Yet Untitled 090 - Radiant Baby
Rescued by a story I wrote 15 years ago
Dearest Yet Untitler,
Thank you for all your messages after my last post. I can’t tell you enough - your concern was deeply appreciated. It was one of the things I turned to as an antidote to the said bad experience I had mentioned in YU 089, to which so many of you kindly responded.
Concern is life-affirming.
As are rom-coms.
I deep-dived into Netflix’s new show - “One Day” and lost myself in the thrill of two attractive people falling in love in a beautiful setting. Rom-coms thrive on delayed satisfaction, keeping the lovers’ fulfilment imminent yet building it up to feel seemingly impossible. They bank on our individual memories around love and trust that such evocation keeps us invested in the story. Love - the idea of it - dissected and put on displayed by this quality rom-com, helped me. Love has its vicissitudes - I thought - as has all of life, including my own!
I’ve been thinking about the other things that quelled my unsettled-ness in the past week. Apart from my usual go-tos - my Three Practices that I’ve written about before - I found another surprising friend that I turned to; interestingly: not a person, but living thing nonetheless.
There’s a story I wrote 15 years ago. It’s a special story. Unlike other stories I seem to have pushed out of myself, this story seems to have chosen me and flowed out of my person with an ease that both surprised me and I have not known thereafter. It was recognised as special the moment someone else read it. People talked about it. At one time, it felt like it took over my identity - when I came to be known in my fraternity more as this story’s person more than as my own person.
I spent years trying to figure out what to do with this story - this ‘radiant baby’ that had somehow landed up in my arms. It happened at a time when I was desperately trying to make my first film as a debutant film-director in Mumbai, but no matter what I tried, its film version would somehow not get made. I just ended up continuing to hold this radiant baby in my arms, running from door to door, looking for someone to help me parent it. There were admirers of its radiance, but no one seemed to have the inclination or the wherewithal to foster it with me towards the next stage of its growth.
Also, I was protective. You don’t go about just handing your precious, radiant child to anyone. Then, I found someone who immediately felt right. He joined me in the struggle of going door to door, holding the story-child’s other hand, helping it walk.
Even with a fantastic co-parent, it was tough going. Despite its radiance, I started to see this story-child as stunted - a baby who would not grow like other children do, still remaining an infant despite time having passed, with the rest of the world looking and wondering why it had not grown as it should have.
Then, there came a time when I hid this story away. I placed it out of my sight and the gaze of others, lest they - and I - had to deal with its abnormality.
Years passed, and even though I kept this baby hidden - those who had known its radiance would ask after it. So many times, I myself have drawn warmth from the memory of its radiance - emanating from that desk-drawer graveyard that we all have - where we hide away the precious things that we may have had hopes for but just didn’t shape up the way that we wanted them to.
It was this story-child that I pulled out in the present time of crisis.
This story-child did not show me any resentment for my having hidden it in a dark place for so long. When I pulled it out, I found it wasn’t a child anymore - it had matured, and it gave me room and didn’t close off that part of itself that I had come looking for.
I’ll step out of my metaphor for a moment. When I came back to this 15 year old story, what was I seeking? Refuge? Comfort? Validation? Seems to me that I was seeking all the things I seek from my friends. Something told me that I could turn to it like I would turn to a friend. I trusted it in the same way as I would trust a friend who’d be able to help me.
Somehow, I knew it would not be enough to simply read this story again. Something told me that I needed to engage.
I started taking the story apart and reassembling it in a new way. I realise now that I was opening it up for one reason alone, because over the years - I had came to know it too well. If I was to merely read it, I could predict the words. I knew the beats. I knew its twists and turns, better than the ups and downs of my own life. Perhaps I had forgotten what lay right under its surface.
Dear Yet Untitler, under its surface was me. Me from another time. From a blessed time. I had quit a job and had branched out as an independent filmmaker. An unpaid independent filmmaker. I was aware of the world watching me closely - my family, my friends, my peers. It was precarious. It was glorious!
You know what, dearest Yet Untitler - a few paragraphs above I said all these things about this how this story chose me et al - but I’m thinking differently now after talking to you. I’m thinking that story didn’t come looking for me or use me as a shaman for its transmission in the world. Perhaps that’s one way to see it, but it’s not the only way.
The story came from me. Everything that is special about it came from my being. And that itself special.
I don’t say this as an agent of my ego wanting to reclaim credit from something special outside of myself that helped birth this special story. I say it because in the wake of the difficult times I faced in the past weeks, it’s important to remind myself that my life is immensely capable and contains the resourcefulness, creativity and wherewithal to to face and surmount difficult things.
What is this forgetfulness that makes us detached from our strengths? Buddhism has a fantastic phrase for it - Fundamental Darkness or Fundamental Ignorance; also referred to as ‘delusion’. Buddhism believes that we delude ourselves regarding our true nature and spend most of our lives missing the enlightened parts of ourselves that in fact are already present in our own lives right now..
In the years I spent desperately trying to make this story-child into a film, perhaps I lost touch with its radiance. I remember how unlucky I felt - as if all my best creation was somehow done with my first shot; or - worse - that this thing that I thought was special was not really special at all.
Coming back to my 15 year old story and engaging with it again this past week has shown me how untrue this is. It’s as radiant as ever. And it fills me with hope and makes me look forward to tomorrow.
Thanks for listening,
Lots of love
V
PS: Is there anything that has ever served as a trigger for you to connect to a past self that was then able to help you in the present, dear YUer?
Tell me.
I want to know!
I so hear these words of saving oneself with our own writing. We are alive inside those old words and there’s a magic in them. Re-ignition of those synapses and pathways. Grateful you share this.
I loved One Day. Binged it all in this last week. All the cultural references took me back to my 20s and 30s in London