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Your Resilience Inspires Mine

A friend of mine recently wrote me a poem. A birthday present telling me that she loved me despite all differences. I have to mention ‘despite all differences’ because our story was never that of just love. Her poem didn’t sugar coat the oscillations of ‘connection, disconnection and reconnection’ that all friendships (including ours) are invariably made of; but rather she hailed them as our battle scars. When I stare straight into love like that, which has the audacity to charge regardless of all differences, I get uncertain of my own ability to do that. Because there have been so many times that I couldn’t. Like with family, where love exists but in some weird corner that is sometimes difficult to access; and I’m unable to love despite all differences. Or with friends I’m so used to taking for granted. I’m sure love exists there too, but I don’t think I ever looked at how I let it blur out; how I let myself grow indifferent to the same things that bring value to life.

I hate what the aesthetic of indifference has made of us. At some point in our lives, we’ve all believed that emotion is ‘cringe’ and veering away from expressing it how we get above the pathetic human predicament. Indifference is the shade that protects our soft egos from damage. Indifference that, I believe, deeply roots from our vulnerability that prefers to look down on others than being looked down upon; to laugh at cringe rather than being called cringe ourselves. I’ve been a part of this culture as much as I resent it now. I’ve built walls around myself, and have invariably caused others to build theirs; leaving no space for love that blossoms despite all differences.

I’ve also taken shelter under the comfortable shade of individualism. ‘My personality and ideologies; what I think and feel cannot be compromised’ is another subconscious bullshit that we all feed on. Only to realize that a million random events make us the people we are, and there’s no point in being so loyal and morally rigid to a 'story' we tell of ourselves that could’ve gone a million other ways. A poem like that reminds me that my relationships with people cannot be based on the congruity of their ‘identity’ with mine; deviations becoming the limitations of love. Identity is a tricky thing to base relationships upon as it doesn’t allow love to survive the test of time, because none of us are the people we were five years ago, or as a matter of fact, even yesterday.

We’ll always find people in our life whose capacity to love softly serves as a reminder of our own ability to do that. It’s a process we have to actively participate in; to patiently keep our indifference and our overt individualism on check. But this is what the living do. We are resilient, and we love despite all differences.









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