You know that space of nothingness, the sorrow of being in the residues of numbness and not knowing what lies next! Where we have done all we could, and now we are in the period of waiting, in the conundrums of being confounded by where to go and nowhere to be all at once.

The Weight of Waiting

I know that space a little too well and find myself torn between who I was and who I am becoming from time to time. I yearn for the days filled with sunshine, a heart filled with the radiance of beautiful life and a mind brimming with peace.

It is exhausting to keep swimming in the tides of the uncertain sea where you can see no sight of the shore, where life turns into the merriment of melancholy, and all you can do is keep on going with no clarity as to what happens next.

I find that more often than not, I'm jolting in the times of what could be, bemoaning the times of the past and how I could have acted differently, and how life could have turned out. Haven't we all done that, of hoping to change the way life would turn out to be and how we could alter the trajectory of the stride we are on.

Regret is a poisonous essence that kills you with its venom every day, latching onto the bounty of self-doubt and rendering us unalive with every thought of gloom that pops into our heads. Over the years, I have garnered a list full of regrets, ones where I wished I had acted differently, ones where I wished I had left sooner.

Ones where I wish I had not said the things I said or where I regret making the decisions I did or not removing the person I once loved sooner from my life. They often haunt me in my daydreams, making me wish I had made different choices earlier.

The Beauty of Imperfection- Becoming, One Day at a Time

I can go on the number of events that have unfolded in my life that I want to not disclose openly and keep it covert in the chapters of my yarn of glory. I wish to have it all figured out by now, I really do. But the more I try to hold onto something, the more it keeps slipping away from my hands. And the more I keep on mourning the life I could have had, the more I lose on the life that is fleeting before my very eyes.

Yes, I have made some mistakes, and yes, I have a lot of flaws, but who would I be if it were not for my passionate heart, my intense need to achieve, my vividness, my sense of depth and my empathy to understand the world from a kinder lens. Who would I be without my whimsical spirit and clumsy acts, who would I be without my sensitivity and joys of diving deeper into poetry?

If I were to erase all my mistakes across the sands of time, it would remove all the wonderfully weird and eccentric moments I have had. How could I hate all the things that the world names as flaws when they are the things that make me uniquely myself? How could I tell my younger version who is a part of me, that I hate her for being humane, that I despise her because she could not live upto to the timelines or the standards society set for her. If my desire to be loved and accepted by the ones around me asks for the trade-off to hate myself and all my flaws, then it is a price I am not willing to pay.

I may have a lot of regrets, but I cannot fathom the regret of not loving myself just because someone else did not see the light in me. I cannot imagine living another second of my life tormenting myself for not doing enough just because I reached the level of my saturation. It is truly ironic that people give us advice on how to live our lives when they have not walked a mile in our shoes. And the funny part is, we make them the center of our lives. As if the opinion we hold for ourselves holds no dearth!

​It took me a lot of adversity to realise that the one opinion that I hold of myself is the only one that matters. What I think about myself, the decisions that I made for myself with the knowledge I had at that given time, the choices I made out of sheer survival, the kind of life that I envision for myself and the pace at which I want to live my life based on what suits me matter more than any opinion other people hold.

What lies next is something I am figuring out as each day comes. But I know one thing that no matter what, I am going to be kinder to myself and love every part of me- the flaws, the good, the bad and the ugly, the light and the dark. I may live a life that does not make sense to others, and honestly, I am okay with it.

Because truly it needs to make sense to only me and no one else. I am waiting for the mist of the aftermath of the storm to finally settle as I row my ship each day and hold onto the anchor of my dear life that lies within me.

-Hridya Sharma

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