‘Perhaps these wildfires and virus attacks are just a manifestation of all the repressed anger humans feel’.
Why then do we keep our feelings repressed?
In the middle of a routine conversation, my friend casually dropped this bomb of wisdom that crawled its way up to claim residence in a (so far) comfortably numb corner of my mind. Time and again during this pandemic, I have found myself looking up to something greater than life as we know it. I am strangely aware of the universe that threatens to swallow us whole as we confront strange realities that make us wonder if we really are heading towards an apocalyptic end of the world. The universe, to me, is a bowl filled with a jelly that encompasses every thought in each living brain on our planet and beyond. As they say, whatever you put out into the universe has a way of coming back to you. Our thoughts disguise themselves as energy and jiggle this jelly to send resounding vibrations into the universe. These thoughts alone have the power to move mountains and perhaps that is why we are advised by wise minds to think positively in order to receive it back. The universe knows our secrets and it promises to keep it.
If our feelings alone could trigger the precursor of an apocalypse, it is worth wondering why we keep them repressed. For the most part, repressed feelings are but a layover to a state of chronic frustration. The harder we press something down, the stronger it will strike us when the time comes for it to recoil. We are, however, a species that embraces avoiding confrontation with the dark thoughts within us. We call it self-preservation and wrap it under layers of a perennially optimistic camouflage that can hide our true insecurities. ‘Be brave’, we are taught and yet we fail to be brave enough to face our fears. I faintly remember this one day back when I was living with my folks in a quaint little town where my dad had moved for work. It was a day not too different from any other. Having taken a breather from work life, I was enjoying being lazy and getting fed homemade food after years of living away from home. My afternoon siesta was rudely interrupted by a harried ringing of the doorbell. I curiously hung my head over the staircase to see our guests- a woman struggling to smile meekly at my mother and a young boy standing next to her with his head buried in his phone. Curiosity got the better of me and I sat behind the wall encasing the upper half of the staircase and listened hard as the woman related her tale. She was addressing my father and talking about one of the employees in his company who had met with an accident recently and was bedridden for a potentially long time. As the woman related the story of this man, who happened to be her brother, she kept dabbing at her eyes and wiping away the merciless tears running down her grief-stricken face. My heart was in my mouth as I heard her ask my father if the company-provided house that she lived in with her brother and his family would be taken away from them, now that her brother was bedridden. She went on to reveal that she had heard through the grapevine that the company representatives were planning to have them evicted and that she was here to request my father to prevent that from happening. It was what she said next that caught my attention more. She spoke about her brother’s kids and how while his older kid (a daughter) was keenly aware of her father’s health and was helping around the house, while his younger one, the son presently occupying a chair in my house, was too distracted by his games and toys to realize the gravity of the situation. At this point, the young boy shifted in his chair and I distinctly saw him bowing deeper to bury his face in the game. Perhaps amidst the cruelty that was meted out to their family, this kid’s attempts to shield himself from the grief and put on a brave front were accepted at face value by everyone around him. As I watched him, I realized how he sat with his head down and pretended to act indifferent while actually holding back tears. This episode made me wonder- why do we try so hard to protect ourselves from our own feelings? Who has conditioned us to believe that detachment and putting up a brave front is actually a sign of strength and courage? Why do we fear the inherent human emotions in their most raw state? Right before darting back into my room to cry out the uneasiness I’d felt in the past few minutes, I watched the woman and her nephew leaving the house with satisfied smiles on their faces as my parents had assured them that they will take this up with the company and revoke any eviction order for the family.
This was a child, barely 7 years old, who had somehow learnt that one way to deal with fears and grief was to lock them up in one corner of the mind and never hold them close around others. Needless to say, I have met an increasingly higher number of people who build such walls around them and actively choose to push their feelings and fears under the rug. Little do we know that feelings have a way of catching us off guard and claiming their territory in our lives. This pandemic is making a lot of us face a particular fear that we choose to distract ourselves from- the fear of death. Almost every person walking on the face of the earth has an inherent fear of the inevitable end that must come to pass. We are taught to live life each day as if it is our last day, but do we? We live with no such thought and on the contrary, we feel a false sense of security in the lie that we embrace, one that convinces us that ‘this will not happen to me’. The year of 2020 is about facing this reality. I have lost track of the number of conversations I have had in the recent past that involved news of deaths by different causes. This year has been dubbed by many as a cursed year and as far-fetched as it may have seemed at one point, the death toll during a pandemic was always meant to rise. As a direct consequence of this, our sheltered minds have been jolted awake with one bad news after another and we are faced with the harsh reality that life, indeed, is fleeting. In her book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling writes about three brothers of which one was wise enough to respect death when he was young and later welcome it as an old friend when his time came. The moral of her story on these brothers was that we must not cheat death, however, I extrapolated it to also imply that we must not fear death. Cheating is but a manifestation of a fear after all. This year served (and continues to serve) as a reminder that, much like life, death does not wait for anyone. It comes when it has to and takes one with it. We must find a way to accept this ultimate journey as a price we pay for this life. Even the most suicidal mind hesitates before taking that final step for we are conditioned to associate death with the end. Some may agree that it is indeed the end while others may disagree.
A couple of months ago when I too was struggling with the realities of this pandemic and the transient journey of life, my friend sent me an image taken by the Hubble Telescope. That was my long overdue introduction to the ‘Pillars of Creation’. For the uninitiated, the Pillars of Creation are a piece of cosmic beauty that was captured in this universe that we are a part of. It is moments like these that make you realize how much we do not yet know about life around us. I looked at the picture below for an achingly long time before texting back ‘could this be what heaven looks like?’ I am a person of science who still finds solace in counting on a higher power. The law of the land of science requires that all questions be answered with rational thinking and evidential information. While science has added beauty to the capabilities of mankind, a rational mind is one that also acknowledges that all questions are not answered through scientific data. When we run experiments or perform surgeries, we hope to find trends- trends that would serve as evidence to convert a hypothesis into a fact. An experimenter always knows that the trend is seldom universal in its rules. There are exceptions and we term them as outliers and exclude them from analysis because we hedge our bets on the confidence intervals generated by the ‘good’ data points. That said, if you ask a surgeon why a procedure that worked on 20 patients did not work on the next 5, without any evidence of a comorbidity, there seldom is an answer to give. When we disconnect from the science of it and seek answers, we realize that even the most rational mind often finds himself relying on something greater than his being because we do not have all the answers. We may call them superstitions or juju but they are all a manifestation of our beliefs. As a Medical Physicist, I was taught about ways in which the human body interacts with different matters and how we utilize its different properties to work in our favor. I distinctly remember one lecture where we were studying Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and how this technique uses nothing but the water molecules in our body to generate images. It is sufficient to know that the hydrogen atoms in the water molecules exhibit magnetic properties that are manipulated using an external magnetic field to aid in MRI. Years later, while dealing with chronic nightmares, I had turned to my mother for help and she had advised me to place a pair of scissors under my mattress and be sure to sleep with my head towards the south. Puzzling, right? Earlier, I would have dismissed it as a mere superstition but ironically, my association with Medical Physics got me curious about the authenticity of this solution. It is plain logic when you think about the magnetic dipoles (two poles, or ends, of a magnet) in the hydrogen atoms within our body and how they interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. The solution here was to place the body in the south-north direction, which, in science, is considered to be the direction in which magnetic waves travel in a magnetic dipole. In simplified language, this can be considered to be a stable state of alignment with the Earth’s field. The purpose of keeping the pair of scissors was to have a sharp metallic object that could provide a point of concentration for the magnetic waves, likely to further aid the state of stability. My nightmares did not go away completely but they did reduce. Was it the pair of scissors? Was it a mere placebo effect? Regardless, I like to believe that it was a mix of science and faith, complemented by the energy one puts out into the universe. It always comes back, never forget.
This, to me, is a way to deal with the realities of this year. In all honesty, 2020 has been a pill far too bitter to swallow. It has us cornered and faced with the fears and realities that we had tried so hard thus far to shield ourselves from. We watched science struggle in the race to develop a cure first and a vaccine later. Collectively, the world turned to place their faith in a higher power. It does not have to be God or any concrete theory. Faith can be an ethereal idea, a softly glowing mist that we can channel to live through these fears and feelings without repressing them. As they say about anger, the more we pent it up, the worse it gets when finally released. Our minds are stronger than we know and perhaps we could see this year as a way to finally let go of our inhibitions and live without the burden of distractions. Look yourself in the mirror and work on what you want to see your image as. Embrace your fears, anger, insecurities, joys, and let them attain equilibrium as you send them out into the universe and unload yourself. Give your heart wings to soar higher and your mind roots to stay grounded, but most of all, give yourself the chance to live freely because this life is too fleeting to live in repression. The freedom we may experience by accepting what we feel and nurturing it before we let it leave us may just be the silver lining that this year promised us. Maybe, just maybe, the path to changing the world begins not with us but within us.
‘Perhaps these wildfires and virus attacks are just a manifestation of all the repressed anger humans feel’.
Why then do we keep our feelings repressed?
