getting to a place where summer never ends

on moving

Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand Alone. An then love will come to you, then it comes to you.

-Anais Nin

Most coming of age tales centering young girls are characterized by them growing conscious of their body, how it appears to others, the power it holds, how to beautify it and harness your sexual appeal. Even the stories that critique this preening don’t deny the emergence of the preening during adolescence. The girl observes her body change, sometimes with awe and sometimes shock but never indifference. 

For most of my teenage years, I was completely divorced from my body. It almost existed as an afterthought, just a gangly collection of long limbs that struggled to fit in the school chairs and study desk, cumbersome and mildly annoying at worst when they gave me prolonged back aches and spine cracking, invisible and out of the way at best. For me, it was never a thing in itself, never an instrument that could be used and harnessed and obsessed over, Something that was bestowed significance on its own just by the fact of its existence, of being female. It never occured to me that it could have a titillating effect on men. I felt completely sexless.

I never partook in the worldly pleasures or preoccupations of the typical teenage girl (cue I’m not like other girls lol), but it was because i subconsciously thought that i couldn't be like them no matter how much i tried. So I rejected that sphere of teenagedom and all its attendant firsts before it could reject me. 

My thoughts then though, were sharp as a knife, vehement. I aimed it at others to keep them at bay but often turned it inside myself too. Now when I read my diary at 15, I wince at my opinionatedness, at my self assuredness even when it went against the world, when it stood alone. Maybe that's precisely what gave it its edge and not despite. There was a thrill in standing alone, in considering yourself so singular and unique that the immediate world around you had no place for you. It felt very transgressive. That I was in many ways better than it, above it. At its worst, ostracism is a trapping and torture if you still cling onto the beliefs of your environment or group that rejected you, made you feel inadequate. At its best, its a relinquishing of everything that the group deemed important and acceptable and a segue for you to build your own world. But the latter can turn into a trapping when you inadvertently reject wholesale everything the group ever upheld. Then, you aren’t boldly living out your own beliefs and desires, whatever they may turn out to be. The foundations of the world I was building were based on rejecting that other world, going against the grain for the sake of it. I became a misanthrope. 

In high school, when in groups or while making friends, there's a code as to what's fashionable, acceptable to talk about. I couldn't keep up with the changing allegiances, the shifting loyalties depending on who was popular on what day. I kept feeling a dissonance. 

Once, I wore a different outfit to school and was told by a few girls that it looked good, bringing me out of my precept of invisibility. I realized that the compliment didn’t make me feel good. Just the fact that it came from some other person, a person who wasnt me and who was in school, automatically degraded it. I didn't want to exist in their hierarchies of what they considered important and worthy of their approval, what they prized and were impressed by. They were of no consequence to me. I had so totally rejected high school and its ways of conferring value upon someone based on what seemed to me, very arbitrary parameters— ones that I could never quite fulfill. This meant having no interest in being an active student at school-- not participating in school events, competitions, gatherings because they involved the same people whose circle I was denied entry into. What meaning does collective effort carry if you despise and are despised by the people in the collective?  So I turned inward. 

I poured myself into writing novels, stories and poems. I lived in a small town where I couldn't talk about the books and poetry I was reading with anyone else, or things that I valued, the music I liked, my aspirations for the future. Those years felt interminable to me. The temporality of three years in your twenties is different from three years in your teens.

I always felt like I was at loggerheads with the environment around me, that it was antagonistic towards me. My evolutionary wiring was making me desire things I didn't want to want so I stifled them and was successful for the most part. But I couldn't find a footing. I believed nothing in my immediate environment was capable of satisfying me and there weren't any options or avenues to build myself a space where I could be happy and thrive, except leaving.

So I did.

I went to college halfway across the world and a switch flipped, like someone suddenly turned on the light in a darkened room. I learned to live in my body, have an embodied existence. I started feeling comfortable in my skin, or rather I started feeling my skin for the first time and my inhabitance inside it. Things I considered frivolous and trivial, beneath me to even pursue, I had access to for the first time and I was reveling in them. They were so pleasurable and felt essential in a way that it didn't matter that they might be frivolous or trivial. I started understanding what body language meant and I paid attention to mine and other people’s. 

I wasn't at odds, in an enmity with my environment anymore. I felt integrated, taken in, I could let go of my guard and find a place for myself here. I fell in love with the world around me, with what it was capable of providing me-- nothing too grandiose, but all the very normal human things I had missed out on. This love came to me in a surge and transmuted everything. All the small things I had never experienced as a teen, that were long due -- happened at last and added up: girls occasionally complimenting me on my outfits and figure, a friend I'd just made saying she'd beat up a person cause he'd wronged me, calling me beautiful, conversing with a person I just met-- a peer, at 3 am, making impromptu plans with people I just knew and couldn't call friends yet, and then countless impromptu texts, conversations and plans with actual friends, being invited to three parties at once and having to decline invitations, being called sexy by the sexiest girl I know, being called hot when you were not expecting it at all. In all fairness, this could hardly be construed as popularity. This is a mostly commonplace experience of a socially well adjusted normal person.

This sounds too easy and wish-fulfilling to be true. Just go someplace else or completely change the context you live in and suddenly all your problems are solved? When it’s your environment that’s the problem and not necessarily you (though I admit I have been the problem in certain situations), then yes. It’s important to recognize this: whether you’re in the wrong place or whether you’re in the right place doing the wrong things.

Where I lived before, it was always warm and summer lasted the whole year and yet I never went out, unless it was absolutely necessary. Summer for me means everything is alive and teeming with life. Yes, even within summer there’s birth and death and sickness but the conditions are always fertile, favorable for new life to grow. Where I live now, it’s sunny only for only four months of the year but I’ve never felt the seasonal blues. Maybe because I’ve gotten to a place where summer never ends.