In Sickness & in Health

After two & a half years, my slip disc problem recurred. About 2 weeks ago, one morning I could not get up from the bed. Excruciating pain, a feeling of helplessness & a strange anger consumed me as I was raised & made to prop against my pillow like a child who has to be made to sit every time he has to eat, minus the pain of course.

Another stint at the hospital and a reasonably long bed-rest advice later, I thought, it is tragic to have this problem at the age of 26. It is more unpleasant than a facebook friend request from the girl I hated in college. It is more unpleasant than the taste of Safi that I have just begun to have each night. It is more unpleasant than the zit that sits proudly on my left cheek right now. It is almost the most unpleasant thing to have happened to me of late – or so I thought.

Being in bed & confined to home all day makes you depressed, chronically moody & deeply retrospective. In one such day, as I lay in bed, with that contraption of a pulley with 2 kilos attached to my neck, I thought how I seem to have wasted my talents away.

I like to believe I used to have a couple of very-pursue-able skills. I am a good cook & always have been. I wanted to be a chef but was always told that hotel management means being a glorified receptionist. By the time I was old enough to understand, I was too old. I am a good photographer. I take lovely portraits & have had my manual SLR to experiment & discover my interest with but I did not pursue photography professionally. Maybe I never bothered to find out how to. I used to write well & always thought that I would be writing for a magazine some day till I come out with a book of my own. And then when I finally could have had that chance, I completely screwed it up at post graduation by willingly specializing in film making – which by the way, is probably the biggest regret of my life till now – and never did pursue journalism of any kind. So all 3 skills which I had were never pursued & I ended up in a television job that I hated & quit, went onto some semblance of a content writing job which soon turned into me writing pre-sales proposals for clients and after that I started making too much money to go back to a mainstream writing job, knowing that when treated as a fresher, I would probably not even be making one third of it. Was it the money that killed my passion or the lack of time with the house to take care of and another thousand personal commitments? I don't know. Ideally I would like to blame myself on neither and make fate the scapegoat but unfortunately that's not how I perceive my haphazard career graph & seeing my personal participation in my own doom, I get morose & depressed all the same.

So I message Miss P, informing her of my feeling of directionless aimlessness and she tells me things that are, to me, as profound as what any shrink would have said as pearls of wisdom for which I would have paid a thousand bucks an hour.

She told me that I am lucky. And it made sense. And that I am not the only one who didn't get to pursue a career out of something I loved. Many people who are bankers & accountants are actually closet rock stars & artists but they don't make a living out of that. I know my husband, who is a fantastic golf player, would have loved to pursue it professionally but he works 8 to 8 in an FMCG company and tries to put as much passion in that as is humanly possible and that is inspiring. If I set aside my constant complains about my lack of passion in my job, there is actually nothing in my life to complain about (apart from the slip disc surely), but the way I see it today, even that could be a blessing in disguise. For all my cribbing about unhealthy living & weight management issues, my medical prescription after I get better is not a couple of pills a day – its actually this: Compulsory yoga daily & swimming at least 4-5 times a week. How many people get a prescription like that? Its like God's way of telling me to start living more healthy.

So I also have anxiety issues. My doc told me to calm down. My parents told me to get a grip or by 30 I will surely get blood pressure. My best friend told me that I need to soothe my nerves every once in a while & my brother told me to control my spurts of uncontrollable anger. Even M told me to take things easy & stop being so much of a perfectionist because more than anyone, its driving me crazy.

Therapy? I asked.

That would be insanely expensive. Miss P said

Is the work driving me over the edge? I inquired

No, you were worse when you were on a break. M told me gently.

I will control my anger. I reassured my brother.

Hah Di! That cant happen! He assured me in return.

Maybe I am becoming a fanatic for perfection. I discussed with Ma.

Please change yourself before you get old & cranky, she told me frankly.

Why are my reflexes so aggravated? I asked my doctor a week ago after the check up

You need to calm down, stop thinking for the future. Worrying is your bad habit. He said as calmly as a prophet would.

And then the prescription for my slip disc – life long swimming to keep my spine in order and yoga – to improve posture & calm my frazzled nerves. I should really consider myself lucky. Some people get strapped to the bed, some go for surgery, some live with a collar as an extension to themselves forever. None of that scary stuff as happened to me yet & instead of pills, I get Yoga. Really, for once, I should stop complaining and start being positive.

So what if I couldn't become the next big thing in the writing circles, it isn't late yet. And I get to do some really awesome freelance writing once in a while which also gets published & read! So what if I couldn't become the photographer I imagined myself to be, I am soon buying myself a Nikon D90 and getting busy with a serious hobby. And so what if I couldn't be a famous chef and feed the world, I continue to feed my friends and family and make them happy! Not every skill has to turn into a profession and not every profession has to become a passion. Sometimes that's the way things go and as long as I have my bracket of people in my life, to love me and keep me, in sickness and in health, I am incredibly lucky & happier than most people in the world.

(P.S - Mom, Dad, Bro, M, Miss P, Adi, Ips, Amby & the recent addition Yesyen – thanks for being the bracket & thanks for being the joy.)