Yet Untitled 111 - Notes from my hollow...
Yet Untitled 111 - Notes from my hollow...
...including a 'thank you' for training me in handling visibility
Dearest Yet Untitler,
This week, Tulsea - the talent agency that reps me - featured me on their social media page. A lot of very kind comments came in that made me feel great, like I’d made Time magazine’s 50 Under 50 (if that even exists 😆)
At the same time, it unsettled me a little too. After so much validation and kindness pouring in, I thought I should unpack the ‘other’ feeling a little. Why not? Unpacking Bequeatheth Instalments!
I think I feel safe under the little rock of obscurity that shelters me. There, I can tinker about as I please. Under the rock, I am the underdog - I’m Rocky Balboa before he gets the mansion with the robot. And I’m not kicking back sipping margaritas, I’m sprinting up the Rocky Steps, getting myself ready to face Apollo Creed.
But recently, I heard Simone Biles say in the documentary Netflix made on her:
“It’s easy being the underdog.”
Being Visible
Simone Biles must’ve been the most visible person in the world during the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Being more visible in the future is a strong possibility given what I do. In a few months, new work of mine will ‘drop’ before hundreds of thousands of eyes. Powers with resources will be working hard to get those eyes to take notice, and in noticing, those eyes shall be poised on me.
Logically, I shouldn’t find this unsettling. I’m a veteran at dealing with stage fright, literally. I’ve played a nagging house wife wearing a salwar suit in front of an all-boy boarding school audience, forcibly making my ears deaf to jeers and catcalls.
Perhaps it's the stage I’m currently standing on - without rafters, without wings and missing the smell of wood and musty curtains - that’s making me nervous. Here, the audience is hidden. I seem to feel more comfortable elocuting before a gathering of people in a darkened hall than putting myself before an audience that I’m not sharing the same physical space with.
Perhaps I feel that occupying shared physical space in a theatre comes with norms, with implied decorum and respect towards the person on the stage. This other stage - it’s the great unknown. Unlike my daughters, I haven’t grown up with it. As it tends to do, the Unknown is filling me with trepidation!
But, I also know from my nearly 30-month tryst with YOU, dear Yet Untitler, that I don’t consider the hollow under the rock as my permanent abode. All the cozy years I spent inside that hollow, I kept scavenging for parts to build a machine that would beam me out yonder - to you. And I knew I had succeeded the day I started publishing this here newsletter.
You have equipped me well 🙏🏼
Dude! Even though 400 subs won’t be considered the equivalent of any bonafide social-media influencer’s armpit hair, for my hollow-dwelling self, it’s huge. It tells me that I’m not going to be leaping off a cliff but hopping off a stepping stone that bridges to, or at least towards the great Unknown.
And, dear Yet Untitler - you have been exemplary. In the course of reading this newsletter, you’ve shown me patience, you’ve encouraged me, you’ve given me validation. Even your silences have given me direction.
How can I not draw strength from this amazing relationship!?
Doors (and what lies on the other side)
Whenever I think back to the time when Sacred Games - India’s first Netflix show that I co-wrote - was released, the metaphor that comes to mind is the opening of a door. For about two weeks, when the show’s hype was at its peak, I could go and talk to a whole bunch of people who were erstwhile inaccessible to me.
Not a bad experience. I made many lovely new friends. But that time, there had been no precedent for this experience. But now that I’ve been through it once, I’m thinking about how things could be different the next time around. As Simone said -
“It’s easy being the underdog.”
Will the next experience be better? Or will the open door let in a demon or seven? Anticipation is perilous. The hollow under the rock just feels so much more comfortable and secure in the face of this anticipation.
But my own experience tells me to suck it up and keep moving!
I remember a period of four or five months - the period of the great paradigm shift between the end of education and the commencement of career - when nothing seemed to move. I was clueless about where to take myself from that point on. All the forward momentum of my childhood seemed to have hit a wall, and there was no direction, and I did not like it. Perhaps this is a clue about the ever forward-moving imperative of life. I find it difficult not to acknowledge.
The trepidation between screenplay drafts
This tension about moving towards the unknown - I’m feeling it right now in another sphere of my existence: I’m writing this instalment having just submitted an outline for a commissioned project after working on it for many weeks. It’s the same project I spoke about in the last instalment, where I went to town enjoying the process, getting lost. But I felt a familiar trepidation before sending the draft out. The next logical thing to happen would be for me to receive feedback.
Suddenly I’m looking at the door as if a demon is going to come through it.
So…
…none of this is unfamiliar
I’ve even written about it all before, perhaps more eloquently in YU 020.
If you do end up scrolling through YU 020, you’ll see me circling similar themes under different circumstances. I was aware of the overlap as I was writing this instalment and was looking for at least one more-elevated perspective to contribute in YU 111 that takes me further than YU 020.
It came to me through a song!
I started listening to The Flaming Lips 22 years ago in 2002 as an impressionable 22 year old far from home, studying in the UK, at a time when the vast Unknown of the future was opening up before me. Apart from the very perspective-shifting refrain this song has in the form of the line “Do you realise / That every one / you know / someday / will die!”, it was the song’s final chorus that caught my attention.
(Do you realize That everyone you know someday will die?) ... And instead of saying all of your goodbyes Let them know you realize that life goes fast It's hard to make the good things last You realize the sun doesn't go down It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round
Night and day. Visibility and obscurity. Noise and silence. Bravery and trepidation. After listening to the ‘Lips afresh, I started seeing these dichotomies as cyclical and fundamental rhythms to life. I experienced the cycle in my 10s, 20s, 30s and 40s and will likely experience it going forward. Going forward, I will continue to seek the comfort of my hollows, but will also thrive on the thrill of stepping out of them. This realisation itself is comforting. And the suggestion that the up and the down is really an illusion…I’m in awe of how much profundity the Flaming Lips could load into a pop song.
Dearest Yet Untitlers - you make stepping out of hollows fun. You make it rewarding. I just realised (!) that I owe you all so much!
Welcome to the new, fledgling YUers who came to the fold after Tulsea shared my mug on their feed. Thank you Tulsea!
Thanks for listening to this freewheeling string of thoughts. As always, I’d love to hear any thought from you that this instalment may have triggered. Hit comment / reply and hit me up!
Lots of love
V
And…
Also 🤖👄😸
Emoji curated by Ananya Nath!
Looking forward to further excellent work from you, God Bess ,🌺🌺
The writer's audience is a curious beast. Who are you writing for or to? It's similar to most forms of art I suppose. I like to think of myself as maker/author/ storyteller as incidental to the work. Somehow it makes it easier... less about me, more about the work... and the work will find it's own audience - for once you've done it and let it go it has a life of it's own. Having said that, I can't wait for what's coming next and I'm sure your brilliance will glow :)