Tune Into Yourself

By Mihika Jindal

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Every time I sit at my desk, I listen. But to whom? On most days, I am by myself. The doorbell is just a part of the inventory, an appendage to this house. Besides a distant drill drilling through some neighbouring wall and occasional plumbing whoosh-wash, quiet is the default. As the silence outside gets deafening, the cacophony within picks up.

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I have started paying attention to what goes on within my being by tuning in to myself, my thoughts, my judgements, assessing my behaviour, issues, and their potential solutions and realisations. But it’s a recent phenomenon that these thoughts occupy a substantial part of my being. They’ve surfaced in the past year or two.

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Back in India, for the first 30 years of my life, I barely listened to myself. I never had to because work, post-work drinks, home, family, obligations, television, rinse, sleep, repeat constituted an average day. I never felt the need. In fact, most days bustled by so matter of factly that the thought of being alone — of being left alone — developed as a phobia. Heavens knows I’ve gone far and beyond on multiple occasions to avoid being alone.

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But life ensures you end up in situations you most dread. The universe thrives on schadenfreude, and no matter how vain I’ve been to believe that I am one of the special few to be dealt the losing hand, we’re all facing the music, each more customised than the last.

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More than four years ago, when I was uprooted from my familiar life to get planted in fresh, foreign soil, my demons showed up. The instinctive reaction was to reject new ground. I complained about not having enough to do and not having people to spend time with. I craved random coffee plans and some evening drinks. As my husband left for work each morning, I was alone, not knowing what to do with myself. Penny, Leonard, Raj or Ross, Rachel, and Chandler could only fill my days so much. Taking a remote, massively underpaying job (that I convinced myself to do because doing something would be better than doing nothing) didn’t help either. All desperate attempts crumbled like a cookie. While I mourned the mess, each crumb led me to me.

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The epiphany?
I was never scared of loneliness. I was scared of spending time with myself.

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No one teaches us how to be with ourselves. We are schooled to keep up the best behaviour, to be kind, polite, and empathetic but always to others. Why are we never taught to be all these things and more to ourselves? And then the society/system/guardians/whatever else you call your authority figures further push it away by teaching us to fill our days with a bazillion things, to do more, to be more.

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But what about understanding ourselves? What about listening to ourselves, our minds, and our bodies? To be comfortable in our skin? Or at least not be fearful of ourselves.

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I recently told a friend how we love celebrating (or at least acknowledging) the day we landed in Paris. Looking back at that first daunting cab ride from the airport to the hotel on a grey chilly January evening helps me reflect on how far I’ve come with myself. I knew we were entering a brand new environment, but when I heard the radio blaring commentary and music in French for 40 straight minutes without understanding a word, the reality hit me hard. It dawned on me that life will be tough, that silence will trump chatter, and that communications will be short and mostly misunderstood. I remember blankly staring out of the window, wiping involuntary streams of tears. Instead of being in awe of the foreign freshness, I was struck by sheer horror because this wasn’t just a passing vacation.

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At some point in this conversation with the friend, I said, “I have embraced this place now.” And as soon as I blurted these words, I questioned myself out loud. “Is ‘embraced’ the right word? Embrace is when you do something willingly, right? Well, to be honest, I didn’t embrace this city. I accepted it. I was cornered, and I had no other option. But I guess I have accepted it now.” She said nothing. Sure, she was on the other side of the call, but this was a conversation I was having with myself. It was a monologue.

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Do you see what happened there?

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I interject myself quite often. Not always out loud, though. My observing brain has built quite a muscle constantly checking my doing/feeling brain. I have been trying to engineer an internal system where I try to be aware of what I think, why I think so, and the resultant action. I am beginning to be self-aware; a word I threw around long before I understood what it entails.

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As I spend time flexing these brain muscles, I realise how deaf I have been to my existence. Most of us are. The rut, the rat race, the hustle, and the notion of doing more and being more keeps the doing brain in action without leaving much time to look inwards. Don’t get me wrong, the hustle is not the problem. At least not if we choose it. The system (obviously) prefers that we ask no questions and “yessir” our way through life. Which, again, is not an issue if one intends for it to be so. And there are plenty of reasons to choose that life: responsibilities, circumstances, material dreams, and aspirations that need material backing. So long as the reason is clear, I feel it’s a life well lived.

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But being in it because everyone else is doing it or because you are opting for that route to escape yourself compels me to raise a red flag on your behalf. Because if it isn’t your plan, be sure you’re playing a role in someone else’s plan.

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This lack of introspection bleeds into our personal lives too. We are so distant from ourselves that we often project ourselves onto others. We engage in a two-way game in our heads where we play not only ourselves but also the other person, get into heady discussions, and assume their context, their narratives to somehow fit in ours. And then act on our assumptions. We blame others for our misery. We attribute our foul mood to the doings of others. We expect others to be accountable for their actions without questioning our own. Many a time, we expect others to be our solution by telling us what to do or directing us either because we don’t want to be accountable and hope to use the other person as a scapegoat if things go south, or because we don’t know what we really want. Either way, it’s a doomsday situation.

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My sister recently mentioned how an old friend got back in touch with her. In their teenage stupor a few years ago, he behaved in a manner that left her wrestling with her self-esteem. Eight years later, he called her to have her opinion on how he acted back then. Not only did he hear her out, but he also apologised for his skewed behaviour; a pebble of self-reflection flung in the pond of introspection to create ripples that leave an impact. She was relieved to shed the baggage she probably didn’t even know she was carrying, and he is on a journey of self-discovery that’ll do him good; a win-win.

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This inward journey — which started inadvertently, I must add — has been replete with rises and falls. But, in retrospect, it has done me good. I can now sip a coffee all by myself. I can spend days in my house without playing music to drown internal ramblings. When anxiety comes knocking, I find the courage sometimes to sit me down and talk it out. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean I have everything in control, but even small wins overwhelm me because I know where I started.

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When we self-reflect, we open doors to a pile of muck collected over time: conditioning and wrong notions that have been hard-coded into us, regressive learnings, and toxic patterns that we unknowingly pick up from our immediate environment. It’s like voluntarily walking into a dilapidated house with broken windows in the winter littered with dead rats and pigeons and probably no electricity. It’s not easy. And so we invent ways to keep ourselves out of that house, crashing at a friend’s place or renting a shady lodge perhaps but never returning to the arduous task of mending the house, the house that truly is ours. But it’s worth getting down and dirty and building it up. At least for me, it has been truly liberating. Because on a good day, it means I don’t have to rely on a friend’s couch for comfort. Sure, there are bad days when the window I just repaired cracks again, and the sun refuses to shine, but hey! At least I am building my safe space, a place where I am wholly me.

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It’s a work in progress, and one life seems too short to make a palace out of it. But every brick I add, every crease I iron out, it’s a win I get to celebrate with myself. And for those good days, I am ready to toil inwards rather than building something to impress the outside world.