EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE

If there is any stalker out there on Facebook, or if any of my friends has been keen enough to observe, s/he would notice the number of people in my network has suddenly gone up. And quite drastically up too.

I was myself quite surprised to learn I now have over a hundred and seventy people in my network. But what was more surprising was many of them were from school.

It is no secret even from my schoolmates I suppose, that for a very long time I had this huge massive grudge against just about every soul from school. People who had made fun of me, people who had betrayed me, who had back-stabbed me, and people who I just plain simple didn’t like. Except for the last category, almost all others were at one point of time my close friends in school. And then things turned sour, and I stopped talking to these people and mixing up with them.

At the time it felt very nice. It felt like I was doing the right thing by not being with people who were intentionally mean, sometimes even arrogant, maybe even selfish. It felt good walking in the opposite direction as the crowd, or rather choosing to do so. It felt amazing to be the rebel.

I don’t remember who it was from my school that I first added on Facebook. But about a few weeks ago I added this girl who was always very nice to me, and who I used to – and still do – genuinely like. The entire school was friends with her, and still is, from what I gather from her Facebook album. Her wrists used to be full on Friendship’s Day every year, and almost everybody in school used to have a band from her tied on their wrists.

I added this girl, and we got talking. And she filled me in on everyone from our batch – who was doing what, where, who was flying off to where, who was switching career lines, and who still asked about me to her, even though only in passing, once in a blue moon. It felt nice to know how much kids from our batch had diversified. She sounded happy to have gotten back in touch with me. And I was happy too.

On a particularly uneventful lazy evening, I was browsing through her photographs – looking at all those familiar faces – and almost immediately all the familiar feelings arose all over again.

Hurt.

Anger.

Bitterness.

Anguish.

I felt raw.

And soon the wave of those feelings got washed over by this immense feeling of tire.

I felt weary. Exhausted.

I recollected how many people it was that I had told this tale to – of being teased in school, of having no or very few friends in school.

And a peculiar realisation hit me out of the blue – the realisation of how long I had carried this baggage with me, and how much it had kept me from enjoying my life.

It’s over six years that I have passed out of school; and six years is a long long time.

For six years I have been constantly hating these people; constantly thinking about how right I was and am and how wrong they were. I have been holding a grudge for so long in my life, and the ones I have the grudge against are not even aware of the fact. They have had their fun, they have had their time treating me the way they wanted, and they have moved on. And even after all these years I am still holding onto things that my peers did at an age when we were all probably not even aware of what is good, what is bad, and what does getting hurt by people mean.

Yes they teased me. But don’t kids do that all the time?

Yes they isolated me and didn’t really let me mix up and play with them. But isn’t that all a part of being kids in a school, a part of growing up?

They have done what they had to, and they have moved on in life.

But I am still there… I am still on that farm-house where everybody was teasing me and I was alone, I am still on that swing where I was crying while everybody else was laughing, I am still there on the first bench at school, having my tiffin alone, I am still at the dining table at someone’s house ignoring the grumbling in my stomach and pretending I am full when I am not just so that my friends don’t tease me, I am still on the sofa in my house watching Dil Chahta Hai and wondering what everybody is doing at the party and if my Mother has been able to lie properly about me not being well. A part of me is still back there, in a place and time and situation that existed ten years ago, and I am keeping memories of that moment fresh within me.

All this pain, this hurt – who for? What for?

Sometimes you need to forgive people not because they deserve a second chance, but more because YOU deserve a second chance; because you deserve to be happy and not be haunted by your past; because you have to grow and move on in life. And that is what I have decided to do.

I still cannot and never will be able to identify with that kind of fun that kids have in that particular age – where you all gang up and corner the not so bright or not so beautiful girl, or the nerdy guy, or the one who is afraid of spiders, or even the one who is very quiet and then tease him/her to your heart’s content and harass the poor child. I seriously cannot understand what kind of pleasure one can derive out of such kind of mockery.

I look back at those times in my life and I look at how I have emerged out of it. And I see what I failed to all these years – so much of who I am now, what I believe in, what I condemn, and who I hang out with has its roots back in what I went through in my childhood and adolescent years. It’s like, it has become difficult for me to imagine what kind of a person would I be now had I not developed or inculcated certain things in me post that trauma; for yes, at that age, it was a trauma in my life. And it really saddens me to see how certain things I inculcated in me back then are affecting my relationships with people now – how I find it so difficult to forgive people; how I always am sorting people’s acts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, constantly that sorter is turned on and fully active; how because of this some of my friends are afraid to confide in me when they are in doubt; how I find it absolutely impossible to change myself even for the people I really love, people who I would really want to change for.

Yes they were not nice to me, but that doesn’t mean I must carry that baggage with me all through my life, or point at it whenever people don’t like things about me – this is what happened to me, so I am what I am now. We must from time to time try and learn to dispense unnecessary thoughts and memories – and by unnecessary I mean those that are going to do nothing but take away from your peace of mind; for that is what is most important at the end of the day. Just because you forgive someone for having wronged you doesn’t mean that you are agreeing with what the person did; it only means that you are exercising your power to choose just what you are going to let stay with you, and what you are going to let shape you and the person you are. Forgiving does not mean to accept the wrong people did – it only means to choose to overlook it, because you know it is not important, because after all they are only people too, because you know it is never a good idea to live in denial, self-pity or with a grudge, because you need to grow as a person, and because you know you deserve to be happy.