How does your body treat you?

Do you ever feel betrayed by your body? Does your body ever disgust you? Or does your body ever scare you? Does it make you livid? Mine does. And I am not talking about all this in terms of the way your body looks, but about the way your body makes you feel.

Does it treat you like a jealous and a possessive lover that is insecure all the time? The one that keeps throwing tantrums to get your attention and keep your attention. Does it treat you like a stubborn old grandfather who refuses to accept anything new? The one who thinks that any deviation from its own thinking is incorrect? Does it treat you like a cruel step mother who wouldn’t let go off any instance to give you pain and discomfort? The one who thinks that being at rest or peace is not your right.

Mine does. All of the above. My own body makes me feel betrayed, disgusted, scared and angry at the same time.

I feel betrayed and disgusted because I didn’t sign up for a body that is weak all the time? In spite of treating it with utmost respect, in spite of trying everything possible to make it feel healthier, it changes only for worse. It betrays me for all the efforts I put towards making it healthier.

I am scared of my body, of trying anything with my body. Be it a new food item, a different sleeping pattern, a new cosmetic product or a mere different workout style. Because it retaliates. As bad as a teenager high on drugs.

It angers me to see other people healthy even when they abuse their bodies so much. Whereas I have been treating it with a caution of a new father holding his child for the first time.

And yet. It behaves the way it wants to behave.   

I can sometimes hear my body talk to me. Like a person. A person who is not an ally. A person sitting across the table scrutinizing and scorning everything I do. Keeping notes for times when it can mock me, smirk at me and take its revenge. I can hear it saying something like, ‘Ahan, so you want to pull a late nighter watching a show on Netflix. Just wait and watch how I make your head explode tomorrow morning’. Or may be something like this, ‘So you think you will be able to get away with eating outside food two days in a row, let me show you the consequences. I am not accepting this food.’

My relationship with my body feels like an unrequited love affair. An affair where I give. And only give. Attention. Care. And medicines. To get nothing in return except being bruised, broken and in nagging pain all the time. Being on medicines for one thing or the other.

Do you know how much amount of time, energy and mental space your own body occupies in case it treats you like mine does? Immense. When I sit and reminisce, it fills me up with regret. Regret of things I could have done if keeping my body in a healthy working condition didn’t occupy so much of my mental space.

So, if yours is treating you well, be grateful. And work towards keeping it that way.

Source: Google images

PS – I am not sick due to any terminal illness. I am just not healthy enough to live without medicines.

Every time you leave

Every time you leave

I start counting backwards

Holding my breath

And your memories

For the time when I will again

Hold you in my eyes

And be held in your arms

Every time you leave

I get engulfed

In an arid sadness

And dizzying loneliness

That only gets cured

After getting inked 

With your smoky lips

And warm embrace

Because whenever you leave

You take a part of me

Leaving your bits

And slow and gradual

I am

Not me anymore

But a reflection

Of nothing

But

You.

Careful

If there is one word that defines my state of mind since a long long time, it would be ‘careful’. That’s what I am these days. All the time. All day. All night. Whether at work or at home. I am careful. It feels as if I am walking on a glass world around me with everything so fragile that one wrong move on my part and it would all just come crashing down. And then, I wouldn’t have anything to pick up from the ashes. The shards would hurt me hard but I wouldn’t have any place to go because those shards were my world. The one I just shattered with my own incompetence.

The planets revolve around their sun on an invisible orbit. They don’t change their route. They can’t I guess. I feel stuck like them. On that invisible orbit around me. Any wrong path I take, any diversion, any digression and I will tilt the whole balance of the universe against my favour, leading only to destruction. Which means that I tread carefully, very carefully. In everything I do. In everything I say. Everything done is measured. Everything said is to be weighed. In a monologue with myself. The consequences of saying and not saying discussed. The repercussions of things done and not done analyzed. And all this weighing, this measurement, this carefulness is burdensome. So much so that it has started affecting my health, my well-being.  

When at home, I fear doing things that aren’t done in a way they are done. At work, I feel out of place. Last year, I did the mistake of making changes in my personal and professional life at the same time. And I think I have been ‘careful’ since then.  

I was never this ‘careful’. In fact, I was somebody who believed in disruption. Not in a destructive way, in a fruitful productive way. I read somewhere that disruption leads to growth. I used to be someone like that. Someone who believed in doing things their way. Someone who didn’t need to follow the norms. Not anymore though. Now, I am careful. Careful of everything. Careful with everything.