“he didn’t give me a chance of showing him this clean and organized side of me” … “but then..shouldn’t it have been a lifetime of chances?”… “What happened to ‘in sickness and in health. Till death do us part’?”

now that i think about it, i seriously wonder where did all my chances go? looking back, i think i didn’t give enough of them… or maybe didn’t receive enough of them. but whatever happened, i know one thing for sure… they weren’t enough.

and now, i keep giving even less to other people.

just yesterday, i found my mother giving advice to a cousin on rebuilding his broken engagement with the same girl. “if she realizes her mistake, then its no harm done” she said. in his case, the girl was at fault so the line makes sense. but in my case, if we did realize our mistakes… would it make the harm go away?

for years, i’ve been coming to grips with myself. trying to be comfortable with who i am and what i do. growing up, i was the subject of ridicule by a lot of people. whether it be because of my size or my tantrums or even my glasses. yes, i know that’s no excuse now, but it happened and it shaped me.

when coming to my own, these experiences, or rather, the consequence of these experiences would rear up their ugly head again and again. to this day, i feel threatened very easily. i have developed commitment issues both in my personal and professional life, and an irrational fear of confrontations. to top it off, i am shy by nature and it takes a lot of effort to open up to people.

these days when you meet me for the first couple of times, you wouldn’t even realize anything from the statement above as true. again and again, i’ve been told off when i claimed that infact, i’m an introvert. i meet people with zeal during meetups and get together, end up in the middle of whatever is going down and have long drawn out, even heated debates with people on various issues. i’ve also been known to be street fights and have scars to prove it.

it didn’t happen overnight. it took over a decade of practice to get right. to look past the fear which tormented me at every social gathering, at being face to face with a new person, or to accept the spotlight every once in a while. baby steps at first, a little move here, a little there…

but every now and again, things fall apart still as easily as a house of cards, and i’m back to square one.. the doubt creeps back in and i close back up in my shell… and that’s when most of my relationships come to an end…

nowadays though, they’re coming in far and few in between. these bouts of doubt and self-deprecating behavior. phases, my mom calls them, but now, they’re taking away more from me than i have to give. back when they were frequent, a lot of people, i still consider friends, just took in stride. ‘mansoor is in a phase’ they said. it hurt to hear, to be classified like that, but when the bouts subsided, i still had friends around. now, these are becoming more intense, and when i do come out of them, i find myself being more alone…

to date, i’ve lost more people than i can count on my fingers… friends, confidants and allys… years of friendships and understanding and love… all broken because they had had enough of the phases. so badly were the bonds cut that i wasn’t even given a chance to patch things up. “i’m much better off now mansoor than i ever was with you”. again and again, the same line repeated itself…

and so, my reservoir for second, third and fourth chances to people is also slowly reducing. it’s funny, because there was a time i believed that everyone should be given enough chances to do the right thing. afterall, even God gives us another chance to be good as long as we’re breathing. otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many people on earth anymore.

i know i can’t ever truly stop giving anyone else another chance to prove themselves, right or wrong. i don’t have that finality within me to give. yes, its reducing, but it’s still very much there… the question is, should i still expect it from others? or in other words, should i keep setting myself up for pain and misery whenever the next phase subsides? it’s better to come out alone, when you’re going in alone in the first place…

i’ll leave you with a video by the pussycat dolls, titled ‘i hate this part’, maybe this is what happens on the other side?

i’ve always been hounded with this question. for one thing, i’ve been very good at piecing together stuff going on in other people’s lives, that’s the easy part. but for everyone i’ve counselled (some willingly, some not), what seemed to be a simple and clear solution or path to me, was something they weren’t willing to accept.

and that lead me to think about the barriers we errect around ourselves. our history, experiences, interactions.. they all play a part in creating who we are today. and which is precisely why no two people can be the same. even twins…

but how much of that history do we even remember? how much do we care to remember?

in the last couple of months, i’ve uncovered some pretty nasty demons in my own past, thoughts and memories which were locked away in the dark recesses of my mind were suddenly uncovered… and it was an interesting experience to tell the least.

let me tell you how i got here. as i mentioned, there was a lot of counselling i’ve done over the years. it’s really interesting how much people will tell you if you listen. for one, i’ve always been more interested in learning how people became who they are, tracing their lives through the intricate web of experiences and figuring out their personalities, in short, understanding what makes them tick. it’s truly fascinating for me. (before you judge, people find sand fascinating too.. atleast i’m talking about people here :p)

anyway, so in the process of understanding people, i stumbled upon the process of reading them. given certain situations and how people deal with them, tell a lot about their life experiences. these couple of months, i decided to apply that on myself. figure out how i tick… or you could say, i started deciphering myself.

it’s been fun, when i think about myself in the third person, it’s actually liberating. i can think clearly and reconstruct the who i really am. the more i do that, delve into what makes me tick, the more i discover that even though i’ve lived this life, breathed through each and every moment of it.. there are so many things that are still a mystery.

now i’m getting a chance to understand my behavior in situations. why i act the way i do, why i react the way i do and why i dont. i’ve recalled certain experiences i wished i hadn’t, rediscovering why i put them away in the first place… but only liberated, since now i’m no longer a slave to them. it’s a hard process, but now i can choose to act in another manner..

that really leads me to think, just how much does a person know their own selves, let alone any other human being on this planet. i keep hearing about divorces and breakups and even murders based on the excuse “they couldn’t understand me” or something along those lines and i wonder….

another important, and i mean really important, thing i’ve learned with all this retrospection.. is that we need to keep up. the world is not the only thing which is changing way too fast, all of us in it are as well.

the person we meet, talk with or even live with our whole lives are not the same people they were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. each one of us is continually evolving into something else, growing or  shrinking, opening up their personalities or closing down their hearts.. something or the other, but always changing…

when we freeze what we think of certain people, whether they be parents, kids, spouses or flings, that’s where the trouble starts. “you never used to be like this…” or “i thought you would always be the same way” are just some of the statements which indicate the mess we’re in. ofcourse we’re not the same person we were 10 years ago, 1 month ago or even 1 day ago!

we learned, we experienced and we grew. we felt pain and we retracted. we conjured up images of how we want things done and some of us actually got down and did it!

yes, we became different.

is it really fair to keep us binded to just what you thought we were? can’t you see, that in this stage of growth, we want you along too? can’t you allow us that? can’t you accept? can’t you adapt?

can’t you decipher us?

if not, then stop saying we’re not who  you thought we were… because you seriously had no idea who were were in the first place!

Image courtesy of fpsurgeon @ flickr

this post deals with the topic of duality. one of the things which has helped me considerably during my professional and personal life is the ability to keep both sides of an argument in my mind. what i took as a natural ability and something common to humanity, i’ve discovered that it really isn’t. 

what most people that i’ve run across do, is to generate a point of view and then perpetuate that point of view during the course of their lives. this view can be as simple as a food choice or as complex as state of the national economy. ofcourse, these views are built up on the basis of bias and experiences the person in question has gone through since their childhood. this is the reason, especially in our part of the world, that many people get into heated debates over seemingly nothing, because it is their worldview which is challenged when another view is presented. 

how did i steer clear of it? well, for the most part, it has to do with my grandmothers. yes, the virtues of having grandparents who are still alive and well (mashallah) are many and they’ve taught me a great many things from their life experiences, what i call pearls of wisdom. we often downplay the stories our grandparents tell us for idle chitchat or their need for reliving memories, but these memories are truly priceless to the right mind. 

anyway, back to my grandmothers. while growing up, i was at one point in time, intrigued with my name. what did it mean, what was the origin and so forth. the name ‘mansoor’ fortunately doesn’t really have a single well established meaning and in my formative years, that was a great source of confusion! afterall, in the mind of a child wrestling with making sense of the world around him, how could this crucial detail be so confusing when everything else was absolute? afterall, i eat because i’m hungry, i sleep because i’m tired and i talk because i want to say something. back then, everything was clear, simple and straightforward. the elders had the answers and they were, largely, the same answers. but my name, that was another story altogether. 

so what does my name actually mean? while i had many connoctions suggested to me, according to one grandmother, my name meant the ‘bringer of happiness’ and according to the other, it was ‘bringer of pain’. you see, they were basing it off the literal meaning of the word ’soor’ which meant pain and happiness in two different languages. other variants were ’success’ and ‘the one who gives peace of heart’ etc. 

as you might imagine, i struggled for quite a few years to understand how or why could something as simple as my name have two so opposite meanings! and to top it all off, which meaning should i be selecting? somewhere along the line, however, i accepted both! 

in terms of logic diagramming, i was posed with the dilemma of the ‘exclusive or’ where it can be one choice or the other, but not both. my solution was rejecting the ‘exclusive or’ and making it of  ’and’ logic, where it would have to be both, or none at all. so now, my name means, atleast to me, the bringer of both pain and happiness, complete opposites yet as one. 

how did this happen, and who taught me this, i dont recall, someday maybe i will, but whoever gave me this ability has bestowed upon me the greatest gift of all. from something as simple as knowing the meaning of my  name, i’ve applied this concept to a myriad of other problems over the course of my short life. being able accept many sides of a given situation, from the simple choice of good and bad to the more complex shades of grey in between, i value myself as being free of bias and being able to look at things in a more objective, non personal way. even though i still get into heated debates defending a point of view with various people, the ability allows me to be able to get into heated debates on both sides simultaneously! 

and yes, the fact that i can think in duality might also be just my point of view, and may not be really true. many have argued with me that i just take the opposite side to whatever argument is presented to me, and that i take the negativity as duality, which leads me to think that their argument is also true, which means i’m able to think in duality in the first place! 

yes, life as me is so much fun. that’s it for soul searching for this time.. if you’re thoroughly confused by this post, dont worry. it’s not supposed to make sense in the first place.