O' Captain, My Captain

 In the years since I came of age, I was raised in a hyper-competitive environment which forced me to view specific other candidates as competition. Consequently, it had become not only difficult but also stressful to form meaningful friendships in any space. I remember my first dick move after I joined JC thinking I was at the top of my game. I called Devesh out and reprimanded him for not being intelligent. It sucked because I didn't want to take it back once I said it. I'm not sure of the ideology I followed then but it had something to do with my views on the masculinity of the time and the type of content I consumed. 

He proceeded to fuck face me and shut me up by being better than me at all possible subjects to such an extent that I wished I had the mental proceedings to enable me to concentrate for the amount of time he did because I knew he didn't a very little part of his life to actually studying whereas I who grew up in the home that I did was forced to face a book for most of my day. Or the day was a "waste".

One time I ran away from school. My father was on a business trip. I did it twice in the same week. Once on a Tuesday when it was not planned, I spent the afternoon in a park fifteen strides away from my bus stop. I let the bus pass such that it didn't see me sitting and watching them go in the distance. I could see my room from there. It looked distant and isolated. I couldn't see the details of my room that I was used to watching every day, but I could make out my room was empty and no one had been there after I'd left. I was in 7th grade. I saw the grandparents of one of the kids I hated from my apartment building. I hated the kid because his father called me an idiot for picking him up by one arm when he was an infant. I was 10 but the memory stuck long enough that I'd just want to drown the kid in a sewer out of spite. Then the year after I ran away I'd fought with his mother. Another upstanding citizen. She voluntarily argued with me when she caught me bullying one of the kids from the building. I was like that. I liked making children cry, especially annoying ones. She caught me and said she'd speak to my mother about it. I urged her on, what the hell even she'd say? she saw me not letting a stupid kid eat a raw mango that was on the ground. I spoke to the kid's mother days later and she forgave me as easily as falling asleep on a crisp cool Sunday morning. In hindsight it was wrong on my part, but do I care. Anyway, I keep moving away from the point I was making. I ran away from school. Twice. Got caught the second time. My mother went on a search for me on her old, shaken-up scooter while I sat in the park till 9 AM and came back home, seeing that she wasn't there I went to our neighbour's place and played with their baby. She came home. Hit me with one of those long spoons, or was it a spatula? I don't really remember. It's been 8 years since that incident, every once in a while my mother calls upon it and laughs making a joke "remember how you ran away from school? haha, I found you in the neighbours place. you were playing. stupid kid." I don't know if it is as much as joking as reciting the incident but it happens. Maybe she does it to remind herself about what happened. One of these days I'm going to ask her why does she think I ran away? Does she know how I suffocated in that school; how terrifying and grotesque the environment and the people were? Does she know how one of my teachers stole my book that belonged to my father and never returned it? And that the same teacher broke my friend's Rubik's cube piece by piece and threw the pieces out of the window when she saw it inside our desk? 

It's been almost 6-8 years since these incidents. Yet they run rampant in my head any given day. I spend most of my time writing, reading, orchestrating, or thinking about how to get rid of this sensory overload of emotions that run through my mind. There's a palpable tension in the air whenever I bring up topics that my parents find overbearing. I recently spoke to my mother about how depressed I was during my JC and how it has been directly manifesting itself into my anxiety every time something important turns up academically. Because I keep feeling I've lost all my academic prowess, resulting in a mediocre performance and an even more mediocre approach to actually participating in studies. Also, my bouts of nausea before I go to college on those days. To which she responded, "you don't know what depression is. You're not depressed." "Then what is this?" "You're just worried about things it'll go away." This slowly graduated into my bursting out saying, "Aapke jaise logo ke wajah se toh hota hain yeh sab, jab koi depressed hain. And you say you're not depressed. You're just dramatic or some shit." She exchanged a very brow-ish look with me but I intercut my last words before she spoke and left the room. She didn't do her usual getting into my room after preparing an argument and repeating it till I disagreed with her for an hour. Then telling the room how her argument was better than mine to validate her own statements. Schizo. Anyhoo. 

My papers end tomorrow. I'm glad this semester is over. It was the best and worst of my semesters yet somehow. I don't want to elaborate on that. IP padhne jaara hu. Bye.