdown, by deliberately sabotaging what we have achieved in the world, we may be trying to go back and taste a simple, conditionless love that was denied to us in the early years. We’re trying - at huge cost - to re-experience a missing stage of development. We are tired of decades of making symbolic offerings under emotional duress to the ghosts of emotionally withholding parents. It might be better to sit in hospital for a while and disappoint everyone.”
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The funny thing is a few hours after I started writing this, I did end up in the hospital - albeit not due to a breakdown - but it developed into an emotional breakdown of sorts.
Like a great white shark, I always felt like if I stopped moving I’d die (#fax). I’m always in a rush, even when - if I think about it - I don’t need to be. I’d rather sprint for a bus coming in two minutes than wait for the next one in ten minutes. Why? I could blame it on London living - a place where missing a tube that comes every two minutes can feel like you’ve been cursed - but I suspect a lot of my actions are tied into my fear of my own mortality, somehow. I have to do things quickly - time waits for no one, I have to get it all done. When will my time be over? We won’t know until it’s too late.
So, there I was, sprinting down a hill to catch the bus to Streatham, my husband running by my side. We smiled at each other and I yelled over, “are you alright?” He had broken his leg a while back, and I didn’t know if I was running too fast for him. Well, it turns out he was fine, but I wasn’t. In the blink of an eye I tripped - God knows over what - but gravity, the steep hill we were running down, and the speed of my sprinting meant that I flew. Bang, bang, bang, my body felt like it hit the pavement more than once as I skidded face down onto the floor after flying a foot or two. I felt like I’d been in a minor car crash, and I couldn’t get up. My hands had saved my face but as a consequence, the skin on the palm of my hand came clean off and skin was hanging down my wrist. A chunk of my thumbnail broke off and was pooling blood. My knee split open, more skin hanging, more blood, stitches would be needed. I wanted to gag, but instead I pissed myself off by crying. God, I hate crying in front of people, it’s so embarrassing.
At 3 am and after a long wait in a&e, the doctor in a south London hospital looked more fatigued than me. “I don’t understand how this happened,” he said as he looked at my thumbnail, and I thought of my mother. “Don’t tell anyone,” she’d say when anything good happened to her. She was so scared of nazar, and she believed in it wholeheartedly. I thought it was a little silly - like Sizzla says, “Who Jah [God] bless, no man can curse,” but the older I got, the more I understood.
“In Pakistan, the evil eye is called Nazar (نظر). The evil eye is a superstitious curse or legend, believed to be cast by a malevolent glare, usually given to a person when one is unaware. Many cultures believe that receiving the evil eye will cause misfortune or injury.”
In June 2021 I got married, I celebrated my birthday - it had been such a blessed month for me, so full of love. I wasn’t crying over the pain, I was crying because the fall felt like it had been willed by someone or something, and I just couldn’t shake that feeling off. As soon as I fell I felt a dark energy radiate across my body, and the energy didn’t belong to me. That feeling stayed with me all night. I am now my mother, superstitious, seeing malevolent spirits in the dark. The thumbnail that had broken off had my husband’s surname painted on it, and the violent removal of it now felt very deliberate - all that was left of it was a small heart that had been the dot of the ‘i’ in his name, and it was congealed in blood. I winced as the doctor gave me a tetanus shot and tweezed the gravel out of my flesh. Maybe the fall was down to the evil eye - or maybe it was divine intervention from the universe, a sign that I should slow down. Or perhaps it was just shit luck, and I should stop reading so deeply into things. Probably won’t happen, though.
A lot of actions come from ego, and what I do know is that my ego is not my friend. I want to refocus where my intentions come from; I want them to come from the core of myself, not my ego. That means rethinking my motivations and ambitions, reevaluating life’s purpose and questioning a lot of what I believe, and asking myself why I believe it. It’s a lot of unlearning, and that is a scary hard process. As I type this my hand hurts, the raw skin cracking under its bandage with every typing motion, and yet I can’t stop. Why? I don’t quite know, but I think of the great white shark again. Let me go listen to some Deepak, init.
“Allow your ego to get out of the way, and you will get in touch with your spirit. You are not your thoughts - you are the thinker of the thoughts. The thoughts come from you. So, where are you?
“You are in the stillness, in the silence between your thoughts. Return to your stillness. That stillness, that silence, is you. And that you is the window to the infinite mind.” - Deepak Chopra
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Ahh Alain 💜 (I always read his books in his voice in my head loool)
Enjoyed reading this 🥰 xxx
You should check out j.krishnamurti my love