Vinita is a graphic designer during the day and a Postcrosser on the weekends. You can find her in the kitchen experimenting with food or polishing her Japanese and Korean language skills while watching rap videos online. She also has a support system for young diabetics called Onetwogether.
For the best effect, you can listen to this music while reading the post.
What's the night time to you?
For many, it’s the time of binging movies, feeling romantic or just the time of peace with sleep. For me, the night is when I can hear myself. The silence amplifies the voices I tell myself. When the world slows down, it's during this time, I take my red lipstick, leave my hair loose and look at myself and ask - What makes the night so painfully agonizing yet so soothingly comforting? What’s in this loneliness that makes me confident?
It’s interesting how the night is what we are scared of as children. We fear monsters below our beds and windows, crying to our parents to not leave us alone. As we grow older, we start becoming more active, running and playing around eventually tiring ourselves to sleep. But as we cross our teen years, night becomes the time to study or swipe on dates. It’s a very fluffy time of finding oneself, filled with being naïve. But also, is the time we self-introspect and start thinking more. As a young adult, the thinking takes over the fantasy. The night is now the ‘me’ time. Away from my masks, emails and chats. And somehow, this is the only time I feel comfortable with myself. Gothic makeup, dancing till my feet hurt, imagining my sexuality, everything is easy to accept when I am with myself. But the moment the dawn comes up, this confidence fades away. It exists but is overpowered by what is more ‘comfortable’ in front of others. The same dancing is something, I shy away and perhaps will stay hidden till the night comes again.
I once decided to break the shell and did a lip-sync performance in college. Funny how I could do some stupid moves, lip-sync some broken Korean and dance in front of a crowd of the unknown. Sure, I would never want that event to happen again but if I even think of doing that again now, my mind would only say ‘Are you mad?’. But would do it alone in my room, with the lights off…at night.
I love the silence of the night. I like how my thoughts are raw, unfiltered from any prejudice, but there is a tradeoff to this silence. It amplifies discomfort equally loud. My insecurities with how I look, what I have not achieved and how much I ‘missed out’ in life gets louder. It starts eating up the warmth I took so long to find for myself. When I look back, most of my sleepless nights have been because of me beating myself up over a heartbreak on a swiping app. So this made me think - What is my definition of being ‘comfortable’?
By definition, comfort means a condition or feeling of pleasurable physical ease or relief from pain or stress. Everything stays within or capacity that we believe we have.
But this line sums my take on ‘comfort’,
a state of ease and satisfaction of bodily wants, with freedom from pain and anxiety.
And anything beyond this is discomfort. Be it physically with an unwanted touch or even thoughts I get which I don’t want to address.
By definition,
an absence of comfort or ease; hardship or mild pain.
How uncomfortable is ‘discomfort’? Do we hide our fears in the label of being ‘uncomfortable’? Where is that line that divides the two and when do things cross over? Why is it that the same lipstick makes me so uncomfortable in the morning, but makes me feel beautiful when I wear it at night? I sit back and look at things I ‘wished’ I did but left them halfway. What is stopping me from it, is this thin line of running away from things because they make me uncomfortable than they being of no value. Like quitting learning Japanese because I felt ‘uncomfortable’ being the only person not knowing how to read in a class of 10.
My biggest confrontation came with my diagnosis. I was diagnosed with Type 2 DM at 17. I was put on a lot of medications, strict diet rules with no context. The medication that was to keep me sane and alive made me very uncomfortable. To a point, not taking them made me feel happy and proud. I just couldn’t come to terms with it and hated every single pill, even if that meant me passing out due to elevated sugars. The fact I was shunned to even say the word ‘juvenile diabetic’ became the source and all my anger came to the only tangible indicator - medicines and blood reports. It’s only over time when I saw and met others who blurred their lines, that I questioned my discomfort towards it. Why did I hate my medicines? Was it because of the label they gave me? And yes, it was because I felt I was sick when I took them. I believe we blur our lines of comfort and discomfort by seeing others do the same. One thought and try at a time. Who knows, in that class of 10, there could have been more who were struggling as well, but had to show them as confident.
So will I not cry my sadness and pain away when I get comfortable with them? No. Some things will make you comfortable and some won’t. And one can’t expect all things to be in one parallel. My only take away is to question the label you put on things before blindly just assuming them. And occasionally look back to see how far you have come. Sometimes, solitude can be comforting, and the night more beautiful.
A message from Let's take a Stroll:
A very Happy New Year!
With the advent of a New Year, we decided to start something exciting for this blog too! We reached out to our friends and family to be a part of our writing and collaborating journey. This post is a part of our first guest post series. We will be posting seven new blogs written by seven persons from January 1, 2021, to January 7, 2021! February onwards, there will be one guest post every month.
Thank you, Vinita, for sharing these wonderful thoughts with us. It really made us stop and ponder over it! We hope to keep working with you in the future!
If you want to contribute your writings for our blog, you can drop us a message in the Contact Us section.
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