2018. A year of firsts.
No, this is not a cliched blog post about the first time I went sky-diving. Don’t let the cover image fool you.
New Year’s Eve is rarely a pleasant day for me. I can’t remember a single New Year’s Eve that I actually felt happy about myself. Riddled with insecurity, and despair, I tend to launch myself into the new year with a bout of mild depression. But fear not! Not everything is as grim as I make it out to be. We are, after all, our own worst critics. A purely objective observer would in fact say that 2018 was a positively rosy year for me! I will let you be this objective observer and judge for yourself.
As with most stories, this one too, started with a girl. It was New Year’s Eve 2017 and my girlfriend was living it up in Thailand with her family. I was having dinner with mine back home in India when she called. India was one and a half hours behind Thailand, so the New Year rang in early there. She wanted me to be the first one she wished a Happy New Year to. She video called me on Whatsapp, so that we could count down the end of 2017 together.
“3, 2, 1, Happy New Year!” The crowds behind her started yelling and jumping. There was confetti everywhere. People were dancing and kissing on the streets. I could barely hear her over the din. The shoddy network connection made her otherwise beautiful face appear pixelated and blurred. It didn’t matter, I was happy just to be able to talk to her. She promised she would call back in one and a half hours when the clock struck midnight in India to wish me a Happy New Year again. I never did get that call. I waited till 2AM in the morning trying to call her but to no avail. I later discovered that she had lost her phone. In the midst of the drunken festivities, someone had managed to steal it from her unattended bag.
I was happy throughout the months of January and February. It was the first time that I had been so happy with someone. We would stay up late at nights with our phones glued to our ears talking to each other up to the wee hours of the morning. The word baby would be thrown around an ungodly number of times in just a single minute. We would spend most weekends cuddled up together watching Netflix. We would have dinner together and I would always get her her favorite chocolate cake for dessert. It was all quite nauseatingly lovey-dovey. But as with most things in life, it was too good to last.
It started to get choppy towards the end (March). We would fight a lot and I would accuse her of always ditching me for her family and not having enough time for us. Back then, I didn’t know that the relationship was in its ending phases. I thought the fighting was something that developed over time in any relationship. In hindsight, perhaps, I could’ve toned down the clingy, needy drama from my side.
In the last week of our relationship, she had to go away out of town for work. We had a big fight on the day she was supposed to leave. I don’t even remember what the fight was about now. All I remember is that we made up before she left. In the week that she was away, we talked less than we normally did. I thought this was because she was busy with her work. I didn’t even think for once that she had slowly started to draw herself away from me. Towards the end of the week I had even stopped calling her to give her her space. I thought she must’ve been stressed out and tired from all the work she was doing. I waited for her to call me as she usually would, but this did not happen. After a gap of 3 days of not talking to her, I decided to call her. She didn’t pick up. I called her three more times after that through the day and on the third call she picked up and told me that she didn’t want to be in a relationship. I was devastated. The worst thing about this was that, it happened on 31st March and I thought it was all part of some elaborate April Fool’s prank. I half expected her to call on the second of April telling me that it was all a joke.
In the months after my breakup I was in a bad state. It was the first time a breakup had affected me like that. I had been too emotionally invested into the relationship. I was barely eating. I lost my appetite and could not keep food down. I withdrew into my own shell and stopped going out. I struggled to get out of bed every morning. A sort of emptiness hung about everything that I needed to do. Heartbreak had turned me into a bitter old man, resentful of everyone who dared be happy in front of him. You probably would’ve avoided me had you met me back then. I could suck the life out of any party in under 3 seconds. It was like hanging out with the goth from IT Crowd. (IT Crowd fans, anyone?)
April, May and June passed by like this. I was desperate to find something to occupy myself with. I decided to focus on personal growth, the most common thing people resort to after a breakup. I went through all the clichéd things that people do to re-invent themselves. I started learning a new language and took lessons in French. I started working out and joined a gym. I engaged myself with a productive hobby and started investing in the stock markets again. All of these were attempts at keeping myself occupied with something so that I did not have any time on my hands to let my mind wander.
Around this time, my brother was making plans to go on a solo-trip across the continental United States. I thought such an adventure was exactly what I needed! I decided to join him. I booked my tickets and dived straight into planning my 2 month long hiatus from the everyday. I booked Airbnbs in each city we were supposed to visit. I bought the tickets to all the sights and attractions I wanted to see. I applied for a sabbatical from work and was all set to leave by the second week of June.
A week before I was supposed to leave, I found out that my Visa application had gotten rejected. The misfortunes kept piling on. Needless to say, I was quite pissed off. That was the first time I was rejected for a Visa. The possibility that my Visa could be rejected had never entered my mind. That put a wrench in all my carefully laid plans. My brother went on ahead without me while I suffered through it back home in India.
July was marginally better for me. I had a trip to Amsterdam and Prague coming up in August to look forward to. A new girl had also come into my life, adding on to the much needed distractions. We started seeing each other casually. She was just what I needed in my life then. She had a very different approach to life than mine- Whereas I was the kind of person who would carefully dip their toe into the pool to test the water thrice before taking a dip, she would just dive in right away and worry about stuff later. It was a refreshingly new perspective on life and I was intrigued. I was determined to live my life and she suited my needs perfectly.
August came and I headed off to Europe for two weeks. After a series of meetings with my clients in Rotterdam, I took off to Prague for my vacation. I had signed up to go Skydiving! The full magnitude of what I had signed up for only started hitting me once I was in the plane and it started gaining altitude. When it was 3000 feet up in the air amongst the clouds and my sky-diving instructor opened the doors, that’s when the panic really started to kick in. I started cursing myself. What the fuck had I gotten myself into?
My instructor strapped himself onto me and pushed me towards the edge of the plane. He almost looked bored. For him it was a routine thing- like brewing his morning coffee. Whereas for me it was a nerve-wracking, nail-biting experience. My heart was beating a thousand times a minute as I sat on the floor on the very edge of the plane, feet dangling out, being buffeted by the winds. And suddenly just like that, without any warning, he pushed me out of the plane! I dropped through the air like a rock. The fear had suddenly disappeared, replaced by an ecstatic joy. The wind was pulling back every part of my body it could latch on to. I could feel the speed I was moving at! It was exhilarating. After what seemed like 10 minutes, he launched the parachute. The speed suddenly stopped and I slowly glided down towards the ground, not a sound to be heard except for the wind gently ringing in my ear. I could see for miles and miles below me, as my instructor slowly maneuvered the parachute towards the landing field. The green fields stood out in stark contrast against the blue skies around me. It was the most blissful experience of my life. It was the first time ever that I had done something so adventurous and I was proud if it.
I had a second adventurous thing planned for in Prague- shooting guns! Growing up playing a lot of video games and watching movies, I was always intrigued by the depiction of guns. What better way to live your life than to make your childhood fantasies come to life with a semi-automatic assault rifle! As I held an AK47 in my hands for the first time in my life, I turned into a little kid, excited to play with his shiny new toy. Two things stood out as I squeezed the trigger- The first, no movie really prepares you for how loud guns actually are. The second, recoil’s a bitch, especially on the pump action shotgun.
After Prague, I went on to visit Warsaw, Stockholm, Tallinn and Amsterdam, exploring those beautiful cities for the first time. I came back from Europe around mid-August and the new girl welcomed me back enthusiastically. We spent that weekend in a luxury hotel, alternating between the bed and the tub for most part of the day.
I had a lot of firsts with her. She had come into my life at a time when I was at my lowest, willing to do anything to numb the pain. Such circumstances compel people to explore life and living in all of its myriad intricacies. Giving in to this compulsion, I too lived. I lived the last four months of 2018 like a sailor on shore leave after a decade at sea. I made a bucket list of things comparable to a life well-lived and ticked off every fantasy that I could dream of. I could write an entire book on just those months of my life.
She introduced me to her thing- music. It was the first time someone had shared my music preferences so closely. Millennials of today generally have Pop or EDM blasting out from their speakers and headphones, whereas I preferred the more poetic Indie Rock. It was difficult to find someone who shared such tastes in the era of electronic music. I wanted music with meaning. I wanted the lyrics to speak to me and connect on a deeper level rather than just making my body move to the rhythm, I wanted it to move my mind as well. She did as well and we spent our time going to music festivals, attending concerts and watching live performances. She would pull me along for these and force me to have fun. The alcohol and other substances flowed freely. Inhibitions down, I would sing and dance away like I didn’t know I could before. She managed to draw out something from me that I didn’t know existed.
Slowly, I started healing. The pain and anguish was beginning to fade away to the background. I was starting to see the first glimmers of happiness shine through an otherwise dark horizon. I still held my distance though, refusing myself to be totally happy or get too emotionally involved. I liked this new found independence that I had. I still had the drive to focus on improving myself while not feeling totally dead inside. I continued with my personal growth regime. I was constantly innovating at work, trying out new things, taking up even more responsibility.
The proudest moment for me, professionally, was when I went back to my old college to recruit for my Startup. After months of hard work through July and August, fine tuning the questions, strategy and our internal online testing platform, we were ready to interview over 2500 students. There was a special feeling of nostalgia and pride as I, graduated just a year ago from the very same college, stood up on the stage and ardently narrated to them the story of my college life and emphatically urged them to join my Startup. We managed to successfully interview over 2500 candidates to select six. It was the first time I had ever felt so powerful in my college.
October, November and December passed by in a blur as time does when you’re not counting every agonizing second, glad to have most of it behind you. I spent that last few weeks of the year reconnecting with my family, after a long interlude. And just like that my year was over. I guess I would call my year evenly balanced out. A mixture of happiness and anguish. Of failures and successes. Of people lost and people found. An overall remarkably interesting year of my life so far. What do you think?
