Social media has turned a very interesting corner of late. I like describing it as an undergrad program with a double major in psychology and technology.

We learn to learn and excel at technology while it unravels such aspects of human psychology that were either only limited to bottled up frustration within individuals or behind closed doors at a shrink’s. It also includes a minor in film and TV studies because let’s face it, everything is larger than life. As opposed to simply grabbing a coffee to go on your way to work, it has become a photo op, to share what you’re wearing, what you’re doing later that day, how you like your coffee etc. Personal preferences are plastered everywhere, larger than life. “We’ve seen it in the movies…”

The learning curve has increased exponentially. So many things to know, so much to learn, a plethora of trends amongst likes and dislikes. Information overload at its best. I digress. It inevitably moves towards how corporations can use this data to better sell their products to us but I’m trying to focus on a more human level of things. Trying being the key word here.

Since everything is now larger than life, it blows the curves, beauty, kindness, cracks and crevices in our personalities out of proportion too. We get to know who is way kinder than what they had come across in a 3 minute hello at a coffee shop while you waited in line, we find out how our seemingly kind hearted acquaintance has their gender politics all twisted upside down.

We know more about people than we know them. Whether it’s a good thing or not, we have this information and we can’t run from it.

Then comes public interaction where we realise that someone seemingly fiery and hot headed, when given a chance, is super bright and backs up their arguments with substantial facts. On the flip side, a lovely, kind and generous one when becomes the moderator on a page let’s say, turns into a monster and a half just because their real life is filled with struggle to match up to everyone’s expectations and perhaps that is their only space of autonomy.

Like an art school, social media slowly opens up the multiple layers of personality within people as well as the complexities of different communities/ societies. Similar issues on a desi (South East Asian) and a non- desi (referring to predominantly western) platform will have responses that are poles apart. Matters are managed, differently, to say the least. Highlights the issues at hand in every society. How our people love to step up and make decisions for you, pass judgments and have a say in your life, the impunity that comes with the online medium simply amplifies that trait. People you don’t know will take the liberty to make rude remarks in the name of freedom of speech, will force their opinions down your throat (or die trying) which by the way is an issue globally and not just restricted to our parts of the world. However the issues that are not common across the globe speak up for the community they come from. Any discussion in a misogynistic society that pertains to women rights will inevitably have a self proclaimed know-it-all pop up and ensure everyone is convinced of how a woman has limited rights to live with and how men are inevitably a step ahead. And so on and so forth. Also public forum conflict resolution methods and strategies speak tons about the real life environment these people come from. Who are thriving and who are the survivors. Calm, positive and composed as opposed to passive aggressive at best if not openly rude.

There is so much to learn from all of these interactions let alone the opportunity to reflect, grow, collaborate, innovate, improve and bloom as an individual as well as a society that I wish we’d start looking at it in constructive ways instead of just a place to regurgitate the toxic within. Use it, make it your own, let it turn you around. It’s the real deal. It is what makes all the difference.

As Gary Vaynerchuk says

“All the best apps, companies, and products have broken the way we live life, transformed how we communicate, and changed our day-to-day. Good products evolve us.”

Let it evolve you into better, more enlightened versions of you.

Photo reference: phoneworld.com.pk

Here I am, sitting with my legs curled over a bunched up pregnancy pillow, trying to balance my lopsided belly because my little digger has taken a fancy to the left side this fine evening and is drilling her way through.

Or at least she thinks she is. Soon she will tire and wedge herself under my ribs in anger and stay there for what seems like an eternity of pain.

Cliched as it may be, it seems like yesterday when I saw pregnancy test after pregnancy test show a faint and then strong positive in my warm white lit bathroom, me muttering “oh crap” under my breath on the loop.

Not that I didn’t want this. I did. It was just so sudden. Talk about immaculate conception or what my husband kept calling all sorts of rude stuff like a “slam dunk” or a “hole in one”.

Strongest ever Defence Mechanism kicked in with the inception of this pregnancy, I don’t count eggs till they hatch, so perhaps waiting for this one to hatch safe and sound before I allow myself to attach to it.

Nine months of sub conscious assurance that something WILL go wrong and I can’t lose heart at it.

The first three months passed and I didn’t hurl the tadpole out.

The following three months passed and I didn’t trip and fall to bung its head on something, the last three months are over and done with too, without everything that could possibly have gone wrong.

Like everything else in life always does.

I am still holding my breath. I am still not counting the eggs. Will this be over fit and fine tomorrow?

Will she be okay? Does she really exist? And round and round we go around the merry go round of disbelief and blocking it all out.

Then there is this sultry (read: muggy) evening. My last evening as a pregnant woman.

I am having trouble believing by this time tomorrow, my belly will not be as big and the backache might be relieved? The heartburn too?

Perhaps replaced by new pains and aches but these friends through the past nine months will be lost for good.

So here’s bidding farewell to my pregnancy, to the nervous question mark of happiness or confusion that lasted a good few months, to ordering 10 books off of Amazon instantly to make sure “I got this”, to the first scan when neither of us felt a thing at seeing her heart beat, it just looked like a tadpole recording, to when we found out it’s a girl and it actually started getting real for us, to the first little t shirt I bought for her in Sri Lanka. It felt so odd. Buying small human clothes. I stopped at one. To discovering the kids section in (almost) every shop and discovering kids’ shops all over town, I had no idea there were so many! To making my own master lists off of “lists of must-haves” off of Pinterest for a newborn only to check every item off and find another new list pop up from some part of the world telling me that I can possibly not raise a child without having everything on THIS list, to end up hating all baby related shopping and eventually feeling victorious at walking into baby shops and walking out empty-handed because “now I actually do have everything”. To the sleepless nights and the truck’s life of turning in bed, the cervix punches, the bladder head butting, the fanny daggers, the ubiquitous acid reflux and never ending heartburn, the movement of my offspring inside me that began on Christmas Eve as a flutter that felt like bubbles popping and have now graduated to actually feeling her limbs push back at me when I press down and the contortionist moves she pulls on me every now and then that has perhaps bruised me on the inside but I won’t exchange that for anything in the world. Keep kicking away darling, as long as I know you’re doing fine.

Tomorrow we meet her. I still feel weird and can’t imagine myself having a child of my own. She kicks me day and night, yet it feels unreal. Like I am preparing for someone else’s baby. I don’t feel motherly. Not yet. Just mechanically apt. Is the hospital bag ready? Are the clothes washed? Is the food arranged for? Is the car to and from the hospital arranged for? IS THE HOSPITAL ROOM BOOKED? (yes I did that in the middle of a session!). Does everyone have work delegated for at least up to a few weeks that I might be busy figuring the new role as a cow and the only protector, provider for something as frail as a tiny kid that I am scared out of my wits to even hold? Looping back to the existentialist question, is there a baby or not, whose baby? What does it look like? Certainly doesn’t feel like mine. I feel like I’m just going through a medical condition.

I hope she likes us. I hope we like her. I hope we reach a nice agreement when it comes to timing things we both need to do, like eat, sleep, wake up, poop, shower etc. Things can be tough. They might most probably be, but I chose this. I choose her. Chances are there will be times we will both hate each other but then there will also be intermittent laughter. Which is fine by me.

It is… fine by me.