I’m emotionally dysfunctional

One of my best and worst talents is the ability to suppress my emotions in stressful situations. It helps, when things are hectic and I can’t get too emotionally vested just so that I can function more effectively. In instances of extreme stress like emergency situations I see how it can be a good thing. But sometimes I unintentionally will push something away and then after days and months of it happening have some sudden realisation and have the world crumble under me.

The best example for such a situation is when I was leaving Spain after spending a year as an exchange student. For weeks before I left, my best friend Erica often broke into tears saying she would miss me when I was gone. But it hadn’t hit me. My friends all wrote letters for me and gave me little presents and although I loved the gesture, it still didn’t help me realise my exchange was going to be ending soon. On my last day my host family came to drop me to the airport. We exchanged tight hugs and kisses and left each other on a very vibrant note.

I then passed through the security check and sat down in front of my boarding gate. While putting my boarding pass back into my handbag, I found a letter my friend Claudia had written me. I hadn’t read it yet and for some reason felt like that was a good idea to read the letter.(BAD IDEA)

Five lines into the letter I had beads of tears trickling down my cheeks and they just didn’t seem to stop. From then right through the two hour flight to Paris I cried like a baby looking at all my cards and pictures of my host brothers. It just hit me that those brats wouldn’t look the same the next time I saw them.

I then got off the flight still sniffing from all the crying. I had to transfer terminals to catch my next flight so I zoomed from one terminal to another. When I reached the gate to board the next flight, the ground staff informed me that the gates had closed. Unable to mentally react thanks to me being so emotionally dysfunctional I lost control and started crying at the counter. At this point my mother and sister were on a flight to Bombay from Istanbul and my boyfriend of that time didn’t know I was getting back as I had was trying to surprise him. With noone to be my emotional crutch I realised my only way to securing a bed that night was if I got my act together and booked myself a hotel and figured my return flight to Bombay.

Ultimately in whatever condition and help from a lot of people, I managed to spend a night at a hotel at the Paris airport, eating some spaghetti bolognese as I fell asleep watching die hard 2.

I sometimes can’t even wrap my head around how quickly my emotions can drift in the span of no time.

Strange encounters.

The rules change as you get older. My parents always told me, “Never talk to strangers,” and that is still excellent advice for the young. But now my abiding rule, wherever I go, is always talk to strangers. In fact, don’t miss an opportunity to chat with someone you don’t know and might never meet again and especially if its with some liquid courage.

People think its really hard to meet new people and to get to know random strangers but I think its really not that difficult. You can just start a conversation with anyone whether its in an elevator or in the line at the restrooms. I simply start conversations with random people and judging from their body language see whether they seem comfortable enough to go on with the conversation. Most of the time people are open to having a casual chat and sometimes you’ll even be amazed by the amount people are willing to share about their lives to random strangers.

Sometimes I feel like people feel more comfortable confiding in strangers because you know the person doesn’t know anything about you and won’t have a reason to judge you. Even if they judged you, the chances of you ever meeting them are so few that you couldn’t be bothered.

I once started a conversation with a girl in the restroom of a club. She looked a little disoriented and I just asked her if she was okay. She smiled and told me that she was okay and she had just had a little too much to drink. And after a few minutes of casual conversation she broke down and told me that I was the first person who had bothered asking her if she was okay all night. She was in a toxic relationship with a boy who made her distance herself from everyone and she had begun to feel like she was losing her identity. Ultimately this conversation ended by us taking selfies together and telling each other that we are strong young women who are invincible. Drunk girls being girls, I don’t expect much different.

Although such strange encounters happen often they’re not always the best experiences. My outspoken nature and friendly behaviour has also gotten me into a lot of trouble and misunderstandings.

But the fear of the possibility of things going wrong doesn’t stop me from taking such risks. It excites me. I guess I am the strange one here.

“Google me you’d blow your socks off.”

Have you ever googled yourself? and hoped that some day you’d see more than just your Facebook profile when you looked for your footprint in the digital universe’s platform?

Recently I was driving from town with a group of friends to Bandra. While we were stopped at a signal a kind old lady stopped my car and asked if I could drop her to Kemps Corner if I was passing it on my way. I don’t know if it’s a foolish thing but I am usually a very trusting person so without hesitating I offered the lady a lift. She sat into the car and I continued to make conversation with my friends as we drove off.

After a little time the lady caught onto the conversation and began making small talk.She asked about our schooling and where we were from. We all answered her questions but none of us asked her much about her. We didn’t even know what her name was until she told us of it. When we reached the signal at Kemps Corner she said goodbye and opened the door to get out of the car. She said she would say a little prayer for us to thank us and then shut the door and began to walk away.  But then she stopped and turned back.

She knocked on my window and asked me to pull down my windows. She then simply said, “Google me, you’d blow your socks off. My name is Meher Moos” and then turned around and walked away. We quickly took out our phones and googled the lady. We couldn’t believe what we saw when we found out. Meher Moos is a holder of 18 passports. She has traveled to 180+ countries and is the first female Indian on Antarctica. Her passports are usually out of pages from all the stamps she has collected.

We were so blown away by her and we wanted to go back in time and ask her about her life and her experiences and thats when it hit me that moments that pass us by don’t ever come back. And all you can do sometime just relish in the memory of such moments that pass us by to fully appreciate it.

P.S. deviating from this whole enlightening experience, Meher is unmarried and never had kids. So I guess it’s a hint that that’s the only way I’m going to ever fulfil my dreams of traveling the world.

DO NOT READ THIS.

If you’re reading this, its too late. You had been warned before, you still have a chance to close this tab and go on with whatever it is that you were doing, however menial and trivial it was I’m sure you’d rather waste your time staring at a wall instead of reading my blog.

When thinking of what to dedicate my blog to a lot of things came to my mind, things that people might actually show interest in. But if I wanted to see if I wrote about absolutely nothing in particular and just took to the internet to ramble about life if people would actually give a fuck to read about it.

So here I am, still talking about absolutely nothing, and here you are, still wasting your time reading my shitty ass blog.

Its the 20th of January, and I guess its safe to say that this year so far has been absolutely great. Minus the fact that I have 3 different essays to right for my applications to university due in the next few weeks and I choose to procrastinate till the very end. I always feel like I work better under pressure. I feel my creative juices flowing and eventually things work out better than they normally would.

Being 21 feels like an enormous amount of stress. I’m at the crossroad of my life where I finally decide what I really want to do in the real world and every decision I make now will have an impact on what I ultimately want and will receive from life.  I’m uncertain about a lot of things that are going to happen this year, however I am absolutely certain that by the end of this year, I am not going to be stuck in this ‘shithole’ (just like Trump says it.).

well that makes this 300 words, if you got to the end of this, please get a life. Or leave a comment, telling me to fuck off and go write my SOP.  If theres something you’d like me to talk about, put it in the comments. (but i won’t talk about it here, this blog is about nothing. remember?)