Ed Sheeran, JioGarden, November 19, 2017.

I wore red lipstick and a red dress and a lotion that made my bare arms and legs shimmer in the dim-lit darkness; kajal and mascara and a band that declared me a superstar. 

I stood in line for six hours, with determination and confidence I had forgotten I could possess, and also with my three most favourite brownies from Theobroma (for the record, these are the millionaire, the red velvet, and the cookie, in that order, although I am convinced each time I have it that I like the cookie brownie more in theory than in taste). 

I joked, laughed and danced with strangers, with the college kids with lamer puns and greater fanaticism than even I; and the girl who'd come here all by herself from Delhi, who was awkward in a way that would have been very familiar to my near-friendless fourteen year old self, whose story I wanted to hear and write. 

I enjoyed the opening act, Lauv, as one enjoys all music that is not noise, and sang along to the one song I knew (I like me better). Things were fine. 

And then he came on stage, and it all changed. 

_________

I've been looking for perspective everywhere. I've talked to older people and younger people and peers and colleagues; parents and counsellors and myself; strangers on Tinder and my best friends. I've looked for it in books and in memes; in the ocean waves and in city lights. 

I did not expect to find it at a concert.

I should have, though. I went to the concert because I love Ed Sheeran; I love Ed Sheeran the way I do partly because I have the most mainstream taste on the planet, but mostly because, no matter what he sings, Ed can pull from within me the feelings I need, and banish the mental clutter I really don't need. His words are specific, his songs situational, and yet, whether I'm homesick or heartbroken or just lost deep within myself, he can pull me out - paint me that larger picture I can never quite capture by myself, make me understand, acknowledge, absorb all those comforting things I know in theory, but cannot feel in practice. 

He can make it okay for things not to be okay (which, let's face it, is how things usually are). 

_________

He sang Castle on the Hill, and Tenerife Sea, and Thinking Out Loud, and Perfect. Shape of You and Eraser and Galway Girl and A-Team. You Need Me, I Don't Need You. 

And somehow, in all the singing along and dancing and feeling and hugging and holding hands, somehow, magically, miraculously, inexplicably, he turned lead into gold. 

Somehow, standing there, squashed between the balustrade and the heaving masses, I was no longer a lost, overemotional, fucked up twenty something questioning every aspect of her life to the point of perpetual misery. I was a kid, an adult, a complete person; not a daughter or an ex or a sister or a friend, not an employee or a lawyer or intelligent or dumb, not a good writer or a bad one. Not a label or a generational stereotype; just...a person, with all the complexity and simplicity that involves. 

Yes, I was young and lost and confused and at least a little bit fucked up. Yes, I was old and had lost so many years, months, minutes to useless endeavours, time and energy and optimism I'd never get back. Yes, I had said and done awful things, and had awful things said and done to me. 

But that was okay. This was life, and we didn't get to type out a draft and review it thrice before finally deciding on a version we could look back on and regret. We had to do the drafting and the reviewing and the looking and the regretting all at the same time, and more often than not, nothing was so unbearably irreversible that we couldn't find a way to live with it. Awful things happened and would happen, but it was okay to be overwhelmingly, unreservedly, guiltlessly happy around the awfulness. 

And it was okay for things not to be okay. At least for tonight. 

~Sam 

Where are we going?

We go step through painful step, hoping to one day make a stairway to heaven. Not knowing where it leads, not knowing whose heaven it is we're so painstakingly heading toward.
Just climbing, climbing, climbing.

But is a fall, a break to enjoy the view, to get your bearings, so bad?

I used to want to change the world. I wanted to be remembered, I wanted to torture students by going down in history with my difficult name, I wanted to be more than one face in seven billion. I still want to make a difference, but with regard to the rest of it, I'm beginning to wonder...why?

Success is so valued in society today-and since forever, I suppose-that it seems crazy to write about failure not being all that bad. For all our talk about someone only failing when they give up, failure as a stepping stone, failure as a part of life, the message that it's okay to fail never seems to really filter in. That failure is natural, necessary-that there must always be a loser-is all fine in theory, as long as that loser is not you. Which is okay, which makes sense. We survive because we strive to succeed, to do better, eat more, sleep softer. But isn't there a point where enjoying what you have should be more than enough, where you can...not be stigmaitzed by failure?

Can there be joy in being average? I see it like this: there are different levels of the atmosphere, where you push against pressure and gravity and all that is against you-but after that there is space. Free and floaty and content and happy. Now whether you go fifty light years away or five hundred, you are still going to be in space. But we don't seem to see that: we don't enjoy the feeling of space, hard-won in the battle against the atmosphere. It's like at every level you're just striving to be more, in whatever level of the atmosphere you are, whether it's a peon trying to be a general manager or a GM trying to be a CEO. And at each level, you get used to it and you start having problems. From not being able to eat out as much as you want to, or to be able to vacation in Italy, to the WiFi malfunctioning.We just keep moving. Keep fighting to go further and further in, even if nothing changes anymore. Even if, after a while, the energy spent in moving further far outweighs any pleasure received from it.

I know that as a human race, we've come this far, however far that is, because of this urge for more and more, even if you're happy here and now, you must want more. And that's cool, it keeps us alive. But when so many of us have moved past struggling to survive to eating cake everyday, perhaps it's time we stood still for a while, stopped hankering for more, enjoyed our immense privilege and helped the others catch up with us.


~Sam
PS: I do realize that these feelings are not universal, although I have made it sound that way in my writing.

Sometimes, I'm afraid of having the wrong opinion.

I don't mean wrong as in unacceptable, because the point of opinions is that they're subjective and therefore in all probability will be unacceptable to someone. I mean misinformed, or uninformed or underinformed. And because you're never quite fully informed, your opinion is always going to be one-sided (which comes with subjectivity, of course, but still, you want to be as objective as possible) and incomplete.
I think that's partly why I'm so indecisive.


~Sam