Friday, February 19, 2010

An ‘odd’ fixation

It’s strange to be blogging after so long. Truth be told I am a little scared. Although my love for writing remains intact my inclination to blog has diminished over time. I have little idea why this is so. It maybe one of those things that captures your interest in the beginning and with time your obsession with it heightens to a climax when it becomes a part of your way of life, but then gradually, for some reason the love starts to wane before you completely decide to be off it and for good. Or it could just be the testing times I am going through. It has lately been putting me off a lot of things I love to do.
I have been debating with myself as to whether its time I gave my blogs, all the three of them, a more serious picture. Like, integrating them and turning them into purpose driven journals with the aim to talk about only one issue, be it Advertising (ah yes, advertising reminds me that there’s a lot that needs to be covered, my departure from Blogger has indeed been inordinately long) or music or whatever it is I decide to write about, a focused blog and not something haphazard.
On the other hand, I could just leave them the way they are; one, a bullshit blog meant to collate my most bizarre ponderings among other zany and totally pointless ramblings; this one, a regular diary, if I twisted an ankle in the staircase I would write about it here; and finally, the third and my favourite, “Gods got a twisted sense of humour..!” which is a documentation of all things memorable and not so memorable in my life. What else are blogs meant for afterall?
Honestly, I miss those days when I could just and belt out anything that came to my mind. Just about anything. The language I used was the voice that spoke from inside. Word to word and not the slightest bit of it was revised or corrected for perfect grammar or context. Now, that to me is true blogging and that was what I loved. Nowadays, I am simply afraid to write. I judge my writing a lot and I take it a bit too seriously, so seriously that I am afraid to sit and write down anything that flies through the doors of my mind. And why is that? It’s mainly because the grammar obviously wouldn’t be right. The content might not be so profound. I might not be able to do it the justice it deserves and the biggest fear of all, in my attempt to polish all grammatical errors off my writing I might end up diluting the very essence of the words and most importantly, the feeling that I set out to emote. But at the end of it all, it still far from perfect and that frustrates me.
Now, I will, for a moment digress from the present topic to talk about another pretty worrying situation I am facing. I feel it has got something to with my predicament as described above. What you are about to read may appear funny but it definitely wouldn’t be so if you were the one to face it and yes, it took me a lot of courage to write about it here.
I have never talked about this to anyone before and I would not have either, untill tonight, when I realised that this could actually lead to something serious. I am sure I hinted on it in a previous blog entry where I wrote about my uncontrollable habit of washing my hands repeatedly till I am convinced they are completely rid of any living organism, good or bad. But I feel my readers should know about this.
I have of late begun repeating words in my head feverishly, over and over again for no reason at all and I am doing it right now as I type. For example, if I hear a word I like, I feel a strong, almost insane need to repeat it in my head for a definite number of times till I feel satisfied. In my case it is mostly 11 times or any odd number, even number wouldn’t do. I have to repeat those words 11 times in my head and say them aloud 11 times. I can’t control it. I have always had this problem and initially it was much worse, if I scratched one ear I would have to compulsively scratch the other. Before leaving a room I would turn on and off the lights 11 times. If I looked at a person a certain way, I’d repeat it 11 times with that person standing right in front me watching me do it. I have been able to work my way out of that madness successfully but little things like, if my tapped my left finger twice I will have to tap that very same finger on the right hand twice and if I tapped one extra time by mistake I’d have to tap the left finger one extra time to balance the number of taps, still exist till date. Also, I tend to repeat facial expressions and I do it on the sly for obvious reasons but it’s hard, very hard.
I pray for my parents lives every fifteen minutes as a voice inside my head keeps repeating stubbornly that I am going to lose them. I have tried to work my way around the problem by instead trying to think they’d live longer but it doesn’t work.

I see a certain disorder at work here and I am at my wits end as to how to set it right. I guess I am still in denial and wouldn’t call it OCD yet but I know I am getting there slowly. It’s scary how obsessed I am with the proportionality of things and how I hate people walking behind me. It scares me like nothing else to be walking down an empty street with someone walking behind me even if he were several meters away. This is perhaps why I hated playing chase as a kid. It would send chills down my spine to have someone on my tail and I would run for my dear life.
Now, having said all this, I see my mad fixation with grammatical correctness of even the smallest of sentences I write, as an extension of this strange anomaly. That’s why the fear.