#Scurf120: A Long Time I’ve Wanted to Say Something
On not talking, hardly expressing, always wading through the feeling of being insufficient
An empty head. Fingers searching the right keys to hit and yield a result from. A private penance. A penetrating chain of thoughts that doesn’t yield in the written form. What do you do when you want to write so bad, but you can’t because the words don’t seem to dribble out on the page? How to stun your thoughts onto the page? How to submit them through the memory, into another form of consciousness? How to go beyond yourself?
As a child, I was often the one for whom other people were finishing sentences. I was told to speak up, be bold, venture into rooms full of guests and recite poems I wrote before them. Even at the thought of guests I would crumble within, keep a cool cat exterior. Beads of sweat breaking right above the brow. Often fumbling, even then I had too many words inside my head, and almost an inversely proportional urge to utter them.
This feeling has carried itself into my thirties. It has gathered moss, and built into a bigger, more daunting version of itself. And it has always made me angry. I, too, have questions, opinions, quips. But my mind doesn’t always help me in speaking them. I hesitate, fumble, a quiet rumble forms within the pit of my stomach and I stop short of speaking.
It enraged me then, it enrages me now. The silent space between the occurrence of a thought and its distillation into words, copious enough to hold meaning. Not always, but sometimes still my fist balls up with furry when I feel like I am the one stopping myself from speaking.
Whenever angry I want to speak. But they tell me, “Don't speak in anger.” As a quiet, angry kid, I would then silently observe the world unroll before me, feeling many emotions within but often impaled at the outsideness of speaking, expressing. Then writing, reading and being alone with myself were minor-key respites. But what about speaking in public? Not just professionally but also before loved ones, especially at the time of making new friends.
I’d heard that a reasonably good therapist makes people understand themselves better. While earlier I didn’t get this notion, now I seem to be slowly growing into this idea. Steady consultations over the last 1.5 years with him have opened me to learning new things about myself. That, for instance, on vacations I like being alone even if I am with someone. I thrive in being cornered, in being without people, even if I am surrounded by them. Slowly these thoughts have taken home, shape, and importance in my life. They have helped me be, grow and unearth their particular meanings.
I am someone who is selectively introverted and have a temperament. For me anger is equal parts impossible to suppress and direly motivating. As a grown up, as I try to reify these beliefs and corral them into reality, I keep running into newer things about myself. I don’t like talking, rather often find myself unable to, even in front of people I’ve long known. I have been trying to manage my anger, exercise, run and meditate on it. And yet, I love to do things out of anger.
Several things help. But most of all Roger Federer’s story gives me company me. In his early career Federer struggled, often in public, with anger on court. Because of that he lacked concentration and felt demotivated. Reams of pages have been filled with memorable times he lost his cool on the court, trying to balance the inside with the outside. Over the years he developed a practise of patience around his feverish rage. In that he eked out the fine lines that defeat you each time you try to do something because you are angry with rational thinking, logic, and deep meditation.
The title of this essay, “A Long Time I’ve Wanted to Say Something” is the title of a Paul Guest poem. It supports me in an unhurried way to think with and into my personal abyss of not talking, of not being able to talk, of living with unexpressed thoughts that I often forget.
Talking, expressing, sharing are things that don’t come to naturally. And over the years I’ve tried to dull the rush of shame, the pang of insufficiency I felt each time I was unable to do them. They felt like performances. Like an external act put on for the rest of the world. And in that I was sheerly alone. Even the most “like me”, similar minded people were garrulous in front of their personal worlds.
Not me.
Then, Federer’s story works like a salve. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so stunned by any other celebrity story. He’s a tennis favourite, for sure. But in this animal struggle of keeping quiet, staying calm, took me to learn about him beyond the game. With that, his story came to hold a space of so much: gratitude, hope, anger, speech, and self-love. And this isn’t just any number of beautiful things, they are all at once a training in self-acceptance. Through him I am coming home to facts about myself — that I might not be the most verbose of the lot, whether before known people or strangers, I might just keep a lot of my thoughts, words to myself.
These are facts that might change with time. I might grow out of these phases, but I will forever be the outsider looking in. This primal, raw urge to project, reveal, share is completely alien to me. The anger and frustration that accompanies this kind of aloneness heaves, breathing down my neck like a wraith. Writing, taking thick written and mental notes, reading sometimes feel like mere filigree design. The slowdown in my personal life due to my own incumbencies are often and ineluctably offset by an increase in the written word.
Amid this all Federer’s story serves as a form of undercutting my own shame. Following his lead I work at develop a definition, obliquely so. I try to forge my own version of trust, acceptance, even love towards myself. The ease of self effacement then feels cheap, a vulgarity leaking out of it. About his game Federer says, “It took me more time than other players maybe to breakthrough but once I broke through, everything was in place and it was.” This situates itself poignantly in his struggle with anger too.
When I think of it this way, I am easily able to enter a warm fugue state where it's just me and this one, solitary thought. I am able to case out all invasiveness. The shame of not speaking eludes me. It makes me think that there might be more like me, hiding behind veneers and veils. All of us secretly carrying the burden and shame of not being able to express much. The unbearable, uncanniness of it. And how some of us are “writing”, to misquote Elisa Gabbert from her recent Paris Review essay, “almost wholly to get yourself off.” Earlier I would feel daunted in the face of it all. Not now. Not anymore.
Today I met with two close friends, talking about the big and small of our seemingly simple, working, big city lives. Notes exchanged, highlights shared. Our afternoon was perforated by beats of peace, tranquil and sometimes even a gentle restlessness. During our lunch I allowed myself to go within and observe the inherent reluctance, the racing, pulsing, heart-in-the-mouth feeling that throbbed moments before each time I spoke. After every 25 words spoken, I felt myself crush the momentum of the conversation. In those measured pauses, pregnant commas, I realised I was coming up for air. A cool control taking over, as my mind sought a moment of rest.
In those moments I felt overcome by an innocent pleasure, a coolth, a quietening of voices. My mind took a pause, like the body halting gradually after a sweaty run, swiftly conjuring me into a seance. All of this, so completely impossible to look away from, was now taking shape in my head.
Many times, over the course of this day, I landed on these thoughts as a resting place.
My mind was allowing me my own personal neurosis, despite the laden thoughts I had repeatedly burdened myself with. “The greater part of our memory,” Proust wrote, “exists outside us, in a dampish breeze.” But now, in those few private moments, I felt like an observer in my own life — in a good way. I felt a trance like state descend, and as I zoned out in front of the world. In those moments I briefly switched off, and it was rewarding, excellent even, as I felt myself return to me. The sun, outside shone off and on, coating Delhi in a silvery glaze. My phone twitched with a missed call, buzzing on the marble slab of the table, as I glanced back at my friend and asked him a banal question, the kind that sustains a friendship. And we dived deep into another new world.
Like the last one, this is also a public essay on Scurf. Subscribe and get more writing to keep you thinking about all things wild, weird and wonderful.
Really enjoyed this one